The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Many reasons have led us to consider how the age of intellectualism—which we have often also called the age of the fifth post-Atlantean culture—begins in the transition from the thirteenth to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this age, human beings come to regard the intellect as the dominant factor in all their endeavours. We have often spoken of the way in which this intellectualism has come to develop in the various realms of inner life. Everything that is characteristic for human evolution has its more inward aspect through which it live:, more expressly in people's feelings, in their views, in their dominant will impulses, and so on. At the same time it also has an outward aspect which manifests in the conditions and circumstances which arise historically in human evolution. In this connection it has to be said that the most significant expression of the intellectualistic age so far has been the French Revolution, that great world-wide movement of the end of the eighteenth century.

For long ages before it took place, much in the life of mankind pointed to ways of striving for the very kind of social community which then came to be expressed so tumultuously in this French Revolution. And since then much has remained of the French Revolution, flickering into life here or there in one form or another in the external social conditions of mankind. Only consider that the French Revolution, in the way it manifested at the end of the eighteenth century, could not have been possible previously. For prior to those days human beings did not seek full satisfaction on this earth with regard to everything they were striving for.

You must understand that before the time of the French Revolution there was never a period in the history of mankind when people expected everything human beings can strive for, in thought, feeling and will, to find an external expression in earthly life. In the times which preceded the French Revolution, people knew that the earth can never provide for every single requirement of man's spirit, soul and body. Human beings always felt that they had links with the spiritual world and they expected this spiritual world to satisfy whatever requirements cannot be satisfied by the earthly world.

However, long before the French Revolution expressed itself in such a tumultuous fashion there were endeavours in many realms of the civilized world to introduce a social order which would allow as many human needs as possible to be satisfied here on earth. The fundamental character of the French Revolution itself was the endeavour to found a social environment which would be an expression here on earth of human thinking, feeling and willing. This is essentially what intellectualism seeks, too.

The realm of intellectualism is earthly existence. Intellectualism wants to satisfy everything that is present in the sense-perceptible physical world. So it wants to organize the social situation here on earth to be an expression of the intellectual element. The endeavour to create in social conditions something which man can strive for here on earth, even goes to the extent of the worship of the goddess of reason—which means, of course, the goddess of the intellect. So we can say: In very ancient times human beings ordered their lives according to the impulses which came to them from initiates and mystery pupils; through them they took into their social order the divine spiritual world itself. Then social conditions moved on to those of, let us say, Egypt, when the social order took in what the kings learnt from the priests about the will of human evolution as it was expressed, for instance, in the stars. Later still, in older Roman times, the times of the Roman kings, the endeavour was made to bring about social conditions based on research into the spiritual world. The meeting of Numa Pompilius with the nymph Egeria is an expression of this.¹ More and more out of this interweaving of the spiritual with the earthly, social realm came the requirement: Everything on earth is to be arranged in such a way as to be a direct expression of the intellect.

To express this in a diagram you would have to draw a downward curve. The French Revolution comes at the lowest point (see sketch), and from here onwards things had to start moving upwards once more. This upward movement was indeed immediately attempted as a reaction to the French Revolution. Read Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays). There we can see quite clearly, for instance, how he was stimulated by what was expressed in the French Revolution in an external way to seek a new connection to the spiritual world within man's inner being. For Schiller the question arose: If it is impossible to create a perfect social order here on earth, how can human beings achieve satisfaction with regard to their thinking, feeling and will? How can they achieve freedom here on this earth?

And Schiller answered this question by saying: If human beings live logically, in accordance with the dictates of reason, they are servants of the dictates of reason and not free beings. If they follow their physical urges and instincts alone, then in turn they are following the dictates of nature and are unfree. He then came to say: The human being is actually only free when he is working artistically or when he is enjoying something artistic. The achievement of freedom in the world can only come about when the human being works artistically or enjoys art. Artistic activity balances what is otherwise either a dictate of reason or a dictate of nature, as Schiller puts it. Living in the artistic realm, the human being feels the compulsion of thoughts less with regard to an artistic object than he does in the case of logical research. Similarly, what comes to him from the object of art through his senses is not a sensual urge. The sensual urge is ennobled by the spiritual seeing of something artistic. So inasmuch as a human being is capable of working artistically he is also capable of unfolding freedom within earthly existence.

Schiller seeks to answer the question: How can man as a social being achieve freedom? And the conclusion he reaches is that the human being can only achieve freedom if he is a being who is receptive to art. He cannot achieve freedom by being devoted to the dictates of reason or the dictates of nature.

At the time when Schiller was writing his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays) this came to expression in a wonderful way in the interaction between Goethe and Schiller. This is shown in the way Schiller perceived how Goethe was rewriting his Wilhelm Meister at that time. Schiller was full of enthusiasm for this way of writing and for this depiction of inner freedom, because Goethe as an artist was a creative spirit—not in his intellect but in the freedom of his thoughts—yet one who, on the other hand, still remained within a sensual experience of art. Schiller sensed this. He felt that Goethe in his artistic activity was as free as is a child at play. We see how Schiller is enthused by a free human artistic activity which is reminiscent of a child at play. His enthusiasm led him to say in one of his letters to Goethe: The artist is the true human being; in comparison even the best philosopher is a mere caricature.² But his enthusiasm also led him to say: The human being is only truly human when he is at play, and he only plays when he is truly human.³ Frivolous or merely entertaining play is not meant, but artistic activity and artistic enjoyment. The human being dwells within artistic experience, which means that the human being becomes truly free: This is what Schiller is saying.

At the point where the line starts to curve upwards from what had been—with regard to a social order—the goal of the French Revolution, towards something for which human beings have to wrestle inwardly and which cannot be given to them by institutions of the state; at this point, what price was the human being willing to pay for this social freedom? He was prepared to pay the price that it could not be given to him through logical thinking and that it could not be given to him through ordinary physical life, but that he could receive it only in the exclusive activity of artistic experience.

These feelings were indeed engraved within the best spirits of that age, in Schiller in a theoretical form, and in Goethe too, who actually practised this life in freedom. Let us look at the characters Goethe created out of life itself in order to reveal genuine humanity, the true human being. Look at Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm Meister is a personality through whom Goethe wanted to depict the true human being. Yet seen from an overall view of life he is actually a layabout. He is not a person who is seriously searching for a world view which includes the human soul. Neither is he someone who can manage to hold down a job in external life. He loiters his way through life. This is because the ideal of freedom striven for in the work of Goethe and Schiller could only be achieved by people who had removed themselves from a thoughtful and hard-working way of life. It is almost as if Schiller and Goethe had wanted to point to the illusion of the French Revolution, to the illusory belief that something external, like the state, might make human beings free. They wanted to point out that human beings can only wrestle for this freedom within themselves.

Herein lies the great contrast between Central Europe and Latin western Europe. Latin western Europe believed in an absolute sense in the power of the state, and it still believes in it today. In Central Europe, on the other hand, came the reaction that the human ideal can only be found within. But the price for this would have to be the inability to stand squarely in life. Someone like Wilhelm Meister had to disentangle himself from life.

So we see that at the first attempt it proved impossible to find full humanity within a true human being. Naturally, if everybody is to become an artist so that, as Schiller put it, society can become entirely aesthetic, this may be all very well, but such an aesthetic society would not be very good at coping with life. I cannot imagine, for instance—let me be really down to earth for a moment—how in such an aesthetic society the sewers will be kept clear. Neither can I imagine how in this aesthetic society certain things will be achieved which ought to be achieved in accordance with strictly logical concepts. The ideal of freedom shone before mankind, but human beings were unable to strive for this ideal of freedom when they stood fully within life. It became necessary to search once more for an impetus upwards to the super-sensible world, but now this had to be done consciously, just as in former times there had been an atavistic downward impetus. A new upward impetus into the spiritual world had to be sought. It was necessary to hold on to the ideal of freedom but, at the same time, the upward impetus had to be sought. First it had to be made possible to secure freedom for human activity, for active involvement in life. It seemed to me that the only possible way was that described in my Philosophy of Freedom.⁴

If human beings can achieve the impetus to rise up to an inner constitution of soul which enables them to find moral impulses in pure thoughts, in the way I have just described, then they will be free beings even though they remain squarely within full, everyday life. This is why I had to introduce into my Philosophy of Freedom the concept of moral tact, which is otherwise not found in moralizing sermons, the concept of acting as a matter of course out of moral tact, by means of which moral impulses can flow over into habitual deeds.

Consider the role played by tact, by moral good taste, in my Philosophy of Freedom. There you see that in an aesthetic society true human freedom is only applied to the feelings, whereas it actually ought to be brought also into the will, that is, into every aspect of the human being. A human being who has achieved a soul constitution in which pure thoughts can live in his will as moral impulses, can enter fully into life, however burdensome it may be, and he will be able to stand in this life as a free being in so far as this life calls for actions, deeds.

Furthermore, with regard to the dictates of reasoning, that is, the grasping of the world in thoughts, a way also had to be sought of finding what it is that guarantees freedom for the human being, independence from external compulsions. This could only come about through anthroposophical spiritual science. Learning to find their way into what can be experienced in spirit with regard to cosmic mysteries and cosmic secrets, human beings live in thoughts with their humanness into a closeness with the inner spirit of the world. Through freedom they achieve knowledge of the spirit.

What is going on here is best demonstrated by the way in which people, with regard to this, are still strenuously resisting becoming free. This is a point of view from which opposition to Anthroposophy can very well be understood. Human beings do not want freedom in the spiritual realm. They want to be compelled, led, guided by something. And since every individual is free either to recognize or deny the spirit, most deny it and choose instead something which they are not free either to recognize or deny.

No free decision is required to recognize or deny thunder and lightning, or the combination of oxygen or hydrogen in some laboratory process. But human beings are free to recognize that angeloi and archangeloi exist. Or they can deny their existence. But those who truly possess an impulse for freedom come through this very impulse for freedom to the recognition of the spiritual in thinking. In Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays), in the whole of Goethe's creative work, the achievement of human freedom through inner effort and struggle was first attempted. But this can only be achieved if we recognize that to our freedom in the realm of artistic experience must be added a free experience in the realm of thinking and a free experience in the realm of the will. These are things which must be properly developed.

Schiller simply took what the age of the intellect had to offer. In Schiller's time art still arose out of this intellectualism. Within this, Schiller still discovered human freedom. But what intellectualism has to offer in the realm of thinking is something unfree, something which is subject to the dictates of logic. And Schiller failed to recognize the possibility that freedom might also hold sway here, just as little as it might hold sway in deeds, in ordinary, hard life. What we have had to achieve through the introduction of anthroposophical spiritual science is the recognition that freedom can also be recognized in the realm of thinking and in the realm of the will. Schiller and Goethe recognized freedom solely in the realm of feeling.

But the path to a full recognition of human freedom can only be trodden if human beings are able to achieve an inner vision of the connection between the spiritual realm they can experience in their soul, and the realm of nature. So long as two abstract concepts, nature and spirit, are seen by human beings as being mutually exclusive, it will not be possible for them to progress to a proper conception of the freedom I have been describing. But even those who do not work their way towards life in the spiritual world, by means of meditation, concentration exercises and so on, can certainly experience something, if they are willing to recognize, simply with their healthy commonsense, what has been found through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Simply by reading in books or hearing in lectures what is brought to the fore in the world through Imagination—and provided they remain alert—people will soon need to approach these revelations from the spiritual world in a way that differs from their approach, say, to a book on physics or chemistry, or on botany or zoology, even though this different approach can just as much take a course which follows ordinary healthy common sense.

Without developing any great inner activity it is possible to absorb everything written today in a book about botany or zoology. But it is not possible to absorb what I have described, for instance, in my book Occult Science, without inner energy and activity such as that needed also for ordinary healthy common sense. Everything in this book can be understood, and those who maintain that it is incomprehensible are simply unwilling to think actively; they want to absorb it as passively as they absorb a film in the cinema. In the cinema there is certainly no need to think very much, and it is in this manner that people today want to absorb everything. What they find in the laboratory can also be absorbed in this way. But what is said in my book Occult Science cannot by absorbed in this way. Occasionally some professorial souls do attempt to absorb it in this way. In consequence, they then make the suggestion that those who perceive such things ought to be examined in psychological laboratories, as they are called today. This suggestion is just as clever as requiring someone who solves mathematical problems to be examined in order to ascertain whether he is capable of solving mathematical problems. To such a person it is said: If you want to find out whether these mathematical problems have been solved correctly, you will have to learn how to solve them, and then you will be able to check. Only if he were stupid would he retort: No, I don't want to learn how to check on the solutions; I shall go to a psychological laboratory in order to find out whether they are correct! These are the kinds of demands made today by some professorial souls, and their words are taken up by all sorts of ‘generals’⁵ and repeated parrot-fashion with evil intent. Such demands are foolish and stupid, but this does not prevent them from being made with the greatest aplomb.

But those who enter with inner activity into what comes from Imagination will certainly find that something bears fruit in their soul. It is not insignificant for the soul when an effort is made to understand something that has been discovered through Imagination. For instance, it is extremely difficult today to make medicines effective for the treatment of illnesses. But someone who has made the effort to understand something given through Imagination will have reactivated his vital forces to such an extent that medicines will once more be effective for him—provided they are the right ones—because his organism will no longer reject them.

It is stupidly suggested nowadays that anthroposophical medicines are supposed to heal people spiritually through hypnosis and the power of suggestion. You can read this in all manner of magazines which refer to remarks I have made on my lecture tours in recent months. But this is, in the first instance, not the point. The point is that today's medical knowledge needs to be advanced positively through spiritual knowledge. Of course it is not possible to heal somebody by inoculating him with an idea. Yet spiritual life, taken quite concretely, does have significance for the effectiveness of medicines. If a person endeavours to understand something given through Imagination, he makes his organism more receptive to medicines—provided they are the ones needed for his illness—than is the organism of a person who remains in the thought structure of today's external intellectualism, that is, of today's materialism.

Mankind needs to take in what can be given by Imagination, if only for the reason that the human physical body will otherwise succumb more and more to a condition in which it cannot be healed if it falls ill. Healing always requires assistance from the element of spirit and soul. All the processes of nature find expression not only in what takes place on the sense-perceptible plane. These processes on the physical plane are everywhere steeped in the element of spirit and soul. To make a sense-perceptible substance effective in the human organism you need the element of soul and spirit. The whole process of human evolution requires that the soul make-up of human beings should once more be filled with what can be grasped by soul and spirit.

It is true to say that amongst human beings there is certainly much longing for soul and spirit. But for the most part this longing remains within the unconscious or the subconscious realm. Meanwhile, what remains within human consciousness is no more than a mere remnant of intellectualism, and this rejects—indeed resists—anything spiritual. The manner in which spiritual things are resisted is sometimes quite grotesque. Before a performance of eurythmy I usually explain that eurythmy is based on an actual, visible language. Just as the language of sounds develops out of the way the physical organism is arranged, so it is with the visible language that is eurythmy. Just as—sound for sound—all vowels, all consonants struggle to be born out of the experience of the human organism, so in eurythmy is sound for sound gathered together, resulting in genuine language. You would think that on being introduced to eurythmy people might endeavour to find their way into the fundamental impulse which tells us that eurythmy is a language, is speech.

Of course it is perhaps not immediately obvious as to what is meant. But with serious intent it is not too difficult to find one's way quite quickly into what is meant. The other day someone read something really funny in a review of a eurythmy performance. The critic pointed out that the impossible nature of this eurythmy performance was revealed in the fact that the performers first gave a rendering of some earnest, serious items, and that they followed these with some humorous pieces. The extraordinary thing, said this witty critic, was that the humorous items were depicted with the same gestures as the serious ones. That is the extent to which he understood the matter. He thought that humorous things ought to be shown with sound gestures that are different from those used to depict serious matters. Now if you take seriously the fact that eurythmy is a visible language, then what this critic says would amount to saying that any language ought to have one set of sounds for serious things and another for humorous things! In other words, somebody reciting something in German or French would use sounds such as I or U, or whatever, but that on coming to a humorous item they would use other sounds. I don't know how many people noticed what utter nonsense this critic was writing in one of Germany's foremost newspapers; but this is what he was saying in reality. This shows that in such heads every capacity for thinking clearly has ceased; they are entirely unable to think any more.

This is the final consequence of intellectualism, which is gaining ground today in all realms of life. People begin by allowing their thoughts to become the dead inner content of their soul. How rigid, how dead are most thoughts which are produced these days; how little inner mobility they have, how much are they parroted from models created earlier on! There are extraordinarily few original thoughts in our present age. But something that has died—and thoughts today are mostly thoughts that have died—does not remain constantly in the same state. Look at a corpse after three days, after five years or after forty years. It goes on dying, it goes on decomposing. If somebody states that a eurythmy performance is impossible because it uses the same gestures for humorous and for serious items, this is a thought that is decomposing. And if this is not noticed it is simply because people are incapable of schooling their common sense by means of inspired truths such as those arising out of Anthroposophy. If people school their common sense by means of inspired truths, even if they do not undertake any spiritual development, then they acquire a delicate sense for the living truth, and for what is healthy and unhealthy in human thinking and in human endeavour. And then—if you will pardon my saying so—statements such as the one I have just quoted begin to stink. People acquire the capacity to smell the stench of such decomposing thoughts. This capacity, this sense of smell, is for the most part lacking amongst our contemporaries. Most of them do not notice these things, they read them without taking them in.

It is certainly necessary to look very thoroughly into what mankind needs. For human beings definitely need that freedom of thinking in their soul constitution which can only become possible if they raise themselves to a position in which they can take in spiritual truths. Without this we come to that decline of culture which is clearly to be seen all around us today. Healthy judgment, the right immediate impression—these are things which mankind has for the most part already lost. They must not be allowed to get lost, but only if human beings can press through to an acceptance of spiritual things will they not be lost.

We must pay attention to the fact that human beings can find in Anthroposophy a meaningful content for their lives if they turn with their healthy common sense to what can be won through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. By opening themselves to what can be discovered, for example, through Imagination, they can recapture that inner vitality which will make them receptive to medicines. Or, it may be that they will also become free personalities who are not prone to succumb to all sorts of public suggestions.

By entering in a living way into the truths revealed by Inspiration, they can gain a sure sense for what is true or false. And they can become skilful in putting this sure sense into practice in the social sphere. For instance, how few people today are able to listen properly! They are incapable of listening, for they react immediately with their own opinion. This capacity to listen to other human beings can be developed most beautifully by entering in a living way into the truths given by Inspiration.

And by entering in a living way into the truths given by Intuition, human beings can develop to a high degree something else which they need in their lives: a certain capacity to let go of their own selves, a kind of selflessness. Entering in a living way into the truths given by Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, this gives human beings a meaningful content for their lives.

Of course, it is easier to say that people can gain a content for their lives out of what Ralph Waldo Trine⁶ promises. It is easier to say they need only read the content of something in order to gain a content for their lives, whereas it is more difficult to obtain a content for life in an anthroposophical way. For along this path you have to work; you have to work in order to enter in a living way into what research reveals through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But then it becomes a content for life which unites intensely with the personality and with the whole human being. This secure life content is what is given by what wishes to enter the world as Anthroposophy.

• 1 . Numa Pompilius, 715-672 BC. Roman King. By tradition, the nymph Egeria was his wife and adviser.
• 2 . Letter to Goethe of 7 January 1795.
• 3 . Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 15.
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1988.
• 5 . This is a reference to speeches given by General von Gleich.
• 6 . Ralph Waldo Trine, 1866-1958. In Tune with the Infinite, London 1915.

Anthroposophy, as I am attempting to expound it, represents a science of initiation originating in the necessity of the day. A science of initiation has existed always. Anthroposophy springs from the same foundation as ancient science, but in the course of human evolution ages succeed each other and vary in their demands. And thus the science of initiation arising out of the modern spirit is in some respects peculiar to this age, just as there was an initiation science of the Middle Ages, of Ancient Greece and of yet older periods of human evolution.

In the course of history the whole constitution and mood and tendency of the human soul undergoes changes. The so-called science of initiation has to investigate and understand what is the eternal in the human being and in the universe. We have to consider the needs and the subconscious longings of today, and a science of initiation, an ancient science that meets those needs and longings, is what Anthroposophy strives for.

It is for that very reason that it meets with such opposition, for the present time, standing as it does in the midst of the thoughts of natural science, is filled with certain judgments and prejudices which very often prevent us from consciously recognizing the sub-conscious longings within. And yet, if we regard life without bias, we have to understand that the conceptions of external natural science do not reach to what is eternal in the human being and in the universe, when, on the other hand, we of to-day turn aside from the external thoughts of natural science and attempt to find the eternal by inner mystic contemplation, we may indeed reach to a certain amount of faith or belief, but we do not attain that clear knowledge which to-day is necessary. Between these two extremes Anthroposophy has to take its stand. So it is that Anthroposophy is so generally misunderstood, because it endeavours in accordance with modern needs to attain to a science of initiation which is exact and of the nature of knowledge, and not of the nature of vague kinds of mysticism. But to understand what are the unconscious longings and needs of our time is to understand the need for such a thing as Anthroposophy.

I am not dwelling any longer on this introductory aspect because I assume that those who are here this evening have already experienced two things: that our natural scientific thoughts—borrowed from natural science and modeled upon it—do not reach far enough to penetrate and place before us the eternal in man and in the world, and that mysticism only reaches in a vague and unclear way and therefore, in that sense, is insufficient to meet present needs. One could prove these things by a multitude of examples if one were to dwell upon them further. Anthroposophy seeks for what may be called exact clairvoyance, again to borrow a term from scientific usage; that is to say it seeks to develop a knowledge and perception of the spiritual worlds which is no less exact, no less conscientious in the sense of exact science, than is the best tendency and striving of our natural scientific age.

I shall now indicate briefly how this path is begun. We must consider in the first place what we know in the ordinary life of the soul by means of our ordinary self-knowledge as the three forces or faculties that work in the soul, viz., thinking, feeling, and willing. We know in our thoughts that we are, as it were, awake; that we are essentially wakeful human beings. It is by virtue of our thinking life, which ceases between going to sleep at night and regaining consciousness in the morning, that we are awake, and it is in our thoughts that our soul-life is filled with a kind of clarity, an inner light.

Next, as to the feeling life. The feelings are perhaps even more important for the human being (or he attaches more importance to them) than are his thoughts, but we know from our ordinary observation that the feelings of our soul-life are far less clear and filled with light than our thoughts. In a sense our thoughts, our conceptual life, play into our feelings and bring them into a certain clarity, but our feelings seem to surge up from the unknown depths of our life. They do not appear with the full clearness of our life of thought.

Then we come to the third category of our soul-life, the impulses of will. Our impulses of will come from still deeper down and are still less clear and have less light. But from what we know already in the observation of our ordinary life about thinking, feeling and willing, we realize at once how little we know of what is happening within us; for example, when an impulse of will arises making us take some action! We realize how little we know of what is happening in that life of will itself, and yet we find that thinking, feeling and willing still form a kind of unity in our soul-life. At the one pole is our conceptual life, our thinking life, we find in the way in which we join the concepts together like the links of a chain that there is an element of will at work in the process. Then passing to the other pole, the life of will—for the feeling life stands midway between the two—we find that for willing there is a certain element of conception; the concepts play into our willing life. So we see that in our soul-life there are the two poles, thinking on the one hand and willing on the other, with feeling as it were between the two, and that in these three something works in them all.

Now with the development of a higher science, the science of initiation, according to modern requirements and to Anthroposophy, it is necessary to train, develop and evolve by our own conscious activity both the conceptual thinking-life and the will-life, and it is thus that we can trace what has been called an exact clairvoyance, a modern science of initiation. In the one case we have to carry out exercises in thought, and in the other of will. So it is that the way is sought to pass through those portals which lead into the super-sensible worlds; indeed without entering those worlds in consciousness it is impossible to gain that clear knowledge we need of the eternal in the soul and in the universe.

It is while taking the exercises in thought that special attention has to be paid to what is not generally observed in ordinary life, viz., that slight additional element of will which is playing into the thinking life. This subject is dealt with in much greater detail in my book that is translated into English under the title Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It. We have above all to train that element of will which is at work in our thinking life, and in a sense have to exercise it. We have to select that very thing which passes unnoticed in the ordinary everyday thought-life, and pay less attention to what is most important to us in that life. We have to form a clear concept in our minds—its content is not of much importance; it may be either a simple or a complex concept—and then hold it as the full content of the soul to the exclusion of all else. To do this calls forth the full energy of the soul and an exercise of strong will power. The selected concept must be clearly abstracted for a certain time from everything else in the world, so that the forces of the soul are concentrated upon it alone. In the case of one individual these exercises may have to be carried on for months, in the case of another years, but sooner or later, provided they are undertaken systematically and with persistent energy, the soul-life will develop and experience an inner strengthening. What happens may be compared with the effect produced by exercising a certain muscle, by its doing the work for which it is best fitted, until it is developed to its full power. After a time has elapsed (varying, as we have seen, according to the individual) there will come a certain moment when the soul will have an experience of such strength and power that it will be shaken to its very foundations.

This experience may be described somewhat as follows: with the strengthening of the soul-life the door is opened to an entirely new way of thinking and to entirely new thoughts. It may be compared with the way in which sense impressions and thoughts are experienced in the ordinary soul-life. How do we experience sense impressions? In all sense impressions such as those of colour and sound, heat and cold, there is a certain vitality and life; they are experienced in a very living way and in the full sap of life. But in the way in which the thoughts are experienced there is something abstract, something vague and sketchy in outline; it is all grey and pale as compared with the intensity and living nature of the sense experiences. Now, when this new way of thinking has been attained, we find that the whole thought-life has become as intense and as full of life as is the ordinary soul-life in sense experiences and perceptions. It is called imaginative thinking; imaginative not in the sense of arbitrary fantasies in the mind but a pictorial, formative thought filled with inner life and possessing a quality of strength and intensity comparable with the sense impressions of the ordinary life. And with this life of imaginative thought, which is saturated with a kind of plastic vitality, there comes the realization that within us is an entirely new human being of which we never knew consciously before. The ordinary physical human being may be described as an ‘organism in space’; we see the different organs spread out in space, so to speak, and know that they are all connected together, that the heart is connected with the whole and the right hand with the left and so forth. The new human being that we come to know within us in the life of imaginative thought, however, is better described as ‘an organism in time’. Suddenly there stands before us in a single imaginative tableau or picture a memory of our whole life; in the first place to a point in early childhood; not, however, in the way in which isolated memories of the past appear more or less dully in the ordinary consciousness, but as the whole individual life laid out before us in a single moment. In this sense we, as human beings, are time-organisms. We have come to experience what in the modern science of initiation are called the ‘formative forces of the body’; not the full human being, using the term body in its extended sense, but its formative forces which in the older science of initiation are called the ether or etheric body. So we come to experience something that works within and builds up the physical organism of man; to know that when we entered this life in the physical body of a child we brought with us certain super-sensible forces direct from the super-sensible world; to know that these forces were modeling and moulding our physical organs, our minds, the circulation of our blood, even in our earliest childhood, and were gradually taking possession of the whole of our organism stage by stage. In the space-organism of the physical body the formative forces of the etheric body were building all the time. With this experience comes also an understanding of how we enter this world with certain particular faculties and qualities of character, and of how one individual will develop in quite a different direction from another. This knowledge of what works in our physical organism as a super-sensible thing brings us to the stage of the exact higher knowledge which the present age needs as its science of initiation. Thus to know the formative forces or etheric body from imaginative knowledge is the first and necessary stage we must pass through before we can learn to know what is essentially the eternal which was working in the human being in the spiritual worlds before birth.

As we have to learn to carry the power of will into our thoughts, and to strengthen that power in the holding of thoughts with the full forces of the soul, so we then have to carry out exercises in the opposite direction. We have to attain the power to extract the soul from the concept that we have learned to hold to the exclusion of everything else, so that they fill our consciousness, and then to extract ourselves from them so that our consciousness is empty of content and yet we maintain our wakefulness.

Now let us consider our ordinary life. Here our consciousness is always filled with thoughts, sense perceptions and memories, and the moment they cease to be there we tend to drop into sleep. Therefore it needs a still greater activity, a greater power, to hold the soul in full wakefulness when it is rendered empty of what has been held within it by imagination and concentration. This power is attained in the next stage if, by means of the exercises referred to earlier, we have once attained the power to hold a concept in our consciousness to the exclusion of all else. It consists in being able to detach the soul from the particular concept leaving the consciousness empty of content and yet wakeful, and once this is acquired there enters into the emptied but wakeful consciousness something which is entirely new to us, something which is not of the nature of a reflection, a memory or a conception, but a super-sensible reality. It floods into the soul, this spiritual reality of being which is in all the individual things of the world, and we see it blossoming forth from everything in nature. Into the consciousness that we have had the strength to train through meditation and concentration, and then to empty of content while keeping it fully wakeful, there streams the reality of spiritual being so that we perceive the super-sensible reality of being in the world. This is the super-sensible reality of which Anthroposophy and the science of initiation speak, not as of a vague ‘beyond’ but of something that is present, that is certainly outside the world of the senses and not perceived therein. So we may learn to penetrate into an entirely new thinking, to see that whereas our ordinary thought is making use of the time and the instruments of the physical brain and the nervous system, this new thinking is independent of the physical organism and outside it. It is thinking purely through the forces of the soul.

This new thinking is so entirely different in its conditions from our ordinary life of thought that we may say we recognize for example that in this new spiritual perception, this spiritually perceptive thought, you have something in which there is no such thing as ordinarily you have in memory. In our ordinary life of thought, if it is healthy and sound at all, there is memory. If we learn a certain thought or concept we can call it to memory again. But in this super-sensible thinking, which does not make use of the physical organism, we cannot call back to mind; we have no memory of the experiences in this new thought we have had, and if we wish to return to it we must only remember the activity of soul, the exercises and the precise path which we took in inner activity and concentration of will in order to reach that particular knowledge or super-sensible concept. We can remember the path our soul took and we can repeat that path. Then that perception, that super-sensible knowledge, is freshly again before us. In the physical world if we have seen a rose, for example, and want to have it raised before us again in all its full colour and freshness, it is no use trying to remember it. No memory will restore what we received by our sense perception; we must come before the rose again. So in the higher super-sensible thinking to have our thoughts again before us in all their freshness we must return by the path that led us to them. Let me put this to you in a personal way. When I speak on the higher knowledge it is not from reading books on the subject or from hearing about it, but as one who has attained to and experienced it. If I give a lecture I cannot do so like one who speaks on external science, who simply has his knowledge systematized in his memory and then gives it out; I must pass through the full experiences, through all those qualities of feeling and of thought, of inner life and activity, through which I had to pass before I had gained that knowledge for the first time. I must speak from the full freshness of the past to give it full freshness in the present. So different are the conditions of this higher knowledge that is attained by the science of initiation from the conditions of the ordinary knowledge which is connected with the physical instruments of the physical brain and nervous system.

There is yet another faculty of soul in which the student of the higher knowledge must train himself. It is that faculty which we know in ordinary life as presence of mind, the power to meet a circumstance that comes upon us suddenly and, without spending a long time in deliberation, to perceive the right course immediately. This faculty must be developed and enhanced, so that he who has these experiences before him in the super-sensible world, shall be able to grasp the reality of the spiritual world as it flits past. He must have the presence of mind to recognize it at once.

Now by the exercising and training of the soul to attain the power of detaching it from the content of consciousness, and of holding it empty and yet fully awake, we are led to perceive something still higher than was explained in the first part of this lecture. We are led to what is essentially the soul and spiritual being of man that had lived in the spiritual worlds before it united with the physical substance of heredity, with the physical bodily substance, for the course of this earthly life. We come to know our own eternal being, our life of soul and spirit in the spiritual worlds before birth. This second stage of knowledge is known as inspired or inspirational knowledge, as a technical term in this modern science of initiation. Just as the outer air enters our lungs through inhalation so does the spiritual world enter into our emptied consciousness. Thus we inhale, so to speak, the spiritual world as we knew it before we descended into physical earth existence. So we learned to know one facet of our being, the other side is the spiritual immortality. This will be dealt with in the third part of this lecture. We come to know in this second stage, but to know clearly, what might be defined as the ‘birthlessness’ or ‘unbornness’ (just as we speak of deathlessness or immortality) of that other side of the eternal in man, viz., that which existed in the spiritual worlds, his life in those worlds before birth. Our present age has very few conceptions, even though it may have dim conceptions through faith, about immortality, but in this second stage we learn to know our birthlessness, our eternal on the other side, our life in the spiritual reality before we entered this particular earthly life.

This higher ‘inspired knowledge’ leads us also in another direction which however can only be touched upon here, since it would take many lectures to describe it in detail. Just as we learn to know the super-sensible, the eternal reality of our own being, and to enter through inspired knowledge into our own soul and spirit before we entered this physical life, so do we learn to recognize the spirit in the world around us. This must be described in a few short sketches. If we look out upon the universe the sun appears to us as a physical ball, but when we enter into ‘inspirational knowledge’ we see it not only as the concentrated physical object that is seen by the senses. We see something that spreads through the whole universe and is accessible to us, namely, the spiritual quality and being of the sun, the sun-like being itself. What we see everywhere in mineral, in plant and animal, what is in man too as sun-force that we see physically concentrated when we look up to the sun. Though it may sound strange from the point of view of modern science, what we thus attain through inspirational knowledge is the power to perceive this sun-like being in everything, in the mineral, the plant, the animal and the human being. We learn to perceive the sun-force working in every single organ, in the heart, the liver and so forth, of the physical organism, and in everything within the whole universe that is accessible to us. This is the actual reality that is attained through the science of initiation.

And out of inspiration-knowledge we see that just as the sun does not only have a sharp outline, the same applies to the moon. The external physical moon is only the physical concentration, while the moon-substance streams through the whole universe. It is in mineral, plant and animal and every organ of man, in them the moon- and sun-substances live on. This experience comes in the second stage of inspirational knowledge, and it leads to something which is eminently practical and which already has been developed as a science, viz., the anthroposophical science of medicine. By its means we learn to see how in every human organ there is a kind of balance between the sun-force and the moon-force, the sun-substance and the moon-substance. In the former we recognize that there is something that expresses itself in the life element, in the blossom and growth of youthful forces, and in the moon-force something that expresses itself in degeneration and aging, in the thinning down of those blossoming, living forces which we can describe as a spiritual reality, as the sun-force. We recognize that there is a kind of balance and that both forces, both qualities of being which are at work permeating every single organ, are necessary; we see how that when we are sick it is because there is a preponderance, an imbalance of the one force over the other. Hence it becomes possible to exercise a healing influence on this or that organ of a sick human being by bringing to bear upon it the particular forces that are at work in some plant or mineral from the external world; the preponderance of one force at work in the sick man is counteracted by a particular plant or mineral in which the opposite spiritual force is at work. So we attain to a definite and rational science of medicine, and one that has not merely collected a number of empirical results but is built up scientifically upon rational conceptions.

I have shown how we can come to a true self-knowledge, how this can also help us in practical life. I have shown this for one field of activity, it is also possible to do the same for others. So we can say: initiation science provides on the one hand the basis for the deepest longings of the human soul; on the other, gives us what we need to work practically in the world, but deeper than through external science. This second aspect of human knowledge leads to the Spirit of the Cosmos. Higher still is that which leads us to conscious knowledge of man's passing through the gate of death.

It is only when this inspirational knowledge is attained that we come to perceive and recognize in full consciousness, the inner soul nature of our own human being. We then recognize our reality, the reality of our existence purely in soul, that is to say, independently of the body, for we recognize how we lived without a physical body in the spiritual worlds before birth.

Having thus dealt with the inspirational knowledge that brings us experience of our spiritual life before birth, I now come to the third stage of higher knowledge, that which leads us to conscious knowledge of the passing through the gate of death to immortality.

This knowledge of the soul-spiritual of man remains one-sided if there is progress only up to inspired knowledge, before birth. To obtain knowledge of life after death, the exercises to develop super-sensible knowledge must be raised to a still higher degree. This time, just as to start with, the element of will was trained and carried into the life of thought which thus became strengthened, so now it is a matter of carrying the thoughts into the life of will. For example, suppose that in the evening we set ourselves to think over the events and experiences of the day that is past, not however by beginning with the morning and following out the events in the order in which they took place, but beginning with those that were the most recent and tracing them backwards. What is the effect of this exercise of following the events of the day in the opposite way from their natural sequence? In our ordinary life and experience our thoughts all the while are being moulded and conditioned and determined by the course of our experiences in ‘time’; as they occur so do our thoughts take their impression. Whereas in those exercises whereby we pass from one event or experience to another in the reverse order we are training a strong element of will, not in the way that is determined by the external events or experiences but in the opposite way. By this means we develop strong forces of will and carry the thinking life into the willing life. It may be done by remembering a tune or melody backwards, or by following the action of a drama from the fifth Act back to the first. It may at first only be possible to pick out isolated episodes during the day, but gradually the power is attained of having the whole of the day's experiences before us in a kind of picture, passing backwards from the evening to the morning. Thus do we drive the power of thought right down into our will-life.

Further, the will-life should be trained so strongly that not only do we go about our life with those qualities and faculties and characteristics which we already had in childhood, or gained through education; we also carry on a rigorous self-education as mature men and women, especially if we set ourselves deliberately to train one or other specific quality or characteristic wherein we are lacking, and to develop along those lines, no matter if the exercises take a number of years. Thus by self-education we train ourselves to will, until we come to pass into the super-sensible world from yet another side. This may be explained as follows. Think of our soul life; what is our volitional life like? For instance, we have a certain conception, and as a result we wish, let us say, to raise our arm; a conception and then an act of will. But we have no knowledge of the way in which we raise our arm; that will-process by means of which we pass from conception to action is entirely hidden from us. We are asleep, so to speak, in our will life, and we are awake in our conceptual and inner thought-life. By way of comparison, how is it that the eye enables us to see the external world? It becomes transparent, and by thus practising a sort of self abnegation enables us to see right through it to the world. So much for the physical sense, but in a sense of soul the whole of our organism must be made transparent so that we learn to look on our physical organism in a physical sense and in a sense more transparent. Then do we come to experience the moment of death. When we have attained the power, through these exercises of the soul, of making our physical body transparent, we have before us a picture of the moment of death and we pass in conscious experience out through the gate of death and experience our immortality. This is the stage of Intuitive knowledge, the true intuitive knowledge. We know that once we have reached this stage after passing through Imagination and Inspiration, that we then belong to the universe as an eternal being, that we behold the spirit in the universe with the eternal spirit in us. That is the plateau initiation science reaches when it adapts to modern consciousness. In old times it rose in us in an atavistic, dreamlike way, but today it has to be in full consciousness, from the transitory to the eternal.

The conclusion should not be drawn that this science of initiation is only of importance to those who immediately set out to acquire these higher faculties of knowledge which have been described as imagination, inspiration and intuition. No. It is necessary for every human being, but just as it is not given to every man to become a painter so it is with this science. Everyone with a healthy and unbiased artistic sense can understand and appreciate a painting, and in the same way those who through the science of initiation have attained imaginational, inspirational and intuitional knowledge of the spiritual world, can describe that knowledge to their fellow men. And when once shown it can be understood by those who will exercise the simple unbiased faculties of thought and judgment normal to our present stage of development; such people can then take their stand upright as human beings equal to the tasks of life in the present age.

We must not meet this science of initiation with all sorts of prejudices and all sorts of confusions arising out of the prejudices and habits of thought and judgment that are external. For example, we must not confuse it with any kind of vision and hallucination, for it is outside and beyond the visionary, hallucinatory, or the mystical experiences. Imagination, inspiration and intuition are the very opposite of such. What is the characteristic of hallucinatory and visionary experience? It is that the person is completely given up to his visions and hallucinations; dependent upon them and therefore unable to maintain his full independence. But when undergoing this higher training of the soul that has been described, when we are developing this higher knowledge, imagination, inspiration and intuition in the soul, all the time there is standing beside us, fully present and fully there, the ordinary human being with his feet on the ground, his firm and sound judgment unhampered, entirely capable of exercising criticism, and with the full presence of mind of the ordinary healthy human being at the present stage. We are not completely given up and lost in these spiritual experiences but maintain full control; standing beside us is a normal and healthy human being.

Anthroposophy is actually a continuation of that modern striving for knowledge which has led to the results of natural science with its achievements of external scientific knowledge. This the anthroposophist would by no means decry, but would maintain that the results of external science need to be supplemented and completed, in the present experience and stage of the world, by a science extending into the higher spiritual worlds. In that sense it is a continuation of the true striving for knowledge of our age, and despite the triumphs of natural science it may well be said by those with a heart and an understanding of the experiences of the modern world, that the need of men for this higher knowledge is being proclaimed on every side. One may speak, for instance, of the need for higher knowledge in the religious and moral and ethical demands of the human soul. The subject that will be dealt with in the following lecture is the application of this science of initiation to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

In conclusion, just as we see the external features and physiognomy of a man confronting us but do not know him well until we become his friend, entering into his life with heart and soul until we know him from within, so it is with the natural science that we have attained so far. For it shows the external features or physiognomy of the world, and the need of the world and of humanity to-day is to gain a knowledge that not only shows those things but enters into the spiritual and soul-life of the universe. It is that which this higher knowledge of initiation reaches; something that perceives the spiritual and soul-being in all the universe and in the human being himself. In that sense and to develop to its real completion, the fundamental striving for knowledge, this science of initiation springing from the needs and from the spirit of the age in which we live and whose tasks we have to accomplish.

Clairvoyance, which is the basis of the modern science of initiation, has always existed. In the past ages it was something that rose up within the human being like an elemental force, and on the path of initiation those who had gone through fewer stages were essentially dependent for their progress upon the authority of those who had gone through more stages than they. But to meet the needs of the human soul of today we cannot build on authority; to do so would be to contradict the stage it has now reached.

In our age the methods are entirely built, as in external science, upon the continuous and full control of the individuality and personality; in the soul life there must be control in every stage and in every step taken by the new candidate for initiation. Hence in speaking of exact clairvoyance in connection with the modern science of initiation we use the word ‘exact’ as it is used in the term “exact” science. Yesterday I spoke of the insight we gain into the cosmos and into the working of all things through the modern science of initiation. That insight is by no means something which, when we study it, lives in the soul merely as a theory or an abstract conception; it is something which becomes a living, spiritual force which penetrates us fully in all our powers and faculties when we allow it to work upon us. Thus the anthroposophical spiritual movement has been made effective in many spheres of life and particularly in that of the artistic life. Through the help and self-sacrifice of its friends and members in many countries the movement has been able to build the Goetheanum, its headquarters at Dornach, near Basle, Switzerland,¹ as an independent school of anthroposophical science. And in all its forms this building expresses that same deep spiritual reality which finds utterance through the spoken and the written word for the ideas and thoughts of the science.

Had any other spiritual movement in our time required to build a headquarters it would have commissioned an architect to design it on Antique, Renaissance or Gothic lines, or in one of the prevailing styles. This the Anthroposophical Movement, by reason of its inner nature, could not do. The architectural forms of the Goetheanum are drawn from the same source out of which the ideas of the super-sensible spring, as they are proclaimed through the world. Everything that is found in Dornach, be it sculpture or painting, is carried by a new style out of which Anthroposophy is born in this modern age. Whoever visits this School for Spiritual Science will find that on the one hand the anthroposophical world view is proclaimed from the rostrum in words and on the other hand the forms of the building and the paintings express in an artistic way what is expressed by the word. That which can work from the stage should only be another form of revelation than that what can be effected through the word. Anthroposophy should come out of the deepest foundations of humanity, of which theoretical Anthroposophy is only one branch, education and the arts are the others. In this way anthroposophical life becomes a factor in the most varied fields of human existence. The Waldorf School, which has been founded in Stuttgart, is not in any sense a school where children are taught a particular anthroposophical conception of the world. It is one where the teachers themselves, not so much in what they teach as in how they do so and in the whole way in which they exercise the art of education—are permeated in their faculties with that which anthroposophy can give them. Reference could be made to other directions in which the modern science of initiation is proving itself of use in every branch of human life and activity. Moreover it operates upon and vitalizes the religious needs of civilized humanity, and as these needs are deeply connected with an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha it is with that subject that I propose to deal now.

Let me begin by connecting what I have to say with what was said yesterday about the path of spiritual development for modern times leading to imagination, inspiration and intuition. I showed how by imagination and concentration, by means of certain exercises, the student can develop his thought-power until it becomes something which may be called imaginative in the real sense of the word, and in such a way that thought becomes not what it ordinarily is—abstract, cold, and in outline sketchy if compared with the intense vitality of sense impressions—but imaginative, pictorial, vivid and full of life, and in these characteristics no way inferior to impressions of the senses. The man who has attained to imaginative thinking, has something as full of life as when in normal daily existence he yields to the impressions of the world of colour or of sound.

But between the students of the new science of Initiation who attain to this imaginative thought, and those who abandon themselves to uncontrolled vision and hallucination, there is an important difference. The man who is subject to visions and hallucinations is not aware that the pictures which arise before him are subjective; on the other hand, he who has imaginative thought is fully aware that what he has before him is not an external reality but is something subjective having its origin in his own inner life. He knows the subjective nature of that imaginative picture-world. He knows too, that when through ‘imaginative thought’ he comes to perceive what was called yesterday his ‘time organism’—the formative force body that works within the physical body as its sculpturer and architect—he is perceiving the first spiritual super-sensible thing that he can experience, and something that essentially belongs to his own inner being.

Then there comes the second stage on that path of development when he becomes so strong that he is not only able to concentrate the full forces of his soul at will upon the concepts, and then upon the imaginative pictures he has before him in imaginative thought, but can divert that picture world away from his consciousness while maintaining it in a fully wakeful condition. He is now ready for the real imaginations to pour into him from the external world spiritually, speaking through the outside spiritual universe, i.e., the objective imaginations as against the subjective picture-world that he had before. Here is attained the stage I have described as inspirational knowledge. He perceives his own spiritual being as it exists independently of his physical bodily organism, and as it existed in the worlds of soul and spirit before he entered into this physical life through conception and birth. He has before him a picture of his prenatal existence in the spiritual world and of the spiritual realities of the whole universe, and comes in contact through conscious knowledge with the spiritual reality of man and of the universe. Thus, through this imaginative, inspirational knowledge, he discovers what he was before he descended into this physical incarnation in a physical body for this life. He discovers also that when he came down from the spiritual worlds he carried with him into this physical life the power of thought which he here possesses in his ordinary consciousness. What is this power of thought? It is that which he already had in his life in the spiritual worlds before birth, but ordinary consciousness only shows it in a pale and abstract outline.

He then comes to recognize something that may be thus described: he gazes upon the picture at the gate of death, and the moment of death, and sees that the physical body is no longer held together and built up in its whole forces by the force of an indwelling human soul but is given over to the forces of the earth as they work in the external mineral world; he sees how, through decay or the process of burning, the human physical body is given up to those mineral forces and assimilated with the earth. He sees by comparison how, in effect, what is carried into the earthly life through birth is something (speaking now in the sense of the soul) that dies into the physical body just as the latter dies into the earth at death. What he had in his power of thought in the ordinary consciousness was something that was vital and full of spiritual life in the spiritual worlds before conception and birth, but was then killed in the physical body so that it appeared in ordinary consciousness as the power of deadened thought.

Because of this fact knowledge of today is so unsatisfactory for man, as he comprehends, in a certain sense, only lifeless nature. It is an illusion when he thinks that through scientific experiments he can reach anything else. Certainly there will be progress beyond representing only lifeless nature; they will be able to create organic substances. But it will not be understood by the deadened thinking, even when they have been created in the laboratories. With this kind of thinking, which is the corpse of the soul which is spiritually dead, only death can be understood.

In what then does the process consist that was described as the development of the soul to imaginative, inspirational and intuitional knowledge? It is in effect this, that we call to life within ourselves what was killed in our power of thought. When we develop the living, imaginative, plastic thought, and inspirational and intuitional cognition, we call to life our power of thought, which was dead.

We have now reached the point where we should be able to understand human evolution and history. Modern scientific history usually skims over the surface of external events, without regarding the metamorphoses that go on within the soul of man from age to age. We may ask why is it that in this age humanity has had to pass through a period when thought was abstract and of a deadened quality. The answer is that the full, living, spiritual thought, by its very vitality and fullness of life, exercises a kind of compulsion on the human soul. It is by passing through this dead and abstract thought that humanity has been able to achieve freedom, and for the evolution and development of freedom this stage was a necessary one.

After man has attained to Imagination and Inspiration, he has to say to himself: Something has happened to me, which causes me anxiety. I mention this as an unusual fact, for the strange thing happens, that the man of today when he has risen to Imagination and Inspiration, experiences real anxiety. This stems from the fact that today, when he becomes clairvoyant, man has to say to himself: I have become too strongly egotistical through my development. Anxiety arises in the heart and mind (Gemüt), for man has the feeling that his ego works too strongly. In ancient initiation, before the Mystery of Golgotha, the candidate went through the opposite experience: As he attained to initiation he found that in a sense he was becoming less ego-conscious, that he was pouring himself out into the universe and becoming less in possession of himself. His ego-consciousness was rather weakened than strengthened.

The turning point between these two characteristics of initiation is the Mystery of Golgotha. The first human being to pass through initiation, and to experience this deeply disquieting feeling when the ego becomes too strong, was St. Paul at Damascus. The passage in the New Testament (Acts 9) is so well known as to need no further reference here. It was on that occasion that he gained insight into the necessity for weakening the power of his ego; he realized that the initiate of the new age stood in need of a force to weaken the intensity of the ego-life, and as a result of his experience he pronounced the words which were to give the keynote to the whole development of humanity through initiation as from the moment of the Mystery of Golgotha. These words, which resounded forth into the future and pointed out the direction to be taken by the succeeding period of evolution, were ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ When we look upon the place of Golgotha, and receive into ourselves the forces of the Christ Who descended to earth from the spiritual worlds and Who since the Mystery has permeated the earth, we are enabled to diminish the forces of the ego and to pass through initiation in the right way.

The abstract thinking of which I spoke in the first part of this lecture, where the power of thought is deadened and becomes like a soul-corpse living in the physical body, has prevailed only in the more recent times of human evolution. It began, gradually, some three or four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the more ancient people, man brought with him into his physical life out of the spiritual worlds more of the full life of thought which is now dead abstract thought. This may be confirmed by studying, without bias, the evolution of humanity and the records and experiences of man, whether initiate or non-initiate, in ancient times. Much is said today about so-called Animism, the poetic fancy of simple and primitive peoples, in an endeavour to explain the experiences of the past ages as recorded and handed down in tradition. But by facing up to realities we see that it was not in a kind of poetic fancy that ancient man described the woods and forests, lakes and mountains, springs, brooks, clouds and thunder and lightning, and everything physical in the world of Nature in a spiritual way. He saw and described not only the physical things that we see, but the spiritual beings that inhabited every flower and mineral, every spring and wood. That description was not, as in the modern conception of Animism, something created out of poetic fancy, but a direct experience of the living, spiritual power which man brought with him into physical life. It was as though, in a spiritual sense, he sent out feelers which felt and touched and realized, giving him experiences of the spiritual beings which inhabit everything in external nature. It is only since the third or fourth century after Christianity that gradually developed in humanity dead thinking, that dead consciousness which today can only see the mineral world. Ancient man experienced in himself something that was living; he was able to experience and to know the spiritual beings in the world and to recognize them as the same thing that had lived within him before he entered into the physical life. His experience was a very practical one, explaining his pre-natal existence in spiritual worlds, and he felt that something was born with him into this physical life and lived within him; he did not feel that this thought proceeded from the organism of his physical body, for he knew it was a living thing he had brought with him from the spiritual world before his birth.

Now we can quite well realize how the course of human evolution would have continued along the line that has been described, and how the thinking power of man would have become more and more dead. We can imagine evolution continuing in a straight downward line, and that is what would have happened if the Cross had not been raised upon Golgotha. Looking at the picture of death we see that had it not been for the Mystery of Golgotha the physical body of man would die, that his soul-life would die with his physical body. We can say out of our consciousness of this abstract, deadened thought, that our soul-life, i.e., our life of thought, partakes of death. And this is what humanity would have had to experience gradually more and more but for the Cross on Golgotha; no longer would there have been the living thought, but the soul-life would have slowly expired in universal death.

This is how we can regard the Mystery of Golgotha by means of the modern science of initiation, just as it is possible for those who are rooted in Christianity to regard the Mystery through the simple study of the Gospel records. This fresh aspect of the Mystery is the starting point for a new evolution and an upward one. He who goes through the experiences and training of the modern path of initiation, and who attains to inspirational and intuitive cognition, is able to attain to the point where a spiritual world is revealed, of which the Mystery of Golgotha is shown as the great solace in world existence. He also realizes that he has attained freedom, but as the price of that freedom he finds this deep and troubling experience, as he passes through the way of initiation to ‘imagination’ and ‘inspiration’, that his ego has been strengthened and intensified, and is now too strong. That is one pole of his experience. The other pole is that in spite of the strengthened ego he has gained from evolution he cannot save himself or mankind from the universal death of the soul-life. But when he looks out, from his spiritual experience in inspirational and intuitive cognition, upon the picture of the Cross on Golgotha, he sees that through the passing of that Divine Being, the CHRIST—first through the physical body of a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and then through the gate of death—mankind can be redeemed from universal death. On the one hand man has strengthened the ego-consciousness, but this cannot save him from universal death; and on the other hand he sees redemption from that death in the picture of the Cross on Golgotha and of the dying and the risen Christ. Through this conscious spiritual knowledge he is able to understand from out of what experience the wonderful writers of the Gospels wrote. He sees that until the third or fourth century after Golgotha something still remained of that living thought in humanity, something of that spiritual world which man brought into his physical life, and that it was this which enabled isolated human beings in the first three or four centuries to understand the Mystery of Golgotha; even as the modern initiate can understand it by means of the new science of initiation when he goes through that path and through the exercises which have been described.

From the knowledge contained in the Gnosis—which resembles in some respects modern anthroposophical science—we find that in the first few centuries there was a certain understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, and that unless that understanding had still existed in isolated human beings the Gospels never could have been written. They were written out of the last relics of the old pre-Christian science of initiation. Hence we see why St. Paul out of his experience was able to say, “Were it not for the risen Christ then all our faith and all our life of soul would have been in vain, would have remained dead'. Then we understand that the Divine Being, the God, descended to the earth and went through the gate of Death, and lives in and with the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, and, as was not the case before, the forces of Christ are working especially in the evolution of humanity upon the earth. We know that He passed through and conquered death, that He rose again through conquering the death of the soul forces and redeemed the soul from death. And so are we able to enter our thinking life again, to enliven what has become dead in the soul-life by looking up from the deeply moving and troubling experience of our too much strengthened ego to the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is thus that anthroposophy can show the path, not away from Christ, but to Him. I shall now give an outline of what anthroposophical cognition tells us of the evolution of mankind in its approach to the Mystery of Golgotha.

In primeval times, when man's thinking was still alive and filled with spiritual vitality, he saw the spiritual alongside the physical being when he looked out upon the physical phenomena of the world of Nature. The spiritual thought he experienced in a somewhat dreamlike, instinctive consciousness, and he knew that his spiritual origin was in the spiritual worlds. From out of the great masses of men who thus knew instinctively of the spiritual world there arose individuals who gave themselves up to science, to the path of knowledge, just as in our time individuals become scientists and learned men. In that time when in the forces of all human souls there was still a connection with the spiritual world, there arose men of science and learning, initiates, who also by exercises and by training the soul (though different in character from those described for the modern science of development) attained to a kind of imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Intuition is the third stage of spiritual development, Here the initiate perceives not only pictures of the spiritual world, but enters into and communes with the spiritual beings themselves. In the spiritual worlds the initiates held a mighty and majestic communion with beings who descended from the divine spiritual worlds; they raised themselves to this inter-course. The most ancient and primeval teachers of humanity were spiritual beings who taught, not through the external senses and not by walking in physical bodies among men and teaching through the physical ear, but through the spiritual consciousness of the ancients. Now what was it primarily that these spiritual beings, the sublime teachers, taught mankind through these ancients? It was the mysteries of ‘unbornness’ of the human soul. They taught in clear knowledge that which was already known or felt instinctively by the masses of mankind, namely, how the life of man is connected in the spiritual worlds before birth. From these ancients, divine spiritual teachers, humanity learnt to know the destinies of the human soul through its connection with the life before birth. We can see how in ancient times death and resurrection were represented merely in pictorial form in the cults and ceremonies. The cults represented the death and the resurrection of gods, of divine beings, prophetically and in a picture that was not at that time a real and practical experience of the mysteries of death. For man had not then the same tragic experience of death as he has today; he still had within him the living life he had brought from the spiritual worlds into his physical life. Death to him did not mean that tragedy which it was to mean later when the soul-life had been drawn into the physical body and become like a corpse. In those ancient cults where death and resurrection of the Divine Being were represented as in a picture it was more like a pictorial prophecy of what was to come—the Mystery of Golgotha. The men who witnessed these cults and ceremonies were already able to say in dim prophecy that the god passes through death and conquers it, and that because the god conquers death so can the divine in the human soul. Nevertheless the pre-Christian mysteries and understandings and teachings of humanity by the divine spiritual beings was a teaching principally of the mysteries of birth not of death. And that is a deeply significant fact in the evolution of humanity.

The first initiates of the Christian era, looking upon the Mystery of Golgotha, recognized that the old initiation and the old teaching of the mysteries did not penetrate into the knowledge of death. They realized however that this knowledge was revealed in the Mystery of Golgotha. Then there was understood and was revealed what can only be described by saying literally that in the Mystery of Golgotha something happened which concerned the destinies of the gods themselves. It may be put in this way: looking down upon the earth, the divine spiritual beings could see that through a destiny that was beyond the power of the gods, the earth and humanity and all that was connected with humanity were being given up to death. But who was it that had no experience of death? The gods, the divine spiritual beings, those from whom the ancient primeval teachers of humanity descended to commune with the initiates when they had raised themselves to a consciousness of the spiritual. And they, the gods, did not partake in that death through which all earthly human beings were destined to pass. Therefore it was decided between the gods, not only as a matter concerning mankind but as one concerning the gods themselves, that a god should pass through the mystery of death on earth in a human body. That is the great mystery that we must understand about the Mystery of Golgotha. It not only concerns man but also the gods.

So it is that when we come to view the Mystery through the modern science of initiation our aspect or outlook is super-sensible. Anthroposophy leads to an understanding of this. Not only the initiate of today but every man may receive a stimulating impulse, encouragement and understanding from the modern science of initiation. We, all of us, may attain to an intensified and strengthened power of knowledge, and having done so may recognize that the Mystery of Golgotha which took place within earth-existence, was at the same time a cosmic and an earthly event. Then are we able to say, ‘It is not I, but Christ in me Who makes me live again in the spiritual life of the soul.’

Anthroposophy does not lead to irreligion but to a religious life in the fullest sense of the term; we are deepened and penetrated with new spiritual forces. Through spiritual-scientific cognition of the Mystery of Golgotha man overcomes all doubts which are contained so strongly in today's religious life. External science has given us freedom, but with it has come doubt. It is the task of Anthroposophy to sweep away these doubts that have come in the train of external science and which were a necessary stage in the development of humanity, and because Anthroposophy is a spiritual science it is able to do so. It can instill into the heart and soul of man a religious sense for everything in the world and in mankind, and above all it can give an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha in a form that can be received, not only by those who adhere to the older Christian tradition, but by all men on the earth.

Anthroposophy did not come to found sects or new religions. It came to call to life again what is the religion of humanity, the synthesis of all religions, the religion that is already there—Christianity. Not only is it able to call Christianity into fresh life, but for those who have been bereft of Christianity by modern science and the doubts arising from it, it is able to bring about, in the fullest sense, a resurrection of the religious life. Amongst all the other life-giving forces, Anthroposophy is able at this present time to enliven us and to bring about the resurrection of religious experience for all mankind.

• 1. Refers to the first Goetheanum, destroyed by fire on December 31, 1922. Rebuilt as the present Goetheanum. (Ed.)

As human beings, we can only know the deeper mysteries of the soul if we consider the totality of a person's experience. This totality of a person's experience is divided into the time during which the person is on the earth, the time between waking up and falling asleep, that is, the ordinary waking state during the day, and the time between falling asleep and waking up, the life that a person spends in a dark state of consciousness, from which the waves of dream life initially arise for the ordinary consciousness.

It is now a matter of really considering this state of transition between sleeping and waking from the most diverse points of view from which it can be observed. If we start from the usual way of looking at life, we can say: In the dream state there is a transition from waking to sleeping. And if we examine the course of dream life, we must make a significant distinction between the content of the images, so to speak, the content of the ideas in the dream, and the course of the dreaming. I have often pointed this out as well.

We can dream this or that according to the content. But we must also see what the inner course of the dream is. Let us say that it unfolds with a certain drama, that we initially have a kind of state of tension in the dream, which becomes ever greater or ever stronger and stronger, and that then a certain resolution comes, or even that such a resolution does not arise in the end, but that the tension gives rise to waking. We must distinguish this dramatic process from the actual content of the dream.

Let us say, for example, we dreamt that we are going on a journey. We come to a mountain cave. We enter the mountain cave. It becomes more and more eerie and eerie for us because it gets darker and darker. Finally, we are overcome by a real state of fear, and then, although we know we have to go on, we come up against some obstacle. The state of fear grows and grows. We see how tension builds up. But the content, the content of the dream, is something quite different. For example, we can also dream the following: We see something approaching in the distance that threatens us. It comes closer and closer, and the individual details become clearer and clearer, and with that our anxiety grows, finally discharging in a mighty state of fear. In terms of the drama of the dream, the same is present in both cases: that which builds up internally as tension. The images in which the dream is clothed according to our imagination are somewhat different.

Now, if we go further, we will often find that, at least for most of our dream life, the imaginative nature of dreaming is in some way taken from our experiences during our earthly existence. Of course, some things may have been transformed, some things may appear in a very disguised form, but in some way or other we will still be able to understand how the conditions on earth that we have experienced come into the dream as images.

What actually takes place during such dreams, let us say, when we dream while waking? Well, during the time from falling asleep to waking up, we are, with our soul-spiritual part – we also call it the astral body and the I - outside of our physical body and the etheric body. We dwell with our ego and our astral body in this world, in which, at first, we cannot perceive as our consciousness is in our earthly existence, because the astral body and the ego in which we are are somewhat indefinite and its organs of perception are not developed. But that is not to say that something is not constantly happening in what is outside the physical body during sleep. In fact, between falling asleep and waking up, a richer life takes place in the astral body and in the I than during waking hours. We just cannot become aware of it. And what we experience in dreams as states of tension, as states of discharge, as fear, perhaps also as anger, rage and so on – all this can play into the dream, clothe it in the most diverse images, and this goes on with us from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up.

In these extra-bodily states, we live in a world whose movements we participate in, just as we participate in the processes of the physical external world through our senses during the waking hours. When we now return to our physical body with our soul-spiritual, that is, with the astral body and the I, when we wake up, we take hold of the organs of our physical body. We sink into these organs. In this moment we are again able to perceive an external world, the external world of the nature kingdoms, minerals, plants, animals, the physical human being. We permeate these organs, which organize the physical body, with our soul. Thus we are in relationship to this external world.

If we do not immediately submerge ourselves completely in our physical body, but if we penetrate the etheric body for a moment before we take hold of the whole physical body, then the forces that form the images of the 'dream' come to us from this etheric body. These images are carried by the forces of the etheric body. They are reminiscences of life, memories of life.

When we dream as we fall asleep, it may be that we leave our physical body and, due to some abnormality, do not immediately leave the etheric body as well. Then, before we enter into a state of complete unconsciousness, we live in the images of the etheric body. But the surging of the astral body and the ego, which takes place during the state between falling asleep and waking up, is already beginning. So we have to strictly separate the images contained in the dream and the dynamic, the flow of energy of the dream, the drama of the dream. We must keep the two strictly separate. And when we are able, through soul exercises, to carry out this separation in practice, as I have just described to you in theory, when one is able to make one's astral body and one's ego so strong through exercises that one does not passively into the etheric body and then into the physical body, but if you learn to make use of the general cosmic ether outside of the body, then you can perceive things that you would otherwise not be able to perceive.

The ether that is secreted and forms our etheric body is, after all, only a part of the general cosmic ether. Ether is everywhere. Some time before our birth, we separate some of the general ether to form our etheric body, which we then carry within us between birth and death. The general cosmic ether remains imperceptible. It only becomes perceptible when we are able to strengthen our astral body and our ego to such an extent that we can hold them outside our physical body, even when we are not sleeping, but we do not merely receive the kinds of dream impressions that we have when falling asleep and otherwise for the ordinary consciousness, but we can perceive in the external etheric. Then the following is present:

The physical world is spread out around us. At first, it is of no concern to us. It remains available to us when we do the right exercises, just as memories remain available. We can survey it; we do not step out of it like a hallucinator, but at first it is of no concern to us. We have strengthened our astral body and our ego. We perceive what takes place in the etheric world, not in the physical world. And what now takes place in the etheric world, that is, what is now perceptible to us, is actually nothing other than what you find, of course only partially, at least in terms of nature, in my book “Occult Science”.

Seen in this light, one sees with the strengthened astral body and I, which now, instead of using the eyes and ears to perceive physically outside the body, perceive ethereally. This ethereal quality presents itself in such images, which can then be described in the same way as I have described in my “Occult Science”.

I would therefore like to say: If one is able to bring the astral body and the I into the body-free state, as they are otherwise every night in sleep, but if one has strengthened them through exercises so that one perceives in the cosmic ether, then one initially has the world in imaginations, in pictures, before oneself. What one otherwise sees only as a small part of the physical world is so expanded that one can depict the existence of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, and so on, in addition to the earthly existence. This is the first thing that can be perceived from the supersensible world.

But now everything that can become the content of the imaginative world lies in this. We are already emerging from the world of ether when, through what I have described as empty consciousness, we no longer merely live in imaginations that arise, but when we learn to dispel the imaginations in turn, when we are able to both, let us say, receive an imagination in the soul and also to let it fall.

This results in a state of mind that can be controlled completely at will, a state of mind in which one lives in the image, then suppresses the image, and lives in the image again, suppressing the image. This is the state of inspired experience of the world. But here one experiences a world that is not completely foreign to man either. He experiences it every night in dreamless sleep. He is just not able to grasp with his consciousness what is going on in it. In this world, one does not just perceive images, but as the images flood in, flood out, arise, pass away, as it becomes still even in the flooding image, and in the flooding-out image a kind of inner so that the world also becomes manifold in relation to our perceptions, we perceive in this inspired world, if I may say so, the actions and deeds of real spiritual beings. In the description I have given in Occult Science, these deeds of spiritual beings are already implied, although essentially the pictures of the evolution of the world are given there. But attention is drawn to the beings of the higher hierarchies, angels, archangels and so on, which appear in this surge of the world, of arising and passing imaginations. I would like to say that on the waves that one experiences in inspired life, those beings who are the beings of the higher hierarchies weave at the same time.

Now one realizes how one's own existence, but that part of existence that only actually becomes free in the time between falling asleep and waking up during physical life on earth, how this essential part of the human being is integrated into a world of supersensible entities. Indeed, between falling asleep and waking up, we are indeed members of this world. As souls, we move among beings.

In imaginative consciousness, it is the case that one really only has an idea of what these beings do. I would like to say that the first stage of supersensible consciousness presents itself in such a way that these beings, so to speak, sketch out their images for us. These are the imaginations. Then one comes to the point where one is not only confronted with images, but images arise and flood in, and in this arising and flooding the deeds of the beings take place. But we ourselves are now in this world of spiritual events. When consciousness breaks through, we are in a state in which we are as free from the body as we otherwise are for ordinary consciousness in dreamless sleep; we actually belong to such a world in which spiritual deeds occur. This world, in which spiritual deeds take place, and in which we ourselves are interwoven, makes clear to us that from which we come out when we hurry towards birth on earth to begin another earthly existence after having lived for some time in the spiritual-soul world.

In fact, the onset of earthly existence at birth is the extinction of this world. Man returns to this world every time he falls asleep, but the inner activity of the astral and the ego within him has become so weak in the course of life between death and a new birth that he is compelled to have the deepest desire, the deepest longing, that something will come to his aid, for he would have to die in the spiritual idleness when birth approaches again and something would not come to his aid.

Let us assume, then, that man has developed from death through spiritual events. At first, his consciousness is very much alive, even reminiscent of earthly consciousness in the early days. Then he rises more and more, as his consciousness takes part in spiritual deeds. But this consciousness later weakens. When the time for an earthly birth approaches again, the person comes into a state as a spiritual being that can only be compared, if we want to characterize it by something that exists on earth, to someone who begins to suffer from amnesia, who thus, so to speak, grabs for his memories and cannot find them. So when earthly life approaches again, the person reaches for reality, for being filled with reality. For at this moment his emotional and volitional life is strong, but the perceptions are dull and he has no inner content. He reaches, as it were, for the perceptions, which become duller and duller, while the will becomes more and more powerful. And this desire now drives him to earthly embodiment, to an earthly organism that is given to him through the current of inheritance. He can now use this as a tool, it gives him the opportunity to think again, although now only about a physical external world, but it does allow the development of the life of imagination, which has become dull. It is through this desire to be able to think again that man enters into physical embodiment on earth. And there he passes through the state of sleep, in which he slowly develops to be able to live again as a spiritual being when he passes through the gate of death, and to begin the cycle anew.

What one experiences now, by rising in the body-free state to this perception of the world, which presents itself in inspiration, that is the whole secret of how man lives in a supersensible world between death and a new birth: how this supersensible world really is.

Some of it, how man in turn comes to an earthly embodiment, I have indeed described in the Vienna cycle of 1914, “Inner Being of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth”. If one rises even further, then what is actually not known in the ordinary consciousness of man arises. In the waking state, we have three distinctly different states of soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. We also have three such states in sleep. But usually only two are distinguished, the one where sleep is so thin, I would say, that we can dream, the lightest sleep, and the dreamless sleep. But very few people know that if you can compare the light sleep of dreaming with the thinking of waking, and the dreamless sleep with the feeling of waking, then there is still a deep sleep. This difference between the middle state of sleep and that deep sleep, which can then be compared with the will of the waking state, is simply overlooked. But this state of deep sleep also exists.

Some people will certainly notice a certain difference, at least when waking up. It does happen that a person goes through nights in which they only experience the two sleep states, dream sleep and dreamless sleep, but not the deeper sleep, which is clearly different from the mere dreamless sleep. When waking up, I said, some people will already notice when they sometimes emerge from sleep, by feeling quite as if they are new, that they are already rising from deeper regions of being than is usually the case. It is necessary to indicate this difference, which, as I said, is not taken into account in ordinary consciousness. It is like this: When we are in a state of dream sleep, then we actually live in a world - we are, after all, outside our physical and our etheric bodies - which can certainly be compared to that world which otherwise takes place invisibly in the earth's environment, where the flowers of the plants unfold, interacting with the sunlight. This weaving and living of the flowering plants escapes ordinary consciousness. But it is into this world that man first plunges. It is, after all, the world that is nearest to the ordinary world of the day. It is everywhere, and by plunging into this world, he lives in the dream sleep.

The deeper, dreamless sleep is the one in which man submerges himself in a world that would be around us in the interior of plants. We are completely in such a world when we sleep dreamlessly, as we would be if we could creep as ghosts into the interior of plants.

But when we are in that deeper sleep, which is a third state of sleep, then we are completely immersed in the mineral kingdom. Then the mineral processes - the earlier alchemy called them the salination processes - also take place most strongly in the human organism. Then, in a sense, the human being is not only given over to the plant kingdom, but also to the mineral kingdom.

For those who can consciously enter this world, in which the human being is otherwise in this deepest state of sleep, it really becomes clear what lives inside the minerals. And when the human being lives in a world like that inside the minerals, it is as if he is now looking at a mineral from the inside, whereas he otherwise always looks at it from the outside. You will understand that this is what I wanted to say in a certain description of the spirit world in my Theosophy. You will find this reversal in this description of the spirit world. And by living into this reversal, man lives into that world in which he can take part not only in the deeds of the higher hierarchies, but in the beings of the higher hierarchies, where he can get to know the beings of the higher hierarchies in the same way as he perceives the soul qualities of people in the physical world. There we are no longer in the inspired world, there we are in the world of intuition. There we not only devote ourselves to the actions, the spiritual actions of the spiritual entities, but to the essence of these entities themselves.

But then we are also in the world in which karma becomes a reality for us. Every time a person enters this third state of sleep, if he were suddenly able to become conscious, he would perceive his karma. He would perceive how past earthly lives play a part in the present earthly life. Man experiences his karma in deep sleep, and he also carries the results of this experience into the physical body. But the physical body is not suited to perceive something like that. It has no organs for that at first. Just as he develops eyes to see outwardly and ears to hear outwardly, so he would have to develop organs of perception inwardly.

These inward organs of perception, however, would kill him if he developed them, if he had to look inward physically, because the human organism cannot live if it sends the forces that lead to the formation of sensory organs inward. If he were to send them inward, he would be able to see his karma with physical organs, so to speak. One can only see it with spiritual organs, precisely in intuitive recognition.

But we see from this that during his life on earth, man lives both in the forces that form his environment in the time between death and a new birth, which work in him in order to then incorporate him into a physical earthly body, and in the world in which his destiny unfolds from life to life. This fate is veiled from our ordinary consciousness because, if a person were to perceive his fate unprepared, he would enter into a very special state.

If a person could perceive his destiny without practising for it – it may not happen, but I will hypothetically assume it – then the desire would immediately arise in him from this perceptibility to develop organs that perceive inwardly, so to speak. He would want to develop eyes and ears that see and hear inwardly. But this would mean forces for his organism. He would not only wake up as he does now, but he would bring with him from his sleep the strength to rebuild his organism inwards. That is, he would kill his organism.

The human organism is designed in such a way that the soul and spirit, the astral body and the I, can only submerge in the etheric body for a moment; then they must immediately submerge in the physical body, after dream images have arisen from submerging in the etheric body. But even there, the etheric body must give what the images are about. A person cannot take in what he otherwise experiences outside. Then he must delve into his physical body, which he must leave as it is, to which he must devote himself, having decided to use it when he descended from the spiritual-soul world, precisely in order to make use of a physical body and its organs. That which lies beyond the threshold, which is imperceptible but is still experienced, is in a sense a reflection of what we go through between death and a new birth.

Only through such a contemplation does the image of the complete human being emerge. And at the same time it emerges that man, as he is in physical life on earth, is so weak spiritually that he would drift through the world in a dull sleep, if I may say so, without perceiving anything at all, if he did not use his physical body to perceive. Between birth and death, man can actually only be seen to live in a dull state and to only inwardly enlighten himself when he makes use of the body. This is the relative justification of materialism, which is quite relatively justified for life on earth, because that which is actually spiritual-soul remains dull for life on earth.

Now we can ask: Is there perhaps a way to look even more sharply at what lives as spiritual-soul and participates in the world as I have described it to you, participates in a world of flowing images, dying away and dying up again, dying up and dying away again, but into which — as you know from my description in Occult Science — there also mingles what can be compared to taste perceptions and so on in the physical world. In this world, man lives from falling asleep to waking up. From this world, he can also become aware of how his karma lies, what his destiny is, how it unfolds from one earth life to the next, when his consciousness is strengthened.

But how one can see more precisely into this world can be seen when one first looks at those beings who, in earthly life, essentially have the astral body, not a distinct ego in earthly life. These are the animals. These animals also have sleeping and waking. If we now look at sleeping in animals, the following emerges. So let us take a sleeping animal. The astral body moves out. This astral body, by moving out of the animal, is immediately absorbed into a world that then presents itself to the senses as this floating world of approaching and disappearing imaginations, of colorations. Then again, when waking up, it withdraws into the animal. But if we observe more closely, this flooding life of imagination with the tints does move in the earthly air while the animal sleeps. From the moment the animal wakes up, the soul moves on the waves of the breathing process, through the respiratory organs in the broadest sense, back into the animal body again. Then it stimulates the senses so that they take part in this life. But when it awakens, it is essentially a flooding in of the soul, whereby skin breathing must of course be taken into account, but one has the exit through the breathing processes, and then the entrance again through the respiratory organs. Once this has been seen, one begins to understand how the astral body unites with the animal in its embryonic life when the animal first comes into being. It unites in such a way that one might say: it is the reverse of the process by which the astral body goes outwards on the waves of breathing. It goes inwards and first builds itself plastically within the body.

If you bear in mind that the animal actually takes its form from its respiratory organs, you will learn a great deal about the formations of the animal. Look at animals and how they are the result of their respiratory organs in the broader sense. But it is only the way in which the soul of the animals lives in them. Compare, say, a proboscis animal with any animal whose head organs are more mouth-shaped than proboscis-shaped. The rest of the animal's form is shaped accordingly, and the way the animal can breathe is decisive for its form. The soul lives on the waves of the air-like substance taken in by the animal.

When we look at a human being, something else comes into play. Even if a child cannot yet speak, it has the ability to speak. Its respiratory organs are already prepared for this. They are different from the respiratory organs of an animal. These respiratory organs enable the air to enter in such a way that not only an astral body but also an ego can envelop the human being and take possession of him.

Anyone who sees through this, however, comes to know the truth: the animal is formed by its respiratory organs in the broadest sense to its shape, but the human being is formed by breathing, modified into speech, into words, to his shape. In man the word becomes flesh in the most literal sense, his form is a result of the word. I have already described how human souls move between the beings of the supersensible worlds. Between death and a new birth, between falling asleep and waking up, human souls belong to the same worlds as the higher spiritual beings. When we observe human souls, we find that they move in a way that can then be transferred to the waves of the air. The same thing that a person unfolds when he speaks, this kind of air movement that he unfolds when he speaks, is also unfolded in his inhalation, which shapes him when it enters him. In a sense, one can see human souls in this way, floating on the waves of air. This is because the I does not merely grasp the air. In the case of an animal, the astral body is there, it grasps the air and grasps the air with its states of warmth. The human astral body takes hold of the air and is able to move on the waves of the air, but it also takes hold of the warmth, the warmth ether. As the I streams through the world on the waves of the warmth ether, it colors breathing, becomes speech from the inside out, human form from the outside in. If we grasp the concrete reality of speech life, we learn to recognize in the speech life, in the cosmic formation of words, what enters the human being as formative, what works plastically, especially in the embryo and then in the child, in that the human being gives himself his form through inner forces, working plastically. And this connection between the word and the human form is something that can be spoken of as something absolutely real, because it can be seen in the way I have described it to you now.

One can also note the following. When you fall asleep, your astral body moves on the waves of the air and remains within the airspace; your ego goes into the indefinite, so to speak, disappears into the warmth of the outside world. The soul is already able to live in the warmth of the ether and the air during the time when a person is between falling asleep and waking up. And so we have the physical body of the human being, which actually belongs entirely to the earth, the etheric body of man, which belongs to the watery, liquid element of the earth, which has a special relationship to it, the astral body, which belongs to the airy element, and the I, which belongs to the warm element, the fire element. And this is what can be perceived when the word of the world enters the human being and brings together the forces of air and warmth, connecting them with the forces of water and earth. All of this interplay of forces is then unfolded by the inner soul when the human being descends from the spiritual and soul world to an earthly existence.

These things can, of course, only be seen inwardly, but they can really be seen inwardly. And one would like to say: It is indeed difficult because today's language is actually formed entirely for materialism and for a materialistic world view, to express oneself in the words of the present languages, but by succeeding more and more in what is seen there, to clothe it in words in such a way that clear thoughts can settle into the human soul, it will become comprehensible to everyone what can be said about the higher worlds through the science of initiation. It is indeed the case that these things can only be found through supersensible research, but supersensible research is not necessary to understand these things.

I have often compared it to saying that you can judge a picture aesthetically without being a painter yourself. In the same way, one can also judge spiritual science, anthroposophy, without being a researcher oneself, although today, to a certain extent, anyone can become one through the instructions in “How to Know Higher Worlds” and so on, so that one can already come to the point of checking the results of spiritual scientific research. But the real value for life is not gained from the content of spiritual truths by researching the facts, but by understanding them, by absorbing them.

Those who truly absorb the ideas clothed in true spiritual research can be said to have the ability to absorb these things within themselves, even if they only have ordinary common sense, just as those who have not learned the chemical composition of sugar also have a taste for it. What one should get from sugar is independent of whether one knows its chemical composition or not. It is the same with supersensible truths. What one should get from them is through their being clothed in the world of ideas, that is how one takes them in. The other is something that has to be done to attain them, but it is of as little help as if I were to say to a child: I will not give you sugar, but I will give you instructions so that you can understand the chemical composition of sugar. The child would not be satisfied. Nor can people be satisfied with mere research into the spiritual worlds; rather, the spiritual results must be translated into formulable ideas. For it is only through these that our soul nature can be so enlivened that a real meaning of life arises from the results of anthroposophy.

When a person takes in what is given through anthroposophy – to begin with, they can take in, let us say, what is described in imagination – they are already doing their common sense a great service, because their personality becomes freer, more independent within. In this way they acquire something that will be very useful for the present and the near future. People today are really quite, quite dependent on uncontrollable ideas and so on that they absorb.

I just want to remind you how the people who attend political or other meetings today are actually just a flock of sheep that fall for the slogans thrown at them by the speakers and then follow them. In this respect, humanity today is terribly dependent. It is also dependent in that it simply absorbs what has been set. As a result, people gradually come to the point where they can no longer think in reality at all, but only seemingly think, because their thinking can no longer, I might say, be seen in the spiritual light. One experiences strange things.

For example, after a eurythmy performance in Berlin, a witty critic recently said: First they presented serious pieces and then humorous pieces. You can see that eurythmy is impossible just from the fact that the humorous pieces are performed with the same movements as the serious pieces.

Now it had first been explained that eurythmy is a visible language, so it really does matter to grasp the content that the eurythmy gives as language. What would be the consequence of what such a witty critic says? The consequence would be that he would have to say: If, for example, a declaimer uses ordinary spoken language, then he must not present serious poems with the same sounds that he uses for comic poems, for example in the German language. In this he would find just as much contradiction as if the same movements occurred in visible speech for comic and serious, for reputable poems. So it is absolute nonsense. People read this, but do not even realize that these are no longer thoughts at all, but that it is just a rolling out of brain processes that are reflected as thoughts but are no longer thoughts; it is the most absolute folly. This shows how people have lost their inner activity. Real life in thoughts must come precisely from people living in the imaginative life and pursuing what comes from the imaginative life with common sense. This makes a person more active, he becomes a personality again in the fullest sense of the word.

But it is of particular importance to engage with what is revealed from the inspired consciousness. If one follows with one's common sense what is described as inspiration, then gradually — as I have already indicated in various ways in other contexts — what is true and false is transformed into healthy and unhealthy judgment. One has the feeling that something that is untrue is morbid. With what is true, one has the feeling: it is something healthy. The logic of truth and falsehood actually only has a meaning for the physical world. As soon as we enter into the spiritual world, we perceive what is true as something healthy and what is false, an error, as something morbid.

But by acquiring a sense of healthy and unhealthy judgment through the study of the truths of inspiration, we prepare the way to understand the Christ event. For the Christ event entered the world because the evolution of humanity was in danger of becoming diseased. From the Christ-event, from the Mystery of Golgotha, there proceeds the power that man may turn again to the Truth, to healing. Through the inspired truths, we really do acquire the possibility of gaining a sense of religious truths again, especially the truths of Christianity. We learn to understand again why the being of Christ was celebrated as a savior, as one who truly heals, has healed and continues to heal humanity. The word really originated in this context. Because at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the old clairvoyant abilities were still there, which then faded away in the fourth century after the Mystery of Golgotha, and only existed in concept, that is why people at that time still understood what the Mystery of Golgotha meant.

Today we must first struggle to come to this realization. Christ lived in the world until the Mystery of Golgotha, which we contemplate in dream sleep, so that the Christ was perceptible to every person in dream sleep before the Mystery of Golgotha. But no human being was allowed to think – this was something that was made absolutely clear to people in the mystery schools – that the being that lives in Christ could be reached with earthly thoughts, that it could also be found in the waking state. This only became possible through the Mystery of Golgotha, through Christ's death. Since that time He may be remembered as an entity belonging to earthly life itself. A real conception of the God who has come out of the land of dreams into the physical land was created.

This is a real process: the God who has come to know that which the gods otherwise do not know, who has learned to die, who has incorporated the fact of dying into himself, that is the Christ, the God who enters into the world where there is birth and death, the descent of the God into human nature. God becomes man. This is precisely the formula in which what the Christ has become can be expressed: for the earth, the archetype of humanity; for the earth, that through which humanity acquires meaning. And if the other had taken place, if at the same time that God became man, a human being had also felt the urge to become God, that is, to no longer die, to no longer be subject to the laws of earthly life, then, while God became the most perfect human being by descending, he would naturally have become the most miserable God. This polar opposite you have! It is not without reason that, alongside the Christ who ascends to Golgotha, stands Ahasver, the man who becomes God, but a bungling God who loses the possibility of dying, who now walks the world but cannot die, the God who remains on the physical plane but develops on the physical plane the same peculiarities that were actually only allowed to be developed in the realm of dreams.

It is a tremendous, spiritual thing that is presented to our souls: that the God has been given the man who has become God, but, as is to be expected, in a way that makes him miserable. The man who has become God also maintains within the evolution of the earth the principle that the Godhead should not descend to the physical plane: Judaism, the Old Testament world view.

Here we already have a mystery. Those who know these things know that Ahasver is a real entity and the Ahasver legends are based on real impressions of perceptions of Ahasver, which have occurred here and there, for Ahasver exists and is the custodian of Judaism after the Mystery of Golgotha has occurred. He is the man who has become God. We must be quite clear that we can only arrive at a complete knowledge of history by including the spiritual.

On the one hand, we look at the incarnation of God in the event of Golgotha; we look at the incarnation of man in Ahasverus. And the initiate can know that Ahasuerus is really wandering. Of course, he cannot be seen as a human being. After all, he has become a god. But he wanders around. He is present in earthly existence. And real historical representations, which grasp the full reality, make it necessary to look at what also passes as a spiritual reality through the historical becoming of human development.

Of course, many things only exist in images. It is only important to know that these images correspond to realities. It is foolish to say that one should not express oneself in such images. After all, we always express ourselves in images when we speak. Take the Sanskrit word 'Manas'. Whoever understands 'Manas' has before him in sound the picturesque image of the bowl that carries the moon and the sun, because when one pronounced 'Manas' in primeval Sanskrit, one felt the human being in his will-nature as the bowl that was then carried by the thinking being. All words can also be traced back to images, only they are more elementary, simple images. What is expressed through words is not contained in them. When there are more complicated entities that cannot be expressed in words, then images have to be formed. When we speak of Ahasver and the legends of Ahasver, as we otherwise speak of images, these are only more complicated forms of expression that point to the spiritual side.

Anyone who rails against mythology in this sense should also rail against the fact that humans have developed a language through which they want to express a content. He should order them to become mute, because the next step after forbidding them to develop a mythology would be to forbid people to speak. For it is the very same process of visualization in ordinary language as in the higher visualization, when one posits something like the Ahasver, who goes through the evolution of the world as a being, but precisely as a spirit being, and continually prevents man from returning to the spiritual world in the way that is in his evolution, through the Christ, back to the spiritual world from which he went out when he lost atavistic clairvoyance.

That is what I wanted to say today, on the one hand to point out man's true place in the spiritual world, through a correct characterization of the state of sleep and dreams, and on the other hand to point out that spiritual beings live in history that only make the full course of history understandable.

The waking state is, of course, what we know most directly, but it is not within this familiar realm that the riddles of existence are actually revealed. If the solution to the riddles of life could be found in the waking state, as it serves us in our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, then these riddles would not actually exist, because they would be constantly being revealed. Man would never come to ask the question. That man asks: What are the deeper reasons for life? That he may not arrive at an exact formulation of this question of the riddle of life, but that from the depths of his soul he has the longing to know something that is not answered by ordinary consciousness , testifies to the fact that something comes up from the depths of the human soul, that is, in a more or less unconscious way, something that belongs to the human being but that must first be sought if it is to come to clear consciousness. And this leads those who observe life less to speculate and develop all kinds of philosophies. Such philosophies then ultimately remain unsatisfactory. But anyone who looks at the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality must realize that in the other state, the state opposite to waking, the state of sleep, something is veiled, and that an understanding of sleep could lead to an understanding of life. We have often discussed such things; but these things must be returned to again and again from the most diverse points of view, for anthroposophy can only be grasped if one tries to grasp it from the most diverse sides.

Now, out of sleep, the dream life surges up first. The dream life proceeds in images. One can very soon notice, when one begins to observe this dream life, that the images do indeed point to something in life, in ordinary conscious life. Even if one can often say that things are dreamed that one has not experienced in this way, I would like to say that the pieces from which the dream is composed, the pieces of images, are of course nevertheless taken from ordinary consciousness. But the drama of the dream, the way in which the dream builds up its tensions, how it can evoke inner feelings of fear, inner feelings of joy, feelings of momentum, is something else. What the course of the dream images means goes even deeper into human nature, and one can see this if one considers the following.

You dream that you are walking along a path and come to a mountain. You enter a mountain cave. At first it is still dark. It gets darker. But an unknown urge causes you to keep going. Anxiety sets in. This all increases until you are finally in a state of fear, let's say, of falling into an inner abyss. You can awaken from this state of fear by continuing to experience this state of fear during awakening.

You can also dream that you are standing somewhere and see a person coming from afar. He comes closer and closer, but he has a terrible expression. And as he gets closer, you realize that he intends to attack you. Your anxiety grows. He comes ever closer. He may transform the initially harmless instrument that he showed you from afar – after all, dreams are transformers – into a terrible murder weapon. Your anxiety increases again to fear, and you now wake up with this fear, which in turn continues into the waking life of the day.

These are two very different images. One time it is a series of images that takes you into the interior of a mountain, the other time it is a series of images that is associated with an approaching enemy. The soul can go through the same thing, even though the two series of images are quite different. What the soul goes through is something quite different from what consciousness experiences when waking up. One could say that it is not the images that are important at all, but rather how the soul undergoes a certain inner drama: how the soul initially has an urge, or how something comes to the soul instead of the urge, but how this then transitions into anxiety, into fear, and then, in a sense, causes the person to shake themselves out of sleep and into ordinary consciousness. What is important is the increasing forces behind the dream, which are not perceived themselves, but which clothe themselves in images. And the two series of images that I have characterized could be multiplied many times over; the same soul content could clothe itself in ten, twenty, a hundred different images. We must therefore say: there is something - if I draw schematically - that takes place in the soul (blue, green. See drawing on page 46). But what takes place in the soul, the human being does not notice; he does not know it. What he does know are images. I draw them schematically on it (yellow). These images are then experienced by the person in his consciousness of the dream. But what matters is the escalation: weak anxiety, stronger anxiety, greatest fear. The dream images are more or less taken from life, because both the mountain and the mountain cave, everything is basically borrowed from life. The enemy that approaches is borrowed from life, his weapon is borrowed from life. The images take their content from life. But that is only the clothing. If, through what I have often characterized as the imaginative consciousness, you have the opportunity to go beyond this clothing, not to form images at all, but to remain here in the soul forces, which are anxiety, fear, and extreme fear, to remain with the imaginative consciousness, if you are able to form images within, then something completely different comes about.

Because when you are asleep, you are initially outside of your etheric body and physical body, with only your ego and your astral body. When you wake up, if you are in a normal state, you enter your etheric body very quickly – you pass through it very quickly – and then immediately enter your physical body. But if you are in some abnormal state and do not enter the physical body immediately, but enter the etheric body before entering the physical body, that is, enter the etheric body first, then these images from life are formed. For in ordinary consciousness, the human being has no perception in sleep itself, and only at the moment when he either penetrates into his body and passes through the etheric body does he receive images, or when he goes out of the physical body while falling asleep but still remains in the etheric body, then he has dream images again. So only in these intermediate states do such dream images form, which are taken from life.

But imaginative consciousness leads to the fact that one can live completely outside of the body in that which stands there as the forces of the soul behind the dream. And then one lives in another reality. Then one lives in the world in which man is from falling asleep to waking up. Man lives from falling asleep to waking up in a world in which he becomes unconscious. You can imagine it as if a person were to submerge in water and lose consciousness, and only regain it when the water carries him out and releases him again. The same thing that happens physically also happens to the soul when a person falls asleep. He submerges into the spiritual world. There he loses consciousness. He leaves his body with his soul and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he reappears and regains consciousness. But reappearing means entering the body. And if, as I said, one does not immediately enter one's body, but still notices the transition in the etheric body, then the dream images arise. But if one does not get involved in this and need not get involved in getting such dream images, but if one gets images entirely outside of the physical body in the spiritual world itself, then not just any images come out, but images come out that you can find as a description of the evolution of the world in my “Occult Science”. And everything that is presented as I have presented it in my “Occult Science” has this origin, which I am now characterizing for you.

If you ask yourself: What is actually written in this “Occult Science”?, then you will say to yourself: Well, thoughts are in it. You can also think about it. I always emphasize that again, with common sense you can think about all of this. Thoughts are in it, but they are not ordinary thoughts. They are the thoughts that are creatively active in the world outside. Man can live in these thoughts when he stands beyond the threshold that leads into the spiritual world. Man can live in these thoughts that work on the world. It is the first thing he finds when he enters the supersensible world.

These are not dream images, because, as I have explained to you, dream images come about in a completely different way. Instead, they are experiences in the spiritual world. I would like to say: Imagine a person who is asleep. During sleep, the most comprehensive and intense processes take place in the soul. The person is unconscious during sleep and is therefore unaware of them. In the morning he enters his physical body, and immediately he is immersed in it. He uses his eyes, sees colors and light, he uses his ears, hears sounds, and so on, and thus he becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state: he does not immediately enter the physical body, he enters the etheric body. Then he has a dream or dreams. But imagine if a person became conscious before he even entered his etheric body. He would become conscious while still in the outer ether that fills the whole world. Then he becomes aware of what is described in my “Geheimwissenschaft.”

If, for example, you became conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that the physical body emerged next to you and you saw it – because you could see it then – then you perceived this cosmology, then you perceived what I described in my Secret Science. I may call what I have described: the formative forces of the world, or even world thoughts.

This presents itself in such a way that one can say how one otherwise has individual thoughts in daily life: the earth came into being in such and such a way, used to have a moon existence, a sun existence, a Saturn existence; in short, everything that I have described in my “Occult Science”.

But this way of perceiving in the spiritual world is only one of three. When a person looks at his state of daytime consciousness, he knows that in this state of daytime consciousness he can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the day-consciousness has these three states, thinking, feeling and willing, so also the night-consciousness, which in the case of the ordinary person is unconsciousness, has three states. One does not always sleep in the same state from falling asleep to waking up, just as one does not always wake in the same state. One wakes by thinking, or also by feeling, or also by willing. One can wake in three states, and likewise one can sleep in three states. For the fact that someone who has imaginative consciousness sees the world-forming forces, the formative forces of the world, comes only from the fact that he has acquired a consciousness of them, a knowledge of them. But every person falls asleep in these formative forces of the world, in the thoughts of the world. Just as you submerge when you jump into the water, so when you fall asleep you initially submerge in the formative forces of the world.

But in addition to this life in the formative forces of the world, there are two other states for the sleeping state, just as there are feeling and willing in addition to thinking for waking. When we consider thinking, having thoughts, in sleep this corresponds to life in the formative forces of the world. This means that when you become aware of the lightest state of sleep, then in this lightest state of sleep you live in the formative forces of the world. It is as if you were swimming through the universe from one end to the other, moving through thoughts, but these are forces. This is the lightest sleep, where you move in the thought-forces of the world. But there is a deeper sleep, a sleep from which, if one does not do special soul exercises, one cannot bring anything into one's daily life through dreams. One can only bring something into one's daily life from the lightest sleep through dreams. But then the dreams, as I have described to you, are not decisive as images, because the same dream can take on the most diverse images. But even the lightest sleep can lead to dreams, that is, one can bring something into consciousness, one can at least sense that one has experienced something during sleep. But one can only sense from this lightest sleep that one has experienced something.

Only those who attain an inspired consciousness can know anything of the deeper sleep. Such a one then perceives more than just what I have described in my “Occult Science”. In this “Occult Science” I have, to be sure, described some of what comes through from the inspired consciousness, but let us just realize what can only be described through anthroposophy – what the transition is like in experience from the quiet sleep to the deeper sleep, to the sleep from which the person in ordinary life can bring back no dreams.

When sleep is so quiet that one can bring back dreams in ordinary life, then the person who can look into these worlds sees the surging, weaving thought images, the imaginations of the world that reveal the secrets of the world to him, which reveal to him which world the human being belongs to, except for the one in which he is with his consciousness from the moment he wakes up until he falls asleep. For what I have described in my “Occult Science” is not something that is merely painted on a surface, but is in perpetual motion, in perpetual activity. But from a certain moment on, images begin to appear in this world, which every person experiences in a quiet sleep – they just do not know about it. These images become clear, they increase their splendor, they reveal certain underlying essences. They subside again, these images. Once again, one has nothing in consciousness but a kind of feeling that the images have been dulled. Then the images appear again. But while the images become more active and then fade away, something occurs that can be called the harmony of the spheres, a kind of cosmic music occurs, but a cosmic music that does not merely live in melody and harmony, but that represents the deeds and actions of those beings that inhabit the spiritual world, the deeds of the angels, the archangels, the elemental forces, and so on.

In a sense, you can see the beings moving on the surging sea of images, directing the world from the spirit. It is the world perceived through inspiration, the second world. I can call them the appearances of spiritual world beings. And this world, this world of manifestation of the spiritual beings of the spiritual world, is just as much the second element of sleeping as feeling is the second element of waking. So that during sleep man not only enters into the world which the thoughts of the world present, but within these surging world thoughts the deeds of the beings of the spiritual world are revealed.

But now, in addition to these two states of sleep, there is a third one. Most of the time, people have no idea about this third state of sleep. They usually know that they have a light sleep, and they also know that dreams reveal themselves from this light sleep. That he has a dreamless sleep, he notices. But that there is a third kind of sleep, that is something that people become aware of at most when they feel when waking up: there was something very heavy in them during sleep, it is something that they must first overcome in the first hours when they are awake again. I am quite sure that a number of you are familiar with this state in the morning, when you know that you have not slept in the usual way, but that there was something within you that leaves you with a certain heaviness that you first have to overcome over a longer period of time when you are conscious in the morning. This points to a third kind of sleep, the content of which can only be grasped by intuitive consciousness. And this third kind of sleep has a great significance for the human being.

When a person is in the lightest sleep, he actually experiences much of what he otherwise goes through when awake. He still participates, albeit in a different way, in his breathing. He still participates, if not from the inside, then from the outside, in his blood circulation and in the other bodily processes. When a person is in the second type of sleep, they no longer participate in physical life, but one could say that they participate in a world that is common to their body and soul. Something still passes over from the body into the soul. Something passes over, as light passes into the plant when the plant develops in the light during the day. But when a person is in the third phase of sleep, there is something in him that has become, if I may say so, like a mineral. The salts in his body are particularly strongly deposited. There are strong salt deposits in the physical body during this third phase of sleep. But in return, the human being is connected with his soul to the mineral world within.

Imagine you could do the following experiment: you go to bed, first fall into the light sleep, from which dreams can come out for the ordinary consciousness, then you fall into the deeper sleep, from which no dreams come, but which still leaves the soul of the person in a connection with the physical body. But now you are sleeping in a way that there are strong salt deposits in your body. You cannot have a relationship in your soul to what is going on in your body. But if you had placed a rock crystal on the nightstand next to you, you could be completely inside the rock crystal with your soul. You would slip into the rock crystal and perceive it from within. You cannot do that in the first or second kind of sleep. In the first kind of sleep, the content of which can enter into dreams, if you dream of the rock crystal, you would still experience it as a kind of rock crystal. You would experience something shadowy, but still something rock-crystal-like. If you sank down into the second kind of sleep, you would no longer experience the rock crystal in such a limited way. If you were still able to dream — you usually cannot, but let us assume that you could — then you would experience that the rock crystal becomes indistinct and forms into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid and then withdraws again. But if you could dream, that is, if you could access intuition from the deep sleep, from the third kind of sleep, then you would experience the rock crystal in such a way that you feel as if you are running along these lines inside, then running towards the tip, then running back again: you then experience the rock crystal within. You inhabit it. And so for other minerals. And not only do you experience the form, you also experience the inner forces. In short, the third type of sleep is something that brings the human being completely out of his body and completely into the spiritual world. During this third type of sleep, the human being stands in the third kind of world, in the essence of the spiritual world itself. That is to say, you are surrounded by the essence of the angels, the archangels, all those beings that one otherwise perceives only externally, that is, only in their revelations. You see, if you apply your sense consciousness from waking to sleeping, you see, so to speak, the external revelations of the gods in nature. During sleep, you enter either into the world of images in the lightest sleep, or in the second type of sleep into the world of appearances, into the world of revelations, or else, when you come to the third type of sleep, into the inner being of the divine spiritual entities themselves.

Thus, just as man lives himself out during the day through thinking, feeling and willing, so he lives himself out during sleep, either by flowing into the thoughts of the world, or by the deeds of the divine spiritual beings being revealed to him out of the thoughts of the world, or but these entities themselves take up the human being, so that he, as it were, rests with his soul in them. Just as thinking or imagining is the brightest, clearest, most distinct for the day-consciousness, just as feeling is somewhat duller - because feeling is actually always a kind of dreaming - and how willing, the most dull state of consciousness during the day, is, in a sense, a sleeping, so we have three states of sleep: the sleeping state in which ordinary consciousness experiences dreams and higher consciousness, the seeing, clear-sighted consciousness experiences the thoughts of the world. We have the second kind of sleep, which remains unconscious even for ordinary consciousness, but which appears to the inspired consciousness in such a way that the deeds of the divine-spiritual entities reveal themselves everywhere. We have the third kind of sleep, which presents itself to the intuitive consciousness, in which it lives in the divine-spiritual entities themselves. As I said, this announces itself by, for example, submerging into the interior of minerals. But this third kind of sleep has a special meaning for man.

If you take the second kind of sleep first, then you will find, as I said, the world beings of the angels, the archangels and so on, in the appearing, disappearing, surging images, but you will also find yourself. You find yourself in it as a soul, not as you are now, but as you were before your birth or before conception. You get to know yourself, how you have lived between death and a new birth. That belongs to this second world. And every time we sleep without dreaming, we live in the same world in which we lived before we descended and took on a physical body. But if you were to enter the third stage of sleep and were able to wake up there – the intuitive consciousness wakes up – so if you imagine entering the third stage of sleep and waking up there: then you experience your destiny, your karma. Then you know why you have special abilities in this life, from the nature of your previous lives. Then you will know why you are brought together with these or those personalities in this life. Then you will get to know karma, then you will get to know your destiny. This destiny can only be recognized if one - I am now approaching the matter from a different point of view - is able to penetrate into the interior of minerals. If you are able to see a rock crystal not only from the outside but also from the inside – of course you must not chop it up, because then what you see would always be on the outside, naturally – but you must, as I have described, be inside it; if you can do that, if you can see the crystal from the inside, then you can also understand why you are struck by this or that blow of fate in this life. Take any crystal, take an ordinary salt cube.

You see it from the outside: that is how you see it with ordinary consciousness. In this state, your life remains opaque to you. If you can penetrate into it - the spatial size does not matter - if you can see it from the inside out, then you are in the world in which you can also understand your destiny. But you are in this world every night when you enter the third stage of sleep.

But this third stage of sleep still has something very special. You see, people before the Mystery of Golgotha – and we were all there ourselves in our earlier lives on earth – people in the development of time before the appearance of Christ on earth, they very often came into this third kind of sleep. But even before they sank, I might say, into this third kind of sleep, their angel appeared and brought them back up again. For that is the peculiar thing: one can always get oneself out of the first and second kinds of sleep as a human being, but not out of the third. In the third kind of sleep, a person would have had to die before the appearance of Christ on earth if he had not been brought out by angels or other entities. Since the appearance of the Christ, the power of the Christ, as I have often emphasized, is connected with the earth, and every time a person must awaken from this third kind of sleep, then the power of the Christ, which through the Mystery of Golgotha has united with the earth, must come to his aid. Without the power of the Christ, a person could no longer awaken from this third kind of sleep. He can slip into the crystals, but he cannot get out again without the power of the Christ. For when one looks behind the scenes of existence, one already realizes what significance this Christ impulse has for life on earth. I therefore emphasize it strongly: man could enter the crystals, but he could not get out again.

These things were felt particularly strongly wherever, after the Mystery of Golgotha, after the appearance of Christ on Earth, a strong, ancient, pagan consciousness still existed and yet the Christ Revelation was already there, as for example in Central European regions. There were people known to have died as a result of falling into a deep sleep. They would not have needed to die if the Christ had come to their aid.

So, for example, people felt - I do not want to say anything other than what people felt - with Charlemagne or with Frederick Barbarossa. Despite the fact that Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the physical world, that was how it was felt. But it was felt particularly clearly with Charlemagne. Where did this medieval consciousness believe such a soul went? Into the interior of crystals. That is why it was placed in mountains, where it was supposed to wait until the Christ came and awakened it from its deep sleep. This kind of myth formation is connected with this consciousness. The strong connection with the Christ impulse since the Mystery of Golgotha on Earth, that is what now causes the world of the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and so on, to get man out again, because otherwise he would not be able to be brought out again when he sinks into the third kind of sleep. This, then, is connected with the power of Christ, not with belief in the power of Christ; for whether one belongs to this or that religious denomination, what Christ did on earth is done in the objective sense, and what I am describing here as objective takes place for man quite independently of belief. We will discuss the significance of faith in the next few days. But what I am talking about now is an objective fact that has nothing to do with faith.

But how did this happen? It happened because a different fate has entered the world of the gods than was previously in it, a fate that I would characterize by saying: People here in the physical world are born and die. It is the peculiarity of the divine spiritual beings that belong to the higher hierarchies that they do not die and are not born, but merely transform. The Christ, who lived with the other divine spiritual beings until the time of the Mystery of Calvary, decided to experience death, to descend to Earth, to become a human being, to go through death within human nature, and then to regain consciousness after death through the resurrection.

This is a very significant event in the divine spiritual world, that a God has gone through death in order to be able to do all that we already know or that I have now described again. We can therefore say: there is the significant event in the history of the development of the earth that the God became man and thereby floods his power into such significant phenomena as those that I have now characterized for you. The God who became man has such power in earthly life that He can bring human souls out of the depths of the soul if they have descended there. So that when we speak of Christ we speak of a World Being, of whom we must say: He is the God who became man. What would be His counter-image? His counter-image would be the man who became God. It does not have to be an absolutely good God; but just as Christ descended into the human world and accepted death, that is, first accepted the human body in order to share in the fate of human beings, so we are led to the opposite pole, to the human being who frees himself from death, frees himself from the conditions of the human body and becomes a god within the earthly conditions. He would then cease to be a mortal man, but would walk on the earth, though not under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal man, who goes from birth to death and from death to a new birth, but such a man, having become a god, would be found as a god who had come to earth unlawfully. Just as Christ is a legitimately incarnate god, so we would have to look for his counter-image in the illegitimately god-become human, the no-longer-mortal-but-wandering-about human who has assumed the nature of god in an unlawful manner. And you are aware that just as the Christian tradition points to the rightly incarnated God, to Christ Jesus, so it points to Ahasver, to the man who has become God unlawfully, who has laid aside the mortality of the human nature. Thus we have in Ahasver the polar opposite of Christ Jesus. That is the deeper reason, the deeper meaning of the saga of Ahasver, the saga that speaks of something that must be spoken of because it is a reality: of a being that wanders the earth. This figure of Ahasver is there. He wanders the earth, he wanders from people to people. Among other things, he does not allow the Hebrew faith to die out. This figure is present, this Ahasver figure, the god who has become unlawful.

Man has every reason, if he wants to get to know real history, to turn his attention to such ingredients of this history, to see how the forces and beings play down from the supersensible worlds into the sensual world, how Christ came out of the supersensible worlds into the sensible world, but also how the sensible world in turn plays a role in the supersensible world, and how we also have in Ahasver a real, actual world power, a world being. There has always been an awareness of this wandering of Ahasver, who of course cannot be seen with physical eyes, but only under the condition of a certain clairvoyance. And the legends that point to him have a good, objective basis. One does not understand human life if one looks at it only externally, as described in the history books, if one does not look at the special forms it takes.

For it is true that just as Christ lives in our inner being since the Mystery of Golgotha, and can be perceived in our inner being when we first awaken our inner gaze, so when we look around us at human life, and since the seeing glance arises in us for most people, for those to whom the seeing glance arises, it is the case, then, as it happens unexpectedly to the person who crosses the threshold of consciousness, Ahasverus, the eternal Jew, will appear to us. Man will perhaps not always recognize him, he will mistake him for something else. But it is just as possible that the eternal Jew will appear to man as it is possible that the Christ will shine forth when man looks into his inner being.

These things belong to the secrets of the world which must needs be revealed in our time, when many secrets should be revealed.

We have often turned our gaze back to the views of older times, and we want to do so again today, with the aim of gaining some insights into history and the development of humanity. If we go back thousands of years in human development, for example to the times that we, in our terminology, refer to as the ancient Indian cultural period, we find that people's way of looking at things was quite different then than it is in our time, even if we take a period that is very far removed from that time. If we go back to those older times, we know that people simply did not see nature as we see it today. They perceived spiritual beings directly in everything, in the individual elements of the earth's surface, in mountains and rivers, but also in everything that immediately surrounds the earth, in clouds, in light, and so on. It would have been inconceivable for a person of those ancient times to speak of nature as we do. For he would have felt as we would feel if we were to sit opposite a collection of corpses and then say that we were among human beings. What presents itself to man as nature today, millennia before our era, man would have felt only as the corpse of nature. For in everything that surrounded him, he perceived the spiritual and soul-like.

We know that when today's humanity hears from poetry or from the messages of myths and legends how it was once believed that spiritual-soul qualities can be found in the source, in the flowing river, in the interior of the mountains, and so on, it believes that the ancients let their imagination run wild and that they were inventing. Well, that is a naive point of view. The ancients did not make things up at all, but they perceived the spiritual and soul just as one perceives colors, as one perceives the movements of tree leaves, and so on. They perceived the spiritual and soul directly, and they would have thought of what we call nature today as merely the corpse of nature. But in a certain sense, some individuals among these ancients strove to gain a different way of looking at things than that which was the general one.

You know, today, when people strive to gain a different view from the usual one, and when they are at all capable of doing so, they become 'studied people', they receive concepts that go beyond what they otherwise see only externally. Then they absorb science, as it is called, into themselves. This science did not exist in the times of which we are now speaking. But there were individuals who aspired to go beyond the general observation, beyond what one knew in everyday life. They just did not study as it is done today. They did certain exercises. These exercises were not like those we speak of today in anthroposophy, but they were exercises that were more closely tied to the human organism in those older times. For example, there were exercises through which the breathing process was trained to do something other than what it is by nature. So they did not sit in laboratories and do experiments, but they did, so to speak, experiments on themselves. They regulated their breathing. For example, they inhaled, held back their breath and tried to experience what happened inside the organism when the breath was altered in this way. These breathing exercises should not be copied today. But they were once a means by which people believed they could come to higher knowledge than they could come to if they simply observed nature with their ordinary perceptions, if they saw external natural things as we see them, but also saw the spiritual and soul-like in all natural things.

When people devoted themselves to such exercises, the nature of which, although in a weakened form, has been preserved in what is described today as yoga exercises from the Orient, when they thus changed their breathing in relation to ordinary breathing, then the spiritual-soul aspect disappeared from the view of the surroundings, and it was precisely through such breathing that nature became for these people as we ourselves see it today. So, in order to see nature as we see it today, such people first had to do exercises in those ancient times. Otherwise, spiritual-soul entities would have leapt out of all the beings around them for them to see. They drove away these spiritual-soul entities by changing their breathing process.

Thus they — if I use the term that is current today for those who aspire so high above the general contemplation — as “learned men” no longer aspired to have nature around them as ensouled and spiritualized, but to have it around them in such a way that they perceived it as a kind of corpse. One could also say that these people felt, as they looked out into nature, as if they were in a surging, billowing, soul-spiritual universe, but they felt within it as a person of the present day would feel when dreaming in vivid images and could hardly wake up from these dreams. That is how they felt. But what did these individuals — let us call them the scholars of that ancient time — achieve when, through such special exercises, they distinguished themselves from this living surging and killed it in contemplation, so that they really felt that they now had a dead, corpse-like thing around them? What did they strive for as a result?

They strove for a stronger sense of self. They strove for something through which they experienced themselves, through which they felt themselves. Today's man says every moment: “I am”. “I” is a word that he uses very frequently from morning till night, because it is natural to him, it is self-evident to him. For these ancient people, it was not a matter of course in their ordinary daily experience to pronounce the “I” or even the “I am”. They had to acquire this. To do so, they first had to do such exercises. And by doing these exercises, they came to such an inner experience that they could say with a certain truth: “I am”. Only by doing this did they come to the awareness of their own being.

So what we take for granted only became an experience for these people when they made an effort in an inner breathing process. They first had to, so to speak, kill the environment for contemplation, to awaken themselves. This is how they came to the conviction that they themselves are, that they could say “I am” to themselves. But with this “I am” they were given something that we take for granted again today. They were given the inner development of the intellectual. Through this they developed the possibility of having an inner, secluded thinking.

If we go back to times when the old oriental views set the tone for civilization, it was the case that people felt a souled nature in their everyday lives, but had a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, did not at all summarize this sense of self in the conviction “I am,” but that individual people who were trained by the mystery schools were led to experience this “I am.” But then they did not experience this “I am” in the way we take it for granted today, but in the moment when they were brought to it through their breathing process, to be able to say “I am” at all out of inner conviction, out of inner experience, they experienced something that even today's man does not really experience at first.

Think back to your childhood: you can only think back to a certain point, then it stops. You were once a baby, but you have no memory of what you experienced as a baby. Your ability to remember ends at some point. You were certainly already there, crawling around on the ground, being caressed by your mother or father. You may have wriggled and moved your hands, but you do not know in your ordinary consciousness what you experienced inwardly at that time. Nevertheless, it was a more active, more intense soul life than later on. For this more intense soul life, for example, has shaped your brain plastically, has permeated your rest of the body and shaped it plastically. There was an intense soul life present, and the old Indian felt transported into this soul life at the same moment that he said to himself, “I am”.

Imagine very vividly what that was like. He did not feel in the present moment when he said to himself “I am”; he felt transported back to his babyhood, he felt the way he felt in his babyhood, and from there he spoke to his whole later life. He did not have the feeling that he now But this was only drawn into this inner being after it had previously lived in the spiritual-soul world. That is, by first transporting himself back to his babyhood through his breathing process, this old Indian yogi became aware of the time before his existence on earth. It seemed to him like a memory. Just as if a person today remembers something that he experienced ten years ago, it was like the occurrence of a memory in the moment when the “I am” shot through the soul, when in this ancient Indian time a person strengthened himself inwardly by breathing exercises and killed the outside world around him, but made it alive, which was not his outside world now, but what the outside world was before man descended into the physical world.

In those days, if I may use a modern expression, which of course sounds infinitely philistine when I use it for those ancient times, one was really lifted out of one's present earthly existence and into the spiritual-soul existence through the study of yoga. One owed one's elevation into the spiritual-soul worlds to one's studies at that time. One had a somewhat different consciousness than we have today. But precisely when one was a yogi in the former sense, one could think – the other people could not think, the other people could only dream – but one thought into the supersensible world, from which one had descended into earthly existence.

This is also a characteristic of the time of the earth's development, which, if we characterize it somewhat roughly, preceded, for example, the Greco-Roman conceptions in the fourth post-Atlantean period. There, the “I am” had already penetrated more into people in their ordinary everyday consciousness. Admittedly, the verb in language at that time still contained the I; it was not yet as separate as it is in our language, but nevertheless there was already a distinct I-experience. This distinct I-experience was now a natural, self-evident fact of the inner life. But in contrast to this, outer nature was already more or less dead. The Greeks, after all, still had the ability to experience the two aspects side by side, and without any special training. They still clearly experienced the spiritual and soul-like in the source, in the river, in the mountain, in the tree, albeit weaker than people of older times. But at the same time, they could also perceive the dead in nature and have a sense of self. This gives the Greeks their special character. The Greek did not yet have the same view of the world as we do. He could develop concepts and ideas about the world like ours, but at the same time he could take those views seriously that were still given in images. He lived differently than we do today. For example, we go to the theater to be entertained. In ancient Greece, people only went to the theater for entertainment in the time of Euripides, if I may put it this way – hardly in the time of Sophocles, and certainly not in the time of Aeschylus or in even older times. In those times, people went to dramatic performances for different reasons. They had a clear sense that spiritual and soulful beings live in everything, in trees and bushes, in springs and rivers. When you experience these spiritual and soulful beings, you have moments in life when you have no strong sense of self. But if you develop this strong sense of self, which the ancients still had to seek through yoga training, and which the Greeks no longer needed to seek through yoga training, then everything around you becomes dead, then you only see, so to speak, the corpse of nature. But in doing so, you consume yourself. They said to themselves: Life consumes the human being. The Greeks felt that merely looking at dead nature was a kind of mental and physical illness. In ancient Greek times, people felt very strongly that the life of the day made them ill, that they needed something to restore their health: and that was tragedy. In order to become healthy, because one felt that one was consuming oneself, that one was making oneself ill in a certain sense, one needed, if one wanted to remain fully human at all, a healing, therefore one went to tragedy. And tragedy was still performed in Askhylos' time in such a way that one perceived the person who created the tragedy, who shaped it, as the physician who, in a certain sense, made the consumed person healthy again. The feelings that were aroused – fear and compassion for the heroes who appeared on stage – had the effect of a medicine. They penetrated the human being, and by overcoming these feelings of fear and compassion, they created a crisis in him, just as a crisis is created in a pneunomia, for example. And by overcoming the crisis, one becomes healthy. So the plays were performed to make people who felt used up as people well again. That was the feeling that was attached to tragedy, to the play, in the older Greek era. And this was because people said to themselves: When you feel your ego, the world is divested of its gods. The play presents the god again, because it was essentially a presentation of the divine world and of fate, which even the gods must endure, thus a presentation of what asserts itself behind the world as spiritual. That was what was presented in the tragedy.

Thus, for the Greeks, art was still a kind of healing process. And in that the first Christians lived according to what was given in the embodiment of Christ in Jesus and what can be contemplated and felt in the Gospels – the death of Christ Jesus, to suffering and crucifixion, to resurrection, to ascension – they felt, to a certain extent, an inner tragedy. That is why they also called Christ, and he was increasingly called the physician, the savior, the great physician of the world. In ancient times, the Greeks sensed this healing quality in his tragedy. Humanity should gradually come to experience and feel the historical, the historically healing in the sight, in the emotional experience of the mystery of Golgotha, the great tragedy of Golgotha.

In ancient Greece, especially in the time before Aeschylus, when what had previously been celebrated only in the darkness of the mysteries had already become more public, people turned to tragedy. What did people see in this older tragedy? The god Dionysus appeared, it was the god Dionysus who worked his way out of the forces of the earth, out of the spiritual earth. The god Dionysus, because he worked his way out of the spiritual forces and up to the surface of the earth, shared in the suffering of the earth. He felt, as a god, in his soul, not in the way it was in the Mystery of Golgotha, also in his body, what it meant to live among beings that go through death. He did not experience death in himself, but he learned to look at it. One sensed that there is the god Dionysus, suffering deeply among human beings because he had to witness all that human beings suffer. There was only one being on the stage, the god Dionysus, the suffering Dionysus, and around him a chorus that spoke and recited so that people could hear what was going on in the mind of the god Dionysus. For that was the very first form of the drama, of the tragedy, that the only really acting person who appeared was the god Dionysus, and around him the choir, which recited what was going on in Dionysus' soul. Only gradually did several persons develop out of the one person who represented the god Dionysus in the older times, and then the later drama out of the one play. Thus the god Dionysus was experienced in the image. And later, as an historical fact in the evolution of humanity, the suffering and dying God, the Christ, was experienced in reality. Once as an historical fact, this was to take place before humanity so that all people could feel what had otherwise been experienced in Greece in the drama. But as humanity lived towards this great historical drama, the drama, which was so sacred in the old grienzeit that one felt in it the saviour, the miracle-working human medicine, was, more and more, I would say, thrown down from its pedestal and became entertainment, as it is already the case with Euripides.

Humanity lived contrary to the times in which it needed something other than being shown in pictures the spiritual and soul world, after nature had been de-animated for viewing. Humanity needed the historical mystery of Golgotha. The ancient yoga student of the Indian times had taken in the breath, held back the breath, so to speak, in his own body, in order to feel in this breathing: In you lives the divine I-impulse. - The human being experienced God in himself through the breathing process as a yoga student. Later times came. Man no longer experienced the divine impulse in himself through the breathing process. But he had learned to think, and he said: Through the breath the soul came into man. - The old yoga student went through that. The later human being said: #SE211-056 he became a soul. The older yoga student experienced it, the later human being said it. And by saying this in ancient Hebrew, one already experienced in a certain sense abstractly what one had previously experienced concretely. But one did not look in ancient Hebrew either, but in ancient Greek. One always takes place in one part of the earth, the other in another part of the earth. One no longer experienced the God within oneself as the old YOGA student did, but one experienced in the image the existence of God in man. And this experience in the image of the existence of God in man was certainly present in the older Greek drama. But this drama now became a world-historical event. This drama became the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the image was also abandoned. The image became a mere image, just as the breathing process was merely described in thoughts. The whole human soul became different.

Man saw the external world dead, and that was the elementary, the natural thing for him, that he saw the external world dead. He saw it without a god. He saw himself as an external world, as a physical external world, deified. But he had the consolation that once in this deified world the real God had come down, the Christ, and had lived in a human being, and through the resurrection as the Christ impulse had passed into the whole of earthly evolution. And so man could now develop a certain view in the following way. He could say to himself: I see the world, but it is a corpse. He did not say it to himself, of course, because it remained in the unconscious; man does not know that he sees the world as a corpse. But gradually the corpse formed in his view on the cross, the dead Christ Jesus. And if you look at the crucifix, at the dead Christ Jesus, then you have nature. You have the image of nature, of that nature in which man is crucified. And if you look at the one who rose from the grave, who was then experienced by the disciples and by Paul as the Christ living in the world, then you have what was seen in all of nature in older times. Of course, in a multitude, in many spiritual beings, in gnomes and nymphs, in sylphs and salamanders, in all possible other entities of the earth hierarchies, one saw the divine-spiritual; one saw nature spiritualized and ensouled. But now, through the burgeoning of intellectualism, there arose the urge to summarize what is scattered in nature. It was summarized in the dead Christ Jesus on the cross. But in Christ Jesus one sees everything that was lost in external nature. One sees all spirituality by looking at the fact that the Christ, the Spirit of God, rose from this body, having conquered death, and that every human soul can now partake of His essence. Man has lost the ability to see the Divine-Spiritual in the sphere of nature. Man has gained the ability to recognize this Divine-Spiritual in Christ in view of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Such is evolution. What mankind has lost, it has been given back to it in Christ. In what it has lost, it has gained selfishness, the possibility of feeling itself. If nature had not become dead to human contemplation, man would never have come to the experience of “I am”. He has come to the experience “I am”; he could feel himself, inwardly experience himself, but he needed a spiritual outer world. That became the Christ. But the “I am”, the egoity, is built on the corpse of nature.

Paul sensed this. Let us imagine Paul's perception for a moment. All around, the corpse of what people had once seen in ancient times. They saw nature as the body of the divine, the soul-spiritual. Just as we see our fingers, so did these people see mountains. It did not occur to them to think of the mountains as inanimate nature, any more than it occurs to us to think of the finger as an inanimate limb; rather, they said: There is a spiritual-soul element that is the earth; it has limbs, and the mountain is such a limb. — But nature became dead. Man experienced the “I am” within. But he would only stand there as a hermit on the de-spiritualized, de-souled earth if he could not look to the Christ. But this Christ, he must not look at him merely from the outside, so that he remains external; he must now take him up into the I. He must be able to say, by rising above the everyday “I am”: Not I, but the Christ in me. If we were to schematically depict what was there, we could say: Man once sensed nature (green) around him, but this nature everywhere ensouled and spiritualized (red). This was in an older period of human history.

In later times, man also felt nature, but he felt the possibility of perceiving his own “I am” (yellow) in the face of nature, which had now become soulless. But for this he needed the image of the God present in man, and he felt this in the God Dionysus, who was presented to him in Greek drama.

In even later times, human beings again felt the soulless nature (green) within themselves, the “I am” (yellow). But the drama becomes fact. On Golgotha, the cross rises. But at the same time, what man had originally lost arises within him and radiates (red) from his own inner being: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

What did the man of ancient times say? He could not say it, but he experienced it: Not I, but the Divine-Spiritual around me, in me, everywhere. Man has lost this “Divine-Spiritual everywhere, around me, in me”; he has found it again in himself and in a conscious sense he now says the same thing that he originally experienced unconsciously: Not I, but the Christ in me.

The primal fact, unconsciously experienced in the time before man experienced his ego, becomes a conscious fact, an experience of Christ in the human heart, in the human soul.

Do you not see, when you draw such a trivial diagram, the form that the reality must take in ideas? Do you not see the whole world filled with the spirit of Christ, which arises from within the human being, and draws from the cosmos into the human being? And when you realize what significance sunlight has for human beings, how human beings cannot live physically without sunlight, how light surrounds us everywhere, then you will also be able to understand when I tell you that in those older times of which I have spoken today, human beings certainly felt themselves to be light in the light. They felt they belonged to the light. He did not say 'I am', he perceived the sunbeams that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the sunbeams. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because that is where he felt himself. When the light arrived, he felt himself on the waves of light, on the waves of the sun, the sun.

With Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that enters one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. Of course, this comparison of Christ with light is mentioned many times in the Bible, but when anthroposophy wants to draw attention to the fact that one is dealing with a reality, today most people rebel who have “divinity” listed as their faculty in the university directories. They actually reject knowledge of these things. And it is a deeply significant fact that there was once such a theologian in Basel who was also a friend of Nietzsche: Overbeck, who wrote the book on the Christianity of today's theology. With this book, he actually wanted to state as a theologian that one still has Christianity, that at that time, in the 1870s, there was still this Christianity, but that much had already become unchristian, and that in any case, theology was no longer Christian. This is what Professor Overbeck, of the Faculty of Theology at Basel, wanted to prove with his book on the Christianity of today's theology. He was highly successful. And anyone who takes the book seriously will come to the conclusion that there may still be some Christianity today, but modern theology has certainly become unchristian. And there may still be some Christianity today, but when theologians begin to talk about Christ, their words are no longer Christian. These things are just not usually taken seriously enough. But they should be taken seriously, because if they were taken seriously, then one would not only see the necessity of today's anthroposophical work, but one would also see the full significance of anthroposophy. And above all, people would be aware of their responsibility towards contemporary humanity with regard to something like anthroposophical knowledge. For this anthroposophical knowledge should actually underlie all knowledge today. All knowledge, especially social knowledge, should be derived from this anthroposophical knowledge. For by learning that the light of Christ lives in them - Christ in me - by fully experiencing this, they learn to see themselves as something other than what one gets when one sees man only as a corpse of nature. But it is from this view that man belongs to nature that has become a corpse that our antisocial, unsocial present has emerged. And a real view, which in turn can make people brothers and sisters and bring real moral impulses into humanity, can only come about if man penetrates to an understanding of the word: Not I, but the Christ in me — when the Christ is found as an effective force precisely in the dealings from person to person. Without this realization we make no progress. We need this realization, and this realization must be found. If we advance as far as it, then we will also advance beyond it, and our social life will be thoroughly imbued with the Christ.

Much is said today about the difference between belief and knowledge. In particular, it is often asserted that anthroposophy, in view of what it has to say, must be regarded not as a science but as a matter of faith, as a religious belief. But basically, all the differences that are made in this way stem from the fact that people have very little insight into what has emerged as belief in the course of human development, and that they actually do not have much insight into what knowledge is.

All belief, everything that is connected with the word belief, actually goes back to very early times in human development. It goes back to those times when the breathing process played a much greater role in the life of man himself than is the case now. Man, with his present state of soul, does not really pay attention to his breathing process. He breathes in and breathes out, but he does not perceive any special experience in doing so.

The beliefs of older times have always pointed to the importance of breathing. One need only remember – as I pointed out a few days ago – that in the Old Testament the creation of man is associated with the breathing of breath, and one need only recall what I said about the striving that existed in ancient India, for example, to gain higher knowledge by regulating the breathing process in a certain way. This striving had meaning in that time when man paid more attention to his breathing. I have said that this striving took place in the time when man perceived around him not only the dead nature that we perceive today, but when man saw spiritual and soul activity in all things and facts of nature, when he perceived spiritual and soul activity in every spring, in every cloud, in the river and in the wind. During this time, the aim was to become more and more aware of one's breathing: to regulate inhaling, holding one's breath, and exhaling. And through this regulation of the breathing process, what one might call self-awareness was generated, the experience of the ego, of “I am”. But this was a time when the perception, the experience of breathing in general played a certain role in human life. From his ordinary consciousness, the person of the present cannot imagine much of what it was like. I would like to give you such an idea.

The breathing process is divided into inhaling, holding the breath and exhaling. This breathing process is initially regulated by human nature. The yoga scholars I have spoken of regulated it differently. Just as today, when someone studies, they develop a way of thinking that is not the thinking of everyday life, so in the times when breathing played a special role in life, a different breathing was developed than in ordinary life. But let us now consider not yoga breathing, the developed breathing, but the ordinary. I can best show you this schematically.

Let us assume that this is the human chest organism, then we can say: we distinguish the inhalation process, the breath-holding process – I will not draw that separately – and the exhalation process. When people in ancient times inhaled, they experienced it as if, with the inhalation, that is, with the inhaled air from the outside world, what was spiritual in the beings and facts of the outside world came in. So in what I have here color-coded red as the inhalation current, the person, let's say gnomes, nymphs, experienced everything that was spiritual and soulful in the surrounding nature. And as he exhaled (blue), as he sent the inhaled air outwards, these beings became invisible again in the exhalation. They were lost, so to speak, in the surrounding nature. You inhaled and knew: there is something spiritual-soul in nature outside, because you felt the effect of this spiritual-soul in the inhalation. You felt connected to the spiritual-soul of the outer nature. That had a certain intoxicating effect on people in those ancient times - but it is only comparatively speaking - in a certain way. He intoxicated himself with the spiritual soul of his surroundings. And by breathing out again, he sobered up. So that he lived in a state of intoxication and a state of sobering up. And in this intoxication and sobering up there was an interaction with the spiritual soul of the outside world. But there was something else as well. Man felt, by breathing in, by intoxicating himself, as it were, with the spiritual-soul, how the spiritual-soul beings quietly drew up into his head from the breathing current, how they filled him inwardly, how they united with his own physical being. So that what man felt there can be expressed something like this: I breathe in the spiritual and soul life of the environment. It fills my head. I feel it, I perceive it. Then the breath is held. And as he breathes out, the person would say: I give back my perception of the spiritual and soul life.

But this had an intimate connection with life. Take just one very simple thing: here is chalk. If you take this chalk today, you look at it, you reach out, take it up. The people of the ancient epoch did not do that. We have the thought of looking at the chalk and then picking it up. This was not the case with ancient man, who looked at it and inhaled what was spiritually radiating from the chalk, exhaled, and only in the exhalation did he grasp the chalk, so that for him inhaling meant observing, exhaling meant being active. This was at a time when man actually always lived in a kind of rhythmic interaction with the environment. This rhythmic interaction has been preserved for later times, but without the living, observing consciousness of ancient times. Just imagine how, in our youth, threshing was still done by hand in the countryside: looking, beating, looking, beating, in rhythmic activity. This rhythmic activity corresponded to a certain breathing process.

Inhaling = observing

Exhaling = doing

As far as the later development of humanity is concerned, we can say that this experience of inhalation ceased to be perceived by the human being, and the human being perceived or perceives only that which goes up from breathing into his head. So in ancient times, the human being perceived how what was inhaled, which was intoxicating for him, continued into the head and connected there with the sense impressions. Later on, this was no longer the case. Later on, man loses consciousness of what is going on in his chest organism. He no longer perceives this upwelling of breathing because the sensory impressions become stronger. They extinguish what arises in the breath. When you see or hear today, the breathing process is included in the process of seeing and also in the process of hearing. In the ancient person breathing lived strongly in hearing and seeing, in the modern person seeing and hearing live so strongly that breathing is completely subdued. So that we can say, what was perceived by the ancient one in the breathing process in his inner being, no longer lives in the intoxicating, head-filling way that he said: Ah, the nymphs! Ah, the gnomes! Nymphs that whirl in the head, gnomes that hammer in the head, undines that surge in the head! Today, this hammering, surging, and whirling is drowned out by what comes from seeing and hearing and what fills the head today.

There was once a time when man perceived more strongly this upwelling of breathing into his head. This passed over into the time when man still perceived confusedly, when he still perceived something of the after-effects of the gnome-like hammering, the Undine-like surging, the nymph-like tumbling, when he still perceived something of the connection of these after-effects with the perceptions of sound, light and color. But then all that he still perceived of the breathing process was lost. And of those people who still had a trace of consciousness that breathing once introduced the spiritual-soul of the world into man, what now remained, what was established from sensory perception in connection with breathing, was called “Sophia”. But breathing was no longer perceived. So the spiritual content of breathing was killed, or rather, paralyzed by sensory perception.

This was particularly felt by the Greeks. The Greeks did not have the idea of such a science as we do today. If one had told the Greeks about a science as it is taught today at our universities, it would have seemed to them as if someone had continually pierced their brains with small pins. They would not have understood that it could give a person satisfaction. If they had had to take in science as we have it today, they would have said: That makes the brain sore, that wounds the brain, that stings. --- Because they still wanted to perceive something of that pleasant spreading of the intoxicating breath, into which, flowing in, the heard and the seen pours. So the Greeks did perceive an inner life in the head, an inner life such as I am describing to you now. And they called this inner life Sophia. And those who loved to develop this Sophia within themselves, who had a special inclination to devote themselves to this Sophia, called themselves philosophers. The word philosophy definitely points to an inner experience. The hideous, pedantic assimilation of philosophy, whereby one simply 'ochst' (as they say in student life) at philosophy, that familiarization with this science, was not known in Greece. But the inner experience of 'I love Sophia' is what is expressed in the word philosophy.

But just as the process of breathing that enters the body is taken up in the head by the sense perceptions, so what emanates as exhaled air is taken up by the rest of the body. In the limb-metabolism organism, just as sensory perceptions flow into the head through what is heard, just as what is seen flows into the head through what intoxicates the inhaled air, so too do physical feelings and experiences flow together with the exhaled air. The sobering effect of the exhaled air, the extinguishing of perception, flowed together with the physical feelings that were aroused while walking and working. Being active, doing, was linked to exhaling. And as man was active, as he was doing something, he felt, as it were, how the spiritual-soul left him. So that he felt when he did something, when he worked at something, as if he allowed the spiritual-soul to flow into the things. I take in the spiritual-soul: it intoxicates my head, it connects with what I have seen, with what I have heard. I do something, I breathe out. The spiritual-soul aspect goes away. It goes into what I hammer, it goes into what I grasp, it goes into everything I work. I release the spiritual-soul aspect from me. I transfer it, for example, by fizzling the milk, by doing something externally, I let the spiritual-soul aspect flow into things. That was the feeling, that was the sensation. So it was in the old days.

But this perception of the exhalation process, this perception of the sobering up, just stopped, and there was only a trace left in Greek times. In Greek times, people still felt something, as if, by being active, they were still giving something spiritual to things. But then everything that was there in the breathing process was dulled by the physical sensation, by the feeling of exertion, of fatigue in working. Just as the inhalation process was dulled in the head, so the exhalation process was dulled in the rest of the organism. This mental process of exhalation was paralyzed by the bodily sensation, that is, by the sensation of exertion, of becoming heated, and so on, by what lived in man so that he felt his own strength, which he applied by exerting himself, by doing something. He did not feel the breathing out process as fatigue in himself now, he felt a power effect in himself, he felt the body permeated with energy, with power.

This power that lived inside the human being was Pistis, faith, the feeling of the divine, the divine power that makes one work: Pistis, faith.

Sophia = the spiritual content of breathing, paralyzed by sensory perception

Pistis (faith) = the spiritual process of exhalation, paralyzed by the bodily sensation.

Thus wisdom and faith merged in man. Wisdom flowed to the head, faith lived in the whole of man. Wisdom was only the content of ideas. And faith was the power of this content of ideas. Both belonged together. Hence the only Gnostic writing that has survived from ancient times is the Pistis Sophia. So that in Sophia one had a rarefaction of inhalation, in faith a condensation of exhalation. Then wisdom became more rarefied still. And in the further rarefaction, wisdom became science. And then the inner power became more condensed. Man felt only his body: he lost consciousness of what faith, pistis, actually is. And so it came about that people, because they could no longer feel the connection, separated what was to arise subjectively from within as mere content of faith, so to speak, and what connects with external sense perception. First there was Sophia, then Scientia, which is a diluted Sophia. One could also say: originally Sophia was a real spiritual being that man felt as an inhabitant of his head. Today, all that is left of this spiritual being is the ghost. For science is the ghost of wisdom. This is something that should actually haunt the soul of today's human being like a kind of meditation, that science is the spectre of wisdom. And in the same way, on the other hand, faith — which is what it is usually called today; here one has not really grasped a particular difference in the words — faith as it is lived today is not the inwardly experienced faith of antiquity, pistis, but it is the subjective closely connected with egoism. It is the condensed faith of ancient times. In the faith that had not yet been condensed, people still sensed the objective divine within them. Today, faith only arises subjectively, as it were, rising like smoke from the body. So that one could say, just as science is the spectre of wisdom, so today's faith is the heavy residue of former faith, the lump of former faith.

These things must be held together, then one will no longer judge as superficially as many people do today, who say that anthroposophy is only a matter of faith. Such people do not know what they are talking about because they have never brought themselves to consciously perceive the whole connection between faith and wisdom, this inner experience of faith and wisdom, from the real history of mankind. Where today do we speak of history as we have to here? Where do we talk today about what the breathing process once was for man, how it represented a completely different experience than it is today? Where do we realize how abstract on the one hand and robustly material on the other that has become what was once a real spiritual-soul-like on the one hand and a real soul-bodily on the other?

When the development of faith had reached a certain point, it became necessary for humanity to include something very specific in this belief. In ancient times, man had the divine within the belief. He experienced the divine in the process of exhalation. But the process of exhalation was lost to his consciousness. He no longer had the consciousness that the divine passes out into things. Man needed a revival of the divine for his consciousness, and he received this revival through the fact that he now received an idea within himself that has no external reality on earth. It has no external reality on earth that the dead rise from the graves. But the Mystery of Golgotha has no real content for a person if he describes the course of Jesus' life until Jesus dies. After all, that is nothing special. That is why Jesus is no longer anything special for modern theology either. Because a person goes through some experiences and then dies, as modern theology presents the life of Jesus, that is nothing special. The mystery only begins with the resurrection, with the living life of the Christ being after the physical body has gone through death. And - that is also according to Paul's words - whoever does not take up this idea of the resurrection into his consciousness has not taken up anything of Christianity at all, which is why modern theology is actually only a Jesusology, actually no Christianity at all. Christianity needs such a concept that refers to a reality that does not take place on this earth as a direct perception of the senses, but that as a concept already lifts man up into the supersensible.

Through an inner experience, the old human being was lifted up into the supersensible. I have shown you in these days how the yoga student was led to the inner experience of being a baby. They experienced the first impressions of being a baby, that which shapes the human being in a plastic way. What one otherwise knows nothing about became conscious through the yoga exercises I have spoken to you about, but with it, at the same time, the whole prenatal life, or the life that lies before conception, when the human being's soul was in the spiritual world above before descending and taking on a physical body. Only a notion of this remained. This notion is also contained in the Gospels: Unless you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. This saying refers to it, but in those days it no longer had any direct effect on life. This saying was, so to speak, a reminder that one could once place oneself back into the time of childhood and experience the Kingdoms of Heaven from which one descended through birth into physical existence. It is hardly the case that a person today, when he hears about the Kingdoms of Heaven from the Gospels or from some other ancient language, imagines something significant by it. He may think: Well, I have seen that here on earth – France, England and so on, they are divided into kingdoms. Whatever there is of kingdoms on earth is also there above, the kingdoms of heaven are there too. – Otherwise, people cannot really get a concrete idea of the kingdoms of heaven if they cannot imagine what is down there as being up there. I believe that in English, if I am not mistaken, they even say: the kingdoms of heaven. Yes, you don't get the idea of what is meant by the term “the kingdoms of heaven”, which has been modernized today. The gospel even usually says it in such a way that you can't even see what it actually means, it even says: the kingdom of God. In doing so, people hardly think of anything, but simply let a word resound. But in ancient times the heavens were exactly that which, when the earth is here (center), spread out as the sphere of the world (white, blue). And “kingdom” — what was that? Let us disregard all philology and take the observation to help here, which can be given by anthroposophical method itself. “Reich” = that which reaches out, encompasses, surrounds, that is the reaching, the sounding, the speaking, so that one must soar to the imagination: Through these heavens, for the one who learns to perceive, the spiritual-soul sounds through. He perceives not only the heavens, but the world-word that resonates and reaches through the heavens.

Those who cannot become like little children cannot perceive the word of the heavens, the word that speaks from the heavens everywhere. If earthly realms are called “realms” and earthly rulers “rulers of these realms,” then one would have to have the secret idea that these rulers could speak or sing so loudly that their voice would resound throughout their entire realm. In older, legendary conceptions, there is also something like a resounding of the realm. And this was symbolically expressed by the fact that laws were given which were proclaimed with trumpets to the quarters of heaven, whereby the kingdom became a reality. The kingdom was not the plane on which men dwelt, but the kingdom was that which the trumpet-angels carried out into the wide spaces as the content of the laws.

But it was a memory. Another concept had to come that was more related to the will – what preceded related to the idea, to the thought – to that which accompanies a person when he passes through the gate of death. The will remains as his energy development. This goes with him through the gate of death with the world thought content. The human will, filled with world thoughts, enters with him into the spiritual worlds when the human being dies. And it was to this will that the new idea of the resurrected Christ turned, of the one who lives even if he has died in an earthly way. This was the strong, powerful idea that did not merely recall childhood, that pointed to death, and that appealed to what passes through the portal of death with man. Thus we find the irruption of the Christ idea, the whole Christ impulse, thoroughly grounded in the evolution of mankind itself.

Now, of course, one can say: Even today there are still many people on earth who know nothing of the Christ. Those people who know about him today usually know it badly, but they learn something about the Christ, even if, according to the sense of today's materialism, they do not have the correct idea of the Christ, the feeling for the Christ that they have within them. But there are many people on earth who live in other, older forms of religion. And that is where the big question arises, which I already hinted at yesterday. I said that the Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. The Christ died for all people. The Christ Impulse has become a power for the whole earth. In this objective sense, apart from consciousness, the Christ is there for Jews, pagans, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on. He is there. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, He has been alive in the forces of the evolution of humanity on Earth. But there is a difference between whether people live within a Christian sphere or a non-Christian one. The only way to study the difference that exists between the life that a person develops between death and a new birth and life on earth is to see the connection. If a person has passed through death and was a Buddhist or Hindu in life, say, if he has not absorbed any idea, any feeling of Christ, then he takes with him for the universe behind death what a person can experience here on earth from the external environment, from nature. One would know nothing of nature in the heavens if man did not take with him the knowledge of the earth when he enters the realms of the heavens through death. Man carries what he takes in here on earth over into the realm of the supersensible by passing through death, for it is only through this that the supersensible worlds have any knowledge at all of the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal on earth. But the one who knows something of Christ, who can have the idea that Christ lives in him, who experiences the Pauline word, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” now carries into the supersensible worlds not only the knowledge of the earth, but the knowledge of the earthly human being. Thus both are carried into them by the modern human being as well. Christians carry into the supersensible world the knowledge of the earthly human being, of the bodily earthly form of the human being. The Hindus, the Buddhists, and so on, carry into the heavens the knowledge of what is around the human being. Even today, human beings complement each other in what they contribute to the supersensible worlds by passing through death. Naturally it becomes more and more necessary that all secrets which man can experience in himself, through himself, are carried into the heavens, so that man is more and more permeated by Christianity. But above all it is important that what man experiences here on earth only as a human being with other human beings is carried through death by means of Christianity.

Consider that this is actually an extraordinarily important truth, a very essential truth. Take, for example, the Hindu or the Buddhist. What he experiences in looking at the world, in feeling the world, in sensing the world, what he experiences in thoughts about minerals, in feelings about plants, in feelings about animals, he carries all this through the gate of death and enriches the knowledge of the gods in the supersensible world with what he experiences. What the Christian experiences by entering into a social relationship with his fellow human beings, by developing social connections, that is, what one can only experience as a human being among other human beings, what is experienced in human brotherhood on earth, that is what the Christian carries with him through the gate of death. One would like to say: The Buddhist carries the beauty of the world through the gate of death, the Christian carries kindness through the gate of death. They complement each other. But the progress of Christianity consists in the fact that precisely the social earthly conditions acquire a significance for the heavenly worlds.

The Oriental tyrants might decapitate as many people as they liked, but it had little effect on the worlds beyond. It only affected them to the extent that the person received external impressions as a result: the external impressions of horror and so on were carried through the gate of death. The unkindness between people that is developing today as a result of miserable social conditions, and which is spreading across the earth as a false socialism due to a misunderstanding of social interrelationships, also has a great significance for the supersensible worlds that people enter through the gateway of death. And when today, under the flag of the realization of socialism in the east of Europe, a terrible, destructive force is being developed, then what is experienced there is also carried into the beyond as a terrible result. And when unloving conditions develop among people in the age of materialism, this is carried into the transcendental worlds through the portal of death, to the disgust of the divine spiritual worlds.

Through Christianity, man should come to bear the results of the evolution of the earth, which arise through him, into the supersensible worlds as well. What man himself develops on earth, he becomes capable of carrying into the spiritual worlds through the thought of the Risen Christ, of a living being who has gone through death and yet lives.

This is why even those people who do not want their social deeds to be carried by death today have such a horror of recognizing the Risen Christ.

The ancients were allowed to become intoxicated by the breath. The moderns are not allowed to become intoxicated by words. Words must not be intoxicating for them, but must be held in the sense of Sophia, penetrating man with wisdom.

These are the things through which anthroposophy also points to what is important in social relationships today. And it wants to express something of this in its name, this anthroposophy, anthroposophia, which is also a wisdom. During the Greek period, the human being was taken for granted. Sophia was already a human wisdom because the human being was still full of light and wisdom. Today, when one says Sophia, people only think of the ghost of Sophia, of science. Therefore, one must appeal to the human being one is calling upon, to the Anthropos: Anthroposophia. One must point out that this is something that comes from the human being, that shines out of the human being, that blossoms out of the best forces of the human being. One must point this out. But it also makes anthroposophy something that enlivens human existence on earth. For it is something that is experienced by man in a more spiritual, but no less concrete way than the ancient Sophia was experienced, and which at the same time is meant to bring about that which was then in the whole human being, the content of faith, pistis. Anthroposophy is not a belief, but a real body of knowledge, but one that gives people a strength that in earlier times was contained only in faith.

Let us visualize the forces that hold the human being together during life on earth, so that we can gain some insight into cosmology during these days. We know, of course, that the human being is structured when we look at the next thing that characterizes him in earthly life: the physical body, the body of formative forces (which can also be called the etheric body), the astral body, and the I.

Let us imagine how we might characterize these four aspects of the human being. The physical body is, after all, what comes to a person through the fact that the forces of the earth work for him, so to speak. In the time that a person goes through between death and a new birth, he does not deal with this physical body. From the remarks I made in the immediately preceding lectures, we have seen that the human being, when it descends from the spiritual and soul realms to a physical embodiment, is, so to speak, spiritually dead and must regain its strength in inwardness by immersing itself in the physical body. But this physical body itself is, as it were, born out of the forces of the earth and connects with that which descends from the spiritual-soul world. But a short time before the human being reaches physical embodiment on earth, he does not yet have the formative forces or etheric body either. This is also only connected to the human being for earthly existence in the same way as the physical body. Only this formative forces or etheric body has a different relationship to the cosmos than the physical body.

If we examine the physical body of man in relation to its forces, we find in it precisely the forces of the earth planet itself. But if we approach the etheric or formative body of man, we find in it more the forces of the cosmos, the forces of the entire universe. On the other hand, the human astral body and the human I contain such forces that are not actually found in the outer space of the universe, which, if we may use the expression, are not of the world to which the earth belongs.

It is actually the case that the earth is constantly striving to take possession of the physical body of the human being and incorporate it into its own being. In contrast, the universe constantly tends to disperse the human being's formative forces or etheric body throughout the world. When a person is in the state between falling asleep and waking up, the forces at work in what remains in bed, in the physical and formative forces, actually work in such a way that the physical body continually, if I may express it this way, wants to connect with the earth. It wants to become similar to the earth, it wants to become completely earthly. The formative forces or etheric body wants to disperse into the universe. And when we rediscover our physical body and our etheric body when we wake up in the morning, it is actually the case that, when we enter our physical body, it tells us: the earth has taken hold of me throughout the night, the earth wanted to shape me into dust. Only because you held me together through your ego and your astral body yesterday and the preceding days on earth have I remained a physical body; the forces of cohesion continued to work in me. Likewise, the formative forces or etheric body says: I have only kept the human form because I have adopted the habit of being like you. Actually, during the night, while you were sleeping, while you were away from me, the forces of the universe wanted to scatter me to the four winds.

Every time we wake up, we basically have to make an effort to properly take possession of our physical body again. It actually wants to lose us from falling asleep to waking up. We do this through the ego. The ego, when trained to do so, can really feel as if it wants to take possession of the physical body anew every morning. The astral body can feel when waking up that it must make the etheric body similar to itself. The etheric body already wanted to take on an inhuman form. The astral body must in turn push it back into the human form. One would like to say: During sleep, the physical body loses its tendency to be possessed by the ego, and the etheric body loses its tendency to have a human-like form. It flutters out. So that in fact the shape that our physical body has is only a result of the I-effect in our human being. In the present state of mind, people do not have much feeling for something that can be expressed in words: when I return to my physical body in the waking state, I first have to take possession of it again. It wanted to get lost, and the etheric body wanted to flutter apart.

But let us assume that there was once a time when people still had a clear sense of this struggle that takes place every time we wake up between the self and the astral body on the one hand, and the physical body and the etheric body on the other. Then, precisely because they would have had this clear perception, they would also have sensed that it would have to be something very special if a person were to suddenly have to leave his physical body and etheric body through some sudden event.

Under normal earthly conditions, when a person leaves his physical body and his etheric body, it is because the physical body, whether through illness or old age, has become very similar to the earth, so that it wants to unite with the earth. Or, through some kind of injury, the physical body has been brought to such a state that the ego can no longer possess it, and so on. But let us assume that the I and the astral body suddenly had to leave the fully healthy and uninjured physical and etheric bodies, so that they still have the tendency to be possessed by the I and to be similar to the astral body in the highest sense. What would have to happen then?

The thought might have dawned on the old person: Yes, then this physical body could not simply disintegrate. It can only disintegrate when it already has the tendencies to disintegrate within itself, as a result of illness or aging or the like. But when the astral body and the I suddenly have to emerge from the fully healthy human organism, in which the body of formative forces is present, then the human-like form would have to remain, because the tendency to be possessed by the I and the astral body is still fully present. The human form would have to remain fully intact. The human being would become like a statue. The physical body could not disintegrate, the etheric body could not become dissimilar because the separation would have been too rapid. The human being would become a statue.

There seems to have been a case of this kind of sensation in reality. You all know the Greek legend of Niobe, who had seven healthy sons and seven healthy daughters and who, out of a sense of abundance, once mocked the mother of Apollo and Artemis because, despite being a goddess, she only had two children: Apollo and Artemis. She refused to sacrifice, and the revenge of the god or the gods came upon her. She had to experience that her seven daughters and seven sons suddenly died, were killed, by the arrows of Apollo and Artemis. She saw the whole field of corpses of her fourteen offspring before her, and her ego and her astral body united in the pain of what she saw around her. You know the figures on the pediment of the statue of Niobe, who becomes a statue herself, surrounded by her seven sons and seven daughters as they meet their deaths. She herself becomes a statue. The physical body and the etheric body must separate from the ego and the astral body. But this physical body and the etheric body, because they were so full of life that Niobe herself could mock the goddess with her two offspring, could not lose their connection to the ego, and the etheric body could not become dissimilar to the astral body. Niobe became a statue.

Such a work of art is certainly the outcome of a deep feeling arising from a world view, of something that was felt to be a truth from the world view of the time. The feeling was simply this: if Niobe had not been so full of life that she could come to mock the goddess Latona, then she could have died with her physical body disintegrating. But she was so full of life that she rebelled against the gods, that she lived so fully in her physical body. And so we see that the Greek genius felt: because of the rapid departure of the ego and the astral body from the physical and etheric bodies, Niobe becomes a statue.

If we look back at the development of humanity, we see that art always follows the feelings associated with the world view of the time in question. But we can see this in many other ways as well. Let us turn our gaze once more to how the human being, upon waking, must take possession of his physical body again, because this physical body wants to become similar to the earth. If Niobe had been able to sleep even for one night after experiencing her pain, she could no longer have become a statue, for the physical body would then already have absorbed the forces to become similar to the earth, that is to disintegrate. Therefore, every morning the human being must again take possession of the physical body, and every morning the astral body must form the etheric body in a similar way, giving it a plastic form again, so that it takes on a human-like shape.

During the Greek development there was a time when it was felt quite vividly that every morning man must develop strength in order to take firm possession of his physical body. The Greeks derived a certain satisfaction from their physical body, and since they knew that they had to take possession of their physical body anew every morning, they felt the need to strengthen the forces that could take possession of the physical body, and also those that could make the astral body strong, in order to make the etheric body similar to it again every morning.

If man, while waking, would consciously follow the whole process that takes place when waking up, he would say to himself every morning: I must not lose my physical body, I must really get back into this physical body! Man would be afraid of not being able to get properly into the physical body. The ancient Greeks knew much about this fear, and they also knew that every night the etheric body has a tendency to split into four different forms: an angelic, a lion-like, an eagle-like, and an ox-like form. Every morning, starting from the astral body, one must endeavor to synthesize these four members of the etheric body, if I may use the expression, in such a way that a real human being is formed again. But the Greeks liked to have life in the physical and etheric bodies. I have often quoted the saying that comes to us from Greece: “Better a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shadows,” in the underworld. The Greeks loved this physical existence. He also wanted to be strengthened in the possession of his physical body, in the becoming similar of the etheric body to man. And you see, tragedy arose out of this tendency. And Aristotle still gives a definition of tragedy that clearly indicates that basically the Greeks did not think of tragedy as modern man thinks of it. I don't know if anyone else has had different experiences, but I have mostly found that people today believe that tragedies exist because, after spending the whole day dealing with what the day brings, they like to sit down for a few hours in the evening to experience something more or less exciting, which is not a real experience but only an image.

This was not how the Greeks thought at the time when Greek culture was actually gradually emerging. For the Greeks, life was one, and everything they put into it was something that should truly belong to the totality of that life. And tragedy was the means by which man could properly possess his physical body and form his etheric body. And tragedy was so developed that by looking at it man should feel fear and pity. Why should man experience fear in tragedy? He should experience fear because by experiencing this fear his power is strengthened to take possession of the physical body in the right way every morning. And he should feel compassion, because through it his astral body is strengthened each morning to form the etheric body in the right way. “Put me before tragedy, said the Greek, then I am able to properly take possession of my physical body, to properly build up my etheric body, then I am able in the fullest sense of the word to be a right person.” The Greeks wanted to be true human beings in their earthly existence. In addition to the other means of immersing themselves in their culture, tragedy was also intended to help them achieve this. Of course, this presupposes that in those older times people knew how the soul and spirit, the I and the astral body of the human being, are connected with the physical and etheric aspects of the human being.

Aristotle gives a definition of tragedy. He says: “Tragedy is the imitation of an action through which fear and compassion are aroused, so that by arousing fear and compassion, man experiences the catharsis, the crisis of fear and compassion. Crisis, catharsis, is an expression borrowed from the older Greek medicine, the art of healing, and even when Aristotle was already developing Greek culture into pedantry, he still felt that tragedy, in particular, should have something healing, something strengthening for man.

Let us try to understand this term “catharsis”, which also comes from the mysteries – and we have often explained what it means in the mysteries – in our ordinary lives.

When a person becomes ill inside, what actually happens? Suffering and pain arise in the person that are not otherwise present. He begins to feel his organism, to sense it in some way, to sense it in a way that he does not sense it in normal, so-called healthy life. In healthy life, one believes, nothing hurts at first. When one becomes ill, something starts to hurt. But this means nothing other than that the I and the astral body are not properly — forgive the somewhat crude expression — integrated into the physical body and the etheric body. If the person is then led to healing and recovery, the I and the astral body are given the strength to integrate properly again. In the healing process, the I and the astral body gain greater power over the physical body than they had before the healing.

Let us assume that a person falls prey to a lung disease. His I and his astral body are not properly connected to the etheric part of the lungs and to the physical part of the lungs. What happens during the healing process is, again, the correct connection. And the crisis consists precisely in the fact that outside of the correct engagement, the I and the astral body are given the strength to engage themselves correctly again afterwards. What happens in an external way in the illness is what the Greek saw continually happening in an internal way in the human being.

The Greek felt this way: If a person does nothing for himself, then his I and his astral body become more and more alien to the physical and etheric bodies. They can take possession of the physical body less and less and shape the etheric body after themselves less and less. They have to be brought out so that they can then be properly brought back in again. The astral body has to be permeated by visualized suffering, by compassion. And the ego has to be permeated by fear. When the ego experiences fear, it strengthens itself. And the ego survives this fear because it is only presented through the image. So the ego does not perish under fear, it endures the fear, it undergoes the crisis, the catharsis, and as a result has a strengthened power to take possession of the physical body again every morning. Likewise, through compassion, through looking at suffering, the astral body is strengthened, making the etheric body more and more similar.

This shows how in Greece, art was seen as being fully connected to the human being, as the figure of Niobe shows, or as something that should have an effect on the process of becoming and educating a human being. The Greeks always looked at the concrete human being, and one can say that since the time of the Greeks, the essence of the human being has actually been lost by the human being himself.

This is particularly evident when we turn our gaze to young Goethe. Even in his youth, Goethe really does get to know a great deal about the world around him, the way people think and feel. And he even became familiar with the way extraordinarily significant, ingenious people try to imagine the world. But for Goethe — as I have already discussed here — it is a struggle to grow into his cultural environment. Because we know, of course, that over the last four to five centuries, the cultural world has become intellectualistic, and Goethe felt this intellectualism, which has poured over everything. He expressed this in Faust: philosophy has become intellectualized, jurisprudence has become intellectualized, medicine has become intellectualized, and even theology has become intellectualized. Faust has studied all of these. But the mere thought that lives in all of this is something that is alien to reality. He wants to relate the spiritual foundations of existence to himself. That is basically Goethe's feeling. Of course, Goethe had to admit that modern man was becoming increasingly intellectual, because that was the way the times were developing. The development of humanity had just reached this point. But for him it was a struggle, because thought does not fully embrace the human being. He felt alienated from the world by seeing the world around him develop as a mental one.

One of those people who, at the time when Goethe was young, strove energetically and with a certain matter-of-factness towards intellectualism, was Lessing. Goethe could have met Lessing in Leipzig. He avoided it because Lessing was too intellectual for him. Herder, later in Strasbourg, was not. Despite his intellectualism, Herder had arrived at a comprehensive worldview full of feeling and emotion. Goethe could relate to that. Lessing, on the other hand, seemed to him to be a little eerily intelligent. He avoided him.

In this context, it is easy to understand how, at a certain age, Goethe could no longer help but break out of this world in which one wants to think about everything. At a certain point in Weimar, Goethe would have liked to get out of his entire skin, even though he was doing extremely well; even though he was idolized at the Weimar court, he could not stand it. He could not stand the whole situation. He also could not bear this: Herder was studying Spinoza. Spinoza, however, is basically a whole thought machinery, a wonderful one, but one does get away from the world when one spins oneself into this thought machinery.

And so he had to go to Italy, because he wanted to discover man. He wanted to discover man in the feeling of Greek art, of ancient art, which had become alien to modern man. Goethe longed to discover, to experience the human being. And basically, the whole of anthroposophy is nothing more than a world view that arises from the longing to find the human being in his or her entirety, to answer the question: what exactly is this human being? How does he or she relate to life?

But as a result, more and more things gradually become vividly clear that have been placed in the development of civilization out of a full feeling for the human being, such as tragedy or a work of art like the Niobe Group. Take this Niobe Group. Niobe, in her soul, that is, in her ego, in her astral body, lives completely outside herself; they radiate completely out into the sphere from which her pain comes. The soul is torn out by the pain. The body is still permeated by the forces of the ego and the astral. The form remains, the form holds firmly together. She becomes a statue, Niobe.

Take the opposite case: there is no reason at all for the ego and the astral body to leave the physical and etheric bodies, and yet they are driven out because the physical and etheric bodies are destroyed from the outside, because they are taken from the ego and the astral body. So the ego and the astral body have to leave. But in that the physical body and ether body are destroyed from the outside, they take on a form which, on the one hand, follows the destructive force and, on the other hand, makes it literally visible how the ego and the astral body are pushed out. With Niobe, this does not have to be the case; there it is suddenly there. But suppose that Niobe, instead of gazing at the field of corpses of her offspring, did not rush out of her physical and etheric bodies, but that something happened to her physical and etheric bodies that forced the soul out. Then one would not see in the physical and etheric bodies how they become statues, how they freeze, as it were, in matter, in formed matter, but one would see how the I still works in there, how the astral body still endeavors to form the etheric body. You also formed that in Greece: this is Laocoon. You can understand Laocoon when you are imbued with the realization that it is the opposite of Niobe, that the physical body and the etheric body are being destroyed from the outside and how the whole thing fights with the I and with the astral body, which are being pushed out. So that in every form, in the shaping of the mouth, in the shaping of the face, in the holding of the arms, in the forms that the fingers take, you can see from Laocoon that the situation I am talking about is being depicted.

We must come to such realizations again, because otherwise the intellectualism that has been so deeply justified for the more recent period will remove man from a true view, from a true knowledge of nature, from reality.

Just think how Lessing tried to explain the Laocoön Group. He basically explained it only in purely external terms. Of course, I say this with all due respect for the great Lessing. But if you take his explanation, it says: When a poet talks about Laocoon, Laocoon is allowed to scream, because you don't see how he opens his mouth when he screams. But when the sculptor forms him, you see how he opens his mouth. You're not allowed to open your mouth. That is purely external: the poet should do it one way, the sculptor another! Of course, Lessing's achievement is something extraordinarily significant. One can say: with all due respect, one must treat these things, but one must be clear about the fact that in Lessing's treatment of the Laocoön Group there is nothing of what now explains the whole figure of Laocoön from the situation. For this it is necessary, as I said in the introduction to these considerations, to survey in the appropriate way the forces that hold man together in his four limbs.

This overview has been completely lost in the age of intellectualism. This age of intellectualism basically no longer knew what to do with what it means to be human. And so, in the age of intellectualism, all sense of proportion was lost. This is what Goethe felt so strongly and what led him to actually loathe it when intellectualism itself extended into art. The young Goethe could not stand the whole style of Corneille-Racine art because there intellectualism forms the dramatic in an intellectualistic way.

In contrast to this, Goethe turns to Shakespeare, who creates out of all the contradictions of nature. Therefore, Goethe finds that Shakespeare is something like the interpreter of the world spirit itself. Goethe feels this very deeply because he feels this incursion of intellectualism. I have often pointed out that Hamlet can be seen as a student of Faust. That Hamlet – Shakespeare's Hamlet, of course, not Saxo Grammaticus' – could have sat at the feet of Faust in Wittenberg during the ten years when Faust led his students around by the nose, that was immediately clear to Goethe. Of course, he did not spell out the details; but anyone who would now say, “Thank God I studied philosophy, law, medicine, and, for my own good, theology,” would naturally not be able to feel an intimate pleasure when he finds, say, the Dane Prince artistically shaped in front of him, speaking the monologue “To Be or Not to Be” and speaking of that land from which no traveler has returned from, despite the fact that the ghost of old Hamlet himself spoke shortly before, who must therefore have an awfully short memory if he cannot remember at the moment he speaks the monologue that he just spoke to his father, who returned from that unknown land!

An intellectual would not do that, of course. And I have met intellectuals like that. They said: Yes, “Hamlet” was not written by a single poet either, the monologue was written by someone else and then it was all mixed up. That's how it was done with Homer too!

It can be easily proved that a whole series of people could have written “Hamlet” because of the contradictions that are everywhere, for such contradictions do in fact exist. And Goethe felt that the reality was richer than the impoverished intellectualism. And so he is perfectly understandable.

If you want to have a good laugh at everything that is terrible in “Hamlet” and what just testifies that Shakespeare can be caught on a contradiction every moment, then you just need to read Professor Rümelin, the famous Heidelberg Rümelin, who pointed out all these things in detail in his essay on Shakespeare. But there is a difference between what Goethe felt about art, to the extent that he called the speaking artist the interpreter of the world spirit, and what is handed down as science, even in Heidelberg.

And if you compare what Lessing said about Laocoön and the beautiful comments on it by Goethe, you will not find in Goethe's remarks what leads to a real understanding, because Goethe did not yet have anthroposophy, but you will find significant progress compared to Lessing's discussions.

You will discover indications everywhere in Goethe of what I have just explained. So that you can say, for example, “Everything I have said about the Laocoon Group is evident from Goethe's comments on it.” And that is why it can be said that, in the right continuation, Goetheanism necessarily leads to anthroposophy, right down to the last detail.

Certain things can only be presented if one attempts to approach the corresponding reality through images. In the face of certain things, one must refrain from speaking in the abstract, intellectualized manner to which one is accustomed today. One would not be able to present the subject I wish to speak to you about today in this intellectualized manner. This, then, is the fundamental premise for the whole kind of presentation I want to give today.

Take, let us say, a certain interior space. I want to keep things as simple as possible. Let us take an interior space that perhaps has a window here (see drawings a, b). Through this window, let us assume, light would fall into this interior space, this light would spread in different ways inside. But let us assume that the interior is filled with all kinds of permeable walls, a kind of permeable vault. So we would have an interior that is filled in the most diverse ways with such vaults, whereby the light is partially transmitted and partially reflected in the most diverse ways, so that this interior would be filled with a light that is reflected and stopped in the most diverse ways.

Now imagine that I would let vapors flow through this inner space, and then let them flow up (red). But this vapor would be alive, it would be a living, sentient being. It would flow upwards and then, let us say, have an outlet, so that it could flow away again. It would flow through this light and into this inner space, into glittering light, into light that is variously modified by these vaults, light that falls through and is reflected. The vapor would feel what it perceived in the light and then flow away. In other words, the vapor would feel what was present in the inner space as a glimmer of light and in this way would get an inner image. It would get an image in its sensation of what is inside, glimmering in the light.

Now let us assume that after some time the steam, by flowing out again, would be able to reproduce what it has experienced inside (violet). We could have a kind of instrument through which the steam would somehow, say by striking musical tones or the like, express what it has experienced inside in the glittering, glowing light. Imagine this picture.

And now I will draw this picture for you in a different way. You see, instead of the vault, I have drawn the inside of the human head, and instead of the window, the eye through which one sees, through which the impressions of light come. What I have drawn as a vault are the convolutions of the brain, the spreading nerves. The light enters there and spreads out. Instead of the vapor that I have drawn there (see page 92), imagine the inhaled air that flows up and scans what can glimmer and glisten in the brain through the light, and what then forms into thoughts in the brain. The air flows back down through the spinal canal. Instead of there being an instrument, there is the human larynx and it can give expression to what has been experienced. There you have a picture of what actually goes on in the human head.

But now we say: Now we don't do it that way, but we close the window here, creating an inner, completely dark vault. So we close the window, now we have this inner vault, and again let steam flow upwards (red). Now, not the light is perceived, which falls in (see first drawing) and is attenuated in various ways, falls back, but now the forms that are there inside are perceived as such. And as the sentient vapor rises, it will be able to perceive the forms that someone once made in there, let's say that a builder once made. So this vapor will be able to feel the actions of this builder. When the vapor then flows out, it can in turn express (red) what has been perceived as the actions of the builder.

But let us assume that this master builder had built in a very special way. Let us assume that this master builder was an extraordinarily universal master builder, and he had made what he had built in there an image of the whole universe. Then, if you just close the window, the vapor inside would sense the secrets of the whole universe. Otherwise, it perceives what glitters in from the outside; but if you close it, it perceives what is inwardly an image of the whole universe.

Imagine, then, that we have here an image of the universe (see drawing). In the human head, in the wonderful convolutions of the brain, we really do have an image of the whole universe. And if we close our senses and then let the inhaled air, which goes through the spinal cord into the head, flow through, there is a way to sense the secrets of this brain interior. But you can't just let the inhaled air sense in a disorderly, chaotic way - then you won't find out anything - but it has to be done in an orderly way.

You know, if you want to detect, say, silk, you have to feel in a certain way. You have to accommodate what you want to feel. But if you can do that, if you can accommodate what you want to feel, then you can definitely find what is there to be felt.

In the time of which I have spoken to you in these days, when people wanted to come to higher knowledge by regulating their breathing process, in the time when the old yoga system of the Orient was really in its prime — because what is spoken of today as the yoga exercise is often a mere secondary thing — there was indeed the awareness: When you inhale, when you send the air you breathe into your head, you can grasp the secrets of the universe in the image of this universe, in the particular distribution of the nervous system in your head. You just have to behave in the appropriate way with the inhalation process.

I am not speaking now of what later occurred in a decadent way, but of the original. And the original was this. One said to oneself: When one inhales and shapes the breath so that one sends it up into this inner vault of the head, which is an imprint of the whole universe, but so that one puts a sound into the inhaled air that is between a and o or between a and u. So when you breathe in the sound a-u, you shape your breath so that, just as the hand is suited to sense something on the outside, the sound is suited to sense the secret of the world on the inside. And you get it into your consciousness if you then continue this breathing process in such a way that you let it run its course in an absolutely devotional mood towards what you have sensed. When you have what you attain by inhaling, by sending out the inhaled air and sensing with it in the a-u, when you then place yourself in a devotional mood, become devoted to the world, and pour out what you have sensed there into an absolute devotion, and then letting the breathing process run its course in “m”, then in such a breathing process, which forms inwardly into “aum”, one has caught - from the reproduction, from the nervous reproduction of the universe within - the secret of the universe. And you have brought it to life, which can become conscious in the air exhaled in the sound “m”. In what I have now discussed, you have a clue to what the original yoga training started from.

This yoga training said to itself: In my head is the secret of the whole universe. I can sense it by inhaling. In inhaling, the secret of the universe is revealed through myself. I grasp it, this secret of the universe. But I can only keep it — otherwise it remains in the unconscious — if I then live in absolute devotional surrender to the universe. And so it is recognized that by shaping the inhalation process, the world word is created, that which creatively pervades and interweaves the world, and by grasping this and breathing it out in absolute devotion to the universe: inhalation is the revelation of the world word, exhalation is the inward condensation of the world word, the confession to the world word. Thus is summarized man's exploration of the World Word and man's formulation of the World Word, in that it is realized: inhalation is revelation, exhalation is confession, and “aum” is the synthesis of revelation and confession, the invigoration of the world secret within, the confession of this world secret within.

For us today, in our present epoch, the tone has moved up further. The tone is lived out in real, concrete, not in intellectualized thoughts. So that we can say: inhalation becomes thought, and exhalation becomes the willful living out of the thought. That is to say, we break down what was once inhalation as revelation and exhalation as confession into exercises of thought and of the will, and thus we receive - likewise in thoughts, but in the thoughts practiced in meditation - the revelation, and in the exercises of the will, which after all are carried out on the other side, we receive the confession to what has been revealed.

For modern man it is as follows: what has been experienced in the mere breathing process, and what has been formed into vowel sound in the inhalation process and into consonant sound in the exhalation process, is lived out in a more soul-oriented way in the inwardly contemplated thought, which is, however, permeated by the will in devotional surrender to the universe. So the process is the same, only spiritualized and internalized. But here too, the process consists in perceiving the inner experience of the universe in its secrets and confessing to this universe, to the spiritual foundation of this universe.

We can also consider the following thoughts. We can say: Man is born out of the light, and his inner being, the inner being of his head, is the result of the light. The whole nervous system is, after all, the result of light. Light is not only transmitted through the eye, but also through the other senses. The eye is only the organ that conveys light in the most fundamental sense. We cannot say of blind people that they are completely cut off from light. Light works in them; it is only their conscious perception of light that is gone.

And sound, actually lives in the whole organism. Sound lives in us. Sound does not live only in the ear; the ear is only an organ of perception for sound. When we experience a sound, we experience it with our whole organism. We always experience a symphony with our whole organism. When we listen to a piece of music, the inner process is actually the following: We bring our breathing into a very definite rhythm, into very definite musical processes, which are prompted by the composition. These formations of our respiratory system strike the forms of the brain; the way they are reflected back gives us the musical impression. There is actually always a sensing of light through sound within us.

Please bear in mind that a sensing of the light through sound is constantly taking place in us. The world of sound in us, the sounding organism, is actually a sensing organ for the light. The light is actually always the external, the sound is actually always the internal.

Thoughts – inhalation: revelation

will – exhalation: confession

Sensing the light -> the outer through sound -> the inner

Sensing world thoughts through the human will.

The inner senses probe the outer. We grasp our own nature correctly only when we see ourselves as a special being, set apart from the harmony of the spheres of the world. This being gropes in the light, and in the configurations of light the sound recognizes the essence of the world. It is only in our epoch that we actually have a sensing of world-thoughts through human will (see diagram). We sense the world-thoughts with the will. The will stands here instead of the tone. The thought stands on the other side instead of the light. As I said, these things are very difficult to express in intellectualistic-abstract forms. But what I have tried to present to you figuratively will help you to understand these things if you reflect on them a little and realize that man's standing in the world is truly such that man has in his head an image of the whole cosmos. Man is indeed, in relation to his head, an image of the whole cosmos.

As the human embryo is formed in the mother's womb, it is also initially formed as an image of the cosmos. The first thing is that, yes, in the mother's body, the human being is formed as an image of the cosmos. At first, the human being is basically a brain, an image of the cosmos. You can study the cosmos by studying the human embryo in its earliest stages. Later, what is no longer an image of the cosmos comes over him, but what must be described as follows: if you have the earth here, on it the human being, then - by taking a piece from the embryo - what powers, parallel to the surface, circle the earth in rhythms, are added. The thoracic organism is formed, which is actually created from currents that circle around the earth. You have, if you will, reproduced these currents in the ribs. The effect of the earth organism itself comes last of all. The currents are sent up from below: you have the exact expression of how these currents run in the two legs. So that I can draw the human being as currents emanating from the earth, as currents orbiting the earth, connected to his chest organization, and at the top as a head, the image of the whole universe.

What takes place in the head is actually always a reflection of the whole universe, throughout life. Man, because he has the head organization, carries within himself a reflection of the whole universe. He only has to perceive it. He would not perceive it if he were not organized from the earth to do so. Actually, the earth perceives the universe through man: the chest organism is the mediator. The inhalation is effected from the cosmos, the exhalation from the earth. The cosmos gives us pure oxygen, the earth causes this oxygen to combine with carbon and thus form the deadening exhaled air. But as this dead air is formed, it is perceived.

Comprehension always has to do with the dying part of the human being. We actually die through our comprehension; we live through the cosmos. But we would live very quickly if we were only devoted to the cosmos. The cosmos provides us with the most life during our embryonic state, then the earth's circumference gradually takes us to work, and later on what flows up from the earth. In this way, the cosmos imparts to our organism the life it gives us until the quantum of life that the cosmos gives us is used up. The cosmos gives us life, the earth kills us as a physical organism and also as an etheric organism. It is just that the cosmos has its share in our etheric organism, while our earth has its share in our physical organism.

If you consider all this and say to yourself: once upon a time a regulated breathing process was carried out to cultivate higher knowledge, for the purpose of exploring the secrets of the universe within man, then you will realize how, in the times of original human endeavors, man inwardly felt inwardly, how he is connected with the whole universe, and how he wanted to experience the word of the universe through the inhalation process, wanted to sacrifice to the word of the universe through the exhalation process; how he wanted to place himself in the yoga breathing in the world process with his consciousness. Unconsciously, of course, he is always part of this world process. From the external description of this yogic breathing given today, one does not really gain any real knowledge of what was actually striven for with it. But one does gain such real knowledge by penetrating to such knowledge through today's anthroposophical spiritual science. People have no documents about the way it originally was. In the periods for which we have documents, these things no longer existed in their original form. We must arrive at the real secrets of the origin of man on earth without documents, otherwise we must abandon the attempt. So anyone who wants to find out about things only through external documents that have been preserved from older times will not find out about them, but only someone who can look back on much more original conditions than those that are attested by external documents. The secret of the oriental Aum prayer, if I may call it that – I might just as well say the Aum formula of knowledge, for both were contained in it – can only be grasped if one really knows the connection between man and the world in inhaling and exhaling. When one knows that the air, which otherwise gives no particular sounds, is formed into certain sounds as soon as one has differently tuned strings, that in the same way the inhaled air, which one sends with the Aum sound through the brain, inwardly expresses the whole secret of the world, when one knows this, then one knows the connection between man and the universe. One gropes for how one actually came into being. Before his conception, the human being lived in the spiritual-soul world, and in the spirit world. But now, as he descends, he passes through the entire configuration of the cosmos in the ether, gathering the ether. In this moment, he takes in all the secrets of the universe and gradually imprints them on his brain. And the very young child actually imprints what the soul has experienced of the total mystery of the universe, little by little, into the brain. And later on, this secret can be found again when one strives to experience this cosmic secret inwardly – in the breathing air in ancient times and now with the thought.

The power of thought, which is nothing other than a rarefied form of the power of breathing, also configures itself when it is truly channeled through the brain. Modern man does not do this. Modern man does not actually direct the power of thought through the brain, but he hears the words spoken in his language everywhere, and in them the thoughts also live, and then he passes through himself what he inwardly repeats from his national heritage. And in doing so, he acquires no inner knowledge at all, but at most writes books about the fact that one has only language, and cannot recognize anything through language. He then writes a critique of language because he has no idea what the power of thought encounters, because he only knows what is, so to speak, recorded in words. The modern human being is, after all, only a sounding board for words. And if he is then perceptive, like Fritz Mauthner, then he writes books about it, that words actually contain nothing of the essence of the world.

But with that you don't get close to the human being. And you don't get close to the world, especially not to the relationship between the human being and the world. You have to be clear about the fact that it is a profound truth that the human being is “human” through the divine breath, through the inhaled air. Because through that, through this inhaled air, he discovers the whole world within himself, he discovers how he is a microcosm.

If you reflect on what I have just explained today, you will see that you will gradually come across very significant connections. You just don't have to believe that it was a quirk that I initially just painted a picture. It is necessary not to characterize these things with our abstract words, but to try to approach them through images.

I believe I have given you a very important chapter of anthroposophical spiritual science, which I will develop further tomorrow.

Published in Anthroposophy Today, No. 4, Winter 1975 and/or 1987. It is the second of twelve lectures in the volume The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection, and is also known as Mystery of Golgotha and its Relation to the Sleep of Man.

Spiritual Science cannot hand people something which, once assimilated, is enough for the rest of life. I have often pointed out that there exists no short summary of a world view which can be kept at hand in one's pocket. In place of ready formulas, science of the spirit provides something with which the human soul must repeatedly unite itself, which must be repeatedly inwardly assimilated and digested. External truths such as those provided by natural science we can, if we have a good memory, take in and then possess them once and for all. That is not possible with spiritual-scientific truths, the reason being that the truths of natural science are lifeless concepts. The laws of nature are dead once they have been formulated into concepts, whereas spiritual-scientific truths are living concepts; if we condemn them to lifelessness because we accept them as if they were external truths, then they provide no nourishment; then they are stones the soul cannot digest.
—Rudolf Steiner, Aspects of Human Evolution, Lecture VIII, Berlin 24 July 1917

Waking life is the state of consciousness that is most familiar to mankind, but within this sphere the problems of existence are not unveiled. If this waking consciousness, as it serves us for ordinary life and knowledge, could solve the problems of life without further ado, such problems would no longer exist. Their solution would be a matter of course. Human beings would never come to the point of questioning. The fact that someone asks about the deeper foundations of life and, while not perhaps coming to the point of definitely formulating questions as to the problems of life yet retains the longing to know something that ordinary consciousness cannot yield, proves that from the deepest foundations of the human soul, though in a more or less unconscious way, something arises which indeed belongs to the human being, but which must first be sought if it is to rise up into the light of consciousness.

This leads those who do not observe life sufficiently closely into speculation and into the forming of all kinds of philosophies which eventually prove to be unsatisfying. But anyone who observes the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality will soon realise that, in the sleeping condition, as opposed to the waking condition of consciousness, something is concealed, and that an understanding of life may result from an understanding of the sleeping condition.

We have often spoken of these things, but it is necessary to return to them again and again, for Anthroposophy can only be understood when the attempt is made to approach facts from the most varied points of view.

Out of the state of sleep there emerges first the life of dreams. This dream life consists of pictures, and if one pays attention to this life of dreams, it is easy to observe that its pictures are related to ordinary life and consciousness. Even if it can often be said that things are dreamed of in a way in which the dreamer has never experienced them, I would answer: the parts out of which the dream is made up, the details of the pictures, are all the same taken from ordinary consciousness.

It is different with regard to the dramatic element of the dream, to the way in which the dream, as it grows in intensity, evokes feelings of anxiety, of joy, of compulsion. The meaning of the course taken by these dream pictures lies more deeply within human nature, and we can understand this when we consider the following example. A man may dream, for instance, that he is walking along a road and comes to a mountain. He passes into a cave in the mountain. At first it is dusk, and then it gets darker. An unknown impulse urges him to go farther; he has a sense of uneasiness and this increases till he stands there in a state of terror, let us say, of falling into some inner chasm or the like. He may then wake up in this feeling of terror, for it has lasted until the time of waking.

Again, we may dream that we are standing somewhere and a man is approaching us from a distance. He comes nearer and nearer, and when he is quite close it appears that he is preparing to make an attack. There is an experience of increasing anxiety. The other man comes still nearer and the harmless instrument which he had shown us from afar changes into a murderous weapon. The dream transforms things in this way. Anxiety becomes terror, and once more we awake full of this terror which continues into waking life.

Here we have two entirely different pictures. In the first dream we have a series of pictures which led us into the mountain cavern, and in the second a series of pictures connected with an approaching enemy. The soul-experience has been the same although the picture sequence has been quite different. What the soul has lived through is something entirely different from what is consciously experienced on waking. The pictures in themselves are not the essential thing. The point is the inner drama through which the soul passes; how there was first an impulse—or something that approached the soul in the place of an impulse—how this passed over into feelings of anxiety and terror, and how at last the dreamer came to the point of rousing himself out of sleep and returning to ordinary consciousness. Forces that increase in intensity are there behind the dream and these forces clothe themselves in pictures. The forces are not perceptible but they are the essential factor.

I might multiply these two picture sequences many times, for the same soul content may be clothed in 10, 20 or a hundred different pictures. Thus we must say that here is something that takes place in the soul which the human being does not observe and of which the person knows nothing. Only the pictures are known. These pictures are experienced in dream consciousness, but the essential thing is the process of intensification: first anxiety, then greater anxiety, and lastly actual terror. The dream pictures are more or less taken from ordinary life—the mountain, the cavern, the approaching enemy, his weapon—all these are borrowed from life. The pictures derive their content from life, but this is only the clothing.

But now when, through what I have often described as Imaginative consciousness, we have the power to remain behind this clothing, building no pictures of this kind, but remaining with Imaginative consciousness within the forces of the soul which have given rise to the anxiety, fear and terror, then something quite different happens.

When a person sleeps, the astral body and Ego are outside the physical and etheric bodies. In normal circumstances when human beings awake, they re-enter the etheric and physical bodies very rapidly; but when, in somewhat abnormal circumstances, someone does not immediately penetrate into the physical body, but before entering it penetrates more intensely into the etheric body, then these pictures are formed out of life. For in ordinary consciousness there is no conceptual activity in actual sleep. The dream pictures arise only at the moment when someone is penetrating into the body and passing through the etheric body, or at the moment of falling asleep when, on leaving the physical body, the sleeper lingers in the etheric body. These dream pictures taken from ordinary life are formed only in the intermediate conditions. Imaginative consciousness, however, enables human beings to live in those forces of the soul which stand behind the dream while the person is wholly outside the body. The individual lives then in a different world of reality, a world which is passed through between falling asleep and awaking. Between falling asleep and awaking human beings live in this world without consciousness. You can picture this to yourselves as though a man sank under water, and there, losing all consciousness, can only regain it when the waters bear him to the surface and make him free again. The same thing that there takes place in a physical sense takes place in the soul when people sleep. They dive down into the spiritual world and there lose consciousness. They pass out of the body with their soul and lose consciousness. On waking they rise up again and regain consciousness, and this re ascent is the entrance into the body. When, as has been said, someone does not enter the body immediately, but becomes aware of the passage through the etheric body, there arise the pictures of the dream. But when we reach a stage where the appearance of such dream pictures is no longer allowed and, existing wholly outside the physical body in the spiritual world, we perceive pictures, these are no longer arbitrary pictures but are such as you will find in the description of world-evolution in my Occult Science. All such descriptions as those given in Occult Science originate in the way just characterised.

If it is asked what is to be found in Occult Science, the answer must be: ‘Thoughts are there’. These thoughts can be studied. I have emphasised again and again that the healthy human intellect can reflect upon these thoughts. Thoughts are there, but they are not ordinary thoughts: they are thoughts which are creatively active in the cosmos. Human beings can live in these thoughts when they stand on the other side of the threshold leading into the spiritual world. They can live in these thoughts which are active in the cosmos. This is the first thing that they will find when they enter the super-sensible world.

Picture to yourselves someone asleep. During sleep, processes of the greatest intensity and far-reaching effect take place in the soul. Nothing is known of all this because in sleep the person is without consciousness. In the morning the person re-enters the physical body, diving down instantaneously into it. The eyes are used to perceive light and colour, the ears to hear sounds, and so on. The person becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state where, before entering directly into the physical body, the person enters the etheric body. Then the dream arises. But should that person become conscious before penetrating into the etheric body, he or she would then be conscious in the outer ether which fills the whole cosmos; there would be consciousness of what is described in Occult Science.

If, for example, you were to become conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that this physical body rose up before you and you were to look upon it—for it would then be visible—you would become conscious of this cosmology, of what I have described in Occult Science. What is there described may be called the formative forces of the cosmos, or cosmic thoughts. Just as people have their own thoughts in waking life, they can now say: ‘The Earth has originated in such and such a way; it has passed through a Moon condition, a Sun condition and a Saturn condition’—as I have described in Occult Science.

This kind of perception in the spiritual world is only one of three existing kinds. When human beings consider their waking condition of consciousness, they know that in this consciousness they can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the waking consciousness has these three states, so also the night consciousness, which in an ordinary way is an unconscious condition so far as the human being is concerned, has its three states. In the period between falling asleep and awaking people are not always in the same condition any more than they are during the period of waking consciousness. A person is awake when thinking or feeling or willing; consciousness can also function in three conditions during sleep. Imaginative consciousness is only able to behold the cosmic formative forces if we have first acquired consciousness and knowledge of them. In sleep we all live within these formative forces of the cosmos, within the cosmic thoughts; just as man is immersed when he jumps into water, so is everyone immersed, in sleep, in the formative forces of the cosmos.

Besides this life within the formative forces of the cosmos there are two other conditions of the life of sleep, just as in waking life the human being not only thinks, but feels and wills. Thinking, the possession of thoughts, corresponds in sleep to the life of the cosmic formative forces. This means that, when we become conscious in the lightest sleep, we are living in the formative forces of the cosmos. It is as though we were swimming through the cosmos from one end to the other, floating through thoughts—thoughts which are, however, forces. In this lightest sleep we float through the thought-forces of the cosmos. But there is also a deeper sleep—a sleep from which nothing can be brought into the waking life of the day unless we have practised special exercises of the soul. A person can bring back something into the waking life through the dream only from the lightest sleep, but, as I have already said, these dream-pictures are not authoritative, for the same dream can be clothed in the most varied pictures. In very light sleep we can always dream, that is, we can always bring something over into consciousness; we can feel that we have had at least some experiences in sleep. This is, however, only the case with the very lightest kind of sleep. Of deeper sleep nothing can be known until we can enter it with Inspirational consciousness, and then we become aware of more than is described in Occult Science. In that work I have, of course, described something of what sounds forth from Inspirational consciousness, but let us make it quite clear—and this is a matter which can only be explained through Anthroposophy—in what way the human being experiences this transition from light sleep to that sleep from which no dreams can be brought back into the ordinary conscious life.

When sleep is so light that dreams can be brought back into ordinary life, then one who is able to look into these worlds perceives the surging, weaving thought-pictures, the cosmic Imaginations which reveal cosmic mysteries showing that human beings indeed belong to a cosmic world just as they belong to the world in which they live consciously from awakening to falling asleep. For what I have described in Occult Science is not as though one merely painted something on a surface, but everything is in perpetual movement, in perpetual activity. At a definite moment, however, pictures begin to appear in this world through which human beings pass in light sleep, though they know nothing of it. The pictures become distinct; their light is enhanced; they reveal certain realities lying behind them. The pictures fade away again, and nothing remains in the consciousness but a kind of feeling that they have died down. Then they rise up again, and in this alternation of activity and withdrawal, something appears which can be called the harmony of the spheres, cosmic music. Thus cosmic music does not reveal itself only as melody and harmony but as the deeds and activities of those beings who dwell in the spiritual world, as the deeds of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so on.

The spiritual beings who guide and direct the world out of the spirit are seen, moving as it were through the surging sea of pictures. It is the world that is perceived through Inspiration, the second world. Let me call it the revelations of spiritual cosmic beings. And this world of the revelation of spiritual cosmic beings is the second element of sleep, as feeling is the second element of waking consciousness. Thus during sleep not only does the human being enter the realm of cosmic thoughts, but within these flowing cosmic thoughts there are revealed the deeds of cosmic beings who belong to the spiritual world.

In addition to these two conditions of sleep there is yet a third of which human beings have as a rule no sort of awareness. They usually know that they can sleep lightly, and they know also that dreams emerge from this light sleep. They know that there is a dreamless sleep. But the utmost that they can know of this third condition of sleep is that on awakening they may be conscious of the fact that, during sleep, they had been faced with some difficulty, with something which they must conquer in the first hours after awaking. I am sure that many of you are familiar with this feeling in the morning, where one knows that one has not slept quite in the ordinary way, but that something was there which has left a certain sense of difficulty, that will take some time to overcome when one regains consciousness in the morning. This is an indication of that third condition of sleep, the content of which can be apprehended only through Intuition. It is a condition which is of great significance to the human being.

When they are in the lightest sleep human beings are still actually concerned with a great deal that belongs to the experiences of waking consciousness. In a certain sense they still participate in their breathing processes; they also participate, although not from within but from without, in the blood circulation and the other processes of the body. In the second condition of sleep they do not actually participate in the processes of their bodily life; they are concerned with a world that is common both to the body and to the soul. Some element connected with the body plays over into the soul, just as something passes over from the light into the plant when it is developing in the light of day. But when they are in the third condition of sleep, there is something within them which—if I may so express it—has become mineral, for in this state the salts of the body are especially strongly deposited. During this third state of sleep a very strong storing up of salts takes place in the physical body—with their souls human beings live in the inner being of the mineral world.

Now let us imagine that the following experiment may be made. You lie down in bed and fall into a light sleep from which dreams may emerge into ordinary consciousness. You pass over into a deeper sleep from which no dreams proceed, but in which the soul is still connected with the physical body. You then enter into a sleep in which strong accumulations of salts take place in the physical body. The soul can have no relation to what is thus taking place in the body. However, if you had placed beside your bed a mountain crystal, it would be possible for you to enter with your soul right into the inner being of the crystal; you would perceive it from within outwards. This is not possible either in the first or in the second condition of sleep. In the first state of sleep, the content of which can enter into the dream, you would, had you dreamed of the crystal, still perceive it as some kind of crystal—it would certainly be a shadowy experience, but something of the nature of a crystal would be there. In the second state of sleep the crystal would be experienced in a less definite sense; and if you could then still dream—that is not possible in the ordinary way but we will imagine it to be so—then you would have the experience that the crystal becomes indefinite and forms itself into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid, and then recedes again. But if you could dream in the deepest sleep—that is, if you could bring into it the consciousness of Intuition—then out of this deepest sleep, this third condition of sleep, you would so experience the crystal that it would seem as though inwardly you followed these lines of form to the apex, and back again. You would experience the inner being of the crystal; you would be living within it. And so also in the case of other minerals. Not only would you experience the form, but also the inner forces. In short, the third condition of sleep is one which lifts human beings wholly out of their bodies and places them within the spiritual world. In this third stage of sleep we live with the essential being of the spiritual world itself. That is, we stand within the essence, within the being, of Angeloi, Archangeloi and of all those beings whom we otherwise perceive outwardly, in their manifestations. Between waking and sleeping we see with our sense consciousness, as it were, the external manifestations of the Gods in nature. During sleep we enter either the world of pictures, in the first condition, or into the world of manifestation, the revelation of spiritual beings, in the second condition. And when we reach the third condition we live within the divine spiritual beings themselves.

Thus, just as in our waking consciousness we live the life of thinking, feeling and willing, so during sleep we either flow with the cosmic thoughts, or out of these cosmic thoughts the deeds of divine spiritual beings are revealed, or these spiritual beings so take us up into themselves that we rest within them with our souls. Just as thoughts and ideas are for the waking consciousness the clearest and most definite things of all, while feeling is darker and really a kind of dreaming, and willing the condition of the greatest insensibility—as it were a kind of sleep—so we have these three degrees of the sleeping consciousness. We have the sleep in which ordinary consciousness experiences the dream and a higher clairvoyant consciousness the cosmic thoughts; we have the second state of sleep which for the ordinary consciousness remains hidden, but so appears to the consciousness of Inspiration that everywhere the deeds of divine, spiritual beings are revealed; and we have the third state of sleep, which to intuitional consciousness is life within the divine, spiritual beings themselves. This can be expressed by saying that we dive down, for instance, into the inner being of the minerals. This third state of sleep has, however, yet another element of great significance for the human being.

In the second stage of sleep, as I have said, we find in the surging pictures, alternately appearing and disappearing, the cosmic being of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so on. But we find ourselves as well. We find ourselves as beings of soul; not, however, as we now are, but as we were before birth, before conception. We learn to know how we have lived between death and a new birth. This belongs to this second world. And every time we pass through dreamless sleep, we live in this same world in which we lived before we descended into our physical body. But when we pass over into the third condition of sleep and are able to awake there, when the consciousness of Intuition awakes, then we experience our destiny—our karma. We know then why certain capacities are ours in this life as the results of a previous one. We know why in this life we have been led into connection with this or that personality; we learn to know our destiny, our karma. We can learn to know this destiny—and I speak now from another point of view—only when we are able to penetrate into the inner being of the minerals. If we are able to see the crystal not only from without but from within—naturally we must not break it up, for that would still be to see it only outwardly, but we must feel fully within it, in the way I have described—when we thus see the crystal from within, we can understand why this or that blow of destiny has befallen us in life. Take any kind of crystal—take an ordinary salt-cube. We look at it from without. That is how it is perceived in ordinary consciousness. Life then remains impenetrable. But if we are able to penetrate within it—the size in space has nothing to do with it—when we look at it from within, looking around in every direction, we are in that world in which we can understand our destiny. We live in this world every night when we pass into the third condition of sleep.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the period of evolution before the appearance of Christ on Earth, human beings—we ourselves in earlier incarnations—entered very often into this third condition of sleep. But before they sank down into this sleep their Angel appeared and raised them out of it again. This is the significant thing: we can always raise ourselves out of the first state, and out of the second state of sleep, but not out of the third. Before the appearance of Christ on Earth we must have died in this third condition of sleep if Angels, or some other beings, had not raised us out of it. Since the appearance of Christ, the Christ-force has been united with the Earth. Every time that we must awaken out of this third state of sleep, the Christ-force which came to be united with the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha must come to our aid. The human being can enter into the inner being of the crystal but cannot emerge again without the Christ-Force. When we gaze behind the veils of existence, we see the significance of the Christ Impulse for the earthly life. Once again, then, I emphasise that the human being could enter into the crystal, but could not emerge again.

After the appearance of Christ on Earth, after the Mystery of Golgotha, these things were strongly felt in certain regions, for example in Central Europe, where there was still a vivid, ancient, pagan consciousness but where, nevertheless, the Christ revelation was known. It was realised that many people had died because they had fallen into this deep sleep, and that they need not have died had Christ come to their aid. This was felt, for instance, with regard to Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa. In spite of the fact that so far as the outer physical world was concerned Frederick Barbarossa was drowned, this feeling was there, and it was very definitely there with regard to Charlemagne.

What happened to such a soul according to the consciousness of the Middle Ages? It passed into the interior of the crystal, thence into the mountain, and there it must wait until Christ should come to raise it out of its deep sleep. All such legends were connected with this consciousness. The deep connection of the Christ Impulse with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha has brought it about that the world of Angeloi, Archangeloi and other spiritual beings is still able to raise human beings from this deep sleep; otherwise, when they sank into this third condition of sleep, they could not be brought back out of it. This is connected with the Christ-force itself, not with belief in the Christ-force. No matter whether a man belongs to this or that religious confession, what Christ accomplished on Earth was an objective fact, and what I am here describing as an objective fact is wholly independent of belief. I will speak of the significance of belief on another occasion, but what I am now stating is an objective fact having nothing to do with belief.

How did these things come about? Into the spiritual world itself there entered a different destiny, a destiny which I will describe in the following way. Human beings here in the physical world are born and they die; the characteristic of the divine, spiritual beings who belong to the higher hierarchies is that they are not born, neither do they die, but only undergo a transformation. Christ, Who until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha lived with the other divine, spiritual beings, resolved to know death, to descend to Earth, to become man, and within the nature of man to pass through death, thereafter to return to consciousness through the Resurrection. In the divine-spiritual world it was an event of the deepest significance that a God should experience death. We can thus say that, in the history of the evolution of the Earth, there came about the mighty event that God became man, and that through this His power manifests as I have described. The God Who became man has such power in earthly life that He is able to raise our souls out of the interior of the crystal when they have passed into it. When we speak of Christ we are speaking of the cosmic Being, the God Who became man. What, then, would constitute the antitype? The antitype would be the man who has become god. This would not, however, be an absolutely good god but, just as Christ descended into the world of men and took death upon Himself, that is, assumed a human form in order to be able to participate in human destiny, so we are led to the opposite pole—to the man who, having freed himself from death, having liberated himself from human bodily conditions, within earthly conditions becomes a god. Such a man would then cease to be mortal. He would wander about the Earth—not, of course, under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal human being who must pass from birth to death, and from death to a new birth. A man who had thus become a god would exist on Earth as a man who had unlawfully become god-like. As the Christ is a God Who has lawfully become man, we must seek His antitype in the man who has become god, who, mortal no longer, has unlawfully assumed the god-nature. Just as in the Christian tradition we have in Christ Jesus the God Who has become man in righteousness, so are we also directed to Ahasueris, the man who has become god in unrighteousness, who has laid aside the mortality of human nature. We have the polar antithesis of Christ Jesus in Ahasueris. That is the deeper foundation, the deeper significance of the Ahasueris legend. This legend narrates something that is a reality, speaking of a man who wanders over the Earth. The figure of Ahasueris is actually there, wandering over the Earth from people to people. This Ahasueris figure exists—the man who has unlawfully become god.

If we wish to gain knowledge of historical truth we must turn our attention to such matters; we should observe how beings and forces from the super-sensible world work down into the physical world; how Christ came from the spiritual world into the physical world; and further how again the sensible world works back into the super-sensible. We must recognise in Ahasueris a real cosmic force, a real cosmic being. A consciousness of this wandering of Ahasueris has always existed, though of course he can be perceived only with clairvoyant vision and not with physical eyes. The legends of Ahasueris have a true objective foundation. We cannot understand human life if we only observe it externally, as it is described in history books.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ has dwelt in our inner being. Just as when we look inwards with quickened sight we can perceive Him there, so also when we look at human life and the eye of vision is opened there appears this figure of Ahasueris—and this is the case in most of those in whom clairvoyance arises, as it may happen unawares to the person who steps across the threshold of consciousness. People may not perhaps always recognise him; he may be taken for something different. It is nevertheless possible for Ahasueris to appear to us, as it is also possible when we look into our inner being for the Christ-figure to shine forth.

These things belong to World Mysteries which now, in this age when many Mysteries are destined to be revealed, must be made known.