The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Exoteric Christianity is to be found in the Gospels and as they have been interpreted through history; esoteric, inner Christianity is the living teaching of the Risen Christ: resurrection. Today it lies in the resurrection of thinking: how dead thoughts can be awakened to life in the form of moral impulses.

The evolution of mankind is recorded in documents that have been preserved as religious records, or as other documents relating to world-conceptions. But it must be emphasized over and over again that, in addition to these records that have influenced mankind throughout history (and there is, indeed, a deep justification for this exterior influence), there are other records, which we may term esoteric records.

When people spoke in a deeper sense of a knowledge of man and of man's conception of the world, they always made a distinction between an exoteric teaching, that gives a more exterior knowledge of things, and an esoteric teaching; only those who had trained their hearts and minds accordingly, were able to penetrate into this teaching. In Christianity, too, especially as far as its central point, the Mystery of Golgotha, is concerned, we must make a distinction between exoteric conceptions and esoteric knowledge. An exoteric contemplation of Christianity, accessible to all the world, is contained in the Gospels. Side by side with this exoteric contemplation, there has always been an esoteric Christianity for those who were willing—as I have said before—to prepare their hearts and minds in an adequate way for the reception of an esoteric Christianity.

All that could be gathered of the intercourse of the Christ who had passed through death and had risen from the dead, with those of his disciples who were able to understand him, was of the greatest importance in this esoteric Christianity. You know already that the Gospels contain very little about the intercourse of the risen Christ with his disciples. But what the Gospels tell us concerning this intercourse of the risen Christ with his disciples, can indeed give us an inkling and a foreboding of something very special, that entered the evolution of the earth through the Christ who rose from the dead. But we cannot go beyond such forebodings, without an esoteric knowledge.

These inklings of a truth acquire weight and significance if we add to them Paul's utterances. Paul's words acquire a particular meaning, for he assures us that he was able to believe in Christ only from the moment in which the Christ appeared to him through the event at Damascus. This gave him the sure knowledge that Christ had passed through death and that, after his death, he was connected with the evolution of the earth as the living Christ. The event at Damascus gave Paul a knowledge of the living Christ and we should bear in mind what this impiles, when it is said by a man like Paul. Why could Paul not be convinced of the true existence of the Christ-being before the event at Damascus? We must bear in mind what it implied for Paul, initiated to some extent in the Hebrew teachings—that the Being who lived on earth as Christ-Jesus, had been condemned to a shameful death on the cross in accordance with human laws and justice. Paul could not grasp that the old prophecies referred to a Being who had been condemned lawfully to the shameful death through crucifixion. Until the event at Damascus, Paul saw in the shameful crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth the proof that He could not be the Messiah. Only the experience at Damascus convinced Paul; the vision at Damascus convinced him of the truth of the Mystery of Golgotha. In spite of the fact that Jesus of Nazareth—or better, the Being who was incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth—had undergone the shameful death on the cross, something very deep and great is implied in this confession of Paul's conviction. The traditions that still existed in the first centuries after Christ, no longer exist. They may exist, at the most, in the form of outer historical records kept by some secret society that does not understand them. We must find again, through an anthroposophical spiritual science, that which surpasses the scanty communications concerning the Christ, after the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what we must find again: What did the risen Christ tell to the disciples that were around him, and that are not mentioned in the Gospels? For, what the Gospels say of the apostles who met Christ-Jesus on the way to Emmaeus, and other things recorded of the apostles, are steeped in tradition and refer to simple souls who were unable to advance to an esoteric knowledge. For this reason we must go beyond this and ask: What did the Christ say after his resurrection to the disciples who were really initiated?

If we want to understand this, we must begin by taking into consideration the frame of mind in which men of past ages took up the real Mystery of Golgotha and how the Mystery of Golgotha changed their disposition.

When we speak of the great truths of the past connected with man's earthly evolution, a modern man finds it very difficult to understand that the first men who lived on the earth did not possess a knowledge of the kind termed “knowledge” by us. The first men who lived on the earth were able to receive the wisdom of gods through atavistic, clairvoyant capacities. This means nothing less than this: Divine beings who descended to the earth from higher worlds could impart their teachings to human beings—in a spiritual way, of course—and these, in their turn, taught other souls. In the ancient past of human evolution on earth, it was a well-known fact that men were taught by the divine beings themselves, who descended to the earth from spiritual worlds. This condition, transcending the earthly one, could be attained especially by those men who had passed through the initiation in the Mysteries, where for the most part, they were outside their bodies with their souls and were able to reveive the communications of the gods in a spiritual way, because they were not dependent on the outer form of speech, or spoken words. They did not receive these communications in a state of mind resembling today's dreaming state, but in a living intercourse with divine beings which took place spiritually, and where they received what these beings considered to be their own particular wisdom. This wisdom at first consisted of communications (if I may call them thus) of the gods concerning the abode of human souls in the divine world before descending into an earthly body. During that state of consciousness which I have just described, the gods taught human beings what the souls experienced before their descent into an earthly body through conception. Then men felt as if they were being reminded of something, and they found that the communications of the gods reminded them of their experiences in the world of the spirit and soul, before birth, i.e. before conception.

An echo can still be found in Plato that this was indeed so in ancient times. Today we can look back on a divine spiritual wisdom received here on earth by men who were in the frame of mind just described, a wisdom received—we may indeed say it in the real sense of the word—from the gods themselves. This wisdom was of a special kind: namely, of such a kind, that people—strange as it may seem today—knew nothing of death. It may seem strange to you today, yet it is so: the oldest inhabitants of the earth knew nothing of death, just as the child knows nothing of death. The people who were instructed in the way indicated by me and passed on this instruction to others who still possessed an atavistic clairvoyance, became conscious at once of the fact that their soul-being had come down from divine-spiritual worlds into a body, and that it would leave this body. They considered this an advance in the life of the spirit and of the soul. Birth and death appeared to them as a metamorphosis, as something which is the beginning and end of something. Were we to draw this schematically we might say that people saw the human soul in its progressive evolution and considered life on earth as an interlude. But they did not see in the points “a” and “b” a beginning and an end, they only saw the uninterrupted stream of the life of spirit and soul. They did see, of course, that the people around them died. You will not think that I am comparing these ancient men with animals; for, although their outer aspect resembled that of animals, these oldest of men had a higher soul-spiritual nature. I have already explained this before. But just as an animal knows nothing of death when it sees another animal which is dead, so did these ancient men know nothing of death, for they received only the idea of an uninterrupted stream in the life of soul and spirit. Death was something pertaining to Maya, the great illusion, and it made no great impression on men, for they knew life, only. Although they saw death, they knew nothing of death. For, their spirit-soul life was not ensnared by death. They saw human life only from within. When they looked at birth, human life extended beyond birth, into the spiritual. When they looked at death, the life of spirit and soul again extended beyond death, into the spiritual; birth and death had no meaning for life. Life alone was known—not death.

Men gradually came out of this frame of spirit. On tracing the evolution of mankind from the oldest times to the Mystery of Golgotha, one may say: more and more, human beings learnt to know death. They learnt to know death more and more as something that made an impression on them. Their souls became entangled in death, and out of man's feelings arose the question: what happens to the soul when man goes through death?

You see, in far distant ages people never contemplated death as an end. Their problem was at the most one dealing with the special nature of metamorphosis involved. They asked whether the breath leaves man and continues streaming, and whether the soul enters thereby into eternity; or else, they had some other conception of the way in which the life of spirit and soul continues. They thought about the nature of this continuation, but they did not think of death as an end. Only with the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha people really felt that death has a meaning and that life on earth is something that ends.This, of course, did not assume the form of a problem formulated in a philosophical or scientific way, but it entered the soul as a feeling. Men on earth had to come to this feeling, for it was necessary for the evolution of mankind that the understanding, or the intellect, should enter life on earth. But the intellect depends on the fact that we are able to die. I have often mentioned this. Man had therefore to become entangled in death. He had to become acquainted with death. The old ages in which man knew nothing of death were all non-intellectualistic. Men received their ideas through inspirations from the spiritual world and did not think about them. There was no intellect. But the intellect had to come. If we express it in a soul-spiritual way, the understanding could come only because man is able to die and carries within him all the time the forces of death. In a physical way, we might say that death can enter because man deposits salts, i.e. solid mineral substances, dead substances, not only in the body, but also in his brain. The brain has the constant tendency to deposit salt—I might say, toward an incomplete ossification. So that the brain contains a constant tendency toward death. This inoculation of death had to enter in mankind. And I might say, that the result of this necessary development—that death began to have a real influence in man's life—was the outward acquaintance with death. If men had remained the same as in the past, where they did not really know death, they would never have been able to develop an intellect, for the intellect is only possible in a world where death holds sway.

This is how matters stand, seen from a human aspect. But they can also be contemplated from the aspect of the higher hierarchies, and then they will appear as follows: The higher hierarchies contain in their being the forces that have formed Saturn, the Sun, the Moon and finally the Earth. If the higher hierarchies had expressed their teachings amongst themselves, as it were, up to the Mystery of Golgotha, they would have said: We can form the Earth out of Saturn, Sun and Moon. But if the Earth were to contain only what we have placed into Saturn, Sun and Moon it would never have been able to develop beings who know something about death, and can therefore develop the intellect within them. We, the higher hierarchies, are able to let an Earth proceed out of the Moon, on which there are men who know nothing of death, and on which they cannot develop the intellect. It is not possible for us, higher hierarchies, to form the Earth in such a way that it is able to supply the forces which lead man towards the intellect. We must rely, for this, on an entirely different being, on a being who comes from another direction than our own—The Ahrimanic Being. Ahriman is a being who does not belong to our hierarchy. Ahriman comes into the stream of evolution from another direction. If we tolerate Ahriman in the evolution of the Earth, if we allow him a share in it, he brings us death, and with it, the intellect, and we can take up in the human being death and intellect. Ahriman knows death, because he is at one with the Earth and has trodden paths which have brought him into connection with the evolution of the Earth. He is an initiate, a sage of death, and for this reason he is the ruler of the intellect. The gods had to reckon with Ahriman—if I may express it in this way. They had to say: the evolution cannot proceed without Ahriman. It is only a question of admitting Ahriman into the evolution. But if Ahriman is admitted and becomes the lord of death and, consequently, of the intellect too, we forfeit the Earth, and Ahriman, whose sole interest lies in permeating the Earth with intellect, will claim the Earth for himself. The gods faced the great problem of losing to a certain extent their rule over the Earth in favour of Ahriman. There was only one possibility—that the gods themselves should learn to know something which they could not learn in their godly abodes which were not permeated by Ahriman—namely, that the gods should learn to know death itself, on the Earth, through one of their emissaries—the Christ. A god had to die on earth, and he had to die in such a way that this was not grounded in the wisdom of the gods, but in the human error which would hold sway if Ahriman alone were to rule. A god had to pass through death and he had to overcome death.

Thus the Mystery of Golgotha meant this for the gods: a greater wealth of knowledge through the wisdom of death. If a god had not passed through death, the whole Earth would have become entirely intellectual, without ever reaching the evolution which the gods had planned for it from the very beginning.

In past ages, people had no knowledge of death. But they learnt to know death. They had to face the feeling that through death, i.e. through the intellect, we enter a stream of evolution which is quite different from the one from which we come.

Now the Christ taught his initiates that he came from a world where death was unknown; he learnt to know death, here on earth, and conquered death. If one understands this connection between the earthly world and the divine world, it will be possible to lead the intellect back gain into spirituality. We might express approximately in this way the content of the esoteric teachings given by the Christ to his initiated disciples: it was the teaching of death, as seen from the scene of the divine world. If one wishes to penetrate into the real depths of this esoteric teaching, one must realize that he who understands the entire evolution of mankind knows that the gods have overcome Ahriman by using his forces for the benefit of the Earth, but his power has been broken because the gods themselves learnt to know death in the being of Christ. Indeed, the gods have placed Ahriman into the evolution of the earth, but, in making use of him, they have forced him to come down into the evolution of the earth without completing his own rulership. He who learns to know Ahriman since the Mystery of Golgotha and he who knew him before, knows that Ahriman has waited for the world-historic moment in which he will not only invade the unconscious and subconscious in man, as in the case since the days of Atlantis (you know this through myOccult Science), but will invade also man's consciousness. If we apply human expressions to the willing of gods, we might say that Ahriman has waited with longing for the moment in which to invade human consciousness with his power. His purpose was thwarted because he knew nothing of the divine plan whereby a being—the Christ—was to be sent to the Earth, a being who underwent death. Thus the intervention of Ahriman was possible, but the sharp edge was taken off his rule. Since then, Ahriman uses every opportunity to encourage men in the exclusive use of the intellect. Ahriman has not lost all hope today that he will succeed in inducing men to use only their intellect. What would this imply? If Ahriman would succeed in convincing men against all other convictions that man can live only in his body and that, as a spirit-soul being, he cannot be separated from his body, the idea of death would seize the souls so strongly that Ahriman would be able to realize his plans quite easily. Ahriman hopes for this always. One might say, for instance, that special joy fills the heart of Ahriman—if one can speak of a heart in Ahriman's case, but this is a comparison, for I must always use human expressions in cases where other expressions should really be found—that special joy lives in Ahriman's soul since the period stretching from the forties of the 19th century until about the end of the 19th century; in the predominant sway of materialism Ahriman could cherish new hopes for his rule over the earth. In this time even theology becomes materialistic. I have mentioned already that theology has become unchristian and that the theologian from Basle, Overbeck, wrote a book in which he tried to prove that modern theology is no longer Christian. This gave new hopes to Ahriman.

An antagonism to Ahriman exists today only in the teachings like those that stream through Anthroposophy. If Anthroposophy can again make clear to men the independence of the spirit-soul being which is not dependent on the bodily being, Ahriman will have to give up his hopes for the time. The battle of the Christ against Ahriman is again possible. And we can have a foreboding of this in the Temptation described in the Gospel. But a full understanding can be gained only by penetrating into what I have often set forth, namely, that Lucifer plays a greater part in the older evolution of mankind, and that Ahriman began to have an influence on human consciousness since the Mystery of Golgotha. He had an influence also before that time, but not on the consciousness of man.

If we look at the human mind and soul we must say that the most important point in mankind's evolution lies where man learns to know that the Christ-impulse contains a living force which enables him to overcome death in himself, when he unites himself with it.

Seen from the spiritual world this implies that Ahriman was drawn into the evolution of the earth by the hierarchies belonging to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, etc. But his claims of rulership were hedged in because they were placed at the service of the evolution of the earth. Ahriman has, as it were, been forced to enter the evolution of the earth. Without him, the gods could not have placed intellectualism into mankind and if they had not succeeded in taking off the sharp edge to Ahriman's rule through the Christ event, Ahriman would have rendered the whole earth intellectual from within and material from without. The Mystery of Golgotha is not only an inner mystical event; we must look upon it entirely as an outer event which cannot, however, be set forth according to an outer materialistic, historical investigation. It must be set forth in such a way as to show the entrance of Ahriman into the evolution of the earth, and, at the same time, the overcoming of Ahrimanism, to a certain extent. Thus we have a battle of the gods which was enacted through the Mystery of Golgotha. That a battle of the gods took place on that occasion, is contained also in the esoteric teachings imparted by the Christ to his initiated disciples, after his resurrection. If we are to designate that which existed in the form of an esoteric Christianity, we might say that in past ages of the evolution of the earth people knew of the existence of these worlds through the manifestations that I have characterized a short while ago. But these divine worlds could not tell them anything concerning death, for death did not exist in the worlds of the gods, and it did not exist for man, because he gained knowledge only of the steady uninterrupted progress of the spirit and soul through the spheres of the gods. Man came nearer and nearer to the understanding of death. By yielding himself up to the Christ, he could gain for himself a sure power which enabled him to overcome death. This is man's inner evolution.

But the esoteric element which Christ gave to his initiated disciples consisted therein, that He told them: What took place on Golgotha, is the reflection of superterrestial events and of the relationship between the worlds of the gods connected with Saturn, Sun, Moon and the present Earth, and Ahriman. The cross of Golgotha cannot be looked upon as something earthly, but as something having a meaning for the entire universe—this was the content of esoteric Christianity.

Perhaps we can awaken a particular feeling in connection with esoteric Christianity: Imagine two esoteric disciples of the Christ, who progress more and more in the acquisition of an esoteric Christianity, and imagine them speaking together while they are still battling with their doubts: One of them would say more or less the following words to the other one: The Christ who is teaching us, has descended from worlds which are known from the past. Gods were known in past ages, but they were gods who could not speak of death. If we had remained with these gods, we would never have learnt anything concerning the nature of death. The gods themselves had first to send down to the earth a divine being, in order to learn something concerning death though one of their own ranks. After His resurrection, Christ teaches us what the gods had to fulfill in order to guide the evolution of the earth to a right end. If we keep to him, we will learn something that men could not learn until then. We learn what the gods did behind the scenes of the worlds's existence in order to further the evolution of the earth in the right way. We learn how they brought in the forces of Ahriman, without allowing them to be of harm to man, but to be of use to him. What the initiated disciples received as the esoteric teaching of the risen Christ was something deeply moving. A disciple, such as the one described above, could only have continued by saying: Today we would know nothing at all concerning the gods, for we would be in the meshes of death had Christ not died and risen, and had He not taught us, after His resurrection, the experiences of the gods concerning death. As human beings, we must immerse ourselves into a period of time in which we can no longer know anything of the gods. The gods found a new way of speaking to us. This way went through the Mystery of Golgotha. The essential knowledge conveyed to the disciples through the Mystery of Golgotha, was that men could again approach the divine worlds which they had left. In the first period of the Christian evolution, the disciples were permeated by this stirring teaching. Many a one, whom history barely mentions, bore within him the knowledge which he could have gained only because in the early times he had enjoyed the teaching of the risen Christ himself, or else because he was connected in some way with the teachers who had been taught by the Christ.

Later on, all these things were exteriorized. They were exteriorized to such an extent that the first heralds of Christianity attached great value to the fact of being able to say that they were the disciples of one who had been taught by a disciple of the apostles. It was a continuous development, for he who imparted the teaching, had known one who had seen an apostle, i.e. one who had known the Lord himself, after his resurrection. In the past, some value was still attached to this living development, but the form in which it reached a later mankind was already exteriorized. It had assumed the aspect of an outer historical description. But, essentially, it goes back to what I have just set forth. The incorporation of the intellect, which began already, and particularly, during the fourth and fifth centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, and underwent a special change in the fifteenth century—the beginning of the fifth post-atlantean epoch—this development of the intellect brought about the loss of the ancient wisdom which enabled man to grasp something of the spiritual truths, whereas the new wisdom was not there. To a certain extent, men forgot for a whole age everything that had an esoteric significance in Christianity.

As stated, some records dealing with this esoteric knowledge remained in the keeping of secret societies, the members of which no longer understood the content of these records—in our age, certainly not. These records really refer to the teachings that were imparted by the risen Christ to some of his initiated disciples.

Suppose that the ancient Hebrew teaching had not received new life through Christianity—then, Paul's conviction before the event at Damascus would have been justified. For, Paul more or less accepted the view that there is an old traditional teaching, which existed originally as a divine-spiritual revelation given to men in a distant past, in the spiritual form which I have described. Then, this was preserved in written records. Amongst the Hebrews, there were scribes who knew what was contained in the records from out of the ancient wisdom of the gods. The sentence that condemned Christ-Jesus to death came from such scribes. While he was still Saul, Paul looked up to this original divine wisdom of the past and thought that this ancient wisdom was the source of the knowledge which came streaming down even to the scribes of his time. The fact that prominent men took up the calling of a scribe, could, however, bring this divine wisdom only as far as the pronouncing of righteous sentences. Impossible—quite impossible—for an innocent man to be condemned to death through crucifixion! Especially if things took the course they did take during the trial of Christ Jesus. This was the course of Paul's thoughts. Only the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, was already entangled instinctively in quite another world-conception and could utter the pregnant sentence: What is Truth? Paul, as Saul, could not possibly imagine that what had taken place according to a righteous judgement, might not be truth. What a conviction had to be gained by Paul? The conviction that there can be error in the truth which used to come streaming down to men from the gods, for men have changed it into error—into an error so strong, that the most innocent of all had to pass through death. The original divine wisdom streams down as far as the wisdom of the scribes, who were the Hebrew contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha. This wisdom can only contain truth—thought Saul. But he had to think otherwise. When Paul was still Saul, he used to say: If he, who died on the cross, is indeed the Christ and the Messiah, this current of wisdom must contain error in its truth, and error brought Christ to the cross. That is, man must have turned the old divine wisdom into error. Naturally, only the actual fact that this is so, indeed, could convince Saul. Only Christ himself could convince him, by appearing to him in the event at Damascus. What did this mean for Saul? It meant that a divine wisdom no longer existed, for the Ahrimanic element had entered into it.

Thus Paul reached the point of seeing that mankind's evolution had been seized by an enemy and that this enemy is the source of error on earth. In bringing the intellect, he brings also the possibility of error, and, in its greatest aspect, this error is responsible for the death on the cross of the most innocent of all. First, this conviction must be gained—that He who has no stain upon him, died on the cross. This enabled men to see how Ahriman crept into the evolution of humanity and how a super-sensible, superterrestial event existed in the evolution of the Ego, through the enactment of the Mystery of Golgotha. An esoteric fact can never be merely mystical. It is always an enormous mistake to explain mere mysticism as esotericism. The esoteric knowledge is always a knowledge of facts which take place, as such, in the spiritual world, and remain hidden behind the veil of the physical world. For, behind this veil, the adjustment between the divine world and Ahriman takes place, as enacted in the death on the cross of Christ-Jesus. Paul felt that error, leading to the death on the cross, can only enter a world wherein man is seized by the Ahrimanic powers. And when he had understood this, he learnt the truth of esoteric Christianity.

Paul was undoubtedly one of those who belonged, in this sense, to the initiates. But initiation gradually died out, through the growing influence of intellectualism. Today we must return to a knowledge of esoteric Christianity: we must know again that Christianity does not only contain what is exoteric, but goes beyond the forebodings that can be awakened through the Gospels. Today very little is said concerning an esoteric Christianity, but humanity must return to this knowledge, which is not based on outer documents. We must learn to fathom what the Christ himself taught to his initiated disciples after his resurrection, and we must take for granted that he could impart such teachings only after having passed through an experience, here on earth, which he could not have had in the divine world—for until the Mystery of Golgotha death did not exist in the divine worlds. No being of the divine worlds had passed through death—Christ is the first-born who passed through death from the world of the hierarchies, connected with the evolution of the Earth that went through Saturn, Sun and Moon.

The secret of Golgotha is the inclusion of death into life. Before Golgotha, the knowledge of life did not include death. Now death became known as an essential part of life, as an experience which strengthens life. Humanity went through a weaker form of life when nothing was known of death; humanity must live more forcefully if it wants to pass through death and yet remain alive. Death, in this connection, is also the intellect. Men possessed a comparatively weaker sense of life when they had no need of the intellect. The older people who obtained their knowledge of the divine worlds in the form of images and inner manifestations, did not die inwardly. They always remained alive. They could laugh at death because they remained alive inwardly. The Greeks still relate how happy the ancients were because, when death approached them, they became so dazed within, that they hardly noticed it. This was the last remnant of a world-conception that knew nothing of death. Modern man experiences the intellect. Intellect renders us cold and dead within. It paralyses us. When our intellect is active, we do not really live. We must feel that when we are thinking, we are not really alive, that our life is poured into the empty pictures of our understanding. A strong life is needed in order to experience the living activity contained in the lifeless images formed by our intellect, a creative, living activity inspite of all. A strong life is needed to reach the sphere where moral impulses flow out of the force of pure thinking, and where we learn to understand the freedom in man, through the impulses of pure thinking.

This is what I tried to set forth in my Philosophy of Freedom, which is really an ethical conception, and tries to show how dead thoughts can be awakened into life in the form of moral impulses, and thus be led to resurrection. An inner Christianity is undoubtedly contained in this Philosophy of Freedom.

With these explanations I wished to place before your souls, from a particular aspect, something concerning an esoteric Christianity. This age, which is so full of disputes concerning the nature of Christianity in an exoteric, historical sense, needs an esoteric Christianity—it is necessary to point out the esoteric teachings of Christianity. I hope that they will not be taken lightly, but with the needed earnestness and responsibility. When speaking of such things, one feels how difficult it is to clothe these experiences in the words of modern speech, which has already become abstract. For this reason, I have tried to attune your souls by describing the inner processes of man in the form of images, in order to form a thread leading from the single human being to that which constitutes, in an esoteric sense, the historical evolution of humanity, which is contained, as something essential, in the Mystery of Golgotha.

Exoteric Christianity is to be found in the Gospels and as they have been interpreted through history; esoteric, inner Christianity is the living teaching of the Risen Christ: resurrection. Today it lies in the resurrection of thinking: how dead thoughts can be awakened to life in the form of moral impulses.

The story of the evolution of humanity is preserved in ancient records mostly either of a religious or philosophical character. But it must be emphasised that as well as these records which have had a deep and good influence upon mankind through the ages, there exists what we may call esoteric knowledge.

Wherever the deeper aspects of human knowledge and human thought have been studied, a distinction has always been made between exoteric teaching (concerned with the more external side of things) and esoteric teaching which is accessible only to those who have undergone the necessary inner preparation. And so in the case of Christianity itself, especially in respect of the spiritual kernel of Christianity—the Mystery of Golgotha—a distinction must also be made between exoteric and esoteric knowledge. The exoteric teaching is contained in the Gospels and is there for all the world; but side by side with this exoteric teaching there has always been an esoteric Christianity, available to those who have prepared their minds and hearts to receive it.

In this esoteric Christianity the teaching of greatest moment is that concerning the communion between the Risen Christ—the Christ Who has passed through death—and those of His disciples who were able to understand Him. The Gospels, as you know, make only brief references to this. What the Gospels say of this communion between Christ after His Resurrection and His disciples does indeed enable them to surmise that something of the deepest import to earthly evolution came to pass through the Resurrection; but unless the step is taken into the realm of esoteric teaching, the words can be little more than indications.

The avowal of Paul, of course, is of the greatest importance, for Paul testifies that he was only able to believe in Christ after He had appeared to him at Damascus. Paul knew then, with absolute conviction: Christ had passed through death and in His life now, after death, is united with earthly evolution. We must reflect upon the significance of the testimony which came from Paul when, through the event at Damascus, the reality of the Living Christ was revealed to him.

Why was it that before the vision at Damascus Paul or Saul as he then was—could not be convinced of the reality of the Christ?

We must understand what it meant to Paul—who to a certain extent had been initiated into the secret doctrines of the Hebrews—to learn that Christ Jesus had been condemned to a death of shame by crucifixion. It was, at first, impossible for Paul to conceive that the old prophecies could have been fulfilled by one who had been condemned by human law to this shameful death. Until the revelation came to him at Damascus, the fact that Jesus of Nazareth had suffered the shame of crucifixion was for Paul conclusive proof that He could not have been the Messiah. It was only after the revelation at Damascus that conviction came to Paul concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, notwithstanding the fact that Jesus of Nazareth, or rather, the Being indwelling the body of Jesus of Nazareth, had experienced a death of shame on the Cross.

It was of immeasurable significance that Paul should have proclaimed his conviction of the truth of the Mystery of Golgotha. Traditions that were still extant during the first centuries of Christendom are, of course, no longer available. At most they have survived in the form of fragments in the possession of a few isolated secret societies, where they are not understood. Anything that goes beyond the very sparse traditions concerning Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha must be rediscovered to-day through anthroposophical Spiritual Science. We have again to discover how Christ spoke after the Resurrection. What was the nature of the teaching given by Him to those disciples with whom He was in communion but of whom the Gospels make no mention? The Gospel story concerning the disciples who met Christ on the way to Emmaus, or concerning the host of disciples, has always been clothed in a form of tradition adapted for naive and simple minds incapable of understanding the esoteric truths. Going further, we must ask: What was the teaching given by Christ after the Resurrection to his initiated disciples? Before we can begin to understand this, we must think of the nature of the human soul as it was in very ancient times and of the change brought about by the Mystery of Golgotha.

A most important truth concerning the earliest periods in the evolution of earthly humanity and one which it is exceeding difficult for the modern mind to understand, is that the first human beings who lived on the Earth had no knowledge or science in the form familiar to us to-day. Because of their faculties of atavistic clairvoyance, these early men were able to receive the wisdom of the Gods. This means that it was actually possible for humanity to be taught by Divine Beings who descended spiritually to the Earth from the realm of the higher Hierarchies and who then imparted spiritual teaching to the souls of men. Those who received such teaching—for the most part they were men who had been initiated in the Mysteries—were able, through their Initiation, to live in a state of remoteness from earthly affairs; the soul lived to a great extent outside the body. In this state of consciousness men were not dependent upon oral conversation or instruction; they were able to receive communications from the Gods in a spiritual way. Nor did they receive these teachings in a condition of consciousness resembling dream-life as we know it to-day. They entered into living, spiritual communion with Divine Beings, receiving the wisdom imparted by these Beings. This wisdom consisted of teachings given by the Gods to man in regard to the sojourn of the human soul in the Divine-Spiritual world before the descent into an earthly body. The experiences of the soul before descent into a physical body through conception—such was the substance of the teaching imparted to human beings in the state of consciousness I have described. And the feeling arose in these men that they were only being reminded of something. As they received the teachings of the Gods they felt that they were being reminded of what they themselves had experienced before birth, or rather, before conception, the world of soul-and-spirit.

In Plato's writings there are still echoes of these things. And so to-day we can look back to a Divine-Spiritual wisdom once received by men on the Earth from the Gods themselves.

This wisdom was of a very special character. Strange as it will seem to you to-day, the earliest dwellers on the Earth knew nothing of death—just as a child knows nothing of death. Those men who received the teachings of the Gods and who then passed them on to others also possessing the faculty of atavistic clairvoyance—such men knew quite consciously that their souls had come down from Divine-Spiritual worlds, had entered into physical bodies and would in time pass out of these bodies. They regarded this as the onward flow of the life of soul-and-spirit. Birth and death seemed to them to be a metamorphoses, not a beginning and end.

Speaking figuratively, we should say: In those times man saw how the human soul can develop onwards and he felt that earthly life was only a section of the onflowing stream of the life of soul-and-spirit. Two given points within this stream were not regarded as any kind of beginning or end. It is, of course, true that man saw other human beings around him, die. You will not accuse me of comparing these early men with animals, for although their outward appearance was not entirely dissimilar from that of animals, the soul-and-spirit within them was on a very much loftier level.—I have spoken of this many times—As little as an animal to-day understands death when it sees another animal lying dead, as little did the men of those early times understand death, for they could only conceive of an onflowing stream of soul-and-spirit. Death belonged to Maya, to the great Illusion, and made no particular impression on them. They knew life and life only—not death, although it was there before their eyes. In their life of soul-and-spirit they were not involved in death. They saw human life only from within, stretching beyond death into the spiritual world. Birth and death were of no significance to life. They knew only life; they did not know death.

Little by little, men emerged from this state of consciousness. Following the evolution and progress of humanity from the earliest epochs to about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, we may say: men were learning more and more to know the reality of death. Death was something that made an impression upon them. Their souls became entangled with death, and a question arose within them: What becomes of the soul when the human being passes though death?

In the very earliest times, men were not faced with the question of death as an ending. At most they enquired about the nature of the change that took place. They asked: Is it the breath that goes out of a man and then streams onwards, bearing the soul to Eternity? Or they formed some other picture of the life of soul-and-spirit in its onward flow. They pondered about this but never about death as an ending.

It was only when the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near that men began, for the first time, to feel that there is a significance in death, that earthly life has indeed an ending. Naturally, this question was not formulated in philosophical or scientific terms; it was more like a feeling, a perceptive experience—an experience necessary in earthly life because reason and intellect were to become an essential part of human evolution. Intellect, however, is dependent upon the fact that the human being can die.

It was necessary, then, for the human being to be involved in death, to know death. The ancient epochs, when men knew nothing of death, were all unintellectual. Ideas were inspired from the spiritual world, not ‘thought out.’ There was no intellect as we know it. But intellect had to take root and this is possible only because the human being can die, only because he has within him perpetually the forces of death. In a physical sense we may say: Death can only set in when certain salts, that is to say, certain dead, mineral substances deposit themselves in the brain as well as in the other parts of the human organism. In the brain there is a constant tendency towards the depositing of salts, towards a process of bone-formation that has been arrested before completion. So that all the time the brain has the tendency towards death.

Humanity had, however, to be impregnated with death. Outer acquaintance with death, realisation that death plays an important part in human existence, was simply a consequence of this necessity. If human beings had remained as they were in ancient times when they had no real knowledge of death, they would never have been able to develop intellect—for intellect is only possible in a world where death holds sway.

So it is when viewed from the standpoint of the human world. But the matter may also be viewed from the side of the higher Hierarchies, and presented in the following way.—

The Beings of the higher Hierarchies have within them the forces which fashioned Saturn, Sun and Moon¹ and finally the Earth. If the higher Hierarchies had, as it were, been holding council among themselves before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on Earth, they would have said: “We have been able to build up the Earth from Saturn, Sun and Moon. But if the Earth were to contain only what we have been able to incorporate from Saturn, Sun and Moon, no beings could develop who, knowing death, are able to unfold intellect. We, the higher Hierarchies, are unable to bring forth an Earth from the Moon embodiment—an Earth on which men know nothing of death and therefore cannot unfold the faculty of intellect. We, the Hierarchies, cannot so fashion the Earth that it will produce the forces necessary for the development of intellect in man. For this purpose we must allow another Being to enter, a Being whose path of development has been different from ours. Ahriman is a Being who does not belong to our hierarchy. He enters the stream of evolution by a different path. If we tolerate Ahriman, if we allow him to participate in the process of the Earth's evolution, he will bring death, and with death, intellect; the seeds of death and of intellect will then be implanted in the being of man ... Ahriman is acquainted with death; he is interwoven with the Earth, because his paths have connected him with earthly evolution. Ahriman is a knower of death; therefore he is also the Ruler of intellect.”

The Gods were obliged—if such a word is permissible—to enter into dealings with Ahriman, realising that without Ahriman there could be no progress in evolution. But—so said the Gods—if Ahriman is received into the stream of evolution to become the Ruler of death and therewith also of the intellect, the Earth will fall away from us; Ahriman, whose only interest is to intellectualise the whole Earth, will demand the Earth for himself.

The Gods were confronted with this dilemma that their dominion over the Earth might be usurped by Ahriman. There remained only one possibility, namely, that the Gods themselves should acquire knowledge of something inaccessible to them in their own worlds—worlds untouched by Ahriman; that they, the Gods, should learn of death as it takes place on Earth through One sent by them, through the Christ. It was necessary for a God to die upon the Earth, moreover for that death to be the result of the erring ways of men and not the decree of Divine wisdom. Human error would take root if Ahriman alone held sway. It was necessary for a God to pass though death and to be victorious over death.

The Mystery of Golgotha signified for the Gods an enrichment of wisdom, an enrichment gained from the experience of death. If no Divine Being had passed through death, the Earth would have been wholly intellectualised without ever entering into the evolution originally ordained for it by the Gods.

In very ancient times men had no knowledge of death. But at some point it was necessary for them to face the realisation: death, and intellect together with death, brings us into a stream of evolution quite other than that from which we have proceeded.

To His initiated disciples Christ taught that He had come from a world wherein there was no knowledge of death; that He had suffered death upon the Earth and had gained the victory over death.

When this connection of the earthly world with the Divine world is understood, intellect can be led back to spirituality. Such, approximately, was the substance of the esoteric teaching given by the Risen Christ to His initiated disciples: it was a teaching concerning death—death as seen from the arena of the Divine world.

To have insight into the depths of this esoteric teaching, we must realise that the following is known to one who understands the whole sweep of the evolution of mankind.—The Gods have gained the victory over Ahriman inasmuch as they have made his forces useful to the Earth but have also blunted his power in that they themselves acquired knowledge of death through the Christ. The Gods indeed allowed Ahriman to become part of earthly evolution but in that they have made use of him, they have prevented him from maintaining his dominion to the end.

Those who have knowledge of Ahriman as he has been since the Mystery of Golgotha and as he was before that Event, realise that he waits for the moment when he can invade, not only the unconscious, subconscious regions of man's life—which as you know from the book Occult Science, have been open to Ahriman's influence since the time of Atlantis—but also the spheres of man's consciousness. Using words of human language to describe the will of a God, it may be said: Ahriman has waited eagerly for the opportunity to carry his influence into the conscious life of man. It was an astonishment to him that he had not previously known of the resolution of the Gods to send the Christ down to the Earth—the Divine Being who passed through death. Ahriman was not thereby deprived of the possibility of intervention, but the edge of his power was broken.

Since then, Ahriman seizes every opportunity of confining man to the operations of the intellect alone. Nor has he yet relinquished the hope that he will succeed.

What would this mean? If Ahriman were to succeed in imbuing man with the conviction—to the exclusion of all others—that he can only exist in a physical body, that as a being of soul-and-spirit he is inseparable from his body, then the human soul would be so possessed by the idea of death that Ahriman could easily fulfil his aims. This is Ahriman's constant hope. And it may be said that from the forties to the end of the nineteenth century, his heart rejoiced—although to speak of a ‘heart’ in the case of Ahriman is merely a figure of speech—for in the rampant materialism of that period he might well hope for the establishment of his rulership on Earth. (Please remember that I am using expressions of ordinary language here, although for such themes others should really be found).—A measure of success in this direction was indeed indicated by the fact that during the nineteenth century, Theology itself became materialistic. I have already said that Theology has become ‘unchristian,’ mentioning that Overbeck, a theologian living in Basle, has written a book in which he has tried to prove that modern Theology can no longer truly be called Christian. In this domain, too, there was reason for Ahriman's hopes to rise.

Opposition to Ahriman really exists to-day only in such teachings as are contained in Anthroposophy. When, through Anthroposophy, man once again realises that the soul and the Spirit are independent of the bodily nature, then Ahriman must begin to abandon hope. Once again, the battle waged by Christ against Ahriman is possible. An indication is contained in the Gospel story of the Temptation, but these things can only fully be understood when it is realised that the more important rôle in ancient times was played by Lucifer and that Ahriman has only acquired the influence upon human consciousness since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. He had of course an influence upon humanity before then but not, properly speaking, upon human consciousness.

Looking deeply into the human heart, we can only say: The most important point in the evolution of earthly humanity is that at which man learns to know that there is a power in the Christ Impulse through which, if he makes it his own, he can overcome the forces of death within him.

And so the Hierarchies belonging to Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth drew Ahriman into Earth-evolution but restricted his claims for domination in that his forces were used to serve the purposes of evolution. In a sense, Ahriman was forced into the stream of Earth-evolution. Without him the Gods would not have been able to introduce intellectuality into humanity, but if the edge of his dominion had not been broken by the Deed of Christ, Ahriman would have intellectualised the whole Earth inwardly and materialised it outwardly. The Mystery of Golgotha is to be regarded not merely as an inner, mystical experience, but as an external event which must not, however, be presented in the same light as other events recorded in history. The Ahrimanic impulse entered into earthly evolution and at the same time—in a certain sense—was overcome.

And so, as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha, we have to think of a war between Gods, and this also formed part of the esoteric teachings communicated by Christ to His initiated pupils after the Resurrection. In describing this early, esoteric Christianity it must be recalled that in ancient times human beings were aware of their connection with the Divine worlds, with the worlds of the Gods. They knew of these worlds through revelations. But concerning death they could receive no communication, because in the worlds of the Gods there was no death. Moreover for human beings themselves there was no death in the real sense, for they knew only of the onward-flowing life of soul-and-spirit as revealed to them in the sacred institutions of the Mysteries. Gradually, however, the significance of death began to dawn upon human consciousness. It was possible for men to acquire the strength to wait for Christ Who was the victor over death.—Such is the inner aspect of the process of evolution.

The substance of the esoteric teachings given by Christ to His initiated disciples was that in what came to pass on Golgotha, super-earthly happenings were reflected, namely, the relationships between the worlds of the Gods belonging to Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth as they had been hitherto, and Ahriman. The purport of this esoteric Christianity was that the Cross on Golgotha must not be regarded as an expression of earthly conditions but is of significance for the whole Cosmos.

A picture may help us to feel our way into the substance of this esoteric Christianity.—Suppose that two of Christ's disciples, absorbing more and more of the esoteric teaching and finding all doubt vanishing, were talking together. The one might have spoken to the other as follows.—Christ our Teacher has come down from those worlds of which the ancient wisdom tells. Men knew the Gods but those Gods could not speak of death. If we had remained at that stage, we could never have known anything of the nature of death. The Gods had perforce to send a Divine Being down to the Earth, in order that through one of themselves they might learn the nature of death. The deed which the Gods were obliged to perform in order to lead earthly evolution it its fulfilment—of this we are being taught by Christ after His resurrection. If we cleave to Him we learn of many things hitherto unknown to man. We are being taught of deeds performed by the Gods behind the scenes of world-existence in order truly to further evolution on the Earth. We are taught that the Gods have introduced the forces of Ahriman but by turning these forces to the service of man have averted his destruction. ...

The esoteric teaching given by the Risen Christ to His initiated pupils was deeply and profoundly moving. Such pupils might also have said: Interwoven as we now are with death, we should know nothing whatever of the Gods if Christ had not died, and now, since His Resurrection, is telling us how the Gods have come to experience death. We should have passed over into an age when all knowledge of the Gods would have vanished. The Gods have looked for a way by which means they could speak to us again. And this way was through the Mystery of Golgotha ...

The great realisation which came to the disciples from this esoteric Christianity was that men have again drawn near to the Divine worlds after having departed from them. In the early days of Christendom the disciples and pupils were permeated through and through with this teaching. And many a man of whom history gives only sparse and superficial particulars was the bearer of knowledge that could only be his because he had either received teaching himself from the Risen Christ or had been in contact with others who had received it.—So it was in the earliest days of the Christian era.

As time went on, all this became externalised—externalised in the sense that the earliest messengers of Christianity attached great importance to being able to say that their own teacher had himself been a pupil of a pupil of one of the Apostles. And so it went on. A teacher had meant one who had come into personal contact with an Apostle—with one, therefore, who had known the Lord Himself after the Resurrection.

In those earlier centuries, weight was still attached to this living continuity, but in the form in which the tradition came down to a later humanity, it was already externalised, presented as bald, historical data. In essence, however, the tradition leads back to what I have just described. The inculcation of intellectualism—a process which really began about the fourth or fifth century after the Mystery of Golgotha and received its great impulse in the fifteenth century, at the dawn of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch—this evolution of intellect entailed the loss of the old wisdom whereby these things could be understood, and the new form of wisdom was still undeveloped. For centuries the essence and substance of esoteric Christianity was, as it were, forgotten by mankind.

As I have said, fragments exist in certain secret societies whose members, at any rate in modern times, do not understand to what they refer. In reality, such fragments refer to teachings imparted by the Risen Christ to certain of His initiated pupils.

Assume for a moment that there had been no regeneration of the old Hebrew doctrine through Christianity. In that case the conviction held so firmly by Paul before his vision at Damascus would have become universal. Paul was acquainted with the ancient Hebraic doctrine. In its original form it had been Divine revelation, received spiritually by men in very ancient times, and it was then preserved as Holy Writ. Among the Hebrews there were learnéd scribes who knew from this Holy Writ what was still preserved of the old Divine wisdom. From these scribes came the judgment by which Christ Jesus was condemned to death. And so the mind of a man like Paul, while he was still Saul, turned to the ancient Divine wisdom preserved by the learnéd scribes of his day who well knew all that it signified to men. Paul said to himself: The scribes are men of eminence, of great learning; judgment derived on their authority from the Divine wisdom could only be lawful judgment. An innocent man condemned to be crucified ... it is impossible, utterly impossible in all the circumstances leading to the condemnation of Christ Jesus! Such was the attitude of Paul.

It was only the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, influenced instinctively as he was by an altogether different mentality, who could speak the momentous word: ‘What is Truth?’ While Paul was Saul, it was impossible even to imagine that there might be no truth in the execution of a lawful judgment. The hard-won conviction which was to arise in Paul was that truth once proceeding from the Gods could become error among men, that truth had been turned by men into such flagrant error that One in Whom there was no guilt at all had been crucified.

Saul could have no other thought than that the primeval wisdom of the Gods was contained in the wisdom of the Hebrew scribes living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In such wisdom there could only be truth ... . While Paul was still Saul, he argued that if indeed it were Christ, the Messiah, Who suffered death by crucifixion, gross error must have entered into the flow of his primeval wisdom; for only error could have brought about the death of Christ on the Cross. Divine truth must therefore have become error among men.

Naturally, Saul could only be convinced by the fact itself. Christ Himself and He alone could convince him, when He appeared to him at Damascus. What did this signify for Saul? It signified that the judgment had not been derived from the wisdom of the Gods but that the forces of Ahriman had found entrance. And so there came to Paul the realisation that the evolution of humanity had fallen into the grip of a foe and that his foe is the source of error on the Earth.

In that his foe brings the intellect to man, he also brings the possibility of error which, in its most extreme form, becomes the error responsible for the crucifixion of One Who was without sin. The conviction that the guiltless One could be brought to the Cross had to arise before it was possible for men to understand the path by which Ahriman entered the stream of evolution and to realise that the Mystery of Golgotha is a super-sensible, super-earthly event in the process of the development of the ‘I,’ the Ego, within the human being.

Esotericism is by no means identical with simple forms of mysticism. To argue that mysticism and esotericism are one and the same denotes gross misunderstanding. Esotericism is always a recognition of facts in the spiritual world, facts which lie behind the veil of matter. And it is behind the veil of matter that the balance has been established between the Divine world and the realm of Ahriman—established by the death of Christ Jesus on the Cross.

Only into a world where the being of man is laid hold of by the Ahrimanic powers can error enter in such magnitude as to lead to the Crucifixion—such was the thought arising in the mind of Paul. And now, having been seized by this conviction, recognition of the truth of esoteric Christianity came to him for the first time.

In this sense, Paul was truly an Initiate. But under the influence of intellectualism this Initiation-knowledge gradually faded away and we need to-day to acquire again a knowledge of esoteric Christianity, to realise that there is more in Christianity than the exoteric truths of which the Gospels do indeed awaken perception. Esoteric Christianity is seldom spoken of in our times. But humanity must find its way back to that of which there is practically no documentary evidence and which must be reached through anthroposophical Spiritual Science, namely, the teachings given by Christ Himself after the Resurrection to His initiated disciples—teaching that He could only give after passing through an experience which he could not have undergone in the world of the Gods; for until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there was no death in the Divine worlds. Until then, no Divine Being had passed through death. Christ is the First-Born, He Who passed through death, having come from the realm of the Hierarchies of Saturn, Sun and Moon who are interwoven with Earth-evolution.

The absorption of death into life—that is the secret of Golgotha. Previously, men had known life—life without death. Now they learned to know death as a constituent of life, as an experience which gives strength to life. The sense of life was feebler in times when humanity had no real knowledge of death; there must be inner strength and robustness in life if men are to pass through death and yet live. In this respect, too, death and intellect are related. Before men were obliged to wrestle with intellect, a comparatively feeble sense of life was sufficient. The men of olden times received their knowledge of the Divine world in pictures, in revelations; inwardly they did not die. And because the flow of life continued they could smile at death. Even among the Greeks it was said: The agéd are blessed because with the dulling of their senses they are unaware of the approach of death. This was the last vestige of a view of the world of which death formed no part.

We in modern times have the faculty of intellect; but intellect makes us inwardly cold, inwardly dead; it paralyses us. In the operations of the intellect we are not alive in the real sense. Try to feel what this means: when man is thinking he does not truly live; he pours out his life into empty, intellectual forms and he needs a strong, robust sense of life if these dead forms are to be quickened to creative life in that region where moral impulses spring from the force of pure thinking, and where in the operations of pure thinking we understand the reality of freedom, of free spiritual activity. In the book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, I have tried to deal with this subject. The book really amounts to a moral philosophy, indicating how dead thoughts, when filled with life, may be led to their resurrection as moral impulses. To this extent, such a philosophy is essentially Christian.

I have tried in this lecture to place before you certain aspects of esoteric Christianity. In these days where there is so much controversy with regard to the exoteric, historical aspect of Christianity, it is more than ever necessary to point to the esoteric teachings. I hope that these things will not lightly be passed over, but studied with due realisation of their significance. In speaking of such matters one is always aware of the difficulty of clothing them in the abstract words of modern language. That is why I have tried rather to awaken a feeling for these things, by giving you pictures of inner processes in the life of human beings, leading on to the esoteric significance of the Mystery of Golgotha in the evolution of mankind as a whole.

• 1. The three earlier embodiments of the Earth. See An Outline of Occult Science.

This lecture is number 8 of 12 in the lecture series entitled The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection and is also included in the lecture series Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity.

Today I should like to speak to you about a certain aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. I have spoken about this Mystery on many occasions in our more intimate Anthroposophical gatherings, yet all that can be said about it is so extensive and belongs to a sphere of such importance and richness that, in order to approach it even approximately from the most varied points of view, we are compelled to elucidate from ever new aspects this greatest of all secrets in human earth evolution.

We shall be able to value this Mystery of Golgotha in the right way only when we allow our soul perception to contemplate two evolutionary streams of human earthly existence: namely, first, that part of the entire evolution of mankind which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, and second, that other part which has already succeeded it or which will succeed it during the remainder of the earth period.

When we speak of the beginning of earth existence, of the primeval epochs of the earth evolution of humanity during which there already existed thinking of a certain kind, although dreamlike and imaginative in character, it was nevertheless a certain sort of thinking; and when we speak of this beginning we must make clear to ourselves that the human beings of that time possessed faculties which enabled them to have intercourse—if I may so express it—with beings of a higher cosmic order. You know from my Occult Science and from other descriptions something of the nature of these beings of the higher hierarchies.

At present, with our ordinary consciousness, we do not know much about these beings of the higher hierarchies. Our intercourse with them has been cut off, so to say. This was not the case in the most ancient periods of human evolution. It would, of course, be wrong to imagine that the meeting with such a being of the higher hierarchies was of a similar nature to the meeting of two modern men incarnated in physical bodies. It certainly was quite a different sort of relationship. What these beings communicated to the human entity by means of the primeval earth language could only be comprehended by spiritual organs. And these beings communicated the mighty secrets of existence to the human being of that time. Secrets of existence were poured out into the human mind of that time and they called forth in man the consciousness that in the region above us, where today we see only clouds and stars, the earthly life had intercourse with divine worlds. These dwellers in divine regions descended in a spiritual manner to the human earth beings and revealed themselves in such a way that the earth man received, through the communications of these super-earthly beings, what may be called primeval wisdom. Within these manifestations of divine wisdom, originating in these beings, an infinite amount of knowledge was contained which human beings, during their earth life, would not have been able to fathom by themselves. In the beginning of earth existence—in the sense in which I have described it here—human beings were of themselves able to know but very little. Everything that was kindled in them as perception, as perceptive knowledge, they received from their divine teachers. Their divine teachings contained much, but they did not contain one thing of special importance which, as a matter of fact, was unnecessary for humanity of that time but which does contain most essential facts of knowledge for modern mankind. The divine teachers spoke to men of the most varied aspects of truth and knowledge, yet they never spoke to them of birth and death.

Naturally, I cannot today during this short hour speak of all the things said by these divine teachers to the human race in those ancient times. Much of this, however, you know already; but I should like to emphasize the fact very strongly that in all these teachings there was nothing about birth and death. The reason for this is due to the fact that in the course of human evolution there was no need for the human beings of those ancient times—also for a long time after for those who followed—to have any knowledge of the wisdom of birth and death. The entire consciousness of mankind has changed in the course of earth evolution. And although we should not compare the animal consciousness of today, even the higher animal consciousness, with the human consciousness in ancient, primitive times, nevertheless we may consider important facts of present-day animal life. This life lies below the level of the human. In the beginning, the life of primitive man lay, in a certain sense, even above the level of the present-day human being, in spite of the fact that, when compared with modern man, he had a kind of animal shape. If we view the animal of today with unbiased perception, we shall agree that this animal is not interested in birth and death, because it is in the middle evolutionary stage of existence. If we disregard birth—although even there the matter in question is quite obvious—we need only to think of the carelessness and lack of interest with which the animal approaches death. It simply submits to death, accepting this transformation of its existence without experiencing such a deep break in life as is the case with the human being.

As we have already noted, the primeval earth man, in spite of his animal-like shape, stood above the animal; he possessed an instinctive clairvoyance, and by means of this instinctive clairvoyance he was able to have intercourse with his divine teachers. But like the present-day animal he was not concerned about the approach of death. Perhaps we might say that he did not contemplate death at all.

We may ask: Why should he? As a result of his instinctive clairvoyance he still had a memory of a clear experience of what had remained within his inner being after he had descended from the spirit world through birth into the physical world. He knew the essential nature of what had entered his physical body; and because he knew this, because he was sure—if I may say so—that an immortal being lived within him, he was therefore not interested in the transition which takes place at death. He must have had feelings somewhat similar to those of the serpent when, after slipping off its old skin, it is compelled to replace it by a new one. The impression of birth and death was something more self-evident and not so desperately important in human life as it is today, for the human being still possessed a vital perception of the soul nature.

Today we have no perception of the soul nature. Today, in dreaming, there is scarcely any perceptible transition between sleeping and waking, and the dream with its pictures belongs at present absolutely to the realm of the sleeping state, it is still half-sleep. On the other hand the dreamlike pictures of primeval man coincided with the waking state; it was a waking state not yet fully developed. The human being knew that what he received in these dream pictures was real. Thus he felt and experienced his soul nature. And it was impossible for him to raise questions about birth and death with the same vigor as is necessary for our time.

In the primeval periods of human earth evolution this state was especially vital; but it decreased continually. Perhaps I may express it in the following way: Human beings became gradually more and more aware that death means a big break in human life, likewise in the soul life, and, therefore, they had to turn their attention also to the fact of birth. Earth life, in regard to this distinction, assumed a character which became ever increasingly significant for the earthly man; for at the same time the living experience of soul existence grew paler and paler, and he felt himself more and more lifted out of a psycho-spiritual existence during his sojourn on earth. This increased more and more, especially for those who lived near the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. With the Greeks, this feeling had already become so vital that they felt the life outside the physical body as a mere human shadow-life and they looked on death with tragic feelings. But what they had received as teachings from their ancient divine preceptors did not deal with the facts of birth and death. Thus, before the Mystery of Golgotha, men ran the risk that experiences might occur in their earth-life, that the apprehension, the perception of these experiences might enter their earth consciousness—Birth and Death—which they did not understand and which were something absolutely unknown to them.

Now let us imagine that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha these ancient, divine teachers of mankind had descended. Had they really done so, they would perhaps have been able to reveal themselves to a few pupils or teachers of mankind who had been prepared through the mysteries; they would have been able to communicate, to prepared priests for the mysteries, the content and extent of ancient divine wisdom which actually had been poured out into primeval wisdom. But within the whole of these teachings nothing would have been found about birth and death. The riddle of death would not have been imparted to mankind through this revealed divine wisdom, not even in the mysteries; and outside in earthly life human beings would have observed something—the facts of birth and death—which would have been of great and fundamental interest to them. But the Gods would not have told them anything about it. What was the reason?

You should consider this matter without bias and you should put aside many of the concepts which today have simply become traditional religion. You should understand that the beings of the higher hierarchies who were the teachers of primeval men had never experienced birth and death in their own worlds. For birth and death in the form we experience them on earth, are only experienced on earth, and on earth are experienced only by human beings. Death in animal and plant is something quite different from death in a human being. And in the divine worlds in which the first great teachers of human evolution lived there is no birth, no death; there is only transformation, metamorphosis from one state of existence to another. Therefore an inward understanding of death and birth—we must characterize it in this way—did not exist in these divine teachers. This host of divine teachers includes all the beings who were connected with the Jahve-being, with the Bodhisattva-beings, with all the ancient creators of human world conceptions.

Let us realize for instance how in the Old Testament—there we can actually grasp it—the secret of death confronts us more and more with a tragic mood. And the teachings that are handed down in the Old Testament give the human being no satisfactory and no inward information about death. If at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha nothing had happened that was different from what did happen before the Mystery of Golgotha in the sphere of the earth and the super-worlds connected with it, if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, then human beings would have found themselves in a terrible plight in their earth evolution; they would have experienced on earth the transitions of birth and death which then no longer were mere metamorphoses, which then indicated an abrupt transition in the whole of human life, and they would not have been able to learn anything about the significance of death and birth in human earth-life. In order to permit the teachings of birth and death to enter gradually into the understanding of mankind, the being whom we call the Christ had to descend by degrees into earth-life. The Christ belongs to the worlds from which the ancient great teachers came; but through the decision of these divine worlds He chose a different destiny from the other beings of the divine hierarchies who are related to the earth. He submitted Himself, so to say, to the divine decision of higher worlds that He incarnate in an earthly body and pass with His own divine soul through earthly birth and earthly death.

You see, therefore, that what has happened through the Mystery of Golgotha is not merely an inner-human or inner-earthly affair, but it is at the same time an affair of the Gods. Only through the events on Golgotha did the Gods learn to know inwardly of death and the secret of birth on earth, for they had not participated in it previously. Thus we have here the significant fact that a divine being resolved to go through human existence in this region, in order to have the same earth experiences, the same destiny as the human being.

Much of the Mystery of Golgotha has become known to human beings. There is tradition, there are the Gospels, there is the entire New Testament, and people of today prefer to approach the Mystery of Golgotha by reading the New Testament and by means of the explanation of the latter as it is possible at present. But from the explanation of the New Testament as it is made in our time we acquire but little real insight into the Mystery of Golgotha. It is necessary for people of the present to acquire this knowledge in an outward manner. However, it is mere outward knowledge. Today we do not know at all how differently human beings looked back upon the Mystery of Golgotha during the first centuries A.D., how differently those who were initiated into this Mystery looked back upon it in comparison with those who came later. Although all that I have described had happened, nevertheless at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha individual human beings still possessed remnants of an old instinctive clairvoyance. And up to the 4th century A.D. these remnants enabled them to look back to the Mystery of Golgotha quite differently from later periods. And it is not without meaning that the teachers who then appeared—we can verify this, although quite insufficiently in the historical traditions of the oldest, so-called church fathers and Christian teachers—that the teachers who then appeared put the greatest emphasis not on written traditions but on the fact that they have received knowledge of the life of Christ Jesus from teachers who have seen Him face to face, or from teachers who had been pupils of the pupils of the Apostles themselves in the oldest times, or the pupils of the pupils of the Apostles' pupils, etc. This continued on up to the 4th century A.D., and the teachers of that century referred to this living connection. As already stated, the historical documents are for the most part destroyed, and only attentive study can discover, by external means, how much emphasis was laid on the following: “I have had a teacher, he has had a teacher,” etc., and at the end of the row there stands one of the Apostles who had seen the Lord Himself face to face.

A great deal of this has been lost. But even more has been lost of actual esoteric wisdom which still existed in the first four centuries A.D., thanks to the remnants of old clairvoyant perception. All knowledge of that time about the resurrected Christ has been lost for external tradition. This knowledge is that of the Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, and then in a spirit body, like the ancient teachers of primeval humanity, taught some of His chosen pupils after His resurrection. The Gospels give mere indications, in a very scanty way, of the significance of the teachings which the resurrected Christ gave to His disciples when He met with them. And St. Paul's experience of Damascus is understood by Paul himself as a teaching which the resurrected Christ gave him, through which Saul became Paul. In those past times people were conscious of the fact that the resurrected Christ Jesus had to impart mysteries of a very special kind to men. The human beings themselves were the cause of not being able to receive these communications at later periods. They had to develop those soul forces which led to the use of human freedom and human intellect. This has appeared with especial force since the 15th century, but it was already in preparation from the 4th century A.D. on.

The question must now arise: What was the content of the teachings which the resurrected Christ was able to give His chosen disciples? For He appeared to them in the same manner in which the divine teachers had appeared to primitive mankind. Perhaps I may express it in the following manner: He was now able to tell them in divine language that He had experienced what His heavenly companions had not experienced. He was able to tell them, from His divine point of view, something about the secret of birth and death. He was able to impart to them the knowledge that in the future the earthly human being would possess a day-waking consciousness by means of which he would not be able to perceive the immortal soul in human life and which would be extinguished in sleep, preventing, during sleep, this immortal soul from appearing to the soul's gaze; but He was able to call attention to the fact that it is possible to include the Mystery of Golgotha in human perception. I should like to express in the following words what He explained to them. I can express it merely in weak, stammering words, for our languages do not offer greater possibilities of expression, but I shall try to put it in the following weak, stammering words: The human body has gradually become so dense, the death forces in it have become so strong that, although the human being is now able to develop his intellect and his freedom, he can do this only in a life which distinctly passes through death, a life in which death signifies an incisive break, and in which, during the waking consciousness, the perception of the immortal soul is extinguished. But ye can receive into your soul a certain wisdom, ye can receive the wisdom that through the Mystery of Golgotha—the Christ spoke thus to His initiated pupils—something has occurred in My own being with which ye can imbue your own selves, provided ye are willing to gain the knowledge that the Christ has descended to the earth from extra-earthly spheres; provided ye are willing to acquire the concept that on earth something exists which cannot be beheld by earthly means, which can only be perceived by means higher than the earthly; provided ye can behold the Mystery of Golgotha as a divine event placed in the midst of earth-life; provided ye are able to perceive that a God has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Through everything else that occurs on earth ye can acquire earthly wisdom; but this would be of no use in gaining an understanding of death in a human way. It would only be of use to you if, like ancient humanity, ye were not intensely interested in death. But since ye are compelled to be interested in it, your insight must receive an impulse much stronger than all other earthly perceptive impulses. It is so strong that ye will be able to say to yourself: With the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha something has happened that has broken all earthly natural laws. If ye are able to absorb into your faith only earthly natural law, ye will never grasp death in its significance for human life, even though ye may be able to behold it. But if ye can bring about in yourselves the understanding that the earth has acquired meaning only through the fact that in the middle of earth evolution, through the Mystery of Golgotha, something Divine has occurred which cannot be grasped by mere earthly comprehension, then will ye prepare in yourselves a special force of wisdom, and this force of wisdom is the same as the force of faith; ye will prepare a special force of pneumasophia, a force of faith and wisdom. For it is a strong force of the soul which says: “I believe, I know through faith what I shall never be able to believe and know through earthly means!” It is a far stronger force than the one which only ascribes to itself the ability to know what can be fathomed by earthly means. Even were the human being to gain all the wisdom of the earth, he would still be weak if he only knew how to sustain his wisdom by earthly means. If he is willing to acknowledge the fact that the super-earthly lives in the earthly, he must develop a much greater inner activity.

The impulse to develop such an inner activity lies in our consideration of the Mystery of Golgotha. The resurrected Christ proclaimed again and again to His original disciples the teaching that a God had experienced human destiny—for the Gods of previous epochs had not had this experience in their own spheres—and that this God had united Himself with the destiny of the earth through human destinies. And this had a tremendous effect in the world. Just strive for a moment to realize how powerful the effect of this could be; try to realize it in considering present-day conditions. Less is demanded of a human being who in his thinking is able to grasp all that he has gathered from earthly conditions, from traditional religious concepts which, in general, are accepted, than of a human being who we expect will raise his understanding to the point where it can grasp the fact that certain categories of divine beings did not possess a knowledge of death and birth before the Mystery of Golgotha but had to acquire it, at that significant moment of history, for the salvation of mankind. It requires a certain strength in order to “mingle” with divine wisdom, if we may be permitted to use this expression. Certainly no special strength is needed in order to read from any catechism that God is “all-knowing,” “all-mighty,” “all-divine,” etc. You need merely to place the little word “all” before everything, and the definition of the Divine is ready-made, but it is the most nebulous definition possible. Today human beings do not dare—if I may say so—to “mingle with divine wisdom.” But this “mingling” must take place. And a part of divine wisdom is what the Gods themselves have acquired through the fact that One of their number passed through human birth and human death. And it was of enormous importance that this secret was entrusted to the first disciples. And the further great and important fact, taught these disciples, was that it is true that the force once lived in the human being which gives him an insight into the eternal in his own soul.

This actual perception of the eternal in the human soul can never be acquired through brain knowledge, that is, through knowledge acquired through the intellect which uses the brain as an instrument. It can never be acquired in reality in the way it was possessed by ancient humanity, unless nature lends her aid through a knowledge which is gained through a special training of the human rhythmical system.

When the last instinctive seers practiced Yoga they achieved much, as long as it was assisted by an ancient instinctive clairvoyance. The present Oriental, the modern Indian, to whom many Westerners turn their attention in such a fantastic manner, does not, when performing his exercises, attain what can be called a real perception of the immortal nature of the human soul. He lives for the most part in illusions by having a temporary experience, although it is something elementary for earth-life, and, in addition, by interpreting this experience by what he finds in his holy books. Real knowledge, fundamental knowledge of the divine human soul can be gained only in a twofold way: Either it can be attained in the way of ancient humanity, or it can be attained in an infinitely more spiritual way through intuitive knowledge, that is, through a knowledge based on imaginative and inspirative wisdom which then rises to intuitive wisdom. Why is this so?

During earth-life the thinking part of the soul has streamed into the human nervous system. Thinking no longer exists for itself, it has molded this plastic structure. And it exists only partially in the rhythmic system. This offers at best some important points from which we might draw further conclusions. Only in the metabolic system, this most materialistic part of earth-life, do we find hidden the actual, immortal part of the human soul. The metabolic system is regarded as the most material on earth, and outwardly this is true; but because it is the most material, the spiritual remains separate from it. The other material parts of the body—the brain and the rhythmic system—absorb the spiritual; it is not present. It is present in the crude-material substances of the body. But the human being must be able to see, to perceive by means of this crude-material substance. This was the case with primeval humanity, and in our present age it may be found in abnormal cases, although this is not desirable. Very few people know, for instance, that the secret of the style of the Zarathustra of Nietzsche rests upon the fact that he took certain poisonous substances into his system which called forth in him the particular rhythm, the particular style of Zarathustra. In Nietzsche a quite definite substance lived as thought. This, of course, is something abnormal, a diseased condition, though it is in a certain sense something magnificent. We cannot permit ourselves to live in illusions about these things if we wish to understand them, any more than we can wish to live in illusions about the opposite pole, about intuition, etc. We must realize what it means that Nietzsche partook of certain poisons, but we must not imitate him. Thus by causing the human organism to take on an etheric mode of existence these poisons irradiate the thought system, thus calling forth what we see in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. By means of intuition we perceive the psycho-spiritual nature as such, quite separate from matter.

In the sphere of intuition nothing material is active. This is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in Occult Science. These two—the spiritual and material perceptions—are the two opposite poles.

In those mysteries into which the resurrected Christ sent His message there still existed the knowledge that in ancient times the human being possessed the highest knowledge of matter, “metabolic knowledge.” The way was sought to reawaken this ancient knowledge of matter—although not in the way of primeval mankind, nor in the way of the “hashish-eaters,” who wished, through the effects of certain material substances, to gain a knowledge which cannot be obtained without them. The way to reawaken this ancient knowledge of matter was striven for, but in a different manner, namely through clothing the Mystery of Golgotha in certain mantric forms, chiefly in the structural forms of the mystery of Revelation, Offering, Transubstantiation, Communion, by presenting the Holy Supper through the giving of bread and wine to the worshipper. Poison was not given, but the Holy Supper was offered him, wrapped in the mantric formulas of the Holy Mass, in the fourfold form of the Mass—Gospel, Offering, Transubstantiation, Communion. For after the Communion, after the fourth part of the Holy Mass, the actual Communion of the Faithful occurred, and an endeavor was made to give them at least an intimation of the fact that a certain wisdom must be regained which leads to the goal of ancient “metabolic knowledge.” The human beings of today can hardly imagine this “metabolic knowledge,” because they have no idea how much more, for instance, a bird knows than a man—although not in an intellectual, abstract sense; or how much more even a donkey knows than a man, a donkey, which is an animal living entirely in the metabolic system. It is, however, only a dull knowledge, dreamlike knowledge. Today there exists a degeneration of what primeval man once possessed in his metabolic system. It was out of the first Christian teachings, however, that the Sacrament of the Altar was conceived in order to lead mankind to regain a knowledge of the immortal of the human soul.

At the time when the Christ, who had passed through death, taught His initiated disciples, men were unable to attain such knowledge by themselves. He imparted it to them. And during the first four Christian centuries this knowledge continued on alive, in a certain way. Then it grew sclerotic within the Roman Catholic Church, for although the latter retained the Holy Mass, it had no longer a proper interpretation of it. The Holy Mass—thought of as a continuation of the Last Supper as it is described in the Bible—has naturally no meaning, unless a meaning is first inserted into it. The establishment of the Holy Mass with its wonderful cult, its imitation of the four mystery-degrees, is to be traced back to the fact that the resurrected Christ was the instructor of those who were able to receive these teachings in a higher esoteric sense. During the subsequent centuries only a childlike sort of teaching about the Mystery of Golgotha could remain. A faculty was developed which for the time being concealed the knowledge of this Mystery. Human beings had first to become fully acquainted with all that relates to death. This marked the first medieval civilization.

Traditions were preserved. In many occult societies of the present, people gather who, in their writings, possess formulas which remind those who understand and recognize them of the teachings of the resurrected Christ to His initiated disciples. But those who today meet in all sorts of Masonic lodges and occult societies do not understand what lives in their formulas; they actually have no idea about all that these formulas contain. But much could be gained from these formulas, because in their dead letters much wisdom still lives. Yet it is not done! But after mankind in its evolution has gone through a certain period of darkness in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha, it has come today to the point of time where human longing for a deeper knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha needs satisfaction. And this can occur only through Anthroposophy. This can occur only through the appearance of new knowledge, acquired in a purely spiritual way. When it does occur we shall then again acquire a fully human understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we shall again learn to understand that the most significant teachings have been given to humanity, not through the Christ who lived in the physical body until the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, but through the resurrected Christ after the occurrence of this Mystery. We shall gain a new understanding of the words of an initiate like St. Paul: “And if Christ hath not been raised your faith is vain.” (I Cor. XV, 17). Since the experience of Damascus he knew that everything depended upon an understanding of the resurrected Christ, upon the union of the force of the resurrected Christ with the human soul, which enabled him to say: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

In contrast to this, it is altogether too characteristic that in the 19th Century a theology developed which does not wish to know anything at all about the resurrected Christ. It is a significant symptom of our time that a teacher of theology in Basle, Switzerland, a friend of Nietzsche, Overbeck, as a theologian, wrote a book about the Christian character of present-day theology. In this he tried to prove that the theology of today is no longer Christian. Much that is characteristically Christian may still exist—this is also the opinion of such a personality as Overbeck, who comprehends Christianity; but theology, as taught by “Christian” theologians, is at any rate not Christian. This, in brief, is the opinion of the Christian theologian Overbeck. And his opinion is very intelligently proven in his book.

Mankind has reached a point in regard to the comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha where those who are officially appointed by the church to say something about it know the least. From this springs the longing, the human longing, to be able to learn something about what everyone can experience in his inmost being, namely, the need of Christ.

It was evident from our recent lectures [Anthroposophical-scientific Course, 6 lectures. The Hague, Holland, April 7th–12th, 1922.] that Anthroposophy has much to render in the way of service to the humanity of our time. A significant service which it can render will be that of religion. But we do not intend to inaugurate a new religion!

The event which has given the earth its meaning is of such a character that it will never be surpassed. This event consists in the passing of a God through the human destiny of birth and death. After the advent of Christianity no new religion can be founded—this is evident to anyone who knows the foundation of Christianity. We would misunderstand Christianity were we to believe that a new religion could be founded. But since humanity itself advances more and more in super-sensible knowledge, there will be an ever deeper comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha, and with it of the Christ Being. To this comprehension Anthroposophy wishes to give, at the present time, what it alone is capable of contributing; for nowhere else will there be the possibility of speaking about the estate of the divine teachers of humanity in primeval times who spoke of everything except birth and death, because they themselves had not passed through birth and death. And nowhere else will it be possible to speak of the Teacher Who had come to His initiated disciples in a form similar to the one in which the divine primeval teachers of mankind had once appeared, but Who was able to give the significant teachings of a God's experience in the human destiny of birth and death.

Out of this communication of a God to mankind we shall draw the force to behold death, in which we must be interested, in such a way that we can say: Death does exist, but it cannot harm the soul. The Mystery of Golgotha enabled us to declare this fact. St. Paul knew that, had it not taken place, had the Christ not risen, then the soul would have been enmeshed in the destiny of the body; that is, been enmeshed in the dissolution of the body into the elements of the earth. Had Christ not risen, had He not united Himself with the earth forces, the human soul would unite itself with the human body between birth and death in such a way that it would also link itself with all the molecules of the body which unite themselves with the earth after the body's destruction by fire or through putrefaction. Then in future ages, at the end of the earth evolution, it would happen that human souls would take the same road as the substance of the earth. But the Christ, by passing through the Mystery of Golgotha, is able to tear the human soul away from this destiny. The earth will continue on its path in the cosmos. But just as the human soul is able to emerge from the individual human body, so the sum total of human souls will be freed from the earth and will advance onward to a new cosmic existence.

The Christ is thus connected with the earth in a very intimate way. But the manner in which we have approached this secret alone enables us to understand it.

In the minds of many the following question might arise: How will it be, at that time, with those who do not believe in Christ? In regard to this I should like to say as a consolation that the Christ has died for us all, even for those who today are unable to unite themselves with Him. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective fact quite apart from human knowledge; but this human knowledge strengthens the inner forces of the human soul. And all the means at our command concerning human knowledge, human feeling, human will, will have to be employed in the further course of earth evolution in order to establish, through direct knowledge, the presence of Christ in the individual human soul.

This, my dear friends, is what I wished to say to you today.

The lecture presented here is the 12th of 12 lectures in the series entitled: The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection. This lecture is also known as: Anthroposophy, a Striving for Spiritual Understanding of Nature Permeated by Christ.

Mankind unfolded its intellectual life in the course of many centuries. This intellectual life gradually led it away from spirituality. The intellect itself is spirit, but its content is no longer a spiritual content. Indeed, the intellect is spiritual, but it seeks as its content external Nature, the external life of Nature. Hence the intellect is spirit, but it fills itself with something which cannot appear to it as spiritual. The great tragedy, the modern tragedy of the world, is that man may look into himself and that he must say to himself: When I am intellectually active, I am spiritually active, but at the same time my intellect, which is pure spirit, cannot absorb in a direct way the spiritual. I fill the spirit in me only with things pertaining to Nature.

This is what devastates and rends the human soul to-day. Even though we do not wish to admit this torn and devastated condition, it nevertheless exists in the spiritual regions of the human soul and constitutes the fundamental evil and the fundamental tragedy of our age.

If we wish to express in habitual terms what I have explained to you just now, we must draw attention to all the spiritual powers that are still active in the whole life of Nature; they enter into us because we fill our own spirit with the life of Nature, and we may designate these powers as the Ahrimanic powers.

Our intellect is thus exposed to the great danger of falling a prey to the Ahrimanic powers. During the past centuries, when the intellect was still unfolding and still possessed the inheritance of an old spiritual life, these Ahrimanic powers did not have that great influence on man which they have now. The life of Nature is apparently spread out round about us; but this is only apparent: for Ahriman lives in Nature. And by absorbing Nature, by believing that it is only controlled by neutral laws of Nature, we really absorb spiritual powers, even though we are not aware of this; we absorb Ahrimanic spiritual powers, who took over a special task in cosmic life, in the whole evolution of the world.

When we speak of the task of these spiritual powers, some people are easily inclined to say: But why does the divine guidance of the world admit these powers?—To this we must reply: All that exists in the earthly sphere may be grasped with the ordinary understanding; but when it is a question of grasping in a spiritual-scientific way that which transcends the earth, we must do this through spiritual vision (Anschauung).

Consequently we must say: These powers exist,—but the way in which they are connected with the divine-spiritual powers pertaining to man, can only be grasped in the course of long epochs; indeed, the powers belonging to the super-human sphere are perhaps quite inaccessible to the human understanding. We can therefore only say: These powers exist, they show themselves to those who have spiritual knowledge.

The tasks of the Ahrimanic beings is the following: To prevent the earth from continuing to develop as it should develop in accordance with the intentions of the divine-spiritual powers with whom man is connected from the very outset, inasmuch as he is a human soul. (You will find all these things mentioned in my “Occult Science”). In my “Occult Science” I have spoken of the future development of the earth, of the Jupiter and Venus phases of evolution: The aim of the Ahrimanic powers is to prevent this course of development.

Their aim is to harden and freeze up the earth, to shape it in such a way that, together with the earth, man remains an earthbound creature. He becomes hardened, as it were, within earthly substance and continues to live in the future ages of the world as a kind of statue of his past. These powers thus pursue definite aims, which undoubtedly appear as part of their own individual striving.

The earth could not reach its goal if the Ahrimanic powers were to gain the victory, if man were alienated from his beginnings, from the powers who supported him at the beginning of his evolution. Outwardly, the human being would develop in a way entirely in keeping with the earthly sphere, but by suppressing his innate disposition, which must lead him beyond the earth.

The Ahrimanic powers could not touch man while the intellect was still rooted in the spiritual through an old inheritance, as was the case during the past three or four centuries. But this has changed since the beginning of the 20^th century. The ancient Indian wisdom knew this, and fixed the end of the 19^th century as the end of the “Dark Age,” of Kali-Yuga. Thus it had an intimation of a new age. This new age was to indicate that from the beginning of the 20^th century, our deepest concern should no longer be that of clinging to an old spiritual inheritance, but of absorbing the new light, the pure light, in our earthly life.

The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution is the title given to this course of lectures. However, man's experience of his inner life does not at first induce him to ask about its connection with general world evolution—at least not consciously. Yet unconsciously he does continuously ask: How do I as man belong within the evolution of the universe as a whole? It is true to say that, particularly, man's religious life has always arisen as a direct result of this unconscious questioning in the depth of the human soul. The way man through religion feels himself more or less clearly related to something eternal prompts this questioning.

Man feels self-contained within his soul; he feels himself within his experiences of the external world; i.e., in what remains within him as memory from his impressions. This calls up in him thoughts and feelings concerning the world and its further destiny and so on. When he looks at his life of will and actions he has to admit that from the deepest regions of his inner being, regions of which he has at first no conscious knowledge, there well up impulses of thinking, feeling and willing.

Man's experience when he begins to observe his inner life, when he engages in what is usually termed introspection, is of his concepts derived from sense perception, of will impulses that come to expression in external action and of memories of past events. He experiences this as something isolated within himself. However, a more penetrating insight into his own being will soon make it clear that this kind of self-observation does not satisfy the deeper needs of man's soul. In the depths of his innermost being he is obliged to ask: What is that in me which belongs to something causative, perhaps to something eternal, and which lies at the heart of all the passing phenomena before me in Nature and in human life?

There is a tendency in man to seek, at first, the deeper reality of his being in feeling and sensation. This leads him to questions which arise out of his religious or scientific knowledge such as: Where are the roots of my innermost being? Do they stem from an objective reality, a cosmic reality? Is perhaps their origin something which though external is yet akin to my innermost self? Is their nature such that they will satisfy the deepest needs of my soul to have originated from them? A person's inner mood and attitude to life will depend upon whether he is able to find answers of one kind or another to these questions which are fraught with significance for his inner life.

These introductory remarks are meant to draw attention to the fact that man's soul life harbors a contradiction. This comes to expression, on the one hand, in his feeling of isolation within his thinking, feeling and willing, and, on the other, in that he feels dissatisfied with this situation. The feeling of dissatisfaction is enhanced through the fact that the body is seen to partake of the same destiny as other objects of nature in that it comes into being and again passes away. Furthermore, since to external observation the life of soul appears to dissolve when the life of the body is extinguished, it is not possible to ascertain to what extent, if at all, the soul partakes of something eternal.

The kind of self-observation possible in ordinary life is not, to begin with, in accord with the soul's deepest needs. When eventually this contradiction, connected as it is with man's whole destiny and with the experiences of his humanity, is felt deeply enough he discovers that the surging, weaving life of soul flows towards two poles. In one direction lies the conceptual life, in the other that of the will impulses. Between thinking and will lies the sphere of feeling. He becomes aware that concepts and ideas formed, let us say, in response to external perception, are accompanied by feelings which bestow on them warmth of soul. In the other direction he becomes aware that his impulses of will are also accompanied by feelings. We determine an action in response to certain feelings. And we accompany the result with feelings of either satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We see, as it were, at one pole the life of ideas, of concepts and mental pictures, at the other the life of will impulses and in between, linking itself to either, the life of feeling.

When we observe our mental life we have to admit, if we are honest, that in ordinary life it comes about simply in response to our experiences of the external world, that is to say, in answer to the totality of our sense impressions. Indeed in a certain sense we continue our sense experiences in our inner life; we give them a certain coloring so to speak. In fact, we often reproduce them in memory with a quite different coloring from what was originally experienced in direct perception. Nevertheless, provided we do not indulge in dreams but confront our fantasies without illusion, we shall always find our conceptual life prompted by external sense perception. When we withdraw to some extent from external perception and, without falling asleep or arousing will impulses, live in our conceptual life, then all kinds of memories of external observations—often altered perceptions—arise in consciousness. But when we close, so to speak, all our senses and live in concepts only, we are quite aware of the picture character of what we experience. We feel we are dealing with images of whatever the concepts convey. We experience their fleeting nature; they enter our consciousness and again vanish. We cannot directly ascertain if they contain any reality or if they are indeed pictures only. We may assume that they are based on reality, but a reality we cannot take hold of because concepts are experienced as pictures.

Our experience of will is radically different. Ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate the will. Our consciousness can take hold of a thought or an indefinite instinctive impulse to do something, say raise our arm. The arm movement follows immediately and we see it. Two mental pictures are involved in this process, first the picture of deciding to raise the arm, then the picture of the arm raised. Of that which takes place in the will between the two concepts we have at first no consciousness at all. We are as unconscious of what takes place in our will as we are of everything in the state of sleep. As regards the will we are asleep even when awake. Our will as such escapes our consciousness when we carry out an action, whereas in regard to our concepts, while we do not know how they are related to reality, we do grasp them in lucid clarity in our ordinary consciousness.

However, we do know something about the will. When will is real and not mere wish it becomes action. It expresses itself emphatically as reality. We have a concept—i.e., a picture: I will raise my arm. Ordinary consciousness knows nothing of what happens next, but the arm is raised. A concrete process is taking place in the external world. What lives in the will becomes external reality just as processes of nature are external reality.

Concepts and ideas have a picture quality. To begin with we do not know what the relationship is between the reality and that which mental pictures express. As regards will we know quite concretely that it is connected with reality. But unlike mental pictures we cannot survey it clearly.

In between the two, lie sensation and feeling which color the mental pictures, and color also the will impulses. Our feelings partake of the lucid clarity of mental pictures on the one hand and on the other of the darkness and unconsciousness of will impulses. We see, let us say, a rose; we form a mental picture of it and turn our gaze away. We retain the rose as a memory picture. Since we, as human beings, are not quite indifferent to things we feel delight in the rose; it gives us pleasure. We feel an inner satisfaction in the existence of the rose. However, to begin with we cannot say how these feelings of pleasure and satisfaction arise within us. Exactly how they come about remains obscure to ordinary consciousness. But that they are connected with the mental picture is completely clear. The feeling tinges, colors, as it were, the mental picture. When we have a clear mental picture of the rose we also have a clear mental picture of what pleases us. The clarity of our mental pictures communicates itself to our feeling.

By contrast, an impulse of will to some action wells up from the depth of our inner being. That this is so needs only to be tested. We often find ourselves impelled by instinct to an action. Our mental picture of a deed may tell us that it ought not to be done at all. We are dissatisfied with what we are doing. Yet when we look back at our inner life we find that a definite feeling was the cause of action, a feeling of which we may disapprove, but whose origin remains in the dark unconscious depth of our inner life. Thus, our feelings participate very differently in the bright clarity of our mental life from the way they participate in the dark dullness of the life of will.

Therefore, our soul life appears threefold: as thinking—i.e., forming concepts and mental pictures—as feeling and as will. The two opposite poles, thinking and will, are completely different in character. Our mental life refers us in the first instance to the sense world. However, we take in not merely simple perceptions such as, let us say, red, blue, C sharp, G major, warmth, cold, pleasant or unpleasant smells, sweet, sour and so on. These can be directly ascribed to the sense world and so can a continuous stream of such sensations. But we also take in more complex external events. Let us say we have before us a human being; countless sense impressions stream towards us—the expression on his face, his walk, his gestures and many others. We could name a host of individual sensations. However, they all combine to form a unity which we experience as the person we see. It can be said that through our sense perceptions we experience the world.

In the narrower sense it is only the actual sense perceptions themselves that are directly connected with us. Our soul life is in touch most of all with single perceptions like red, blue, C sharp, G major, warmth, cold, etc. Yet even our more complex experiences are in the last resort arrived at through sense perception. We mentioned the example of meeting another human being; we could also think of an occurrence, in which we are not directly involved, meeting us as an external objective event. In the case of the red of the rose we know we are directly involved since we expose our eye to it. We could take a more complex example. Let us say we saw a mother giving her little son a rose. Here the event takes place apart from us, we are not so closely connected with it. We are even less in direct contact when we remember some complex event, where perhaps sense perception had no direct contact with the external object. We remember perhaps what we know about the Rose of Schiras,¹ which we have not seen but learned about some other way. We may have read about it, in which case our sense perceptions were those of printers' ink in the form of letters on paper; or someone told us about it. All such sense impressions point to something completely separate from us. In this way we can discover the difference between sense perceptions that are more closely connected with our soul life and those we know of only indirectly.

Something similar applies to the pole of will. It is an expression of will when I move an arm. What takes place is connected solely with my organism. I am in close touch with what results from my will impulse. I am as closely connected with it as I am with direct sense perception. But now consider a situation where my will impulse results not only in a movement of an arm but in my chopping wood; then what happens through my will separates itself from me. It becomes an external event which is just as much a result of my will impulse as are the arm movements, but it detaches itself from me and becomes something objective in the external world. And just think of all the complicated events that can come about through will impulses! When you now examine the matter more closely you will be able to compare what on the one hand enters into us when direct sense perceptions lead us to external events existing apart from us, and what goes out from us in that the will impulses separate themselves from the results they produce solely out of our organism. These then become external processes separated from us. Thus, are we placed within the world through the two poles of our being.

Contemplation along these lines makes us realize that we are related to the world in two different ways. We have one kind of relationship to objects and processes which enter our consciousness through our senses. They are there apart from us and we become aware of them through sense perception. We are related differently to what comes about through our will impulses. Yet that, too, is something that then exists in the world. They are both external realities. If I imagine myself out of the picture and only look at what is there apart from me, then what is left in the case of sense perceptions is the external reality. In the case of will impulses, if I think myself away and look only at what came into existence through me, then again what is left is an external reality. In both cases I am related to something that exists outside and apart from me. In the outer world, the two merge with one another.

Let us say I chop wood. First, I see the block of wood before me. Perhaps I see not merely the wood but a complex external occurrence. I see someone bring the wood and place it before me to chop. I make ready to do so. All the time I am guided by sense perceptions. First, I have a piece of wood of a certain size. I then chop it and now it is different. The change has come about through me (see diagram). Sense perceptions merge into one another, so that what occurs through me and what occurs apart from me form a continuous stream of events.

One must be able to feel how the very riddle of the soul is contained in the simple fact that, on the one hand, we see around us objects and events that are given, complete in themselves, and, on the other, things whose existence is due solely to us. One can say that this simple fact characterizes our soul's relation to its surroundings. Nothing very special has been said by this characterization, but at least a certain aspect of the riddle has been presented.

Let us now consider the problem from another aspect. We are beings who possess sense organs, through which we gain a certain insight into our surroundings. We also possess limbs that enable us to move about. Basically, all that we accomplish in the world through our will comes about by means of our limbs. Thus, we have on the one hand the senses and on the other our limbs. On the basis of all the facts presented so far, we can say that the nature of our limbs and the nature of our sense organs are also polar opposites. In the case of our sense organs the external world approaches and stops at this boundary, so to speak. The external world as such does not actually enter into us, whereas an external world has its beginning through our limbs as it detaches itself from us and continues its existence apart from us. This suggests that there must be a connection between senses and limbs.

The essential nature of man's senses can perhaps best be recognized if we consider the eye. The eye is a comparatively independent organ, set into its bone cavity. Only at the back of the eye do blood veins and nerves continue into the rest of the organism. Apart from this connection the eye is relatively independent. A whole series of physical processes take place in the eye, at least processes that can be interpreted as being physical. Speaking symbolically, we could say that light approaches and penetrates the eye and becomes modified to some extent. At present I shall not describe the physical and chemical processes as I wish to speak about soul life, not about physiology. But I want to draw your attention to the fact that the eye has a sort of independent life.

This independent life can even be compared with what takes place in a purely physical instrument, in a kind of camera obscura, which is a copy of the eye and into which light falls in a similar way. Certain processes occur which are like those in the eye, though admittedly they are not living processes like those in the eye; they do not become sensation or perception. But we can reproduce certain processes which take place in the eye and bring them to manifestation in a physical instrument. So, we see that something akin to a physical process is unconsciously taking place in a comparatively independent organ. What does enter consciousness is the external illumined object, whereas what resembles a physical process takes its course unconsciously in man, independently of him. This is due to the relative independence of man's organ of sight from the rest of his organism. Something similar could be said about the other sense organs, though it is less obvious with them. The eye was chosen because it is the most characteristic.

Thus, we see that sense perception is a relatively independent process. And when we consider the processes taking place in the eye itself (see diagram) we can actually say that even what is transmitted by nerves and blood is like a continuation of processes taking place in the external world. So much are they alike that we can reproduce them physically

as I have indicated. It is as if the external world made inroads into the inner being of man. What takes place outside continues, so to speak, into our physical body; this is one aspect of sense perception. How we unite what thus pours in like a stream from outside with our inner life, we shall speak about in the course of these lectures.

There is, however, another side to sense perception. Let us continue with the example of the eye. I do not want now to speak about the blind, but to consider lack of sight from a general human viewpoint. We shall later consider all these things more especially from an anthroposophical, spiritual- scientific viewpoint. Let us imagine being robbed of the sense of sight. It is easy to recognize that there would then be a deficiency in our inner life. We should lack all that otherwise flows in through the sense of sight. Imagine what it must be like within the soul when it is so dark because light is unable to enter. Even in ordinary life we know that to be in darkness can cause fear, especially in persons of a certain temperament. People who become blind or are born blind are not really, at least not consciously, in this position, though they do experience something similar to someone who is temporarily in darkness. The fact that vague feelings of fear are connected with the experience of darkness shows that there is a relationship between our state of soul and what streams into us through our eyes. And it is easy to see that the state of soul would in turn affect the bodily constitution.

Someone who is condemned to a certain melancholy by having to live in darkness through being deprived of light, will transfer the effect of his melancholy to certain finer structures of the eye. We must realize that man would be different if he did not receive into his organism what he does receive through his soul's experience of light. This soul experience of brightness is diffused over our whole inner being. Light permeates us to such a degree that it affects certain vascular reactions and glandular secretions. These would function differently without the refreshing, quickening effect of light weaving through the organism. Darkness, too, affects secretion and circulation but in a different way. In short, we must realize that while we are indebted to the eye for being able to form mental pictures of a certain aspect of the objects and processes in our surrounding, we are also indebted to it for a certain inner condition even of the physical body. In a sense, we are what light makes of us.

We have seen that the eye is not only a sense organ through which we receive pictures of the external world; we also experience brightness or darkness through it. This causes all kinds of instinctive processes to refresh or oppress our soul life and even our body. How we are depends upon what we experience through the sense of sight.

Let us now leave the eye and turn our attention to the lungs. The lungs, too, are in connection with the external world. They take oxygen from the external air and modify it. Our life is maintained by the breathing of the lungs. Unless we are an Indian yogi, we do not in normal life notice the function of our lungs. But it affects us differently if the lung has a healthy perception of the air or whether through illness it does not perceive the air in the right way. How we are depends upon how we breathe through our lungs. In ordinary consciousness we are not aware that we perceive through the lungs. But organically we are the way we are through the way our lungs function.

While the function of the eye—and this can be said about each of the external senses—is perception, it also has another more subtle function. This other function must be brought to consciousness before we can know that through the experience of brightness or darkness something takes place in us which is not so obvious, or radical and pronounced, as the lungs' intake of oxygen. Man is aware of what he owes to the lungs' intake of oxygen because it is a robust and strongly vitalizing process, whereas what he receives through the eye, in addition to actual sight, is a more intimate, more subtle vitalizing process. So we can say: What is strongly pronounced in an organ like the lung is only indicated in a subtle way in the case of a sense organ like the eye.

In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and the second part of Occult Science—An Outline you will find descriptions of exercises that will develop faculties of knowledge which otherwise lie fallow. Such exercises completely transform man's inner being. In the case of the lung the result of this transformation is that it attains a function which is similar to that of the eye, with the result that to higher vision the lung's vitalizing function retreats. Higher insight is less concerned with the effect of the breath on our organism. The lung becomes transformed into an organ of perception, not the physical lung but a finer part, the etheric part of the lung. Through the exercises we transform the finer structure of the lung into something akin to what the eye is without our doing. Nature made our eye into an organ of sight as well as an organ that sustains us. To ordinary consciousness the lung is primarily an organ that sustains. When we attain knowledge of higher worlds we transform the lung into an organ of perception. Its finer, etheric part becomes a higher sense organ. When we experience the lung's etheric nature we must describe it as a higher sense organ, for its etheric body perceives; however, inasmuch as it contains the physical lung it is also an organ that sustains and vitalizes. So you see, when we attain knowledge of higher worlds the lung, from being an ordinary non-perceiving bodily organ dedicated to growth and life processes, becomes an organ of perception in a higher sense.

The same applies to the heart and other organs, the kidneys, the stomach and so on. All man's organs can, through higher development, become organs of perception. This means that they become sense organs in their higher, etheric nature or even in their more spiritual astral nature.

When we consider our environment in relation to our sense organs we have to say: On the one hand our senses mediate perceptions, on the other they mediate vitality. When we consider our inner organs: lung, heart and so on, we find that these organs primarily sustain and vitalize us. We can, however, develop them through methods described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment', then they become sense organs. Just as we see through the eyes a certain aspect of the external physical world, its light and color, so do we become aware of certain aspects of the external spiritual world through the etheric organ of the lungs, and another aspect through the etheric organ of the heart. We can transform our whole organism into a sense organism.

To ordinary consciousness the external world presses in on man only as far as the surface of his senses, where it becomes image. To higher consciousness it presses deeper, only what presses deeper is an external spiritual world. As he attains knowledge of higher worlds, and transforms his inner organs into sense organs, man gradually becomes inwardly as transparent as the eye. The external world permeates him.

It must be realized that as long as we remain in ordinary consciousness we can only know our senses from their external aspect. But ask yourself if it is possible to acquire insight into the ethnology of all the races on earth if one knows or has heard of only three? It is not possible, for one must be able to compare. Imagine the opportunity we shall have for making comparison—also in regard to the external senses—when we are in a position to examine the nature of the inner organs as sense organs.

This leads to a quite special kind of knowledge of man. We learn of the possibilities that lie within us, of what we are destined to become. It also poses significant questions: If our lungs can become a sense organ when we take our higher development in hand, then what is the situation, for example, in regard to the eye or some other sense organ? We saw the lung develop from being a vital organ to become a sense organ. Was the eye, perhaps in an earlier evolution of the world, not yet sense organ but only vital organ? Did it at that time sustain the organism in a way similar to that of the lung today? Has the eye in the course of evolution become an organ of perception through a different process from our conscious cultivation of higher cognition?

We have seen that the possibility to become higher senses lies in our vital organs. We have seen how a sense organ comes into being. We must at least ask the question, if, during evolution, the opening of our present senses came about in a similar way. Should we perhaps trace mankind's evolution back to a time when man had not as yet turned his present senses outwards, to a time when perhaps these senses were inner vital organs and man, as regards his present senses, was blind and deaf? Man's eyes and also his ears must of course have been quite different in form and served different purposes.

We see how knowledge of man, possible through external means, is supplemented when knowledge of higher worlds is attained. Most of you will have heard me describe man's being from many different points of view. Today, by way of introduction, I have indicated certain things from yet another aspect. You will be able to see from this how spiritual science may start investigation from the most varied viewpoints and, by combining the results, arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the being of man.

It is often imagined that anthroposophical research is a straight continuation of one or two definitions of higher worlds to be found in non-anthroposophical writings. This is not the case; what is gained from one aspect can be illumined and enlarged from other aspects. These will fit together into the totality of a spiritual-scientific truth that carries within it its own proof. This approach is often severely censured because people believe that reality can be investigated from one standpoint only.

In our materialistic age someone who is accustomed to physical proof may say that Anthroposophy is not built on a firm foundation, whereas science is based on direct observation. That assertion is the equivalent to someone saying that the earth cannot possibly float freely in space—all bodies must rest on something if they are not to fall. Therefore the earth must rest on a mighty cosmic block if it is not to fall down. But the proposition that everything must be supported by the ground holds good only for objects on earth. It no longer holds good for cosmic bodies. It is folly to transfer laws that apply on earth to cosmic bodies and their interrelationships. They mutually support each other and so do anthroposophical truths. They lead us out of our habitual world into other worlds where truths mutually support each other. And, more to the point, truth supports itself.

This is what I wished to say today as introduction to these lectures. I wanted to show that it is possible, in speaking of the soul, for a spiritual-scientific method of research to take as its starting point considerations that are open to sensible interpretation by ordinary consciousness.

I could only make a beginning today in describing how higher consciousness sees the lung, for example, on the way to becoming a sense organ. However, we shall continue this line of investigation so that in the coming days we may learn more about the nature of man's life of soul and its relation to world evolution.

• 1. Shiraz: Town in southern Iran known for its roses.

I spoke yesterday about the sense organs and drew attention to the way they appear when, to our ordinary knowledge, we add what is gained through knowledge of supersensible worlds. Taking the lungs as an example I showed that the moment we rise with spiritual sight into supersensible worlds, then other organs become just as much sense organs as our present ones. We come to the conclusion that our organs are in process of evolution and transformation. This is not apparent to ordinary consciousness because we are always observing a process arrested, a process which, because we cannot survey either its earlier or its later stages, reveals only a momentary stage of its evolution.

If our advance into the imaginative world—as I termed it in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment—reveals the lung in a state of transition, from being a vital organ to becoming a sense organ, we can no longer regard it in the way we do in ordinary life. We realize that what we ordinarily observe is a momentarily arrested stage in the lungs' evolution. If we compare this with the arrested stage of the evolution of the eyes, we come to the conclusion that the lung reveals itself to be at a younger stage than the eye.

I said yesterday that we could at least put forward as a question whether the eye, in the course of evolution, had once been a vital organ as the lung is now. Let us remain cautious and merely say that there is at least a possibility that the relationship between lung and eye is like that of a child to a grown-up. One shows itself to be a younger entity, the other an older one. In other words, the eye in its youth could at some stage of world evolution have been a vital organ which has now become a sense organ, while the lung, which is now a vital organ, could later become a sense organ. Yet we shall only come to know the truth by advancing further in supersensible knowledge. To do so let us today consider the other extreme of the soul's life, the pole of the will. Yesterday it was described purely externally.

Concerning the pole of the will we can ask: How does it appear when we have attained imaginative cognition? We find that the organs belonging to the will sphere become paler. They fade away before spiritual sight. Our limbs are organs that belong more immediately to the will sphere; they grow paler. In fact, the characteristic feature, when we rise to imaginative consciousness and observe the external organism, is that the limbs become lost. And so does the metabolic system with which the limbs are connected. This aspect of man is simply no longer there in the intensity it was to physical sight. When we compare all that, which to higher vision fades from view, with something in the physical world, we arrive at a quite astonishing result.

Let me draw some sketches of what comes about. Imagine that this is man as he appears to physical sight (drawing on the left). Now we observe him with imaginative cognition: the limbs grow paler (drawing in the center). Suppose this next sketch is of all that which becomes ever paler and fades away. What we get becomes more and more like an image of a human corpse (drawing on the right). In other words, we get an image of what man leaves behind at death, of that which is either buried or cremated. When a corpse is cremated it ceases to be visible to physical sight, just as that part of man ceases to be visible to supersensible consciousness.

But something else becomes visible: At the place where the arms fade away something becomes visible which a former instinctive clairvoyance saw more or less correctly. It was said that where physical man has arms spiritual beings have wings; and that after death so did spiritual man. However, to replace spiritual beings with a kind of symbol in the form of a winged creature, a superior bird, is a crude ghostlike image. When cognition of higher worlds is further developed, that is when one ascends, in the way I have described, from imaginative knowledge to inspired knowledge, then one recognizes what one is really seeing. And to depict this as wings is a distortion, but then it is not so easy to recognize the reality. However, the moment the ascent is made from imagination to inspiration then, by careful observation, one gradually realizes what takes the place of say the right arm and hand. Let me put it this way: You will agree that we make a lot of movements with our arms. According to materialistic critics a dreadful lot of movement is carried out in eurythmy. People who do not understand eurythmy cannot bear it. But when you observe, with inspired cognition, what is done by the movements in eurythmy, you no longer see the arms and hands, all you see are their movements. All the individual movements are all there, and because they all merge into one another they look like wings.

Well, people who are not eurythmists also move their arms. In fact, most of the movements done by human beings are done with the arms. All the movements, their curves and forms become visible (see drawing, orange). Everything physical—muscles, flesh, bones—ceases to be visible, whereas all movements become visible. And it is the same with the legs. I said yesterday that the movements man makes are not confined within the body. In order to point to something useful I spoke of chopping wood rather than of sport. When someone chops wood, he makes continuous movements. All these are also visible when one ascends from imagination to inspiration. However, man causes things to happen not only through his body, he does so also by means of thoughts, perhaps through other people. All the events that he causes to take place gradually become visible, particularly as one ascends from inspiration to intuition. In short, when we contemplate the pole of will, all that at death is placed in the grave ceases to be visible; whereas all man's deeds gradually become visible. After a person's death what is still in existence are all the deeds he has carried out. That has further life and continues to exist. What passes through the gate of death can be said to be a birth of will. So you see as regards the limbs we must choose a different approach in order to find the transition from the physical aspect of man to the soul. And the same applies to the metabolic system.

We have now considered from a certain aspect the nature of man's senses and also what so to speak constitutes his will nature—that is, the source of his actions. To enable us to proceed further let us return to the pole of the senses. Let us look back with imaginative and inspired consciousness and see what becomes of a sense organ, let us say the eye, and then consider it at the stage where the lung let us say has become an organ of perception.

When the lung has become an organ of perception we begin to see a completely different world. Even in public lectures I have often spoken about the fact that another world becomes perceptible to the higher man who gradually develops and frees himself from ordinary man, though the latter is still present and in control. We also begin to experience the world more rhythmically, more musically as soon as the lung becomes sense organ. In fact, we begin to experience all that which in my book Theosophy I described partly as Soul World, partly as Spirit Land. When the lung becomes sense organ we experience a different environment. I mentioned yesterday that the lungs become sense organ in their etheric part. But what happens to our ordinary sense organs?

Unlike the organs of the metabolic-limb system which disappear to higher vision, the sense organs do not disappear, they reveal themselves as they are at present but in their spiritual nature. They reveal themselves as objective entities; they become, as it were, spiritual beings. They are—if I may so express it—what peoples our spirit world. One gets the strong impression that the sense organs expand into worlds. We witness, as it were, a world being built up out of our sense organs. Our soul has the experience that the world which we now witness coming into being unites itself with something else. It unites with what in ordinary life we look upon as our memories; that is, our mental pictures of past events.

Here I must point to an important experience which occurs as one ascends from imaginative to inspired knowledge. The sense organs become, as it were, independent beings which take into themselves our memories. As we turn our attention to this fact we become clearly aware of a certain aspect of our soul's nature.

Take the example of the human eye. To ordinary consciousness this organ is as I described it yesterday. When we begin to develop imaginative cognition and then ascend to inspired cognition, the physical aspect of the eye disappears but not the eye itself. It becomes ever more spiritual and expands to cosmic proportions. It becomes a world, a world that unites itself with our memories; it unites with the thoughts that live in our memory (yellow in diagram). Along this path we gradually attain a specific insight into a certain area.

A trivial concept of popular psychology is the idea that man perceives with his physical organs and develops his mental pictures—i.e., his thoughts—from the physical percepts. And then the thoughts he has formed go—well, they go somewhere. The philosophy of Herbart,¹ in particular, attained eminence by letting thoughts disappear beneath some sort of threshold. Then when they were remembered they wandered up again and appeared in consciousness.

This idea always reminds me of a children's game I often watched as a small boy: One runs both hands up a child's arm, tickling him while chanting, “Up comes a little mouse who wants to hide in Joey's house.” This suggests to the child that a mouse is running up his arm to hide in a box somewhere inside his head. Psychology is just about as clever; it also lets thoughts emerge from sense perceptions and then walk into a sort of savings-box within the soul from where they arise again when remembered. It is a trivial concept but one that is much bandied about in psychology. The true facts become clear only when one comes to know the whole process through imaginative and inspired knowledge. What then becomes clear is the following: Things we see through our eyes are there, they are not created by the eyes. So, too, what we see through imagination and inspiration is also there, it is not created by the higher faculties.

In other words, while ordinary consciousness is functioning the higher reality is also present. It all goes on but becomes visible only to supersensible sight. It goes on through every moment of our waking life. This reveals that whenever we perceive in ordinary consciousness, another process takes place beyond that consciousness. Another process goes on which runs parallel to that of perception, only we do not become aware of it until we have attained higher consciousness. Let me put it this way: In ordinary life whatever we perceive in everyday consciousness is already there. But all that which only becomes visible to imagination and inspiration is also there. A process takes place of which we know nothing in ordinary consciousness. When we learn to know it through higher cognition we become aware that the memory pictures we have in ordinary consciousness are indeed only pictures. Their true reality becomes apparent to higher consciousness. There is no question of memory pictures wandering up again after having first gone down somewhere.

When I form a mental picture of a physical object and then withdraw from it, the mental picture remains. After a while the mental picture disappears and because it is mere picture it disappears completely. But our senses do something else: they carry out a process we do not see. They vitalize in our inner being a process that is living, which endows the thoughts contained in our memory with reality. This means that when we have a physical perception and form a mental picture (red) then another process (blue) takes place through which something real comes about—i.e., a reality, not just a picture. The picture vanishes, but when we remember then this, real memory takes the place of the former physical percept and what we now perceive is the reality that was brought to life in us, without our knowledge, at the time of the physical perception. And this reality is the soul.

If today you have physically before you a human being and you see him again after eight or ten years then nothing of what you see today will be present. You cut your nails, your skin flakes off, externally the physical body continually falls away; it becomes dust. After seven to ten years that which today is the physical substance most deeply embedded in you will have come so far to the surface that it flakes off or is cut off as long nails. You can be certain that what is today at the center of your physical body gradually comes to the surface and falls away. But then what remains? What remains of man's whole being is solely the reality developed inwardly through the process taking place parallel to that of forming mental pictures.

In ten years' time nothing of what you are today will exist except the memories of your experiences. Today nothing exists of what you were ten years ago except what your memories have made of you. You are woven out of your memories, all that is physical flakes off and disappears. Anyone with sound common sense, who thinks through and correlates what he can observe in ordinary consciousness, will acknowledge the truth of what I have brought before you with the help of imagination and inspiration.

If we would picture to ourselves how a human being develops, taking into account his soul nature, then from one aspect—and I beg you to keep in mind that we are considering everything from one pole, the pole of thought—we would depict it thus (see drawing). When we are born, a body is provided for us (white lines). This body is gradually filled with all that results from the process taking place parallel to sense perception (yellow lines). All that which is body (white lines) gradually flakes off. We eat, we take in a variety of substances from the air. All this reaches into the process taking place when memories are formed and builds up the bodily nature ever anew, whereas that which impregnates the soul from the metabolic system is what is buried after death. The soul itself weaves its own essential being. It develops its being from those processes which to begin with are experienced merely as mental pictures. One can say in truth: I live in thoughts, but what I experience as thought in ordinary consciousness is only image. It is, so to speak, an attendant phenomenon to the reality which I bring into existence.

Something of extraordinary significance emerges from this: it shows that what takes place within us, unknown to ordinary consciousness, is by far the most important for man's development. We look at the world, what we perceive through our various senses brings us experiences; we rejoice in what meets our eyes or ears. And all the time while we see, hear and feel there slips into our inner being all that which later can be called up in memory. In other words, all that constitutes my soul slips into me. That is an activity that goes on perpetually. One can never say that it is because it is forever surging and weaving.

Whoever earnestly endeavors to ascend to spiritual knowledge will have vivid experiences of all I have indicated. Whatever one has accumulated in life by way of written notes can, like any possession, be comfortably taken home. And because in present day life comfort is much preferred to inner experiences of disquiet, all knowledge tends to be given a form that allows it to be written down and comfortably taken home. It is said, however, that anthroposophical lectures do not transcribe well, so one actually does not get much from what is written down about them and comfortably taken home.

But, you see, that is only a reflection of the experience of higher knowledge. When a university student today prepares for an examination he is really happy when he manages to store up some facts in his head. And when after three or four weeks the time comes for the examination he hopes to be able to pour it all out unchanged just as he crammed it in. One cannot set about acquiring higher knowledge in that way. Those who really develop higher knowledge are faced with spiritual perceptions that have a life of their own. Higher knowledge is perpetually alive. It will not permit itself to be so conveniently stored in notebooks as do the rigid concepts which today are kept as scientific records of the external world. These, though radically expressed, are real inner facts.

Take the case of someone who has attained supersensible cognition to a fairly high degree. Let us say he has at present certain spiritual perceptions; he can attain those experiences again later by means I have often described. He may experience them after three or four years; they have meanwhile gone through a life of their own. If he once more builds them up they burden his soul with uncertainty. One gradually learns that this is nothing exceptional. Supersensible knowledge in general, fills one with uncertainty when it develops further—when, as it were, it grows old. One has to attain certainty about it all over again. One experiences uncertainty already the following day even about the loftiest spiritual perceptions and must struggle to attain the knowledge once more. Only lower kinds of perceptions cease to be alive, and they become specters which reappear unchanged. The one who has them feels satisfied that he has attained some insight into a higher world. He grabs a notebook to make sure the experience is preserved. He would in fact like to have a kind of soul-notebook for the purpose.

Genuine spiritual perceptions act differently—they are living entities and must continually be created anew. One must go through the process repeatedly for already the following day uncertainty arises, especially about the loftiest experiences, and one must win certainty all over again. One must relate to spiritual knowledge as one relates in the physical world to what is reality and not image. A real process in the physical world is the need to eat: not many of you would refrain from eating today because you had a good meal a week ago. You would not say that the meal of a week ago is still in you nourishing you, so that there is no need to eat today. By contrast a soul content arrived at via the body remains and can be recalled unchanged in many respects. That is not the case with a spiritual soul content; this does not just fade; its very certainty is repeatedly shaken and must be regained ever again.

One effect of this aspect of attaining supersensible cognition is that the world is, as it were, illumined by it. It is like coming into a brightly lit cosmic hall. After eight days one has the following experience: A certain residue of memory lingers due to the fact that in attaining this higher knowledge one drew near its reality and this had an effect even on one's physical being. But concerning the supersensible perceptions as such, one has the experience that one continuously meets them in a dark room where one must rekindle the light ever again. This is an indication of how supersensible knowledge is experienced in the human soul.

When supersensible perceptions are attained then, unlike the instinctive clairvoyant, one cannot claim that they remain like specters. The spiritual realm that is attained must be conquered anew. Yet, though the experiences do not stay in ordinary memory, the effect naturally does. The effect is felt after a time particularly if the supersensible knowledge has to be faced again in the form of a written manuscript or even—dreadful thought—in print. The spiritual investigator may have before him a new edition of a book he has written. He is faced with the external effect of his earlier experiences.

I can imagine there are lecturers who experience deep inner satisfaction when they have before them the result of the golden words they have spun together, especially if, again and again, new editions are produced based on those same golden words. It is a very pleasurable feeling. But the written results originating from spiritual perceptions do not provide pleasurable feelings; they cause pain. What has become preserved and poured out into the physical world is a source of pain. That is the other side of the coin. This pain is not only like going with one's spiritual perceptions into a dark room where one must kindle the light ever anew. It is like going into a room where arrows are hurled at one from all sides. An armor must be created against what one meets as a residue, as an embodied remnant of supersensible worlds.

This is an indication of how soul life is experienced when one has reached higher knowledge. In ordinary consciousness one does not experience the soul's life directly; it is adjusted to the physical body and experienced through it. To experience the soul directly is different. The soul is continuously becoming; it is in a state of transformation and metamorphosis. This fact escapes one unless, during supersensible experience, one enters into the process and identifies with it. Yet, to do so is felt to be unbearable; it causes pain because it is bound up with the past. Whenever a spiritual experience is not of the present it causes pain and one must be armed against this pain. So you see, if the living content of higher knowledge has really been absorbed it is not so easy to live with as that to which our students listen in the universities. That knowledge only hurts when it has been forgotten and the students do badly in examinations, although that kind of knowledge does not in itself cause pain, but pleasure, for when the students possess it they rejoice. The knowledge may pain them later if they come to see that there is something better than their own knowledge which has become like fixed ideas in them.

When the supersensible is entered into deeply one experiences it as, through and through, alive. One learns how to attain and how to endure it. In the knowledge itself one finds joy and satisfaction and also pain. One also learns at last to know the soul directly in its reality. In ordinary daily life the soul has fallen so deeply into materialism that its life appears to consist merely of pale concepts. Into these pale concepts warmth of feeling must be poured to rescue the soul life from the painful, pale, cold thoughts which are but images without life, whereas what is attained as supersensible knowledge is alive; it is in fact the living soul. And this living soul content gives us the first real concept of what we are; for our memory pictures are but faint reflections of the reality. If we manage to penetrate the curtain of memories, we arrive at that which I have just described as joyful, satisfying, light-filled and also painful experiences of the world. In its participation in this, our soul is united with a knowledge which itself contains soul-life. The past we experience as pain, but we become aware that what we experience as happiness and delight goes with us through the portal of death; it is the future.

There must flow into ordinary powers of comprehension a reflection, but a living one, of what I have been saying. If mankind's past evolution is contemplated merely in the light of the frigid ideas of history it remains just image, an image which has significance only as long as it remains in our head. Just as the mental pictures we form of sense perceptions have significance only as long as we have them in our heads, so, too, the mental pictures of history formed purely intellectually have significance only for the head. What in popular terms is called “the spirit of the times” is in fact the historian's own spirit held up to reflect the times.

One only learns real history when one participates with living knowledge in the reality of world evolution and mankind's evolution, when one feels the greatest intensity of pleasure and pain in the events taking place in the world. This means, for example, to turn the eye of the soul backwards in time to, let us say, ancient Persia, India or Greece; or any other past age. When, for instance, one feels how differently the Greeks experienced their tragedies from the way modern man experiences a theater performance. Goethe pointed to the fundamental difference between Greek tragedies and modern dramas when he said that a modern drama is a shadowy affair, whereas a Greek tragedy was a world-shaking event. And certainly those who experienced a Greek tragedy were affected by it very differently from the way modern man is affected. The latter goes to the theater to be amused and lets the play flow over him indifferently. When a Greek watched a tragedy, he felt shaken through and through; he felt shattered right down into his bodily nature. The basic issues he saw portrayed sent a chill down his spine. The Greeks also experienced life as full of sin and guilt and therefore full of sickness. They felt the tragedy as a healing force. They felt that a remedy was needed and that the public performances repeatedly raised life out of its state of guilt and sickness to what it truly ought to be. Thus, the

Greek tragedy was not something that merely provided amusement, it constituted a power that acted as healing for what, in social life, continuously fell into sickness.

What effect has modern drama on present-day society? Its effect might be compared with that of having one's hair shampooed by the hairdresser, whereas the effect of a Greek tragedy must be compared with one's soul and body being healed by a truly competent physician who with genuine health-giving medicine dynamically vitalizes the organism through and through. When one approaches history, identifying oneself completely with every situation such as the one of a Greek watching a tragedy, then history is indeed experienced very differently from the usual way where there is no participation.

In the present-day world there is also social sickness, but no remedy is sought as was done in ancient Greece. If one really transfers one's soul into the Greek age in the anthroposophical sense then—if I may express myself somewhat trivially—one at last catches hold of the soul element which nowadays is otherwise suppressed in ordinary consciousness. In contemplating the world, one discovers the soul.

This is what I wanted to describe to you in order to demonstrate that if the soul is to be known in its reality one must first find where it is hidden. The images produced in ordinary consciousness tell one nothing of the soul. However, these images are what psychologists describe as soul. If one opens a book on modern psychology one finds the first chapter dealing with mental pictures but described in the way they appear in ordinary consciousness. What psychologists describe is that which at every moment dissolves (see drawing, red, page 24). Nothing is said about the parallel process taking place beneath it. This approach of modern psychology could be compared with a conference in which instead of the chief speakers being present only their portraits were there. The portraits would have the same relation to the living reality they depict as man's mental life has to reality in ordinary consciousness. Psychologists are dealing with nothing but pictures; what matters is the reality behind them.

I have been at pains to show you the reality that lies behind mental pictures. One cannot reach the soul through ordinary consciousness. It must first be drawn up from hidden depths. That must be kept in mind; to do so is very important when one speaks about the human soul in relation to world evolution. As the soul's true being is attained, so one gradually enters into world evolution.

In these first two lectures I have attempted to show how, through spiritual knowledge, one can reach the soul. Now that a foundation has been laid we shall consider, in the further lectures, human soul life and its connection with world evolution in a more accessible form.

• 1. Johan Friedrich Herbart, 1776-1841. Philosopher and Educator.

In order to extend our considerations and link on to what was said last week, let us bring to mind some of the things already known to us. When we consider man as he lives between birth and death we see his life divided into sections which can be studied from various aspects. Attention has often been drawn to the alternating states of waking and sleeping and we know that dreaming is a state between these two. Thus, we have three states of consciousness in ordinary life—waking, dreaming and sleeping. Human nature itself can be divided correspondingly. When we trace the content of ordinary consciousness we experience thinking—i.e., forming mental pictures. I have often pointed out that only in this state, or to the extent that we are in this state, are we really awake. Anyone who observes himself without prejudice will acknowledge that feeling presents a much duller state of consciousness than thinking. Feelings surge through the soul and, unlike mental pictures, we cannot relate them so definitely either to something in the external world or to something remembered. And we are conscious, or at least could become conscious, that as soon as we are awake, feelings come and go very much the way dreams come and go in the intermediate state between waking and sleeping. Anyone who has a sense for comparing different states of consciousness must say to himself: Dreams have a pictorial quality; feelings are more like indefinite forces surging within us. But apart from their content, dreams come and go just as feelings come and go. Furthermore, dreams emerge from a general darkness and dullness of consciousness just as feelings emerge and again submerge within a general inner existence.

When we consider the will we find that what takes place within us when we have a will impulse remains as unknown to us as that which we sleep through. The only aspect that is clear in a will impulse is the thought that initiated it. What next comes into consciousness is the movement of our limbs or the event taking place in the external world through our will. But what takes place in the legs when walking or in the arms when we lift them remains as unconscious as that which takes place between falling asleep and waking. So we can say that while we are awake we experience all three conditions of waking, dreaming and sleeping.

However, we shall only arrive at a comprehensive knowledge of man if we use discernment when comparing what is given us, on the one hand, as sleeping, dreaming and waking; and, on the other, as willing, feeling and thinking. Let us consider sleeping man, on the one hand, and, on the other, man engaged in an act of will. The characteristic feature of sleeping man is that the very factor that makes us human—the experience of the I or ego—is absent. This situation is usually described by saying that the I, between falling asleep and waking up, is outside of what is present before us as physical man.

Let us now compare dreaming man with man experiencing feelings. By means of ordinary self-observation you will immediately recognize that dream pictures come before the soul in a, so to speak, neutral fashion. When we dream, either on waking or before falling asleep, we cannot really say that the pictures come before the soul like a tapestry, rather do they surge and weave within the soul. Thus, what then takes place in the soul differs from what occurs when fully awake. When awake we know that we take hold of the pictures which we then have; we grasp them in our inner being. They are not so nebulous and indefinite as dreams.

Let me illustrate what has just been described (left hand drawing). Let us imagine man schematically (white lines) and draw what we imagine to be weaving dreams (red lines). One must imagine the red part as a tissue of dreams experienced by the soul which continually withdraws and again approaches the soul.

The moment he wakes up man does not experience such a tissue of weaving pictures. He now has the pictures of whatever he is experiencing firmly within him (right hand drawing). The weaving pictures which were formerly outside are now within him; he lays hold of them with his body and because he does so they are no longer undefined weaving pictures but something which he controls inwardly.

When man is fully awake then what weaves and hovers as dreams become thoughts within him. He is then in control of what now lives in his soul as mental pictures. In this relationship you can see that the soul is taking hold of something which from outside draws into man. What has just been described is in fact the entry of what we call the astral body into man's inner being. To ordinary consciousness it is that which before entry weaves and hovers as dreams. The astral body is, therefore, within us when after waking we begin to think. We then form mental pictures and we know that we do so, for these mental pictures are under our control. As long as they are dreams they hover outside. You need only imagine a kind of cloud that hovers near you in which dreams are weaving. You then draw in this cloud, you now control it from within. Because it is no longer outside you cease to dream. Just as you grasp objects with your hands so do you grasp dreams with your inner being; which means that you have drawn in the astral body.

We must ask: What precisely is it that we now have within us? We can perhaps find a point of reference by looking at certain dreams which are not just pictures but begin also to become indefinite feelings. Just think how often dreams can be quite unpleasant. Many dreams are connected with anxiety. You wake up feeling anxious. In this undefined state of anxiety—less often it may be a state of joy—you have the first glimmer of something which as it further develops becomes fully present as you wake up. What is it that glimmers forth when a dream causes, for example, anxiety?

Such dreams are interwoven with feelings; anxiety is a feeling. The feeling is undefined because the dream is still partly outside the organism; yet it is far enough within to intermingle with feeling. It interweaves with what already lives in the soul as feeling. Only when the astral body has entered completely do you have definite feelings. These are conditioned by the physical organization and can now be penetrated by mental pictures present in the astral body.

When we consider certain nightmares and anxiety dreams in the right light we draw near to what actually takes place when the astral body enters man's physical body. You will always find that it is some disorder in the breathing which causes the state of anxiety of some dreams. From this you can see clearly that the astral body draws in and again draws out through the breath. It is really possible to observe these things if only the observation is thorough enough and free from prejudice. Something can be seen here that enables us to recognize that what weaves in dreams is in fact the astral body and that it draws into our organism by taking hold of the breath as we wake up.

This leads to the recognition of something else that is not normally taken into account but is of great significance. The human being is usually regarded as if he were simply a physical organism, a body built up of solid matter. That is just not true. The least part of the human body is solid, less than ten percent. For the rest it is a water organism, an organism of liquid, so that in reality we must think of this organism built up in such a way that one tenth is solid (see drawing, white lines) and the solid saturated with water (blue lines). You only represent the human organism truly when you see it as a column of liquid in which the solid is deposited.

However, there is more to it. We must also picture the human organism as an organism of air. The air is outside, we breathe it in; a part of the outside air is now within us and we breathe it out again. So we are also an air organism. Let us draw that, too (red lines). It is just this air organism which is taken hold of by the astral body as we wake up. We breathe in the air, it goes through transformations the effect of which pours through the whole organism. The oxygen takes up the carbon and transforms it into carbonic acid. Thus, an air process continually takes place within us.

As we wake up the air process is permeated by the astral body. The movement of the astral body follows the same path as the air through the organism. The air process consists solely of air when we sleep; when we are awake then the movements of the astral body, as it were, swim along within what lives in us as air processes. But now depict to yourselves the following: the astral body draws into that which I have schematically drawn in red and carries out its movements, in fact, carries out its general activity, within the air organism. This all takes place within the watery organism, which is represented in the blue lines. When we are awake, these air processes are in reality processes of the astral body and they continually push against the watery organism. Man's etheric body is within the watery organism both night and day. So you have simultaneously a reciprocal effect between the etheric body and the astral body, as well as between their physical counterparts which are the air processes and the water processes. Thus, you can visualize these processes running their course within man between his breathing and the movements of all the bodily fluids. Yet that is again merely a copy of what takes place between the astral and etheric bodies.

The whole organism consisting of solid, fluid and air is also permeated with warmth (see drawing, yellow lines, page 38). The whole organism has its own warmth—i.e., its own warmth ether. On the gaseous waves moves astrality and in the warmth flowing through the body moves the actual I or ego of man.

So you have the physical body as such, then the fluid body, which is also physical but differentiated from the solid physical body. The fluid physical body has an intimate connection with the etheric body. Then the gaseous organism which has an intimate connection with the astral body, and finally all the warmth processes—that is, the warmth ether in man, which has an intimate connection with the human I. Thus, one can say that in the various physical constituents of man we have a picture of the whole man. The solid part, so to speak, exists by itself; the fluid within the organism cannot exist by itself. Within the head we have very little solid and what there is swims in the cerebral fluid. Within this fluid is the etheric part of the head.

In the breathing process the following takes place: As we breathe in, the breath pushes inwards up through the spinal fluid towards the brain. In our waking state the astral also moves along this thrusting movement towards the etheric part of the head. We have then, on the one hand, an interaction of the movement of the cerebral fluid with the movement of the breath, and, on the other, an interaction of the etheric part of the head—of which what takes place in the cerebral fluid is only an image—with the breathing process, which is again only an image of the astrality in man. We also have a continuous interplay of warmth; the movement of the blood mediates the warmth. On the waves of this sea of warmth our I also moves.

To become clear about these interactions within man's bodily nature it is essential that we represent them vividly to ourselves. Only the solid organism can be observed by itself. The fluid organism does not have the possibility of moving

in waves the way water moves in the external world. The play of movement in the fluid organism is an image of what takes place in the etheric body. Again, what takes place in the delicate processes of breathing is an image of what takes place in man's astral body. Keeping this in mind let us once more look at the cerebral fluid: within it certain movements take place copying movements of the etheric body. Man acquires the etheric body when he descends from spiritual worlds into the physical world. Within the spiritual world he does not yet possess it. But as man takes hold of his physical body he also takes possession of his etheric body; he, as it were, draws out the ether from the cosmos. He can unite with the physical body, which he receives through heredity, only when he has drawn the ether from the cosmos. So that all that lives in the etheric body of man we bring with us when we take hold of the physical body.

The human embryo develops within the maternal body. Let us consider the fluid within the embryo. In general physiology only the solid components, or what appear to be solid components, are examined, not the fluid. Were this to be investigated it would be found that the cerebral fluid, in particular, contains an image of all that which was present already in the ether body, as the ether was drawn together, and which then slips into physical man.

If this is the physical body (see drawing) in which the physical human embryo develops—I do not draw the solid, only the fluid embryo (red lines)—then what as astral and `I' is present descends from the spiritual world; what has been drawn together from the ether slips in (yellow lines). In fact, as he dives down into his physical body the fluid part of the organism absorbs what man brings with him. Therefore, if the movements within the cerebral fluid of the child were to be investigated they would be found to be like a photograph of what the human being had been before he united with the physical body. You see, it is very significant to realize that a photograph is to be found in the cerebral fluid, that is to say in the movements of the cerebral fluid, of what has taken place before conception.

It is fairly easy to understand that a kind of photograph of what existed before conception is to be found in the cerebral fluid. But let us now consider the process of breathing. Breathing appears to be an out and out physical process because of the way our lungs function. Air is drawn in and, under the influence of the external world, the breathing takes place even when we are asleep—that is, even when the eternal part of our being is not united with the temporal part. Our breathing is not affected by whether we are awake or asleep. When we sleep the wave movements of the breath go through the organism; when we are awake they, in addition, carry the astral body. In other words, they are able to carry the astral body but it is not incumbent on them to do so, for when we are asleep they do not.

What follows from this? It follows that the reason the cerebral fluid can carry on by itself is because it is isolated within man's inner being. It constitutes a kind of continuation of what existed before. On the other hand, nothing of what existed before can be continued in this intimate way within our breath. When we consider the human head, we find within the cerebral fluid, that is, within the physical body itself, the actual continuation of pre-natal spiritual man; whereas when we consider the organization of the chest and the process of breathing we find a different situation. The physical breath takes place by itself (see drawing, yellow lines); the spiritual is less strongly connected with the physical process (red lines). Therefore, one must say that in the head, spiritual man, the man of soul and spirit, is closely connected with physical man; they have become a unity. In the chest that is not the case—there the two are more apart; the physical organism is more by itself and so, too, the soul-spiritual.

Let us now compare this with the state of dreaming. When we dream the I and astral body are outside, they are separated from the sleeping body. However, for the chest man, that is to some extent always the case. The chest man—that is, the man of breath and heart, in short, rhythmic man—is the organism for feeling. Feelings run their course like dreams because the soul-spiritual is not so firmly connected with the physical organism, is not so completely within physical man. So you see, if one wants to consider the whole man one must take into account these different interactions of what pertains to the soul and what pertains to the body.

In our materialistic age the human being is considered only in the most external way. This is evident from the way modern science looks upon man as if he were nothing but a solid organism within which the soul is somehow active. On this basis it is impossible to visualize how, for example, an impulse of will, experienced purely within the soul, can lead to the lifting of the arms or legs. In fact, from the point of view of what we experience as the soul's part in an act of will, the human organism, as conceived by modern anatomy and physiology, is like a piece of wood, as alien to the soul as a piece of wood. What in physiology today is described as human legs is like a description of two pieces of wood. They are related to the soul as if they were wooden legs. As little as the soul could have any relationship with two pieces of wood lying about, just as little could it have any relationship with legs as described by modern physiology. However, human legs are penetrated by liquid. Here we already come upon something in which it is easier to understand that the spiritual can be active within it. Yet, it is still difficult.

Once we come to the gaseous, the airy element, then we are in a physical material so fine that it is much easier to visualize the soul element to be within it, and easier still when we come to warmth. Just think how close a connection can come about between the warmth of the physical organism and the soul. You may at some time have had a terrible fright and grown quite hot. There you have an inner experience of the connection between the soul and the warmth in the physical organism. In fact, when we examine the solid, fluid, gaseous and warmth components of the whole organism, we gradually arrive at the soul.

It can be said that the 'I' takes hold of the inner warmth; the astral body of the gaseous; the ether body of the fluid and only the solid remains untouched; in the solid nothing enters. Picture to yourselves the way the human organism functions: You have the human brain (see drawing, page 46) that has fluid in it and also solid parts into which, as I said, the soul does not enter. The solid parts are, in reality, salt deposits; whatever solid we have within us is always salt-like deposit. Our bones consist solely of such deposits. In the brain very fine deposits continually occur and again dissolve. There is always a tendency in our brain to bone formation. The brain has a tendency to become quite bony. But it does not become bony because everything is in movement and is continually dissolved. When we examine the organism, especially the brain, we first find within it a condition of warmth, and within the warmth the air which is the bearer of the astral body and is continually playing into the cerebral fluid while being breathed in and out. We then have the cerebral fluid in which the ether body lives. Then we come to the solid into which the soul cannot enter because it consists of deposited salt. Because of this salt formation, which is less than ten percent of the total organism, we have within us something into which the soul cannot enter.

As human beings we have an organism; within this organism there are warmth, gaseous and fluid elements, all of which the soul can penetrate. But there is something which the soul cannot penetrate. This is comparable to having objects on which light falls but cannot penetrate and is therefore thrown back. Let us say we have a mirror; light cannot go through it and is therefore reflected. Similarly, the soul cannot penetrate the solid salt organism and is, therefore, continually reflected.

If this were not the case, there would be no consciousness at all. Your consciousness consists of soul experiences reflected from the salt organism. You are not aware of the soul life as it is absorbed by the warmth, gaseous and fluid organism; you experience it only because the soul life within the warmth, gaseous and fluid, is reflected everywhere by salt, just as sunbeams are reflected by a mirror. The outcome of this reflection is our mental pictures.

When someone deposits too much salt—salt always takes on forms—then he produces a lot of mental pictures; he becomes rich in thoughts. If too little salt is secreted the thoughts have vague outlines, like reflections from a faulty mirror. Or, said differently, when too much salt is secreted thoughts predominate and become very precise, and he who has them becomes pedantic. He is convinced of the rightness of his thoughts because they arise from so much solid, he becomes materialistic. When too little salt is secreted, or perhaps too much in the rest of the organism but too little in the head, then the thoughts become indefinite and the person becomes fanciful or perhaps he becomes a mystic. Our soul life is dependent on the material processes taking place within us.

It may be necessary, when someone is too prone to fanciful ideas, to administer some remedy that will enable him to deposit more salt or else give better form to the salt he does deposit. He will then escape from his fantasies. However, one should not make too great an effort to cure a human being by physical means of his fantasies or pedantry; not much can be done anyway. To do something different is more important and can be of great value—someone who knows how to observe human beings in regard to both soul and body will notice if there is too much sediment, whether in the head, or in the organs of the rhythmic or metabolic systems. He will notice it because the whole thought configuration becomes different. The manner in which a person alters his thoughts can contribute significantly to a diagnosis. But such delicate reactions are not often noticed. For example, someone may suddenly make mistakes repeatedly when speaking. He does not normally do so, but suddenly he makes mistakes again and again. It may last a few days and then cease. He has suffered a slight ailment, and the mistakes in speaking are merely a symptom. Such instances can often be described quite exactly.

For example, someone may for a few days secrete too much gastric acid. Now what occurs? This gastric acid dissolves certain substances in the stomach, which ought to pass on beyond the stomach. This means that the organism is deprived of these substances with the result that the person's inner mirror pictures lack the necessary sharpness. His thoughts become vague and he makes mistakes in speaking. You will have realized what must be done: One must provide a remedy that will ensure less acidity in the stomach, then the person's thoughts will again become ordered. His digestion is now in order and he ceases to make mistakes when speaking.

Or take the example of someone who absorbs gastric acid too intensely. This can occur if the spleen is abnormally active. When this happens the gastric acid is distributed throughout the body; the body, as it were, becomes all stomach. Such acid sediments are, in fact, the cause of many illnesses. A specific pricking pain may be felt or, if the head is affected, a feeling of dullness. When you look at such a person with insight it will often be found that the absorption of all the acidity has created in him a certain greediness. When someone is permeated with acidity his eyes may lose their friendly expression. If someone is suffering from too much acidity his eyes will reveal it. It is sometimes possible to restore his friendly expression by administering an acid that can be digested in the stomach because it is of a kind that has no tendency to spread throughout the organism.

The reason I am saying all this is to show you that the science of the spirit meant here does not simply contemplate the human soul in a nebulous way. It recognizes the soul as the ruler and builder of the body, active within it everywhere.

The human organism is described nowadays as if it were solid through and through; the solid alone is taken into account. It is impossible to arrive at any conception of how the soul actually exists within the body unless one also considers the fluid, gaseous and warmth elements of the organism. The soul does not live in the solid part of the organism; it does not enter the solid any more than light penetrates a mirror. Light is thrown back from the mirror, the soul retreats everywhere from the salt.

The peculiarity of the soul is that it is deflected from the bones (see drawing, red lines). We carry our bones within us empty of soul. The soul is not within them but is rayed back into the organism.

The bones in the skull are really ingeniously arranged. The soul rays out in all directions and is reflected into our inner being. We do exist within the skull bones but only as solid physical man. If we would make a comprehensive sketch of the head we would have to depict the soul as raying out within the head (see drawing, red lines). If nothing else happened, we would be in a dull unconscious condition. However, as the soul cannot enter the bones of the skull it is rayed back into our inner being (arrows, short red lines).

We experience the soul only when it is reflected into our inner being. So, you see how matters stand: The reality is that you have the soul within you rayed back from the mirror of the skull bones.

Spiritual science does not exclude what is material; on the contrary, recognition of how the soul controls matter makes it, at last, comprehensible. After all one does not come to know that someone is a baker by the fact that he makes certain movements, but from knowing that the movements he makes shape the rolls and croissants. Neither does one come to know the soul through abstract considerations but by knowing that a reflection of the soul's activity is to be found in the physical organism. It is a question of understanding the organism rightly and recognizing that it is an image of the soul. If we cannot make the effort to understand even man's physical nature we shall never learn to know the soul. We must have the goodwill to understand how human nature comes to expression through the physical. What is usually spoken of as soul, by those who will not approach the physical with spiritual insight, is something utterly unreal. It is as unreal as if you had a tasty meal before you and, instead of eating it, tried to eat its reflection in a mirror standing beside it. One can become knowledgeable about the soul only by observing her creative activity and not by persisting to regard it as a mere abstraction. And one should certainly not adopt the view that to be a conscientious spiritual scientist one must scorn the material. Rather should the material be understood spiritually; it will then reveal itself as spirit through and through. To do otherwise is to live in intellectual abstractions, and they obscure rather than enlighten.

May main concern yesterday was to show that the human soul is an active being, that she permeates the human organism with creative activity. When contemplating the soul one must always keep in mind that, provided one grasps the human organism in its totality as it appears to external sight, it reveals itself as an expression of the soul. And insofar as the organism is mobile and in constant transformation, it must also be seen as the soul's creation. However, this is only one side of soul life; today we shall begin to investigate the other side.

Let us look for a moment at man in relation to his environment, bearing in mind what was said in the first lecture of this course. The first thing that one notices in this relationship is that man's life of soul is separate, is external to the beings and objects which surround him. It cannot be said that we are within the chair on which we sit or within the table at which we stand. We see the outside of these things, and we are outside of them even with our soul life. In fact, we are just as much outside part of our own organism.

To fully realize this, you need only think through what has often been mentioned in regard to our will impulses: the fact that we first have the thought, the mental picture that we want to lift an arm, then after the thought has disappeared somewhere into the organism, we have the phenomenon of the lifted arm. But what goes on in the organism after we first had the thought, up to the moment when the arm movement is seen—we cannot even say after the thought has worked, for the effect of the thought does not enter our consciousness—lies outside the awareness of the human soul

to begin with. It is, in fact, as much outside the soul as the table or chair. Just as I do not penetrate the chair so do I not penetrate into what takes place within me when a will impulse is carried out. However, as soon as man attains higher, supersensible cognition he becomes aware of what actually takes place. For ordinary consciousness the situation is that man, through his senses, perceives the outside of things: color, sound, warmth and so on. This aspect of things then continues within him; i.e., he forms mental pictures of them. That is the situation when man's attention is directed towards the external world.

When man looks within himself he becomes aware first of all that he retains mental pictures of the things he has observed. These can be called up again, or at least that is how it appears; we have seen that the situation is somewhat different, but for ordinary consciousness that is how it appears. The mental pictures are saturated with feelings which, dream-like, well up from our human nature. In short, we also see a world when we turn our attention inwards; this world presses towards us from within as much as do color and sound from without. In a certain sense we are as much outside of what meets us there as we are outside the things that meet us in the external world.

However, this situation changes both in regard to the external as well as the internal world when we ascend to higher knowledge in the way that has often been described in lectures and in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. The first to be attained is imaginative cognition, then inspired cognition. This may be well known to you. When this happens then the situation that can be called “the-standing-outside-of-things” becomes different.

Through imaginative cognition of the external world we first attain pictures. When these are dealt with appropriately they become pictures of what surrounds us as an external spiritual world. Already at this point inspired cognition must step in. Through inspired cognition we attain insight into an external spiritual world which surrounds us, just as the sense world of color, sound, warmth and so on, surrounds us. When we stand before this whole world, which is now an external spiritual world, we must constantly be aware that it is something which is apart from ourselves. In this spiritual world we discover elemental beings and also beings of the higher hierarchies. All this is something other than what we are ourselves. We do learn to know ourselves ever more as spiritual beings, but we also learn to distinguish ourselves from all other beings.

While we carry out exercises which lead us to knowledge of the external spiritual world, we also make progress in the inward direction. What we first discover is that, from the viewpoint of the soul, we come to value our head with its knowledge rather less. By contrast, we become very aware of that knowledge which is more concentrated in the heart, not so much in the physical heart as in the etheric and astral heart. At this point something of the greatest significance becomes crystal-clear knowledge.

Let me make a drawing of what it is that man discovers when he progresses in the inward direction: Imagine this to be the heart (see drawing, red lines) and above the heart all that which man prizes so highly on the physical plane—his thoughts. This web of thoughts man feels to be located in his head and when without higher knowledge he contemplates his being as a whole, he feels the thoughts to be—what shall I say—the more aristocratic part of human nature. But thoughts themselves do not care particularly about the person as such. Let us say we think of a triangle; we have to devote ourselves to the thoughts concerned with the triangle. His lordship, the thought, does not care whether I have a headache or a stomachache. To him it makes not a scrap of difference what condition I am in. Nor does he care whether I am sad or cheerful, whether something is painful or enjoyable. Within the consciousness of my head the thought of triangle rules supreme with a certain nonchalance, not caring about my subjective well-being. This is the reason why people, whose main concern is their subjective wellbeing, fall asleep when one mentions thoughts that have no concern for their subjective state.

Well, the life of thought is, in a certain sense, a distinguished world, unconcerned about subjective states. However, when man sends his subjectivity into this distinguished realm, thus making it feel closer to his human nature, then his feelings pass through his heart. Rays from the head shoot, as it were, down into the lower part of man and from there well up again (see drawing, arrows). But what is it that wells up?

From below there arise feelings, instincts, urges, passions; everything active in man's nature bursts forth (red arrows). Within all this subjectivity, which is part of man, wells up also the effect of everything that seethes in the organism itself. The effects of whatever processes that are taking place in the stomach or intestines or in any other bodily function burst forth and come up to meet him together with the instincts and passions, so that one can indeed say that there, above, a distinguished world exists. Distinguished it may be but, as it has no concern for subjectivity, it contains no soul life. Thoughts in themselves are not subjective; for them it is quite immaterial whether Smith thinks of a lion or a triangle or whether Jones thinks of them. Thoughts are not concerned about subjects. The soul aspect only becomes evident when out of man's inner being there well up feelings or instincts which saturate the thoughts. Subjectivity only enters when, for example, Smith, being a hero, thinks of a lion and there well up within him feelings of a kind that make him unafraid of a lion; whereas when Jones, being a coward, thinks of a lion, he immediately wants to flee. The thought “lion” is universal; it contains no soul element, it is spiritual. Soul comes into it when it meets the instinctive element within man. That is what imbues the thought “lion” with a soul content which in Smith's case makes him think of some instrument with which to attack the lion and defend himself, come what may; or in Jones' case makes him think of how fast he can run, and so on. In ordinary life thoughts are imbued with soul because in one way or another the soul element always rays into the spiritual.

However, when the ascent has been made first to imaginative cognition, and then to inspired cognition, things become different. At first there is a great struggle to beat back the instincts and desires which are now all the more in evidence for being undisguised. They must not be allowed expression; they must be vanquished completely. However, something else rises towards the heart, which has now become a wonderful sense organ—a great etheric sense organ as large as the whole blood system. Towards this heart there now rise, not what lives in instincts and passions but another kind of thought complex (white arrows). These thoughts come up to meet the thoughts which have their origin in the external world and have made the head their abode in such an aristocratic manner. But the thoughts now rising through the heart to meet them are mighty pictures which do not in any way express what otherwise rises up within the organism. They express what man was before birth.

Man learns to know himself in his existence within the spiritual world before he was born (or conceived) on earth. That is what comes up to meet him. He is transported into his existence in the spiritual world before he descended into physical embodiment. This occurs, not through what lives in his passions and desires, but through what meets him when he has attained imaginative and inspired cognition. As he learns to know his own being within the spiritual world, he also learns to distinguish himself from what, to imaginative and inspired cognition, otherwise surrounds us as an external spiritual world. In that world we learn to know elemental beings, angels, archangels and so on. Out of the wisdom itself we learn to know our own being, now widened beyond earth existence.

This also leads to a significant insight into the working of the soul. We gradually come to recognize that the soul is completely poured out within the head. It has shaped the head in its own image (see drawing, blue) and organized it for the external world, so that the latter can imprint itself and become mental pictures which we retain in memory, whereas within the rest of the organism, as I indicated yesterday, the soul life does not unite so intensely with the physical; it remains more separate. Therefore, when the heart becomes sense organ we can look down into the flaming, scorching, burning emotions, desires and passions on the one hand, but also into that which lives alongside them, yet never unites with them: our eternal being.

It now becomes clear that as far as the head is concerned our soul is buried within it; there the soul rests. The head is essentially an external organ, organized for reflecting the physical environment; in the head we grasp the external physical world. We grasp ourselves when we look through the heart into the depth of our being. For ordinary consciousness the waves of emotions are all that are thrust up from that depth. When we gain more insight through higher knowledge then our eternal being comes up to meet us. Then our soul learns to unite itself with that spiritual being which is ourself. We are not part of the spiritual environment which we see outside. We are that which we behold through our heart when it has become sense organ. The path which otherwise led only to the experience of our soul's external side, its urges and desires, now leads us into the eternal soul within us, which is saturated with spirit. The eternal soul is as spiritual as the spiritual environment. We have come into a sphere where soul and spirit are one.

No matter how much you seek within the brain, only what is physical is to be found there; in the head you are yourself physical. Yet the brain is the main field of research for modern psychology. It is said that psychology investigates the soul, but only the brain is investigated. This can be done because the brain is an expression of the soul which lies entombed within it. The soul rests like a corpse within the brain and this corpse is the subject of modern psychology. The soul itself is beneath the heart where it is united with the spirit. Only its external aspect unites with the instincts and desires; the soul's inner being does not.

Now we discover something else. Let us look once more at a sense organ, at the eye; to begin with you look around you with physical sight. Let us for the moment disregard the fact that we usually come together under artificial light. It can easily be proved, in a roundabout way, that that, too, has something to do with sunlight; but for the moment we will disregard this kind of light. Let us imagine a lecture given on a beautiful morning in an open field, where instead of this dreadful light we should have sunshine. Something like that is, after all, a common enough experience. There we would have the sun everywhere, for the sun is more than just the disc or sphere up there, for it radiates everywhere. When its rays fall on a flower they are reflected back to us. The sun penetrates our eyes, and it is thanks to the sun that we see the flower and form a mental picture of it. Everywhere we see objects because of the sun. It is easy enough to recognize that insofar as we see objects illumined it is the sun which, via the eyes and brain, is the mediator of the external physical knowledge we gain of these objects. However, it is not only through our eyes that the sun mediates knowledge of the external world. There is a deep element of truth in the words heard in “Faust target=_blank>Faust”: “The sun-orb sings in emulation mid brother spheres his ancient round.”*¹ This cosmic harmony is indeed present and insofar as it manifests in our atmosphere it is also ultimately a reflection of the sun. Thus, sound, too, comes in a certain roundabout way from the sun. Everything that is perceptible in the external physical world comes from the sun: warmth, sound, everything, only not as directly as light.

And now I must say something which no doubt sounds surprising when first heard. It may, to begin with, be difficult to understand, but not after it has once been thought through as we are accustomed to do in Anthroposophy: We are, in reality, within the sun. We are within the external physical-etheric aspect of the sun in all that which we externally perceive because of the sun's presence, and our senses' inner connection with what the sun enables us to perceive.

However, when we attain imaginative and inspired cognition—that is, when through the heart we penetrate further into our own being—then we experience the sun differently. At a certain point, when inspired cognition begins and we are within a world of pictures which at the same time are realities, we become aware, as if through a sudden jolt of soul and spirit, that we have arrived within the sun.

This is an experience of immense significance. On earth the sun shines on us; as human beings we perceive things around us because they reflect the sunlight. But the moment we ascend to inspired cognition, when for us the heart becomes a sense organ, we suddenly experience ourselves within the sun. We no longer look up and see the sun move in its orbit—I am taking into account only the sun's apparent movement—rather do we feel that with our heart we are within the sun and moving with it. For us the heart is in the sun and the sun becomes our eye with which we behold what begins to appear around us. The sun now becomes our eye and our ear and our organ of warmth. We no longer feel that we are outside the sun; rather do we feel transported into the sun and existing within the light. Formerly we were always outside the light, but now that we have plunged with our being into the heart we have the feeling that our relation to the world is such that we are within the light, that our being is light. Within the undulating, weaving light we touch the spiritual beings with the organs of light which we now possess. We are now, in our soul being, akin not to the world outside the sun, but to the world within it. And I want to emphasize that our being becomes linear, so much so, that we feel we are within the sun's linear path. When we advance just a little further in higher cognition we feel ourselves to be not only within the sun but also to a certain extent beyond it (see drawing). Formerly we were tiny human beings there below and we looked up at the sun. But now that we have come into the sun we feel we are, with our soul being, within the sun and the world which was formerly around us is now within us (see drawing, green).

Only when this insight has been reached do we begin to understand that this is where our soul being goes when in ordinary life we sleep. We are then where, in order to perceive, we must look through the sun. The reason we see nothing is because we go as souls into a world that can only become understandable to us when it reflects the sun. We have to get further out beyond the realm of the sun sphere; this can be achieved only through inspiration and intuition. Not until we are beyond the sun sphere do we perceive anything; this is because we, as human earth beings, press through all kinds of objects belonging to the earth when we go out of our physical and etheric bodies. We do this from falling asleep till waking. At first, we do not see ourselves. When we have attained spiritual sight, we perceive other beings. We can only perceive ourselves when through schooling we come out into the realm where we were between death and a new birth.

What is it that separates us from the realm in which we live between death and rebirth? There is only one answer: the sun. As human beings we are born into the physical world. Before conception—that is, before we came down—we had no connection with the external physical sun, only with the spiritual behind the sun. We then descended into the physical world, where the sun shines everywhere. And here we take into our thoughts—that is we form mental pictures of—what the sun makes physically visible. The physical sun prevents us from seeing the spiritual. And when, after falling asleep, we are out there among the physical objects which the sun made visible, then we are too weak to see beyond the sun's domain. And we see nothing within its domain because during earthly life we are adapted to our physical body but not to beholding the beings that surround us in the external world—elemental beings and spirits of the higher hierarchies.

So you see from this aspect, too, it is clear that the soul as such can be known only to a consciousness higher than the ordinary one. It also makes it clear that the soul has a deep inner kinship with all that makes up the world. It is intimately bound up with the whole world evolution. When we inhabit our body, then it is the sun that makes the external world visible, audible and so on; but it also prevents us from beholding the spiritual world. When we ascend to the spiritual world we come, in a certain sense, to the other side of the sun. In physical life we are this side of the sun's being, and when we advance to the spiritual world we come to the other side. Our consciousness, in the transition from this side of sun life to the other side, is as I have just described it: We feel ourselves to be within the sun, making with it the passage through the cosmos. Thus, we cannot learn to know the soul without relating it intimately to the whole being and evolution of the world.

Our physical body places us alone, isolated, as it were, at a particular spot on earth. The physical body is adapted to the external sun and prevents us from uniting our soul with the cosmos. Our isolation is due to our organism. In reality, man lives within the sun's radiance. Viewed purely externally we know that sunlight mingles with moonlight. Externally, the sun illumines the moon; on moonlit nights the moon reflects the sunlight. The sun's light then comes to us from the moon. When the sun's light comes from the moon there is a kind of shadowing or dimming of light. This has an effect on everything coming into the world under the influence of the moon.

From the moon comes more than the silvery light which, when reflected by objects, gives them such hazy outlines compared with their sharp contours in daylight. More than reflected sunlight reaches us from the moon; its influence is active in all the beings on earth who are capable of propagation. The moon is active in all reproductive and hereditary forces.

If man were under the influence of the sun only, he could still be man on earth, but he could not bring forth another human being. If sunlight alone were always present the earth would be in a state of permanence, of duration. No being would perish, no new one arise. Neither heredity nor propagation would exist. One can say that the sun is the primordial physical force on earth. It expels soul life from the head and makes everything into pictures. In the ordinary life of soul, we become real human individuals only through our instincts and emotions. In our higher soul life, we attain reality when through the heart we behold the spirit, and when we come outside the sun's domain. In order to prevent the primordial sun force from being all powerful and enduring, and in order to prevent plants, animals and also man from permanence, but enabling them to die away after bringing forth new life, there is intermingled, in the course of world evolution, the moon element with that of the sun. Thus, the moon element, too, is incorporated into man.

When a new human being enters the world, moon forces are always active. The sun forces then do not merely reach the surface but enter right into man's inner being and exclude him from a certain sphere. Thus, we have, on the one hand, the mighty sun power and, on the other, excluded from it, a certain aspect of our external evolution because there the moon element enters.

To illustrate this, I must draw man's being as a diagram with the moon element inserted (drawing, orange). In this part the sun influence is excluded insofar as it is active in man's being as a whole. There the moon influence asserts itself. So, you see that in the external physical world something is taken away from the primordial sun influence. Therefore, what in propagation is under the influence of the moon cannot develop in the external world. That in which the moon forces are most active is withdrawn from the external world—except in the lowest animals, where a part of the process takes place externally in that their eggs are laid in the sun to be hatched.

However, this moon influence is counter-balanced: what on the one hand is taken away from the sun, to enable earthly propagation and heredity to occur through the moon's influence, is given back to the sun on the other. And in that this is given back the sun is not just the physical entity of which external science speaks. To the sun belongs a spiritual sun, a kind of higher sun (see drawing, orange). This higher sun acts as much on man as does the moon, which is a kind of lower sun. In our age not much that makes sense is known about the moon's influence in earth evolution; but nothing whatever is known about the higher sun. While the moon has a powerful influence on man's physical nature, the higher sun has a powerful influence on his soul nature.

This was known in earlier times through instinctive clairvoyance. It was known that not only can man physically extend his being, as it were, by bringing forth another human being; he can also extend his being on the spiritual side of his nature. This was indicated in the case of especially spiritual people, people gifted with receptivity for true spirituality, in that they were depicted with halos. This was to indicate that they were under the influence of the spiritual sun, that they were therefore more than the result of the influence coming from sun and moon. Just as man in his ability to bring forth his kind extends, on the physical side, beyond the limits of his physical body, so does his being extend also on the spiritual side. Through the higher sun he extends beyond that part of his soul that is bound up with the body. He towers into the spirit and he therefore, in the view of people in earlier times, wore a halo. In later times when halos were indicated they were invariably depicted as caps set on the head, because there was no longer any knowledge of the true connections with man's being. A halo is not a cap, it is something that man attains through the higher sun. It is a widening into the spirit of his own soul to the extent that it becomes visible in the etheric.

When we learn through Anthroposophy to understand why ancient atavistic clairvoyance depicted the halo we not only gain a deep insight into man's soul and spirit, but also into what could be known through the dreamlike clairvoyance. It gave access to true reality, and modern man is very foolish when he suggests that halos were given certain people merely out of fantasy. That was not the case; they were to indicate that those who wore them were predominantly influenced by the higher sun, the soul-spiritual aspect of the sun. So you see that, on the one hand, man is excluded from the physical aspect of his being where the moon exerts its influence in propagation and heredity. On the other hand, the sun regains in the higher sun what it lost for the earth through the moon; and insofar as man partakes of the higher sun he already, in his etheric body, reaches into the spiritual.

These things must be presented to indicate how intimately the soul of man is connected with the evolution of the world. One simply cannot speak about man's soul without speaking also about world evolution. The moment insight is gained into the true nature of the human soul, insight is also gained into the nature of the sun. Man has an impulse towards physical evolution through his inherent hereditary characteristics; this connects him strongly with matter. On the other hand, through permeating his corpse-like, lifeless head-spirituality with the forces of the higher sun, thus ensouling it, he is connected with the spiritual world. Man's soul nature continually projects into his mental pictures. We saw that in the case of Smith, in whom, because he was a brave fellow, courageous feelings arose into his mental picture of a lion; whereas in Jones, who was cowardly, there arose feelings urging flight. We see here how thoughts become ensouled by what arises out of man's organism; for, in the last resort, what thus projects into man's thought life, arises from the processes going on in his organism. But equally, there streams in from the other side, from the spiritual sun, not urges and passions, but the World Soul.

This is a point on which we must be quite clear: There streams into man's life of thought the outcome of his instinctive animal life. This ensouls the thoughts and mental pictures, which would otherwise remain cold and prosaic (see drawing, red lines). But, equally, what streams into his life of thought from the spiritual aspect of the sun also ensouls his thoughts (yellow lines). It is simply prejudice to maintain that someone who does not live merely in emotion, but is able to receive into his thoughts what streams in from the higher sun, is as dry and prosaic as someone who lives merely in abstract thoughts.

People are afraid of the spiritual in its pure cosmic aspect. They feel that as far as their thought life is concerned they are already sufficiently cold and arid. They are afraid that if they also take in universal thoughts they will become quite stiff. But the very opposite is the case. One becomes just as inwardly warm; one is filled with just as much enthusiasm—albeit pure, spiritual warmth and enthusiasm—as one does from what rises into the life of thought through instincts and cravings harbored in the animal organism.

In my book, Goethe's World Conception, I have drawn attention to the fact that it is possible to bring warmth into the life of thought by other means than through instinctive life. Certainly passions and cravings make thoughts warm with animal warmth. However, another kind of warmth exists which comes from the world, from the higher sun. It makes one glow, not with animal warmth, but with warmth of the higher hierarchies above man. This I could at least indicate in Goethe's World Conception when I spoke about how wrong it is to regard someone as a dry stick who is filled with thoughts and ideas permeated with a purer warmth, and even be afraid of becoming a dry stick oneself by entertaining such thoughts. This fear stems from the fact that it happens all too often to those who occupy themselves with the arid ideas so prevalent today.

I have tried to describe the nature of the soul in connection with world evolution. Tomorrow we shall look at some special aspects of the life of soul.

• 1. Bayard Taylor's translation. “Sun-orb sings ...,” “Faust I,” Prologue.

Very much more could be said about the present subject; however, some indications, only, could be given and with these we must for the moment be satisfied. Today I shall try, by means of a kind of comprehensive overview, to show how the soul of man is incorporated into world evolution as a whole.

When we, as ensouled beings between birth and death, let the external world act upon us, we receive in the first place a number of impressions. Present-day man has for centuries been in the habit of regarding the external world as the most essential; this attitude is largely due to the scientific education which he receives already from the lower school onwards. Lately even psychology is dealt with as if it were one of the natural sciences, not only by the experts but by the simplest people. This all stems from the fact that modern man has little talent for examining his own inner being. Consequently, it is not easy for him to become aware of things such as those we spoke about yesterday. Present- day man has no inclination to look into himself objectively; he is not in the habit of doing so. He is aware of all that which I referred to yesterday as the up-surging waves of instinctive life—urges, cravings and passions—in fact, all emotions in general. But he is little inclined to look at these in an objective way because when he observes himself all that emerges are just these cravings. Through education they often become refined, but it is still instinctive life that wells up. On the other hand, man forms at least some ideas concerning the external world in which he is not personally involved; these ideas therefore have a certain objectivity.

There are many people who do not care for such objective ideas; they prefer to keep to what is subjective and personal. However, modern cultural life brings up in every field such objective concepts concerning external nature and has done so for centuries. These concepts about the world fill man's inner being. Whether it is only a little local paper he reads or one of the Sunday supplements, he is learning, in both, to look at the world according to such concepts. He is not aware that, even from the smallest publication, he absorbs a natural-scientific view of the world, but he does so nonetheless. So it can be said that the only thing that really occupies man today is the external world. I am not saying this in criticism of individuals. It is more a criticism of the age; or, better said, a characterization of the age, for there is no point in criticizing. The whole situation is simply a necessary outcome of the time. People today are so little interested in man as such that it has become a matter of indifference whether a living actor is seen on the stage or a specter on the cinema screen. In reality, it naturally does make a considerable difference. But today there is no deep fundamental feeling for this difference. If there were, then there would also be more concern for the considerable part played by the cinema and similar phenomena in the decline of our civilization.

The concepts which are today imparted to man's soul are simply accepted through blind faith in authority. When told that science has achieved this or established that, he is immediately convinced. One really must be clear about the fact that utterly blind faith in authority is involved in the way ideas about the world are conveyed. Things are accepted simply on the basis of a statement without the slightest knowledge of what actually takes place in the laboratories and so on.

It was by no means always so. I have often drawn attention to the fact that if we go back in the history of mankind's evolution, we arrive at a time when something was present in man which I have always designated as an instinctive, dreamlike clairvoyance. This clairvoyance was indeed instinctive and dreamlike, yet far better able to enter into the nature of things than the so-called scientific ideas of today. Through those conceptual pictures, which today are considered to be merely symbolic or allegoric or else flights of fancy, one was actually transported into the reality of things. Whether a particular picture corresponded quite exactly to the external object was not what mattered. Of importance was rather that, with the picture, one also received the spiritual reality of the object. Today it is, of course, essential that the idea one has formed corresponds exactly to the external fact, for this correspondence is all man has to hold on to.

This touches on something we must be quite clear about because it is of immense importance for judging our present civilization. It must be strongly emphasized that, formerly, man in his instinctive clairvoyance had a living quality within him. Modern man believes that it was mere fantasy and that it had nothing to do with external objects.

In a certain sense, it is of particular importance, if our insight is firmly rooted in Anthroposophy, that we accept this modern approach in which, disregarding the inner reality of external nature, we formulate faithful copies of her. Perhaps you are aware of how scientifically scrupulous Anthroposophy does just that, by declining every kind of hypothesis about the phenomena of nature. On the contrary, we remain in our phenomenalism, as it must be termed, strictly within the phenomena themselves—that is, within what nature conveys—and that we allow the phenomena to explain themselves, in the Goethean sense.¹ We do not think into them all kinds of atom-bombardment or atom-splitting and the like, as is usually done nowadays because of the inertia of old habits. When we speak about external nature, on the basis of Anthroposophy, it is essential that we do not hypothetically add anything to what the phenomena themselves reveal.

Modern technology is an example of how not to think anything into the phenomena. It has arisen with the natural- scientific world view in recent times. When we utilize nature's laws in technology we actually create the phenomena ourselves. True, something is left out of account in the phenomena, in electricity, for example, of which the modern researcher says that he uses it, but does not know what it is. He speaks similarly about all nature forces such as heat and light, etc. In other words, there is always an element which is not explained. However, what really matters in technology is that which we want to control. And as it is we ourselves who put everything together in the experiments, we can survey every detail.

It is just because every detail is surveyable that one can have an immediate feeling of certainty about what is built up technically—for example, in chemistry; whereas, when one turns to nature there is always the possibility of several interpretations. So it must be said that a thinking which is truly of our time is to be seen at its most perfect in the technician. Someone with no inkling as to how a machine or a chemical product is made, and works does not yet think in the modern way. He lets other people think in him, as it were; people who are in the know, who think technically. The external achievements of technology such as mechanisms, chemistry and so on, have gradually become the basis for a modern view of the world. In the course of time this approach has spread to what is today regarded as a world conception.

What is modern astronomy? For a long time it has represented nothing but a world mechanism. The way the sun is seen in relation to the planets and their movements is nothing but the picture of a huge machine. Lately, chemistry has been added to this in the form of spectral-analysis.² Astronomy does not venture further. This science of the universe is today only concerned with the question of whether our mental picture of it will correspond to reality if it is simply built up on concepts taken from technology; that is, if what can be derived from technology is imagined transposed into outer space. We should then have a science, it is thought, containing valid ideas, if one excludes those of neo-vitalism³ and all talk of psychoid⁴ and the like. A world view would be obtained in which the effectual ideas would be those applied in chemical preparations and the construction of machines. These ideas are then carried over to the structure of the universe and thus represent that, too, as a huge mechanism in which certain chemical processes occur.

This was not always the view. Right up to the 15th Century—I am referring to the civilized part of the world—man lived with mental pictures of the world which were not merely technical. They were inner pictures in which he could participate. What is of a technical nature is quite external to man; it is completely separate from him. Formerly, man experienced what he knew; he, so to speak, lived within his knowledge. Modern man does not participate in what he knows. This is why, nowadays, clever people in particular feel that man in former times dreamed all kinds of things into his environment, he indulged in fantasies; whereas today we have at last the possibility to represent the world to ourselves without such fantasy. It is even believed that technical concepts are the only kind that ought to be applied to the world, because only then can the danger of fantasy be avoided, and true knowledge obtained.

However, something of a very much more fundamental nature lies at the basis of what has just been stated; something which was prophesied already in the ancient mysteries by initiates who had attained a certain grade. In fact, it is characteristic of the mysteries, at the time when the ancient clairvoyance was prevalent, that they prophetically foresaw the kind of view of the world that was bound to come.

Something like the following was said: If the view of the world prevalent today—this “today” was in very early times when man, in an instinctive, dreamlike way, participated in his environment—is preserved for future mankind then the human being will never become free. His impulse to action will always come from his inner experience of the world. In his heart a divine world will speak, but a divine world that makes him dependent. People in the ancient civilizations were always unfree. They were aware that, when they were not obeying laws of state, laid down by their rulers, they followed divine commands. They were, so to speak, beings who simply carried out the impulses prompted by the divine within them. Therefore, in the mysteries it was said: A time must come when the divine influence within man must cease. A time must come when he looks out on an external world and sees only objects and events that have nothing to do with his humanity, a world of which he only takes into his soul the external aspect. Man can be free inwardly just when he witnesses, and experiences only forces of nature and not those that sustain him. Then his inner being will be unburdened because nothing will fill his soul except what is external to his nature.

A phase had to come in mankind's evolution when he would see external nature as something apart from himself and thus achieve independence. This was foreseen in the ancient mysteries where the initiate said: What at present we can give human beings, whose instinctive clairvoyance enables them to meet us with understanding, will not always be possible to give to men, because it makes them dependent. Man must acquire a knowledge which does not determine his inner impulse to action but leaves him free. A knowledge that only conveys concepts of what exists outside his being will awaken his inner impulse to freedom.

This characterizes the extreme problem I was faced with when I felt impelled to write, first the introductory essays, and then my Philosophy of Freedom. The fact had to be fully recognized, with all its implications, that the age in which we live is completely orientated towards knowledge of a technical nature. There is no choice but to adapt to this approach; otherwise the doctrines derived from the instinctive experience of the world in ancient times, and still preserved in the creeds and so on, will be distorted. No other possibility exists than to make use of concepts which are also applicable to the construction of machinery and so on. We live in a world that is thought of as a huge machine and as a huge chemical plant. If we are to find again what is spiritual in the world then we must simply break completely with everything that has come down in the form of mysticism from former times. In the mechanical world, devoid of spirit, given us by modern science, there we must find the spirit.

Let me sketch on the blackboard the situation that had to be reckoned with when I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom. If this is man (see drawing on the left, white lines) and this his surrounding world (yellow lines) then one must depict the situation in ancient times as follows: When man looked into the environment he experienced—also within himself—what his instinctive, dreamlike, clairvoyant pictures transmitted to him (red lines). And he related his inner experiences to what he saw outside. Therefore, he perceived the environment as spiritual through and through (red lines within yellow ones). He saw elemental and also higher beings in everything, because he brought towards them the right inner condition.

Modern man of the civilized world, for whom in the early Nineties I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom, has a different relation to his environment (drawing on the right). He no longer unites his inner being with what he perceives; he focuses on what can be worked out in technical terms. He traces the laws at work in the environment, but these are laws of nature and in them no moral impulses are to be found; whereas man in ancient times, as I drew it here (drawing on the left), was still inwardly connected with the environment. He saw in stone, animal, and plant moral impulses, because everything contained divine spiritual beings. In the laws of nature there is only what applies to mechanical construction.

What then did the Philosophy of Freedom set out to do? The necessary task to be accomplished was to show that if man is unable to find moral impulses, when he stands outside of nature, because through his senses he can reach only natural laws, then he must go out of himself. He can no longer remain within the confines of his body. I had to describe this first going out, when man leaves behind his bodily nature. This first going out is accomplished in pure thinking in the way it is described in the Philosophy of Freedom. Here man does not project himself into the environment by means of instinctive clairvoyance; he goes out of his body altogether. He transfers his consciousness into the external world (green lines). And what does he attain there? He attains moral intuition because he has reached the very first delicate degree of clairvoyance—or you may wish to use the subjective term I used then: moral imagination. Here man goes out of himself to find within the technical the spiritual—the spiritual is, after all, within it—where it is first to be found: in the sphere of morality.

But people do not recognize that what is described in the Philosophy of Freedom is the very first degree of the new clairvoyance. This is not recognized because people still think that clairvoyance means plunging into something obscure and unfamiliar. Here it is just the familiar that is sought; here one goes out with a thinking that has become independent of matter. It is a thinking that sustains itself, so that, through this self-sustaining thinking, the world is grasped for the first time purely spiritually. Indeed, the world is grasped through the very purest spirituality.

Mystics find in the Philosophy of Freedom too much emphasis on thinking. According to them it is just too full of thoughts. Others, such as rationalists and scientists and even modern philosophers, can make nothing of it for the very reason that it leads into a realm of spiritual sight where they do not want to go. They want to remain within the realm of external sight even when their subject is philosophy. The whole approach and content of the Philosophy of Freedom fulfils the obligation placed upon modern man.

This is what in an elementary way can be said in connection with what was prophetically forecast in the ancient mysteries. The initiates saw the future situation in exact details, both in relation to the human soul and also to world evolution. They saw clearly that the world, which man would later come to know, would be not only external to man but also to the Gods. It would be a world outside the realm of that divine creation about which they—the initiates—spoke. They sought revelations of the divine through initiation; thus, they were able to commune with the Gods. The various heathen peoples communed with their own divinities. The Jews, for example, with Jahve or Jehovah, and, insofar as they were initiates, did so not just in thought, but in actual fact. It is absolutely correct to speak about real communion with divine beings. The initiates achieved this within the mysteries. When they and their pupils were in the outside world they saw the surrounding world, and in it what their instinctive clairvoyance conveyed. The initiates in particular and also their pupils knew that the external world they saw resisted, in a certain sense, what they projected into it through their clairvoyance. They knew that a time would come when it would no longer be a question of resistance only, but one would only see merely that which can be seen without such projection.

These initiates recognized a truth which modern man would not have the courage to admit because his knowledge would be too shallow. The initiates said, “The external world we see is non-divine unless we project into it what the Gods have bestowed upon us.” For what they saw within the external world had been bestowed upon them by the Gods since the beginning of world evolution. They said, “We have around us a world which has not originated from the Gods with whom we commune in the mysteries.”

It was this which later, in the Middle Ages, led to a particular form of contempt for nature and to asceticism and which still is to be found in certain religious confessions, though often hypercritically. This attitude had its first beginning in the ancient mysteries when man had to acknowledge: When I look into my inner being I can commune with the Gods, but the world I see around me does not originate from them. This world is not created by those Gods whom I seek when I go through initiation.

Through initiation within the mysteries it was learned that the external world had not originated from the Gods. This was accepted more and more as a fundamental objective truth. The Gods had intended quite a different world.

A particular event had caused man to sink down into a world not at all willed by the Gods. If time allowed, it could be shown that all ideas concerning the fall of man—his expulsion from paradise—stem from the recognition that the world around him is not a world created by the Gods.

Attempts were made to discover the will of the Gods in regard to the world they had not created, and it was realized that what the Gods wanted was the disintegration, the annihilation of that world. This fact, too, the initiates in ancient times had to face. The Gods whom they reached up to revealed that their decision regarding this world was its destruction. Yet the initiates also knew that man, in order to become independent, had at some time to derive his human knowledge precisely from the world which the Gods found ripe for extinction.

In the early Greek mysteries this knowledge was understood in a specific way. There the aim was to interpret the world through art. At that time there was no inkling of a natural-scientific approach such as we have today. Through plastic art and particularly through the Greek tragedy—in fact, through art in general—the aim was to create something through man which, though associated with this world, nevertheless transcended it. The initiated Greek said to himself: The world I see around me with its trees, its springs and so on, all this will disintegrate; however, what from this world has been secreted into a Venus de Milo, a Zeus or Athene, or into the dramas of Sophocles, will surely pass over from the realm of the visible into the invisible. The thoughts which had gone into a work of art would remain and would secure the continuation of the earthly world—which otherwise might disappear completely—even if the earth itself disintegrated.

Already the very early Greeks, at the time when art still proceeded from the mysteries, visualized that the world must be saved through art. For the world, though derived from the Gods, had absorbed a content which the Gods themselves wished destroyed. Certain fundamental facts of science were fully known to the initiates; this can be proved even historically. Certainly we have added much by way of technical construction in the course of recent centuries, particularly the 19th Century. But certain fundamental things which are still operative in technology were well known to the initiates of old. They knew much more than can be derived from what they told others who were not initiated. This knowledge led the initiates in the mysteries to say: If by combining natural forces we simply put together something technically we shall have something in the nature of a machine. We shall be making something which will be destroyed together with that aspect of the earth which the Gods themselves wish annihilated. For every initiate knows, and did know, that those Gods they venerated and communed with in the ancient mysteries—and with whom one can naturally still commune—those Gods hate nothing so much as, for example, a locomotive or a motor car. That to them is something dreadful. Those Gods say, “Not only must we endure that Ahriman has made the earth machinelike: now added to that, human beings are imitating the work of Ahriman. Our task in destroying Ahriman's endeavors is great enough and now we have in addition all these steam engines, all these electric machines and all that trash which has to be destroyed as well.”

Therefore, the initiate in ancient times said: It is of no help at all if we simply add to the outer forces of nature, which no longer contain anything spiritual, by constructing technical works like machinery or chemicals. The initiates were absolutely convinced that this was how matters stood and they decided, therefore, that as much as possible of the world must be rescued. As mentioned already, in Greece the impulse to do so was through art. If we go further towards the East people would say: As far as man's true evolution is concerned, everything that works according to so-called natural laws has, in reality, no meaning. The Gods will eventually destroy it. We shall, therefore, clothe all we do in such a way that the spiritual can live within it. This is how the cult in its earliest form originated. The spiritual cannot enter a creation such as a machine or a chemical, but it can enter the act of worship. It was considered that what one did should be something sacramental, something in which the spirit could live and participate. The aim of the cult was to rescue as much as possible from earth evolution.

I have often spoken of this on earlier occasions when I illustrated it by saying that we must reach a point in our technical research when the bench in the laboratory becomes an altar for divine service; so that we perform a moral-spiritual deed on the bench which in the laboratories of physics or chemistry has become an altar. I have often spoken of this; today I approached it more from the historical aspect.

This was the origin of religious cults to which people are again returning because they cannot rouse themselves to spiritual activity. It is remarkable that it is just people of intelligence who are today returning in great numbers to the bosom of the Catholic church. They do this for the simple reason that they want to be saved. They want to stay with what will remain when the earth disappears without trace, through the will of the Gods. Little attention is paid to what is happening in our time; so this present flow of intelligent people into Catholicism goes on unnoticed. It is happening because people want to escape from destruction. They want to participate in something, like the Catholic ceremonies and Mass, which, resting as they do on very old traditions, will at least belong to what will remain. It is happening because people lack the motivation to discover something new and essential for the future. People lack inner strength because they have lost it in our technical age.

At a certain moment it ought to have been realized that our world of technology is a negative world; it contains no inner impulses as was formerly the case. It should have been recognized that now it is necessary to achieve moral intuition and moral imagination. It is just those who are blind to this necessity of the age who are now returning to Catholicism. The explanation lies in the weakness of our time.

That this situation would arise was known to the initiates in ancient times. They asked themselves: What is going to happen? We know that the Gods with whom we commune in the mysteries want the destruction of the earth. But if human beings are to become free and independent they must of necessity become ever more like the things of earth. Only through technical knowledge can man become free. If the initiates of old could have foreseen no more than this, they would have faced a dreadful prophetic revelation. They would have foreseen that man, in order to become truly man, had to entangle himself completely in the Ahrimanic world bereft of God, and must turn to dust with the earth when the Gods dissolve it. Men themselves would gradually become mechanisms, become ever more like machines. Eventually, only technical impulses would activate their thoughts. Astronomy is basically nothing but thoughts about a huge world machine. Man's thoughts concerning astronomy are of a mechanical nature. If the thoughts are of the same technical pattern it ultimately makes no difference whether one thinks of nuts and bolts or about Venus and Mercury.

But in the mysteries, prophetically, something else was foreseen before it happened on earth: the Mystery of Golgotha. Once it had taken place it would gradually be understood more and more. This the initiates in ancient times learned from their Gods with whom they communed. The Gods knew all things; from them the initiates could receive an all-embracing wisdom. But there was one thing they could never learn from these Gods; they could never learn anything relating to birth and death. Particularly about death the Gods knew nothing. But in the mysteries, it was known that the God who was later called the Christ would come down, and that on earth he would know death. Thus, the Mystery of Golgotha consists of the fact that one of the Gods, who till then had known neither death nor birth and heredity, would learn to know death. Through knowing death, he could unite with earth evolution and create a counterweight to what necessarily had to happen for the development of freedom: the ever-increasing union of man with the disintegrating earth. Man can now create in himself the counterweight. He must, on the one hand, devote himself completely to modern cognition, really take into himself modern natural-scientific knowledge; yet, on the other hand, turn to the God who has come to know death and birth—the Christ. Now it is possible for man to incline fully towards what is necessary for attaining freedom; but he must, on the other hand, find the counterweight by balancing this knowledge with that of the other realm. He must find the path leading to the Pauline saying, “Not I, but the Christ in me.” Then man will again find the possibility, through pervading the world with his Christianized thinking, to transform from within himself what must otherwise fall away from the world of the Gods, to which man, in reality, belongs.

Thus, the Ahrimanic powers, active on earth in what is disintegrating, are being opposed by the Christ, Who through an extra-earthly decision of the Gods is now active in the earth. It was not necessary for him to become free; He is a God and remains a God after going through death. He does not become akin to the earth. He lives as a God within the being of the earth. As a consequence, man now has the possibility to restore the balance by the development of freedom. He can go to the highest limit of individualism; for only in individual man can moral imagination be attained.

My Philosophy of Freedom has been called the most extreme philosophy of individualism. It cannot be anything else because it is the most Christian of philosophies. Thus, one must place on one side of the scales everything that can be attained through knowledge of the laws of nature, which can only be penetrated with spirituality by ascending to pure independent thinking. Independent thinking can still be restored within pure technical knowledge. However, there must be placed on the other side of the scales a true recognition of Christ, a real understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It was, therefore, a matter of course that I wrote, on the one hand, the Philosophy of Freedom and, on the other, found it essential to point to the Mystery of Golgotha in my Christianity as Mystical Fact and Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age. These two things simply belong together. Yet there are people who superficially see a contradiction in these two kinds of books. To them it is as if meat were placed on one scale and a weight on the other and they exclaim: What nonsense—these two things belong together. In short, everything must be mixed up. So, they take the weights and put them with the meat. Well, you do not get balance that way. Yet that is the way of modern critics. Having placed mysticism on one side and philosophy on the other they proceed to mix them together. But if modern man wants to stand in the right way within world evolution then there must live in his soul, on the one hand, a strong impulse towards freedom, towards independence, and, on the other, a strong impulse towards a deep inner experience of the Mystery of Golgotha.

This must gradually develop in the life of the individual and must also be developed in the sciences. The individual must overcome the old instinctive mysticism and clairvoyance. He must rely solely on knowledge of the kind needed for understanding, say, how a steam engine works. In my

Philosophy of Freedom, when I spoke of knowledge of external nature, I presupposed only the kind of concepts needed for understanding a steam engine. However, in order to understand a steam engine, one must set aside one's whole human personality except for the very last: pure thinking. The latter must be inwardly cultivated and then carried outside into the object, where it will be found to exist already.

Thus, one can take one's stand fully on the ground of freedom provided one also stands fully on the ground of the Christ fact. This applies also to science. And it will be seen to apply when it is realized that, no matter how extensively external nature is investigated according to Haeckel,⁵

something is always left unexplained, something always remains which cannot be understood with concepts of that kind. Let me put it somewhat more strongly: We are, after all, earnest people who have come together to understand something and not to enjoy five o'clock tea. So let me put it this way: The two things of which I have spoken must enter civilization in the right manner. In earlier times, when one was aware through instinctive clairvoyance of man's connection with the spiritual in the external world, it led to depicting the halo. The halo was particularly cultivated in very early times, appearing frequently in many different forms, even in the cult itself. With the approach of the Middle Ages and the first awakening of materialism there was a preference for depicting something else: the pregnant woman. Just look at the many pictures from the Middle Ages in which all the women are pregnant. So, you have, on the one hand, the halo which is the loftiest proclamation of the spiritual world and points to man's salvation after death, and, on the other, what points to that which again and again brings man into the physical world—birth.

When the present-day world is contemplated one cannot but recognize the need for the things I have described. There is nothing nebulous about it; the need is comprehensible through and through. It must, therefore, be said that the soul in its striving towards freedom brushes against the Ahrimanic. In the soul's religious experiences, even when they concern the Mystery of Golgotha, it comes very near the Luciferic. If egoistical religious instincts alone are cultivated, which is often the case today, it is all too easy to cultivate Luciferic instincts and desires as well.

This is what in the immediate present must concern the human soul; it is also what Christ taught his intimate disciples directly after the Resurrection. His intimate disciples were successors of the initiates of old. They were to teach that He had descended from the world of the Gods who did not yet know death, and who therefore in primordial times could tell man nothing about death. They were to teach that Christ had descended in order to experience the mystery of birth and death. Teachings about the birth and death of Christ have remained so obscure because human beings could not find a way to explain these things. Yet after the Resurrection, in the original Christian mysteries, Christ Himself imparted to His first initiated pupils the secret of a God's learning about earthly death. In their true form the Christian mysteries disappeared already in the Fourth Century. They disappeared because the impulse to freedom had to be developed first. However, the original wisdom had already been imparted to man by the ancient Gods. It had increasingly been transmitted to later generations, becoming all the time more diluted. What Christ imparted to His intimate disciples after the Resurrection was the original revelation concerning the meaning of earth evolution. This revelation was the spiritual foundation for the further life of the human soul. What the ancient Gods had taught in the mysteries was basically the secrets of Saturn, Sun and Moon. The essential secret of the Earth could be imparted to the human soul only after this secret had been experienced by a God on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Birth and death, in the human sense, did not occur until the earth evolution. Previously only metamorphosis and transformation took place.

Thus, the most fundamental revelation after the death of Christ is at the same time the foundation from which the human soul can set out to accomplish the salvation of earthly life.

You see how human souls are connected in manifold ways with the evolution of the earth, indeed with the evolution of the world as a whole, not only through the various facts I have presented to you during the last few days, but above all through their understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what I wished to impart to you in these lectures.

• 1. Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings.
• 2. Spectral-analysis: Chemical analysis by means of spectroscope.
• 3. Neo-vitalism: developed by Hans Driesch, 1867—1941, biologist.
• 4. Psychoid: Concept of Vitalism. Description of certain strata of soul (C.G. Jung).
• 5. Ernst Haeckel, 1834-1919. Natural scientist. Founder of Monism. Defender of Darwin's Origin of Species.

We have often discussed the development of the human being during the first periods of life. Many years ago I first drew attention to the fact that up to about the time of the change of teeth the child behaves to a great extent as an imitative being. He instinctively participates in everything that goes on in his environment. Later in life, though man is not aware of it, this participation continues but only in the sense organs.

A process takes place in our eyes, for example, which in a certain sense imitates what goes on in the external world, reproducing what is there just as a camera reproduces what is in front of the lens. The human being becomes aware of what is reproduced in his eyes and thus learns about the external world. The same applies to the other senses. It is only in later life that this imitative principle becomes confined to the periphery of the human being. In early childhood, until the change of teeth, the whole body participates in the imitative process, though to a lesser degree. At that time the whole body has, in a certain respect, the same relationship to the external world as the senses have in later life. The child is predominantly an imitative being and he inwardly adapts to the effects upon him of the external world. Therefore, it is very important to let nothing happen in the young child's environment, not even in thoughts and feelings, which is not suitable for it to absorb and adopt.

With the change of teeth, the possibility arises for the child to cease reacting as a sense organ and assimilate thoughts and ideas. The child is more and more guided by what he is told; whereas, formerly, he was influenced by deeds done in his environment, he now begins to grasp what he is told. Authority becomes the decisive factor between the change of teeth and puberty. What the child is told must be of such a nature that he can be guided by it and follow it quite naturally. The child learns language through imitation but what is expressed through language—i.e., what grownups impart to the child—becomes significant for him only from the change of teeth onwards. Not until puberty does real power of judgment awaken and the child or adolescent begins to make his own judgment. Only then can one assume the child's judgment to originate within himself.

This is merely an external description of how the child adapts to the world, which any unbiased observation can verify. These things are, however, connected with significant inner processes of which I want to speak today. I have often mentioned that only up to the time when the change of teeth occurs does the human ether body live in intimate union with the physical body. Therefore, it can be said that the change of teeth marks the actual birth of the ether body. We can likewise speak of puberty as marking the actual birth of the astral body. But, as I said, this is merely an external description of what takes place; today we shall try to reach a deeper insight into these processes.

When we observe man in the spiritual world, long before he develops an inclination to leave that world and descend to physical embodiment, we see him as a being of soul and spirit in a world of soul and spirit. So were we all before we descended to unite with what was prepared as physical body in the maternal organism. We unite with this physical body in order to go through our earthly existence between birth and death. But long before this we were spiritual-soul beings in a spiritual-soul world. What we are and what we experience there differs considerably from what we experience here on earth between birth and death. Hence, it is difficult to describe the experiences between death and new

birth; they are utterly different from earthly conditions. Yet one can make use only of ideas and mental pictures relating to earthly experiences. However, today we will not deal so much with man's life in the spiritual-soul world—this will be the subject for tomorrow and the day after—but rather focus our attention on how he draws near his descent to earth in order to penetrate a physical body.

Before man approaches his physical body, or rather the embryo, he draws to himself the forces of the etheric world. The characteristic of the physical world we live in here, is that we perceive it through our senses and understand it with our earthly intellect. Yet everything in the physical world is permeated by the etheric world. Everything we see and hear and so on is everywhere permeated with the etheric world, the world in which man lives prior to his life on earth. Before uniting himself with the physical world, through the embryo, he draws forces from the etheric world and fashions his etheric body.

In order to represent this more exactly let me draw a diagram on the blackboard. Let us imagine this to be the soul and spirit of man approaching from the spiritual world (see drawing, violet). That which man draws towards himself from the general ether becomes his etheric body. He clothes himself, as it were, with his etheric body (orange) as he descends from the spiritual world. But to say that is to say very little. We must enter somewhat more closely into the nature of this etheric body. The etheric body which develops within man is a world in itself. One might say that it is a universe in the form of images. In its circumference it has something like stars (yellow stars), and in its lower part something reveals itself which is more or less an image of the earth. It even contains a kind of image of the sun and moon.

It is of extraordinary significance that we, in our descent into earthly life, draw together forces from the universal ether and thus take with us, in our ether body, a kind of image of the cosmos. If one could extract the ether body of man, at the moment when he is uniting himself with the physical body, we should have a sphere which is far more beautiful than any formed by mechanical means—a sphere containing stars, zodiac, sun and moon.

These configurations of the ether body remain during embryonic development, while the human being grows together more and more with his physical body. Though they fade a little they remain. Indeed, they remain right into the seventh year, until the change of teeth. In the ether body of a little child this cosmic sphere is always recognizable. But with the seventh year or with the change of teeth these structures, which are to be seen in the ether body, begin to ray out; up until then they were more star-like. I will make a schematic drawing of how it appears between the ages of seven and fourteen—i.e., roughly between the change of teeth and puberty (see drawing, red rays). As I said, the structure begins to grow paler during embryonic development and continues to do so but is still clearly present. From the change of teeth, it becomes quite pale, at the same time it sends rays inwards (red). One could say that the stars dissolve within the human ether body and become rays which have a tendency to come together inwardly.

All this takes place gradually throughout the period of life between the change of teeth and puberty. At puberty the process is so far advanced that these rays, having grown together at the center, form, as it were, a distinct structure (red). It could be said that the surrounding stars become very pale and so too the rays, though something is still discernable. By contrast, what has come together into a ball-like formation in the center becomes particularly vivid and alive. Within this structure the physical heart, with its blood vessels, is suspended by the time puberty sets in (blue).

Thus, we have this extraordinary situation that the star- ether body draws inwards. As ether body it is, of course, present throughout the body but in later life it is undifferentiated at the periphery. During the time from the change of teeth until puberty it rays intensely from without inwards. It forms a center within which the physical heart is suspended.

You must not suppose that until then man has no etheric heart. He certainly has one, but one obtained differently from the way in which he acquires the etheric heart he now has. For what has thus rayed together into a center becomes, at the time of puberty, the etheric heart. The etheric heart he had before this time he had received as heritage through forces inherent in the embryo. When man gathers his ether body and with it approaches the physical organism a kind of etheric heart, a substitute etheric heart, so to speak, is drawn together by the forces of the physical body. But this etheric heart which man has in childhood slowly decays—this may not be a very nice expression, but it does fit the situation—and is replaced gradually, as the decaying processes take place, by the new etheric heart. The latter is formed by a raying together of the whole universe. In reality, it is an image of the cosmos which we bring with us as an etheric structure when, through conception and birth, we enter earthly existence. Thus, we trace, throughout the time from birth or rather conception until puberty, a distinct change in the structure of the etheric body. One can say that not until puberty is man's own etheric heart present—formed out of his own etheric body. Thus, he no longer has a provisional heart.

All the ether forces active in man up until the time of puberty have a tendency to provide him with a fresh etheric heart. It can really be compared with the change of teeth in the physical sphere. At the change of teeth, the inherited teeth are pushed out and replaced with our own. Likewise, the inherited etheric heart, which we have until puberty, is pushed out and we get our own etheric heart. This is what is essential: that we get our own etheric heart.

Parallel with this, something else occurs. When we observe man soon after his entry into the physical world, that is, when we observe a very young child, we find an extraordinary number of organs distinguishable in his astral body. As just described, man gathers together an ether body which is an image of the external cosmos. But in his astral body he brings with him an image of the experiences he has undergone between his last death and his present birth. Much, very much is to be seen in the astral body of the young child; great secrets are inscribed there. Very much is to be seen of his experiences since his last death. This astral body is extraordinarily differentiated and individual. The strange thing is that during the time when all that I have described takes place in the etheric body, the highly differentiated astral body becomes ever more undifferentiated. Originally, it is a structure of which one must say—if one observes it with understanding—that it comes from a different world. It has entered into this world from a realm that can be neither the physical nor the etheric. Up to the time of puberty all the many individual structures living in the astral body slip into the physical organs, as it were, primarily into those which are situated above the diaphragm (that is not quite exact but approximately so). Wonderful structures, radiantly present in the astral body in the first days of life, gradually slip into the brain and also penetrate the sense organs. Other structures slip into the organs of breathing, yet others into the heart and through the heart into the arteries. They do not slip directly into the stomach; but through the arteries they spread into the abdominal organs. Gradually, one sees the whole astral body, which man brings with him into physical existence through birth, dive down into the organs. The astral body slips, as it were, into the organs. One could express it by saying that by the time we reach adulthood our organs have imprisoned within them the individual structures of our astral body. This may sound strange to ordinary consciousness but it corresponds absolutely to the reality. It also provides a deeper knowledge of the human organs. One cannot fully understand the human organs unless one understands the astral body that man brings with him. One must know that each individual organ, in a certain sense, harbors within it an astral inheritance, just as the first etheric heart is an inheritance.

Gradually, the inherited astral is completely permeated by what man brings with him as his astral body. This astral body dives down, bit by bit, into the physical and etheric organs. The heart is as it were an exception. Here, too, the astral dives down; but in the heart, not only the astral process, but the etheric, too, is concentrated. This is also the reason why the heart is such a uniquely important organ for man.

The astral body becomes ever more indefinite because it sends the distinct structures it brought over from another life through birth into the physical organs in which they become confined. This causes the astral body to become more or less like a cloud. But the interesting thing is that while, on the one hand, the astral body becomes cloud-like, on the other, new differentiations enter in, slowly at first, but from puberty onwards quite regularly.

When a baby kicks with its little legs this is not particularly noticeable in the astral body. True, the effects are there but the differentiations which the astral body brought with it are so strong that the following occurs: Let this be the astral body with its wonderful structures (yellow). (This sketch is, of course, merely an indication, but it does illustrate the reality.) These structures gradually disappear; they slip into the physical organs and the astral body becomes ever more cloud-like. But, as I said, when the baby kicks, all kinds of effects are to be seen in the astral body. They

impinge upon the structures within it and from these the effects are reflected and disappear (red). It is comparable with making an impression on an elastic ball—the ball at once recovers its shape. No matter how forcefully the child kicks, while it does make impressions in the astral body they do not last. However, more and more is retained in the astral body in proportion to the child's learning to speak and form mental pictures which are retained in memory. To the extent that the child speaks and develops memory, to that extent less and less is thrown back. Rather does one see how the movements which the child now makes—no longer kicking, but reasonable movements with arms and legs and so on—are retained in the astral body. Indeed, an extraordinary amount can be inscribed in the astral body.

At forty-five practically all movements have left their traces in the astral body and much else besides, as we shall see. The astral body will by that time have taken up much of what has happened since the person, as a child, learned to speak and to think and the astral body's own configuration dissolved. Therefore, the wonderful structure, which the astral body of the child presents, gradually becomes undifferentiated; though not completely so, as its content disappears into the organs. Into this undifferentiated structure all the movements we make with our arms and legs are inscribed. And so, too, are the actions resulting from these movements. For example, when we guide a pen in writing, all that comes about in the external world through this action is inscribed. When we chop wood, or we give someone a box on the ear, all is inscribed into the astral body. Even when we do not do something ourselves but instruct somebody else to do it, this too is inscribed. In the latter case it happens through the relation that exists between the content of our words and the deed. In short, the whole of man's activity which finds expression in the external world is inscribed into the astral body (red in yellow). Thus, our astral body becomes differentiated in the most varied manner through our human activity. As already mentioned, this begins when the child learns to speak, endowing its speech with thoughts. Those concepts which the child receives but cannot later remember are not so inscribed. It begins only at the time to which our ordinary memory reaches back in later life. From then on practically everything a man does become inscribed in his astral body.

The strange thing is that what is thus inscribed has a tendency to meet inwardly just as the rays in the ether body meet in the etheric heart. All human deeds also meet there. This coming together is due to an outside cause. As human beings we must, right from childhood, engage in some activity. All this activity expresses itself as indicated throughout the astral body; but there is a constant resistance to its being inscribed. The influence on the organism cannot always take full effect in the upper part (upper part in drawing). It meets resistance everywhere in this part and is pushed down. Whatever we do with the help of our physical organs has a tendency to stream upwards to the head. But the human organization prevents this from happening by holding it back. This causes the influences to collect together and form a kind of astral center (red).

This, again, is clearly developed at the time of puberty, so that at the same place where our own—not the inherited- etheric heart formed itself we have also an astral structure which centralizes all our deeds. Thus, from puberty a central organ is created wherein all our doing, all our human activity is centered. In the same region where man has his heart the sum total of all his activity is centralized, but in this case neither physically nor etherically, but astrally. The significant thing is that at the onset of puberty—the astral process coincides only approximately with the physical process—man's etheric heart is so far prepared that it can take into itself the forces which develop from our activity in the external world. Thus, to describe what actually occurs one could say: From puberty onwards, the totality of man's actions pours, via the astral body, into the etheric heart—i.e., into the organ which is an image of the whole cosmos.

This is a phenomenon of extreme significance. When you think about it you will realize that it amounts to an interconnection of man's earthly deeds with the cosmos. You have in the heart, as far as the etheric world is concerned, a whole cosmos drawn together, and, at the same time, as far as the astral world is concerned, the totality of man's activity drawn together. This is where the cosmos and its processes join with man's karma. Only in the region of the heart is there such a close correspondence between the astral and etheric bodies and man's organism. The reality is that the ether body which man brings through birth is an image of the whole cosmos; and this essence of the

cosmos within him permeates itself with all his deeds. This flowing into one another in mutual permeation provides the opportunity for human actions continually to be inserted into the essence of the cosmic images.

When man goes through the portal of death and lays aside his physical and etheric bodies, this etheric-astral structure—within which the physical heart, as it were, swims—contains all that which man takes with him into his further soul-spiritual life. Because within the heart, in the etheric body, the substance of the whole cosmos is drawn together, man is able, as he grows spiritually larger and larger, to hand over to the cosmos his entire karma. The etheric structure, which is an essence of the cosmos drawn together in the heart, now returns to the cosmos. The human being expands into the whole cosmos and is received into the soul-world. He then continues his passage through what I described in my book Theosophy as the Soul World and Spirit Land.

When we observe the human organization in its becoming we have to say: In the region of the heart the cosmic and the earthly come together. They form a union in such a way that the configuration of the cosmos is taken into the etheric heart and there it prepares to receive all our deeds. Then when we go through the gate of death and enter a new cosmic existence, we take with us the outcome of this intimate union of the etheric and our human actions.

This is, in fact, a concrete description of how man lives his way into his physical body and how he is able to withdraw from it again through the fact that his deeds give him the force to hold together what he formed out of the essence of the cosmos.

The physical body is built up within the physical-earthly realm through heredity—i.e., through embryonic forces. With this unites that which man brings down from the spiritual world after having drawn together the ether body. This T,' which has gone through many earth-lives and has a certain development behind it, lives within that wonderful structure he has brought with him as his astral body. His T has a certain sympathy for the structures that exist in the astral body. When they slip into the organs of the physical body as described, the `I' retains this inner sympathy which now extends to the organs. (The word `sympathy' denotes the concrete reality.) The `I' expands more and more within the organs and takes possession of them. Indeed, the `I' has already in earliest childhood a relation to the organs; however, at that time the hereditary conditions are present, as I explained, and the relation is, in consequence, an external one.

Gradually the `I' and astral body slip into the organs of the physical body. This occurs as follows: To begin with the `I' has a somewhat separate existence along the bloodstream within the child, then it begins to unite ever more closely with the blood circulation until at puberty they are fully united. Thus, while you have an astral structure surrounding the etheric and physical heart (see drawing, page 94, orange), the `I' takes another path to the heart. Let us say the `I' slips into the lungs—it will then, through the veins leading to the heart, gradually approach the latter. The `I' follows the circulating blood, becoming more and more intimately united with it, so that here again, via the detour of the ego forces circling with the bloodstream, the `I' enters the structure formed by the union of the etheric and astral heart. This structure alone makes it possible for the cosmic-etheric to grow together with a human astral. I said earlier that the astral body gradually comes to contain an extraordinary amount because all our deeds are inscribed in it. But more than that is inscribed. Through the fact that the `I' has sympathy for everything concerning the astral body, our intentions—that is, the ideas on which we base our actions—also become inscribed. In this way human karma unites with cosmic laws.

Of all this taking place in man's inner being, practically nothing is known nowadays. What is known are the results of man's physical actions which are judged according to laws of nature; also known are his moral actions which are judged according to laws of morality. But man's moral and physical deeds come together in the heart. Therefore, these two things, which for man today go on side by side independently of each other, are discovered to be a unity when one learns to understand the whole configuration of the human heart. That is to say, when we understand what takes place in the heart, albeit in a much more hidden way, it is comparable to what occurs openly at the change of teeth.

We inherit our first teeth and form the second ones out of the organism. The first fall out, the second remain. The first have an inherent tendency to decay; even if they did not fall out they would not last. The reason that the second teeth sometimes decay is due to external circumstances; to these belong the external causes within the organism itself. Hidden from sight, at the onset of puberty, our inherited etheric heart succumbs to forces of decay and we acquire a kind of permanent etheric heart. Only the permanent etheric heart is fully adapted to take into itself our deeds. Therefore, it makes a great difference whether a person dies before or after puberty. When a person dies before puberty he has only the tendency to bequeath his earthly deeds to karma. Separate earthly deeds may be incorporated in their karma when children die before puberty, but these will be indefinite and changeable. The real building up of karma only begins from the moment when the astral heart has fully penetrated the etheric heart, so that the two form a unity. One could say that this union constitutes, as it were, an organism for the forming of karma; what has thus united and contracted within man, becomes after death ever more cosmic. In the next earthly life, it is again incorporated into the human being. Thus, something is incorporated in us out of the cosmos which retains the tendency to hand over our deeds after death to the cosmos. The laws that shape our karma are effective within the cosmos so that at the start of a next earthly life we carry into it the consequences of what the cosmos made of our deeds.