The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As we are meeting together here for the first time today, let us speak of some intimate concerns of our spiritual science. We will discuss what concerns the evolution of the human individuality at first in somewhat general terms and next time in detail. We can understand the life of a single individual only when we also know the epoch in which he lives. The human soul evolves through the ages, progressing from one incarnation to another. The soul's faculties today are not the same as in earlier times. Human faculties have reached the point today at which human beings can perceive the world of the senses and can think it through inwardly. Before this epoch it was completely different, because human souls still possessed a certain dreamlike clairvoyance, one could say.

At that time, a person would not have been able to develop his consciousness of self, of his I. The ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance had first to disappear; he had to be limited to the world of the senses to be able, by means of a growing capacity for discernment of physical appearances, to arrive at the consciousness of his own self. In the future, he will win back the clairvoyance he once had and will at the same time be able to hold onto his self-consciousness.

This evolution has proceeded slowly and continuously; nevertheless, we can indicate the exact moment when the conscious condition of physical, sensible perception began. It was the year 3101 before Christ's appearance on earth. Until that time, there existed a natural clairvoyance. Then it gradually began to disappear, and the dark epoch called the lesser Kali Yuga began, in which the human soul could no longer perceive the spiritual world.

Let us imagine now the state of human souls at the onset of that dark epoch. In remembering past epochs, the human soul might say, “I once could behold spiritual beings; I could see into at least a part of the world where the ancient Rishis and Zoroaster were teachers, and I could listen to those great leaders and masters of old; I could hear the great leaders who spoke to me from the wisdom that arises from the spiritual world.” This feeling, however, became ever weaker in those souls.

Three thousand years after the beginning of that dark epoch, a new possibility arose for a human being to unite himself with the spiritual world. This possibility lay in the fact that a person could achieve union with the spiritual world through his I; that is, it was possible for him to perceive the spiritual world even though human perception was limited to the senses. It was through the incarnation of Christ that this possibility arose. All other great world leaders incarnated in such a way that their spiritual being united with an astral body. When we attempt to understand the essence of the Bodhisattvas, we find that their spiritual portion, which worked on earth, raised itself into higher worlds and was linked only to the astral body. In Christ alone do we find a divine-spiritual being in direct connection with a physical body. This means that the I of Jesus abandoned his physical, etheric, and astral sheaths, and the Christ incarnated Himself as the I within those sheaths so that the I of every human being can have a connection with the Christ. Consequently, we see that in earlier ages the great leaders of humanity could be so perceived that one could reach an understanding of their bond with the spiritual world only through pictures. Now, however, in contrast, the whole biography of Christ consists of facts that could come to expression in the physical world. In other words, the Christ event can be grasped with our intellect, with our physical mind. God had to descend to the physical world because the human faculty for perception could no longer raise itself above the world of the physical senses. For this reason came the mighty prophecy of John the Baptist that the disposition of the human soul must change so that the kingdom of heaven can draw near.

In earlier times one could approach the kingdom of heaven to some degree through human clairvoyance. Now one had to find it in Christ Himself through the medium of the senses. In order that humanity should not lose its link with the spiritual world during the dark age of Kali Yuga, Christ had to descend to the physical plane. The Dark Age lasted more than 5,000 years. We are living in the important time of the end of Kali Yuga. Since 1899, the Dark Age, which began in 3101 BC, has already run its course, and since then certain faculties of soul have slowly begun to develop that have not yet been recognized by human science. In this twentieth century of ours, new faculties of the human soul will gradually evolve in a portion of humanity. Before the end of the century, for instance, it will be possible to perceive the human etheric body. Another faculty will be to look inward and behold, as if in a dream, the picture, the counterpart, of a deed one is about to perform. Certain persons endowed in a particular way will have still another experience. What Paul experienced at Damascus, which was a personal experience for him, will become common experience for a certain number of people.

One can perceive the significance of this event in the twentieth century from the following. Paul could learn about everything that had happened in Palestine without its changing him from Saul to Paul. His condition of soul was such that he could not be convinced that the Christ lived in the man from Nazareth. At the event of Damascus, he could say for the first time with his clairvoyant consciousness: Christ exists! The people who will experience the event of Damascus in the twentieth century will receive direct knowledge of Christ. They will not require documentary evidence in order to recognize Christ, but they will have direct knowledge, as is today possessed only by the initiates. All the faculties that today can be acquired by means of initiation will in the future be universal faculties of humanity. This condition of soul, this experiencing of soul, is called in esotericism the “second coming of Christ.” Christ will not be incarnated again in a physical body, but He will appear in an etheric body as in the street near Damascus.

Christ incarnated on the physical plane when humanity had become limited to the physical body. We can repeat today the words of John the Baptist, “Repent! for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (“Change the disposition of your soul so that your own faculties open the spiritual world to you.”) Human beings with etheric clairvoyance will thus behold the Christ appearing before them in an etheric body. The faculties I have just described are lying like seeds in the soul. In the future they will be developed, and one will be able to say that the destiny of a person lies to a certain extent in his own hands. When this etheric vision appears, however, it will be necessary for people to know the significance of these faculties. It will be impossible then to fall back into materialism as people do today. One will not be immediately aware of the faculties when they appear, and those who possess them will even be regarded as sick or deluded by fantasy. It is therefore the mission of spiritual science to prepare human beings for the understanding of such faculties. Communicating the fundamental wisdom (Ideale) of spiritual science thus is not optional but is a necessary measure for the evolution of humanity.

What we have said will often be repeated in the years to come, but it is vital that it be understood correctly. It is possible that materialistic tendencies will penetrate the Theosophical Society, (see Note 6) even to the point that one will believe that Christ will take on a material body when He comes again. If this were to be the case, one could assert that humanity has made no progress at all in the last 2,000 years. Christ appeared 2,000 years ago in a physical body to be perceived by the physical senses. For future clairvoyance He will appear in an etheric body. By means of spiritual science we are preparing ourselves to understand the significant era ahead of us. To be anthroposophists, it is not enough to understand anthroposophy in a theoretical way; we must bring it to life within ourselves. It will be necessary to observe this great event with complete exactness. There will be ambitious persons who try, out of the materialistic direction of theosophy today, to profit for themselves by making believe that they are the Christ, and they will find people who believe them. For the true anthroposophist, it will be a test to arm himself against such attempts and, instead of debasing human feeling in such a way, to raise it up to the spiritual worlds. Those who understand anthroposophy in the right way will say to these false messiahs of the twentieth century: you have announced the appearance of Christ on the physical plane, but we know that Christ will manifest Himself only in an etheric form. True anthroposophists will await Christ's appearance to the higher senses. A person must, before his death, have understood the true significance of this second coming of Christ; then, in the life between death and a new birth, this understanding will open his spiritual senses. Those who will not have these faculties, who have not been able on earth to understand the significance of Christ's second coming, however, must await a new incarnation to be able to acquire this understanding on the physical plane.

We are living in an extremely important epoch. We must characterize the event of Christ's second coming, which will be perceived by clairvoyant human beings. We can characterize this event by directing our attention to the cosmos and by alluding to an event that is approaching in our own day. This event is the appearance of Halley's Comet (see Note 4) which is also an important subject of study in Rosicrucian theosophy. The appearance of this comet is connected with events in the spiritual world. Just as the movements of the planets circling the sun correspond to the regular events in the evolution of humanity, so the appearance of a comet corresponds to an influence that runs counter to the regular events. Rosicrucian research has demonstrated that every comet exerts a particular influence on human evolutions. (see Note 7) The present comet has as its particular influence an intense impulse toward materialism. Every time Halley's Comet has appeared, a new impulse toward materialism has taken place. Its appearance in 1759 corresponded with the epoch in which Voltaireanism was at its high point. The appearance in 1835 corresponded with the materialism of Moleschott, Büchner, and others. (see Note 5) In the same way, in our time there will be a new impulse toward materialism, and the outer sign of this is the appearance of the comet. Those who let themselves be swayed by its influence will fall into the deepest materialism.

Today, not only this impulse exists, but there is also another influence, which is to raise humanity to spiritual heights. This will be observed by those who understand the signs of the times. In the macrocosm, the sign for this influence is the fact that the sun at the vernal equinox has entered the sign of Pisces, the Fish. At the time when Christ appeared, the sun was in the sign of Aries, the Ram. The sun began to enter this sign in about 800 BC and was well into Aries at the time of the event of Golgotha. Now the sun has been in the sign of Pisces for several centuries. In the near future it will have advanced so far in this sign that it will be the outer symbol for the appearance of Christ in the etheric body. You will see, therefore, that anthroposophy does not expound to the world theoretical teaching but rather that the signs of the times have given us the task of teaching anthroposophy. In the West this message has been foreseen for many centuries by those who call themselves Rosicrucians. (see Note 7) Among the Rosicrucians, a Fifth Gospel is taught beside the four that are well known. It is through this spiritual gospel that the other four can be understood, and it will be given to a portion of humanity of the twentieth century, just as the others were given on the occasion of the physical appearance of Christ. Those adherents to the Rosicrucian movement who will have a clear consciousness will understand the significance of this Fifth Gospel for humanity. (see Note 8)

If you will become attentive to Rosicrucian theosophy, your striving will be able to enter into the spirit of the progress of humanity, so that it will become possible to understand the Christ Who is to appear in a new form. The time is at hand when we will be able to recognize the Christ directly, even if, though this is unlikely, all the Gospels as printed documents should be lost.

One can speak about these things only in a circle where a preparation exists that has been acquired not only through theoretical learning but through continuous breathing of the air of our group life. In public lectures one must observe certain boundaries, but in this group we breathe such an air that these great truths could be spoken of tonight. Our souls, however, should not be satisfied merely with the expression of such truths in words but should gain from them the strength for daily work, a light that will stream daily into ordinary life, and a strength for the future. One must become wiser through truth, but one must also speak ever more courageously of the truth, as of a spiritual blood that we wish to allow to flow into our feeling and will.

The question often arises today as to why the teachings of spiritual science must be imparted now, while one hundred and twenty years ago, for instance, one heard nothing of it. Actually, the communication of spiritual truths has always taken place, but in a different form from today. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the teachings penetrated out of small brotherhoods and, for well-considered reasons, were put into writing not by the originators but by other people. Only scanty accounts penetrated out of those early mystery schools. One can still find today, however, one or two books in whose dim pages—dim only on the surface—are quite wonderful things. Such a book, Aurea Catena Homeri, was mentioned by Goethe. What its pages reveal will seem like fantasy or nonsense to modern readers, especially the most “enlightened.” If one approaches this “nonsense” with the tools of spiritual science, however, one will find something quite different. The greatest secrets are disclosed to one who studies its pages carefully. In earlier times, only a few individuals could advance into this occult science, but now there is unlimited opportunity for everyone whose heartfelt longing leads him there. How has this come about and why may these secrets now be brought to the public?

There is almost no historical age that cannot be described as a time of transition. Every age is asserted to be so, with more or less justification. Our present time, however, in which such fundamental events are occurring, can rightly be called an era of transition. To understand the deep foundations of our time, it is necessary to consider some well-known facts. We are approaching an era in which the ascent to higher worlds must take place with clear, clairvoyant consciousness. The old clairvoyance of Atlantis expired in 3101 BC, and then the time came when human beings began to perceive everything around themselves with an understanding bound to the brain. (This date is not to be taken as an absolute but as an approximate date.) The clairvoyant consciousness of humanity had to be darkened for a certain time in order that man should fully master the physical plane. The lesser Kali Yuga, or the Dark Age, now began and lasted 5,000 years; it had run its course by 1899. Now a time is being prepared in which it will become possible for people to unfold delicate clairvoyant faculties even without special training. From 1930 to 1950 there will already be people who will say, “Around that person I can see something like a bright band of light.” Another will see something rising before him like a dream-picture with a strange content. If this person has just performed a deed or action, something will appear to him that will rise like a picture in his soul. This picture will show him what action he must undertake sooner or later to compensate for this deed. It may happen that a person in whom these faculties are found relates them to a friend who will perhaps tell him, “Yes, there have always been human beings who know what you have seen. They call it ‘the etheric body of man,’ and what rises up in you like a dream-picture they call ‘karma.’”

Spiritual science has had to appear so that this age of etheric clairvoyance, which redeems the age of thinking that is controlled by an understanding bound to the brain, should not pass by unrecognized. As the Christ had to have a forerunner, so spiritual science had to appear in order to prepare for this clairvoyant age. Something could certainly happen now that would crush the bud of these delicate faculties of soul. This danger exists when people will not listen to the teachings of spiritual science, when they close themselves to them. Then the persons in whom these faculties appear will be called fantastic and foolish and will be locked up in mental hospitals. Many will themselves believe that they have had hallucinations; others will be afraid to speak about them, dreading to be laughed at or ridiculed. All this can lead to destruction of the new faculties of soul. Clever and enlightened persons in that era—you can put “enlightened” in quotation marks—will then say, “Look here! People lived long ago who declared that in our age there would be individuals with special faculties of soul. Where are these people? We are not aware of them.” Nevertheless, the prophecy of spiritual science will have been fulfilled. Although everything could be stifled by the increasing power of materialism, one can expect from souls today an understanding for that freer and lighter age just beginning.

Everything that happens in the world has an effect on everything else. The microcosm corresponds to the macrocosm. Let us study the events in the world that are connected with us. People are so easily satisfied when they can assert the truth of something. For spiritual science, however, it is of less concern always to emphasize that something is true than that this truth is also important. Much, for instance, is spoken and written about the similarity between human and animal skeletons. That is certainly a fact to which there could be no objection; yet there are truths that are much, much more important. There is, for example, the truth everyone can observe, a fact standing right before our eyes and yet connected with a great cosmic event. This is the truth that man is the only being who walks erect, who has raised himself up. Concerning the oft-mentioned similarity of the human skeleton to that of the ape, the erect gait of the ape has been botched. The ape tried to raise himself up but did not succeed. His erect gait is bungled. The erect gait of man is directly connected with the sun and the earth, with their spiritual working one upon the other. In order for man to walk upright, the sun and earth had to separate from each other. The animal is earthbound, but man has raised himself, and his countenance is turned upward. He walks in a vertical line, and with his erect gait he is a continuation of the earth's radius. That this truth is of importance is something we must feel; we must learn to feel it.

Let us look at another important instance of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. In outer form a human being appears as either masculine or feminine. It is important to consider, however, that only in the outer form is one a man or a woman, not in one's inner being (we are speaking now of the outer characteristics in one incarnation). What contrast in the macrocosm corresponds to what appears in us as masculine and feminine? To clarify this, we must cast a glance into world space. There we find material substances that have remained backward; they have not taken on the laws of the sun and earth but have remained at the ancient Moon stage of evolution. Just the opposite is the case with the present moon, which is a body that has precipitated its own evolution. On account of this, it has become too strongly hardened. It had to dry up and freeze because it overshot its normal development. It is a future Jupiter condition that has miscarried, as if in human life a child had the constitution of an old man. The moon has thus missed its strength by going too far, thereby causing its own death.

In general, people will swear to a truth if it comes to them as an abstract principle; in concrete terms, however, this same truth appears to them as illusion. In all theosophical books one finds the remark that the world is an illusion or maya. Every theosophist knows this as truth and often repeats it. To say that the masculine or feminine body is only an illusion contributes something concrete to the abstraction. It is a fact that neither the masculine nor the feminine body, with the exception of the head, is properly developed. The feminine body is not fully developed, whereas the masculine has gone too far in its development. There is no middle position here. The feminine form is untrue in its backwardness, the masculine because it went too far beyond the middle position of development. Great artists have always felt these imperfections. Clothing arose from an exalted feeling for this fact. The ancient robes of priests were supposed to represent what the human body should be. Only sensual people can devote themselves to nudist colonies, because they recognize no higher expression than the body they see before them.

There is thus a lunar body, the moon, which has gone too far in its evolution, and such bodies as have remained at an earlier stage of evolution, namely, the comets. You may ask what all this has to do with man and woman. A comet brings with it the laws of the earlier Moon and therefore renews these ancient laws. It also brings with it the cyanide compounds, as has recently been established by outer science and has been known for a long time to occult science. Just as oxygen and carbon compounds are necessary to us on earth, so the cyanides were essential on the ancient Moon. In 1906 I enlarged on this in Paris, at the annual meeting of the Theosophical Society, in the presence of Colonel Olcutt, our president at that time, and various others. (see Note 2)

Because a woman's body has remained behind in its development, it has preserved a softer, more flexible, less substantial materiality; her brain can more easily be ruled by the spirit. A man, however, having rushed ahead in his development, now has difficulty prevailing over his rigid material and more impermeable brain substance. For this reason, a woman is more receptive to new ideas, her soul takes possession of them, and she can more easily direct her thoughts through the brain. It is harder for a man to set into motion the rigid parts of his brain. It thus stands to reason that there are, for example, more women than men in the Theosophical Society, a fact much deplored on various sides. Perhaps the men who stand in such dread of appearing as women in a later incarnation will find these thoughts somewhat consoling.

We will now apply the law of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, between the large and small worlds, to another important matter. Just as in ordinary life we have our humdrum days—waking up, going to bed, waking up again, going about our usual tasks—so it is also in the far reaches of space. There, too, everything goes about its usual course; the rising and setting of the sun are repeated in a regular rhythm. Just as a family's methodical pace is interrupted when a child appears, since a completely new impulse enters earthly existence with a new spiritual being, so the appearance of a new heavenly body, such as a comet, has the same effect in space. All material is the expression of something spiritual, and occult science is able to indicate what lies behind the phenomena. The way in which modern science tries to occupy itself with comets is similar to a fly observing the Sistine Madonna. When it crawls over the Madonna, it certainly sees the colors, sees a spot of red here, a spot of blue there, but beyond this it sees nothing at all. This “fly-science”—the term is naturally used only in reference to what was mentioned above—knows nothing of the inner lawfulness whose outer sign is the comet. Halley's Comet particularly has the tendency to drive humanity still further into materialism. Without Halley's Comet, the books of the Encyclopedists would not have appeared, and there would not have been articles by Moleschott and Büchner after 1835. Today the ominous sign of the comet is appearing again, and if people do not listen to the teachings of spiritual science and do not make use of what is offered through it, spirituality will receive a death-blow. (see Note 4)

There is another significant sign, however, one that makes it possible for humanity to escape the destructive influence of the comet; its forces are even stronger than the comet's. This is the spring sign of Pisces, the Fish, in which we have stood for several centuries; at the time of Christ the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Aries, the Ram. We are thus well into this sign of great spiritual forces that will carry us upward. Through understanding these forces, we will develop the faculties that we will be able to attain in this age of Pisces.

Man rises to true human dignity only when he grasps from the depths the relationships that lie at the foundation of the spiritual. People should not rush so blindly past what the heavenly signs have to show them. Wisdom should inflame and enlighten its association with small and great. You may take as an example of this the wisdom-filled organization of an anthill. There the whole has a meaning; every ant feels itself to be a member of a whole. Human beings, however, regulate their social life according to what each individual considers useful for himself. They run around each other senselessly, without understanding. Human life is really nonsensical in many ways.

Whenever a person takes on an inner discipline, however, he makes himself ripe for what should be brought forward as a third fact: the possibility of looking out into the etheric with newly awakened faculties. There the soul will see what Paul once saw: the Christ in His etheric body. Without books and documents this great event—the second coming of Christ—will take place for those who have made themselves worthy of it. It is the obligation of anthroposophy to announce this. There are already human beings who sense that we have overcome the Dark Age and are approaching a more luminous era. Anthroposophists must walk this path consciously. Anthroposophy must bring its fruits to humanity, so that souls are made capable of uniting themselves with Christ. Whether these souls inhabit a physical body or not makes no difference; He has descended to the dead as well as to the living. The great and sublime event of Christ's appearance in the etheric thus has significance for all the world.

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

Let us ask ourselves why must self-knowledge be so difficult for us. Man is truly a complicated being, and if we speak of his inner life, his life of soul, we should not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We should rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate always more deeply into this wonderful structure, this organization of the divine-spiritual powers of the world, which can appear as man.

Before we investigate the nature of this self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has north and south poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world as the principle poles of the light, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. Both these poles can appear when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations in life. Suppose we are watching someone standing on the street who is entirely lost in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that he is engaged in making an inner picture of what he sees. We say that he is absorbed in contemplation of what surrounds him. That is one situation; here is another. A man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him, injured him. Without much thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and we can easily imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two extremely different deeds. In the one there is only the forming of a mental picture, a process from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no forming of a mental picture, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. These two things present us with the two extreme poles of the human soul. One pole is surrender to contemplation, to forming mental pictures, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. We have arrived at these facts simply by exoteric observation of outer life.

We can go into these things more deeply, and we come then into those spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of esoteric research to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. We know the esoteric significance of the relationship between sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I—are organically and actively interwoven but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed while the astral body and I are poured out into the whole great world bordering directly on our physical existence. We could also approach these facts from a different point of view. We might ask what there is to be said about contemplation of the world, forming mental pictures, thinking, and the will and its impulses during waking life on the one hand and during sleep on the other.

You see that if one penetrates more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, essentially always asleep. He sleeps differently during the night, however, from the way he sleeps during the day. You can be convinced of this in a purely outer way, because you know that one can wake in the esoteric sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The ordinary physical body is asleep to this observation, and one can rightly say that it is an awakening when man learns to use his spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. One can therefore say that ordinary sleep is sleep in relation to the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep in relation to the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny one realizes that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, little power or control over his will. The will quite detaches itself from daily life. Observe attentively what we call the human will, and you will see how little man has in his control during daily life regarding the will impulse. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking and forming of mental pictures, of your personal, individual decisions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!” that cannot be called a true decision of your own thinking and willing. If you are hungry and seat yourself for a meal, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your condition, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life, and you will see how little the will is directly influenced from the human center. Why is this the case? Esoteric teachings show us that regarding his will man actually sleeps by day; that is, he does not really live within his will impulses at all. We can evolve better and better concepts and mental pictures, or we can become more highly moral, more refined individuals, but we can do nothing regarding the will. If we cultivate better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will, but we can do nothing directly to the will that concerns life. This is because in our daily life our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely, through sleep. When you are asleep you do not think; you do not form mental pictures. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we do not perceive this activity of the will, that we know nothing about it, becomes comprehensible if we consider that all conceptual activity sleeps when we sleep. To begin with, therefore, we will offer this suggestion for further contemplation, further meditation. You will see that the more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in his will when he is awake and sleeps in his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

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

There are thus two poles in human beings, the life of observation and forming mental pictures and the impulses of will, and the human being is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. These are only the two poles, however. The whole life of soul lies in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding this soul life by bringing the microcosmic life of soul into relation to what we know as the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have seen that the life of forming mental pictures is one of the poles of one's soul life. This life of forming mental pictures is something that seems unreal to externally, materialistically minded people. We often hear the thought expressed, “Oh, mental pictures and thoughts are only mental pictures and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if one takes a piece of bread or meat into one's hands, this is a reality, but a thought is only a thought. By this is meant that one cannot eat a thought, and thus a thought is not real but “only” a thought. But why? Basically, because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image of an object is to the thing itself. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadow-image of mental pictures and beings belonging to a higher world, the world called the astral plane. You represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus (this is not absolutely correct but simply sketched schematically). In this head are thoughts, which I shall represent with these dashes. These thoughts that are in the head, however, must be pictured as living beings on the astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming mental pictures and deeds that cast their shadow-images into human beings, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking. Continuous streams move from your head into the astral plane, and these are the shadows that establish the life of thought within your head.

As well as what we can call the life of thought, there is yet another life within the human soul. In ordinary life one distinguishes (this is not entirely correct, but I say it so that one can receive a concept from ordinary life) between a life of thought and a life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from the mere forming of mental pictures. We form mental pictures of things regardless of any other factor. Our soul, however, experiences sympathy or antipathy only regarding what is beautiful and good or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in the human being as thoughts points to the astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Just as I could draw lines earlier between mental pictures and the astral world, so now in relation to feeling I can point upward to Devachan or the heavenly world. Processes in the heavenly world, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. In what we can call our experience of the moral-aesthetic world, we bear within our souls shades of the heavenly world or Lower Devachan.

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

We can easily picture these three separate stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, mental pictures, observation), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to do good or evil deeds)—as microcosmic images within human experience of the three realms which, in the macrocosm, the great world, lie one above the other. The astral world is shadowed in the world of thought, the intellectual world; the Devachanic world is shadowed in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is shadowed as morality.

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the human soul, we must experience the pole of intellect as that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is intellectually awake. During the day man is awake regarding his intellect; during sleep he is awake regarding his will. Because at night he is asleep regarding his intellect, he becomes unconscious of what he is undertaking with his will. What we call moral principles and impulses are working indirectly into the will. In fact, man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he absorbs through the life of thought can come into effective activity. In his ordinary life today, man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane, for there he is dependent upon help coming from the macrocosm.

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

Between these two poles, that of the will that wakes by night and that of the intellect that is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation that is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake; only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. Human beings basically must actually dream by day, they must always be able to dream a little when awake; they must be able to give themselves up to art, poetry, or some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a bond that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such thoughts is to a certain extent like a dream penetrating into waking life. You know well that dreams enter into the life of sleep; these are real dreams, dreams that permeate the other consciousness in sleep. This is also something that human beings need by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreams come during sleep at night in any case, and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming lies the condition that can live in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the astral plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought, wherein originate the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep, and images from Lower Devachan are shadowed into us. When we work during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot perceive this directly, but certainly we can perceive its effects—when we are able to imbue our thinking during the night with the influence of divine-spiritual powers, then the impulses we perceive are shadowings from Higher Devachan, the higher heavenly world. These are the moral impulses and feelings that live within us and lead us to say that human life fundamentally is justified only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of divine-spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

What we present here as the life of the human soul, first from outer, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character, is revealed by deeper esoteric research. The processes that have been described in their more outer aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the clairvoyant eye, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart toward the head. If we wish to sketch this schematically, we must draw the region of the heart here and show the continuous streamings from there to the brain, flowing in the head around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland.

These rays of light stream from the heart to the head and flow around the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is continually dissolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance that streams upward toward the head and flows glimmeringly around the pineal gland. This process, the etherization of the blood, can be shown in the human being throughout his waking life. It is different now, however, in the sleeping human being. When a human being sleeps, the occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart.

These streams, however, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ greatly from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to esoteric observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular coloring of the streams that flow into human beings during sleep; in a person of lower moral principles the streams are quite different from what is observable in a person of higher principles. Endeavors to disguise one's nature by day are useless. In the face of the higher cosmic powers, no disguise is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination toward moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in color—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake, the intellectual element streams upward from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downward from above. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality and an outstreaming intellectuality, a peaceful expansion of glimmering light appears in the region of the pineal gland. This gland is almost surrounded by a small sea of light in the moment between waking and sleeping. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral character is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the region of the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—one from the macrocosm, the other from the microcosm.

To estimate the full significance of how these two streams meet in man, we must first consider what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the moral elements that stream downward from above, from the brain toward the heart; we must also grasp the full significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful esoteric research of recent years, undertaken by individuals among the genuine Rosicrucians. (see Note 7) These investigations have shown that something corresponding to what has been described in connection with the microcosm also takes place in the macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, so a similar process takes place in the macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our eyes to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ. This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been described as the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, it must be recognized as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds and into the earth, a substance was imparted to our earth which, in uniting with it, constituted an event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the earth, and it could take place only once. What happened with this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of earthly evolution, this blood passed through a process of “etherization.” Just as our blood streams upward from the heart as ether, so, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the etherized blood of Christ Jesus has lived in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the earth is permeated by what the blood that flowed on Golgotha became. This is important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the earth could only have been as previously described. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, there has existed the continuous possibility for the activity of the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherized blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the earth, it accompanies the etherized human blood streaming upward from the heart to the brain, so that not only do these streams that I described earlier meet in man, but the human bloodstream unites with the bloodstream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can come about, however, only if man is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ impulse. Otherwise, there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every age of earthly evolution, we must acquire understanding in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on earth, preceding events could be rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They experienced baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives, karma, that had come to an end, might be changed, and in order that they might realize that the most powerful impulse in earthly evolution was about to descend into a physical body. The evolution of humanity progresses, however, and in our present age it is important that man should learn to understand that the knowledge contained in spiritual science must be received and gradually be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that anthroposophy can be understood. If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to comprehend the event that has its beginning in the twentieth century: the appearance of the etheric Christ in contradistinction to the physical Christ of Palestine.

We have now reached the moment in time when the etheric Christ enters into the life of the earth and will become visible, at first to a small number of people, through a natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next 3,000 years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass; it is an event of nature. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A certain number of individuals will see the etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. This will depend, however, upon such human beings learning to observe the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young in years—already preparation is being made for this—that some person here or there has certain experiences. If only he has truly sharpened his vision through engaging himself with anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he sees is a physical man. He will come to realize, however, that this is a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silently in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people, even in considerable numbers, are sitting together not knowing what to do and waiting, they will see the etheric Christ. He Himself will be there, will confer with them, will cast His word into such gatherings. We are now approaching these times, and the positive, constructive element now described will take hold of the evolution of humanity.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of human beings. Whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress, however, in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the person who experiences the awakening in his soul through Christ, Who will now take hold of human culture and its concerns. What thereby awakens in human beings will be unifying, positive forces. Christ brings constructive forces into human civilization.

If we were to look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that human beings built their dwelling places by methods quite different from those used today. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces, they summoned nature to their aid by having plants and branches of trees interlace with one another, and so on. Today, human beings must build with broken fragments. We make all culture of the outer world with the products of fragmentation. In the course of the coming years you will understand even better how much in our culture is the product of destruction.

Light is destroying itself within our post-Atlantean earthly processes. Until the time of Atlantis the earthly process was a progressive process, but since then it has been a process of decay. What is light? Light decays, and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is destroying itself within matter. The chemical force that undergoes a transformation within earthly evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active, and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilization in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied to destroy the earth in order that man can become free of the earth and that the earth's body can fall away. As long as the earth was involved in a progressive process, this was not done, since only the decaying earth can use the great achievements of electricity. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. We must understand the process of evolution to evaluate our culture in the right way. We shall learn thereby that it is necessary for the earth to be destroyed; otherwise, the spirit will not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely, the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on earth.

We thus realize what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ necessarily lived for three years on the earth in a specially prepared human body in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years, human beings have become ripe to behold the Christ Who will move among them in an etheric body, Who will enter into earthly life as truly and effectively as did the physical Christ in Palestine. If human beings observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about within the physical world, but they will know that this is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles I have mentioned, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia human beings will learn increasingly to observe the etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be permeated in waking life, too, by the direct working of the good from the spiritual world. Whereas now the will sleeps by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through what from our time onward is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of human beings in waking condition, too, can be directly productive of good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue be able to be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on earth not only for our intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but, through this teaching, for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is most difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognize moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, through the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ. Through this, the need for moral impulses on earth will be increasingly clear to man. Man will transform the earth in so far as he feels with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of the earth. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for people who receive immoral help, who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric powers, and who strive for this possession.

This is the future condition of the earth: there will be a sufficient number of people who increasingly teach morality and at the same time offer a moral foundation, but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the time when the earth passes into conditions which, as in so much else, are only described in the great definitions of Oriental occultism, Oriental mysticism. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered considerable strength. For many thousands of years Oriental mysticism has spoken of this moment in time, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken especially strongly about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Oriental mysticism thus foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the earth from the being we call the Christ. It was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental mysticism were set.

Oriental mystics were able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. They could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of one Who could not be recognized through Oriental mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would come to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the moral atmosphere of the earth, not in physically embodied form but as pure Akashic forms within the earth's moral atmosphere. Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, so it was said, the teacher will also be there to make known to human beings what these wonderful forms are, these pure forms of Fire and Light. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our time and will be able to teach people about the Christ impulse.

Oriental mysticism thus unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a beautiful unity. It will also be disclosed that he who will appear 3,000 years after our time as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the beginning of our era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is the same one who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha himself but as Bodhisattva. Even in our age there proceeds from him who later will be the Maitreya Buddha the most significant teachings concerning the Christ being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian mysticism.

Those things by which man can recognize the being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian wisdom. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognized by the fact that at first in his youth his development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognize the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being, manifesting between the ages of thirty and thirty-three and not before. Something akin to an exchange of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began his lifework in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ impulses, reveal themselves in the thirty-third year of their lives. The Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that must first be created, because no human being today could find the words with which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason human beings cannot yet be addressed in this way is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teaching of the Enlightened One will not stream into human beings as teachings only but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Such words cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that will come in the future. Those who take the process of man’s evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that its development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for human beings could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the spiritual life through what we today call anthroposophy. The cultivation of anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually experience, something toward which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when we experience the mysteries of the world so as to arouse in us the wish to become anthroposophists, then our experience is right. Anthroposophy must not, however, be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only when this is the case do we experience in the right sense; only then do we live as living building stones in that great construction that must be carried out in human souls and that can embrace all humanity.

Anthroposophy is thus a revelation of true world phenomena that will confront people of the future and will confront our own souls, whether still in a physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming upheaval will concern us regardless of whether we are still living in the physical body or whether we have laid it aside. People must acquire understanding of the earth in the physical body if it is to take effect between death and a new birth. To those who acquire some understanding of Christ now in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes to behold Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the portal of death. But if those who now reject understanding of the Christ have already passed through the portal of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, because such understanding cannot be acquired between death and a new birth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth. Anthroposophy is thus not only something we learn for our physical life but also has value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as an understanding of humanity and a handle in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher worlds and beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great world, and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and the I—are worlds for divine beings. Our physical, etheric, and astral bodies and I form one world; the other is the higher world, the world of heaven. For the divine-spiritual beings, the higher worlds are the bodily members in high, divine-spiritual worlds.

Man is so complex because he is truly a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realization of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. From this knowledge, however, that although we are pictures of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, in addition to consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility toward the macrocosm and its gods.

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

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (I Cor. 12:10), to be understood?

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

Question: How will one understand Christ's words of consolation?

Answer: Human beings will feel these words of consolation as though they arise in their own hearts. They can also be received through physical hearing.

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

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances that can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the harmony of the spheres. In the union of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a shadowing of two tones of the harmony of the spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a shadowing from the world of the harmony of the spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are really an expression of the numerical ratios of the harmony of the spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able actually to bring material substance into etheric dilution and to perceive the atomic numbers as the inner formative principle, one would hear the harmony of the spheres.

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

Question: What is electricity?

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

Question: What happens to the earth's corpse?

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

 Reflected as sub-physical world: Astral World ............. the province of Lucifer Lower Devachan ........... the province of Ahriman Higher Devachan .......... the province of the Asuras 

You will recall the studies in which we have tried to establish a relationship to the different premises and assertions of modern psychoanalysis. What mattered to me in those studies was to bring clarity into the concept of the “unconscious,” to show that the way in which the concept of the “unconscious” is commonly used in psychoanalysis is essentially unfounded. As long as one is unable to go beyond this concept, a purely negative concept, one cannot say more than that psychoanalysis works with insufficient methods of cognition on an especially challenging phenomenon today. Because the psychoanalysts strive to explore the soul and spirit and, as we have observed, even pursue this soul and spirit into a social life, one must admit that we have here a point of departure that is much more significant than what official academic science is able to offer in this realm. Because analytical psychology tries to intervene in life, however, through pedagogy, therapy, and soon, most likely, social and political means, the dangers related to this matter must be regarded with great concern. The question thus arises what it is essentially that the researchers of today cannot and do not wish to reach. They recognize that there exists a soul nature beyond consciousness; they search for a soul beyond consciousness, but they cannot raise themselves to cognition of the spirit itself. Spirit can in no way be grasped through a concept of the unconscious, because an unconscious spirit is like a human being without a head. I have brought to your attention that there are people who under certain hysterical conditions walk about the streets and see in other human beings only their bodies, not their heads. It is a definite form of illness if one is unable to see a person's head. Among contemporary researchers, there are some who believe they are seeing the whole spirit. Since they represent the spirit as unconscious, however, they show immediately that they themselves have fallen prey to illusion, the illusion that there is an unconscious spirit, a spirit without consciousness, if we were to cross the threshold of consciousness, whether in the right way, as we have always described it in our spiritual scientific research, or in an ill, abnormal way, as in the cases that are usually submitted to psychoanalysts.

When one crosses the threshold of consciousness, one always enters a spiritual realm; regardless of whether one enters the subconscious or the super-conscious, one always enters a spiritual realm. This is a realm, however, in which the spirit is conscious in a certain way, is developing some form of consciousness. Where there is spirit there is also consciousness. One must only seek the conditions under which the consciousness in question exists. Through spiritual science it is possible to recognize what type of consciousness a particular spiritual being has.

A week ago the case was presented here of the lady who left a social gathering and ran in front of some horses but then was prevented from jumping into a river and was carried back to the house from which she had fled. There she was brought together with the master of the house, because in some unclear, subconscious way she was in love with this man. In this case it may not be said that the spirit, which did not belong to this lady's consciousness, this spirit that pushed and led her, is an unconscious spirit or that it is an unconscious soul quality. Indeed, it is something extremely conscious. The consciousness of this demonic spirit that led the lady back to her unlawful lover, this demon is indeed much shrewder in its consciousness than the lady is in her muddle-headedness, that is to say her consciousness. When the human being in any way crosses the threshold of his consciousness, these spirits that become active and powerful are not unconscious spirits. Such spirits become consciously active and powerful in their own right. The expression, “unconscious spirit,” as the psychoanalysts use it, has no sense whatsoever. If I were to speak merely from my own viewpoint, I could just as well say that the whole illustrious company sitting here is my unconscious if I were unfamiliar with it. Just as little may we describe as unconscious the spiritual beings that surround us and that take hold of the personality under particular conditions, as was the situation in this case that I related a week ago. They are subconscious; they are not actually grasped by the consciousness that lives directly within us, but in themselves they are fully conscious.

It is exceptionally important to know this—particularly for the task of spiritual science in our time—basically because the knowledge of a spiritual world that lies on the other side of the threshold and the knowledge of truly self-conscious individualities is not merely an achievement of today's spiritual science but is actually an ancient knowledge. In earlier times it was only known through an ancient, atavistic clairvoyance. Today one knows it through other methods; one learns to know it gradually. The knowledge of actual spirits to be found outside of human consciousness—spirits living under different conditions from human beings but standing in continuous relationship to human beings, spirits that can take hold of the human being in his thinking, feeling, and willing—this knowledge was always there. This knowledge was always considered the secret treasure of particular brotherhoods, who treated this knowledge within their circles as strictly esoteric. Why did they treat it in this way? To enlarge on this question would lead at this moment too far afield. It should be said, however, that individual brotherhoods were permeated with the earnest conviction that the majority of humanity was not sufficiently mature for this knowledge. Indeed, this was the case to a large extent. Many other brotherhoods, however, which are called brotherhoods of the left, were striving to retain this knowledge, because such knowledge, when taken possession of by a small group, would give this group power over others who did not possess such knowledge. There have always been endeavors whose aim was to secure power for certain groups over others. This could be achieved by considering a particular kind of knowledge as an esoteric possession but using it in such a way that the power over something quite different was expanded.

In our day it is particularly necessary to have real clarity in these matters. As you know—I have enlarged on this in the last lectures—since 1879 humanity has been living in a very special spiritual situation. Since 1879, extraordinarily powerful spirits of darkness have been shifted from the spiritual world into the human realm, and those people who cling to the mysteries connected with this fact and retain them wrongfully within small groups could cause everything imaginable with these secrets. Today I shall show you exactly how certain mysteries that relate to present-day development can be used in a wrongful way. You must be careful, however, to consider coherently all that I say today, which will be of a more historic nature, with what I will add tomorrow.

You all know that for a long time attention has been drawn within our anthroposophical stream to the fact that this twentieth century is one that should bring about in the evolution of humanity a special relationship to the Christ. This relationship to Christ will come about in the course of the twentieth century, and already in the first half, as you know, will begin the phenomenon that has been suggested in my first Mystery Drama, in which for a large number of people Christ in the etheric will be an actual, existing being.

We know that we actually live in the age of materialism. We know that since the middle of the nineteenth century this materialism has reached its climax. In reality, however, polarities must converge. It is exactly this climax of materialism within the evolution of humanity that must converge with the intensification in human evolution that leads to truly beholding Christ in the etheric. One can grasp that just the announcement of the mystery of beholding Christ, of this new relationship with humanity into which Christ will enter, would arouse ill-will and resistance from some human beings. These would be members of certain brotherhoods who wished to exploit the event of the twentieth century, this event of the appearance of the etheric Christ, who wished to use it for their own purposes and not allow it to become general human knowledge. There are brotherhoods, and brotherhoods always influence public opinion by allowing this or that to be publicized by such means as would be least noticed by people. There are certain occult brotherhoods who spread the message that the age of materialism has almost run its course, that in a certain way it is already past. These poor, pitiable, “clever people”—in quotation marks, of course—spread the doctrine in numerous assemblies, books, and societies that materialism has exhausted itself, that one can already grasp again something of spirit, but they can offer people nothing more than the word spirit and single phrases. These people are more or less in the service of those who have an interest in saying what is not true, that materialism has been “ruined by bad management,” as it were. This is not true; on the contrary, materialistic thinking is in the process of growing. It will thrive most when people deceive themselves by believing that they are no longer materialists. The materialistic way of thinking is in the process of increasing and will continue to increase for about four or five centuries.

It is necessary, as has been frequently emphasized here, to grasp this fact in clear consciousness, to know that it is so. Humanity will come to a true healing when one works so thoroughly in the life of spirit that one knows absolutely that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is there for the purpose of extirpating materialism from the general evolution of humanity. A more spiritual being, however, must counteract materialism. I have spoken in previous lectures about what people of the fifth post-Atlantean period must learn to meet, that is, the fully conscious struggle against evil rising up in the evolution of humanity. Just as in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch the task lay in the struggle with birth and death, so we are now facing a struggle with evil. What matters now, therefore, is to grasp spiritual teaching in full consciousness, not to cast sand into the eyes of contemporaries as if the devil of materialism did not exist. He will thrive increasingly. Those who deal with these matters in a wrongful way know about the event of the appearance of Christ as well as I do, but they deal with this event in a different way.

In order to understand this one must keep one's eyes on the following. Now that humanity has become what it has in the post-Atlantean time, the phrase that many people expound in their comfortable smugness is completely incorrect: “While we live here between birth and death, it is a matter of surrendering ourselves to life. If later, when we have passed through death, we then enter a spiritual world, that will reveal itself in good time and for that we can wait. Here we will enjoy life as if there were only a material world; if one enters a spiritual world through death, such a world will then reveal itself, if it really exists.” This attitude is about as clever as the pledge that someone makes, saying, “As truly as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” It is just about that intelligent, but it is the attitude of many who say, “It will be revealed after death how things are; meanwhile it is not at all necessary to occupy ourselves with spiritual science.”

This attitude has always been contestable, but in the post-Atlantean period in which we live it becomes especially ominous, because it has been particularly urged upon human beings by the powers of evil. When man under the present conditions of evolution passes through the portal of death, he takes with him the conditions of consciousness that he has created for himself between birth and death. The person who has occupied himself under present circumstances exclusively with materialistic ideas, concepts, and sense impressions of the material, of the sense world, condemns himself after death to live in an environment in which only concepts defined during bodily life have bearing. The human being who has absorbed spiritual ideas enters the spiritual world legitimately, but one who has rejected spiritual ideas is forced to remain in a certain sense within earthly conditions until he—and this may endure for a long time—has learned there to absorb enough spiritual concepts that he can be carried by them into the spiritual world. Whether we absorb spiritual concepts or reject them therefore determines our environment on the other side of the threshold. Many of those souls—and this must be said with compassion—who have rejected or were hindered from absorbing spiritual concepts here in life are still wandering about on earth and, though dead, remain bound to the earthly sphere. The soul of the human being, however, when no longer separated from its environment by the physical body—which can then no longer prevent the human soul from acting destructively—becomes a source of disturbance within the earthly sphere.

Let us study what I would like to characterize as the more normal situation, in which souls under present circumstances pass over into the spiritual world after death, souls who wished to know nothing at all about spiritual concepts and experiences. They become sources of disturbance, because they are retained within the earthly sphere. Only souls who here on earth have already been completely permeated by a certain relationship to the spiritual world pass through the portal of death in such a way that they can be received in the right way in the spiritual world. They will be carried away from the earthly sphere in such a way that they can spin threads to those remaining behind, threads that are continually being spun. We must be clear about this: the spiritual threads between the souls of the dead and those of us who are bound to them are not ruptured by death; they remain, are even closer, after death than they were here on earth. What I have said must be accepted as a serious, significant truth.

I am not the only one who has this knowledge; others are also aware that this is so at present. There are many, however, who exploit this truth in a terrible way. There are misguided materialists today who believe that material life is the only one, but there are also initiates who are materialists and who spread materialistic teaching through brotherhoods. You must not be misled into believing that these initiates are of the foolish opinion that there is no spirit or that the human being does not have a soul that can live independently of the body. You can be confident that one who has been truly initiated in the spiritual world would never surrender himself to the foolishness of believing in mere matter. There are many, however, who have a certain interest in encouraging the dissemination of materialism and who make all sorts of arrangements so that a large proportion of human beings believe only in materialism and are totally under its influence. There are brotherhoods that have at their head initiates who have exactly this interest in cultivating materialism and disseminating it. These materialists are well served when there is constant talk that materialism has already been overcome, for it is possible to further some causes by using words with antithetical meaning. How this is handled is often most complicated.

What is it that such initiates desire, these initiates who know quite well that the human soul is a purely spiritual being, a spiritual being fully independent of corporeality? What do these initiates desire who, in spite of knowing this, shelter and cultivate the materialistic thinking of human beings? These initiates desire that there should be as many souls as possible who here between birth and death absorb only materialistic concepts. Through this, these souls are prepared to remain in the earthly sphere. They become to a certain extent fastened to the earthly sphere. Picture to yourself that brotherhoods are established that clearly know this, that are thoroughly familiar with these circumstances. These brotherhoods prepare certain human souls so that they remain in the realm of the material. If these brotherhoods then arrange—which is quite possible through their infamous power—that these souls come after death into the region of the power-sphere of their brotherhood, then this brotherhood grows to tremendous strength. These materialists, therefore, are not materialists because they do not believe in the spirit—these initiate materialists are not so silly; they know full well the spirit's position. They induce souls to remain with matter even after death, however, in order to make use of such souls for their own purposes. From these brotherhoods, a clientele of souls is thus produced who remain within the realm of the earth. These souls of the dead have within them forces that can be guided in the most diverse ways, with which one can bring about a variety of things and by means of which one can come to special manipulations of power in relation to those who have not been initiated in these things.

This is simply an arrangement of certain brotherhoods. In this matter, one can see clearly only if one does not allow oneself to be deceived by darkness and fog, does not permit oneself to be deceived by the belief that such brotherhoods either do not exist or that their activities are harmless. They are by no means harmless; they are, in fact, extremely harmful. They say that human beings should enter more and more deeply into materialism, that they should believe, according to the thinking of such initiates, that spiritual forces exist, to be sure, but that these spiritual forces are nothing other than certain forces of nature.

Diagram 5 Click image for large view

I would like to characterize for you the ideal that such brotherhoods hold. One must exert a little effort to understand the situation. Picture for yourself, therefore, a harmless world of people who are somewhat led astray by today's prevailing materialistic concepts, who have strayed away a little from the old, established religious ideas. Picture for yourself such a harmless humanity. Perhaps we can picture it for ourselves graphically.

We imagine here the realm of such a harmless humanity (larger circle). As I said, this humanity is not completely clear about the spiritual world; led astray by materialism, they are unsure how they should conduct themselves toward the spiritual world. They are especially unclear how they should act in relation to those who have passed through the portal of death. Let us assume that the realm of such a brotherhood is here (small circle, green). This brotherhood spreads the teachings of materialism; it is concerned that people think purely materialistic thoughts. In this way the brotherhood brings about the procreation of souls who remain in the earthly sphere after death. These would become a spiritual clientele for the lodge (see drawing, orange). This means that dead people have been created who would not leave the earthly sphere but would remain on earth. If the right preparations have been made, they can be retained in the lodges. In this way, therefore, lodges have been created that contain the living as well as the dead, but dead who are related to earthly forces.

The matter is directed so that these people hold sessions in the same way as was the case with the seances held during the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, about which I have often spoken. It may then happen—and I beg you to bear this in mind—that what occurs in these seances is directed by the lodge with the help of the dead. The true intention of the masters of those lodges, however, is that the human beings should not know that they are dealing with the dead but rather should believe that they are dealing with higher forces of nature. People are made to believe that these are higher forces of nature, that psychism and the like are only higher forces of nature. The true concept of soul will be taken from them, and it will be said that, just as there is electricity, just as there is magnetism, so there are also such higher forces. The fact that these forces are derived from souls is concealed by those who are leaders in the lodge. Through this, however, these others, these harmless souls, gradually become completely dependent, dependent in their souls, upon the lodge, without realizing what is subjugating them, without realizing the source of what is actually directing them.

There is no remedy against this situation other than knowledge of it. When one knows about it, one is already protected. When one knows it to the extent that the knowledge has become an inner certainty, a real conviction, then one is protected. One must not, however, be too lazy in striving to gain knowledge of these things. It must be said, though, that it is never entirely too late. I have often brought the following to your attention: these things can become clear only gradually, and I can pull together only gradually the elements to bring you complete clarity. I have often made you aware that, in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, many brotherhoods of the West introduced spiritism experimentally to convince themselves through this test that they had gone as far with humanity as they had intended. It was a testing to see how far they were with humanity. In these seances they expected that people would say that there are higher forces of nature. Then they were disappointed, these brothers of the left, that people did not say this but rather said that in the seances spirits of the dead appear. That was a bitter disappointment for the initiates; that was exactly what they did not want, because it was just this belief in the dead that these initiates wished to take from man. Not the activity of the dead, not the activity of the forces of the dead, but this thought that the forces derive from the dead, this correct, significant thought, this was to be taken from man. The brothers see that this is a higher materialism; it is a materialism that not only denies the spirit but wishes to force the spirit into matter. They see that materialism has forms in which it can already be denied. One can say that materialism has disappeared—we are speaking already about spirit, but all of them speak about spirit in a vague way. It is very easy to be a materialist when all nature has been made into spirit in such a way that psychism emerges. What is important is that one is able to cast one's glance into the concrete spiritual world, into concrete spirituality.

Here you have the beginning of what will become more and more intense in the next five centuries. These evil brotherhoods now are limiting themselves, but they are bound to continue their activity if they are not prevented, and they can only be prevented if one overcomes laziness toward the spiritual scientific world conception.

Through these seances, therefore, these brotherhoods betray themselves, so to speak. Instead of covering themselves, they have unveiled themselves through these seances. This showed that their scheme was not really quite successful. For this reason, the impulse sprang up within these same brotherhoods to strive to discredit spiritism for a time during the 1890s. In short, you can see how deeply incisive effects can be achieved in this way with the methods of the spiritual world. What we are dealing with here is the enhancement of power, exploiting certain evolutionary conditions that must emerge in the course of humanity's evolution.

This growing materialization of human souls, this imprisonment of human souls within the earthly sphere—lodges are also in the earthly sphere—will be counteracted. If the souls therefore haunt the lodges and are to be effective there, they must be confined to the earthly. This striving, this impulse to work in the earthly sphere through the souls, is counteracted by the significant impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. This impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha is also the healing of the world against the materialization of the soul. The way taken by Christ Himself is completely outside the will and intentions of human beings. No human being, therefore, no matter how knowledgeable—also no initiate—has influence over what Christ does, which will lead, in the course of the twentieth century, to the appearance about which I have spoken and of which you will find indications in the Mystery Dramas. This depends completely upon Christ Himself. Christ will exist in the earthly sphere as an etheric being. It depends upon the human being how he establishes a relationship to Him. On the appearance of Christ Himself, therefore, no one, no initiate however mighty, has any influence. It will come. I beg that you hold firmly to this. Arrangements can be made, however, for receiving this Christ event in this way or that, for making it effective.

These brotherhoods about which I have just spoken, which wish to confine the souls of human beings to the materialistic sphere, strive for the Christ to pass unnoticed through the twentieth century, for His coming as etheric individuality to be unobserved by human beings. This striving evolves under the influence of a quite definite idea, under a definite impulse of will. These brotherhoods have the urge to conquer the sphere of influence that is to come through Christ in the twentieth century and to continue further, to conquer it for another being, about which we shall speak later in more detail. There are brotherhoods of the West who strive to battle the Christ impulse. They wish to place another individuality who has never yet appeared in the flesh but only as an etheric individuality, who is of a strong Ahrimanic nature, in place of Christ.

All these measures about which I have just spoken regarding the dead and so forth serve in the end the aim of leading human beings away from Christ, Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and of securing the rulership of the earth for another individuality. It is a real struggle, not just something that I know of as abstract concepts or whatever but a real struggle. It is a real struggle that concerns itself with placing another being in place of the Christ being in the course of human evolution for the rest of the fifth post-Atlantean period and for the sixth and seventh. It will be the task of a healthy, honest spiritual development to eradicate such strivings, which are in the true sense of the word anti-Christian, to remove them, to annihilate them. This can be achieved, however, only through clear insight. This other being whom the brotherhood wishes to substitute as ruler they will call “Christ”; they will actually designate him as the “Christ.” What will be important will be to distinguish between the true Christ, Who, when He appears, will not be an individuality incarnated in the flesh, and the being that is distinguished from the true Christ by having never yet incarnated during earthly evolution. This other being is one who has only reached etheric embodiment, and he will be put by the brotherhoods in the place of Christ, Who is to pass by unobserved.

There we have the part of the battle concerned with counterfeiting the appearance of Christ in the twentieth century. He who observes life only on the surface, above all in outer discussions about Christ and the question of Jesus and so forth, does not look into the depths. This is the fog, the fumes with which people are deceived, diverting them from the deeper things, from what is the essential issue. When theologians debate about Christ, there is always in such discussions a spiritual influence from somewhere. These people then encourage quite different aims and purposes from those in which they actually believe consciously.

This is just the danger of the concept of the unconscious, that people are driven into confusion even concerning such circumstances. These evil brotherhoods pursue their aims very consciously, but what the brotherhoods pursue consciously naturally becomes unconscious for those who have all kinds of superficial discussions and plans. One does not reach the heart of the matter, however, when one speaks about the unconscious, for this so-called unconscious is simply on the other side of the threshold of everyday consciousness. It is in that sphere in which the knowing one can unfold his plans. You see that this is essentially one side of the situation, that it is really so that a number of brotherhoods take an opposing stand, brotherhoods who wish to replace the activity of the Christ with the activity of another individuality. These brotherhoods arrange everything so that they can achieve their purpose.

Countering this are brotherhoods of the East, especially Indian brotherhoods, who wish no less significantly to interfere in the evolution of humanity. These Indian brotherhoods pursue yet another goal. They have never developed the type of esotericism through which they could ensnare the dead into their realm, into the realm of the lodges. That is far removed from their purposes; they have no interest in such things. On the other hand, they also do not wish the Mystery of the Golgotha with its impulse to take hold of the evolution of humanity. They also do not wish this. It is not, however, that they do not wish it because the dead are at their disposal, as I indicated is the case with the brotherhoods of the West. They wish to fight against the Christ, Who will enter human evolution as an etheric individuality in the course of the twentieth century, not by substituting another individuality; for that purpose they would need the dead and these they do not have. Instead they wish to divert the interest away from this Christ. They do not wish to allow Christianity to become strong, these brotherhoods of the East, especially the Indian brotherhoods. They do not wish the interest in the true Christ, Who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, to flourish, the interest in the Christ Who had only a single incarnation for three years here on earth and Who cannot appear again on earth in a physical incarnation. They do not wish to make use of the dead in their lodges but something other than what were once simply living human beings. In these Indian, Eastern lodges, a different type of being is made use of in place of the dead used by the Western lodges.

When a human being dies, he leaves behind his etheric body; it separates from him soon after death, as you know. Under normal conditions this etheric body is assimilated by the cosmos. This absorption is somewhat complicated, as I have shown you in many different ways. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, however, and even after Golgotha, particularly in the Eastern regions, something quite distinctive was possible. When the human being after death surrenders such an etheric body, certain beings are able to inhabit this etheric body; they then become etheric beings with these etheric bodies that have been laid aside by human beings. In Eastern regions, therefore, it now happens that not dead people but all kinds of demonic spirits are induced to inhabit etheric bodies laid aside by human beings. Such demonic spirits that inhabit the etheric bodies laid aside by human beings are taken into the Eastern lodges. The Western lodges thus have the dead who have been directly confined within matter; the Eastern lodges of the left have demonic spirits, spirits that do not belong to earthly evolution but who creep into earthly evolution by occupying the etheric bodies vacated by human beings.

Exoterically this phenomenon is transformed through veneration. You know that certain brotherhoods possess the art of calling forth illusions. Because people do not know how widespread illusion already is in reality, they can easily be deceived by artificially called forth illusions. It is done in this way: what one wishes to achieve is clothed in the form of veneration. Imagine that I have a tribe of people, a related clan; I have arranged ahead of time as an “evil” brother the possibility that the etheric body of an ancestor is occupied by a demonic being. I say to them that they must venerate this ancestor. The ancestor is simply the one who had laid aside his etheric body, which was then occupied by demons through the machinations of the lodge. The veneration of ancestors is thereby brought about. These ancestors who are being worshipped, however, are simply demonic beings within the etheric body of the respective ancestor.

One can divert the world conception of Eastern people from the Mystery of Golgotha by working in these ways, as they do in the Eastern lodges. Through this their purpose will be achieved, that Christ as individuality, as He is intended to pass over the earth, remains unnoticed by Eastern people and perhaps by people everywhere. They therefore do not wish to substitute a false Christ but to cause the appearance of Christ Jesus to remain unnoticed.

To a certain extent a twofold struggle is thus waged today against the Christ impulse appearing in the etheric in the course of the twentieth century. Humanity is actually inserted within this evolution. What we see happening in individual cases is essentially only a consequence of what is transpiring in the great impulses of humanity's evolution. For that reason it is sad that people will be deceived constantly when the unconscious, the so-called unconscious, is working within them—be it some receding love affair or something similar—when, in fact, impulses of extremely conscious spirituality are passing from all sides through humanity but remaining relatively unconscious if one does not trouble oneself about them in one's consciousness.

To these things you must add much more. Human beings who have been honestly concerned with the evolution of humanity have always taken into consideration such things as we have characterized, and they have undertaken what was right from their point of view. Much more than this the human being cannot or is not permitted to do.

A good sheltered place for spiritual life, an exceptionally good sheltered spot, protected against all possible illusions, was Ireland, the Irish Island during the first Christian centuries. It was truly protected from all possible illusions, more than any other region on earth. This is also the reason that so many disseminators of Christianity in the early Christian centuries originated in Ireland. These disseminators of Christianity, however, had to work with a naive humanity, because European humanity, among whom they were active, was in those days naive. They had to take this humanity in its naiveté into consideration, but as far as they themselves were concerned, they had to know and understand the great impulses of humanity. In the fourth and fifth centuries particularly, Irish initiates were active in Central Europe. They began there, and their activity consisted in preparing what was to take place in the future. To a certain extent they were under the influence of the initiate-knowledge that revealed that in the fifteenth century (1413, as you know) the fifth post-Atlantean era was to begin. They were under this influence. They also knew that they had to prepare for a completely new age, that a naive humanity must be protected for this new period. What was it that was done at that time to protect this naive humanity, to build a fence around it, as it were, to keep certain harmful influences from entering? What was done?

Evolution was guided first by well-instructed and then by honest groups in such a way that gradually all ocean journeys were suppressed, journeys that in past times had been made from Northern lands to America. It was thus arranged that whereas in past times boats would cross from Norway to America for certain purposes (I shall say more about this another time), this knowledge of America would be completely forgotten by the European population, so that the connection with America was gradually obliterated. In the fifteenth century nothing was known of America by European humanity. The development was directed particularly from Rome so that for definite reasons the connection with America was gradually lost, because European humanity had to be sheltered from American influences. Especially involved in this process of protecting European humanity from American influences were just these monks from Ireland who as Irish initiates had spread Christianity over the European continent.

In ancient times quite definite influences were brought from America; in the age when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, however, matters were arranged so that European humanity was uninfluenced by America, knew absolutely nothing about it, lived in the belief that America did not exist. Only after the fifth post-Atlantean period had begun was America again discovered, as is familiar history. One of the truths with which you are most likely familiar is that what is learned in schools as history is many times a “fable convenue.” That America was discovered for the first time in 1492 is such a convenient fable. It was only rediscovered. It was merely that for a period the connections were cleverly concealed, as had to occur. It is again important, however, to know what the situation was, to know the true history. True history is that Europe was fenced in for a time and was carefully protected against certain influences that were not to come to Europe.

Such things show you how significant it is not to accept the so-called unconscious as an unconscious but rather as something that is extremely conscious and takes place beyond the threshold of everyday human consciousness. It is indeed important for a larger portion of humanity to learn about certain mysteries. I have therefore done as much as it is possible to do now in public lectures in Zurich. In Zurich, as you may know, I have gone at times as far as to explain to people the extent to which historical life is not grasped by human beings with the ordinary consciousness but is in reality dreamt, how the content of history is in reality dreamt by human beings. Only when people become conscious of this will health come to these concepts.

These are things through which one gradually awakens consciousness. The phenomena, the facts that will come about, will show us the truth of these things. One must only be sure not to overlook them. Human beings go blindly and slumbering through the facts; they also go blindly and slumbering through such tragic catastrophes as the present one. These are things that I would like to impress upon your hearts, today more historically. Tomorrow I shall speak about these things more explicitly.

I would like to add one more picture to these things. First, you have seen from the discussion what a tremendous distinction there is between East and West in the evolution of humanity. Second, I ask you to consider the following. You see, the psychoanalyst speaks about the subconscious, about the subconscious life of the soul, and so on. It is not so important to speak about such an indefinite concept of these things, but it is necessary to grasp what is truly beyond the threshold of consciousness. What is there? Much is certainly to be found down there under the threshold of consciousness. For itself, however, what lies down there is extremely conscious. One must come to understand what kind of conscious spirituality exists beyond the threshold of consciousness. One must speak of conscious spirituality beyond the threshold of consciousness, not unconscious spirituality. We must become clear that man has much about which he knows nothing in his ordinary consciousness. It would put the human being in a terrible position if he had to know in his ordinary consciousness all that goes on within him. Just consider how he would be able to go about eating and drinking if he were to acquaint himself exactly with all the physiological and biological processes that take place from the ingesting of food onward, and so on. All this takes place in the unconscious. There are spiritual forces at work everywhere, even in the purely physiological. Man cannot wait with eating and drinking, however, until he has learned what is really going on within him. So much goes on within man! For man, a large portion, by far the largest portion, of his being is unconscious, or to say it better, subconscious.

The strange thing is that this subconscious that we carry within us is taken hold of by another being under all circumstances. This means that we are not only a fusion of body, soul, and spirit, carrying within us through the world our soul, which is independent of our body; shortly before birth another being takes possession of the subconscious portions of the human being. This being is there, this subconscious being that accompanies man the entire way between birth and death. Somewhat before birth it enters man and accompanies him. One can also characterize this being as one that permeates man in those parts that do not come into his ordinary consciousness: it is a very intelligent being and possessed of a will that is akin to the forces of nature; in its will it is much more closely related to the forces of nature than is man. I must emphasize the peculiarity, however, that this being would suffer extraordinarily if under present conditions it were to experience death with man. Under present conditions this being cannot experience death with man. It thus disappears shortly before death; it must always save itself. It always has the urge, however, to arrange the life of the human being in such a way that it can overcome death. It would be dreadful for the evolution of the human being, however, if this being that has taken such possession of man should also be able to conquer death, if it could die with man and in this way enter the spiritual worlds that man enters after death. It must always take its leave of man before he enters the spiritual world after death. In some cases this is very difficult for this being, and all sorts of complications arise.

This is the situation: this being that holds sway completely in the subconscious is extremely dependent upon the earth as a whole organism. The earth is not at all the being described by geologists, mineralogists, and paleontologists; this earth is a fully living being. Man sees only its skeleton, because the geologist, mineralogist, and paleontologist describe only its mineral nature that is the earth's skeleton. If you knew only this much, you would know about as much as if you were to enter this room and, through some special arrangement of your capacities for sight, could see nothing of this honored company but the bones, the skeletal system. Imagine if one entered through the door and on these chairs sat nothing but skeletons (not that you necessarily would have nothing but bones—that I do not expect of you—but we will assume that man has the capacity to see only bones; he would be fitted out with some kind of X-ray machine). This is just what geology sees of the earth; it sees only the skeleton. This earth, however, not only consists of skeleton but is a living organism, and this earth sends from its center to every point on the surface, to every territory, special forces. Picture for yourself the surface of the earth (see drawing):

Diagram 6 Click image for large view

Here is the Eastern region, there the Western region, to take it only on a large scale. The forces that are transmitted from the earth are something that belong to the life organism of the earth. Depending on whether a human being lives on this or that spot on earth, his soul, this immortal soul, does not come directly in contact with these forces but only indirectly—the immortal soul of man is relatively independent of earthly conditions. The soul is only artificially dependent upon earthly conditions, as was shown today. By the circuitous path through this other being, however, this being that takes possession of man before birth and must leave him again before death, these various forces work particularly strongly. These forces are active in racial types and geographic differentiations in human beings. It is thus this “double,” which man bears within him, upon whom the geographic and other differentiations particularly exert their influences.

This is extremely significant, and we will see tomorrow in which way this double is influenced from various points of the earth and what the resulting consequences are. I have already mentioned that it is necessary for you to consider what I have said today with what will come tomorrow, because the one can hardly be understood without the other. We must now try to absorb into ourselves such concepts as become even more serious when related to the total reality, to that reality in which the human soul lives with its entire being. This reality metamorphoses itself in various ways, but how it is metamorphosed depends greatly upon man. Two significant metamorphoses that are possible become clear when one is aware of how human souls, depending upon whether they absorb materialistic or spiritual concepts between birth and death, imprison themselves on earth or come into the right spheres. In these matters increasing clarity must prevail in our concepts. We will then find increasingly the right relationship to the entire world. This will not occur in an abstract spiritual movement, but rather it must lie within us, in a concretely comprehended spiritual movement that reckons with the spiritual life of a number of individualities.

It is truly satisfying for me that such discussions—discussions that are also particularly significant for those among us who no longer belong to the physical plane but have passed through the portal of death, remaining our faithful members—that such discussions as these are fostered here as a reality, that they bring us ever closer to our departed friends.

We are now cultivating studies that I have associated with a striving for knowledge that is streaming in, without there yet being the adequate methods to achieve this knowledge. This has led us to distant historical perspectives, in relation to which I beg you to consider the following. With these things—as was also the case in what I said in my last visit with the same intention, from the same impulse—we are dealing with reports of actual events, not with some theory or system of ideas but with reports of facts. It is just this point that we must bear in mind, because otherwise it will be difficult to reach understanding of these things. It is not a matter of my developing historical laws or ideas for you but of presenting facts that relate to the intentions and purposes of certain personalities who are allied in brotherhoods. They are also allied with other beings who influence such brotherhoods, whose influence is sought by these brotherhoods. These beings are not human beings incarnated in the flesh but are beings that incarnate themselves in the spiritual world. It is necessary to bear this in mind, especially regarding such information as I gave yesterday, because with these brotherhoods we are dealing to a certain extent with different factions. You could recognize this already in last year's discussion. At that time I drew your attention to the fact that within such brotherhoods we are dealing with a faction that insists on absolute secrecy regarding certain higher truths. Opposed to them, with various shadings in between, are members of other brotherhoods who contend that, particularly since the middle of the nineteenth century, certain truths must be revealed to humanity, carefully and appropriately, even if to begin with only those truths whose revelation is most necessary. In addition to these main factions there are other groups with different nuances. From this you can see that what is intended, what is planted by such brotherhoods as an impulse into the evolution of humanity, often becomes subject to compromise.

These brotherhoods, who were familiar with the spiritual impulses effective in humanity's evolution, saw the approach of a significant event at the beginning of the 1840s, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century. This event was the struggle between certain spirits and higher spirits, the struggle that culminated in 1879 when certain angelic spirits, spirits of darkness, fell prey to the event that is represented symbolically by Michael conquering the dragon. When the brotherhoods felt the approach of this event, they had to take a stand, they had to ask themselves what could be done. Those members of the brotherhoods who wished above all to take into account the demands of the time were, to some degree, filled with the best intentions. It was they who undertook the erroneous impulse that wished to take into account the materialism of the time. It was they who thought it preferable to bring to the human beings who wished to know things only on the physical path something of the spiritual world; this would be communicated directly in the materialistic way of this physical path. The intentions were thus good when spiritism was thrust by them into the world in the 1840s.

At the time of this struggle, a time in which, as I have indicated, the spirit of criticism was to reign on earth—the intellect directed purely to the outer world—it was necessary to instill into the human being at least an experience, a feeling, that there is a spiritual world surrounding man. As compromises arise, so this compromise also arose. Members of these brotherhoods who maintained an attitude that totally rejected the revelation of certain spiritual truths to humanity saw themselves as being beaten by the majority, as it were, and had to consent to it. Wherever one is dealing with a group, and the will of the group prevails, one has to do with compromises. As is natural in outer life, however, if something is decided within a group, something is expected from the decision not only by those who have set things in motion for their own purposes; those who originally opposed the decision also expect this or that once the decision is made.

Well-meaning, spiritual members of the brotherhood thus held the erroneous attitude that by the use of mediums people could be convinced of the existence of a spiritual world around them. It would then be possible, they believed, to impart to man higher truths on the basis of this conviction. This might have occurred if what these well-meaning members of the brotherhood had surmised would occur had actually taken place, if what these mediums had brought to light had been presented as though one were dealing with the spiritual world around us. Something completely different took place, as I pointed out yesterday. What came to light through the mediums was interpreted by the people who took part in the seances as coming from the dead. What was revealed through spiritism was therefore essentially a disappointment for all. Those who had allowed themselves to be overruled were naturally most distressed that in the seances, at times rightfully, there could be talk about manifestations of the spirits of the departed. The well-meaning, progressive initiates did not at all expect that there would be talk about the dead. They expected that the universal elementary world would be mentioned. They were therefore also disappointed.

Such things are carefully followed by those who are initiated in a certain way. We have, in addition to the aforementioned members of brotherhoods, members of other brotherhoods, or at times portions of the same brotherhood in which minorities—and sometimes also majorities—could form.

We must take heed of other initiates, those who are called within the brotherhoods the “brothers of the left,” that is, those who exploit everything that is embodied as an impulse in human evolution as a means for power. It is self-evident that these brothers of the left also expected all sorts of things to come to light through spiritism. I explained yesterday that it was mostly such brothers of the left who made the arrangements for the use of the souls of dead human beings. For them it was of compelling interest what would come out of these seances. They gradually took over the whole field. The well-meaning initiates gradually lost all interest in spiritism; they felt in a certain way ashamed, because those who had been against the spiritism from the beginning told them it could have been known from the beginning that nothing could come out of spiritism now. Through this, spiritism came into the sphere of power, so to speak, of the brothers of the left. I spoke yesterday about such brothers of the left, who felt disappointed because they saw that, through the spiritism that they themselves had set into motion, could be revealed what they wished above all things would not emerge. Since the participants believed themselves influenced by the dead, it was possible in the seances to reveal through messages from the dead what certain brothers of the left were doing with the souls of the departed. In these seances, exactly those souls could manifest themselves who had been misused to a certain degree by the brothers of the left.

You must take into consideration that with these messages we are not dealing with theories but are relating facts that can be traced to individualities. When these individualities are united in brotherhoods, one individuality can expect one thing, while another expects something different from one and the same matter. It is not possible to speak about actualities in the spiritual world; it is impossible to seek there anything but a working out of the impulses of the individualities. What one does and what another does contradicts itself even as in life. When theories are spoken of, the ground for contradiction may not be broken. When one speaks of facts, however, then just because facts are spoken of, it will frequently be shown that these facts agree just as little in the spiritual world as the actions of human beings do here on the physical plane. I therefore beg you always to consider that it is impossible, when one speaks about these things, to speak about realities if one does not speak about individual facts. It is these with which we are concerned. It thus becomes necessary to keep the individual streams apart, to peel them apart.

This is connected, however, with a very significant matter that one must bring above all to one's consciousness if one wishes in the present to arrive at some sort of satisfying world conception. What I am saying is of prime importance, and although it is something abstract, we must lead this fact once before our souls.

If man wishes to build for himself a world conception, he rightly strives toward harmonizing the individual parts. This he does out of a certain habit, out of a habit that is most justified, because it is related to all that through many centuries has been humanity's dearest treasure of soul and spirit, to monotheism. What is encountered in the world as experience one wishes to lead back to an undivided foundation of the world. This is well justified, though not in the way that we usually believe it to be justified. It is justified in a completely different way, about which we will speak next time. Today I would like to lead before your soul only what is of principal importance.

One who approaches the world with the expectation that everything must explain itself without contradiction, as if it arose from an undivided foundation of the world, will experience many disappointments when he faces the world and its experiences in an unprejudiced way. It is traditional for the human being to treat all that he perceives in the world according to a pastoral world conception, in which everything is led back to the undivided, divine, primordial foundation; everything stems from God and therefore must be understandable as a unity.

This is not the case now, however. What surrounds us in the world as experience does not stem from the undivided primordial foundation. Rather it stems from spiritual individualities different from one another. Different individualities work together in all that surrounds us in the world as experience. This is how it is above all. We will speak next time about other ways of justifying monotheism, but this is how it is above all. We must think of individualities as being to a certain degree—actually to a high degree—independent of one another as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world. One cannot then require that what appears be accountable by an undivided principle. Imagine that this, schematically represented, is some experience (as far as I am concerned it could be the experiences from 1913–1918).

Diagram 7 Click image for large view

The experiences of human beings continue naturally in both directions. The historian is always tempted to assume an undivided principle in this whole process. This is not the case, however. As soon as we cross the threshold to the spiritual world—which can be crossed from either above or below (see drawing, red), it is one and the same—various individualities work together in influencing these events that are relatively independent of each other (see drawing, arrows). If you do not take this into consideration, if you assume everywhere an undivided foundation of the world, you will never understand these events. Only when you take into consideration what is to a certain degree the ebb and flow of events, the varied individualities who work with or against one another, only then will you understand these things in the right way.

This matter is indeed connected with the deepest mysteries of human evolution. Only the monotheistic feeling has veiled this fact for centuries or millennia, but one must consider it. If one wishes to progress today, therefore, with questions of a world conception, above all one must not confuse logic with an abstract lack of contradiction. An abstract lack of contradiction cannot exist in a world in which individualities are working together independently of one another. A striving for conformity will therefore always lead to an impoverishment of concepts; the concepts will no longer be able to encompass the full reality. Only when these concepts are able to take hold of this world full of contradictions, which is the true reality, will they be able to encompass the full reality.

What man has before him as a realm of nature materializes in a remarkable way. Different individualities also work together in all that man calls nature and includes in natural science on the one hand and nature worship, aesthetics of nature, etc., on the other hand. In the present evolutionary cycle of humanity, however, a fortunate arrangement has been found for human beings through the wisdom-filled guidance of the world: man can grasp nature with concepts that relate him to an undivided guidance, because only what is dependent upon an undivided guidance can approach the human being as experience from nature through sense perception. Behind the tapestry of nature lies something quite different, which is influenced from a totally different direction. This is blocked out, however, when man perceives nature. What man calls nature is consequently an undivided system, but only because it has been sifted. When we perceive through our senses, nature is, as it were, sifted for us. Everything that is contradictory in it is sifted out, and nature is transmitted to us as an undivided system. At the moment when we cross the threshold, however, and perceive the reality, bringing clarification into nature—the elemental spirits or influences upon human souls that could also be regulated by nature—one is no longer in a position to speak about nature as an undivided system. Rather one must become clear that we are dealing with influences of individualities who are either struggling with one another or supporting and strengthening one another.

In the elementary world we find spirits of earth, gnome-like beings; spirits of water, undine-like beings; spirits of air, sylph-like beings; and spirits of fire, salamander-like beings. They are all there. They are not there, however, to form a unified regiment. It is not like that. These various realms—gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders—are in a certain way independent. They do not work only as the rank and file from a single system, but they fight with one another. Their intentions have nothing to do with each other to begin with, but what then arises evolves through the most diverse working together of intentions. If one is familiar with the intentions one can see in what appears before us perhaps a working together of fire spirits and undines. One must never believe, however, that behind these beings stands someone who gives them a certain command. This is not the case. This idea is widespread today, and philosophers such as Wilhelm Wundt (about whom Fritz Mauthner unjustifiably said, “Authority by his publisher's grace,” though he was the authority for almost the whole world before the war) aim to gather together as a unity all that lives in the human soul, the life of thinking, life of feeling, and life of willing. They say that the soul is a unity and therefore everything must belong to a unity, to a common system. This is not so, however, and those strong contradictions so full of significance in human life, which analytical psychology has discovered, would not emerge unless our life of thinking beyond the threshold were not to lead us back to quite different regions where other individualities influence our life of thinking, our life of feeling, and our life of willing.

It is so curious! You see, if this is the human being (see drawing) and we have within the human being the life of thinking, life of feeling, and life of willing (see drawing, T, F, W), a systematizer like Wundt would not picture anything but that it is all a system. Meanwhile the life of thinking leads to one world (W1), the life of feeling leads into another world (W2), and the life of willing into yet another world (W3).

Diagram 8 Click image for large view

The human soul is there exactly for the purpose of forming a unity of what in the pre-human, momentarily pre-human world, was a three-foldness.

All these things must be taken into account as soon as we concern ourselves with the impulses for the historic evolution of humanity, these impulses that will be embodied in this historic evolution.

I have mentioned in the course of these studies that every era in the post-Atlantean age has its particular task. I have characterized in general the task of the fifth post-Atlantean period, indicating that it is humanity's task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world. We have frequently discussed what this means. It cannot be otherwise than that forces that appear at the wrong place appear as evil. They can be conquered for humanity, however, through the exertions of human beings in the fifth post-Atlantean period, so that with these forces of evil something good for the future of the evolution of the whole world is in the position to unfold. For this reason, the task for the fifth post-Atlantean period is a particularly difficult one. As you see, a great many temptations face humanity. When the powers of evil gradually appear, it is natural that man is more likely under the circumstances to give in to this evil in all realms, rather than taking up the struggle to allow what appears to him as evil to be put in the service of the good in world evolution. Yet this must happen: the evil must to a certain degree be placed at the service of the good in world evolution. Without this, it would be impossible to enter the sixth post-Atlantean period, which will have a completely different task. It will have the task of allowing humanity to live above all in a continuous contemplation of the spiritual world, of spiritual impulses, in spite of the fact that it is still connected with the earth. Just this task in the fifth post-Atlantean period, that of opposing evil, is connected with the new possibility of a certain kind of personal darkening for humanity.

We know that since the year 1879 the spirits of darkness who are closest to human beings, the spirits belonging to the kingdom of the angeloi, wander about within the human kingdom, because they were thrown out of the spiritual world into the human kingdom and now exist within human impulses, are working through human impulses. I have said that, exactly because of this, beings that are close to man work in an invisible way among human beings, and man is held back from recognizing the spiritual with the intellect through the play of forces of evil. This is again bound up with the task of the fifth post-Atlantean period, because precisely through this many opportunities are given to the fifth post-Atlantean period to lend itself to dark illusions and the like. Man must accustom himself to a certain extent in this period to grasping the spiritual with his intellect. The spiritual will already have been revealed. Because the spirits of darkness were overcome in 1879, more and more spiritual wisdom can flow down from the spiritual worlds. Only if the spirits of darkness had remained above in the spiritual kingdom would they have become a hindrance to this flow. This flow of spiritual wisdom they henceforth cannot hinder, but they can cause confusion and could darken souls. We have often described which opportunities for darkening are exploited. We have already mentioned what arrangements are made to prevent the human being from receiving the spiritual life.

Naturally, all of this cannot give rise to wailing or something of that sort but should strengthen the force and energy of the human soul to approach the spiritual. If in this fifth post-Atlantean period man can achieve what can be achieved through embodying the forces of evil in a good sense, then at the same time something tremendous will be achieved; then this fifth post-Atlantean period will know something for human evolution out of greater ideas than any other post-Atlantean period, yes, than any other period of earthly evolution. Christ appeared, for example, in the fourth post-Atlantean period through the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, however, can make this mystery its own through the human intellect. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, human beings could grasp that they possessed something in the Christ impulse that would lead them as souls beyond death. This became sufficiently clear through Pauline Christianity.

Something still more significant, however, will enter the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in which human souls will recognize that they have in Christ the helper to transform the forces of evil into good. One thing is bound up with this characteristic of the fifth post-Atlantean period, however, one thing that one should inscribe anew every day within the soul. It should never be forgotten, although man is especially inclined to forget this, that man must be a fighter for the spiritual in this fifth post-Atlantean time. He must experience that his forces will weaken if he does not continually hold them in check for the conquest of the spiritual world. Man is given his freedom to the highest degree in this fifth post-Atlantean period! He must endure this. To a certain extent the idea of human freedom must be the testing ground for all that meets man in the fifth post-Atlantean period. If the forces of man should weaken, everything could take a turn for the worse. Man is not in the position in this period to be led like a child. There are certain brotherhoods, however, which hold as their ideal to lead human beings like children as they were still being led in the third post-Atlantean period and in the fourth. These brotherhoods are therefore not doing what is right—they are not doing at all what should be done for the evolution of humanity: to direct human beings toward the spiritual world in such a way that acceptance or rejection of the spiritual world is left to the freedom of the human being.

This must be kept in mind continually by anyone who speaks of the spiritual world in this fifth post-Atlantean period. For this reason certain things in this period can only be said, but the saying is just as important as something else was important in another era. I will give you an example. In our time the communication of truths or, if I may express it trivially, the lecturing about truths, is most important. After that, people should find their direction in freedom. One should not go any further than the lecture, the communication of truths; the rest should follow in free resolve, follow as things follow that one makes as resolves from the impulses of the physical plane. This relates also to things that to a certain extent can only be directed and guided from the spiritual world. We shall understand this better if we enter into individual examples. In the fourth post-Atlantean period it was still so that other things came into consideration than the mere word, the mere communication. What came into consideration? Let us take a definite case: the island Ireland, as we call it today, has particular characteristics. This island distinguishes itself from the rest of the earth in certain ways. Each realm of the earth differs from the others through certain characteristics; that is nothing special. I will emphasize today only the relatively strong distinction between Ireland and the other regions of the earth. In the evolution of the earth, as we have seen in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, (see Note 3) one can go back in time, and various influences, various occurrences, confirm what can be gathered as facts from the spiritual world. You know from Occult Science what things existed when we refer back to what was called the Lemurian time, what has developed since the Lemurian time, how the various things have evolved. I called your attention yesterday to the fact that the whole earth must essentially be regarded as an organism from within which stream different forces upon the inhabitants of different territories. This out-streaming has a special influence upon the double, to which I called your attention yesterday. In past times, the human beings who were familiar with Ireland brought the particular characteristics of Ireland to expression in fairy tales and legends. I would like to point out that an esoteric legend was known that expressed the essence of Ireland in relation to the earthly organism. It was said that humanity was once cast out of paradise because in paradise Lucifer had misled humanity, which was then scattered across the rest of the world. The rest of the world, however, had already been there at the time when humanity was cast out of paradise. One therefore distinguishes—so it is said in this fairy tale, in this legendary representation—between the paradise with Lucifer in it and the rest of the earth into which humanity was expelled. It is different with Ireland, however; it does not belong in the same sense to the rest of the earth, because before Lucifer had set foot in paradise a likeness of paradise had formed itself upon the earth, and this likeness has become Ireland.

You should well understand that Ireland is therefore that bit of earth that had no part of Lucifer, to which Lucifer had no relationship. That which had to be separated from paradise so that the earthly likeness of paradise could arise would have hindered Lucifer from entering paradise. Ireland thus was conceived according to this legend as a separation of those portions of paradise that would have hindered Lucifer from entering paradise. Only after Ireland had been separated from paradise could Lucifer enter paradise.

This esoteric legend that I have presented in a very incomplete way is something very beautiful. It was for many people an explanation for the unique task of Ireland throughout the centuries. In the first Mystery Drama that I have written, you find what is so often told, how the Christianizing of Europe originated with the Irish monks. When St. Patrick introduced Christianity into Ireland the situation was such that Christianity led there to the highest devoutness. It gives new meaning to the legend about which I just spoke that Ireland—called Ierne by the Greeks and Ivernia by the Romans—was called the Isle of the Saints in those times in which the forces of European Christianity originated in their best impulses directly from Ireland, from Irish people who had been lovingly initiated into Christianity. It was called this because of the great devoutness that reigned within their Christian cloisters. This is connected with the fact that these territorial forces, about which I have spoken, ascending from the earth and taking hold of the human double, are at their very best on the island of Ireland.

You will say that in that case the best human beings must be in Ireland. Yes, this is so, but not in the world. Into every region other people wander and have descendants, etc. It is not so, therefore, that man is merely the product of the bit of earth on which he stands. It can very well be that the forces ascending from the earth oppose the character of the human beings there. One must not confuse what really develops within the human being with the characteristics of the earthly organism in a definite territory. Then one would simply open oneself again to the world of illusion.

What I have just suggested, however, that Ireland is a special land, we are able to say today. From this should emerge a factor, among many factors, that could lead today in a fruitful way to social and political ideas. One must take such factors into account. What I have just said about Ireland is a factor, and one must reckon with such factors. One must gather everything together, to be created into a science of the forming of human conditions on earth. Until this comes about no true healing can come into the arrangement of public affairs. What can be communicated from the spiritual world must flow into the regulations that one encounters. For this reason I have said in public lectures that it is important that everyone concerned with public affairs—statesmen and so on—should acquaint himself with these things. Through this alone can public servants master reality. They will not do it, or at least they have not done so up to now, but it is a necessity nevertheless.

In accordance with the tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean period, emphasis must be put today on speaking out, on communication, because before what has been said can become deed, resolves must be made as they are determined by the impulses of the physical plane. This was different in former times; then one could act differently.

At a definite moment in time in the third post-Atlantean era a certain brotherhood made arrangements to send a large number of colonists from Asia Minor to the island of Ireland. At that time colonists settled there from the same realm in Asia from which later the philosopher Thales originated. You may read in my Riddles of Philosophy (see Note 9) about the philosophy of Thales. Thales came from the same region, although later; he was born, of course, only in the fourth post-Atlantean period. Earlier, however, out of the same milieu, out of the whole spiritual substance from which later the philosopher Thales originated, the initiates had sent colonists to Ireland. Why? Because they were familiar with the characteristics of a realm of the earth such as Ireland. They knew what was indicated in the esoteric legend about which I have spoken to you. They knew that the forces ascending from the earth through the soil of the Irish island worked in such a way upon human beings that man was influenced little in the direction of intellectualism, little in the direction of egoism, little in the direction of the capacity to make resolves. The initiates who sent colonists there knew this full well, and they selected people who, through their particular karmic predisposition, seemed suited to be exposed to just these influences of Ireland. Today there are still descendants in Ireland of that old population who were at that time transplanted from Asia Minor and who were to develop in such a way that not the least intellectuality, not the least intellect, not the least capacity for making resolves, should develop but instead special qualities of the feeling (Gemuet) soul.

Through this was prepared far in advance what took place in Ireland as that glorious evolution of Christianity, the peaceful spreading of Christianity from which streamed the Christianizing of Europe. This was prepared far in advance. The countrymen of the later Thales sent people there who proved themselves equipped to become monks and who could work there in the way I indicated. Such things were often done in ancient times, and when you find historic colonizations described in exoteric history by today's unintelligent historians (who have, however, much intelligence—intelligence can be found in the streets today) you must always understand that in such colonizations lay a deep-seated wisdom that was directed and guided by considering always what was to take place in the future, by taking into account at that time the characteristics of earthly evolution.

This was another way of bringing spiritual wisdom into the world. This should not be done today, however, by just anyone who takes the proper path; it would be wrong simply to prescribe something for people against their will in order to partition the earth; rather one should proceed in such a way that people are told the truth so that they may guide themselves accordingly.

You see, therefore, that this was an essential progression from the third, fourth, to the fifth post-Atlantean period. One should keep this matter clearly in view and recognize how this impulse toward freedom must pull itself through all that rules over the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is exactly against the freedom of human feeling (Gemuet) that the antagonist conspires, the antagonist who, as I told you, is like a double accompanying man from some time before birth to death but who must abandon man just before he dies. If one is under this influence that works directly with the double, all sorts of things might emerge that can appear already in the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is not suitable for this period, however, to give man the full possibility of achieving his task. This task consists in the struggle against evil, of transforming evil into good.

Just think what lies behind all the things into which man in the fifth post-Atlantean period has been placed. The individual facts must be illuminated in the right way. They must be understood, for wherever the double works intensely, one works against the essential tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period. In this fifth post-Atlantean period, humanity has not come far enough to evaluate the facts correctly. Especially during these past three sad years, humanity has not been at all ready to assess the facts in a correct way.

Let us take a fact, however, that is seemingly far afield from what I have discussed today. This is the fact that I wish to present to you: in a large iron factory, 10,000 tons of molten iron are to be loaded onto trains. For this work a definite number of workmen naturally would have to be engaged. Seventy-five men must do the work, and it emerged that each one could load twelve and a half tons a day; thus from seventy-five men each, twelve and a half tons per day. There was one man, Taylor, who put more emphasis on the double than on what must be won for humanity in the sense of progress, on what must be won for the human spirit in the fifth post-Atlantean period. This man first asked the factory owners if they did not believe that a single man could load much more than twelve and a half tons per day. The factory owners supposed that a workman could load at most eighteen tons. Then Taylor said, “We shall experiment.” Taylor began to experiment with the workmen. The machine standard was applied through this to human social life. These experiments were to be done on human beings. He tested to see whether it was really so, as the practical factory owners said, that a man could load at most eighteen tons a day. He arranged for rest periods, which he calculated according to physiology; men in these intervals would recoup as many forces as they had exerted. Naturally it turned out that under these conditions the results differed from one workman to another. Then he worked with arithmetic means. You know that it does not matter if one uses arithmetic means in mechanics, but with human beings one cannot employ arithmetic means, because each man has his justification for existence. Taylor employed arithmetic means, however: he selected those workers who recovered completely during these rational pauses and he granted them such pauses. The others, who were unable to regain their forces during these rest periods, were simply discarded. It was discovered by experimenting with people in this way that the selected ones, those selected when they completely recuperated in the pauses, could each load forty-seven and a half tons.

He applied the mechanics of Darwin's theory to the life of workers: away with the unfit, the fit chosen by selection! The fit are those who, fully exploiting the pauses, could load not a maximum of eighteen tons, as had been assumed earlier, but rather forty-seven and a half tons. In this way, the workman could also be satisfied, because immense savings were made and the wages for each workman could be raised by sixty per cent. The chosen ones are thus made, those most fit in the struggle for existence, who have been chosen in this way through selection; one has very satisfied people in addition. The unfit may die of starvation, however!

This is the beginning of a principle! Such matters are observed little, because they are not illuminated with larger perspectives; one must always illuminate such matters with larger perspectives. Today it is only erroneous ideas of natural science that are applied to human life. The impulse remains, however, and the impulse will then be applied to the esoteric truths that will come in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Darwinism contains no esoteric truths, but its application would lead to great monstrosities, this application of the Darwinian view to direct experimentation with human beings. When esoteric truths are added to this, however, as they will have to be revealed in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean era, an unbelievable power over human beings will certainly be gained in this way, through always selecting the fit. It is not only that the fit will be selected, however, but the striving for a certain esoteric invention to make the fit always more fit, through which a tremendous exploitation of power could be achieved, would oppose precisely the good tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Regarding the relationships that I have just presented to you, I wished to show only the beginnings of intentions that encompass the future and to show the need to have these things illuminated from higher perspectives. Next time it will be our task to point to the three or four great truths to which the fifth post-Atlantean period must arrive. It will then be shown how these truths can be misused if they are not applied in the sense of the good tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period but when instead the demands of the double are fulfilled. It is these demands of the double that are supported by the brotherhoods that wish to set another being in the place of the Christ.

Today I would like to connect and amplify individual observations that we have made in the course of our studies with this or that detail. If you follow the times attentively, you will have been able to notice here and there that, in the thoughts, experiences, and impulses that in the past man felt had “brought him so wonderfully far,” he can no longer find what can help him reach into the future. Yesterday, one of our members pressed into my hands last week's issue of the Frankfurter Zeitung, dated November 21, 1917. In that journal is an article by a very learned gentleman—it must have been a very learned gentleman, because he had in front of his name not only the title Doctor of Philosophy but also the title Doctor of Theology, and in addition there is also Professor. He is thus Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy. He is therefore, of course, a very clever man! He has written an article that deals with all sorts of contemporary spiritual needs. In the course of this article there is a section that is expressed in the following way: “The experience of being that lies behind things has no need of pious consecration or religious estimation, because it is in itself religion. Here it is not a matter of the feeling and comprehension of one's own individual values but of the great Irrational that is hidden behind all existence. He who touches it so that the divine spark leaps across undergoes an experience that has primary character, the ‘primeval experience.’ To experience this, along with all that is moved by the same stream of life, endows him with, to use a word beloved in modern times, a cosmic feeling for life.”

Forgive me, dear friends. I am not reading this to arouse within you some particularly lofty mental pictures to correspond with these washed-out sentences but rather to lead before you a symbol of our time. “A cosmic religiosity is in the process of growing among us, and the extent of the longing for it is shown by the perceptible growth of the theosophical movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses.” It is indeed difficult to stagger over all these washed-out concepts, but is it not nevertheless true that as a symbol of our time this is quite peculiar? Further on he says, “In this cosmic piety, it is not a question of mysticism that begins with rejection of the world . . .” etc.

One cannot conceive of anything clever in these sentences! Since the Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy represents it, however, one must naturally consider it as something clever. Otherwise one would perceive it as something that is brought falteringly to expression in an unclear tirade, reminding one of the learned gentleman who can no longer continue on the path on which he has traveled and who feels obliged to point to something that is there, something that apparently seems to him not completely hopeless. One should not be at all delighted with these utterances; such things must not lull us into slumber just because we notice that from some direction someone has again observed that something lies behind the spiritual scientific movement. That would indeed be very harmful, because those who make these remarks are often the same ones who feel satisfied with such utterances, who do not go further. They even point with these washed-out things to an event that will enter the world, and this would thereby belong precisely to those who are altogether too comfortable to become involved in something that requires earnest study of spiritual science. This event must really break in and take hold of human feeling (Gemuet) if what is bound up with reality is to flow into the time-stream of evolution so that healing forces are able to rise from it. It is naturally easier to speak of the “surging waves” and of “cosmic feelings” than to enter seriously into the things that are demanded by the signs of the time and that must be made known to humanity. For this reason it seems to me necessary to say things here that have been stated previously in public lectures but that will be spoken of further, now with a strong emphasis on the difference between what is worn out, what is no longer capable of life, which has led to these catastrophic times, and what must really take hold of the human soul if any progress is to be made.

With the old wisdom by which human beings have reached the present, thousands of congresses can be held—world congresses and national congresses, and whatever—thousands of societies can be founded, but one must be clear that these thousands of congresses, thousands of societies, will not be effective unless the spiritual life-blood of the science of the spirit flows through them. What man is lacking today is the courage to enter into the real exploration of the spiritual world. It sounds strange, but it must be said that all that is needed to begin with is to circulate to a broad public, for example, the small brochure, Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. Something new would be achieved through this in calling forth knowledge of man's connection with the cosmic order. Attention is drawn precisely to such knowledge in this brochure. Concrete attention is drawn to the way in which the earth annually alters its conditions of consciousness and the like. What is said in this lecture and in this brochure is said with particularly full consideration of the needs of our time. To receive this would be of greater significance than all the wishy-washy talk of “cosmic feeling” and of entering some sort of “surging waves,” or what have you. I have only quoted these things to you, because to reword them is impossible for me, as they are too senseless in their formulation.

One is not hindered, of course, by being attentive to these things, because they are important and essential. What I wish to draw to your attention is that we must not “mystify” ourselves, that we must be clear. Utter clarity is necessary if we wish to work for an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I wish to point out once again that what is essential for humanity in this fifth post-Atlantean period is to enter into a special treatment of great issues of life that have been obscured in a certain way through the wisdom of the past. I have already pointed this out to you. One great issue of life can be characterized in the following way: an attempt will have to be made to place the spiritual etheric in the service of outer practical life. I have brought to your attention that the fifth post-Atlantean period will have to solve the problem of how human moods, the motions of human moods, allow themselves to be translated into wave motions on machines, how man must be brought into connection with what must become more and more mechanical. For that reason I called your attention a week ago to how superficially this mechanizing will be accepted by a certain portion of the surface of the earth. I presented an example to show how, following the American way of thinking, an attempt was made to extend the mechanical over human life itself. I presented the example of the pauses that were to be exploited so that, instead of far fewer tons, up to fifty tons could be loaded by a number of workmen. For this one need only carry the Darwinian principle of selection actually into life.

In such situations the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution.

I have deliberately drawn attention often, even in public lectures, to the fact that the consciousness of the human being is connected with the forces of disintegration. On two occasions I have said in public lectures in Basel that within our nervous system we are dying. These forces, these forces of dying away, will become more and more powerful. The bond will be established between these forces dying within man, which are related to the electric, magnetic forces, and the outer mechanical forces. Man will to a certain extent become his intentions, he will be able to direct his thoughts into the mechanical forces. Hitherto undiscovered forces within human nature will be discovered, forces that will work on outer electric and magnetic forces. The first problem is to bring together human beings with the mechanical, which will have to prevail increasingly in the future. The second problem consists in calling upon the help of the spiritual circumstances. This can only be done, however, when the time is ripe and when a sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way. The time must come, however, when the spiritual forces are made mobile enough to master life in relation to illness and death. Medicine will become spiritualized, intensely spiritualized. Of all these things, caricatures are being made from certain directions, but these caricatures show only what really must come.

Again it is a question of whether this problem is attacked from the same direction to which I pointed regarding the other problem, in an outer egotistical or group-egotistical way.

The third problem is to introduce human thoughts into the actual evolution of the human species, in birth and education. I have pointed out that conferences have already been held on how in the future a materialistic science would be founded regarding conception and the relationships between man and woman. All these things indicate to us that something most significant is in the process of evolving. It is still easy today to say, “Why is it that people who know about these things in the right sense do not apply them?” In the future it will become clear just what is involved in this application and which forces are still actively hindering the foundation of large-scale spiritualized medicine or spiritualized national economy. No more can be accomplished today than to talk about these things, until people have enough understanding of them, people who are inclined to accept them in a selfless way. Today many people believe that they are able to do this, but many circumstances of life hinder what they are able to do. These life circumstances can be overcome in the right way only when a deeper and deeper understanding gains ground and when there is willingness to renounce, at least for a time, the immediate, practical application of these things on a larger scale.

These things have all developed in such a way that one can say that little has been retained of what was once hidden behind the ancient, atavistic strivings until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is much talk today about the ancient alchemy. The proceedings of the procreation of Homunculus are also recalled at times, and so on, but what is spoken of here is for the most part groundless. If one once understood what can be said in connection with the Homunculus scene in Goethe's Faust, one would be better informed about these things, because what is essential is that, from the sixteenth century on, a fog has been spread over these things; they have receded in human consciousness.

The law that governs these things is the same as the law that regulates within the human being the rhythmical alternation of waking and sleeping. Just as man cannot rise above sleep, so, in regard to spiritual evolution, he cannot disregard the sleeping of spiritual science that has marked the centuries since the sixteenth century. It was necessary for humanity to sleep through the spiritual for a time in order that it could appear again in another form. One must comprehend such necessities, but one must also not allow oneself to be depressed by them. For this reason one must be very clear that the time of awakening has come and that one must take an active part in this awakening, that events often hurry ahead of knowledge and one will not understand the events that take place around us unless one accustoms oneself to knowledge.

I have repeatedly pointed out to you that certain egotistical groups are striving esoterically, and their influence is active in the ways that I have often indicated in these studies. First of all, it was necessary that a certain knowledge should recede within humanity, a knowledge that is designated today with such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, and so on. This knowledge had to recede, fall into a sleep, so that man would no longer have the possibility of drawing what pertains to the soul out of observation of nature but would have to become more dependent on himself. Through this he would awaken the forces within him, for it was necessary that certain things appear first in abstract form and later take on again concrete, spiritual form.

Three ideas have gradually arisen in the course of evolving during the last centuries, ideas which, in the way they have entered human life, are essentially abstract. Kant has named them falsely, while Goethe has named them correctly. These three ideas Kant called God, freedom, and immortality; Goethe called them correctly God, virtue, and immortality. When one sees the things that are hidden behind these three words, it is clear that they are exactly the same as what modern man views more abstractly but that were viewed more concretely until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the ancient atavistic sense they were also viewed more materially. They experimented in the ancient way, indeed, they sought at that time with alchemical experiments to observe the processes that showed the working of God in process. They tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Behind all these things is hidden something concrete. This Philosopher's Stone was to present human beings with the possibility of becoming virtuous, but it was thought of more materially. It was to lead human beings to experience immortality, to put them into a certain relationship to the universe, through which they would experience within themselves what goes beyond birth and death. All these washed out ideas with which one seeks today to grasp the ancient things no longer coincide with what was intended at that time. These things have become simply abstract, and modern humanity speaks from abstract ideas. They have wished to understand God through abstract theology; virtue is also regarded as something purely abstract. The more abstract the idea, the better modern humanity likes to use it in speaking about these things, even immortality. One speculates about what could be immortal in man. I spoke about this in my first Basel lecture, saying that the science that occupies itself today philosophically with questions about immortality is a starved science, an undernourished science. This is only another form of expression for abstract thinking in which such matters are pursued.

Certain brotherhoods in the West, however, have still preserved a relationship to the old traditions and have tried to apply them in a corresponding way, to place them in the service of a certain group egoism. It is really necessary for these things to be pointed out. Naturally, when these things are spoken of in public, from this comer of the West, in exoteric literature, then God, virtue or freedom, and immortality are also talked about in an abstract way. It is only in the circle of the initiates that it is known that all of this is only speculation, that these are all abstractions. For themselves, they seek what is being striven for in the abstract formulas of God, virtue, and immortality in something much more concrete, and for this reason, these words are translated for the initiates in their respective schools. God is translated as gold, and one seeks behind the mystery to come to what can be described as the mystery of gold. Gold, representing what is sun-like within the earth's crust, is indeed something within which is imbedded a most significant mystery. In fact, gold stands materially in the same relationship to other substances as within thinking the thought of God stands to other thoughts. It only matters in which way this mystery is understood.

This relates to the egotistical group exploitation of the mystery of birth. One is striving to wrestle here with real cosmic understanding. Modern man has completely replaced this cosmic understanding with a terrestrial understanding. When man today wishes to examine, for example, how the embryo in animals and man develops, he examines with a microscope what exists precisely in the place on earth onto which he has cast his microscopic eye; he regards this as what is to be examined. It cannot be a matter only of this, however. It will be discovered—and certain circles are coming close to this in their discoveries—that the active forces are not in what one meets with the microscopic eye but are rather within what streams in from the cosmos, from the constellations in the cosmos. When an embryo arises, it arises because into the living being in which the embryo is being formed are working forces from all directions of the cosmos, cosmic forces. When a fertilization takes place, what will develop out of the fertilization is dependent upon which cosmic forces are active.

Diagram 9 Click image for large view

There is one thing that will come to be understood today that is not yet understood. Today one looks at some living being, let us say a chicken. When in this living being a new embryo arises, the biologist examines how, so to speak, out of this chicken the egg grows. He examines the forces that are supposed to allow the egg to grow out of the chicken. This is a piece of nonsense. The egg does not at all grow out of the hen; the hen is only the foundation; the forces work out of the cosmos, forces that produce the egg on the ground that has been prepared within the hen. When the biologist today works with his microscope, he believes that what he sees in the microscopic field also includes the forces on which what he sees depends. What he sees there, however, is subject to the forces of the stars that work together in a certain constellation, and when one discovers the cosmic here, one will discover the truth, the reality: it is the universe that conjures the egg from the hen.

All of this, however, is connected above all with the mystery of the sun and, observed from the earth, with the mystery of gold. Today I am offering a kind of programmatic indication; in the course of time these things will become clearer.

In the same schools about which we are speaking, virtue is not called virtue but is simply called health, and one endeavors to acquaint oneself with those cosmic constellations that have a connection with the health and illness of human beings. Through acquainting oneself with the cosmic constellations, however, one learns to know the individual substances that lie on the surface of the earth, the juices and so on, that are connected with health and illness. From certain directions, a more material form of the science of health is increasingly being developed, one that rests, however, on a spiritual foundation.

The notion will also spread from this direction that man becomes good not by learning all sorts of ethical principles, through which man can become good, but rather by, let us say, taking copper under a certain constellation of stars or arsenic under another. You can imagine how these things could be exploited for power by groups of egotistically inclined people. It is only necessary to withhold this knowledge from others who are then unable to participate, and one has the best method of ruling over great masses of people. One does not need to speak about these things at all; one need only introduce, for example, some new delicacy. Then one can seek a market for this new delicacy, which has been tinged appropriately, and thus bring about what is necessary, if these things are comprehended materialistically. One must be clear that in all matter there are hidden spiritual workings. Only one who knows in the true sense that there is nothing really material but only the spiritual will penetrate beyond the mysteries of life.

Likewise, the attempt will be made from this direction to bring the problem of immortality into materialistic channels. This problem of immortality can be led into materialistic channels in the same way, by exploitation of cosmic constellations. One does not, of course, attain through this what is often speculated as being immortality, but one attains a different immortality. One prepares oneself—so long as it is impossible to influence the physical body to prolong life artificially—to undergo soul experiences that will enable one to remain in the lodge of a brotherhood even after death, to help there with the forces that one has at one's disposal. Immortality is simply called prolonging life in these circles.

You can see outer signs of all these things. I do not know whether some of you have noticed the book that for a time provoked a sensation, a book that also came from the West bearing the title, The Disturbance of Dying (Der Unfug des Sterbens). These things all move in this direction. They are only the beginning. What has gone further than the beginning is carefully preserved for the group egotism, is kept very esoteric. These things are actually possible, however, if one brings them into materialistic channels, if one makes the abstract ideas of God, virtue, and immortality into concrete ideas of gold, health, and prolonging life, if one exploits in a group-egotistical sense what I presented to you as the great problems of the fifth post-Atlantean times. What is called in a washed-out way “cosmic feeling” by Professor, Doctor of Theology, Doctor of Philosophy, is presented by many—and unfortunately by many in an egotistical sense—as cosmic knowledge. While science for centuries has beheld only processes occurring on earth, has rejected all study of what is approaching as the most important extraterrestrial occurrence, it will be precisely in the fifth post-Atlantean time that exploitation will be considered of the forces penetrating in from the cosmos. Just as it is now of special importance for the regular professor of biology possibly to have a much-enlarged microscope, possibly to use much more exact laboratory methods, so in the future, when science has become spiritualized, what will matter will be whether one carries out a certain process in the morning, evening, or at noon, or whether one allows what one did in the morning to be somehow further influenced by active factors of the evening, or whether the cosmic influence from morning until evening is excluded, paralyzed. In the future such processes will prove themselves to be necessary; they also will take place. Naturally much water will run over the dam until the materialistically oriented university chairs, laboratories, and so on, are handed over to the spiritual scientists, but this exchange must take place if humanity is not to come completely into decadence. This laboratory work will have to be replaced by work in which, for example—when it is a matter of the good that is to be attained in the future—certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day; the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening, and this is preserved rhythmically until it is morning again. The processes are conducted in such a manner that certain cosmic workings are always interrupted during the day, and the cosmic processes of morning and evening are studied. To achieve this, manifold arrangements will be necessary.

You can gather from this that when one is not in a position to participate publicly in what happens, one can only talk about these things. From the same direction that wishes to put gold, health, and prolonging life in place of God, virtue, and immortality, the effort is made not to work with the processes of morning and evening but with something totally different. I called to your attention last time that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be eliminated from the world by introducing another impulse from the West, a kind of Antichrist; from the direction of the East, the Christ impulse, as it appears in the twentieth century, is to be paralyzed by directing the attention, the interest, away from Christ appearing in the etheric.

Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead of the Christ have endeavored to exploit what could work especially through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit electricity and especially the earth's magnetism to have influence over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work spiritually across the earth. Look at the magnetic map of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe the course of the line where the magnetic needle swings to East and West and where it does not swing at all. (I can only give indications at this time.) From a certain celestial direction, spiritual beings are constantly at work. One need only put these spiritual beings at the service of earthly existence and, because these spiritual beings working in from the cosmos are able to transmit the mystery of the earth's magnetism, one can penetrate the mystery of the earth's magnetism and can bring about something very significant of a group-egotistical nature in relation to the three things, gold, health, and prolonging life. It will simply be a matter of mustering the doubtful courage for these things. This will certainly be done within certain circles!

From the direction of the East, it is a matter of strengthening what I have already explained: the in-streaming and actively working beings from the opposing sides of the cosmos are placed at the service of earthly existence. A great struggle will arise in the future. Human science will move toward the cosmic. Human science will attempt to move toward the cosmic but in different ways. It will be the task of the good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces that, through the working together of two cosmic streams, are able to arise on the earth. These two cosmic streams will be those of Pisces and Virgo. It will be most important to discover the mystery of how what works out of the cosmos in the direction of Pisces as a force of the sun combines with what works in the direction of Virgo. The good will be that one will discover how, from the two directions of the cosmos, morning and evening forces can be placed at the service of humanity: on the one side from the direction of Pisces and on the other side from the direction of Virgo.

Diagram 10 Click image for large view

Those who seek to achieve everything through the dualism of polarity, through positive and negative forces, will not concern themselves with these forces. The spiritual mysteries that allow the spirituality to stream forth from the cosmos—with help from the twofold forces of magnetism, from the positive and negative—emerge in the universe from Gemini; these are the forces of midday. It was known already in antiquity that this had something to do with the cosmos, and it is known even today by exoteric scientists that, behind Gemini in the Zodiac, positive and negative magnetism are hidden in some way. An attempt will be made to paralyze what is to be won through the revelation of the duality in the cosmos, to paralyze it in a materialistic, egotistical way through the forces that stream toward humanity especially from Gemini and can be put completely at the service of the double. With other brotherhoods, which above all wish to bypass the Mystery of Golgotha, it is a matter of exploiting the twofold nature of the human being. This twofold nature of the human being, which has entered the fifth post-Atlantean period just as man did, contains the human being but also, within the human being, the lower animal nature. Man is to a certain extent really a centaur; he contains this lower, bestial, astral nature. His humanity is somehow mounted upon this astral beast. Through this cooperation of the twofold nature within the human being there is also a dualism of forces. It is this dualism of forces that will be used more by the egotistical brotherhoods of the Eastern, Indian stream in order also to mislead Eastern Europe, which has the task of preparing the sixth post-Atlantean period. For this, forces from Sagittarius are put to use.

The question standing before humanity is whether to master for itself the forces of the cosmos in a doubly wrong way or simply to master them in the right way. This will give a real renewal to astrology, which was atavistic in its ancient form and would not be able to continue in this form. There will be a struggle among the knowledgeable ones in the cosmos. Some will bring about the use of the morning and evening processes, as I indicated; in the West, the midday process will be preferable, excluding the morning and evening processes; and in the East the midnight processes will be used. Substances will no longer be prepared according to forces of chemical attraction and repulsion; it will be known that different substances will be produced depending upon whether they are prepared with morning and evening processes or with midday or midnight processes. It will be known that such substances work in a totally different way upon the three-foldness of God, virtue, and immortality—gold, health, and prolonging life. From the cooperation of what comes from Pisces and Virgo one will not be able to bring about anything harmful. Through this one will achieve what in a certain sense loosens the mechanism of life from the human being but will in no way found any form of rulership and power of one group over another. The cosmic forces that are called forth from this direction will beget strange machines but only ones that will relieve the human being from work, because they will have within them a certain force of intelligence. A cosmically oriented spiritual science will have to concern itself so that all the great temptations that will emanate from these mechanized beasts, which man creates himself, will not exert a harmful influence upon the human being.

To all of this the following must be added: it is necessary for human beings to prepare themselves by not taking realities for illusions, really entering into a spiritual conception of the world, into a spiritual comprehension of the world. What is important is to see things as they are. One can only see things as they are, however, when one is in the position of applying to reality the concepts, the ideas, that emerge from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The dead will actively participate for the remainder of earthly existence. How they will participate is what matters. Here, above all, the great distinction will appear. Through man's conduct on earth, the participation of the dead will be guided from a good direction in such a way that the impulses of the dead to work will be able to originate from themselves, impulses taken from the spiritual world that the dead are experiencing after death.

Opposing this will be many endeavors to lead the dead in an artificial way into human existence. By the circuitous route through Gemini, the dead will be led into human life in such a way that human vibrations will reverberate in a definite way, will continue to vibrate within the mechanical performance of the machine. The cosmos will bring motion to the machines through the circuitous route that I have just indicated.

For that reason, it is important that nothing inappropriate be applied when these problems appear; only elementary forces that are part of nature should be applied. One will have to renounce introducing inappropriate forces into mechanical life. From the occult sphere one must refuse to harness human beings themselves into mechanical factory work, a practice through which the Darwinian theory of selection is used for the determination of the work force, as I presented to you as an example last time.

I make all these suggestions, which naturally cannot exhaust the subject in such a short time, because I think that you will meditate further upon these things, that you will seek to build a bridge between your own life experiences and these things, above all those life experiences that can be won today in these difficult times. You will see how many things will become clear to you when you observe them in the light that can come to you through such ideas. In our time, we are not really concerned with forces and constellations of forces confronting one another, the sorts of things about which one is constantly speaking in outer, exoteric life, but with entirely different things. Some intend actually to cast a kind of veil over the true impulses that are involved. There are bound to be certain human forces at work to save something for themselves. What is there to be saved? Certain human forces are at work to defend impulses that were justified until the French Revolution and were even defended by certain esoteric schools; they are being defended now in the form of an Ahrimanic/Luciferic retardation, being defended so as to maintain a social order that humanity believes has been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

There are mainly two powers that stand in opposition to each other: the representatives of the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the representatives of the new age. It is quite clear that a large number of people instinctively are representatives of the impulses of the new era. The representatives of the old impulses—still of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries—must therefore be harnessed to these forces by artificial means, to forces emanating from certain group-egotistical brotherhoods. The most effective principle in the new age to extend power over as many people as one needs is the economic principle, the principle of economic dependency. That is only the tool, however. What is involved here is something entirely different. What is involved is something that you can deduce from all my suggestions. The economic principle is bound up with all that is involved in making a large number of human beings from all over the earth into an army for these principles.

These are the things that oppose each other. The one points essentially to what is fighting at present in the world: in the West, a rigid, ironclad principle of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries, which makes itself noticeable by clothing itself in the phrases of revolution, the phrases of democracy, a principle that assumes a mask and has the urge to gain in this way as much power as possible. It helps this endeavor when as few people as possible exert themselves to see things as they are, when they allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again in this realm by maya, by the maya that one can express with these words: there is a war today between the Entente and the Central Powers. There is nothing at all like this in reality. We are concerned here with entirely different things that exist behind this maya as the true realities. The struggle between the Entente and the Central Powers is only maya, is only illusion. One can see what stands side by side in the struggle if one looks behind these things, illuminating them in the way that I, for certain reasons, have only suggested. One must at least endeavor not to accept illusions for realities, because then the illusion will gradually dissolve, in so far as it must be dissolved. One must endeavor today above all to consider the things as they present themselves to truly unprejudiced thinking.

If you consider in a coherent way all that I have developed here, then a seemingly incidental remark that I made in the course of these lectures will not seem to you to be merely incidental. When I quoted a certain remark that Mephistopheles made in confronting Faust, “I see that you know the devil”—he would definitely not have said this about Woodrow Wilson—it was no incidental remark. It is something that should illuminate the situation! One must really study these things without antipathy and sympathy; one must be able to study them objectively. One must be able above all to reflect today about the significance of constellations in something that is at work and the significance of individual strength, because behind individual strength often lies something completely different from what lies behind the mere constellation. Think for a moment upon the problem, “How much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if this brain were not sitting in the Presidential chair of the United States?” Assume that this brain were in a different constellation: there it would show its individual strength! It all depends upon the constellation.

I will now speak abstractly and radically—I will not, of course, characterize the aforementioned case; it would never occur to me to do that in such a neutral country—but independent of that there is a very important insight in relation to the question, for example, about the brain. Does it have value because it is actually illuminated and made active by a particular spiritual soul force—does it thereby have a spiritual weight in the sense that I have spoken in these studies of spiritual weight—or does this brain actually have no more value than would show if one laid it on a scale and on the other side placed a weight? In the moment in which one penetrates beyond the mysteries I presented to you last time concerning the double, one arrives at the point (and I am not speaking of something unreal) of bringing value to the brain, which before had value only as a mass on the scale, because one is capable, if the brain is to be revived, of allowing it to be revived merely by the double.

All these things strike human beings today as being grotesque. What seems to them grotesque, however, must come to be something self-evident if these things are to flow into a healthy stream from an unhealthy one. And what use is it if one only chatters about them constantly? You must accept the idea that all this wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “the extent of the longing for it” or “the movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses,” and so on, does nothing but spread a fog over things that must come into the world only in clarity. They can be effective only in clarity, and they must be carried in clarity above all as practical, moral-ethical impulses in humanity.

I can only make single suggestions. I leave it to your own meditation to build on these realms further. These things are in many respects aphoristic, but you will have the possibility of gathering a great deal from such a summary as this picture of the Zodiac if you truly use it as the substance of meditation.

Today I would like to return to the subject of an earlier lecture given here in Bern and to pursue it further along the lines of what I am convinced must now be discussed among us. It is clear to me that definite things demanded by the signs of our difficult times must be said in public anthroposophical lectures, so that they will penetrate human ears. I am also convinced that definite spiritual scientific truths must now be spoken of among us.

In the previous lecture to which I refer, I described the participation in earthly life of souls who have gone through the portal of death. We undertook to study the type and manner of the impulses of the so-called dead, who continue to participate in what is done by human beings here on earth, and how connections are made between the forces of the so-called dead and those of the living. Today I wish to say more about this.

It must first be made clear that above all it is necessary for life between death and a new birth to be presented in a certain sense with images that have been taken from physical, sensible life on this earth and from mental pictures we acquire within this physical life on earth. Life in the sphere of the dead is such, however, that it can be understood only with great difficulty through earthly concepts and mental pictures. One must try, therefore, to approach this life from various sides.

I would like to say that one such attempt was made just before the outbreak of this world catastrophe in the Vienna lecture cycle, (see Note 10) in which I spoke about life between death and a new birth in relation to the inner forces of the soul. Today I would like to draw your attention above all to a domain that in a certain respect is and must be the primary concern for the human being in his earthly life. It must be a primary concern that this very domain is closed to the experience of souls who have gone through the portal of death. Think how much we have, as earthly human beings, through mental pictures that come to us from the mineral and plant realms. To these mental pictures must be added all the impressions and mental pictures that come to us from heavenly space: the starry sky above us, the sun, the moon. Since they enable us during our earthly life to have physical images as perceptions, they belong precisely to what I am now calling mineral nature. This mineral nature, and essentially—I say, essentially—the plant nature as nature, are excluded from what souls will perceive between death and a new birth.

In this connection there is something especially characteristic regarding the experiences of the so-called dead. When we human beings here on earth confront the mineral or plant natures, we have a quite definite consciousness. I have said on another occasion, it is true, that it is an illusion to speak of the absence of pain or the absence of pleasure in the mineral and plant realms. Through what we human beings perform with our actions, however, we make impressions on the mineral realm and also on the plant realm; we can say with a certain justification that these realms remain without such impressions, without such activities as are spread by pain or pleasure, sorrow or joy. You know that if we as human beings smash a rock, certain elemental beings will indeed experience pleasure or sorrow, but this does not enter our ordinary, everyday consciousness. It can therefore be said that within the experience of an ordinary human being on earth, he must have the feeling that, if he breaks rocks, if he undertakes any action within what is the mineral or essentially plant nature, he thereby causes neither pleasure nor pain in his environment.

This is not at all the case in the realm man enters when he has gone through the portal of death. One must be clear above all that there the slightest deed that man does, even if he only barely touches something (we must bring into service words from earthly language), is bound in this spiritual realm to arouse either pleasure or sorrow; it arouses some sort of sympathy or antipathy. You must therefore picture this realm of the dead in such a way that one cannot barely touch something, cannot make even the slightest contact, without causing whatever has been touched to experience pleasure or sorrow, that is, without calling forth sympathy or antipathy.

This has already been pointed out in my book, Theosophy, (see Note 11) in which the realm of the soul is described and in which the most important forces in that realm are sought precisely in the forces of sympathy and antipathy. Such facts must become living ideas, however. As one becomes conscious of the working together, in a certain sense, of the realm of the dead and the realm of the so-called living, one must also picture how the dead operate, so to speak, in their own realm. They operate in such a way that they must always be conscious that everything they do will call forth sympathy or antipathy, joy or sorrow; everything they do induces, if I may so express it, a resonance of living sensation. What one could call insensitivity in the sense of our plant and animal realms is not there at all on the other side of the portal of death.

In a sense, this characterizes the lowest realm that man enters when he has gone through the portal of death. Here, when he comes through the portal of birth into the physical realm, he enters the lowest domain, the mineral realm. When he enters the spiritual world, he finds himself in a realm with a universal faculty for sensations, in a realm where sympathy and antipathy hold sway. Within this realm he unfolds his forces; he works within this realm. When we picture him as being active there, we must also picture the sensation-bearing forces constantly proceeding from his actions, forces carrying sympathy and antipathy.

What is the significance of these forces in the entire web of relationships of the universe? You see, we have arrived at an issue that can be unraveled for our physical, earthly life only through spiritual science. You will realize its importance if you consider all the implications. So much has occurred in the present time that the person who will only find an explanation of the world within the physical renounces any explanation that he does not conceive of as an explanation.

Something that in modern times is regarded as such an explanation is the principle of evolution for the animal beings inhabiting the earth with us. I need only draw your attention to all that has appeared recently to support what is called the theory of evolution. One speaks today of the evolution of the animal world with a certain justification, in that it is believed that the animal world has evolved upward from imperfect beings to more perfect ones. A better way to express it would be to say that the animal world has evolved from undifferentiated beings to more and more differentiation, finally to human nature, in so far as man is a physical being. This theory of evolution has already entered popular consciousness to a great extent. It has even become in a certain sense a component of the secular religion of humanity. The various religious faiths make an effort to reckon with this theory of evolution. They no longer—at least in their more important representatives—have the courage that was still theirs only a short time ago to testify against this theory of evolution. To a certain extent they have accepted it themselves and have come to terms with it.

One could now ask, however, what is actually at work in this evolution of the animal beings, if they evolve from imperfect to more perfect beings. What is at work in all that one can observe in the animal world, not only in its evolution but in the overall existence of the animal world? Strange as it may sound to a modern person, one discovers upon entering the realm inhabited by the dead, through clairvoyant consciousness, that the forces prevailing over a large part of the animal world are coming from the dead. Man is called upon to be a co-ruler of the impulses in the cosmos. In the mineral realm he has only to do with what he constructs as machines and the like through his technology, in obedience to the laws of the mineral realm. In the plant realm, it is a matter of what he sows and cultivates as a gardener or farmer. In these two realms he can at most take only second place during his life between birth and death. With the realm that is mirrored here on earth in animal existence, however, he is much involved, in that after death certain forces immediately awaken in him, in that he immediately enters and works within a domain of forces that rule this animal realm. It is in a certain sense the basis, the foundation for his activity there, precisely as here the mineral world is our foundation; it is the very ground, the soil, on which he stands.

In our existence in the physical world we have the plant realm rising from a ground provided by the mineral realm. Similarly for the dead, the realm in which rule sympathies and antipathies—which then extend into the life of the animal realm on earth—provides the foundation for a second realm. In this second realm the same things are not so much at work in the dead, the mere experiences of pleasure or sorrow, the transmission of merely sensation-bearing impulses that then continue, that then are active in the world. This second realm works essentially with what can be called the strengthening and weakening of the will forces belonging to a human being after death. If you wish to know more about these will forces, refer to the Vienna lectures, (see Note 10) in which I pointed out that the will that is characteristic of the human soul between death and a new birth is not exactly like what we call will here in physical life. We can speak of it as will, however, although it is entirely different there; it is permeated there by elements of feeling and by yet another element that does not exist here on earth. This will in the life of the human soul after death is in a constant ebb and flow. When one is in communication with a dead human being, his soul life is experienced such that at one moment he feels strengthened in his will impulses, stronger in himself; at another moment his will is somewhat lamed; it sleeps. His will fluctuates between becoming stronger and becoming weaker. This is an essential aspect in the life of the dead.

This strengthening and weakening of the will are impulses, however, that flow not only into the basis for the realm of the dead but also into the human realm here on earth, not, to be sure, into our thoughts in ordinary consciousness but indeed into all that we experience here as will impulses and also as feeling impulses.

It is, of course, a strange fact that man, in his ordinary consciousness as a physical, earthly person, experiences clearly only his sense perceptions and his thoughts. Waking consciousness only exists in this perception and thinking. Feelings are actually only dreamt, and the will is generally slept through. No person knows what happens when he just raises a hand, that is, when the will plays into his bodily organism, in the same way that he knows his thoughts. There is also the rule of the feelings; although this is somewhat clearer in consciousness than the rule of the will, it is still dark; it is no brighter than the pictures we have in our dreams. Passions, emotions, feelings are in truth only dreamt; they are not experienced in the light of consciousness that lives in the sense perceptions and mental pictures, and our will is not experienced consciously at all.

In all that plays into waking life as dream or sleep, the dead are living. They live with souls who are incarnated in physical bodies on the earth. They live in them just as we live within the plant world, except that we are not inwardly bound to the plant world as the dead are to our feelings, emotions, and will impulses. They live continually in all of that. This is their second realm. While here we unfold our feelings and sensations in human life, the dead live in this life continually, and indeed in such a way that the fluctuating, which I have just been describing as the strengthening and weakening of the will, as the increasing or declining of the will of the dead, has a certain relation to what here on earth the so-called living are dreaming and sleeping through as feelings and will impulses.

You can see, therefore, how little the realm of the dead is separated from our earthly realm and what an inner bond there is between these two realms. As I have said, under normal conditions (with certain exceptions that I will mention later), the dead have nothing to do with the mineral and plant realms, but they have very much to do with what goes on in the animal realm. That is in a sense the ground on which they stand. They also have much to do with what goes on in the realm of human feeling and human will. In these realms we are not separated from the dead at all, but it is like this: when one goes through the portal of death and experiences the strengthening and weakening of the will, one can live with the so-called living in their physical bodies, though not with everyone. There a definite law holds sway: one can live only with those to whom one is to some degree karmically related. Someone living here who is karmically a total stranger is not even perceptible to a dead person; he simply does not exist. The world that the dead person experiences has boundaries that were made by his own karma that had harnessed him here in life. This world is not limited only to souls who are still on earth; it extends also to souls who themselves have gone through the portal of death.

This second realm thus embraces all the relationships a person has made karmically with those who are still on earth and other souls who like himself have already gone through the portal of death. This realm rises out of another realm that is common to the dead, a realm of animal existence, by which we must not picture earthly animals! I explicitly said earlier that our animals on earth reflect what exists in the spiritual world, that is, the group-souls of the animals. In relation to the dead, we must think of the spiritual being of the animals. From this common soil, then, there arises for each and every dead person, in an entirely different sense from what is the case in our earthly realm, an individual karmic realm. One person has made this relationship, another has made that one. Only that by which karmic relationships are balanced is there from the human realm.

Yet another law rules there; it shows us how this second realm is actually constituted. At first, whatever works on a dead person in this realm in such a way that it strengthens or weakens his will forces is limited to the circle of human beings in which he moved during his last earthly life, perhaps at first even during just a part of it. The individuals who were especially close to him, to whom he was especially related who have passed through the portal of death, are now still the ones with whom he lives particularly intensely. The circle widens only gradually to include persons with whom he had had only distant karmic relationships.

For some this lasts but a short time, for others longer. One can scarcely tell from the way an earthly life has taken its course how it will be after death. Many personalities, many souls whom one would not have expected, appear in the sphere of the dead person, because from the physical life one can easily make a wrong assessment. There is a fundamental law, however, that the karmic circle gradually widens, and the whole process of becoming acquainted in this circle takes place exactly as I described it in the Vienna lecture cycle, (see Note 10) where I dealt with life between death and a new birth. What I described there as an important element in the life of the dead is precisely this expanding life of will impulses. The will impulses are now for the dead what mental pictures are for the living, through which the dead person knows, through which he has his consciousness. It is extraordinarily difficult to explain to earthly human beings that a dead person knows essentially through the will, while the earthly human being knows through forming mental pictures. Obviously, this also makes it difficult to come to an understanding with the dead.

One can thus say that this realm entered by the dead as their second realm gradually widens. Later (this is always relative: for one it happens sooner, for another later) more distant karmic relationships are added to immediate ones. I mean this in the following way. When a dead person has spent a certain time in his life between death and a new birth, the circle of his experiences has widened and stretched beyond those souls—be they on earth or over yonder—with whom he had had particularly close karmic relationships. These souls now have karmic relationships apart from those of the dead person. It is like this: person A has a certain relationship with person B but not with person C. One sees how the dead person A lives with B as I have described and expands his experiences beyond B. Later it comes about that B becomes a go-between to person C. Previously A had had no relationship to C, but now he acquires that relationship directly through B's having a karmic relationship to C. Through this, the second realm slowly, gradually expands over an extremely large area. One becomes ever richer, as it were, in such inner experiences, experiences of strengthening or weakening the will, experiences that gradually accustom us to the realm of the dead—or living souls—after we ourselves have gone through the portal of death.

An essential aspect of life between death and a new birth is precisely that as souls we—if I may express myself trivially—increasingly widen our circle of acquaintances. Just as here in earthly existence we widen our experiences between birth and death, just as here we acquaint ourselves with more and more of the world around us, so there we undergo more and more experiences that relate us to the fact that one senses the existence of other souls, that one knows that through some of the souls one experiences a strengthening of the will, through others a weakening. This is an essential part of our experience there.

You can realize the actual significance of this for all existence, for all cosmic existence. It means that actually, in a certain relation between death and a new birth, a spiritual circle of acquaintances is being formed among a great portion of humanity around the earth, not just that faded ribbon the pantheists and mystics dream and thrill about. Really, if we look at what we experience between death and a new birth, we do not live all so far from human beings on earth. This is not an abstract bond but a really concrete one.

just as here on earth the animal realm stands as a third realm above the mineral and plant realms, so across the threshold we perceive as a third realm the realm of certain hierarchies, a realm with beings who never experience earthly incarnations but with whom we come into relation between death and a new birth. This realm of the hierarchies is across the threshold the same thing as what gives us between death and a new birth the fully intense experiences of our I. Through the first two realms we experience “the other”; through the hierarchies we experience ourselves. One can even say that as a spiritual being within the hierarchies man experiences himself as a son, as a child of the hierarchies. He knows himself as be is related to the other human souls as I have described it; he knows himself at the same time as a child of the hierarchies. As he feels himself here, when he perceives himself in the cosmos, as a fusion of the outer, natural forces and the surrounding cosmos, so across the threshold he feels himself organized, as it were, as a spiritual being through participation of the different hierarchies.

Here, if we observe ourselves as human beings—this should certainly not engender any pride in us—we see the so-called lower realm of nature and ourselves placed at the peak of these realms of nature. We go through the portal of death and find over there that we are on the lowest level of the realms of the hierarchies but as the fusion of impulses from the hierarchies. There, however, the fusion comes from above, while here it ascends from below. Whereas here our I is sunk into the physical organism so that it is an extract of the rest of nature, there our spirituality is sunk into the hierarchies and is an extract of them. One can also say that there it is our spirituality with which we clothe ourselves, while here it is our bodily nature in which we are clothed when we come through the portal of birth.

An imaginative perception can already picture the general course of life between death and a new birth. Indeed, it would be extremely sad for a person if he were not able to create such mental pictures. Just think! We are not separated from the dead at all in our life of feeling or of will. What is removed from our gaze is only hidden from our sense perceptions and our mental pictures. It will be a giant step forward in the evolution of the human race on earth, in that part of human evolution that we still must live through, if some day people become conscious of the fact that in their impulses of feeling and will they are one with the dead. Death can indeed rob us of our physical view of the dead and of our thoughts of them. There is nothing that we feel, however, without the dead being there with us in the sphere in which we feel; likewise, there is nothing that we will without the dead being there with us in the sphere in which we will.

I spoke earlier of exceptions regarding the mineral and animal realms. Such exceptions are especially valid for our present epoch. They did not carry much weight formerly, but we do not need to speak of this now. In our time, in which a certain materialistic conviction is of necessity spreading over the earth, human beings can easily miss the chance to acquire spiritual mental pictures during their earthly lives. In yesterday's public lecture I even went so far as to draw attention to how a person, if he fails to acquire spiritual mental pictures during his earthly life, chains himself to this earthly life; in a sense, he cannot escape from it, and he becomes therefore a source of disturbance. Many of the destructive forces working in the earthly sphere come from these dead individuals imprisoned in it. One must have compassion for such human souls rather than judge them critically, because it is not particularly easy to have to remain after death within a realm that is actually not suited to the dead. The realms in this case are the mineral and plant realms, actually that mineral realm that the animals bear within them, that man himself bears within him. These beings are permeated by the mineral realm. For individuals who have not absorbed spiritual mental pictures, the situation is such that they shrink from this experience after death; feelings are aroused at all times, warning them that they cannot enter the realms that govern animal and human spirituality and that they can enter only what is mineral and plant nature. I can scarcely depict this, because language has no words for it. One can only approach slowly and gradually what lies actually at the foundation, because the approach is at first something too frightful.

One must not imagine that such dead souls are then permanently banished from the life I described earlier. They draw near to this life with a certain dismay and fear, however, and rush back again and again into the plant and mineral realms, because the mental pictures they had constructed only have a certain significance in the mineral realm, in the realm of dead objects, the realm of physical mechanisms.

I consider it my main task today, through such mental pictures as these, to arouse in the consciousness an understanding of how the dead are participating in human evolution. One would really like to say these things today in public lectures, but one cannot, because people do not allow themselves such mental pictures unless they have already gone through something that has been communicated in our groups. By describing life between death and a new birth, particularly in its relation to earthly life, one satisfies or, said better, one is fulfilling the demand of our age. For a relatively long time our age has discarded the ancient, instinctive mental pictures concerning the realm of the dead, and now humanity must receive new mental pictures. Humanity must free itself from abstractions about the higher worlds and not merely speak of a kind of general spirituality; it must come truly to perceive what is at work as spirituality. We must be clear that the dead have not died; the dead are still living on and working in the historical process of human evolution. We must be clear that the forces that spiritually surround us are forces of the higher hierarchies but also forces of the dead. The greatest illusion that future humanity could entertain would be to believe that the social life on earth that people develop among themselves through their feelings and their will happens merely through earthly arrangements, with the exclusion of the dead. This simply is not possible, because the dead are already participating within feeling and willing.

It may be asked how it will be possible in the midst of impulses of the new age to develop consciousness in the right way to perceive this kind of gathering with the spiritual world. The evolution of humanity is proceeding in such a way that man in his physical body with his ordinary consciousness is increasingly cut off from the spiritual world. It was in order that man shall once again, as physical man, find the right access to the spiritual world that the Mystery of Golgotha took place in earthly evolution.

The Mystery of Golgotha is not only a one-time event and, as such, the greatest single event in all of earthly evolution. It is also a continuing event, an impulse that continues to be active. Humanity must do something to allow this force to work on it in the right way. For a long time I have been emphasizing that the task of our spiritual science is connected with the impulse of Golgotha, that spiritual science must exist in a certain way for the impulse of Golgotha to be understood in the right way in our age and in the immediate future. You can be sure that, as an earthly science that has become at the same time the world religion, natural science will gain greater and greater influence. I am often reproached for seeming to be unfriendly to the natural sciences, even in their radical developments, a reproach that belongs to the most old-fashioned prejudices imaginable, because whoever understands the course of the evolution of the earth understands that the natural sciences cannot be proved wrong and that, on the contrary, they will spread further and further. A kind of religious belief in them that now sweeps through the world is not to be halted in any way. It will come. It advances confidently, and it comes “for the blessing of humanity!” The time will not be long, perhaps only a few decades, before all the religious faiths will find themselves unable to save even the most simple, primitive human beings from consciousness of a purely natural existence such as natural science cultivates. This is inevitable.

Something else is also certain, however. Just as the purely natural scientific world conception gradually seizes human feeling (Gemuet), it will be less and less possible for the spiritual element itself to be cultivated by natural science. The spiritual element will have to be brought in just as strictly scientific a way, while natural science will still be recognizing the natural existence. Knowledge of natural existence will become more and more necessary for the fulfillment of those tasks that man in the future will have to undertake between birth and death. Whatever will lift him toward the spiritual world, however, will have to come to him from a spiritual science.

There is now a fundamental impulse in the widest circles to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha. This could be seen in earlier epochs, but it is especially apparent in our own time. Today one can already say that the greatest enemies to grasping the Christ impulse are the priests and clergy of the various religious faiths, no matter how strange this may sound. What keeps humanity furthest from the Christ impulse is the way in which the clergy and the theologians interpret this Christ impulse, because they are far from understanding what it actually is.

It is not my intention today to say essential things regarding the Christ impulse. We have already compiled a great deal about it in the course of time and will continue to do so. I would like to bring one aspect before you now, because it seems especially important at the present time, namely, that human beings need to perceive that the Christ impulse must, in the most profound sense, be dealt with differently from other historical impulses. People see that this is so, but they constantly make all kinds of compromises. They speak half-truths; they do not have the courage for the whole truth. What one must perceive is that it is impossible to speak about the Christ impulse with the same methods with which one speaks of ordinary history. Significant theologians say that it is foolish to speak of the Gospels being true in an ordinary historical sense, because all that can be offered as historical proof that Christ lived can be written down on a couple of sheets of paper. Well-known contemporary theologians thus acknowledge that it is useless to look to the Gospels if one wishes to deal with them only as historical sources. There is no way of proving that they are presenting historical facts. This is considered to be self-evident today. All that can be produced as historical proof similar to authentic documents concerning other personalities of world history can be written, according to the famous theologians, on a couple of sheets of paper. The real significance of this is, however, that even what stands written on those few sheets of paper is not true in the ordinary historical sense.

Humanity will have to acknowledge the fact that historical sources, such as there are for Socrates or Caesar, are simply not there for the existence on earth of Christ Jesus.

His existence must be grasped spiritually. This is the essence of the matter. Humanity will have to receive in the Mystery of Golgotha something for which there are no physical proofs but which must be grasped in a spiritual way.

Concerning everything else, humanity can always keep searching for historical proofs, but for the Mystery of Golgotha these will never, in the most profound sense, be of any use. Humanity should be urged not to grasp this important event on earth in a physical-historical way but to try to approach it with a spiritual understanding. He who will not grasp the Mystery of Golgotha through spiritual understanding of earthly evolution, without historical documents, will never be able to grasp it. This is the will of the gods, one can say. Regarding the most important event on earth, humanity must exert spiritual activity. The Mystery of Golgotha can always be refuted historically; humanity can understand it only if it rises to a spiritual comprehension of the world.

Only spiritual science as such can speak of the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. One could say that everything else is out of date. Read the recent book by a theologian, a book remarkable in spite of everything, which develops all the Jesus theories of the new age, from Lessing to Wrede. You will find proof in such a presentation that in this field, history really must take second place, that there must be a new kind of comprehension. This can be found only on the spiritual scientific path.

We must understand this, my dear friends, and now in our time the moment has come when human beings will really be able to experience in a spiritual way the further activity of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is the reason that I have spoken of the spiritual, etheric reappearance of Christ in the twentieth century and that I presented it in my first Mystery Drama. It will be a spiritual experience, however, a spiritual, clairvoyant experience.

There is thus an inner relationship between the Mystery of Golgotha and the necessary ascent of humanity, starting from our time, to spirituality. Truly, from this time on, human beings must rise to a certain spirituality. They must grasp in this coming time that the Mystery of Golgotha can be comprehended further only by spiritual activity, that Christianity must have an essentially spiritual continuation, not just an outer continuation through historical traditions or more historical research. I hope that what I have just said will not be taken in an abstract sense, so that someone will think, if he picks up one or two concepts about the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, that he has done everything that needs to be done. It so often happens that way. No, one must approach these things fully concretely. One must not only build mental pictures about the Christ and His activity, but one must also be able to find in a certain way the realm of Christ within the earthly realm. Christ descended into the earthly realm, and one must be able to find His domain.

Natural science, if it has someday developed to its highest level of perfection, will offer a picture of the world as it could come to be without the help of the Mystery of Golgotha. Natural science will never of itself come so far during earthly evolution that a physicist or biologist will be able to speak of the Mystery of Golgotha from his presuppositions. All science, however, will gradually, in so far as it deals with what goes on around us between birth and death, become more and more a natural science. Beside this, spiritual science will be drawing its content from the spiritual kingdom.

The question now, however, is to find not just a science but a way to stand within the spiritual realm, so that we do not find only nature. In nature we will never find the Christ impulse. How are we to find a way actually to place ourselves within the spiritual realm, not merely to have knowledge of it? You recognize from what I have been saying that the consciousness of modern and particularly of future humanity will become a merely natural consciousness, a consciousness of entirely natural facts, but that in addition to this another consciousness must be added. An entirely different consciousness must be added. For this new consciousness, the necessity of comprehending the Mystery of Golgotha as a spiritual fact will be, as it were, only the highest peak. The same approach as is needed for the Mystery of Golgotha, a readiness to penetrate through to the spiritual element in things, will have to extend through the rest of life. This means nothing other than that, beyond a purely natural view of things, there must enter human consciousness an entirely different view of things.

This view of things will come and must come when man learns, just as he now beholds the world of the senses through his sense perceptions, to observe just as consciously the course of his destiny in the world, in great events and small. What do I mean by this? Today man pays little attention to the course of his destiny. Consider some extreme cases, however. I will relate just one to you, which will show you what I mean, and it is only one case out of thousands. One could relate thousands of such cases, countless thousands.

A man leaves his house to go for a walk along a path he knows quite well. It takes him up a mountain slope to a rocky place from which there is a beautiful view. He has often gone to enjoy this view; it is his usual walk. On this day, while he is walking, a thought suddenly strikes him as if out of the blue, “Watch out! Look out!” He hears an inner voice, not as a hallucination but in the spirit, saying, “Why are you going this way? Can you not miss this pleasure just once?” He hears this in the spirit. It makes him hesitate, and he steps off the path to think for a moment. At once a tremendous mass of rock plunges down over the very spot where he would have been had he not stepped aside; it would obviously have killed him.

Now I ask you to consider for a moment what role destiny was playing there. Certainly something was active. The man is still alive. The lives of many human beings on this earth are connected with his life. All of them would have been changed if the rock had killed him. Something was accomplished there. If you try to explain it by natural laws, you will never arrive naturally at the act of destiny that took place there. Certainly you can explain by natural laws how the mass of rock came to be loosened, how the man could have been killed when the rock suddenly fell across his path, and so on. In all that can be said about the matter, however, from the standpoint of natural laws, the laws of destiny are nowhere to be found; it has nothing to do with them.

I have related to you an extreme case, but our lives are composed of just such things, in so far as our lives are a matter of destiny. It is just that man does not notice it; he pays no attention to these things. He does not notice these things as he notices what is conveyed to him through his senses as natural facts. From day to day, from hour to hour, from moment to moment, things happen of which only one example has been given, the extreme case I have just described. Think how often, for instance, you are about to leave your house and are delayed half an hour (one must study even the small things). Such things and similar ones happen thousands of times during our lives. You only see what happens when you have been delayed that half hour; you do not consider what would have happened completely differently if you had gone out as scheduled half an hour earlier!

Quite another realm is thus continually reaching into our lives, the realm of destiny, a realm to which as yet modern man pays no attention, because he casts his gaze only at what has happened and has no interest in what is constantly being prevented from happening in his life. None of you sitting here this evening can possibly know whether three hours ago you may have undertaken something that was then prevented from happening, something that would have kept you from sitting here tonight, perhaps even from still being alive tonight. You see only the thing for which spiritual impulses were already gathered in manifold ways, through which the thing did occur. You do not usually consider with ordinary consciousness that what you do in life is a result of participating spiritual impulses. Once you begin to grasp this fact, once you realize that there is a realm of destiny just as there is a realm of nature, you will find that this realm of destiny is no poorer in content than the realm of nature. Into this realm of destiny, however, which reveals itself, I should like to say, with particular clarity when some extreme incident occurs such as I have just related—becoming obvious to the human intellect—into this realm of destiny works what I was describing earlier this evening. Into the feelings and into the will impulses through which destiny moves are working the impulses of the dead. In spite of the fact that a man who says such things today is still looked upon by the entire “intelligentsia” as a superstitious fool, it is nevertheless true that, with the same exactness with which one expresses a natural law today, one can also make the following assertion: when someone has heard such a voice, it is this or that dead person who has spoken at the behest of one or another hierarchy; furthermore, from morning till evening, and especially from evening till morning, during our sleep, the impulses of the dead are constantly working into us, together with the impulses of the spiritual hierarchies who work in our destiny.

I would like to mention something here. You know already about the daimon of Socrates and what Socrates, that wise Greek, said about it, that everything he did, he did under the influence of his daimon. I spoke of this Socratic daimon in my small book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind. In my recent book, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 12) the second chapter speaks of that learned individual, Dessoir, and you can see what he had to say about such things. I drew attention there to Socrates’ daimon. It was a matter of Socrates' coming to consciousness of something that is active in all human beings. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, certain beings directed what the dead were to carry into human life. These beings lost their power at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and the Christ impulse took their place. Now you have the Christ impulse bound to human destiny in the way described by spiritual science. The forces, the impulses of the dead work as I have described into the sphere of our will and feeling. The dead are active, but they also experience strengthening or weakening of their own will. This whole realm is an earthly realm, an earthly realm just like the realm of nature. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, the Christ impulse is living within it. Christ is the directing power in this realm that I have described.

One will therefore have to found a science of the Mystery of Golgotha. It will have to be known in the future that, just as the world of natural facts permeates our world, so also a realm of destiny permeates it as the opposite pole. This realm of destiny is still scarcely noticed today. It will have to be studied in the future just as fully as the realm of nature. When one does so, one will know that in this realm of destiny one is bound up with the dead. One will know that this realm, which we have in common with the dead, is at the same time the realm of Christ. Christ descended to earth to unfold his influence through the Mystery of Golgotha in order to share with human beings on earth what we have in common with the dead, in so far as the dead are active in the earthly sphere. (I refer now not to exceptional incidents but to normal cases.)

This must not remain merely an abstract truth, merely a conceptual truth, or perhaps just a “Sunday truth,” to be recalled occasionally “because, after all, something of the sort might possibly be true.” Man should walk through this realm of destiny as consciously as he walks through the realm of his sense perceptions; he should be able to go through the world making use of his eyes and yet also feeling himself to be woven right into this realm of destiny; he should be able to feel that in this realm the forces of Christ are always united with the forces of the dead. If these things were the case, dear friends, humanity would develop in itself a real, concrete, and sensitive life with the dead. One would experience, if one felt this or that or engaged in this or that, that one is united with loved ones who have already passed on. Life would become endlessly enriched.

At the present time we do not altogether forget our departed ones. We hold them in our memory. An intense life—and that will be the only true life, because otherwise life will be slept through in so far as destiny is concerned—will take hold of humanity and will lead one not only to hold the dead in the memory but to the knowledge that when you do this, when you work toward that, when you undertake this, when you succeed in that, this or that dead soul is participating. Our bonds with the dead are by no means severed by death; they continue. This enrichment of life is the prospect for humanity in the future of the earth. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, humanity is actually evolving in the direction I have been describing, and truly, humanity will not be able to survive the sixth epoch if people do not begin to feel these things in the right way, unless they take the reality of destiny into their consciousness just as completely as they now absorb the reality of natural occurrences.

We must perceive concretely the connection of the Mystery of Golgotha with the problem of death. This is what I wished to point out today. This is something that is intimately related to what must now enter the consciousness of humanity, because among the many things lost by humanity is the possibility of still experiencing true reality in the feeling and will impulses. Human beings have gradually been lulled into a great illusion, namely, that they can shape this earthly life according to earthly laws. This is the greatest illusion to which humanity can succumb. We find its radical extreme, for example, in the purely materialistic socialism, which arranges everything according to economic laws, in other words, according to purely physical laws. Obviously, materialistic socialism would never accept the idea that when we human beings do the smallest deed among ourselves, the dead are participating. Socialism is the extreme in one direction. At the opposite pole is the extreme of which all so-called idealists now dream, to create, without regard to anything spiritual, purely programmatic organizations throughout the world, both domestic and international, to promote programs through which supposedly all war will be abolished. It is impossible to convince people who cherish such an illusion that they do not thereby destroy what they wish to destroy but rather are burdening themselves all the more with the monster they had wished to destroy. There is plenty of good will in these things. It is simply what must emerge from the materialistic consciousness of this time, what results—I would like to say—as the political peak of the whole essence of the world.

It will lead to the exact opposite of the desired goal. The important development that must spread over the earth is an understanding of destiny. It is this that must take hold in the making of laws and the forming of political organizations, because it must provide the foundation for the structure of social conditions. Whatever is incompatible with the spiritual evolution of humanity will simply dissolve; it will break down or wear out. This is all closely connected with what the signs of the times are proclaiming today. We have no need here to do political campaigning, if I may express it so crudely; naturally, we would not do that. The demands of the times, however, must be observed carefully by persons who wish to concern themselves with the spiritual evolution of humanity. It must be understood that on the path most commonly traveled today, the Christ will only be lost. He can be won as the rightful king and lord of the earth only through humanity's ascent to spirituality. Of this you may be sure: Christ must not be sought as the various faiths seek Him today, faiths that in a remarkable way have already acceded to every possible compromise in interpreting Christ—here and there they have even agreed on how to celebrate the Christ as a god of slaughter. Christ must be sought where He is to be found in reality, through human beings coming to understand the realm of destiny as a reality in which Christ will be found, as we have suggested today. Only then will an international organization have been created that will signify the spread of real Christianity over the earth.

You have only to reflect for a moment to realize that we have not yet approached this goal. Think what would happen if you were to offer all the people who now talk about wishing to establish peace around the world—and who does not talk about it!—a program to make Christ available to humanity. Then peace would come, lasting peace, in so far as it is at all possible on earth. Imagine what all those organizations (created, I grant you, out of sincere good will) would say if you presented them with such a program! We have even experienced a “peace program” going out from “Christ's representative on earth.” You will not have found within it, however, much of Christ. I know that these things are not taken seriously enough at the present time. Unless they are taken seriously, humanity will not be able to follow a healthy path. Just as it is a necessity that the Mystery of Golgotha be grasped on a spiritual level, so it is also a necessity that human beings understand clearly the signs of the times, that they see in spiritual science something without which even the outer social structure of the future cannot emerge.

In closing, I am obliged to say something to you that I have also had to say to the other groups. It is an unpleasant task. This matter is known to most of our friends; even so, I must make formal statements for the sake of completeness. I do not know whether you are all aware that the most unbelievable slanders are being circulated in the world, tales of a character that one wonders how such a monstrous impulse could invade people's minds. Our spiritual scientific movement must be protected from such—one has to say it—vicious slanders. It is necessary, therefore, for the immediate future, regardless of the fact that help ought to be available to our friends for problems relating to esoteric development, that what have been private conferences in the ordinary sense can no longer take place. It is precisely these private conferences that have given rise to the slanders. This statement in itself would be incomplete, however; a second must follow it, namely, that whoever wishes to—obviously, only whoever wishes to!—may relate quite frankly and fully everything that has been said or done at any time in these conferences. There is nothing in our movement that needs to be hidden, if one speaks the truth.

I am obliged to take these two steps. Give me a little time, however, and I am sure other ways and means will be found by which to allow everyone their spiritual scientific rights. The spiritual scientific movement must not be interrupted, however, by things that have nothing whatever to do with it. It is therefore particularly those who belong most truly and honestly to our movement who must understand that these conferences in the ordinary sense can no longer take place and that I also release everyone from any kind of obligation. Anyone anywhere may make known what he wishes; no one must, of course, but as far as I am concerned there is no restriction, for there is nothing that cannot be told if one reports the reality, the truth. In order that the truth may be established, however, both requirements must be fulfilled. It gives me much sorrow to have to take these measures. I know, however, that the friends who stand closest to our movement will fully perceive its necessity and will be in complete agreement with it.

We need to be conscious now of the seriousness of our present situation. For this reason, such a gathering as this is for me a particularly important, serious event. Especially now, in this catastrophic time, I hope we can be truly permeated by the consciousness that we need to stand together in support of our anthroposophical cause, to stand together in the spirit. Even if for the time being we find we are not able to meet together in space, let us remain together in spirit. This is the wish I would express as I part from you: we have been together in space; now perhaps for a time we must be together only in the spirit.

During the first half of 1910, Rudolf Steiner gave lectures that marked a new development in the movement of spiritual science (later known as anthroposophy and founded at the turn of the century).

Earlier, he had repeatedly spoken of the dawn of the Light Age in 1899, following a period of spiritual darkness known as Kali Yuga, which had lasted 5,000 years. Now in 1910 a new dimension was added: a change of consciousness regarding man's relationship to the Christ being would gradually occur.

In the lectures of 1910, published here together for the first time in English, Rudolf Steiner, traveling from Scandinavia via the major cities of Germany to Rome and Palermo, and returning to Hamburg via Hannover, spoke to small groups of prepared listeners concerning the advent of the appearance of the Christ in the etheric life-element of the earth. To begin with, He would only be seen by a few, but as the century progressed He would be perceived by an ever greater number of human beings on earth, bestowing comfort and strength to people. Steiner pointed quite specifically to the period between 1930 and 1940 (he also mentioned 1950) in this respect. The years 1933 and 1935 are singled out in some lectures—years that later marked the beginning of events precipitating the Second World War, which led to appalling suffering for countless human beings. Steiner had warned, however, that opposing powers would conspire to darken the consciousness of humanity so that the second coming of the Christ, His appearance in the etheric, might go unnoticed. He further foretold that powerful attempts would be made on the part of certain groups to proclaim false messiahs to whom people would flock, convinced that the Christ could reappear in physical form in our time. Various other occult efforts to obscure the new Christ revelation are described in the four lectures of 1917, included in this book.

The main thrust of the present collection of lectures which also includes Steiner's key 1911 lecture, “The Etherization of the Blood,” lies in helping to raise the individual consciousness of those souls seeking to find the new Christ event in our age. This means learning to understand and experience the etheric world, a super-sensible sphere closely bordering on the physical, permeating all the kingdoms of nature and human beings with a life-giving element. This etheric realm is where Christ now lives, accessible to the whole of humanity.

Although what Rudolf Steiner brings with such variety and strong images in these lectures was the result of actual spiritual perception, the New Testament contains a number of well-known prophetic passages referring to the second coming and the new spiritual consciousness that will dawn in the future. In the opening of the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke, a pupil of St. Paul, the event of Ascension is described. It is related how Christ vanished in the clouds and, just as he disappeared from the gaze of the Apostles into this airy, water-filled garment of the earth, from which all things receive their life, so out of the clouds He would reappear (Acts: I).

In several of these lectures, Rudolf Steiner refers to the experience of Saul (later Paul) who, having crossed the desert, was drawing near to the gates of Damascus. Not having known Christ on earth, Paul suddenly experienced in the spirit His mighty presence through the light, the word, and the fullness of His being. This initiation event—unusual at that time—would now in the dawning Age of Light, so Steiner proclaimed, become more and more wide-spread. Paul may, therefore, be considered a precursor of a new form of consciousness of the spiritual world.

In conclusion, it should be mentioned that the first eight lectures, spanning a period from January to Easter 1910, were followed by the writing and premiere of the first of Rudolf Steiner's four Mystery Dramas, The Portal of Initiation, performed in August of the same year in Munich. In the opening scene of this mystery drama, the character Theodora announces in artistic form the impending appearance of Christ in the etheric, which will not depend on faith but rather on a newly won, light-filled spirit vision. In the second part of Theodora's speech, addressed to a number of friends engaged on a spiritual path, she says,

A human being
emerges from glowing light.
It says to me,
You shall proclaim to all
who have the will to hear
that you have seen
what human beings soon will experience.
Christ once lived on earth,
and from His life it follows
that as soul He embraces
human growth on earth.
He is united with the spiritual part of earth,
but human beings cannot yet behold Him
in the form in which He reveals Himself;
because they lack the eyes of spirit
that will be theirs.
Now the time draws near
when with new power of sight
human beings on earth will be endowed.
What once the senses could behold,
when Christ lived on the earth,
will be perceived by human souls.

Readers seeking renewal in their active relationship to the Christ being will find in these lectures an elaboration of the substance poignantly and concisely expressed in the words of Theodora.

René M. Querido

Uebersinnliche Mensch und Die Fragen der Willensfreiheit und Unsterblichkeit nach Ergebnissen der Geisteswissenschaft. (Free Will, Immortality. Lecture given at Stuttgart, Germany, April 24, 1918)

All serious investigation of man has always taken as its starting point the recognition that his being is spiritual. For it is quite obvious to anyone, a philosopher, for example, studying the nature of man that the kind of science that operates within the world of the senses is not able to reach the real essence of man, or at least, if it is thought that this essence can be comprehended by an understanding limited by the senses and bound by the normal operation of the human brain, as is more or less believed by the materialistic form of monism, then we find that our need for a deeper kind of knowledge remains unsatisfied and we are left with the feeling that something further is needed to show that the real being of man is to be found outside the world of the senses. I would like to bring to your notice one of the very first thinkers in the spiritual evolution of humanity who, through tremendous effort in his own thinking, even told his students at the university and those who heard his lectures elsewhere, how in the inner life of the soul one can get away from the situation which prevents the recognition of what the being of man really is and come to a point where this is possible. This is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And he tried in what one might call a paradoxical way to show his audience what kind of activity the soul had to develop in order to find its way from the sensible to the super-sensible. For instance, he said to the audience at the beginning of his lectures, “Try to think the wall.” Well, of course, this was easy. The audience tried to put itself into the position of thinking the wall. Then after he had let the people think the wall for a while he said, “Now try to think the person who has been thinking the wall.” Fichte knew what he wanted, and even contemporary witnesses have described the scene—how the effect was immediate and convincing, how the audience was completely nonplussed when they tried to think the person who had thought the wall, and how their thinking was in a way paralyzed when they were unable to reach the goal put before them.

Goethe always studied these questions concerning the theory of knowledge from a particularly human viewpoint, that is, he was most concerned with those things in life which bear fruit, and there is a saying of his, which is greatly illuminated by Fichte's demand and the results it had, and this is that Goethe said he managed to lead a sane and wise life because he avoided thinking about thinking. Goethe always sought to be aware of the real nature of life wherever his soul was engaged and he felt that the attempt to think thinking put a person, keeping to the ordinary means of thinking, into an impossible position. Despite this, anyone beginning to investigate the super-sensible worlds can only rely on the thinking at the outset, for he very soon sees that what the senses can teach him or what can be achieved by combining sense phenomena only raises questions that lead man away from his real being. In his thinking he is within himself, and in employing the power of his soul to penetrate the inner activity of his thinking he can expect to find something that will lead him to the real being of man.

Now it is very odd that the further we get, the more effort we make with our thinking as employed in ordinary life, the greater our doubts become of finding in it a gateway into the world where the real being of man is. In fact, at last we become convinced through this experience of our thinking that—if I may use a somewhat crude expression—we can no more think thinking than we can wash water.

And yet, the real method, the real way of penetrating to those worlds where the real being of man can be known, or, as we shall see later, be experienced, is by way of the thinking. However, this method does not use the thinking as we do in everyday life or in science, but thinking is developed in a particular way so it becomes quite a different power in the soul from what it was before. And this is the basis for understanding any investigation of the super-sensible worlds—that we learn to experience how the thinking can be developed into something quite different in the soul from what it is in ordinary life and science.

Now I have often described the main essentials that have to be undertaken in order that the thinking becomes a different power in the soul from what it was before, and so today I shall not go into the things that the thinking has to perform to get, as it were, outside itself and become this new power in the soul. I shall just mention a few things to characterize what is actually achieved when this comes about. You can find a more detailed description of how the thinking is handled in my book, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and also in the second part of my Occult Science. Today I would only like to emphasize that there are certain inner exercises that the thinking has to undertake. These concern only the soul and consist in taking particular mental images into the consciousness and in being related to them in such a way that the soul is really able to experience something within the thinking. This can happen only when the thinking is inwardly permeated by something that is not normally present. The experience then achieved is the first step toward investigating the super-sensible worlds. It comes about by strengthening the thinking by meditation (the various kinds of meditation and concentration are described in the books mentioned above), and it makes us aware that the kind of thinking employed in ordinary life and science is not suitable for the investigation of super-sensible worlds. In particular we notice that in using our ordinary thinking we do not become conscious of the forces that lead us into the super-sensible worlds. And such exercises of the thinking, and a real inner experience of it, convince us more than any purely materialistic theorizing that a bodily instrument, the physical organism, is necessary in order that we can think as we do in ordinary life between birth, or rather conception and birth, and death. And because the bodily organism is necessary, because our thinking is dependent upon the bodily instrument for all that it achieves, our thinking cannot free itself from its connection with the physical world, and we cannot use this thinking for penetrating any world except the one in which it is not possible to find the being of man. We see that because our thinking is bound to the physical instrument we are prevented from penetrating into the super-sensible worlds. We observe this when we stop all outward perception in meditation, when we intentionally blot out the operation of our senses and bring to a standstill all our inner feelings and sensations, devoting ourselves inwardly in meditation entirely to a certain thought, in order to concentrate all the powers of our soul upon this thought, and thereby strengthen our thinking.

It is precisely in our meditation that we learn how we make use of the body in order to think, and our experience brings us a greater conviction concerning the dependence of the thinking upon the physical organism than any theoretical materialist could do. But we also notice that in living within the physical organism, the latter makes something possible that could not exist without it, that the thinking is given something it could not have were there no physical organism. I hope I may be permitted to make such a paradoxical statement. Its truth will become apparent as we proceed. What we notice is what has to remain of the thought afterward if our soul life is to be sound, and this is the memory of it. It is essential in our soul life that in addition to our thinking we must also have memory. If a person were not able to hold on to what he thinks he would not, for our ordinary physical world, be a normal person. Everything depends upon our being able to preserve our thoughts in our memory. And now we observe in our inner methodical training of our thinking that the physical organism is necessary in order that memory of our thinking is retained. But here we also notice that our thinking can be released from the physical organism—only not the kind of thinking that becomes memory.

What I have just said leads the scientist of spirit on a particular path. It leads him to realize that memory, as it normally exists in the human being, is a power that is only significant in the physical world and that it has to be separated from the activity of thinking. Just as the chemist arrives at the mysteries of the material world by separating substances from one another in the laboratory, so, too, the scientist of spirit has to proceed with the various functions of the soul, but his spiritually-scientific analysis consists in purely inward processes of the soul, and this is even more the case with the synthesis, the putting together again of what has been separated. Thus the necessity arises of separating the activity in thinking which leads to the normal memory, from the actual activity of thinking itself. But how can we do this?—This is the question which now arises: Analogous to the way certain substances are treated so that constituent elements that are dissolved in it can be extracted from it, how can we extract that part of the thinking that leads to memory so that something finally remains? This comes about by constantly dwelling on certain thoughts and pictures for a very long time, even if only for a very short period each day, and by laying the emphasis in this not on seeing that a memory remains, but on observing what we do when we are occupied in thinking. Then we observe that something lives in this thinking activity, which, it is true, we also always have in everyday life and in ordinary scientific investigation, but which remains unconscious, does not reach into our consciousness. I will make this clear by the following: Let us assume we perform an external action connected with our profession or business. In doing it we are constantly producing the same thing. A person has to choose a job which leads him to perform the same action every day. This is the main thing, for our everyday lives at least, to make something which can be produced by our action. The result is the main thing. But alongside this, something else frequently takes place and even when it concerns an external action, we can regard it as something most important and essential in our ordinary lives. In carrying out the same task every day we become more skilled, our hands become more alive so that we not only produce the necessary product, but we also intensify our own activity. Perhaps we do not often notice this intensification of our activity. But we can do so.

What I have described here about ordinary life, where it naturally has quite a different significance, must be applied by the scientist of spirit to the inner experience of his thinking, of the kind of thinking that he employs in meditation, when he immerses himself in a state of forgetfulness so far as his surroundings and various experiences are concerned. And he will then find, as long as he does not overdo the individual meditations—I shall speak further about this later—that in constantly and intensively pursuing such an inner development of his thoughts he will come to observe not the thoughts but the activity itself that works in his thinking. He observes that there is such an activity of thinking through the intensification of his own experience. And it is in feeling this activity of the thinking, in strengthening this activity so that he can be conscious of it in a way that does not come about in ordinary life and science, that he fashions something in his soul that he can then separate off from the memory-activity of his thinking. For the continuation of such exercises as have been described brings about a quite definite result. And this result is that a person, in these moments which he himself controls, can immerse himself to such an extent in a new activity, which the thinking now produces, that in this new activity memory actually disappears, and he is left solely with an experience of his activity. In developing and experiencing his thinking in this way, the thoughts themselves vanish and he lives entirely within his thinking activity. The curious thing is that having grasped this point where we live solely within our inner activity, we notice that in this inner activity of the soul we are without memory as we know it in normal life. Something else is present. I would like to use an illustration to show how our whole soul life is now altered by what happens in our thinking.

There is a well-known occurrence in the life-story of the poet Grillparzer. I am not mentioning this in order to prove that Grillparzer, as far as his capacity enabled him, took the same view as is put forward here, but because his experience provides us with a lever for what has to be produced rather more artificially if we wish to rise to an investigation of the super-sensible being of man.

Grillparzer had conceived the whole outline of his Golden Fleece. He had thought out the plan, the individual events and how they were related, in short, he had conceived his drama, The Golden Fleece, in thoughts. But the remarkable thing happened that later he forgot the form in which he had conceived it. He was absolutely unable to remember it. But, lo and behold! one day at the piano as he played a piece that he had played at the time he had conceived The Golden Fleece, his memory suddenly came to life again, and the whole thing was once more present in his mind. How did this come about? Well, it shows us that the inner activity, which was the same both times he played, enabled him to find the same thought content that he had before. As I have said, this is a step toward the kind of thing we are discussing here, but only a step. We have only to proceed further on the same path in the appropriate way.

For the peculiar thing that the one meditating, the scientist of spirit, arrives at is that on the one hand he feels his ordinary memory dying away—though naturally only for those times when he is practicing spiritual investigation—while on the other something else can arise that is not of the nature of memory but comes about in another way. This is the activity in which he has immersed himself. This activity constantly reappears. And then, when we have accustomed ourselves for a while to separating the activity of thinking from the thoughts that remain as memory, we notice that the whole mood of our soul life has become different under the influence of these exercises. When we have reached a certain point in the development of our soul through these exercises we notice something that can fill us with dismay—we notice that we can experience things where no memory of them remains. And because they leave no memory behind, they remain as processes of our experience, constantly in movement, in a way real dreams, but dreams that have great power over our inner soul life. And so in this kind of “empty” consciousness that is unable to preserve any memory of what it has thought, we very soon become aware how our own experiences come to us as if from outside us, in the way that sense perceptions come to us. This does not come about through the activity of the memory, nor through our normal effort to produce thoughts. The impression we get is more or less of our whole life as far back as the moment to which we can normally remember. Our thoughts appear as real entities; they appear to be alive. They do not appear as they normally do in our memory, but they approach us as living beings. Our thinking altogether assumes quite a different character under the influence of these exercises. It really becomes quite a different power in the soul. And I would like to add a further illustration to show the surprising way this change in our thinking activity can work.

Imagine that a statue stands before us—it has a definite form. Then imagine that the moment could arrive when this statue would begin to walk, to live. We would then experience something that goes against the laws of nature. Naturally this could not happen. But I want to use this illustration because something comes about in our soul life which can be compared to this. With the thoughts we have in ordinary life and that result in memories, we have in our inner experience the impression that these thoughts have to be passive copies that imitate the outer world, that they do not have their own inner life and that if they were to lead their own lives, then our soul life would, through this inner life of our thoughts, lead its existence in pure phantasy, in dreams, hallucinations and even more serious states. In our ordinary soul life our thoughts really do have something that can be compared with the forms of a statue. Here I have no intention of saying anything against the value of sculpture. That would of course be stupid. But we can nevertheless compare a dead statue with the kind of logic that operates in our ordinary thinking where we are not conscious of the actual activity in our thinking, of that which joins our thoughts together, which unites and divides them. Whereas the statue is unable to take on life, to become active, our inner logic, the inner weaving and life of our thoughts can be taken up into our consciousness, can become inwardly alive; in the same way an inner, living and logical being can arise out of the “logic” of the statue, a being that we feel to the extent of having the impression that we are in a quite different world. From this moment onward we know that what in the first instance freed itself from the memory, the actual activity of thinking, has now freed itself from dependence upon the physical organism.

The scientist of spirit is aware at this important point in his development that he has released his thinking activity from the physical organism, that his soul, inasfar as it moves in thoughts, has left his bodily organism, and that he is no longer in his body.

However paradoxical this may appear, it is true. This experience of the scientist of spirit has been characterized in earlier lectures here, and it can frequently be referred to because it describes something that has a shattering effect on the soul when it reaches the point I have just been talking about. For we cannot get away from the fact that the development which the scientist of spirit goes through involves inner upheavals and the surmounting of difficulties which we should know something about. This has no objective value. But if we are to speak about the ways and methods employed in investigating the super-sensible being of man, we should not omit this aspect. But now I must add that the way the science of spirit works, as I have been describing it here, can come into being only in our own time. For everything that comes into being in the course of the cultural evolution of humanity has naturally to appear at a particular moment. The scientific way of thinking was made possible three or four centuries ago by the inner conditions of human evolution existing at that time. Likewise, before our time it would not have been possible to train the powers of the soul in the way I have described. There had first to be a training of several hundred years in scientific method before thinking could acquire the necessary power to undertake such a development.

In earlier times, hundreds or even thousands of years ago, there were always people who penetrated into the spiritual worlds, though they proceeded along a different path and used different powers for their development, using methods that are no longer suited to humanity as it has evolved today. These methods have to be changed, just as the way we look at nature has changed during the course of time. Nevertheless, the observers of the spirit in the past also reached the point referred to here, where they were embraced by this living, weaving power of thought, the objective power of thought that permeates everything. And they described the moment when the soul can have this shattering experience as the soul's approach to the gate of death.—This whole experience makes us aware that having cultivated the activity of thinking to the extent that it has been transformed in the way I have described, we actually enter into this living state of thinking. Alone, we are faced with an inner—not a physical—danger. This is the danger of not being inwardly able to carry what is otherwise our normal everyday self-consciousness into the world we now experience. It is the danger of entering a world where we are powerless in our souls to take our self-consciousness with us, where at first we seem to lose ourselves so that we actually reach the state of approaching the gate of death. But in approaching it, it is as if we had left ourselves behind. This losing ourselves, this no longer feeling in possession of ourselves, is a shattering experience. And in becoming completely one with it, we get to know something further—that the self-consciousness that we have, which arises at the moment to which our memory stretches back, the moment when we are aware of ourselves as an ego, this self-consciousness is really more bound to the physical organism of the body than the other powers of the soul, so that when we loosen our connection with the bodily organism we face the danger of not being able to say “I” any more, of losing ourselves. We recognize what is taken from us when we go through the gate of death, when death really divides the spirit-soul nature from the physical-bodily nature. We really achieve what I would call a theoretical but living experience of what death is from an objective, spirit-soul viewpoint.

This is a shattering experience. And this is why those who knew something about it called it the approach to the gate of death. But now we have actually to follow the path that has been described as leading to this significant experience. Only in following the exercises described in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science can we understand how these exercises are fashioned out of the experiences of the soul. In addition to this we also proceed along another line of development which runs more or less parallel to the first, and which prevents us from losing ourselves when we approach the gate of death with our consciousness. The scientist of spirit has therefore to undertake something else if he is not to lose himself at this point but rather can take himself with him into this other world. On the one hand we have seen that in order to reach this point we have to develop our thinking, to separate the power and activity of thinking from the power in the thinking that leads to memory, but now on the other it is necessary to develop the activity of our will, again with the help of certain exercises of the soul.

And here it must be said that this development of the will involves separating something from it that belongs to it in normal life, that—to use an expression from chemistry—something must be extracted from it. Of the normal activity of our will, especially when seen from the scientific viewpoint, we know that however filled with ideals we are, the will remains full of emotions and the like, which motivate it. These have to be present or the will would not function in ordinary life.

Now in order to progress along the path parallel to the first one, the scientist of spirit has to do exercises which enable him to separate the will from all those things that have to be present within it, because there must be motivation that stems from our physical nature, from our ordinary soul life, and so on—this kind of motivation, which for our ordinary life appears to be the most essential and most valuable, has to be separated from the will. Of course, this separation should not affect our ordinary lives or we would become quite useless or even worse, but such a will that is free of our everyday will should be brought about only in those moments when we wish to investigate the spiritual worlds. And here again there are exercises to achieve this. You will also find these in the books I have mentioned.

Whereas the aim of the thought exercises is to strengthen the thinking, to immerse ourselves in the experience of our thoughts that we place in the center of our consciousness, the aim of the will exercises is to gain an increasing control in shutting out the normal activity of the will, and to command an inner peace in the whole life of the soul. Our ordinary soul life is filled with the remains of the motives of our will, our cares and other feelings, in short, all those things that arise out of our ordinary soul life. The object of the exercises is to learn to suppress all this consciously.

Here the scientist of spirit brings something about which in ordinary life can only come about unintentionally. In order to describe this I must refer to our experience in ordinary life of the 24 hour cycle with its changing rhythm of waking and sleeping. It is not necessary now to go into what happens when the transition from waking to sleeping occurs. But everyone knows from his own trivial observation of life that the activity of our senses disappears in a particular order without any direction on our part—it would serve no purpose to describe this further here—and that even what finally remains, an inner feeling of ourselves, a consciousness of our own life,—that even this disappears too. Then we remain in a state of unconsciousness.

The scientist of spirit now discovers that when a person is in this unconscious state he is nevertheless within the being of his soul. He discovers this when in undertaking a particular development of his will he learns to produce a condition which on the one hand is similar to the state of sleep, but which on the other hand is so radically different from it that one could even say it is the very opposite of the state of sleep. The development of the will is aimed at eliminating all the activity of the senses, a condition that is normally achieved only in deep, unconscious sleep. This involves the same thing with the activity in our thinking, in our feeling, and in everything connected with the motives in our will.—The whole life of our senses and of our soul has to be suppressed by our own conscious intention. Having acquired the requisite power to achieve this we notice that we are able to bring our physical, organic life to a standstill. In sleep we achieve this without any effort on our part, but now we no longer need to remain unconscious, we do not enter into sleep, but experience the transition in a conscious state. The power that enables us to suppress our organic activity also enables us in another way and at the same time to lift our spirit-soul consciousness, which is now our activity of will, out of our body, so that we are no longer, as in sleep, withdrawn from our body in a state without consciousness—I do not have to explain all this today, as nothing in our discussion depends upon it—but we are fully conscious in sleep and are aware that we are no longer in that which lives in us, but that nevertheless our consciousness has not disappeared. Consciousness is fully present, including self-consciousness and the ability to know ourselves as an ego.

The reason this state is radically different from the state of sleep is that in sleep we have no consciousness, but here we leave the body consciously in such a way that we are able to look at the latter as we would look at a table or any other object. Thus we withdraw consciously from our body and are fully aware that we are outside it because we are able to perceive it as an object outside ourselves, just as we normally see physical objects outside ourselves.

To anyone who has never heard anything about these things or can gain no understanding of them, they can naturally appear only paradoxical and unreal. Despite this, it is a real process, much more real than the processes normally at work in the soul. By means of it the soul now manages to experience itself in the will to the extent of complete consciousness.

And now our experience goes further, but in describing it, we are bound to make it appear purely pictorial, as if only a symbol or perhaps even an allegory were meant. But this is not the case, for our inner experience is absolutely real. In this state where the will is detached from our normal soul activity, and where it is conscious, we come to experience something in us that is always there, not as substance, but as spirit-soul consciousness. We become aware of a second person in us that is always present in everyone, though it cannot be brought to light by our normal consciousness. Of course, if we were to say in the normal way that each person bears a second person within him, we would frequently be understood to mean something pictorial or contrived. This is not what is meant here. We really do become aware that we carry a second person within us that really has a consciousness and is witness to all the activity of our will in normal life.

We are never alone. In the depths of our being there is a true being evolving, watching what we do, a being that is in constant activity and which we gradually come to know when we do the exercises that have been described. But before we can make closer acquaintance with this being we have to overcome another shattering experience in our souls. The other similar experience I described as the approach of the scientist of spirit to the gate of death. This one can be described as follows: In our spirit-soul experience we become aware of what weaves in the world as pain and suffering. We experience the basis, the being, of this pain and suffering. We come to know for the first time what pain and suffering are in the soul. This we must do. For in experiencing this pain and suffering we develop the ability to grasp this inner conscious being in us as an immediate inner spirit-soul experience. We can say that a person who has an open heart and mind for what surrounds him in the world will in many respects find much that is beautiful, exalted in it and will see it as the flower of the world. A person who undertakes the exercises described knows that the flower of all the beauty, the exalted nature and the glory of the world rises as if out of the ground, the earth, of the pain that weaves through the world.

Of course people can come forward with their human wisdom and say that such a statement could make one despair of the wise direction of the world, even of the wisdom of God, for why has God not seen to it that the beautiful, the wonderful, the exalted can appear without this foundation of pain?—Such people produce objections out of their human wisdom without having any deep feeling for the iron necessities of existence. Anyone who asks why the exalted, the beautiful, the flower, cannot exist in the world without the basis of pain is more or less in the same position as a person who demands of a mathematician that he should draw a triangle whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees. Necessities simply exist. They do not contradict the wise guidance of the world.—All the exalted nature and beauty of the world evolves out of what we experience in the depth of our souls as pain, just as the flower of a plant has to evolve out of its root. This leads us to a deeper conception of life and of the world, it shows us in which fundamental elements of life beauty, exaltedness and wisdom have their roots, and that these could not exist, that the power to experience them could not exist, if we were not to acquire this power which is present only inasmuch as it grows out of pain.

Now the question arises: Why is it that we experience pain just at the moment when we permeate this inner observer, this inner consciousness of the soul with life? Why just then?—Although this is more difficult to understand, I would nevertheless like to describe it as exactly as possible. It begins when, having developed the will, we experience in our newly-evolved activity of the will what the inner observer is that weaves and lives within us. Our first experience of it seems to contradict all we have experienced in our soul life since we have been able to think. It is rather like—only to a far greater degree—thinking something through most carefully, and then someone comes and disproves our argument, showing it to be untenable. What rises up out of the depths of our will is felt just like such a living refutation.—A very remarkable and odd experience! It is just this something that comes about in the life of the soul, that begins like the pain of a refutation of our own soul life, that finally evolves and intensifies to the experience of our feeling the flowing stream of pain that moves over the mother earth of existence. It is this experience of pain which makes what rises up out of the will increasingly more concrete and more real.

We then come to a full realization of what this is. We gradually come to understand why it appears like this in the form of pain, for we now become aware of what normally cannot be experienced at all in the way of thinking and willing in our everyday lives, namely, what lies at the root of our ordinary experience, what actually has evolved in the depths of the soul throughout the whole of our life, and which we grasp when we have begun to become scientists of spirit. We experience part of our soul life that is normally hidden and what remains with us when everything is removed from our soul life that is bound to the instrument of the physical body. We experience the part of us which goes through the gate of death, which when we die goes on into the spiritual world. And because this part of us that goes into the spiritual world is not at first fit to live in purely spiritual surroundings, is not suited to the life we have developed, but simply exists in it without being properly adapted to it, it therefore appears to us at first in the form of pain and suffering. In the form that it develops it is really destined for another kind of experience. So now we know how the part of us that goes through the gate of death when our body disintegrates is present in the soul, and lives in the soul as its immortal core. In our inner experience we are like a plant feeling how it gradually prepares the forces in its growth that lead to the formation of the seed in the flower, which having lived a different life in the earth, can then develop into another plant of the same kind. We become aware of a new seed of life within us.—And just as the seed grows out of the forces of the plant and can become a new plant, so, too, we now experience that this seed of life, enclosed at first within pain, can lead to a further life on earth. The only difference is that whereas the plant can be destroyed by the conditions existing in space and time so that not every seed develops into a new plant, there are no such conditions or hindrances in the spiritual world when we have passed through the gate of death, but we proceed through the spiritual world and appear in a further life on earth. Then we have to seek out another body with which to unite ourselves, and which we fashion in joining ourselves to what is produced by our father and mother. We take what exists through heredity and impress our own organization upon it so that we can enter into a new life on earth.

In following this path I have described, the scientist of spirit comes upon two factors in his inner life of the soul. The one is that he feels the danger of losing himself, the other that he acquires consciousness in his otherwise unconscious thinking. The consciousness which he normally possesses is in danger of becoming lost. But the other kind of consciousness which arises out of the will can now be employed in entering into the world. At first we experience only pain in this seed of life in the will, but if the exercises are continued in the right way we discover that the pain in fact reveals mysteries of the world to us, for what really happens is that we take this consciousness which lies in the soul into a condition which we normally experience as emptiness, and which, if we could feel it, makes us powerless, but that now it ceases to be pain and we awaken to a life which may be compared to the awakening of the senses when they have been fashioned in the embryo and are then able to perceive the physical world.

When these two factors I have described are united, they become a new sense organ, which Goethe calls the “spirit eye” and the “spirit ear.” This is now really present. Our thinking, which has been developed to the point described, is united as activity within this new consciousness. A fully developed spirit-man, now existing entirely outside the physical body, is experienced by the soul within itself and lives together with it, and this spirit-man now lives within the spiritual world. In being within the spiritual world the spirit-man possesses a higher stage of memory, not the kind of memory that arises when thoughts reappear, but when what is present in the spiritual world appears before us as living being.

Then also everything we have experienced in time before we were joined to a physical body, before our previous death and conception and birth, all this appears before us as living being. The experiences of former lives on earth come into view. A higher kind of memory arises. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is something that can be developed. In the young child, faculties that are needed in ordinary life are not yet present and have to be developed. These make us competent in life. The new memory leads us to a perception of ourselves as spiritual beings within the spiritual world. We experience ourselves as spirit within the spiritual world. And just as we are surrounded in the physical world by physical beings that are of the same nature as our physical organism, in the spiritual world as spirit-man we are with beings of a spiritual nature. Such spiritual beings never appear in physical life. They have their tasks in the spiritual world and do not alternate their lives like human souls between a spiritual life between death and birth and a physical life between birth and death. We experience all this as a spiritually objective world before us. We must in no way imagine that this world is a mere repetition of the physical world.—I will discuss this aspect in greater detail on another occasion, I would only stress now that the whole way in which the spiritual world is experienced is different.

Now since people compromise themselves today when dealing with truths about the spiritual world, I will also have to compromise more than is normally the case with the prevailing approach to life when I now give you a further illustration. Let us assume that in our spiritual experience we are concerned with a human soul that passed through the gate of death many years ago. It can then happen, in the way that one spirit perceives another, that we can feel this soul of the dead affecting us. But it is not as some would imagine that we see a very much refined material picture, or the sort of nebulous ghost as imagined by trivial and superstitious kinds of clairvoyance, but in a quite different way the spiritual enters the consciousness which has arisen out of the stream of our will. In order to characterize how the spiritual is now experienced, I must say the following: Assume that as human souls we have thoughts. The thoughts live in us. Assume that a thought could experience itself, in which case it would say: I am in the human soul. The thought would not be like something that we copy from the outer world, but would realize that it exists in a world; it would know this. Thus the connection with the spiritual world is much more real than the connection with things in the visible world, though it is a different kind of connection. What lives in the spiritual world enters our consciousness so that the latter, which we ourselves have just now taken into the spiritual world in the way described, becomes aware of other consciousnesses he now meets. Our consciousness is now aware of living with spiritual beings.

We can therefore be aware of a soul that wishes to help us or draws toward us from the spiritual world—it can be a human soul or a soul that has never incarnated in the physical world—and such a soul we experience as living within our own consciousness. We see then that in our everyday lives we really have the spiritual world living within us in our consciousness. But because ordinarily we are not aware of this, we do not normally find these spiritual beings in our usual consciousness. But when we have something spiritual to carry out, where inventiveness is required, we can feel that the activity of the soul of a person who died long ago flows into our consciousness.

It is only natural to cite personal experiences in connection with this, though not out of any immodesty. There was, for example, the soul of a person who died many years ago, and who had quite special artistic gifts which were taken through death and then gave help when certain artistic things were being done. Having acquired this spiritual perception we are able to distinguish between what originates in ourselves—although we could please our pride and vanity more by ascribing it all to our own gifts—and what lives in us that originates in the spiritual world and the beings belonging to it.

And if someone says this could all be an illusion, hallucination, then we would reply that there are also certain types of philosophy which maintain that everything we see is only a creation of our eyes. We have only to think of Schopenhauer's statement “The world is only idea.” This had such an effect on one person that he told Goethe that when he closed his eyes the sun was not there—A more recent scientist who is by no means averse to including the more marginal areas of research in his work, commented that we have long since discovered that the man is dead and can no longer open his eyes, yet the sun is still moving through the universe.

I know all the various kinds of objections that can be brought against this, but it is nevertheless essentially apt. In the science of spirit we learn to distinguish between what is real in the world and what is merely thought out or simply experienced in the soul. Only life can teach us about the world of senses. In our spirit-soul experience only our own soul can be the arbiter and can recognize the reality of the beings and events that we perceive. If we can do this, then all the objections vanish, just as the objections of the philosophical idealists vanish in face of the realities of the physical world. Even in the physical world reality can only be experienced. There is no logical proof that can be advanced; only in life itself can we learn to distinguish the real from dreams and hallucinations.

Thus, too, in the spiritual world we learn to distinguish what is dreamed from what really is.

Today I only wanted to go as far as to show how through the investigation of the spiritual world we can acquire knowledge of our own spiritual being that belongs to this spiritual world. This particular way of looking at the spiritual world, which is based on an inner development of the soul, could only arise in the age of science as we now know it, which has been a kind of preparatory training for the further development of the soul. And it is quite understandable that having immersed itself for a time in the greatness of the scientific way of thinking, humanity has rejected the possibility of the soul attaining real knowledge of the spiritual world.

Every person, whether he is a scientist of spirit or not, can take in knowledge of this spiritual world and appreciate the degree of truth it contains. This is no different from being able to value the truths and products of chemistry for our ordinary lives without actually being chemists. The scientist of spirit completely understands when those who are immersed in ordinary science and have become familiar with the faculties of the soul that share in it, who have learned to use and develop these faculties for a method of investigation that has resulted in the tremendous successes of modern science (which the science of spirit fully recognizes)—he completely understands when such people must believe for a while that it is not possible to have a science beyond the one bound to the development of the senses and of the brain, that is, which is founded on the kind of thinking that is bound to the physical organism.

But what we can experience proves that the province of real knowledge can be widened to include the spiritual world, and that we really can investigate our spirit-soul being which proceeds through births and deaths in repeated lives on earth. A brilliant scientist of the 19th century, Du Bois-Reymond, quite rightly emphasized that the approach to knowledge which has led science to its great successes does not lead us beyond the sphere of nature perceptible to our senses, and therefore could not fathom the depths of existence. He was able to express this inability to know, this “not knowing,” because he himself was immersed only in the faculties of knowledge that can comprehend the outer world of the senses. And he said that if we wanted to undertake something in order to get beyond the natural world, we would enter into supranaturalism, that is, we would immerse ourselves in the spiritual world. But then he said, Where supranaturalism begins, science comes to an end. He did not yet know—and there is good reason why he could not know—that the faculties of our mind which are sharpened and strengthened in observing nature cannot lead to the spiritual world, but that these same faculties first have to transform our thinking and our will so that they can evolve differently from the way they do in ordinary science. Then they have to bring themselves to life, to acquire strength, in order to penetrate up into the spiritual world.

And so we must admit that, from one viewpoint at least, what Du Bois-Reymond said was right—that we cannot penetrate to the spiritual world with those faculties of acquiring knowledge which have brought success to natural science. But we can develop these very same faculties by a purely inner and spiritual method to lead us into the spiritual world. Then our knowledge does not remain purely passive (though in this form it has contributed much to science), but becomes something living. It is like the transition from the statue to living logic, to inner life, when the soul itself becomes living logic which can be permeated by what it finds flowing out from the will. Thus we can only experience what the spirit is when knowledge is awakened to life which lives as living knowledge in the living world of the spirit, when knowledge is awakened to life which normally is bound to the world of the senses and to the physical organs, but which now leads the human being to living knowledge. It is in turning knowledge into living knowledge, in discovering a new man, an inner being in us that we rise to the spiritual world, in which we live as spiritual beings among spiritual events and other spiritual beings. In this way we rise to the world where our true origin, our true task and our true purpose lie.

Die Raetsel des geschichtlichen Lebens der Menschheit nach Ergebnissen der Geisteswissenschaft. (The Historical Evolution of Humanity and the Science of Spirit. Lecture given at Stuttgart, Germany, April 25, 1918)

No person with real inner sensitivity would find it any longer necessary to have to speak about a mystery when dealing with human soul life, than he would have to speak about the presence of hunger when dealing with the life of the body.

In the way it functions the life process must be so regulated that it induces hunger. It is possible to disregard hunger by the use of certain drugs and to believe that we can get away from it for a time, but in the long run this cannot be done without injury to the body. Similarly, any attempt to conceal the fact that there is a mystery in human life is bound to lead to injury in the soul. Those who disregard the mystery of the human being, either because of their condition in life or a lack of interest, very easily fall prey to a kind of soul hunger and to what happens as a result of this—a sort of atrophy in the life of the soul, an uncertainty and powerlessness, an inability to find one's way in the world.

Although no really sensitive person would find it necessary to have to speak about a human mystery in general, he would probably find more reason to consider that the great questions of life take on a new character in each succeeding period of time. As our time is so short, it is not possible to do more than indicate this fact. We can see how the outer conditions of life change from epoch to epoch, how new needs, new questions arise about the way we live. This also happens within the soul, which in its search for a solution to the mystery of man, changes its own finer qualities from epoch to epoch in order to make it possible for man to find such a solution. In this age that has been with us for three or four centuries, and particularly in the 19th century and our own day, which has culminated in the controlling of the world by means of steam, electricity, modern economic and social conditions, in this age there are also questions about the world in which the human being is placed that are of a different kind from those of earlier times. The science of spirit or anthroposophy seeks to approach the solution of the mystery of man out of the needs of modern times.

It is a mistake to regard the science of spirit, or anthroposophy, as a renewal of the views of the old mystics. Those who level this sort of criticism, from whatever viewpoint it happens to come, usually construct their own picture of the science of spirit and then criticize this picture, which actually has very little to do with what the science of spirit really is. It is only a caricature of the science of spirit that is criticized.

It is of course not possible within the framework of an evening's lecture to mention everything that would be necessary even to provide an outline of the science of spirit. Only a few further points can be added to what I have been saying about this for many years now, even in this city. It is particularly important to remember that the science of spirit does not take its origin from religion or mystical movements—although we should not conclude that it is necessarily opposed to these, as we shall see later—but it arises out of the life of the modern scientific outlook, out of a scientific approach to the world, connected with what is happening in the evolution of present-day natural science.

I do not think that anyone who despises the modern scientific outlook can penetrate the mysteries of the world as is done in the science of spirit, even if it is not the results of science that matter so much as the method of approach in conscientiously applying one's thinking to the phenomena of the world. The science of spirit must be well versed in the ways natural science investigates and thinks, and in the way in which it disciplines the inner life of the soul in the art of acquiring knowledge. The science of spirit must absorb this and reckon with it, if it is to keep abreast of the times.

It is just in connection with such an approach that the question arises: How is it at all possible for modern science and the outlook which results from it, to arrive at a view of the mysteries of the human being that really satisfies us deep down? If we are really positive thinkers we cannot permit ourselves an answer derived from preconceived opinions, or from one form of belief or another, but only from the facts of present-day scientific development and its method of thought. And so you will allow me to start with the course of scientific thought and research in more recent times. This will be regarded very much from the viewpoint of an admirer of the enormous progress made by the scientific approach in the 19th century, a viewpoint which enables one to realize that the hopes placed in natural science, particularly in the 19th century, for a solution to the great mysteries of man were absolutely honest and genuine.

To take one aspect of this, let us look at the rise of the physical and chemical sciences, along with the hopes and aspirations which came with it. We see how people steeped in the scientific outlook began to believe (around the middle of the 19th century) that the inmost being of man can be explained in terms of the physical body just as the working of the forces and forms of nature can be explained in terms of the wonderfully advanced laws of physics and chemistry. The great progress made by physics and chemistry no doubt justified such hopes for a while, and this progress led to the formulation of particular ideas about the world of the smallest particles: atoms and molecules. Even if people think differently about such matters today, nevertheless what I have to say about the atom and the molecule holds good for the whole of the scientific development. The idea was to investigate them and to explain how the substances and physical forces worked in terms of the constitution of the material molecules and atoms, and of the forces and mutual relationships brought about by this constitution. It was thought that if it was possible to explain a process in terms of the smallest particles, it would not be long before the way would be found to understand even the most complicated process, which was seen as a natural process: the process of human thinking and feeling.

Now let us examine where this approach with its great hopes has led. Anyone having studied the achievements of physics and chemistry during the past decades can only be filled with admiration for what has been achieved. I cannot go into details, but I will mention the views of a representative scientist, who sought his views in physics and chemistry in investigating the nature of the smallest physical particle, the atom,—Adolf Roland, who specialized in spectral analysis. He formulated his views on the basis of everything that is possible to know about the smallest particles that can be imagined as effective in the material world.—And how remarkable his views are! And how justified they are must be recognized by anyone who has some understanding of the subject. Adolf Roland says: According to everything that can be known today, an atom of iron must be imagined as being more complicated than a Steinway piano.

Now this is a significant statement, coming from one so familiar with the methods of modern science. Years ago it was believed that one could investigate the tiniest lifeless beings, or at least produce provisional hypotheses about them, in order to find out something about the world that constitutes the immediate surroundings of our ordinary consciousness. And what, in fact, does one find out? The scientist has to admit that having penetrated this smallest of worlds, he finds nothing that is any more explicable than a Steinway piano. So it becomes quite clear that however far we are able to go by this process of division into the very smallest particles, the world becomes no more explicable than it already is to our ordinary, everyday consciousness.—This is one of the ways of approach, with its great hopes. We see as it were, these great hopes disappearing into the world of the smallest particles. And honest scientific progress will show more and more by penetrating into the smallest particles of space that we can add nothing toward answering the great human mystery to what can be known to our ordinary consciousness.

In another sphere there have been just as great hopes, and understandably so, in view of the condition of the times. Just think of the great hopes people had with the advent of the Darwinian theory, with its materialistic bias! People thought they could survey the whole range of living beings, of plants and animals, right up to man. It was thought possible to understand man through having seen how he arose out of the species below him. And in following the transformation of the different species, from the simplest living being right up to man, it was thought possible to find material which would help solve the mystery of man.

Once again, anyone initiated into the ways of modern research can only be filled with admiration for the wonderful work that has been done on this subject even to this day. It was thought that we would find the single egg cell, out of which man had evolved, in the appropriate simplest living being, and would then be able to explain the origin of man out of this egg cell, which would be similar to what would be discovered as the simplest animal form in the world. Once again the path was taken to the smallest, this time the smallest living beings. And what has been found there? It is interesting to hear what a conscientious and important scientist of the 80's, Naegeli, had to say. He expressed his view, which has become famous, in the following way: Exact research on the individual species of plants and animals shows that even the tiniest cells of each single species have the most varied differentiation. The egg cell of a hen is just as fully differentiated from that of a frog as a hen itself is different from a frog.—In descending to the simplest living cells, by means of which it was hoped to explain the complications facing our normal consciousness, we do not arrive at anything simpler—as for instance when we study the iron atom—and in the end have to admit that it is just as complicated as a Steinway piano. Thus we have to imagine that the difference between the individual egg cells is as great as is the difference between the various species we see in nature with our ordinary consciousness.

Naegeli therefore proves by means of his own scientific conscientiousness that the approach of Darwinism with its materialistic bias is of no value.

But now there is another interesting fact. We could, of course, think that Naegeli, the great botanist, was really a one-sided personality, and in any case what he said was spoken in the 80's and that science has progressed and that his views are out of date. But we can also study the very latest developments on this subject, which have been well summed up by a most significant person, one of the most eminent pupils of Ernst Haeckel:—Oskar Hertwig. In the last week or two there has been published his summing up of what he has to offer as a result of his research on—as he calls his book,—Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufalls theorie.

Just imagine, we are confronted by the fact that one of the great pupils of Haeckel, the most radical exponent of materialistic Darwinism, has in the course of his life come to refute this materialistic Darwinism in the most thorough and complete way. I myself often heard from Haeckel's own lips that Oskar Hertwig was the one from whom he expected the most, and whom he expected to be his successor. And now we find today that it is Oskar Hertwig who refutes what he had absorbed as scientific Darwinism from his teacher, Haeckel! And he does it thoroughly, for his work—if I may use the expression—has a certain completeness.

This is what I wanted to say, to start with. I shall come back to the question later. I would only like to add that Oskar Hertwig makes use of everything that even the most recent research has brought to light in order to prove that what Naegeli said was absolutely true, so that one can say that the present-day position of biological research shows that a study of the smallest living entities does not tell us any more than does a study of the various species that we can perceive quite normally. For these smallest living entities, the cells, are, according to Naegeli and Hertwig, just as different as are the species themselves. A study of them only teaches us that nothing can be discovered in this way that cannot also be discovered by our normal perception in looking at the ordinary world.

Nor is it much different when—I can only mention this briefly—instead of looking at the very small, we look at the very large, the world of astronomy. For here too there has been the most wonderful progress in more recent times, for instance, in the study of the way the heavenly bodies move, which surprised everyone so much in 1859, and which has had such tremendous consequences in astronomy and especially in astrophysics.—And what has been the result? A thing one hears frequently from those who are at home in this subject is: Wherever we look in the world, whether we discover one or the other substance, this is not the main thing, for we find exactly the same substances with exactly the same forces in the universe, in the relatively large, as we find working here on the earth, so that when instead of looking into the very small, we examine the very large we only find what we know from our ordinary experience of space and time in everyday life. It is just in deepening what can be achieved by natural science and in particular in feeling deep admiration for what natural science has achieved that the way for a modern science of spirit or anthroposophy is prepared. But the latter is also well aware that however admirable these achievements of natural science are, however significant they may be for particular purposes, however necessary they may be for sound human progress, they can never penetrate the real mystery of man. This they themselves have proved until now.

The science of spirit or anthroposophy therefore takes its cue from natural science and tries to go quite a different way, and this way is not connected with trying to explain what we experience with our normal consciousness by means of a study of the very small or the very large, nor with methods using microscopes, telescopes or anything that can be attained by our senses or instruments which help them, nor by any scientific methods used in the sense world, nor by studying anything other than what we experience in our normal consciousness, but the science of spirit seeks to approach a solution to the mystery of man by a quite different kind of perception, as far as it is possible for human beings to do this.

In giving an outline of how one can imagine this other way of looking at the things that surround us, and at the events that happen around us in the world, I will make use of a comparison which will help to make the matter clearer.

In ordinary life we are familiar with two states of consciousness, the state of our normal consciousness which we have from the time we awaken in the morning to the time we go to sleep in the evening—this is our normal day consciousness. We are also familiar with the state of our so-called dream consciousness, in which pictures rise chaotically out of depths of the organism that are not accessible to human consciousness, and these pictures appear to be completely without any form of order. It is our experience that makes us aware of the difference between this chaotic dream consciousness and our orderly day consciousness which is encompassed by the real world.

The science of spirit or anthroposophy shows us that just as we awaken out of the chaotic dream consciousness into our ordinary day consciousness there is also a further awakening out of our day consciousness to—as I have called it in my book, Riddles of Man—a perceptive consciousness. The science of spirit does not deal with a reversion into a world of dreams, visions or hallucinations, but with something that can enter into human consciousness, into ordinary day consciousness in the same way that this day consciousness replaces our dream consciousness when we awaken. The science of spirit or anthroposophy is therefore concerned with a perceptive consciousness, with a real awakening out of our ordinary day consciousness, with a higher consciousness, if I may use such an expression. And its content is derived from the results of this perceptive, higher consciousness.—Just as the human being awakens from his dream world, where pictures move chaotically to and fro, into the world of the senses, so now as a scientist of spirit he awakens from the normal day consciousness into a perceptive consciousness, where he becomes a part of a real, spiritual world.

Now, first of all, I must give an idea of what this perceptive consciousness is. It is not acquired by means of any particular fantastic, arbitrary act or fantastic arbitrary decision, but it is acquired by a person working as a scientist of spirit, work which takes a long time, that is no less toilsome than work in the laboratory or observatory, which is pieced together out of the smallest fragments, perhaps even with only small results, but which are necessary for the progress of science as a whole. But everything that the scientist of spirit has to do is not done as in the laboratory or observatory with ordinary methods and appliances, but is done with the only apparatus that is of any use to the science of spirit, the human soul. It consists of inner processes of the human soul, which, as we shall now see, have nothing to do with vague or chaotic mysticism, but which demand systematic and methodical work on the human soul.

How does one acquire the wish to pursue such spiritual work, such an inner development, such a higher self training? It is possible to do it by taking our ordinary conscious life as a starting point, and gradually coming to a particular kind of conviction that becomes more compelling as one immerses one's mind in the modern scientific outlook. For several hundred years already there have been some personalities with this attitude of mind, and today this is increasingly the case. I cannot mention individual names now, but this inner experience, which gradually emerges under the influence of the scientific way of thinking as a distinct and necessary inner outlook and attitude, will affect increasingly wider circles of people and will become a common conviction with all the consequences that such a conviction is bound to entail.

There are two things that we are concerned with here. The first is that we have to acquire a certain view of the human ego, or what we call our self, by means of true and intimate observation, carried out willingly and with discipline. We address this self, we express it in one word, when after a certain point in our childhood development, we begin to use the word “I.” In our honest self-observation based on self-training we ask: What is this ego really like? Where is it to be found in us? Is it possible to find it or, if we are honest and conscientious, do we not have to admit as the great thinker Hume did, who did not arrive at his convictions arbitrarily, but by honest, self-observation, that however much I look into myself, I find feelings, ideas, joy and sorrow, I find what I have experienced in the world, but I do not find an ego anywhere? And how can I in any case—as he quite rightly says—find this ego? If it could be found so easily it would also have to be present when I sleep. But when I sleep, I know nothing about this ego. Can I assume that it is extinguished in the evening and revives again in the morning? Without actually being grasped by the mind, it must be present even when the mind is not working in sleep.

This is absolutely clear. And all those who are familiar with present-day literature on this subject will increasingly find this clear and obvious, that this will become more and more the case.

How are we to understand this? I would have to speak for hours if I were to go into details to prove what I am now saying.—I can only just mention the one fact that the ego of which we are speaking is present in the same way in our day consciousness as it is in the deepest, dreamless sleep. The ego always sleeps. It sleeps when we are asleep, and it sleeps when we are awake, and we know only about a sleeping ego when we are awake, about what lives, even as far as our waking consciousness is concerned, in a hardly conscious sphere of our soul life. Even when we are wide awake in our ordinary consciousness the ego is still only present as it is when we sleep. The reason we cannot imagine anything like an ego in us is because the rest of our soul life is present and, like the black spot in our eyes, cannot see.—The ego is made dark in our souls in a way, and can only be perceived as something we cannot imagine. The ego is always asleep and there is no difference between the way the ego should be imagined in sleep and when we are awake.

It is the same when we consider our minds; for if we train our self-observation properly we realize that our mental images have exactly the same existence in our waking day life as they do in the night in the chaotic mental images of our dreams. In our minds we dream, even when we are awake.

These truths that our ego sleeps and that we dream in our minds and imagination, even when we are awake—these truths, it is true, are washed away by our active life in the day. But for anyone able to observe the human soul they prove to be great and shattering truths which stand at the start of every spiritually scientific investigation.

And if we were then to ask, to ask one's self-observation: This is all very well, but how do we actually distinguish our ordinary waking life of the day from our dream life and our sleeping life? What happens at the moment when we wake up?—As I have said, I cannot go into details—you can find all the details necessary to understand more completely what I am now saying in outline in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.—The question arises: What actually happens when we wake up, if our ego really remains asleep and our ideas and images, even in waking life, are like dream pictures? What is the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being?

Trained self-observation provides the answer: It is solely the penetration of the will into the soul life which differentiates waking life from sleeping and dreaming. The fact that we are awake and do not dream is due solely to the will pouring into us. It is because of this that we do not have dream pictures rising up without any direction of will, that we unite ourselves to the outer world with our will and with our will become a part of the outer world. It is what awakens the dream pictures to the substance of real-ness that they are images of an outer world, that brings it about that after waking up we are able to incorporate ourselves into the world through our will.

However paradoxical this may sound to many people today, it will have to become a basic conviction of a future outlook and will indeed become so, because it is bound to follow from a science based on true self-observation.

It is the flashing of the will into our minds that gives us our real connection with the outer world, which we experience with our ordinary consciousness. It is this that provides us with real self-observation in our ordinary consciousness. But we cannot remain in this consciousness if we really wish to fathom the actual nature of the things that surround us and the connection of human beings with the world. There has to be a similar transformation in our soul life, in the ordinary soul life we have in the day, in relation to the transformation that happens in our sleeping and dreaming life when we wake up. And a transformation can come about by working arduously towards a change, firstly in the life of our minds, and secondly, in the life of our will.

And I would like to point out at the start that what we call the science of spirit or anthroposophy is not based on anything metaphysical, spiritualistic or anything vaguely mystical, but that it is a true continuation of the well-founded and human scientific way of thinking. And so we can, for instance, link on to the sound beginnings that are to be found in the Goethean outlook upon nature and the world.

Allow me this personal remark, because it has something to do with what I have to say. That I am linking on to this Goethean outlook upon nature and the world is due to the fact that my destiny led me to immerse myself in it and to take from it what leads, as we shall see, to real perception into the spiritual world that surrounds us, surrounds us in the same way that the sense world does. What is so noteworthy with Goethe—and which is still not appreciated today—is that for instance he is able to bring physical phenomena that normally are only considered quite apart from the soul being, right into the life of the human soul. It is really quite wonderful to see how Goethe treats the physical aspects in his Theory of Color, which is still looked down upon by most people today, how he starts with the physical and physiological aspects and leads from them to what he expresses so beautifully in the section, “The Physical and Moral Effect of Color.” Naturally, one compromises oneself in many respects if one speaks about Goethe's Theory of Color. It cannot be spoken about as a matter of course because in its present form physics does not allow for any possibilities of discussing a justification of Goethe's theory. But the time will come when Goethe's Theory of Color will be vindicated by a more advanced kind of physics.

I can refer to what I have said about the artistic side of this in my book Goethe's Conception of the World, and in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. (Published in English as Goethe the Scientist—Ed.) Today, however, I am not concerned with vindicating Goethe's Theory of Color, but only wish to deal with method, with how Goethe manages to evolve beyond purely physical considerations in the chapter “The Physical and Moral Effect of Colors.” Here he describes so beautifully what the human soul experiences when it perceives the color blue. Blue, says Goethe, pours into the soul the experience of coldness because it reminds us of shadow. Blue rooms bestow a feeling of sadness on all the objects in the rooms.—Or let us take what Goethe says about the experience of the color red. Red, says Goethe, produces an experience purely according to its own nature. It can produce the experience of seriousness and worthiness, or of devotion and grace—of seriousness and worthiness in its darker and thicker shades, of devotion and grace in its lighter and thinner shades.—So we see that Goethe does not only deal with the immediate physical nature of color, but he brings the soul into it, the experiences of sympathy and antipathy, as immediate experiences of the soul, as we have in life when we feel joy and sorrow. It may be that the intensity with which Goethe studied the colors is hardly noticeable, but nevertheless he goes through all the colors in a way that one can do if one allows one's soul life to pervade them,—that is, Goethe does not separate the physical from the soul experience. In doing this he laid the foundation for a kind of observation which even today is naturally only in its beginnings, but which will find a serious and worthy further development in the science of spirit. For the human being's relationship to color is exactly the same as exists with the rest of his senses. He is so fully taken up with the perception of something physical, with what works through his eyes and ears, that he does not perceive what radiates through and permeates the physical percept as an element of soul; he does not experience its full power and significance in his inner life. It is like not being able to see a weak light against a strong one. For it is above all the physical object that our eye normally perceives so strongly.

Now it is possible to take what is to be found in Goethe in its first beginnings—albeit instinctively with him because of his naturally sound outlook—a stage further. And it can also be looked at from another viewpoint. Goethe never deals with colors only as they exist in the world, but he also deals with the reaction they stimulate, their effect on the organism. How wonderful, even compared with the latest experiments in physics done by Hertwig, Hume and others, are the things that Goethe brought to light about the reaction of the eye, how the colors are not only perceived as long as one looks at them, but then they only gradually fade away. In all this there are in our ordinary perceptions weak beginnings which can be applied much more to the inner life of our mental images and can undergo further development. For in the conscientious and careful development of particular aspects of our cognitive and imaginative life there is to be found an aspect of science that belongs to the science of spirit or anthroposophy. Goethe's attitude to color has to be applied by those who wish to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of the science of spirit to the content of our minds, which for our normal consciousness is really only a world of dream pictures permeated by the will. The scientist of spirit also approaches the outer world in exactly the same way as our ordinary consciousness approaches the pictures in our minds, concepts and ideas. A sound thinking person does not become any different from anyone else. But if he is to receive a revelation of the spiritual world he has to effect a particular kind of perceptive consciousness. And he does this by inducing a certain metamorphosis in the life of his mind.

The details of what has to be done you can find in the book already mentioned. I only want to put before you now the main principles.

The scientist of spirit gradually manages to free his mental images from their normal task by a particular kind of methodical approach to the content of his mind. The normal function of our mental images is that they enable us to have pictures of the outer world. These pictures are the end result. But for the scientist of spirit they are a beginning, for whatever their significance, whatever kind of picture of the world they give, he immerses himself in its inner life, the inner effects of the picture, the image. And he does this in such a way that he does not look to its content, but to the forces that develop in it, and he does this when his consciousness has been completely brought to rest and becomes alive in the activity of his imagination and thinking.

Normally, a scientist starts with nature as it is in the world and ends up with his ideas. The scientist of spirit has to start with the inner activity of his ideas, with a kind of meditative activity, but which is not at all the same as the kind of meditation normally described and which is nothing more than brooding on something that is on one's mind—no, what we are concerned with here is that the soul is brought to rest, its activity is stilled, so that the life of the soul approaches certain ideas that can be grasped and surveyed like a calm sea. They should then become active in the life of the soul, active solely in the life of the mind. After a great amount of meditative work which is certainly not less than work done in the laboratory or observatory, we arrive at a stage where we perceive remarkable things happening, affecting the life of the soul in this inner life of the mind. One of the most important and significant faculties of the soul that we develop in our normal consciousness is our memory, our ability to remember. What is it that our memory, our ability to remember brings about? It enables us to call up at a later time mental images that we have formed at an earlier time. First of all, we have an experience and this is taken into the mind. The resulting image is like a shadow of the original experience. The experience disappears, but the fact of its existence continues.—We carry the image of the experience in us. Years later, or whenever it might be, we can recall it. What we recall out of the total organism of our spirit, soul and body as a memory image is a shadow-like copy of what was imprinted on the memory in the first place.

If we pursue the methods actively and energetically that are given and described in my books for the cultivation of the mind, we acquire a much stronger kind of activity in the soul working in the memory. However paradoxical it may appear, I have to describe it, because I do not want to speak about the generalities of the science of spirit, but to deal with the positive and concrete aspect of it, upon which it is based. The scientist of spirit experiences that a mental image is brought alive, and by bringing the peace of his consciousness constantly to bear upon this image he gets to the point where he knows: Now you have exercised the powers of your thinking to such an extent that you can continue no further.—Then something shattering happens. The moment arrives when we know that we cannot continue to use our thinking in the same controlled way, but have to let it go, just as we let an idea or image go that then sinks into forgetfulness and that later can be recalled out of this by our memory. But when an image that we have as a result of an energetic meditative life is let go, it enters into much greater depths of our life than an image that is taken into our memory. The scientist of spirit then experiences—this is only one example, other experiences have to be linked to this, but now I only wish to give a few examples—that he has strengthened an image by the powers of his thinking to such an extent that he can allow it to sink into his being so that it is no longer present. But then it appears later, according to the images we have—this has all to be regulated—these images remain present. We acquire views in the course of time in which these images have to remain present, deep down in the unconscious. Some images remain for a longer period in the subconscious, others a shorter period and we acquire the power to recall them again and again. We do not do this by exerting ourselves in trying to remember an image. Images are recalled by peaceful immersion in ourselves; It is not like the way our ordinary memory works, for here we are dependent upon a mood of expectancy that we bring about at the right moment. We become aware of this mood of expectancy by other things which cannot be described here. We have a mood or feeling of expectancy; we do not do anything to bring about an image or an experience. We simply have this peaceful expectancy, this purely selfless immersion in ourselves and only after hours, weeks or even only after years does there come back what we have perceived in the very depths of our being, as if in a kind of abyss. And then the opposite happens from what takes place in our normal consciousness.

With our normal consciousness the experience comes first in all its vividness and then the shadowlike image is produced. Here something quite different happens. We start with something which leads at the same time to self-discipline and self-education, and this is an image which we put before our souls and let it be present in the soul for weeks or months until the moment comes when it can be completely immersed. Then it emerges again—but how it emerges is the surprising thing, for it is not anything as shadowlike as the normal image.

This experience is brought about by working on the image in a certain way and we know full well, if we are familiar with things that lead to such results as these, that we are dealing here with something sound and not morbidly introspective. These are not the same forces that lead to hallucinations or visions, or that produce morbid or unsound states of any kind, but they are the forces that produce precisely the opposite and, in fact, have the effect of banishing everything in the nature of hallucinations and visions.—It is the opposite process. The soul, in undergoing this, is not as it is in everyday life with its normal, healthy understanding, but it has to be much healthier and sounder if the exercises which belong to this whole development and which have to be done regularly are to overcome everything that would lead one astray. What this leads up to is something we have not known before—something spiritual, something super-sensible, that we now perceive in ourselves. What is it that perceives? It is what Goethe called the eye or the ear of the spirit, of which he had an instinctive presentiment.

From the moment onward when we have had an experience such as I have just described, we know that we do not have only a physical body, but that we have a finer, more inward body that is in no way made up of physical substance. However paradoxical it may appear to many people today when in the science of spirit or anthroposophy we speak of a fine etheric body, a soul body, it is nevertheless a truth—but a truth that can really be investigated only in this way I have described. We now know that we have something in ourselves in which spiritual perception can arise, just as perception can arise in the physical organism in the physical eye. We know that the eye or the ear of the spirit, as Goethe called it, becomes something from which there springs something out of the etheric world, out of the super-sensible body. We cannot use this super-sensible body like a physical body, but we know that it exists and we know that there has to be a science of spirit for us to find it. It does not come into being by means of any arbitrary act of the will, but it comes into being with the help of the most recent philosophical thought.

Let me cite a few facts that are especially important in this connection for the formation of a judgment about anthroposophy. The philosophers of more recent times who inherited the work of their predecessors done around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and in the first half of the 19th century, pointed out, albeit instinctively and not as a result of method, that man does not have only a physical body, which provides the basis for his being, but he also has what one can call an etheric, a soul body. Only the terminology for this fine body was different, a body which exists as a fact for the science of spirit.

This kind of assumption led Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797-1879) to his conception of the process of death, which he expressed in the following way: “For we hardly have to ask how the human being acts in regard to himself” when “going through death ... With this concept of the continuing existence of the soul we are not therefore bypassing our experience and laying hold of an unknown sphere of merely illusory existence, but we find ourselves in the midst of a comprehensible reality accessible to our thinking.” And now Fichte says—and this is what is important—this consciousness points to something beyond itself. “... Anthroposophy produces results founded on the most varied evidence that according to the nature of his being as also in the real source of his consciousness man belongs to a super-sensible world. Our ordinary consciousness, however, which is based on our senses and on the picture of the world that arises through the use of sight, and which includes the whole life of the sense world, including the human sense world, all this is really only a place where the super-sensible life of the spirit is carried out in bringing the otherworldly spiritual content of ideas into the sense world by a conscious free act ... This fundamental conception of man's being raises `Anthropology' in its final result into `Anthroposophy'.”

Into an “anthroposophy!” He uses the expression, anthroposophy. We can see from this the longing for the science that today has to become a reality.

To cite another example—owing to lack of time I can only quote a few examples—I would like to bring in the important German thinker, Vital Troxler (1780-1866), who also did some important teaching in Switzerland. He speaks out of the same approach, but still instinctively, because the science of spirit or anthroposophy did not exist at that time: “Even in earlier times philosophers distinguished a fine, noble, soul body from the coarse body ... a soul, which contained within it a picture of the body which they called a model and which for them was the inner higher man ... More recently even Kant in his Dreams of a Spiritual Seer dreams seriously as a joke about a wholly inward soul man, that bears within its spirit-body all the limbs normally to be found outside ...”

And now Troxler says: “It is most gratifying that the most recent philosophy, which ... must be manifest ... in anthroposophy, climbs to greater heights, and it must be remembered that this idea cannot be the fruit of mere speculation ...”

I do not need to quote the rest. He means that there must be a science which leads to the super-sensible, to the qualities of this super-sensible body, just as anthropology leads to the physical qualities and forces of the physical human body.

I have dealt with characteristic thinkers on this subject in my book, The Riddles of Man. They did not work out these things as the present-day science of spirit can do, but they spoke out of instinctive longing for a future science of spirit that has now to become a reality through this present science of spirit. Thus also the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the important philosopher, Immanuel Herman Fichte.

In his Anthropology, the second edition of which appeared in 1860, Fichte says that there can be nothing that persists in matter: “In the elements of matter it is not possible to find the unifying form principle of the body that is active during our whole life. We are therefore directed to a second, essentially different cause in the body. Insofar as this contains what persists in the digestion it is the true, inner, invisible body that is present in all visible matter. The outer manifestation of this, formed out of the never-ceasing digestion may henceforth be called `body' which neither persists nor is a unity and which is the mere effect or image of the inner bodily nature, which casts it into the changing world of substance in the same way that an apparent solid body is made out of the particles of iron filings by a magnetic force, but which is again reduced to dust as soon as the binding force is taken away.”

Thus we see that Immanuel Hermann Fichte instinctively finds himself in the position of having to accept a force-body which holds the material components together in a material body in a certain formal structure like a magnetic force.

You notice, too, that Fichte also longs for an anthroposophy when he deals with the super-sensible in man and draws our attention to it.

Anthroposophy does not appear at a particular time without reason, but it is something that has long been anticipated by the really deep core of our soul life. This can be seen quite clearly in the examples I have given.

Now I must turn to the other aspect of the development of our soul life, the development of the will. What I have said so far was concerned with the development of the mind. The will, too, can be led beyond the condition it has in our normal consciousness. If you imagine that someone—I only want to mention the most important things, the rest can be read in my books—that someone were to look at his inner life in the same way that we look at our ordinary life between human beings under normal conditions, the life of the human community, we can notice our reaction when a desire or impulse awakens when we say: Conditions allow this impulse, this desire to take its course; another time the conditions do not allow us, or we do not allow it. We see that we evolve a certain responsibility toward outer life that is rooted in our conscience. We develop quite definite feelings, a particular configuration of our soul life in our conscience, concerning what we do or do not do. Our normal consciousness is subject to our soul life in developing such inner demands or standards—we obey logic, but when it comes to thinking or not thinking, to whether thinking is clear or restricted, how cool and logical our relationship is to this as compared to our relationship to outer life! We accept the one because we can, as it were, grasp it in spirit, as a mental image; we reject the other. But one cannot experience the intensive life that we feel in our human responsibility when it comes to our purely logical and scientific thinking.

The second kind of exercise consists in pouring out a certain kind of inner responsibility over our thinking, over our mind, so that we reach the point of not only saying: This opinion is valid, this opinion is properly conceived, I can give it my assent and so on, but also that we manage to preserve a mental image in the same duty-bound consciousness as we have when we do not go through with the one or the other action. Morality—though quite a different kind of morality from the one we have in normal life—is poured out over our mind, over our mental images. Inner responsibility poured out over the life of our mental images results in attitudes where in dealing in certain experiences we allow ourselves some mental images and reject others, in the one case accepting them, in the other rejecting them by a justified but temperate antipathy. From this new aspect, sympathy and antipathy activate our inner life. This again has to be practiced for a long time. I will give an example of how this can be supported by accustoming ourselves to allowing a mental image to be present in our souls in as manifold a way as possible.

In ordinary life one person may be a monist, another a dualist, the third a materialist, the fourth a spiritualist and so on. If we learn to immerse ourselves in the life of our mental images our concepts take on a different aspect in the living inner experience of the world of our mental images so that we come to recognize: Of course, there are concepts of materialism, they can be used for a particular province, for a particular sphere of the world. In fact, they must be available, for one can only get something out of immersing oneself in a particular sphere of the world if one has grasped materialism in all its many aspects. For another sphere of the world spiritualistic concepts are needed, for a third, monistic, for a fourth, the concept of idealism and so on. Monistic, dualistic concepts—they enrich the life of our minds and we know that such concepts mean no more than do different photographs of a tree taken from different points. We learn now to immerse ourselves in an inner element, an inner tolerance, that once again is an outpouring of moral substances over our inner life. It is just like someone receiving a picture of a tree that he has actually seen, who would never say, if he received a picture of the tree taken from a different angle, that it was not the same tree. Just as we can have four or even eight pictures which all portray the same tree, so we learn to look at all sorts of ideas, which singly would represent a one sided picture of reality, and to learn about them, to look into them with great care and immerse ourselves in their manifoldness. This is normally underrated when it comes to doing the exercises which have now to be undertaken. This is something that is not much understood today, even by the best, but it does lead to the further development of the will in a way similar to the development of the mind that I have described. We then experience that the will liberates itself from being bound to the body.

Just as oxygen can be extracted from water, so the will is released by means of the energetic pursuit of these various exercises that are described, and it becomes freer and freer, and more and more spiritual. By these means we awaken a real, higher man in ourselves that is not just an image of an ideal nor something thought out. We make the discovery which is still a paradox to most people today, but which is quite real for the science of spirit, that a second, more subtle man lives in us, having a quite different consciousness from our normal consciousness. And this consciousness that we can awaken in this way shows us that it is a much more real man than the one that we live in the physical body and move around in. This man in us can make use of the eye of the spirit, as I called it earlier, in the etheric body, in the way I have described.

The acceptance of such another consciousness of another more all-embracing man—this has a far more intimate connection with nature and its beings and to the spiritual world than our normal consciousness.—The acceptance of this also was instinctively foreseen by the more penetrating scientists of the 19th century. Here, too, the science of spirit brings about a fulfillment. I would only like to point out how Eduard von Hartmann worked in this direction, though I do not wish to advocate his philosophy in detail in any way. In his really controvertible work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann referred to the fact that an unknown soul quality is to be found behind the normal consciousness of the human being that—as Eduard von Hartmann describes it—comes to expression painfully in a way, and which has a kind of underground telephone connection with the unconscious spiritual nature of the outer world, and which can work its way up, and does work its way up, through the astral nature and pours out of the unconscious or subconscious into our normal, everyday consciousness.

Eduard von Hartmann really pointed instinctively to what the science of spirit teaches as a fact. Only he believed that this other consciousness of the human being could only be arrived at by theoretical hypotheses, analytical concepts and inferences. This was what he was lacking because he never wanted to take the path which is appropriate to his time: not just to formulate the life of the soul theoretically, but to take it actively into training in the two ways that have been described.

It has been possible to see from this that the acceptance of this spiritual nature in everything is much more helped by the solution of the mystery of the human being—even from a philosophical viewpoint, if it really remains philosophical—than all that can be done by the rest of science in the ways described above. And this can be proved by what has happened. Just in these matters Eduard von Hartmann proves a remarkable figure.

In 1869 he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious. Here he discussed how the spiritual that lives in the soul, hidden, as it were, in the spiritual soul, also lives in nature, and how the materialist today has only a one-sided idea of how the spiritual that lives in the soul also permeates and invades nature. In was 1869 that The Philosophy of the Unconscious was first published. It was the time when people had the greatest hopes of gaining a new view of the world on the basis of the new Darwinian approach, the laws of natural selection and the struggle for existence. Hartmann energetically opposed everything connected with this approach from a spiritual viewpoint, and naturally enough the scientists who were full of materialistic interpretation of Darwinism reacted to what Hartmann said. They said: Well, of course, only a philosopher can speak like that who is not at home in real scientific research and who does not know how conscientiously science works!—And many works were published by various scientists attacking Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. They all wrote basically the same thing—Hartmann was a dilettante and one should not bother to listen to him any further. One only had to protect the layman who always fell for such things; that is why Hartmann's position should be exposed.

Among the many works that appeared there was also one which was anonymous. From start to finish everything was brilliantly refuted. It was shown how from the viewpoint which a scientist had to have, he understood nothing about how science works in its approach to the great mystery of the world!—The scientists were tremendously enthusiastic and were in full agreement with what the anonymous author had written, and it was soon necessary to reprint this ingenious, scientific work. Oskar Schmidt and Ernst Haeckel themselves were full of praise and said: It is a pity that this colleague of ours, this significant scientific thinker, does not say who he is. If he will only say who he is we will regard him as one of ourselves.—In fact, Ernst Haeckel even said: I myself could have said nothing better than what this anonymous author has marshaled from the scientific viewpoint against Hartmann.

And lo and behold, a second edition was needed just as the scientists had wished, But now in the second edition the author revealed himself. It was Eduard von Hartmann himself who had written the work! This was a lesson that could not have been executed more brilliantly for people who constantly believe that those who do not adopt their own attitude could not possibly understand anything about their learning and knowledge. It is a lesson from which we can still learn today, and particularly those could learn who, when it comes to opposing what the science of spirit teaches, approach it with a similar attitude.

The scientist of spirit or anthroposophist knows quite well the sort of things that can be leveled against anthroposophy, however well it may be presented. He is fully aware of what can be said against it, just as Eduard von Hartmann was able to present what the scientists found to be excellent and to their liking. Such lessons, it is true, are soon forgotten, and the old habits soon return. But we can recall them, and we should learn from them. It is not only with Eduard von Hartmann but also with others that an instinctive feeling has arisen that quite a different kind of consciousness is at work in the depths of the human soul.

I would remind you of Myers, the English scientist and editor of the reports of psychic experiments which were published in many volumes and which set out to show how there is something hidden in the human soul that exists alongside our ordinary experience,—what James, the American, called the year of the discovery of one of the most significant facts, namely the discovery of the unconscious in 1886. Today scientists on the whole know very little about such things. They know nothing of Eduard von Hartmann's arguments, nothing about James, nothing about 1886 when Myers discovered the unconscious, the part of us that is of a spirit-soul nature and is connected with the spirit-soul nature of the world, and that rises into and awakens our normal consciousness. It is the same as I have described as awakening as if out of our everyday consciousness, out of a dreaming state, and makes our ordinary consciousness into a perceptive consciousness.—But in Myers and James it is to be found in a chaotic and immature state, rather like a hope or promise.—It becomes a real fact for the first time with the science of spirit or anthroposophy.

And so we see—however paradoxical it may appear today—that the development of the inner powers of the soul emerges on two fronts. I can only indicate how what I have described in its first beginnings, when systematically carried out, eventually leads to our being increasingly able to learn to use the spiritual eye in the etheric body by means of the other man that lives in us, and we discover this world of inner processes in ourselves and are able to feel ourselves as belonging to it. How we then learn not only to overcome our conception of space, but also of time. We come to look at time in quite a different way. And, as I have said, we become able not only to carry ourselves back in our memories into the past, but also to gain experience of ourselves at earlier points of time and also to carry ourselves back beyond the time that we normally remember.

You all know that we can remember back only to a certain point in our childhood. This is as far as we can think back to. What we experienced in the first years of our childhood we can only be reminded of from outside. But now we can carry ourselves back to the time in our earliest childhood when as human beings we were not yet able to recognize or perceive our powers, to the time when the forces we need for our ordinary consciousness were needed for the initial growth of the body. That is to say, we learn to perceive not with the ego of our earliest childhood, but the ego that has brought our spiritual nature out of the spiritual world and united itself with what has been inherited in the way of physical forces and substances from our father, mother and ancestors. We go back to this spiritual human being. From the present moment we look back with an awakened consciousness and see through the sense world into the spiritual; we have a spiritual world before us. Similarly, when we carry ourselves back in time we then have a qualitative experience of the life that we live in the body and that comes to an end with death. On the one hand, our ordinary perception cuts us off in our normal consciousness from spiritual reality; on the other, our bodily experience cuts us off in our normal consciousness from what exists beyond the gate of death. The moment we reach the time which we can remember back to, we see on the other hand life bordered by death, and we see what death makes of us. What is beyond death is revealed, together with what is beyond birth, only divided, kept apart by our life in the body. The spiritual man, the eternal in us, is experienced in that we see our physical life as a river; the one bank is birth and the other bank is death. Death, however, is revealed together with what exists before birth.

We also see maturing in us what leads from this life to a further life on earth. For if we have gone through the gate of death we then see what lives in us. Just as we can say that there is something that lives in the plant which, having gone through the dark and cold time of year, develops into a new plant, so we see how our spirit-soul nature that is within us in this life goes through the spiritual world between death and birth and appears again in a new life on earth. All this becomes accessible to our perception when we develop the powers of the soul in the way that it has been described. Just as we grow accustomed to a physical world through our open eyes and open ears, so we accustom ourselves to a spiritual world, really become concretely aware of a spiritual world that exists around us. We live together with spiritual beings, spiritual forces. Just as we recognize our life, our body, as the expression of our spiritual being which begins at birth, or rather at conception, so we also come to know our physical life on the earth, our physical earth, as a further condition or state of something that has been preceded in planetary existence.

We come to see our earth as a metamorphosis, a transformation of an earlier planet, in which we existed as human beings at an earlier stage, not yet with the present-day physical body, but in a spiritual state and with the nature we have today in a spiritual form. The animals have undergone a downward evolution, the human being has evolved in such a way that the point at which man and animal meet is to be found in the spiritual and not in the physical. Man's evolution on the earth is a continuation of the life on an earlier planet, which has been transformed into the present earth, and which will similarly be transformed into the next stage and will enable the human being to take into himself an ego that today is still slumbering in him, but which will become more and more awake in the further course of evolution. The whole world will be spiritualized.

When we speak about nature we do not content ourselves with referring to a vague pantheism existing in the outer world, but in looking at the being of the earth we speak of rising stages that we get to know. Nor do we enter into a spiritual world with a vague pantheism, but as a concrete individual and real human being.

Today one is forgiven least of all for saying such a thing as this. Nevertheless it is true that a real, concretely spiritual world is opened up to us, the spiritual world that we belong to with our spiritual man, just as with our physical man we belong to ordinary physical reality.

And so in bringing about a methodical awakening of inner life the science of spirit or anthroposophy adds knowledge of spirit to natural knowledge and introduces a different picture of the world from the one we have in our ordinary consciousness. In this connection the science of spirit will gradually have to be taken into the hearts of those who are longing for it, but who for the most part do not know that this longing exists in their hidden feelings. But it is there, and it will come to be more and more recognized.

It is remarkable how even the most eminent thinkers of our time and of the immediate past have not yet been able to grasp the details of the kind of experience I have been describing. I wanted to cite the great philosopher Eduard von Hartmann who had an idea of what it was about, but who was only interested in reaching another consciousness in the human being theoretically, and who was unable to discover that one cannot find one's way into the spiritual by theories or hypotheses, but only by experience, by working upon one's thoughts in such a way that they are sent out as messengers into an unknown world, from which they return as experience, and that leads one into the spiritual world, as I have described. But the experience of it must be based on accepting the existence of a world of ideas and images as real.

Forgive me if I say something personal once more, but it is very much connected with this whole subject. I do not particularly wish to do so, but you will see why I refer to it.

In 1894 I attempted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to provide the world with just such a philosophical approach as a preparation for the science of spirit, where the individual human viewpoints, which sometimes have such remarkable names, could be understood, not as a choice of mutually exclusive views, but that they could be seen like photographs or different pictures of the same object and that these concepts could be allowed to speak for themselves so that one has a many-sided picture.

Eduard von Hartmann studied this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in 1894, and he sent me his copy in which he had made notes. I would like to read a passage from the letter he sent me. It contains singular, philosophical expressions but what he means is quite clear even without going into what these expressions mean.

In the first place he says, for instance: “The title should be `Monism based on the theory of knowledge—ethical individualism,' and not `Philosophy of Spiritual Activity'.”

But he has an instinctive feeling for the fact that these two aspects are supposed to throw light on one and the same thing. He thinks, however, that they cannot be brought together. They are in fact brought together in the life of the soul and not by means of empty theories. This is what he meant. And similarly in other points.

Eduard von Hartmann therefore says: “In this book neither Hume's absolute phenomenalism nor Berkeley's phenomenalism based on God are reconciled, nor this more immanent or subjective, phenomenalism and the transcendental panlogism of Hegel, nor Hegel's panlogism and Goethean individualism. Between these two aspects there yawns an unbridgeable abyss.”

Because all these views exist in such a living way, they all testify to the same thing, they characterize one and the same thing from varying viewpoints!

Hartmann has an inkling of this, a feeling for it, but he does not see that what is important is not a hypothetical and theoretical way of putting them together in thought, but a living way of experiencing them as a unity.

He therefore goes on to say: “Above all, the fact is ignored that phenomenalism leads with absolute inevitability to soliphism [this may be a coined word, a `typo,' or the translator really meant solipsism - e.Ed] (that is, to a doctrine of being one, a doctrine of the ego), to illusionism and to agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy, because the danger is not even recognized.”

This danger certainly has been recognized! And Eduard von Hartmann once again instinctively uses the right expression: “plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy.”

This is precisely what I have described today! Of course, this plunge into the abyss is not prevented by un-philosophy or by any hypotheses setting out to be philosophical, but only by our real life being led into the other existence, by the unconscious being made conscious, so that what is experienced objectively and independently in the soul can be guided back again into the conscious.

You can see here how the science of spirit or anthroposophy has gradually to get to grips with the longings and hopes for such a science, that exist at the present time, but which in themselves cannot get as far as what has to be achieved in the science of spirit, because for this to happen it is imperative to see that intimate work on the soul has to be done which does not remain mystically subjective, but is just as objective as ordinary science and knowledge.

What then has been done about this up to now? I have cited Oskar Hertwig to you. Oskar Hertwig is one of those who felt the significance of Eduard von Hartmann!

Ernst Haeckel is one of those who mocked most at what Eduard von Hartmann published in his Philosophy of the Unconscious.

Oskar Hertwig still cites Eduard von Hartmann continuously and does so in full agreement with what he says, even where Eduard von Hartmann says that the way in which the idea of natural selection is treated as a modern superstition is like a childhood disease, a scientific childhood disease of our times. This is cited by Oskar Hertwig, himself a pupil of Haeckel, as an appropriate statement about natural science by Eduard von Hartmann. And there is much more like this. It all adds up to a clear statement as to what science is unable to recognize and what it would really have to recognize. But what has happened is that the pupils of the great teachers of science of the 19th century have already started to refute everything that existed earlier in the nature of the hopes I have been talking about.

Oskar Hertwig is extraordinarily interesting because he shows that science today cannot have any objection to such a philosophy as Eduard von Hartmann's.

If the scientists find their way to Eduard von Hartmann, they will also find their way to the science of spirit. But then the general consciousness of humanity too will be able to find its way.

The science of spirit will encounter opposition enough from other directions as well. To conclude, I would like to mention briefly the objections that are constantly brought by the adherents of various religious organizations against the science of spirit. It is remarkable how it is just from the religious viewpoint that the science of spirit is attacked. It is said, for instance, that what the science of spirit has to say contradicts things in the Bible or that are held according to tradition.—But is this really what we should be concerned about? Could we think of not wanting to discover America because it cannot be found in the Bible or in Christian tradition?

If anyone believes that the power of the greatest thing in the world—Christianity—could be endangered because of some discovery, he cannot have much faith in it!

When I hear of how objections can be made by Christians, I recall a theologian, this time not Protestant, but Catholic, a teacher of Christian philosophy, member of a Catholic faculty of theology, who gave his inaugural lecture on Galileo—and we know how the church dealt with Galileo. This really genuinely Christian and Catholic priest, who up to the time of his death never denied that he was a true son of the church, said in his lecture on Galileo: It is with injustice that a really perceptive Christianity turns against the progress of natural science as brought about by such people as Galileo. It is with injustice that Christianity declares certain ideas which are falsely said to be derived from Christianity, to be irreconcilable with natural science. For modern science, thinks this priest and professor of theology, only appears to be irreconcilable with the more limited view of the world held by the ancient peoples, but not with the Christian view, for this Christian view, properly understood, is bound to confirm the discoveries of more and more wonders in the world, and is bound to confirm the glory of the Godhead and the glory of the Christian view; it is bound to confirm the wonders that divine grace has instituted upon the earth.

We can say the same about the science of spirit, for there is no contradiction between it and Christianity, properly understood. But contradiction exists only between it and a false teaching that unjustly purports to originate from Christianity. The only thing that the science of spirit cannot be reconciled with is a narrowly conceived scientific view of the world and not with a broadly based Christian view. And the discoveries of the science of spirit, the wonders that it finds in the spiritual world, will not mean an end to the wonders that Christianity teaches us about, but on the contrary will confirm them.

Laurenz Mueller, also a genuinely Christian theologian and professor, speaks in a similar vein: Christianity does not contradict and is not intended to contradict a doctrine of evolution properly understood, as long as it does not set out to be a purely causal evolution of the world and to place man only within the framework of a physical causality.

The science of spirit does not clash with Christianity, because it does not lead to the deadening of religious life and vision, but, on the contrary, it encourages and fires religious life and vision.

And those today who still believe that their Christianity would be endangered by the science of spirit will gradually have to realize that whereas wrongly understood science has driven away more and more souls, both outwardly and inwardly, anthroposophy or the science of spirit, because it kindles religious life, will bring even educated people back to the great mysteries, not only of Christian teaching, but also of Christian deeds and ceremonial services. This will largely be the work of the future, in fact, of the relatively near future.

Just in this connection one could wish that things would be better understood and that above all there were more willingness to understand the matter, that one would not formulate a picture without really going into it and then setting up this picture as something contradictory to Christianity.

I can only mention this very briefly. I would have to speak for a long time if I had to go into everything in detail—but this could be done—to show that Christianity has not the slightest grounds for turning against such ideas as repeated lives on earth.

To finish with, allow me to say a few words about the teachings of natural science.

Today natural science has arrived at the point of realizing what it cannot attain. Oskar Hertwig—to keep to our former example—hits upon something in a remarkable way in his book Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie.

In a remarkable way he comes to the conclusion that it is not any objective research, nor analytical research into scientific facts, that has led to the materialistic philosophy of Darwinism, but it arises from the fact that the people of this age have borne this materialistic outlook in themselves, have borne the belief in the unspiritual nature of the outer world in themselves, and have applied this to nature.

And here it is very interesting to feel the weight of Oskar Hertwig's own words to show the real nature of the situation.

Hertwig says: “The principle of utility, the conviction of the necessity of unrestricted commercial and social competition, materialistic tendencies in philosophy, are forces that would have played an important part, even without Darwin. Those who were already under their influence greeted Darwinism as a scientific confirmation of the ideas they already cherished. They could now look at themselves, as it were, in the mirror of science.”

“The interpretation of Darwin's teaching,” Oskar Hertwig continues, “which is so ambiguous in its uncertainties, also allows for a varied application in the other spheres of economic, social and political life. Each person can get what he wants from it, just as from the Delphic oracle, and can draw his own conclusions concerning social, hygienic, medical and other questions, and can call on the scientific learning of the new Darwinian biology with its unalterable laws of nature, to confirm his own views. If however these laws of nature are not what they are made out to be”—and Oskar Hertwig sets out to prove, and does prove, that they are not really laws of nature, “could there not also be social dangers when they are applied in various ways to other spheres? We surely do not believe that human society can use for fifty years such phrases as bitter struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, of the most useful, the most expedient, perfection by selection etc., without being deeply and substantially influenced in the whole direction of this kind of ideas.”

This is what a scientist is already saying today. He is not just saying that these materialistically formulated ideas of Darwinism are wrong, but that they are injurious, that they inevitably lead to difficulties in the soul life, and to social and political harm. Only the restricted and one-sided views of certain scientists could maintain otherwise. And sometimes this works out in the most terrible way.

A great scientist of the present day for whom I have great respect—and it is just because I have respect for him that I cite him now—hints in a remarkable way at how the scientist does not perhaps wish to be understood, but at how he must be understood on the basis of his attitude toward what can be expected of a purely naturalistic view of nature. The scientist, for whom I have the greatest respect, says at the end of a significant book—and these are now his own words that I am quoting: “We live today in the best period of time”—this is what he maintains, it cannot be proved with full validity, but he asserts: “we live today in the best period of time, at least we scientists, and we can even hope for better,” he says, “for in comparing the science of today with the achievements of earlier scientists we can say with Goethe who knew so much about nature and the world:

The pleasure ... is great, to cast

The mind into the spirit of the past,

And scan the former notions of the wise,

And see what marvelous heights we've reached at last.”

—Thus speaks a first class scientist at the end of an important book!

I do not know whether many people notice and think about the person whom Goethe makes say this. Is it really Goethe, the one who knew so much about the world and nature, who says this? No, he puts it into the mouth of Wagner

And Faust replies to Wagner:

“How strange, that he who cleaves to shallow things

Can keep his hopes alive on empty terms

And dig with greed for precious plunderings,

And find his happiness unearthing worms!”

This is the real view of the one who knew so much about the world and nature!

And if scientists today do not yet realize what can be built on the basis of the sound foundations to be found in a view of the world, such as also shone through Goethe, one can understand what Oskar Hertwig so rightly says: The materialistic conception of the world and Darwinism with its materialistic bias have arisen out of the general materialistic attitude of the times, their naturalistic methods, their materialistic impulses and feelings, and which have then been applied to nature. But the facts disprove this.

The scientist of spirit replies to this out of what he believes to be a deeper knowledge of the world and of man: No, it is not such a narrow view like the one prevalent around the middle of the 19th century that should affect our study of nature, but our views should be formulated according to the highest possible content that spirit and soul can attain, and they should then be applied to nature to see if nature really confirms them. We can then expect that the resultant view will not be anything like Darwinism. This latter believed the world to exist according to certain laws and, as we have seen, nature herself has disproved this belief.

The science of spirit strives to study the human soul in its depths, and to draw out of these depths the spirit that exists in the broadest and most embracing sense as the foundation of existence in spiritual beings and forces. It is not a one-sided but a many-sided path that it takes, for there is not only one path it follows, but it follows all the paths on which the human soul is led, from out of its own rich inner life. The science of spirit may be allowed to hope that the questions, the mysteries, which nature has put to it will not be refuted by nature, but that the spirit in nature will affirm them because the spirit that lives in nature also lives in man, and not, as in the other case, to deny what the science of spirit or anthroposophy envisages the real nature of the human mystery to be.