The Rudolf Steiner Archive

One may say that the original idea of Festivals was to make people lift their eyes, turning them from dependence on earthly things to dependence on super-earthly ones. And it is consideration of the Easter Festival that can especially bring about such thoughts. In the course of the last four or five hundred years the civilization of the world has gone through a spiritual evolution which has inclined humanity to turn its attention more and more away from its connection with cosmic forces and cosmic powers. Human attention has been restricted increasingly to the study of those conditions prevailing between man and earthly forces and powers. It is also the case that with those means of knowledge which are considered legitimate to-day it is impossible to keep other connections in view. If anyone in pre-Christian times, or even in the first Christian centuries, who was closely associated with the Mysteries could have experienced our present-day knowledge, he would not in the least have understood—if he approached things with the thoughts and feelings of those days—how it was possible for people to live without a consciousness of their super-earthly, their cosmic connections.

I might here give an outline of many things which you find more fully described in different cycles of lectures; but as these present lectures are intended to give a more intimate understanding of the thought of Easter, I naturally cannot bring forward every particular but can only hint at how things are.

If we were to transfer ourselves in thought into the various ancient religious systems of the past, we might choose as an example that one most familiar to modern people, the ancient Hebrew-Jewish system; we would find, when these ancient systems are mono-theistic, the worship of the one Godhead. This is that Godhead of whom, in accordance with Christian acceptance, we call the Father.

Now, in all those religions in which the thought of this Father-God lived, there has existed more or less, but especially among the priests of the Mysteries, a connection between this God and the cosmic moon-forces, a connection with everything streaming down to earth as force from the moon.

Of this ancient consciousness of the connection between man and the moon forces, hardly anything has remained other than the stimulus given to the poetic fancy of the soul by the moon, and the number of months in the gestation period of man, in accordance with the ten lunar months as reckoned in medicine. But in the older ideas concerning such things a clear consciousness did exist, that when man came down from the spiritual world, where in pre-earthly times he had lived as a psycho-spiritual being, into physical life, he was filled with and strengthened by impulses that streamed to him from the moon. When a man considers what it is that has formed him as living being, what lives in him as the forces of nutrition and ˂ breathing, and as forces of growth generally, he must not look to the forces of the earth but to forces outside the earth.

It is easy for him to see how, when looking to earthly forces, these are connected with him. But if our body were not held together by forces outside the earth, if it did not receive its form from forces beyond the earth, what could the mere earthly forces do towards its preservation and cohesion (Zusammengehalt)?

The moment the non-earthly forces—those coming from beyond the earth—leave it, the body is exposed to the forces of the earth: it then perishes, disintegrates, and becomes a corpse. The forces of the earth can only make corpses of men, they cannot construct their human form. Those forces living in man, by which he is raised above what is earthly, so that between birth and death he can live on earth as a coherent organic form and not succumb to the forces of earth that lay hold of him at death and destroy him, against which he wages a life-long struggle here—for they must be struggled against—these forces he owes to the influences of the moon-world.

If on the one hand we can state theoretically that the moon contains the forces by which the human body is formed, we must realize on the other hand that ancient religions reverenced these as the divine Father-forces which were the means of bringing man into physical existence at birth. The ancient Hebrew Initiate had a distinct consciousness of the fact that the forces leading man to earthly existence streamed to him from the moon, maintained him on earth, and were torn from him as physical man when he passed through the gates of death.

A kindly feeling of love for these Father-forces, a looking up to them in the practice of their cult by means of prayers, etc., was the content of certain ancient monotheistic religions. These ancient mono-theistic religions were more consistent than people think. Such matters are very incorrectly represented in history, because history can only go by external documents, not by what is observed with the help of spiritual vision.

Those religions which looked up to the moon, and to that which existed in the moon as spiritual Beings, belonged to a later period. Compared with the opinions held by them concerning the moon, those held by earlier religions concerning the Sun-forces, and even the Saturn forces, of which I shall have something to say later, were very clearly defined, but they concerned themselves principally with the Sun-forces.

With these early religions we enter an historical field of study for which external documents no longer exist, lying as they do many thousands of years earlier than the foundation of Christianity. In order to provide this age with a name I have called it in my book, “An Outline of Occult Science,” the “Old Indian,” which was followed by the “Old Persian,” age. In these civilizations human development was very different from what it became later, and religious beliefs depended upon this development. During the last two thousand years and more we have developed so that we are not aware that a split has occurred in our earthly evolution. This has hardly been noticed. What takes place in the greater part of present-day humanity, inwardly, at about their thirtieth year, has also hardly been noticed. It has remained to a great extent in the subconscious; it has not entered into man's consciousness. Conditions were very different in a humanity that lived eight or nine thousand years before the foundation of Christianity. The development of individuals was then more continuous up to about the age of thirty. With the thirtieth year a great change took place. What I have now to say about this change has naturally to be spoken of somewhat crudely, but these simple descriptions are in accordance with the facts that concern us at the moment.

In those remote times the following might happen: A man might have contracted a friendship with someone (before his thirtieth year who was considerably younger than himself—perhaps three or four years younger. This man shortly afterwards experienced the change that took place about the age of thirty. It might happen, these two men not having seen each other for a long time, that the one who had experienced the change at his thirtieth year was spoken to by the other without his knowing who he was. His memory had been so completely changed. I have had to put this in the language of to-day, hence it may strike you as being somewhat crude. In olden times the control of certain arrangements (Einrichtungen) stood in close connection with the Mystery schools; and by these, in the small societies then existing, a register of the lives of the young people was kept, because they themselves forgot, owing to the great alteration (Umschwung) that had taken place in them, and had to be taught again what they had experienced in life before their thirtieth year. These men then knew: I have become a quite different being in my thirtieth year, I must go to “the registry” (a modern expression, of course) in order to learn what I had previously experienced. This is actually what happened! Through instructions they received, at the same time they were told: Before your thirtieth year the Moon-forces worked in you exclusively; after attaining this age the Sun-forces entered into the development of your earthly life. The Sun-forces work on man with an entirely different purport from the Moon-forces. What does present-day humanity know of the Sun-forces? Only the outer physical part. Man knows that they warm him, that they cause him to perspire; he knows besides this that people practise sun-bathing, that there is something therapeutic connected with the forces of the sun, but all this he learns in a merely external way. He has no idea what the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun do to him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the heathen Cæsars, had experienced something of these forces in the last lingering note of the Mysteries, and just when he desired to make proof of these experiences he was murdered on his expedition into Persia; so powerful in the early Christian centuries were the forces which desired all knowledge of such things to be lost.

It is therefore not to be wondered at that even to-day no knowledge concerning them can be acquired. While the Moon-forces are those which determine what man is, which permeate him with an inward necessity (Notwendigkeit), as to his actions, and determine his instincts, his temperament, his emotions and the nature of his physical-etheric body generally, the spiritual Sun-forces free him from this compulsion. They caused this necessity or compulsion to dissolve, as it were, and man became really a free being through the Sun-forces. In that ancient time to which I have referred, the difference between these two forces in human evolution was strictly defined. In his thirtieth year a man then became a Sun-man, a free man; up to his thirtieth year he was a Moon-man, and was not free. To-day these two conditions slide one into the other. To-day the Sun-forces work along with the Moon-forces even in childhood, and the Moon-forces continue to work on into later years; so that to-day these two things, compulsion or necessity and freedom, work one into the other. This was not always the case. In the early pre-historic times of which we are speaking the action of the sun and that of the moon were absolutely distinct in the course of a man's life. This is why it was said at that time concerning the greater part of humanity: a man was born not once but twice. For it was held to be abnormal, something pathological, if a man did not experience this great change of life in his thirtieth year. It came about in the course of human evolution that the second of these births—they were spoken of as the Moon-birth and the Sun-birth—that the Sun-birth was no longer so noticeable in man, and certain ceremonies were carried out, certain exercises and actions were performed on those who desired initiation into the Mysteries. Such persons then experienced, in the Mysteries, what could be no longer experienced generally by men, and they became the “twice-born.”

When this expression “twice-born” is found in Oriental literature to-day it is misleading. Any Oriental scholar, any Sanskrit expert, might be asked—I think Professor Beckh is present here and you can ask him—if it is not the case that, as a matter of fact, no Oriental science can clearly and distinctly put before you, in a few words, what the content of the expression “twice-born” really is. Formal explanations there certainly are in plenty, but what it means in substance no one knows. Only those who are aware that it reaches back to a reality know the reality I have just explained to you. In such things spiritual observation alone can speak. And when once it has spoken, I would like to ask all those who hold with what can be learned from documents, with everything external science can discover—I would like to ask, taking for granted that science has gone to work in an unprejudiced manner, if this science does not corroborate in every particular the investigations made by spiritual science? Your attention must, however, be directed to certain things which take precedence of all documentary science; for the understanding of life, of man, cannot be gained by a science of documents.

Let us turn our gaze back to a very far-off age when people spoke of the Moon-birth of man as creation through the Father. With regard to the Sun-birth, people were quite clear that in the spiritual Sunlight the power of Christ, the Son, was active, and that this was the power that freed people. Consider for a moment what this force, this Sun-force, does. It is the force that enables us as men on earth to make something out of ourselves. We would have been strictly confined within an unchangeable, natural—not fateful—necessity, if the liberating Sun-forces had not by their influence dissolved this necessity.

This fact was known to those who held the more ancient opinions concerning the world. They looked up to the sun and said: This eye of the world, from which the power of Christ streams forth, is the cause of my not having to remain always under that brazen necessity with which I was born from out of the forces of the moon, as a man whose whole life had to evolve under compulsion. It is the Christ-force looking down on me through that cosmic Sun-eye that enables me through my inner freedom to make something of myself during my life on earth, something I could not have been, through the Moon-forces which placed me here.

This consciousness that he could transform himself, could make something out of himself, is what men saw in the forces of the Sun.

I would like to add here, but only by way of parenthesis, that Saturn was also looked up to as a third source of birth. In the Saturn forces these men saw all that preserved them when they passed through the gate of death: the third earthly metamorphosis. Birth on earth, meaning birth through the Moon; the second birth, meaning birth through the Sun; the third birth, meaning Saturn birth or earthly death. Man was here upheld by the mighty forces of Saturn, forces then holding sway at the extreme limit of the planetary system of the earth. These forces preserved him, bore him out into the spiritual world, and provided a connecting link for his being, when the third metamorphosis took place. This was absolutely the mental outlook of the men of those ancient times.

But human evolution goes on. A time arrived when it was no longer known in the Mysteries how the Sun-forces affected mankind. Knowledge concerning these forces was preserved longest among the medical workers in the Mysteries. For the forces which in his ordinary development give man freedom, and the possibility of making something out of himself—the Sun- or Christ-forces—live also under various conditions in certain plants and in other earthly beings and things, and reveal in these earthly things properties of healing.

Generally speaking, all sense of their connection with the sun was lost to humanity; and while for a considerable time the consciousness still remained that man is dependent on the Moon-forces, or Father-forces, all consciousness of his dependence—or rather his liberation by means of the Sun-forces—had long been lost. What to-day we call Nature-forces, almost the only ones we do speak of when discussing our conceptions of the world, are but Moon-forces that have become entirely abstract. But the Sun-forces were still known to One, even Jesus of Nazareth, the bearer of the Christ, who lived His life in accordance with them. He knew them because he was ordained to receive these forces into his own body as they streamed to earth from the sun—forces which men had only been able to come in touch with in the Ancient Mysteries when they looked up to the sun. This I explained in the last lecture. What was of greatest importance was this, that in the thirtieth year of His life a change took place in the body of Jesus of Nazareth similar to that change which in primeval times took place in everyone, only it was but the reflection (Schein), as it were, of the Spiritual sun that shone into these men, while now the original Lord of the Sun, the Christ himself, came down into human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This fact lies behind the Mystery of Golgotha as the supremest event (Urergebnis) affecting all earthly life.

You will realise the full connection of these things when we now consider how the festival of Easter, which in those days was an entirely human concern, was actually carried out in the Ancient Mysteries—the Festival of Easter was, in fact, an initiation. The ceremony progressed through three stages. The first requirement, before the neophyte could attain true knowledge, before he could be initiated, was that through all that came to him from the side of the Mysteries he should be made so humble that people to-day can hardly form an idea of this deep, inner humility. People imagine to-day that they have the appearance, as regards knowledge, of being exceedingly modest, while for those who can see into the matter they are really possessed by pride. When about to enter upon initiation a man has, in the first place, to feel convinced that he cannot consider himself to be a man at all, but says rather: I have first to become a man!

It cannot be said of people to-day that at any point in their lives they consider themselves not to be men. But this was the first demand made on them, that they should hold themselves not to be men and should address themselves as follows: I certainly was a man before I came down into an earthly body; in pre-earthly existence I was a man of soul and spirit. The Soul-Spirit then entered a physical body, which it had received from its parents.

It, then, not clothed itself with the physical body—that would be to express it incorrectly—but it permeated itself with this physical body (durchdrungen mit diesem physischen Leibe). Men have really no idea of the manner and means by which the Soul-Spirit, in the course of long ages (das Geistig-Seelische durchsetzt das Physische), permeates the physical, permeates the nerves and sense-system, permeates the rhythmic-system, the digestive-system, and the limbs of man. They have no idea of this. They know very well that they are able to perceive the physical world by means of their senses. But what is a man capable of when he has reached the point where he has permeated his physical body so profoundly with his soul and spirit nature that he considers his development to be complete, when he is a fully evolved, fully developed man. ... What is he then capable of? At present he can certainly see external objects, he can hear external sounds, perceive through his skin things warm or cold, smooth or rough: he can perceive things outwardly; but he cannot perceive inwardly. He cannot look into himself with his eyes; he can at most remove the skin from a dead body and think that he sees into it, but he does not do so really. It is childish to think, for instance, here before me is a house, it has windows but I cannot see through them, so I will take all kinds of instruments, and, if I am strong enough, smash the house down, but then I will have only a heap of broken bricks before me, and these ruins are all I see. This is what people do to-day. They flay, they dissect people, in order to learn about them; but by such means they learn nothing. It is not the man at all they learn to know by such methods. If it is desired really to know something of man, you must be able to turn your eyes inwards and view him exactly as we view him to-day when we direct our eyes to him outwardly, and in the same way you must hear inwardly with your ears. All these activities taken together—those of the eyes, the ears, the whole skin as organ of touch, the organs of smell, etc., all these were called in the Mysteries the door to man (das Tor zum Menschen).

Initiation depended principally upon a person becoming aware that he knew nothing at all of human nature (vom Menschen); therefore, as he had no self-consciousness of human nature, he could not be a man. He had first to learn to look inward through his senses as ordinarily he looked outward. This was the first stage or degree of initiation in the ancient Mysteries. As soon as the pupil learnt to look thus inwards, in that same moment he became conscious of his pre-earthly existence. At that moment he knew: I am now “in my soul and spirit.”

The ordinary man looks outwards; instead of this the pupil of the Mysteries learnt to look inwards. In this inward gazing he became aware of what had entered into him in his pre-earthly existence, what had passed into him through his eyes, his ears, his skin, and so on. He was aware of these things, and through this was also aware of his pre-earthly existence. At this stage he was told that he would learn to know what we call natural science.

When we study natural science to-day, how do we do it? We are led to observe the things of Nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is much the same as if I were to meet a man again whom I had known long ago, and someone were to insist: You have to forget everything you did in company with this man; on seeing him again you are not to recall the intercourse you had with him. It is unbelievable that responsible people would do such a thing as this! I can indeed believe that occasionally this might be agreeable.... but under such conditions life could not go on. But this is imposed on the man to-day simply through the laws of civilization. For he knew the kingdoms of Nature; he knew them from their spiritual side before he came down to earth. To-day he is told to forget all that he knew of the mineral, plant, and animal world before he came down to earth, whereas the ancient Initiates taught him about them in what was called the first stage of the Mysteries. The Initiate said: Look at this piece of quartz. ... And then he did everything he could that might enable the pupil to recall what he had known about quartz before he came down to earth, what he had known, say, of the lily, the rose, etc. What was thus imparted as knowledge of Nature was a remembrance, a re-cognition (wieder erkennen). And anyone who had learnt the teaching regarding Nature as a remembrance of what he had seen before he descended into earthly life was received into the second degree.

In the second degree the pupil learnt Music, which at that time was Architecture, Geometry, Surveying, etc. For in what did this second degree of initiation consist? It comprised all that a man perceived when he not only looked inwards into himself with his eyes, or listened inwardly with his ears, but when he actually entered into himself (in sich hineinsteigt). The neophyte seeking initiation then said to himself: Thou enterest now into the grotto of the human temple (Tempelgrotte). He now learnt to know this grotto of the human temple. This was that physical part of him which was permeated by the soul and spiritual forces which were man before he came down into earthly life. Into this he now entered. He was told that this hidden place had three chambers. The first was the chamber of Thought; there he learnt all that was connected with this. ... Verily seen from outside the head is small.... when a man enters and sees it from within it is as vast as the whole universe. Here he learnt to know his spiritual nature. This was the first chamber. The second chamber was that in which he learnt to know Feeling. The third chamber was where he learnt to know Will.

He then learnt how a man is organised according to his instruments of thought, feeling, and will; he learnt what was of value on earth. Knowledge of Nature was not only of value on earth; man had already acquired knowledge of Nature before he came down to earth. But here we must remember that houses are not built above in the spiritual world as they are here with the help of earthly architecture. Over there, there is music, but it is spiritual Melos. Earthly music is something projected into earthly air; it is a projection of heavenly music, but as experienced by men it is earthly. It is the same when we measure things here on earth. We measure earthly space; the art of measuring, geometry, or surveying is an earthly science. It was important that those seeking initiation in the second degree should be made to realize that all talk of knowledge gained by mere earthly means, unless connected with geometry, architecture, or the art of surveying, is illusory; that true natural science is a recollection of pre-earthly knowledge; and that geometry, architecture, music, and the science of measuring are sciences that have to be learnt here on earth.

Thus in the second degree of initiation a man descended into his own self and learnt to know the men of the three chambers in respect of the single earthly incarnation, as he would otherwise learn to know them from outside, without descending into their inner being.

In the third degree the pupil learnt to know men, not simply by sinking down into himself (wenn er nun nicht bloss in sich untertaucht), by getting to know himself as spiritual being, but when this spiritual part of him learnt further to know the body. Therefore in all the Ancient Mysteries this degree was known as the gate of death. Here he learnt how it is with a man when he lays aside his earthly body; only there is a difference between actual death and that experienced during initiation. Why this must be I will explain in the next lecture; at present I only mentioned the fact.

When man really dies he lays aside his physical body. He is no longer bound to it, nor does he follow any longer the forces of the earth, having been freed from them. But while still bound to his physical body, as was the case in olden times at initiation, he had to attain liberation from the body (which at death comes of itself), and had to maintain it for a certain time through his own inner power. The attainment of those strong powers by which a man is able to maintain his soul in freedom, apart from the body, was necessary to initiation. It is these that give him a higher knowledge concerning the things he can never perceive through his senses, never think through his understanding. They place him as man in the spiritual world as the physical body places him as man in the physical world. He had then advanced so far as to be able to realize what he was as man of soul and spirit, to know that he had been initiated while still in earthly life. From this time onwards the earth for the Initiate was as a star existing outside humanity (Von da ab war die Erde ein ausser dem Menschen befindlicher Stern für den Initiierten), and in the ancient Mysteries he had before all else to learn to live with the sun instead of with the earth. He knew what he had received from the sun, and how the Sun-forces worked in him.

This third degree that I have just described was followed by a fourth. It affected the man seeking initiation in the following way: When on earth a person eats vegetables or game, when he drinks various things, he knows that such things were outside him and that now they are within him. He breathes the air; at first it is outside, then within him, then outside again. He is so closely bound up with the forces of the earth that he bears within him earthly substances and forces which otherwise were outside him. It was clearly explained to those seeking initiation in ancient times: Before initiation thou art a bearer of Earth, of vegetables, game, pork, etc. But when once initiated in the third degree, and when all those things have been imparted to thee that can be imparted to one who is free of the body, thou art no longer a bearer (träger) of cabbage, pork, or veal, but thou then dost become a bearer of those things which the Sun-forces give to thee.

That which the Sun-forces give spiritually was called, in all the Mysteries, Christos. Therefore, he who had surmounted the first three degrees of initiation—though on earth he might feel himself to be a bearer of cabbages—knew that he was a bearer of the Sun-forces and that he was called a Christophoros. In nearly all the Ancient Mysteries this was the name for those who had entered the fourth degree.

In the third degree certain things had to be grasped; the Neophyte had principally to realize that, in moments of knowledge, desire according to the physical body must cease, that as regards his physical body he belonged to the earth, but that really the earth has only to do with the destruction of his physical body, not with its construction. If the man of those former ages had been addressed in the words of to-day, he would have had things explained somewhat as follows (the sense would certainly have been made clear to him, but to you I can only say these things in the language of to-day, not in that of those former times): If you would know the teaching concerning substances, how these unite and separate, you must look up to the spiritual forces that from out the cosmos permeate all substance. This you cannot do unless initiated. For this you must have been initiated in the fourth degree. You must be able to perceive with the forces appertaining to Sun-existence; you can then study chemistry.

Supposing that someone to-day, wishing to take a degree in chemistry or in pharmacy, had first to submit to the necessity of feeling as a cabbage feels with regard to the forces of the sun, how absurd this would seem! But this was a fact. It was made absolutely clear that with such forces as people have in life, and which are generally employed during life, only geometry, surveying, music, and architecture can be studied ... not chemistry. If people speak of studying chemistry to-day, they speak in an entirely external way. All talk of chemistry has been entirely external ever since the time when the ancient initiation-wisdom was lost. This is a fact. It is enough to drive to desperation those who really wish “to know,” when they have to learn modern official chemistry, for it is founded only on assertion, not on any inward understanding of the matter. If men were only unprejudiced they would acknowledge that something else is needed, that people must be able to understand or realize differently if they wish to study chemistry. It is the modern timidity regarding knowledge or realization (erkennen) that has been implanted in people that holds them back from such an impulse.

After this a man was ripe. When sufficiently ripe to become Astronomos, which was a still higher grade (for to learn something of the stars externally, through calculations and the like, was considered absolutely unreal), he knew that in the stars spiritual beings dwelt who can only be known when physical perception has been overcome, when geometry has also been overcome, when man actually lives in the universe (Weltenall) and learns the spiritual nature of the stars—he was then a “Risen One.” He could then see how the Moon-forces and the Sun-forces actually work within earthly humanity.

I must therefore endeavour to-day to help you to understand from two sides how Easter was experienced inwardly in the ancient Mysteries—how this Festival did not take place at any fixed season of the year but when a man attained a certain degree of development. Easter was then experienced by him as a resurrection of his soul and spirit-nature out of the physical body, as a rising into the spiritual universe (Weltenall). It was thus that those who still knew something of the wisdom of the Mysteries at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha regarded this Mystery. They said: What would have happened to mankind if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place? In olden times it was possible for man to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for in quite ancient times he experienced a second birth naturally, as one might say, when he was about thirty years old. At that time at least there were still memories of this, and there was a science of the Mysteries which preserved in its traditions what an earlier age had experienced. All this had faded and been forgotten by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Mankind would have become entirely decadent, if the Power to which Initiates of the Mysteries rose when they became Christophoroi had not entered into One Jesus of Nazareth—so that it has remained on the earth ever since—and men, through Jesus Christ, have been able to unite themselves with it.

Thus what rises before our eyes to-day in the Festival of Easter had already formed a part of the history of the Mysteries. Men will only know the real meaning of Easter when they revive this ancient portion of the history of the Mysteries. They will only approach an understanding of the real meaning of Easter when they endeavour in some way at least to understand what men seeking initiation experienced in olden times. Such an Initiate said to himself: Through initiation I have become aware of how sun and moon work in me in their reciprocal relations to each other; I now know that I have been formed as physical man in a certain way; that I have eyes of a certain kind, a nose, a whole bodily form constructed within and without as it is; and the fact that this form is able to grow and continue to grow to-day through the nourishment it receives depends on the Moon-forces. All I require comes from them. That I am inwardly free, that I can be active as a free being within my bodily nature, that I can transform myself, take myself in hand, depends upon the Sun-forces, upon the Christ-forces. These I must stimulate, if I wish to achieve consciously by my labour what the Sun-forces accomplished in me under other conditions through a sort of natural necessity.

From this we can understand how man still looks up to Sun and Moon to-day and from their reciprocal constellations fixes the time of the Easter Festival. This method of reckoning is something that has remained from former times. People ask: When is the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring equinox? And they fix the Easter Festival of the year on the first Sunday after the full moon; indicating thereby that people see something in the structure, in the form of the Easter Festival, that comes from the cosmos and must accord with it. The thought of Easter must be grasped once more. It can only be understood when people look back to the content of the Ancient Mysteries, where man was first made aware of what took place when he looked into himself: the door of humanity! When he entered into himself, living inwardly in himself: the three-chambered inner man! When he made himself free: the Gate of Death! When he moved freely in the spiritual world: when he was a Christophoros.

The Mysteries themselves went back to a time when free human development had to find a place. And the time is now come when the Mysteries have to be found once more. They must be found again. People must realize consciously that preparations have to begin now, by which they can be found again.

Out of this consciousness the “Christmas Session” (Weihnachtstagung) was held, for it is an urgent necessity that a place should exist on the earth where Mysteries can once more be established. The Anthroposophical Society in its further development must provide the means for a renewal of the Mysteries. Your task, my dear friends, must be to co-operate towards this end, doing so out of the right consciousness. This demands that life be considered according to its three stages—according to the stage in which a man looks into the nature of men; according to the stage when he strives towards the inner being of men; according to the stage in which he is in that state of consciousness which otherwise he only experiences in the reality of external death.

As a remembrance of the lesson that has been given here to-day, let us take with us the following words, allowing them to work powerfully in our souls:—

Stand before the portals of the lives of men,
Behold on their lintels words of power.

Live in the inward souls of men,
Feel in this realm the beginning of worlds.

—otherwise world-beginning is not always perceived, but only what is in the world—

Ponder the earthly-end of man;
Find in it the Spirit's turning-point.

In these words you have the essence of to-day's lesson—

Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte;
Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte.

Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern;
Fühl' in seinem Kreise Welt beginnen.

Denk an des Menschen Erdenende;
Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.

In order to carry further the matters with which I have dealt in the last few days, I would now like to refer to the astronomical aspect of Easter. In order to do this it is necessary to allude to some of the facts connected with the so-called Moon-Mysteries.

During all those ages in which men were aware of mystery-wisdom, the Moon-Mysteries were spoken of, and these were connected with the being of man in so far as he is a part of the whole cosmos. For we must clearly realize that man with his complete being is dependent on the whole cosmos, just as he is dependent on the earth as regards his physical body.

Now the years of materialism have brought in their train a complete loss of consciousness on the part of humanity, of the spirituality existing in the wide spaces of the cosmos, as revealed in the formation of the constellations, and in the movements of the stars, when these are planets. No trace of this consciousness has remained beyond the outward observance of the stars and the calculation of the movements of the planets.

When we observe how all this is studied according to the ideas of modern astronomy, it strikes us as being exactly the same as if one were to study the human physical organism, completely unconscious of the fact that it is permeated with soul and spirit, keeping before one only the conditions of measure, and the external relationships of movement of this organism, and forgetting entirely that in the relationship of measure and of movement the soul and spirit find expression.

In man, an undivided soul- and spirit-nature comes to expression, held together by the ego. But in the organism of the whole universe, spiritual perception finds the expression not of a single undivided soul- and spirit-nature but of a multiplicity—an immeasurable, boundless multiplicity of spiritual Beings, who reveal themselves in the grouping of the stars, in the movements of the planets, through the light streaming from the stars, and so on.

All this multiplicity of spirituality living in the stars is related inwardly to man in the same way as those things are related to him, which, from an earthly side, and throughout the whole realm of Nature, provide him with the means of sustenance. But the closest connection between man and the universe has to do with what is called the “Moon Mystery.”

When the moon is observed outwardly, it is seen in its relation to the earth to be in a state of metamorphosis or change. At one time it is seen as a full luminous orb; we look again and see that only a part of it is luminous—a half, then a quarter. We also have that state of the moon in which it is entirely withdrawn from external sight, the state which we call that of new moon. Then we have again the return of full moon.

All this is explained nowadays by merely saying that in the moon we have a body moving in space which is illumined by the sun from different directions, so that to us it seems to assume different forms. But with this we have not exhausted what the moon does for the earth, and more especially what it does for man on the earth. We must clearly understand when we look at anything so apparently physical on the surface, as the full moon is, that what it here presents to us in its physical aspect is something entirely different, in that physical aspect, from what the new moon presents to us (which because of the relative connection of worlds it cannot do directly and physically), and we must not think when the moon does not show itself that its powers and activities are not present.

When because of the relationship of the heavenly bodies we know: now it is New Moon ... the moon certainly is invisible, but because of this it is present in a more spiritual way than when we see its physical light at the time of Full Moon. So the moon is present at one time physically and at another time spiritually. We have therefore a constant rhythmic alteration between a physical manifestation and a spiritual manifestation of the moon.

If we wish really to understand what is brought about through this, we must turn back to those facts already known to you through statements made in my book, An Outline of Occult Science. We must recall what is said there: The moon was once within the earth; it belonged to the earth-body; it left the earth and became what might be called a neighbouring planet. It has therefore split off from the earth, and now circles round it. It showed influences exercised by it on men while it was still connected with the earth.

Man was, of course, an entirely different being when he lived and evolved on an earth that still had the moon within it. Since the withdrawal of the moon the earth has been impoverished in respect of moon-qualities; from that time man has been maintained in his lower parts by other forces, by purely earth-forces, not by earth- and moon-forces. On the other hand, those forces which (so long as the moon was within the earth) worked on man from within have now, since its withdrawal, worked on him from the moon—that is, from outside.

We can therefore say: The forces of the moon streamed at one time through man, they encountered first his feet and legs, then streamed through him upwards from below. Since the departure of the moon from the earth these have worked in a reverse direction, from the head of man downwards. Because of this the Moon-forces have had an entirely different task for humanity than they had before.

In what way did this task show itself? It became evident through man having a clearly defined experience on descending from pre-earthly to earthly existence. When a man has passed through the period between death and rebirth, and has been acquitted of everything regarding the things affecting his soul and spirit during that period, he turns his attention to the descent to earth, to the union of himself with what in a physical, corporal way is to come to him from his father and mother. But before—with the help of his ego and astral body—he can find the means for union with the physical body; he must be clothed with an etheric body which he attracts to himself out of his cosmic surroundings.

This occurrence has been fundamentally changed since the time of the moon's withdrawal from the earth. Before the moon's departure, when a man, having completed his life between death and a new birth, drew near to earth again, he had need of powers by which he could organise the ether which was dispersed through all the surrounding universe, around himself, his ego, and astral body into the form of an etheric body. These powers he acquired on his approach to earthly existence from the moon, which was then one with the earth. Since the moon's departure he has acquired the powers necessary to the formation of his etheric body from outside the earth, in fact from the departed moon; so that immediately before his entrance into earthly life man has to apply to that which is contained in the moon—to something cosmic—in order to construct his etheric body.

Now, this etheric body must be so constructed that it has, as it were, an outer and an inner side. Let us try to picture in a quite diagrammatic way how the etheric body is formed. It has an outer and an inner side, so that we realize man has to construct it both outwardly and inwardly. In forming the outer part of the etheric body he requires the forces of light, for besides other substances the etheric body is principally formed of waves of cosmic light. Sunlight is not fitted for this; sunlight cannot supply the power which enables man to form his etheric body. For this purpose light is needed that has shone from the sun on to the moon and has been reflected back from the moon again, and through this the light has become radically changed. All the light coming from the moon, and streaming from it out into the cosmos, contains powers which enable man when coming down to earth to construct the outer side of his etheric body.

On the other hand, that which streams spiritually from the moon, at the time of the new moon, sends into the cosmos the forces needed by man for the construction of the inner side of his etheric body.

Therefore, man's power to form the outer and inner sides of his etheric body depends on the rhythm between the periods of bright external moonshine and the dark of the moon.

What the Moon-forces are thus able to bring about in man depends also on this: that the moon is not the mere physical body that modern natural science imagines it to be, but that it is permeated through and through with spirit, that it is indeed composed of a plurality of Spiritual Beings.

I have explained on many occasions how it was that the moon separated at one time from the earth. It was not only physical substance that passed out into space, but I explained how those ancient Beings who lived at one time on the earth, not in any kind of physical body but in a spiritual form, how they were the original teachers of humanity and withdrew along with the moon into cosmic space, and that there they established a kind of moon-colony. So that we must distinguish on the moon between its physical-etheric and its psychic-spiritual nature, only this latter is not a unity but a multiplicity.

The whole spiritual life of the moon is dependent on the manner in which the Beings dwelling in the moon look from their moon-standpoint out on the surrounding universe—how they regard the world around them. And were I to express myself in a pictorial way I might say: the Spiritual Beings of the moon turn their attention first to what is of the greatest importance to them—to the planets belonging to our planetary system. Everything that takes place in the moon, by which man receives in the right way the forces necessary for the forming of his etheric body, depends on the results of observations (Beobachtungsresultaten) arrived at by those Beings living, as one might say, in the moon and observing from it the planets of our surrounding planetary system—Mercury, Sun, Moon, etc.

This was a knowledge that existed in certain of the Mysteries. An ancient knowledge preserved in certain of the Mystery Oracles held that the constellations and the mutual movements of our planetary system were observed from the moon, and that in accordance with these movements the deeds of the Moon-beings were determined.

Stress was laid on this by those who regarded the Moon as the point from which, in a certain way, world-connections (Weltenverhältnissen) having to do with the formation of the human etheric body were determined; and these Moon-forces came to be associated in the consciousness of men with the forces of the other planets.

We see this in the names of the days of the week, how

So men came to associate what was perceived from the moon with that which entered their consciousness regarding the relationship of the planets to different parts of time.

In the centres of the Ancient Mysteries something like the following was said: “Remember, O man! that before thy descent to earth thou hadst need of powers that were built up by the moon, through the fact that the Moon-beings gazed upon the other planets of the planetary system. Thou hast to thank the powers of the moon derived from Zeusday, Wodensday, Thorsday, Freiasday, etc., for the special configuration assumed by thine etheric body at its descent into thy physical body.”

Thus on one side we have the rhythmic progression of the moon in periods of light and darkness round the earth; on the other side we have the impression made on the consciousness of men by the whole sequence of the planets in their courses. The Mysteries added to that which had already been given out, this: Because certain Moon-beings could gaze on Mars, man was enabled to organize within his etheric body the capacity for speech. Because these Beings were able to gaze on Mercury, man acquired that which enabled him to construct within his etheric body the aptitude for movement.

If people desire to speak in accordance with these Moon-mysteries at the present time, it is possible to give expression to them in an entirely different form: this can be done by means of Eurythmy. Eurythmy develops out of speech. Having investigated the mysteries of language, by allowing the Moon-beings to instruct us in what they are able to observe when gazing on Mars, we make further investigations: we then notice how what we investigate changes, if after having directed our observation to Mars we direct it to Mercury. Thus when we turn from what the Moon-beings experience through Mars, to what they experience with regard to Mercury, we pass from the human aptitude for sound-production to the human aptitude for Eurythmy. This is to explain the matter in its cosmic aspect. What pours into man as the capacity for acquiring wisdom comes to him through experiences the Moon-beings have in respect of Jupiter.

All that permeates the souls of men, as love and beauty, they receive through the experiences that come to the Moon-beings from Venus.

The experiences that come to the Moon-being through their observation of Saturn impart to the etheric bodies of men their inner soul-warmth; and that from which man must be preserved, that which must be repulsed, as it were, by him so that the construction of his etheric body is not disturbed immediately before its descent to earth, is what comes to him from the sun. Thus those things come from the sun—or rather from this contemplation of the sun—against which man must be shielded by protecting powers so that he may become a being cut off and enclosed within his etheric body.

In this way man learns to know what takes place on the moon. In this way he also learns how the human etheric body is formed—how it is constructed when a man comes down from pre-earthly into earthly existence. The things just described are those connected with the Mysteries of the Moon (Mondengeheimnisse). It is possible to speak of such things to-day; in certain of the Ancient Mysteries they were not only described but experienced—truly experienced. They were experienced in such a way that what is written below was not only known but really inwardly felt—

Through initiation into the Mysteries, of which I spoke in the last lecture, people could rise above mere sight by the eyes, and hearing by the ears, as these are known in earthly conditions, they could free themselves from the body, they could withdraw (sich fernhalten) from the physical body and live only in the etheric body. But when living thus in the etheric body a man lived with all those things of which I have just been speaking. He then lived with speech, not as formed by the larynx, but with the speech that resounds in Mars as universal language (Weltensprache). He moved in accordance with the way Mercury controls movements in the cosmos; not with feet and limbs, but in the sense in which Mercury guides the movements of human beings. A man did not then attain to wisdom with such trouble as is customary in the years of a child's education to-day, and which in this materialistic age is in fact un-wisdom, but he lived directly in the wisdom of Jupiter, because he was able to unite himself with the Moon-beings who gaze on Jupiter. When men were initiated in this way they were actually and entirely within the rays of the moon's light; they were not beings living in flesh and blood on earth—they had left the earth and dwelt as beings in the moonlight, but in moonlight that was modified and transformed by what lived in the other planets of our planetary system During the periods of spiritual observation a man living in such Mysteries was a Light-being of the Moon. This must not be taken in a symbolic sense, or thought of as in any way abstract; but just as a man is aware of reality when he goes on a journey, say to Basle and back, such an one was conscious of the reality about him when through the ceremonies of initiation he had approached the Moon-beings.

Such a man knew that he had left his physical body for a time, and with his soul- and spirit-nature had entered the light-sphere of the Moon, that he had been clothed with a light-body, and, because united with the Moon-beings, he had gazed out into the wide spaces of the planetary worlds and had actually been able to perceive what it is possible to discover there. And what was it he saw? The principal thing he saw—he saw other things too—was that the forces coming from the Sun-beings have nothing to do with the formation of the human etheric body. In observing the sun he beheld something that for the etheric body was disruptive; and he knew that none of the forces proceeding from the etheric body could be acceptable to the sun, but that such forces must proceed from the higher members of human nature, from the ego and the astral body. Only on these could the Sun-forces work. Thus he knew that one did not look to the sun, but to the planets, for the human etheric body. One looked to the sun for the human astral body, and especially for the ego; but that for the whole inner power of the ego one must turn to the sun. This was the second fact that came to him through initiation into the recurring mysteries of the moon: the fact that in the etheric body he belonged to the planetary system, but that for the forces strengthening and permeating the ego and the astral body he must look to the sun.

The actual result of this initiation was that a man felt himself to be one with the moonlight, but that through the moonlight-existence (Mondenlichtdasein) of his own being he could gaze into the sun. He now said to himself: The sun sends its light to the moon because it must not impart it directly to man. He receives the moonlight united with the forces of the planets. From these he constructs his etheric body.

These secrets were known to anyone who had been initiated in this manner. By this he knew in how far he bore the power of the spiritual sun within him. He had seen it. He had reached a consciousness of the extent to which he bore the spiritual sun within him. This marked the degree of initiation he had gained, and by which a man became a Bearer of the Christ, which means a bearer of the Sun-being; not a receiver, but a bearer of the Sun-being. In the same way as the moon when it is full is a bearer of the sunlight, so such a man was a bearer of the Christ—a Christophoros. Initiation to this degree was therefore an entirely real experience.

And now picture to yourselves that other absolutely real experience by which a man escapes from the earth and, as an initiated human being, rises to the existence of a Light-being, and think of this earlier inward human Easter experience as changed to a cosmic experience—a cosmic festival. In later times men knew nothing of this; they did not know that such a thing was possible as that a man could really pass out of earthly existence into super-earthly existence, could unite with the Moon-nature (mit dem Mondenhaften) and from the moon gaze on the sun. But a remembrance of this had to be preserved; and this remembrance is preserved in the Festival of Easter.

The way in which all this can be experienced by man does not pass over into our later super-materialised consciousness. Instead, we are left with but an abstract conception of it. A man no longer looks into his own being so that he says: I can become one with the moonlight ... but he looks to the moon—to the full moon. In those days he looked up to the full moon and said: It is not I who evolve so as to attain that; but the earth which strives towards it. When does she strive towards it most? She strives towards it most in early spring, when the forces which were formerly with the seeds and the plants within the earth stream forth from the surface of the earth. On earth these forces become plants; but they go further, they stream forth into the wide spaces of the cosmos. In the Mysteries people made use of the following image; they said: At the time when the inner forces of the earth carry that which streams upwards through the stalks and leaves of plants out into the cosmos, man is able most easily to attain to the Sun-moon initiation and become a Christophoros; for he then floats, as it were, towards the moon on the forces that in spring stream from the earth to the moon. But he has to do this at the time of the full moon.

All this passed into the memory of the people, but it became abstract. They felt something must come to them with the full moonlight.... but it was an unconscious feeling, it was no longer a clear knowledge that these people experienced. Something, not the man himself, streamed up towards the full moon when this was the first full moon after the beginning of spring.

What can the full moon do now? It gazes on the sun—that is, it gazes on it on the first day dedicated to the sun, on the first Sunday following the coming of spring. As in former times the Christophoros looked up to the Sun-being from the standpoint of the moon, so the moon now gazes on the sun—that is, on what it symbolises—on the Sunsday.

Thus we have, say on the 21st of March, the beginning of spring; the forces of the earth then begin to reach forth into space. The right moment must be awaited when the observer—the full moon—is present. Full moon falls this year on the 21st of March. What does the moon gaze on? The sun. The following Sunday was then fixed as Easter Sunday.

It is therefore an abstract computation of time, and has endured as the relic of an entirely real event of the Mysteries which took place frequently in ancient times and happened to many people.

This is the truth concerning the Easter festival. Our present day spring festival represents a certain occurrence in the Mysteries that was celebrated everywhere in spring; but this occurrence in the Mysteries was different from the one I described in the first lecture.

The one I then described was that which led men to an understanding of death. I then explained that the thought of resurrection, which was made comprehensible by such means as the celebration of the Adonis festival in autumn, led them in about three days, through experiencing death, to a realization of resurrection in the spirit. This process of resurrection belongs really to autumn for the reason I then stated.

The event I am describing to-day is different; it was celebrated in other Mysteries and was carried out in connection with special initiations, those of the sun and moon. And this event was placed by man at a time before the beginning of life (vor den Lebensanfang). So that we must be able to look back to a time when in certain Mysteries there was knowledge concerning man's descent from pre-earthly to earthly existence, and in other Mysteries—those connected with autumn—there was knowledge concerning his ascent to that which was spiritual.

But in later ages, when there was no longer any understanding for the living connection between man and the spiritual nature of the cosmos, it happened that the autumnal festival of the Mystery of Resurrection became simply confused with the mystery of man's descent (Niederstiegsmysterium)—that of the spring.

In the confusion which thus arose we see how materialism gradually entered into human evolution, and how this not only gave rise to false views but actually produced absolute confusion in men's minds regarding things in which at one time a holy order reigned. For there was a holy order in the fact that, as autumn approached, a cosmic festival drew near which again called attention to an occurrence in the Mysteries. On these occasions it was said: Nature now becomes barren, withers and dies; this resembles the death of the physical side of man. But while man, when looking at Nature, sees only that which works destructively, something lives in him that is eternal, something that, disregarding what takes place in Nature, can be seen in spirit, something that rises after death to life in the spiritual world. In the mystery of the spring season it was made clear to men that Nature is conquered by the spirit; that spirit works down again out of the cosmos; that physical life will sprout and spring again from the earth because the spirit compels it to do so.

At this festival men were not to think of how they passed through death to a spiritual life but of how they had come down from what was spiritual. Therefore, when Nature first began to stir in spring, man had to think of his descent into physical life; and when Nature was in decline, then he had to think of rising to what was spiritual—to think of his resurrection. The life of the soul can be intensified in an extraordinary way when anyone thus experiences his connection with the cosmos. The carrying out of these mysteries varied in different regions. In ancient times there were some races that were really more Autumn-people and some who were more Spring-people. The people of the Adonis-mystery were among the Autumn-people; the Spring-people were connected with other Mysteries, more with those I have been describing to-day. And only those people who, seeking wisdom, journeyed like Pythagoras from Mystery to Mystery have passed through the totality of human experiences. Prom one Mystery “station” where the secrets concerning autumn—the true Sun-mysteries—were seen, they passed on to another where the secrets of the Spring—the Moon-mysteries—could be perceived. This is why we are always told concerning the ancient fully qualified Initiates that they travelled from one station of the Mysteries to another. It could be said of them that in a certain way these Initiates experienced the year inwardly through its festivals. An Initiate of olden times might have said: When I arrive at a place where the Festival of Adonis is celebrated, I behold within me the autumn of the universe and the rays of the spiritual sun when the night of winter begins. If he came to another place where the Spring-mysteries were celebrated he said: Here I behold the secret of the Moon-mysteries. Thus he learnt to know inwardly that which was connected with the real meaning of the whole year.

You can gather that our Easter Festival is really burdened with something that it should not be burdened with. Our Easter should really be a Festival of Burial, and this burial-festival had also to occur in spring, as was really the case in respect of the Festival of Human Spirituality; it was a festival for the purpose of stimulating men to work, and was necessary for primitive humanity as summer approached. Thus the Easter Festival was a Festival of Exhortation to work during summer. And the Autumn Festival, the Festival of Resurrection, was an exhortation to strive towards the spiritual world, and was celebrated at the time when work ceased in the outer world. But when man ceased from work it was intended that he should experience in his inner being that which was of greatest importance to his soul and spirit: consciousness of the eternal part of him, by looking to his resurrection in the spiritual world three days after death.

When we pass in this way from earthly mysteries (Geheimnissen) to cosmic knowledge we are able to recognise the inner structure of the order of the year in its festivals. But much of what was veiled in the festivals, much of what they really contained, has disappeared.

In the next lecture I shall endeavour as far as possible, and in close connection with certain Mystery-stations, to enter more deeply into the subject which to-day I desired to place before you more in accordance with the connections of the heavenly bodies themselves.

We have seen how out of the Mysteries has grown that which has bound the consciousness of man so closely to the universe that this bond found expression in the annual round of festivals, and we have seen especially how the Festival of Easter has evolved out of the principle of Initiation. From all that has been said, you must have been struck by the great importance of the part played by the Mysteries in the development of mankind.

Everything spiritual that passed through the world in ancient times, by which men were able to develop, did in fact have its rise out of the whole life and content of the Mysteries (Mysterienwesen). Making use of a modern expression, one might say: the Mysteries had a great deal of power in respect of the guidance of all spiritual life.

Now humanity was ordained from the beginning to develop freedom. That this might develop, it was necessary that the life of the Mysteries should decline, so for a long time men were not so closely associated with the powerful guidance coming from the Mysteries and were left more to themselves.

It is very certain we cannot yet say that the time has come when men have attained true inner freedom, that they are now sufficiently ripe to pass on to the next age following the one in which freedom has been gained. Truly we are unable to say this. All the same, there are a sufficient number who have gone through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less apparent than formerly; and if to-day the seed of their passage through these incarnations has not yet germinated, still it is there—it is implanted in the souls of men. And as an age is now approaching which will be again an age of greater spirituality, men must begin to develop what in their present state of dullness they have not yet developed. Without appreciation, without reverence and true knowledge, a spiritual life is really not possible. We make a right use of these festival seasons when we employ them to develop, and to some small extent to implant in our souls, this feeling of appreciation and reverence for what is spiritual that has evolved in the course of human history; when we endeavour to learn as intimately as possible how and why external historical events point to spiritual facts, and carry over what is spiritual from one age into another. This is mainly possible because men come again and again into earthly existence in recurring earthly lives, and therefore carry with them into later epochs what they had experienced in earlier ones. Men are the most important factors in the further development of human history. In every age they live in a definite surrounding or atmosphere (Umgebung), and one of the most important of these was that of the Mysteries. Thus one of the most important agents in human progress is the power to carry over what was experienced in the Mysteries and to live this again, whether it be in the Mysteries themselves, where it works into humanity at large, or simply as cognition or knowledge. To-day this must be in some form of conscious knowledge (Erkennen), for the true life of the Mysteries (Mysterienwesen) has withdrawn more or less from the external life of to-day and must come forth into it again.

We are here constrained to say: It is indeed the case that if that impulse which went forth from the Christmas session here at the GStheanum really enters into the life of the Anthroposophical Society, this society, by pressing onwards to ever greater depths of knowledge, can provide the foundation of a further “living content of the Mysteries” (Mysterienwesen). This must be nurtured consciously within the Anthroposophical Society. For this society has experienced an event that can be utilized in evolution in the same way as a similar event was once utilized: the burning of the temple at Ephesus. Both there and here a great wrong lies at the root of what was done. Things present, however, different aspects on different levels, and what at one level is a dreadful wrong, may be used in accordance with human freedom in such a way that real human progress can be achieved through it.

If we are to enter into such matters with understanding we must grasp them, as I have already said, in as intimate a way as possible. We must study the special way in which the spiritual things of the world were cultivated in the Mysteries. I indicated in the last lecture how out of the spiritual observation of the constellations of the sun and moon, as practised in the Mysteries, the fixing of the annual festival of Easter was determined; further, that the other planets were regarded from the point of view of the moon. I said that according to what was experienced in the observation of the other planets a man was guided at his descent from pre-earthly to earthly existence, that his luminous etheric body was constructed in accordance with what was then seen.

Now if anyone desires to gain some comprehension of how through the forces of the moon—or rather through the spiritual observations by the moon—these etheric forces are transmitted to man, this can be done, as we have tried to do, from observation of the cosmos itself, where it is inscribed, where it exists as fact.

But it is most important that the human interest, which throughout the ages has been felt in these truths, should be permitted to influence the soul. Never did the souls and minds of men take so much interest in the descent of the soul from pre-earthly existence, never was so intimate an interest felt in the last stage of this descent, in man's clothing of himself with the etheric body, as in the Mysteries of Ephesus.

In the Mysteries of Ephesus the whole ritual practised by the goddess of Ephesus, who is named esoterically Artemis, was really directed towards participating in the spiritual blending and interweaving of life in the ether of the universe—in the cosmic ether.

We can venture to say that, when those taking part in the Mystery of Ephesus approached the image of the goddess, an enhancement of perception occurred which amounted to hearing, and what was heard might be given in the words of the goddess somewhat as follows: “I rejoice in all that is fruitful within the wide-spreading universal ether.” This expression of inward joy on the part of the goddess exercised a very profound influence on all growing, blossoming life in the universal ether. And feelings inwardly connected with this springing life breathed like a magic sigh through the spiritual atmosphere of the sacred precincts of the temple of Ephesus.

All the arrangements at this centre of the Mysteries were so directed as to enable people to say: Nowhere but at Ephesus is there so close a union with the growth of living plants, with this sprouting and springing of the being of plants from the earth. This led to the fact that within those Mysteries especially clear instructions were given concerning those secrets of the moon of which I spoke in the last lecture, and which were for the special purpose of bringing an understanding of such things to the souls of those who were adherents of the Ephesian Mysteries.

To feel himself as a light-form was an individual experience to each of these Ephesian pupils and initiates, for it was a real and living fact to them that their light-forms came to them through the moon. The instruction they received was somewhat as follows:

Those able to let the instructions they received in the places of consecration work on them were entirely taken up with this self-construction out of Sunlight that came to them, though changed, by way of the moon. They then heard as if coming to them from the sun the tones: J O A.

They knew that these tones, J O A, stimulated their ego and their astral body. J O equalled the I (ego) and astral body, and they perceived the approach of the Etheric-Light-Body in the A, forming together J O A. When these tones vibrated within the pupil for initiation he was conscious of his ego, of his astral body and etheric body.

Then it was as if there rang forth from the earth (for the man was now entered into cosmic conditions) something which enforced the J O A, making of it eh v, J_ehO_vA. It was the forces of the earth that revealed themselves in the eh v.

The pupil now felt his whole human being in the J_ehO_vA. He felt a premonition of the physical body as it was first on earth in the consonants which accompanied the vocalization, which in the J O A indicated the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body. It was the experiencing of himself in the J_ehO_vA that enabled the pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries to experience the final steps in his descent from the spiritual world. At the same time the consciousness of the J O A was such that he felt himself to be in the light, that he was this tone, J O A. He was then a Man: a resounding (Klingendes) ego, a resounding astral body, within the luminous, shining etheric body. Man was then tone in light. This is the cosmic man.

Thus man is capable of accepting (aufzunehmen) that which he sees out in the cosmos, in the same way as here on earth he accepts the things he sees with his eyes when he looks out to his physical surroundings on the earth. The pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries really felt when he bore the J O A within him as if transported to the Moon-sphere. He shared in what was observed from the point of view of the moon. At that time the human being was still a universal being (Mensch im allgemeinen). It first became man and woman at its descent to earth. But man then felt he was transported to the realms of pre-earthly existence, though aware of the approach of what was earthly. This transporting of themselves into the Moon-sphere was, to the Ephesian pupils, an act of the greatest possible intimacy. They then bore within their hearts and within their souls all the things they had experienced and which sounded in their ears somewhat as follows:

Thou Being, offspring of worlds, who in thy Light-form art strengthened by the Sun under the Moon's control,

Thou art endowed by Mars with his creative resonance, with Mercury's swinging movement of thy limbs ;

Enlightened by the rays of Jupiter's wisdom, And by the love-bearing beauty of Venus,

And Saturn's age-old spiritual inwardness consecrates thee to life in space, to growth in time!

Consciousness of this filled each pupil of Ephesus. He realised that this consciousness which pulsated through him was of the greatest consequence to his humanity.

One can say: this was something which enabled a pupil belonging to the Ephesian Mysteries to feel himself most truly man. To put it trivially—when these words sounded in his ears he felt a consciousness dawn in him that connected him, through the powers of his etheric body, with the whole planetary system:

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

This is expressed most pregnantly in the following words spoken to the etheric body by the universe:

“Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt, Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt.”

The man now consciously felt himself within the power of the moonlight.

“Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen.”

Here the resonance, which has something creative in it, comes to him from Mars. And that which imparts power to his limbs, that enables him to become a being of movement, comes from Mercury:

“Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen.”

From Jupiter illumination comes to him:

“Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit.”

And from Venus there comes:

“Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit.”

In order that Saturn can gather together all that completes man inwardly and outwardly, preparing him for his descent to earth, clothing him with his physical body and enabling this physically clothed being, who bears God within him, to carry on his life on earth:

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

From all I have described you can gather that the spiritual life at Ephesus was inwardly bright and full of colour. And this inwardly bright and colourful life contained precisely all that is summed up in the thoughts of Easter, all that the consciousness of man was able to grasp as his own intrinsic worth in the whole cosmos, the whole universe.

Many of those wanderers to whom I alluded in the last lecture, who passed from Mystery to Mystery in order that they might gather the full sum of those influences that came from the Mysteries—many of these wanderers have given us the assurance: that nowhere had the Sphere-harmonies resounded so clearly, so inwardly, as they sounded at Ephesus, because of the perception they had of things as seen from the aspect of the moon. In no other place had the astral light of the world appeared so luminous as when perceived in the light of the sun flooded by the softly glimmering light of the moon—and spiritualized by this astral light as man is ensouled by it—in no other place had they been able to perceive this, or at least not with the same joyousness and inward artistic acceptance.

All this was associated with the temple which later went up in flames through criminal or crazy folly. Initiates of these Ephesian Mysteries were incarnated, as I informed you at the Christmas meeting, in Aristotle and Alexander the Great. These individuals came in touch at that time with what could still be traced of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now an external, apparently chance event is sometimes of great importance in the evolution of the world. Some considerable time ago I informed you that the time of the burning of the temple at Ephesus coincided with the birth of Alexander the Great. But other things also took place through this burning of the temple. Oh, how manifold and tremendous are the things that have happened in the course of centuries to those who belonged to this Temple! How much of spiritual light and wisdom has passed through these Temple Halls! And all that passed within these halls was recorded in the world-ether while the flames burst forth from out the Temple. So that one can say: the continuous Easter festival at Ephesus, enclosed as it was within the Temple Halls, has been inscribed ever since on the vast dome of the universe in respect of this dome's ether-nature, though perhaps in letters that are not perceptible to all.

And so has it been with many things. Much of the wisdom of humanity was in ancient times enclosed within Temple walls. It has escaped from these walls, has been inscribed on the universal ether, and henceforth is immediately visible there to those who have risen to real imaginative knowledge.

This imaginative knowledge is to a certain extent the interpretation of the secrets of the stars. What once was Temple-wisdom has been inscribed on the universal ether, and can thence be read by those possessing Imagination.

This can be put in a different way; yet it is the same in whatever way it is put. One can say: I go forth into the night, and gaze on the starry heavens, allowing the impression they make to sink into me. And if the necessary faculties have been acquired, that which is contained in the grouping of the constellations, in the movements of the planets, is transformed into a mighty script. And when this cosmic script is read, something emerges from it of a similar kind to what I described in the last lecture concerning the Secrets of the Moon. These things can absolutely be read in the script of the firmament by those to whom the stars are not merely objects for mathematical calculations but when they are letters in a cosmic script. Something further might here be added for the elucidation of this matter.

At the very time the Mysteries of the Kabiri arose in Samothrace, and the older Mysteries were declining, something emerged through the influence of these Kabiri Mysteries which for Alexander and Aristotle were like a remembrance of the earlier times they had passed through together in a certain century at Ephesus. (Samothrace was not a Mystery-establishment of remembrance, nor was it a place for work where development was practised; as a matter of fact the life of the Mysteries was in general decline at the time of Alexander.) In this remembrance they heard again the sound of the word J O A. Once more there sounded within them:

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,

Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen

Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit

Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit

Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe.

In this remembrance—in this historical remembrance of things long past—there lay a certain power for the creation of something new. From that moment a power went forth for the creation of something new—a very remarkable new thing which has attracted very little attention from mankind. You must try to understand how this new creation which proceeded from Alexander and Aristotle was really brought about.

Take some well-known poetic work, or any other work—the most beautiful you can find—take for instance a German translation of the “Bhagavad Gita,” GSthe's “Faust,” or the “Iphigeneia,” anything on which you set a high value, and think of its rich and mighty content, that of GSthe's “Faust,” for example. By what means is this rich content communicated to you, my dear friends? Let us take it that it is communicated to you as is done in the case of the majority of men: that at some time of your life you read GSthe's “Faust.” What came to you on this occasion on the physical plane? What was on the paper? Nothing was on the paper but certain combinations of a b c d e f, etc. These combinations were the only means by which the mighty content of “Faust” was passed on to you. When you know the Alphabet there is nothing on the printed page that is not comprised in its 26 letters. But the rich content of the “Faust” is conjured from the paper in a magic way by means of these letters. It is clear to the eye that the repetition of a b c is wearisome; it is the most abstract thing imaginable. Yet this abstract thing, rightly combined, gives you the complete “Faust”!

And now, when that cosmic world-tone of the moon was heard again—the tone in which Aristotle or Alexander were versed—the meaning of the fire of Ephesus became clear, they knew how this fire had borne out into the far spaces of the world-ether the secret of Ephesus—and there now arose in Aristotle the inspiration to establish (zu begründen) the Cosmic-script. Only this world-script could not be built on the foundation of a b c d e f; but just as ordinary script was founded on letters, the world-script was founded on thoughts. In this way letters of the world-script came into being.

When I write down the following list, the words are just as abstract as a b c d e:

You have here a few ideas. Learn to accomplish with these ideas which were first propounded to Alexander by Aristotle—learn to do with these ideas what you have learnt to do with abed; you then learn how from Being, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Place, Having, Doing, Suffering, to read the Cosmos.

In the age of abstraction something extraordinary occurred in the schools of logic. Only suppose, if in certain schools concern was not with teaching people to read, but with compiling books in which every possible combinations of a b c d had to be learnt—a c, a b, b e, and so on—but not so as to learn by this to make use of the letter in a way that could bring any rich content to their souls, this would be to do exactly the same as the world has done to the logic of Aristotle. In his logic what were called categories were put forward; they were learnt by heart, but people did not know how to make use of them. This is similar to learning the a b c by heart without knowing how to use it.

Reading in the script of the universe can be traced back to something as simple as the learning of a b c is to the content of “Faust.”

In fact, what has been put forward by Anthroposophy, and can continue to be put forward, is arrived at from these ideas in the same way as the reading of “Faust” is arrived at by means of letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are contained, as a world-alphabet, within these simple concepts.

You have to realize that in the course of the world's development it happened, that as opposed to the earlier direct perception of which the events at Ephesus were still the most characteristic example, something arose which had its beginning at the time of Alexander, and continued to evolve more especially during the Middle Ages, something most profoundly hidden and esoteric.

Most profoundly esoteric is the thought living in these ten simple conceptions. We must learn really to live more and more in them; we must strive to experience them in our souls, when these have a richly organized spirit-filled content, as vividly as we experience the a b c.

Thus we see, how in these ten concepts whose inner illumination and source of power has once more to be discovered, was comprised something which like a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom endured through thousands of years. And it will one day come to pass that what seems actually to have been laid within a grave—that is, the Wisdom of the world—will once more emerge and find the Light of the world, men will learn to read in the cosmos once more, and the resurrection of that which has been kept in concealment during the interval of human evolution between the two spiritual epochs, will again be experienced.

Our purpose, my dear friends, is to reveal to mankind that which has been hidden. I can therefore say, as on other occasions: Anthroposophy is a Christmas event, and in all its acts it is also an Easter event, a resurrection experience that is connected with a burial. And it is important that we should feel, especially at this Easter Assembly, the solemn sanctity—if I may so express it—of our Anthroposophical aspirations, in that we have some perception of being able to go to-day to a Spiritual Being who stands near us, perhaps immediately beyond the threshold, and to Whom we can say: Ah! at that time humanity was blessed by a divine spiritual revelation, which shone with exceptional clarity at Ephesus, but now all that lies buried. How can I again bring forth what thus lies buried! Yet we can believe that what once has been can somewhere be found again—can be found in the grave where it was hidden.

Then a Being will answer us, as on a similar occasion this same Being answered once before: “That which ye seek is no longer here, it is in your hearts, if only ye will open them to receive it in the right way.”

Anthroposophy already dwells in the hearts of men. These men have only to open their hearts to it in the right way. Then we shall experience in full sunlight, not in the old-time instinctive way, our return to that Wisdom which lived in, and illumined the Mysteries.

These are the things, my dear friends, which I desired to bring before you at this Easter season. For to fill ourselves with that which like a sacred breath can inflame the heart of everyone who holds to Anthroposophy, and can bear us with it into the spiritual world, is an impulse which is closely associated with the Christmas Impulse given at Dornach. This impulse must not remain something that can be thought out; it cannot stop at intellectuality; it must be an impulse coming from the heart, not dry or insipid—not sentimental, but in accordance with its whole nature it must be a very solemn one.

In the same way as the flames at Ephesus were used by Aristotle to fire his heart anew, and after they had streamed up into the outer ether they had brought to him again the secrets which he was then able to grasp in their primal significance ... as the fire at Ephesus could be used in this way, it is laid upon us, and we shall soon be able to carry out the demand (I say this in all humility), it is laid upon us to use that which as the aim and purpose of Anthroposophy was carried up into the ether along with the flames of the GStheanum for the further carrying out of this purpose.

What is to be the outcome of this, my dear friends? The outcome is to be that we receive a new impulse from the GStheanum. At the annual commemoration of the sad event which falls at Christmas time, the time in which this misfortune overtook us, we must receive a fresh impulse from the GStheanum. And why? Because we should feel what formerly was more or less an earthly concern, founded and constructed as a thing of earth, has been borne up by the flames into the wide spaces of the cosmos. Because this misfortune has come upon us we ought to be able to say in recognizing the results of this misfortune: We now realize that we should not have carried this out as a merely earthly concern (Erdensache) but as one appertaining to the whole far-reaching etheric world in which the Spirit dwells: then what happened to the GStheanum becomes something that concerns the wide ether in which dwells the spirit-filled wisdom of the universe. It has been carried out far into the beyond, and we must fill ourselves with the impulses of the GStheanum that comes to us from out the cosmos.

Let us take this as we will, let us take it as an image. But the image contains a profound truth. And this profound truth can be expressed in simple words when we say: The activities (Wirken) of Anthroposophy have been permeated with an esoteric tendency since the time of the Christmas impulse, 1923. This esoteric impulse or tendency exists, for though the earthly part through the co-operation of physical fire streamed out into space as astral light ... this impulse works back again into the Anthroposophical movement if only we are in a position to receive it.

When we are able to do this we are aware of a most important factor in all that lives in Anthroposophy. This important factor or part (Glied) is the Easter-feeling (Osterstimmung), that Anthroposophical feeling that can never be persuaded that the spirit can possibly die, but that, when owing to the world it has to die, it rises eternally anew. Anthroposophy must hold to the spirit that from eternal foundations ever rises again.

Let us take this to our hearts as an Easter thought, an Easter feeling. We will then take with us from this place of meeting, when we take our way into other walks of life, something which will give us courage and power to carry on our work.

In attempting to give a kind of introduction to Anthroposophy I shall try to indicate, as far as possible, the way it can be presented to the world today. Let me begin, however, with some preliminary remarks. We have usually not sufficient regard for the Spiritual as a living reality; and a living reality must be grasped in the fulness of life. Feeling ourselves members of the Anthroposophical Society and the bearers of the Movement, we ought not to act each day on the assumption that the Anthroposophical Movement has just begun. It has, in fact, existed for more than two decades, and the world has taken an attitude towards it. Therefore, in whatever way you come before the world as Anthroposophists, you must bear this in mind. The feeling that the world has already taken up an attitude towards Anthroposophy must be there in the background. If you have not this feeling and think you can simply present the subject in an absolute sense—as one might have done twenty years ago—you will find yourselves more and more presenting Anthroposophy in a false light. This has been done often enough, and it is time it stopped. Our Christmas meeting should mark a beginning in the opposite direction; it must not remain ineffective, as I have already indicated in many different directions.

Of course, we cannot expect every member of the Society to develop, in some way or other, fresh initiative, if he is not so constituted. I might put it this way: Everyone has the right to continue to be a passively interested member, content to receive what is given. But whoever would share, in any way, in putting Anthroposophy before the world, cannot ignore what I have just explained. From now on complete truth must rule in word and deed.

No doubt I shall often repeat such preliminary remarks. We shall now begin a kind of introduction to the anthroposophical view of the world.

Whoever decides to speak about Anthroposophy must assume, to begin with, that what he wants to say is really just what the heart of his listener is itself saying. Indeed, no science based on initiation has ever intended to utter anything except that which was really being spoken by the hearts of those who wished to hear. To meet the deepest needs of the hearts of those requiring Anthroposophy must be, in the fullest sense, the fundamental note of every presentation of it.

If we observe today those who get beyond the superficial aspect of life, we find that ancient feelings, present in every human soul from age to age, have revived. In their subconscious life the men and women of today harbour earnest questions. They cannot even express these in clear thoughts, much less find answers in what the civilised world can offer; but these questions are there, and a large number of people feel them deeply. In fact, these questions are present today in all who really think. But when we formulate them in words they appear, at first, far-fetched. Yet they are so near, so intimately near to the soul of every thinking man.

We can start with two questions chosen from all the riddles oppressing man today. The first presents itself to man's soul when he contemplates the world around him and his own human existence. He sees human beings enter earthly life through birth; he sees life running its course between birth (or conception) and physical death, and subject to the most manifold experiences, inner and outer; and he sees external nature with all the fullness of impressions that confront man and gradually fill his soul.

There is the human soul in a human body. It sees one thing before all others: that Nature receives into herself all the human soul perceives of physical, earthly existence. When man has passed through the gate of death, Nature receives the human body through one element or another (it makes little difference whether through burial or cremation). And what does Nature do with this physical body? She destroys it. We do not usually study the paths taken by the individual substances of the body. But if we make observations at places where a peculiar kind of burial has been practised, we deepen this impression made by a study of what Nature does with the physical, sensible part of man, when he has passed through the gate of death. You know there are subterranean vaults where human remains are kept isolated, but not from the air. They dry up. And what remains after a certain time? A distorted human form consisting of carbonate of lime, itself inwardly disintegrated. This mass of carbonate of lime still resembles, in a distorted form, the human body, but if you only shake it a little, it falls to dust.

This helps us to realise vividly the experience of the soul on seeing what happens to the physical instrument with which man does all things between birth and death. We then turn to Nature, to whom we owe all our knowledge and insight, and say: Nature, who produces from her womb the most wonderful crystal forms, who conjures forth each spring the sprouting, budding plants, who maintains for decades the trees with their bark, and covers the earth with animal species of the most diverse kinds, from the largest beasts to the tiniest bacilli, who lifts her waters to the clouds and upon whom the stars send down their mysterious rays—how is this realm of Nature related to what man, as part of her, carries with him between birth and death? She destroys it, reduces it to formless dust. For man, Nature with her laws is the destroyer. Here, on the one hand, is the human form; we study it in all its wonder. It is, indeed, wonderful, for it is more perfect than any other form. to be found on earth. There, on the other hand, is Nature with her stones, plants, animals, clouds, rivers and mountains, with all that rays down from the sea of stars, with all that streams down, as light and warmth, from the sun to the earth. Yet this Realm of Nature cannot suffer the human form within her own system of laws.¹ The human being before us is reduced to dust when given to her charge. We see all this. We do not form ideas about it, but it is deeply rooted in our feeling life. Whenever we stand in the presence of death, this feeling takes firm root in mind and heart. It is not from a merely selfish feeling nor from a merely superficial hope of survival, that a subconscious question takes shape in mind and heart—a question of infinite significance for the soul, determining its happiness and unhappiness, even when not expressed in words. All that makes, for our conscious life, the happiness or unhappiness of our earthly destiny, is trivial in comparison with the uncertainty of feeling engendered by the sight of death. For then the question takes shape: Whence comes this human form? I look at the wonderfully formed crystal, at the forms of plants and animals. I see the rivers winding their way over the earth, I see the mountains, and all that the clouds reveal and the stars send down to earth. I see all this—man says to himself—but the human form can come from none of these. These have only destructive forces for the human form, forces that turn it to dust.

In this way the anxious question presents itself to the human mind and heart: Where, then, is the world from which the human form comes? And at the sight of death, too, the anxious question arises: Where is the world, that other world, from which the human form comes?

Do not say, my dear friends, that you have not yet heard this question formulated in this way. If you only listen to what people put into words out of the consciousness of their heads, you will not hear it. But if you approach people and they put before you the complaints of their hearts, you can, if you understand the heart's language, hear it asking from its unconscious life: Where is the other world from which the human form comes?—for man, with his form, does not belong to this. People often reveal the complaints of their hearts by seizing on some triviality of life, considering it from various points of view and allowing such considerations to colour the whole question of their destiny.

Thus man is confronted by the world he sees, senses and studies, and about which he constructs his science. It provides him with the basis for his artistic activities and the grounds for his religious worship. It confronts him; and he stands on the earth, feeling in the depths of his soul: I do not belong to this world; there must be another from whose magic womb I have sprung in my present form. To what world do I belong? This sounds in men's hearts today. It is a comprehensive question; and if men are not satisfied with what the sciences give them, it is because this question is there and the sciences are far from touching it. Where is the world to which man really belongs?—for it is not the visible world.

My dear friends, I know quite well it is not I who have spoken these words. I have only formulated what human hearts are saying. That is the point. It is not a matter of bringing men something unknown to their own souls. A person who does this may work sensationally; but for us it can only be a matter of putting into words what human souls themselves are saying. What we perceive of our own bodies, or of another's, in so far as it is visible, has no proper place in the rest of the visible world. We might say: No finger of my body really belongs to the visible world, for this contains only destructive forces for every finger.

So, to begin with, man stands before the great Unknown, but must regard himself as a part of it. In respect of all that is not man, there is—spiritually—light around him; the moment he looks back upon himself, the whole world grows dark, and he gropes in the darkness, bearing with him the riddle of his own being. And it is the same when man regards himself from outside, finding himself an external being within Nature; he cannot, as a human being, contact this world.

Further: not our heads but the depths of our subconscious life put questions subsidiary to the general question I have just discussed. In contemplating his life in the physical world, which is his instrument between birth and death, man realises he could not live at all without borrowing continually from this visible world. Every bit of food I put into my mouth, every sip of water comes from the visible world to which I do not belong at all. I cannot live without this world; and yet, if I have just eaten a morsel of some substance (which must, of course, be a part of the visible world) and pass immediately afterwards through the gate of death, this morsel becomes at once part of the destructive forces of the visible world. It does not do so within me while I live; hence my own being must be preserving it therefrom. Yet my own being is nowhere to be found outside, in the visible world. What, then, do I do with the morsel of food, the drink of water, I take into my mouth? Who am I who receive the substances of Nature and transform them? Who am I? This is the second question and it arises from the first.

When I enter into relationship with the visible world I not only walk in darkness, I act in the dark without knowing who is acting, or who the being is that I designate as myself. I surrender to the visible world, yet I do not belong to it.

All this lifts man out of the visible world, letting him appear to himself as a member of a quite different one. But the great riddle, the anxious doubt confronts him: Where is the world to which I belong? The more human civilisation has advanced and men have learnt to think intensively, the more anxiously have they felt this question. It is deep-seated in men's hearts today, and divides the civilised world into two classes. There are those who repress this question, smother it, do not bring it to clarity within them. But they suffer from it nevertheless, as from a terrible longing to solve this riddle of man. Others deaden themselves in face of this question, doping themselves with all sorts of things in outer life. But in so deadening themselves they kill within them the secure feeling of their own being. Emptiness comes over their souls. This feeling of emptiness is present in the subconsciousness of countless human beings today.

This is one side—the one great question with the subsidiary question mentioned. It presents itself when man looks at himself from outside, and only dimly, subconsciously, perceives his relation, as a human being between birth and death, to the world.

The other question presents itself when man looks into his own inner being. Here is the other pole of human life. Thoughts are here, copying external Nature which man represents to himself through them. He develops sensations and feelings about the outer world and acts upon it through his will. In the first place, he looks back upon this inner being of his, and the surging waves of thinking, feeling and willing confront him. So he stands with his soul in the present. But, in addition, there are the memories of experiences undergone, memories of what he has seen earlier in his present life. All these fill his soul. But what are they? Well, man does not usually form clear ideas of what he thus retains within him, but his subconsciousness does form such ideas.

Now a single attack of migraine that dispels his thoughts, makes his inner being at once a riddle. His condition every time he sleeps, lying motionless and unable to relate himself, through his senses, to the outer world, makes his inner being a riddle again. Man feels his physical body must be active and then thoughts, feelings and impulses of will arise in his soul. I turn from the stone I have just been observing and which has, perhaps, this or that crystalline form; after a little time I turn to it again. It remains as it was. My thought, however, arises, appears as an image in my soul, and fades away. I feel it to be infinitely more valuable than the muscles or bones I bear in my body. Yet it is a mere fleeting image; nay, it is less than the picture on my wall, for this will persist for a time until its substance crumbles away My thought, however, flits past—a picture that continually comes and goes, content to be merely a picture. And when I look into the inner being of my soul, I find nothing but these pictures (or mental presentations). I must admit that my soul life consists of them.

I look at the stone again. It is out there in space; it persists. I picture it to myself now, in an hour's time, in two hours' time. In the meantime the thought disappears and must always be renewed. The stone, however, remains outside. What sustains the stone from hour to hour? What lets the thought of it fluctuate from hour to hour? What maintains the stone from hour to hour? What annihilates the thought again and again so that it must be kindled anew by outer perception? We say the stone ‘exists’; existence is to be ascribed to it. Existence, however, cannot be ascribed to the thought. Thought can grasp the colour and the form of the stone, but not that whereby the stone exists as a stone. That remains external to us, only the mere picture entering the soul.

It is the same with every single thing of external Nature in relation to the human soul. In his soul, which man can regard as his own inner being, the whole of Nature is reflected. Yet he has only fleeting pictures—skimmed off, as it were, from the surfaces of things; into these pictures the inner being of things does not enter. With my mental pictures (or presentations) I pass through the world, skimming everywhere the surfaces of things. What the things are, however, remains outside. The external world does not contact what is within me.

Now, when man, in the sight of death, confronts the world around him in this way he must say: My being does not belong to this world, for I cannot contact it as long as I live in a physical body. Moreover, when my body contacts this outer world after death, every step it takes means destruction. There, outside, is the world. If man enters it fully, he is destroyed; it does not suffer his inner being within it. Nor can the outer world enter man's soul. Thoughts are images and remain outside the real existence of things. The being of stones, the being of plants, of animals, stars and clouds—these do not enter the human soul Man is surrounded by a world which cannot enter his soul but remains outside.

On the one hand, man remains outside Nature. This becomes clear to him at the sight of death. On the other hand, Nature remains external to his soul.

Regarding himself as an object, man is confronted by the anxious question about another world. Contemplating what is most intimate in his own inner being—his thoughts, mental images, sensations, feelings and impulses of will—he sees that Nature, in whom he lives, remains external to them all. He does not possess her.

Here is the sharp boundary between Man and Nature. Man cannot approach Nature without being destroyed; Nature cannot enter the inner being of man without becoming a mere semblance. When man projects himself in thought into Nature, he is compelled to picture his own destruction; and when he looks into himself, asking: How is Nature related to my soul? he finds only the empty semblance of Nature.

Nevertheless, while man bears within him this semblance of the minerals, plants, animals, stars, suns, clouds, mountains and rivers, while he bears within his memory the semblance of the experiences he has undergone with these kingdoms of Nature, experiencing all this in his fluctuating inner world, his own sense of being emerges amid it all.

How is this? How does man experience this sense of his own existence? He experiences it somewhat as follows. Perhaps it can only be expressed in a picture:

Imagine we are looking at a wide ocean. The waves rise and fall. There is a wave here, a wave there; there are waves everywhere, due to the heaving water. One particular wave, however, holds our attention, for we see that something is living in it, that it is not merely surging water. Yet water surrounds this living something on all sides. We only know that something is living in this wave, though even here we can only see the enveloping water. This wave looks like the others; but the strength of its surging, the force with which it rises, gives an impression of something special living within. This wave disappears and reappears at another place; again the water conceals what is animating it from within. So it is with the soul life of man. Images, thoughts, feelings and impulses of will surge up; waves everywhere. One of the waves emerges in a thought, in a feeling, in an act of volition. The ego is within, but concealed by the thoughts, or feelings, or impulses of will, as the water conceals what is living in the wave. At the place where man can only say: ‘There my own self surges up,’ he is confronted by mere semblance; he does not know what he himself is. His true being is certainly there and is inwardly felt and experienced, but this ‘semblance’ in the soul conceals it, as the water of the wave the unknown living thing from the depths of the sea. Man feels his own true being hidden by the unreal images of his own soul. Moreover, it is as if he wanted continually to hold fast to his own existence, as if he would lay hold of it at some point, for he knows it is there. Yet, at the very moment when he would grasp it, it eludes him. Man is not able, within the fluctuating life of his soul, to grasp the real being he knows himself to be. And when he discovers that this surging, unreal life of his soul has something to do with that other world presented by nature, he is more than ever perplexed. The riddle of nature is, at least, one that is present in experience; the riddle of man's own soul is not present in experience because it is itself alive. It is, so to speak, a living riddle, for it answers man's constant question: ‘What am I?’ by putting a mere semblance before him.

On looking into his own inner being man receives the continual answer: I only show you a semblance of yourself; and if you ascribe a spiritual origin to yourself, I only show you a semblance of this spiritual existence within your soul life.

Thus, from two directions, searching questions confront man today. One of these questions arises when he becomes aware that:

Nature exists, but man can only approach her by letting her destroy him;

the other when he sees:

The human soul exists, but Nature can only approach this human soul by becoming mere semblance.

These two truths live in the subconsciousness of man today. On the one hand, we have the unknown world of Nature, the destroyer of man; on the other, the unreal image of the human soul which Nature cannot approach although man can only complete his physical existence by co-operating with her. Man stands, so to speak, in double darkness, and the question arises:

Where is the other world to which I belong?

Man turns, now, to historical tradition, to what has been handed down from ancient times and lives on. He learns that there was once a science that spoke of this unknown world. He looks to ancient times and feels deep reverence for what they tried to teach about the other world within the world of Nature. If one only knows how to deal with Nature in the right way, this other world is revealed to human gaze.

But modern consciousness has discarded this ancient knowledge. It is no longer regarded as valid. It has been handed down to us, but is no longer believed. Man can no longer feel sure that the knowledge acquired by the men of an ancient epoch as their science can answer today his own anxious question arising from the above subconscious facts.

So we turn to Art.

But here again we find something significant. The artistic treatment of physical material—spiritualisation of physical matter—comes down to us from ancient times. Much of this treatment has been retained and can be learnt from tradition. Nevertheless, it is just the man with a really artistic subconscious nature who feels most dissatisfied today; for he can no longer realise what Raphael could still conjure into the human earthly form—the reflection of another world to which man truly belongs. Where is the artist today who can handle earthly, physical substance in such an artistic way?

Thirdly, there is Religion. This, too, has been handed down through tradition from olden times. It directs man's feeling and devotion to that other world. It arose in a past age through man receiving the revelations of the realm of Nature which is really so foreign to him. For, if we turn our spiritual gaze backwards over thousands of years, we find human beings who also felt: Nature exists, but man can only approach her by letting her destroy him. Indeed, the men who lived thousands of years ago felt this in the depths of their souls. They looked at the corpse passing over into external Nature as into a vast Moloch, and saw it destroyed. But they also saw the human soul passing through the same portal beyond which the body is destroyed. Even the Egyptians saw this, or they would never have embalmed their dead. They saw the soul go further still. These men of ancient times felt that the soul grows greater and greater, and passes into the cosmos. And then they saw the soul, which had disappeared into the elements, return again from the cosmic spaces, from the stars. They saw the human soul vanish at death—at first through the gate of death, then on the way to the other world, then returning from the stars. Such was the ancient religion: a cosmic revelation—cosmic revelation from the hour of death, cosmic revelation from the hour of birth. The words have been retained; the belief has been retained, but has its content still any relation to the cosmos? It is preserved in religious literature, in religious tradition foreign to the world.

The man of our present civilisation can no longer see any relation between what religious tradition has handed down to him and the anxious question confronting him today. He looks at Nature and only sees the human physical body passing through the gate of death and falling a prey to destruction. He sees, more-over, the human form enter through the gate of birth, and is compelled to ask whence it comes. Wherever he looks, he cannot find the answer. He no longer sees it coming from the stars, as he is no longer able to see it after death. So religion has become an empty word.

Thus, in his civilisation, man has around him what ancient times possessed as science, art and religion. But the science of the ancients has been discarded, their art is no longer felt in its inwardness, and what takes its place today is something man is not able to lift above physical matter, making this a vehicle for the radiant expression of the spiritual.

The religious element has remained from olden times. It has, however, no point of contact with the world, for, in spite of it the above riddle of the relation of the world to man remains. Man looks into his inner being, and hears the voice of conscience; but in olden times this was the voice of that God who guided the soul through those regions in which the body is destroyed, and led it again to earthly life, giving it its appropriate form. It was this God who spoke in the soul as the voice of conscience. Today even the voice of conscience has become external, and moral laws are no longer traceable to divine impulses. Man surveys history, to begin with; he studies what has come down from olden times, and—at most—can dimly feel: The ancients experienced the two great riddles of existence differently from the way I feel them today. For this reason they could answer them in a certain way. I can no longer answer them. They hover before me and oppress my soul, for they only show me my destruction after death and the semblance of reality during life.

It is thus that man confronts the world today. From this mood of soul arise the questions Anthroposophy has to answer. Human hearts are speaking in the way we have described and asking where they can find that knowledge of the world which meets their needs.

Anthroposophy comes forward as such knowledge, and would speak about the world and man so that such knowledge may arise again—knowledge that can be understood by modern consciousness, as ancient science, art and religion were understood by ancient consciousness. Anthroposophy receives Its mighty task from the voice of the human heart itself, and is no more than what humanity is longing for today. Because of this, Anthroposophy will have to live. It answers to what man most fervidly longs for, both for his outer and inner life. ‘Can there be such a world-conception today?’ one may ask. The Anthroposophical Society has to supply the answer. It must find the way to let the hearts of men speak from out of their deepest longings; then they will experience the deepest longing for the answers.

• 1. This sentence and the rest of the paragraph in which it occurs must of course be read in the context of the lecture as a whole. Taken by itself it may well arouse the objection: ‘The human form is as much within Nature's system of laws as those of the plants and animals. Certainly Nature destroys it after death; but does she not also bring it to birth?’ It may help to remind the reader that Dr. Steiner is at this stage merely putting into words a feeling, which, he expressly says, arises when we stand in the presence of death. Later on in the book, when he deals with the relation in which the human body stands to the world of nature, he shows how the human form in fact has an origin quite different from those of other living creatures. Editor.

Yesterday I had to show how we can observe ourselves in two ways, and how the riddle of the world and of man confronts us from both directions. If we look once more at what we found yesterday, we see, on the one hand, the human physical body, perceived—at first—in the same way as the external, physical world. We call it the physical body because it stands before our physical senses just as the external, physical world. At the same time, however, we must call to mind the great difference between the two. Indeed, yesterday we had to recognise this great difference from the fact that man, on passing through the gate of death, must surrender his physical body to the elements of the external, physical world; and these destroy it. The action of external Nature upon the human physical body is destructive, not constructive. So we must look quite outside the physical world for what gives the human physical body its shape between birth (or conception) and death. We must speak, to begin with, of another world which builds up this human body that external, physical Nature can only destroy.

On the other hand there are two considerations which show the close relationship between the human physical body and Nature. In the first place, the body requires substances—building materials in a sense—although this is not strictly accurate. Let us say, it has need of the substances of external nature, or, at least, needs to take them in.

Again: when we observe the external manifestations of the physical body—whether it be its excretions, or the whole body as seen after death—it is nevertheless substances of the external, physical world that we observe. We always find the same substances as in the external, physical world—whether we are studying the separate excretions or the whole physical body cast off at death.

So we are compelled to say: Whatever the inner processes going on in the human body may be, their beginning and end are related to the external, physical world.

Materialistic science, however, draws from this fact a conclusion that cannot be drawn at all. Though we see how man, through eating, drinking and breathing, takes in substances from the external physical world and gives these same substances back again, in expiration, in excretion or at death, we can only say that we have here to do with a beginning and an end. We have not determined the intermediary processes within the physical body.

We speak so glibly of the blood man bears within him; but has anyone ever investigated the blood within the living human organism itself? This cannot be done with physical means at all. We have no right to draw the materialistic conclusion that what enters the body and leaves it again was also within it.

In any case, we see an immediate transformation when external, physical substances are taken in—let us say, by the mouth. We need only put a small grain of salt in the mouth and it is at once dissolved. The transformation is immediate. The physical body of man is not the same, in its inner nature, as the external world; it transforms what it takes in, and then transforms it back again. Thus we must seek for something within the human organism that is, at first, similar to external nature and, on excretion, becomes so again. It is what lies between these two stages that we must first discover.

Try to picture this that I have said: On the one hand, we have what the organism takes in; on the other, what it gives of including even the physical body as a whole. Between these are the processes within the organism itself. From the study of what the human physical organism takes in we can say nothing at all about the relation of man to external nature. We might put it this way: Though external physical nature does destroy man's corpse, dissolving and dissipating it, man does, with his organism, ‘get even’ with Nature. He dissolves everything he receives from her. Thus, when we commence with man's organs of assimilation, we find no relationship to external nature, for this is destroyed by them. We only find such a relationship when we turn to what man excretes. In relation to the form man bears into physical life, Nature is a destroyer; in regard to what man casts off, Nature receives what the human organism provides. Thus the human physical organism comes eventually to be very unlike itself and to resemble external Nature very much. It does this through excretion.

If you think this over you will say to yourself: There, outside, are the substances of the different kingdoms of Nature. They are, today, just what they have become; but they have certainly not always been as they are. Even physical science admits that past conditions of the earth were very different from those of today. What we see around us in the kingdoms of Nature has only gradually become what it is. And when we look at man's physical body we see it destroys—or transforms—what it takes in. (We shall see that it really destroys, but for the moment we will say ‘transforms’.) At any rate, what is taken in must be reduced to a certain condition from which it can be led back again to present physical Nature. In other words: If you think of a beginning somewhere in the human organism, where the sub-stances begin to develop in the direction of excretions, and then think of the earth, you are led to trace it back to a similar condition in which it once was. You have to say: At some past time the whole earth must have been in the condition in which some-thing within man is today; and in the short space of time during which something incorporated into the human organism is transformed into excretory products, the inner processes of the organism recapitulate what the earth itself has accomplished in the course of long ages.

Thus we look at external Nature today and see that it was once something very different. But when we try to find something similar to its former condition we have to look into our own organism. The beginning of the earth is still there. Every time we eat, the substances of our food are transformed into a condition in which the whole earth once was. The earth has developed further in the course of long periods of time and become what it is today; our food substances, in developing to the point of excretion, give a brief recapitulation of the whole earth-process.

Now, you can look at the vernal point of the zodiac, where the sun rises every spring. This point is not stationary; it is advancing. In the Egyptian epoch, for example, it was in the constellation of Taurus. It has advanced through Taurus and Aries, and is today in the constellation of Pisces; and it is still advancing. It moves in a circle and will return after a certain time. Though this point where the sun rises in spring describes a complete circle in the heavens in 25,920 years, the sun describes this circle every day. It rises and sets, thereby describing the same path as the vernal point. Let us contemplate, on the one hand, the long epoch of 25,920 years, which is the time taken by the vernal point to complete its path; and on the other hand, the short period of twenty-four hours in which the sun rises, sets and rises again at the same point. The sun describes the same circle. It is similar with the human physical organism. Through long periods the earth consisted of substances like those within us at a certain stage of digestion—the stage midway between ingestion and egestion, when the former passes over into the latter. Here we carry within us the beginning of the earth. In a short period of time we reach the excretory stage, in which we resemble the earth; we hand over substances to the earth in the form they have today. In our digestive processes we do in the physical body something similar to what the sun does in its diurnal round with respect to the vernal point. Thus we may survey the physical globe and say: Today this physical globe has reached a condition in which its laws destroy the form of our physical organism. But this earth must once have been in a condition in which it was subjected to other laws—laws which, today, bring our physical organism into the condition of food-stuffs midway between ingestion and egestion. That is to say, we bear within us the laws of the earth's beginning; we recapitulate what was once on the earth.

You see, we may regard our physical organism as organised for taking in external substances—present-day substances—and excreting them again as such; but it bears within it something that was present in the beginning of the earth but which the earth no longer has. This has disappeared from the earth leaving only the final products, not the initial substances. Thus we bear within us something to be sought for in very ancient times within the constitution of the earth. It is what we thus bear within us, and the earth as a whole has not got, that raises us above physical, earthly life. It leads man to say: I have preserved within me the beginning of the earth. Through entering physical existence through birth, I have ever within me something the earth had millions of years ago, but has no longer.

From this you see that, in calling man a microcosm, we cannot merely take account of the world around us today. We must go beyond its present condition and consider past stages of its evolution. To understand man we must study primeval conditions of the earth.

What the earth no longer possesses but man still has in this way, can become an object of observation. We must have recourse to what may be called meditation. We are accustomed merely to allow the ‘ideas’ or, mental presentations [Vorstellungen], whereby we perceive the world, to arise within us—merely to represent the outer world to ourselves with the help of such ideas. And for the last few centuries man has become so accustomed to copy merely the outer world in his ideas, that he does not realise his power of also forming ideas freely from within. To do this is to meditate; it is to fill one's consciousness with ideas not derived from external Nature, but called up from within. In doing so we pay special attention to the inner activity involved. In this way one comes to feel that there is really a ‘second man’ within, that there is something in man that can really be inwardly felt and experienced just as, for example, the force of the muscles when we stretch out an arm. We experience this muscular force; but when we think we ordinarily experience nothing. Through meditation, however, it is possible so to strengthen our power of thinking—the power whereby we form thoughts—that we experience this power inwardly, even as we experience the force of our muscles on stretching out an arm. Our meditation is successful when we are at length able to say: In my ordinary thinking I am really quite passive. I allow something to happen to me; I let Nature fill me with thoughts. But I will no longer let myself be filled with thoughts, I will place in my consciousness the thoughts I want to have, and will only pass from one thought to another through the force of inner thinking itself. In this way our thinking becomes stronger and stronger, just as the force of our muscles grows stronger if we use our arms. At length we notice that this thinking activity is a ‘tension’, a ‘touching’, an inner experience, like the experience of our own muscular force. When we have so strengthened ourselves within that our thinking has this character, we are at once confronted in our consciousness by what we carry within us as a repetition of an ancient condition of the earth. We learn to know the force that transforms food substances within the body and retransforms them again. And in experiencing this higher man within, who is as real as the physical man himself, we come, at the same time, to perceive with our strengthened thinking the external things of the world.

Suppose, my dear friends, I look at a stone with such strengthened thinking. Let us say it is a crystal of salt or of quartz. It seems to me like meeting a man I have already seen. I am reminded of experiences I had with him ten or twenty years ago. In the mean-time he may have been in Australia, or anywhere, but the man before me now conjures up the experience I had with him ten or twenty years ago. So, if I look at a crystal of salt or of quartz with this strengthened thinking, there immediately comes before my mind the past state of the crystal, like the memory of a primeval condition of the earth. At that time the crystal of salt was not hexahedral, i.e. six-faced, for it was all part of a surging, weaving, cosmic sea of rock. The primeval condition of the earth comes before me, as a memory is evoked by present objects.

I now look again at man, and the very same impression that the primeval condition of the earth made upon me, is now made by the ‘second human being’ man carries within him. Further: the very same impression is made upon me when I behold, not stones, but plants. Thus I am led to speak, with some justification, of an ‘etheric body’ as well as the physical. Once the earth was ether; out of this ether it has become what it is today in its inorganic, lifeless constituents. The plants, however, still bear within them the former primeval condition of the earth. And I myself bear within me, as a second man, the human ‘etheric body’.

All that I am describing to you can become an object of study for strengthened thinking. So we may say that, if a man takes trouble to develop such thinking he perceives, besides the physical, the etheric in himself, in plants and in the memory of primeval ages evoked by minerals.

Now, what do we learn from this higher kind of observation? We learn that the earth was once in an etheric condition, that the ether has remained and still permeates the plants, the animals—for we can perceive it in them too—and the human being.

But now something further is revealed. We see the minerals free from ether, and the plants endowed with it. At the same time, however, we learn to see ether everywhere. It is still there today, filling cosmic space. In the external, mineral kingdom alone it plays no part; still, it is everywhere. When I simply lift this piece of chalk, I observe all sorts of things happening in the ether. Indeed, lifting a piece of chalk is a complicated process. My hand develops a certain force, but this force is only present in me in the waking state, not when I am asleep. If I follow what the ether does in transmuting food-stuffs, I find this going on during both waking and sleeping states. One might doubt this in the case of man, if one were superficial, but not in the case of snakes; they sleep in order to digest. But what takes place through my raising an arm can only take place in the waking state. The etheric body gives no help here. Nevertheless if I only lift the chalk I must overcome etheric forces—I must work upon the ether. My own etheric body cannot do this. I must bear within me a ‘third man’ who can.

Now this third man who can move, who can lift things, including his own limbs is not to be found—to begin with—in anything similar in external Nature. Nevertheless external Nature, which is everywhere permeated by ether, enters into relation with this ‘force-man’—let us call him—into whom man himself pours the force of his will.

At first it is only in inner experience that we can become aware of this inner unfolding of forces. If, however, we pursue meditation further, not only forming our ideas ourselves, and passing from one idea to another in order to strengthen our thinking, but eliminating again the strengthened thinking so acquired—i.e. emptying our consciousness—we attain something special. Of course, if one frees oneself of ordinary thoughts passively acquired, one falls asleep. The moment one ceases to perceive or think, sleep ensues, for ordinary consciousness is passively acquired. If, however, we develop the forces whereby the etheric is perceived, we have a strengthened man within us; we feel our own thinking forces as we usually feel our muscular forces. And now, when we deliberately eliminate, ‘suggest away’ this strengthened man we do not fall asleep, but expose our empty consciousness to the world. What we dimly feel when we move our arms, or walk, when we unfold our will, enters us objectively. The forces at work here are nowhere to be found in the world of space; but they enter space when we produce empty consciousness in the way described. We then discover, objectively, this third man within us. Looking now at external Nature we observe that men, animals and plants have etheric bodies, while minerals have not. The latter only remind us of the original ‘ether’ of the earth. Nevertheless there is ether wherever we turn, though it does not always reveal itself as such.

You see, if you confront plants with the ‘meditative’ consciousness I described at first, you perceive an etheric image; likewise if you confront a human being. But if you confront the universal ether it is as if you were swimming in the sea. There is only ether everywhere. It gives you no ‘picture.’ But the moment I merely lift this piece of chalk there appears an image in the etheric where my third man is unfolding his forces.

Picture this to yourselves: The chalk is, at first, there. My hand now takes hold of the chalk and lifts it up. (I could represent the whole process in a series of snapshots.) All this, however, has its counterpart in the ether, though this cannot be seen until I am able to perceive by means of ‘empty consciousness’—i.e. until I am able to perceive the third man, not the second. That is to say, the universal ether does not act as ether, but in the way the third man acts.

Thus I may say: I have first my physical body (oval),¹ then my etheric body, perceived in ‘meditative’ consciousness (yellow), then the third man, which I will call the ‘astral’ man (red). Everywhere around me I have what we found to be the second thing in the universe—the universal ether (yellow). This, to begin with, is like an indefinite sea of ether.

Now the moment I radiate into this ether anything that proceeds from this third man within me, it responds; this ether responds as if it were like the third man within me, i.e. not etherically, but ‘astrally’. Thus I release through my own activity something within this wide sea of ether that is similar to my own ‘third man’. What is this that acts in the ether as a counter-image? I lift the chalk; any hand moves from below upwards. The etheric picture, however, moves from above downwards; it is an exact counter-image. It is really an astral picture, a mere picture. Nevertheless, it is through the real, present-day man that this picture is evoked. Now, if I learn, by means of what I have already described, to look backwards in earth-evolution—if I learn to apply to cosmic evolution what is briefly recapitulated in the way described—I discover the following:

Here is the present condition of the earth. I go back to an etheric earth. I do not find there, as yet, what has been released through me in the surrounding ether. I must go farther back to a still earlier condition of the earth in which the earth resembled my own astral body. The earth was then astral—a being like my third man. I must look for this being in times long past, in times long anterior to those in which the earth was etheric. Going back-wards in time is really no different from seeing a distant object—a light, let us say—that shines as far as this. It is over there, but shines as far as here; it sends images to us here. Now put time instead of space: That which is of like nature with my own astral body was there in primeval times. Time has not ceased to be; it is still there. Just as, in space, light can shine as far as here, so that which lies in a long gone past works on into the present. Fundamentally speaking, the whole time-evolution is still there. What-ever was once there—and is of like nature with that which, in the outer ether, resembles my own astral body—has not disappeared.

Here I touch on something that, spiritually, is actively present and makes time into space. It is really no different from communicating over a long distance with the help of a telegraph. In lifting the chalk I evoke a picture in the ether and communicate with what, for outer perception, has long passed away.

We see how man is placed in the world in a quite different way from what appears at first. And we understand, too, why cosmic riddles present themselves to him. He feels within that he has an etheric body, though he does not realise it clearly: even science does not realise it clearly today. He feels that this etheric body transforms his food-stuffs and transforms them back again. He does not find this in stones, though the stones were already there, in primeval times which he discovers, there as general ether. But in this ether a still more remote past is active. Thus man bears within him an ancient past in a twofold way; a more recent past in his etheric body and a more ancient past in his astral body.

When man confronts Nature today he usually only studies what is lifeless. Even what is living in plants is only studied by applying to them the laws of substances as discovered in his laboratory. He omits to study growth; he neglects the life in his plants. Present-day science really studies plants as one who picks up a book and observes the forms of the letters, but does not read. Science, today, studies all things in this way.

Indeed, if you open a book but cannot read, the forms must appear very puzzling. You cannot really understand why there is here a form like this: ‘b’, then ‘a’, then ‘l’, then ‘d’, i.e. bald. What are these forms doing side by side? That is, indeed, a riddle. The way of regarding things that I have put before you is really learning to read in the world and in man. By ‘learning to read’ we come gradually near to the solution of our riddles.

You see, my dear friends, I wanted to put before you merely a general path for human thinking along which one can escape from the condition of despair in which man finds himself and which I described at the outset. We shall proceed to study how one can advance farther and farther in reading the phenomena in the outer world and in man.

In doing this, however, we are led along paths of thought with which man is quite unfamiliar today. And what usually happens? People say: I don't understand that. But what does this mean? It only means that this does not agree with what was taught them at school, and they have become accustomed to think in the way they were trained. ‘But do not our schools take their stand on genuine science?’ Yes, but what does that mean? My dear friends, I will give you just one example of this genuine science.—One who is no longer young has experienced many things like this. One learnt, for example, that various substances are necessary for the process referred to today—the taking in of foodstuffs and their transformation within the human organism. Albumens (proteins), fats, water, salts, sugar and starch products were cited as necessary for men. Then experiments were made.

If we go back twenty years, we find that experiments showed man to require at least one hundred and twenty grammes of protein a day; otherwise he could not live. That was ‘science’ twenty years ago. What is ‘science’ today? Today twenty to fifty grammes are sufficient. At that time it was ‘science’ that one would become ill—under-nourished—if one did not get these one hundred and twenty grammes of protein. Today science says it is injurious to one's health to take more than fifty grammes at the most; one can get along quite well with twenty grammes. If one takes more, putrefying substances form in the intestines and auto-intoxication, self-poisoning, is set up. Thus it is harmful to take more than fifty grammes of protein. That is science today.

This, however, is not merely a scientific question, it has a bearing on life. Just think: twenty years ago, when it was scientific to believe that one must have one hundred and twenty grammes of protein, people were told to choose their diet accordingly. One had to assume that a man could pay for all this. So the question touched the economic sphere. It was proved carefully that it is impossible to obtain these one hundred and twenty grammes of protein from plants. Today we know that man gets the requisite amount of protein from any kind of diet. If he simply eats sufficient potatoes—he need not eat many—along with a little butter, he obtains the requisite amount of protein. Today it is scientifically certain that this is so. Moreover, it is a fact that a man who fills himself with one hundred and twenty grammes of protein acquires a very uncertain appetite. If, on the other hand, he keeps to a diet which provides him with twenty grammes of protein, and happens, once in a while, to take food with less, and which would therefore under-nourish him, he turns from it. His instinct in regard to food becomes reliable. Of course, there are still under-nourished people, but this has other causes and certainly does not come from a deficiency of protein. On the other hand, there are certainly numerous people suffering from auto-intoxication and many other things because they are over-fed with protein.

I do not want to speak now of infectious diseases, but will just mention that people are most susceptible to so-called infection when they take one hundred and twenty grammes of protein [a day]. They are then most likely to get diphtheria, or even small-pox. If they only take twenty grammes, they will only be infected with great difficulty.

Thus it was once scientific to say that one requires so much protein as to poison oneself and be exposed to every kind of infection. That was ‘science’ twenty years ago! All this is a part of science; but when we see what was scientific in regard to very important matters but a short time ago, our confidence in such science is radically shaken.

This, too, is something one must bear in mind when we encounter a study like Anthroposophy that gives to our thinking, our whole mood of soul, a different direction from that customary today. I only wanted to point, so to speak, to what is put forward—in the first place—as preliminary instruction in the attainment of another kind of thinking, another way of contemplating the world.

• 1. The drawings in this volume are reconstructions of those freely drawn by Rudolf Steiner in coloured chalks on the blackboard. Some were made progressively but as depicted here they are from the completed sketches. Reproduction in colour is impracticable.

Today I should like to give another transitional lecture and indicate, from a certain aspect, the relation between exoteric and esoteric life; or, in other words, the transition from ordinary knowledge to knowledge attained through initiation. In this connection we must bear in mind what I have already explained in the News Sheet for Members when describing the Free College of Spiritual Science, namely: that the content of the Science of Initiation, expressed in appropriate words, can certainly be understood by everyone who is sufficiently free from prejudice. One should not say that a person must first be initiated himself in order to understand what the Science of Initiation has to give. Today, however, I should like to discuss the relationship of Anthroposophy to its source, which is the Science of Initiation itself. These three lectures will then form a kind of introduction to the composition of man (physical body, etheric body, etc.) which will be given next in the lectures of the General Anthroposophical Society.

When we consider the consciousness of present-day man, we are led to say: He stands here on the earth, and looks out on the wide spaces of the cosmos, but does not feel any connection between these and himself and what surrounds him on the earth, just consider how abstractly the sun is described by all who claim today to be the representatives of sound science. Consider, too, how these same savants describe the moon. Apart from the fact that the sun warms us in summer and leaves us cold in winter, that the moon is a favourite companion of lovers under certain conditions, how little thought is given to any connection between man, as he lives on earth, and the heavenly bodies.

Nevertheless, to know such connections, one need only develop a little that way of looking at things of which I spoke in the lecture before last. One need only develop a little understanding of what men once knew who stood nearer to the cosmos than we do today, who had a naive consciousness and an instinct for knowledge rather than an intellectual knowledge, but were able to contemplate the connection between individual heavenly bodies and the life and being of man.

Now this connection between man and the heavenly bodies must enter human consciousness again. This will come about if Anthroposophy is cultivated in the right way.

Man believes today that his destiny, his ‘Karma’, is here on the earth, and does not look to the stars for its indications. It is for Anthroposophy to grasp man's part in the super-sensible world. All that surrounds him, however, really belongs in the first place to his physical, or at most his etheric body. However far we look into the starry worlds we see the stars by their light. Now light, and all that we perceive in the world by light, is an etheric phenomenon. Thus, no matter how far we look in the universe, we do not get beyond the etheric by merely turning our gaze this way or that.

Man's being, however, reaches out into the super-sensible. He carries his super-sensible being from pre-earthly existence into the earthly realm, and carries it out again at death—out of the physical and the etheric too.

In reality there is in the whole of our environment on the earth or in the cosmos nothing of those worlds where man was before descending to earth and where he will be after passing through the gate of death. There are, however, two gates which lead from the physical and etheric worlds to the super-sensible. One is the moon, the other the sun. We only understand the sun and moon aright when we realise that they are gates to the super-sensible world, and have very much to do with what man experiences as his destiny on earth.

Consider, in the first place, the moon. The physicist knows nothing about the moon, except that it shows us reflected sunlight. He knows that moonlight is reflected sunlight, and gets no further. He does not take into account that the cosmic body visible to our physical eye as the moon, was once united with our earth-existence.

The moon was once a part of the earth. In primeval times it separated off from the earth and became an individual cosmic body out there in cosmic space. That it became a separate body is not, however, the important point; after all, that can also be interpreted as a physical fact. The important point is something essentially different.

If anyone, in full earnestness, extends his studies of human civilisation and culture back into remote times, he finds a wide-spread primeval wisdom. From this is derived much that endures today and is really much cleverer than what our science can explore. And whoever studies, for example, the Vedas of India or the Yoga philosophy from this point of view, will feel deep reverence for what he finds. It is presented in a more poetic form to which he is not accustomed today, but it fills him with deeper reverence the more deeply he studies it. If one does not approach these things in the dry, prosaic manner of today, but lets them work upon him in their stirring, yet profound, way, one comes to understand, even from a study of the documents, that Spiritual Science, Anthroposophy, must say from its own cognition: There was once a widespread primeval wisdom, though it did not appear in an intellectual, but rather in a poetic form.

The man of today, however, is constrained by his physical body to understand, through the instrumentality of his brain, what confronts him as wisdom. Now this brain, as his instrument of understanding, has only evolved in the course of long periods of time. It did not exist when the primeval wisdom was here on earth. Wisdom was then the possession of beings who did not live in a physical body.

Such beings were once companions of men. They were the great, original teachers of humanity, who have since disappeared from the earth. It is not only the physical moon that went out into cosmic space; these beings went with it. One who looks at the moon with real insight will say: There above is a world with beings in it who once lived among us on earth, and taught us in our former earthly lives; they have retired to the colony of the moon. Only when we study things in this way do we attain to truth.

Now today, within his physical body, man is only able to contemplate a very weak infusion—if I may use this term—of the primeval wisdom. In ancient times, when these beings were his teachers, man possessed something of this wisdom. He received it, not with his understanding but with his instinct, in the way by which higher beings could reveal themselves to him.

Thus everything connected with the moon points to man's past. Now, for the man of today, the past is over and done with; he no longer possesses it. Nevertheless, he bears it within him. And though we do not, in our present condition between birth and death, really encounter those beings of whom I spoke just now who were once earth-beings but are now moon-beings, we do meet them in our pre-earthly life, in the life between death and rebirth. That which we bear within us and which is always pointing to our earlier existence before birth—which speaks from our subconscious life and never attains full intellectual clarity, but has, on this account, much to do with our feelings and emotional disposition—this directs to the moonlight, not only the instinct of lovers, but the man who can value these sub-conscious impulses of human nature.

Our subconscious life, then, directs us to the moon. This may witness to the fact that the moon, with the beings who dwell there, was once united with the earth. In this sense the moon is a gate to the super-sensible; and one who studies it rightly will find, even in its external, physical configuration, support for this statement.

Just try to recall the way the moon, with its mountains, etc., is described. It all indicates that these mountains cannot be like those on the earth. The whole configuration of the moon is different. It is always stressed that the moon has neither air nor water, for example. The configuration of the moon is, in fact, like that of the earth before it became quite mineral.

I should have to read you a large number of my books and many passages from the lecture-cycles if I had to draw together what I am here presenting as a result of what has been worked out here. I only want to sketch, in an introductory way, how Anthroposophy proceeds. It leads us, in the manner described, from the physical to the spiritual again. Through Anthroposophy we learn to think in accordance with Nature. This men cannot do today.

For instance, men know today that the physical substance of their bodies is often changed in the course of life. We are continually ‘peeling off’. We cut our nails, for example; but every-thing within us is moving towards the surface until, at last, what was in the centre of the body reaches the surface and peels off-You must not believe, my dear friends, that the flesh and blood—or any physical substance—sitting on your chairs today would have sat on these chairs had you been here ten years ago. That substance has all been exchanged. What has remained? Your psycho-spiritual being. Today, at least, it is known to everyone that the people sitting here today would not have had the same muscles and bones had they sat here ten or twenty years ago; only, this is not always borne in mind.

Now, when people look up at the moon, they are conscious, to a certain extent, of its external, physical substance, and believe this was the same millions of years ago. As a matter of fact, it was just as little the same then as your present physical body was the same twenty years ago. Of course, the physical substances of the stars are not exchanged so quickly; still, they do not require so long a time as our physicists estimate in the case of the sun. These calculations are absolutely accurate—but they are wrong. I have often referred to this. You see, you may measure, for example, the changes in the inner configuration of a man's heart from month to month. You may estimate them over a period of three years. You may then calculate, quite correctly, what the configuration of his heart was three hundred years ago, or what it will be in three hundred years' time. You can arrive at some fine numbers; your calculations may be quite correct—only, his heart was not there three hundred years ago, and will not be there in three hundred years to come.

Geologists calculate in this fashion today. They study the strata of the earth, estimate the changes occurring in the course of centuries, multiply their figures and say: Twenty millions of years ago the earth was so and so. This is just the same sort of calculation, and just as sensible; for twenty million years ago all these strata were not yet there, and will no longer be in twenty million years to come.

However, apart from this, all the heavenly bodies are subject to metabolism, as man is. The substances we see when we look up at the moon were just as little there a certain number of centuries ago, as your own substances were on these chairs ten years ago. It is the beings themselves who sustain the moon, just as it is the psycho-spiritual in you that maintains your body. True, the physical moon once went out into cosmic space; but what went out is continually changing its substance, while the beings who inhabit the moon remain. It is these who form the permanent element of the moon—quite apart from their passage through repeated moon-lives.—But we will not go into that today.

When you study the moon in this way you acquire a kind of ‘science of the moon’. This science becomes inscribed in your heart, not merely in your head. You establish a relationship to the spiritual cosmos, and regard the moon as one gate thereto. Everything present in the depths of our being—not only the indefinite feelings of love, to mention these once again, but every-thing in the subconscious depths of our souls that results from earlier lives on earth—is connected with this ‘moon-existence’. From this we free ourselves in all that constitutes our present life. We are continually doing so. When we see or hear outer things with our senses, when we exercise our understanding—i.e. when we disregard what comes from the depths of our soul life and is clearly recognised as part of an active past, and turn to what draws us again and again into the present—then we are directed to the ‘sun-existence’, just as we are directed by the past to the moon-existence. Only, the sun works on us by way of our physical bodies. If we want to acquire independently, of our own free will, what the sun gives us, we have to exert that will: we must set our intellect in action. Yet, with all that we human beings of today understand through our busy intellect and our reason, we do not get nearly so far as we do instinctively—simply through there being a sun in the universe.

Everyone knows, or can, at least, know, that the sun not only wakens us every morning, calling us from darkness to light, but is the source of the forces of growth within us, including those of the soul. That which works in these soul-forces from out of the past is connected with the moon, but that which works within the present and which we shall only really acquire in the future through our own free choice, depends on the sun.

The moon points to our past, the sun to the future. We look up to the two luminaries, that of the day and that of the night, and observe the relationship between them, for they send us the same light. Then we look into ourselves and observe all that is woven into our destiny through past experiences undergone as men; in this we see our inner moon-existence. And in all that continually approaches us in the present and determines our destiny, in all that works on from the present into the future we see the sun-element. We see how past and future are weaving together in human destiny.

Further: we can study this connection between past and future more closely. Suppose two people come together for some common task at a certain time of life. One who does not think deeply about such things may say: He and I were both at Müllheim (let us say), and we met there. He thinks no more about it. But one who thinks more deeply may follow up the lives of these two who came together when one was, perhaps, thirty years of age and the other twenty-five. He will see in what a wonderful and extraordinary way the lives of these two people have developed, step by step, from birth onwards, so as to bring them together at this place. One may say, indeed, that people find their way to one another from the most distant places to meet about half-way through their lives. It is as if they had arranged all their ways with this end in view. Of course, they could not have done this consciously, for they had not seen one another before—or, at least, had not formed such a judgment of one another as would make their meeting significant. All these things take place in the unconscious. We travel paths leading to important turning points, or periods in our lives, and do so in deep unconsciousness. It is from these depths that—in the first place—destiny is woven. (Now we begin to understand people like Goethe's friend Knebel, whose experience of life was deep and varied and who said in his old age: On looking back on my life it seems as if every step had been so ordained that I had to arrive finally at a definite point.) Then the moment comes, however, when the relationship between these two people takes place in full consciousness. They learn to know one another, one another's temperament and character, they feel sympathy or antipathy for one another, etc. Now, if we examine the connection between their relationship and the cosmos, we find that moon-forces were active on the paths taken by these two people up to the moment of meeting. At this point the action of the sun begins. They now enter, to a certain extent, the bright light of the sun's activity. What follows is accompanied by their own consciousness; the future begins to illuminate the past, as the sun the moon. At the same time the past illuminates man's future, as the moon the earth with reflected light.

But the question now is, whether we can distinguish the solar from the lunar in man's life. Well, even our feelings can distinguish much, if we study them more deeply. Even in childhood and early life we come into contact with people whose relation-ship to us remains external; we ‘pass them by’ as they us, even though they may have a good deal to do with us. You all went to school, but only very few of you can say you had teachers with whom you had any deeper relationship. Still, there will be one or two of you who can say: Yes, I had a teacher who made such an impression on me that I wanted to be like him; or: He made such an impression on me that I wished him off the face of the earth. It may have been either sympathy or antipathy.

There are others, again, who only affect our understanding, so to speak, or our aesthetic sense at most. Just think how often it happens that we learn to know somebody and, meeting others who know him too, we all agree that he is a splendid fellow—or a terrible person. This is an aesthetic judgment, or an intellectual one. But there is another kind of judgment. There are human relationships that do not merely run their course in the above two ways, but affect the will; and this to such an extent that we do not merely say, as in childhood, that we would like to become like this person or that we wish him off the face of the earth—to mention extreme cases—but we are affected in the unconscious depths of our will life, and say: We not only look upon this man as good or bad, clever or foolish, etc., but we would like to do, of our own accord, what his will wills; we would rather not exert our intellect in order to judge him. We would like to translate into action the impression he has made upon us.

Thus there are these two kinds of human relationships: those that affect our intellect, or, at most, our aesthetic sense; and those that affect our will, acting on the deeper life of our soul. What does that mean? Well, if people act on our will, if we do not merely feel strong sympathy or antipathy towards then but would like to give expression to our sympathy or antipathy through our will, they were somehow connected with us in our previous life. If people only impress our intellect or our aesthetic sense, they are entering our life without such a previous connection.

You can see from this that in human life, especially in human destiny, past and present work together into the future. For what we experience with others, even though they have no effect on our will, will come to expression in a future life on earth.

Just as the sun and moon circle in the same path and are interrelated, so, in the human being, are past and future, moon element and sun-element. And we can come to look upon the sun and moon, not as external luminaries, but as mirrors reflecting, in the wide spaces of the cosmos, the interweaving of our destiny. Past and future continually interpenetrate and interweave in our destinies, just as moonlight passes into sunlight, and sunlight into moonlight. Indeed, the interweaving takes place in every case of human relationship.

Consider the paths travelled by two people, the one for thirty years, the other for twenty-five. They meet here, let us say. All they have passed through until now belongs to the moon-element in man. Now, however, through learning to know one another, through confronting one another consciously, they enter the sun-element of destiny, and weave past and future together, thus forming their destiny for future lives on earth.

Thus, from the way destiny approaches man we may see how, in the one case, a person acts on another through intellect or aesthetic sense, in another case through the will and the life of feeling connected therewith.

As I have said, I only want today to sketch these things in a brief, fragmentary way in order to show you the path of Anthroposophy and of its source—the Science of Initiation. We shall study the details in the future. As far as I have gone at present however, everyone can have direct, first-hand knowledge of these things. He can study his destiny with understanding. That peculiar, intimate, inner relationship in which another person speaks from within us—as it were—indicates tics of destiny from the past. If I feel that someone ‘grips’ me, not merely in my senses and intellect but inwardly, so that my will is engaged in the very way he grips me, he is connected with me by ties of destiny from the past. Such ties can be felt with a finer, more intimate sense.

One experiences this in an essentially different way, however, when one attains a certain stage of the path described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, or in the second part of my Occult Science. When one attains initiation another person with whom one has ties of destiny is not only experienced in such a way that one says: He acts on my will, he acts in my will. One actually experiences the other personality as really within oneself. If an initiate meets another person with whom he has ties of destiny, this other person is present within him with independent speech and gestures—speaks from out of him, as one who stands beside us speaks to us. Thus the tics of destiny, which are usually felt only in the will, take such a form for the initiate that the other person speaks from out of the initiate himself. For one possessing the Science of Initiation a karmic encounter means, then, that the other person works not only on his will, but as strongly as a man standing beside him.

You see, what ordinary consciousness can only surmise by way of feeling and will, is raised for higher consciousness to full reality. You may say: That means that the initiate walks about with a group of people inside him with whom he is connected through destiny. That is actually the case. The attainment of knowledge is not a mere matter of learning to say more than other people while talking just as they do; it really means enlarging one's world.

Thus, if one intends to speak on the way Karma operates in human lives, fashioning mutual destiny, one must be able to confirm what one says from a knowledge of how others speak in one, how they really become a part of oneself.

If we then describe these things, they need not remain out of reach of one who has not been initiated; for he can and—if sane and healthy—will say: True, I don't hear a person speaking within me, if we are connected through destiny; but I feel him in my will, in the way he stirs it. One learns to understand this effect on the will. One learns to understand what is experienced in ordinary consciousness but cannot be understood unless we hear it described, in its true concrete significance, out of the Science of Initiation.

It was my special concern today to explain that this feeling of karmic connection with another, which otherwise enters consciousness in a kind of nebulous way, becomes a concrete experience for the initiate. And all that the Science of Initiation can achieve, can be described in this way.

There are many other indications of our karmic connections with other people. Some of you will know, if you study life, that we meet many people of whom we do not dream; we can live long with them without doing so. We meet others, however, of whom we dream constantly. We have hardly seen them when we dream of them the next night, and they enter our dreams again and again.

Now dreams play a special part in the subconscious life. When we dream of people on first meeting them, there is certainly a karmic connection between us. People of whom we cannot dream make only a slight impression on our senses; we meet them but have no karmic connection with them.

What lives in the depths of our will is, indeed, like a waking dream; but it becomes concrete, fully conscious experience for the initiate. Hence he hears those with whom he has a karmic connection speaking from within him. Of course he remains sensible and does not walk about speaking, as an initiate, from out of others when he converses with all sorts of people. Nevertheless, he does accustom himself, under certain conditions, to hold converse with persons connected with him through Karma. This converse takes place in a quite concrete way, even when he is not with them in space, and things of real significance come to light. However, I shall describe these things at some future time.

Thus we can deepen our consciousness on looking out into the wide spaces of the cosmos, and on looking into man himself. And the more we look into man himself, the more we learn to understand what the wide cosmic spaces contain. Then we say to ourselves: I no longer see merely shining discs or orbs in stellar space, but what I see in the outer cosmos appears to me as cosmically woven destiny. Human destinies on earth are now seen to be images of cosmically woven destinies. And when we realise clearly that the substance of a heavenly body is changing—is being exchanged, just as is the bodily substance of man—we know there is no sense in merely speaking of abstract laws of Nature. These abstract laws must not be regarded as giving us knowledge. It is just as in life insurance companies. To what do these owe their existence? To the fact that they can calculate a man's ‘expectation of life’. One takes a certain number of people aged twenty-five and, from the number of these who reach the age of thirty, etc., one can calculate the probable number of years a man of thirty will live. He is insured accordingly. Now, one gets on quite well with such insurance, for the laws of insurance hold. But it would not occur to anyone to apply these laws to his innermost being; otherwise he would say: I insured myself at the age of thirty, because my ‘probable death’ would occur at the age of fifty-five. I must die at fifty-five. He would never draw this conclusion and act accordingly, although the calculation is quite correct. The correctness of the reasoning has no significance for actual life.

Now we only arrive at laws of nature by calculations. They are good for technical applications; they enable us to construct machines, just as we can insure people in accordance with certain natural laws. But they do not lead us into the true essence of things, for only real cognition of the beings themselves can do that.

The laws of Nature, as calculated by astronomers for the heavens, are like insurance laws in human life. What a real Science of Initiation discovers about the being of the sun or moon is like my funding someone still living in ten years' time when, according to his insurance policy, he should have died long before. It lay in his inner being to live on.

Fundamentally speaking, actual events have nothing at all to do with the laws of Nature. These laws are good for applying natural forces; real Being, however, must be known through the Science of Initiation.

This concludes the third of the lectures in which I only wanted to indicate what the tone of Anthroposophy should be. We shall now begin to describe the constitution of man somewhat differently from the way it is done in my “Theosophy.” In doing this we shall build up an Anthroposophical Science, an Anthroposophical Knowledge from its foundations. You may regard the three lectures I have just given as illustrations of the difference in tone between the speech of ordinary consciousness and the speech of that consciousness which leads into the real being of things.

I shall now continue, in a certain direction, the more elementary considerations recently begun. In the first lecture of this series I drew your attention to the heart's real, inner need of finding, or at least seeking, the paths of the soul to the spiritual world. I spoke of this need meeting man from two directions: from the side of Nature, and from the side of inner experience.

Today we will again place these two aspects of human life before us in a quite elementary way. We shall then see that impulses from the subconscious are really active in all man's striving for knowledge in response to the needs of life, in his artistic aims and religious aspirations.

You can quite easily study the opposition, to which I here refer, in yourselves at any moment.

Take one quite simple fact. You are looking, let us say, at some part of your body—your hand, for example. In so far as the act of cognition itself is concerned you look at your hand exactly as at a crystal, or plant, or any other natural object. But when you look at this part of your body and go through life with this perception, you encounter that seriously disturbing fact which intrudes on all human experience and of which I spoke. You find that what you see will one day be a corpse; external Nature, on receiving it, has not the power to do anything else than destroy it. The moment man has become a corpse within the physical world and has been handed over to the elements in any form, there is no longer any possibility that the human form, which has been impressed on all the substances visible in his body, will be able to maintain itself.

All the forces of Nature which you can make the subject of any scientific study are only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Every unprejudiced study that is not guided by theory but controlled by life itself, leads us to say: We look at Nature around us in so far it is intelligible. (We will not speak, for the present, of what external cognition cannot grasp.) As civilised people of today we feel we have advanced very far indeed, for we have discovered so many laws of Nature. This talk of progress is, indeed, perfectly justified. Nevertheless, it is a fact that all these laws of Nature are, by their mode of operation, only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Human insight is unable, at first, to discover anything in the external world except laws of Nature which destroy man.

Let us now look at our inner life. We experience what we call our psychical life, i.e. our thinking, which can confront us fairly clearly, our feeling, which is less clearly experienced, and our willing, which is quite hidden from us. For, with ordinary consciousness, no one can claim insight into the way an intention—to pick up an object, let us say—works down into this very complicated organism of muscle and nerve in order to move, at length, arms and legs. What it is that here works down into the organism, between the formation of the thought and the perception of the lifted object, is hidden in complete darkness. But an indefinite impulse takes place in us, saying: I will this. So we ascribe will to ourselves and, on surveying our inner life, speak of thinking, feeling and willing.

But there is another side, and this introduces us again—in a certain sense—to what is deeply disturbing. We see that all this soul life of man is submerged whenever he sleeps and arises anew when he wakes. If we want to use a comparison we may well say: The soul life is like a flame which I kindle and extinguish again. But we see more. We see this soul life destroyed when certain organs are destroyed. Moreover, it is dependent on bodily development; being dreamlike in a little child and becoming gradually clearer and clearer, more and more awake. This increase in clarity and awareness goes hand in hand with the development of the body; and when we grow old our soul life becomes weaker again. The life of the soul thus keeps step with the growth and decay of the body. We see it light up and die away.

But, however sure we may be that our soul, though dependent in its manifestations on the physical organism, has its own life, its own existence, this is not all we can say about it. It contains an element man must value above all else in life, for his whole manhood—his human dignity—depends on this. I refer to the moral element.

We cannot deduce moral laws from Nature however far we may explore it. They have to be experienced entirely within the soul; there, too, we must be able to obey them. The conflict and settlement must therefore take place entirely within the soul. And we must regard it as a kind of ideal for the moral life to be able, as human beings, to obey moral principles which are not forced upon us. Yet man cannot become an ‘abstract being’ only obeying laws. The moral life does not begin until emotions, impulses, instincts, passions, outbursts of temperament, etc., are subordinated to the settlement, reached entirely within the soul, between moral laws grasped in a purely spiritual way and the soul itself.

The moment we become truly conscious of our human dignity and feel we cannot be like beings driven by necessity, we rise to a world quite different from the world of Nature.

Now the disturbing element that, as long as there has been human evolution at all, has led men to strive beyond the life immediately visible, really springs from these two laws—however many subconscious and unconscious factors may be involved: We see, on the one hand, man's bodily being, but it belongs to Nature that can only destroy it; and, on the other hand, we are inwardly aware of ourselves as soul beings who light up and fade away, yet are bound up with what is most valuable in us—the moral element.

It can only be ascribed to a fundamental insincerity of our civilisation that people deceive themselves so terribly, turning a blind eye to this direct opposition between outer perception and inner experience. If we understand ourselves, if we refuse to be confined and constricted by the shackles which our education, with a definite aim in view, imposes upon us, if we free ourselves a little from these constraints we say at once: Man! you bear within you your soul life—your thinking, feeling and willing. All this is connected with the moral world which you must value above all else—perhaps with the religious source of all existence on which this moral world itself depends. But where is this inner life of moral adjustments when you sleep?

Of course, one can spin philosophic fantasies or fantastic philosophies about these things. One may then say: Man has a secure basis in his ego (i.e. in his ordinary ego-consciousness). The ego begins to think in St. Augustine, continues through Descartes, and attains a somewhat coquettish expression in Bergsonism today. But every sleep refutes this. For, from the moment we fall asleep to the moment of waking, a certain time elapses; and when, in the waking state, we look back on this interval of time, we do not find the ego qua experience. It was extinguished. And yet it is connected with what is most valuable in our lives—the moral element!

Thus we must say: Our body, whose existence we are rudely forced to admit, is certainly not a product of Nature, which has only the power to destroy and disintegrate it. On the other hand, our own soul life eludes us when we sleep, and is dependent on every rising and falling tide of our bodily life. As soon as we free ourselves a little from the constraints imposed on civilised man by his education today, we see at once that every religious or artistic aspiration—in fact, any higher striving—no matter how many subconscious and unconscious elements be involved, depends, throughout all human evolution, on these antitheses.

Of course, millions and millions of people do not realise this clearly. But is it necessary that what becomes a riddle of life for a man be clearly recognised as such? If people had to live by what they are clear about they would soon die. It is really the contributions to the general mood from unclear, subconscious depths that compose the main stream of our life. We should not say that he alone feels the riddles of life who can formulate them in an intellectually clear way and lay them before us: first riddle, second riddle, etc. Indeed, such people are the shallowest.

Someone may come who has this or that to talk over with us. Perhaps it is some quite ordinary matter. He speaks with a definite aim in view, but is not quite happy about it. He wants something, and yet does not want it; he cannot come to a decision. He is not quite happy about his own thoughts. To what is this due? It comes from the feeling of uncertainty, in the subconscious depths of his being, about the real basis of man's true being and worth. He feels life's riddles because of the polar antithesis I have described.

Thus we can find support neither in the corporeal, nor in the spiritual as we experience it. For the spiritual always reveals itself as something that lights up and dies down, and the body is recognised as coming from Nature which can, however, only destroy it.

So man stands between two riddles. He looks outwards and perceives his physical body, but this is a perpetual riddle to him. He is aware of his psycho-spiritual life, but this, too, is a perpetual riddle. But the greatest riddle is this: If I really experience a moral impulse and have to set my legs in motion to do something towards its realisation, it means—of course—I must move my body. Let us say the impulse is one of goodwill. At first this is really experienced entirely within the soul, i.e. purely psychically. How, now, does this impulse of goodwill shoot down into the body? How does a moral impulse come to move bones by muscles? Ordinary consciousness cannot comprehend this. One may regard such a discussion as theoretical, and say: We leave that to philosophers; they will think about it. Our civilisation usually leaves this question to its thinkers, and then despises—or, at least, values but little—what they say. Well; this satisfies the head only, not the heart. The human heart feels a nervous unrest and finds no joy in life, no firm foundation, no security. With the form man's thinking has taken since the first third of the fifteenth century magnificent results in the domain of external science have been achieved, but nothing has or can be contributed towards a solution of these two riddles—that of man's physical body and that of his psychical life. It is just from a clear insight into these things that Anthroposophy comes forward, saying: True; man's thinking, in the form it has so far actually taken, is powerless in the face of Reality. However much we think, we cannot in the very least influence an external process of nature by our thinking.

Moreover, we cannot, by mere thinking, influence our own ‘will-organism’. To feel deeply the powerlessness of this thinking is to receive the impulse to transcend it.

But one cannot transcend it by spinning fantasies. There is no starting point but thought; you cannot begin to think about the world except by thinking. Our thinking, however, is not fitted for this. So we are unavoidably led by life itself to find—from this starting point in thought—a way by which our thinking may penetrate more deeply into existence—into Reality. This way is only to be found in what is described as meditation—for example, in my book: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

Today we will only describe this path in bare outline, for we intend to give the skeleton of a whole anthroposophical structure. We will begin again where we began twenty years ago.

Meditation, we may say, consists in experiencing thinking in another way than usual. Today one allows oneself to be stimulated from without; one surrenders to external reality. And in seeing, hearing, grasping, etc., one notices that the reception of external impressions is continued—to a certain extent—in thoughts. One's attitude is passive—one surrenders to the world and the thoughts come. We never get further in this way. We must begin to experience thinking. One does this by taking a thought that is easily comprehended, letting it stay in one's consciousness, and concentrating one's whole consciousness upon it.

Now it does not matter at all what the thought may signify for the external world. The point is simply that we concentrate our consciousness on this one thought, ignoring every other experience. I say it must be a comprehensible thought—a simple thought, that can be ‘seen’ from all sides [überschaubar]. A very, very learned man once asked me how one meditates. I gave him an exceedingly simple thought. I told him it did not matter whether the thought referred to any external reality. I told him to think: Wisdom is in the light. He was to apply the whole force of his soul again and again to the thought: Wisdom is in the light. Whether this be true or false is not the point. It matters just as little whether an object that I set in motion, again and again, by exerting my arm, be of far-reaching importance or a game; I strengthen the muscles of my arm thereby. So, too, we strengthen our thinking when we exert ourselves, again and again, to per-form the above activity, irrespective of what the thought may signify. If we strenuously endeavour, again and again, to make it present in our consciousness and concentrate our whole soul life upon it, we strengthen our soul life just as we strengthen the muscular force of our arm if we apply it again and again to the same action. But we must choose a thought that is easily surveyed; otherwise we are exposed to all possible tricks of our own organisation. People do not believe how strong is the suggestive power of unconscious echoes of past experiences and the like. The moment we entertain a more complicated thought demonic powers approach from all sides, suggesting this or that to our consciousness. One can only be sure that one is living in one's meditation in the full awareness of normal, conscious life, if one really takes a completely surveyable thought that can contain nothing but what one is actually thinking.

If we contrive to meditate in this way, all manner of people may say we are succumbing to auto-suggestion or the like, but they will be talking nonsense. It all turns on our success in holding a ‘transparent’ thought—not one that works in us through sub-conscious impulses in some way or other. By such concentration one strengthens and intensifies his soul life—in so far as this is a life in thought. Of course, it will depend on a man's capacities, as I have often said; in the case of one man it will take a long time, in the case of another it will happen quickly. But, after a certain time, the result will be that he no longer experiences his thinking as in ordinary consciousness. In ordinary consciousness our thoughts stand there powerless; they are ‘just thoughts’. But through such concentration one really comes to experience thoughts as inner being [Sein], just as one experiences the tension of a muscle—the act of reaching out to grasp an object. Thinking becomes a reality in us; we experience, on developing ourselves further and further, a second man within us of whom we knew nothing before.

The moment now arrives when you say to yourself: True, I am this human being who, to begin with, can look at himself externally as one looks at the things of nature; I feel inwardly, but very dimly, the tensions of my muscles, but I do not really know how my thoughts shoot down into them. But after strengthening your thinking in the way described, you feel your strengthened thinking flowing, streaming, pulsating within you; you feel the second man. This is, to begin with, an abstract characterisation. The main thing is that the moment you feel this second man within you, supra-terrestrial things begin to concern you in the way only terrestrial things did before. In this moment, when you feel your thought take on inner life—when you feel its flow as you feel the flow of your breath when you pay heed to it—you become aware of something new in your whole being. Formerly you felt for example: I am standing on my legs. The ground is below and supports me. If it were not there, if the earth did not offer me this support, I would sink into bottomless space. I am standing on something. After you have intensified your thinking and come to feel the second man within, your earthly environment begins to interest you less than before. This only holds, however, for the moments in which you give special attention to the second man. One does not become a dreamer if one advances to these stages of knowledge in a sincere and fully conscious way. One can quite easily return, with all one's wonted skill, to the world of ordinary life. One does not become a visionary and say: Oh! I have learnt to know the spiritual world; the earthly is unreal and of less value. From now on I shall only concern myself with the spiritual world. On a true, spiritual path one does not become like that, but learns to value external life more than ever when one returns to it. Apart from this, the moments in which one transcends external life in the way described and fixes attention on the second man one has discovered cannot be maintained for long. To fix one's attention in this way and with inner sincerity demands great effort, and this can only be sustained for a certain time which is usually not very long.

Now, in turning our attention to the second man, we find at the same time, that we begin to value the spatial environment of the earth as much as what is on the earth itself. We know that the crust of the earth supports us, and the various kingdoms of Nature provide the substances we must eat if our body is to receive through food the repeated stimulus it needs. We know that we are connected with terrestrial Nature in this way. We must go into the garden to pick cabbages, cook and eat them; and we know that we need what is out there in the garden and that it is connected with our ‘first’ or physical man. In just the same way we learn to know what the rays of the sun, the light of the moon and the twinkling of the stars around the earth are to us. Gradually we attain one possible way of thinking of the spatial environment of the earth in relation to our ‘second man’, as we formerly thought of our first (physical) body in relation to its physical environment.

And now we say to ourselves: What you bear within you as muscles, bones, lung, liver, etc., is connected with the cabbage, the pheasant, etc., out there in the world. But the ‘second man’ of whom you have become conscious through strengthening your thinking, is connected with the sun and the moon and all the twinkling stars—with the spatial environment of the earth. We become more familiar with this environment than we usually are with our terrestrial environment—unless we happen to be food-specialists. We really gain a second world which, to begin with, is spatial.

We learn to esteem ourselves inhabitants of the world of stars as we formerly considered ourselves inhabitants of the earth. Hitherto we did not realise that we dwell in the world of stars; for a science which does not go as far to strengthen man's thinking cannot make him conscious of his connection, through a second man, with the spatial environment of the earth—a connection similar to that between his physical body and the physical earth. Such a science does not know this. It engages in calculations; but even the calculations of Astrophysics, etc., only reveal things which do not really concern man at all, or—at most—only satisfy his curiosity. After all, what does it mean to a man, or his inner life, to know how the spiral nebular in Canes venatici may be thought of as having originated, or as still evolving? Moreover, it is not even true! Such things do not really concern us. Man's attitude towards the world of stars is like that of some disembodied spirit towards the earth—if such a spirit be thought of as coming from some region or other to visit the earth, requiring neither ground to stand on, nor nourishment, etc. But, in actual fact, from a mere citizen of the earth man becomes a citizen of the universe when he strengthens his thinking in the above way.

We now become conscious of something quite definite, which can be described in the following way. We say to ourselves: It is good that there are cabbages, corn, etc., out there; they build up our physical body (if I may use this somewhat incorrect expression in accordance with the general, but very superficial, view). I am able to discover a certain connection between my physical body and what is there outside in the various kingdoms of Nature. But with strengthened thinking I begin to discover a similar connection between the ‘second man’ who lives in me and what surrounds me in supra-terrestrial space. At length one comes to say: If I go out at night and only use my ordinary eyes, I see nothing; by day the sunlight from beyond the earth makes all objects visible. To begin with, I know nothing. If I restrict myself to the earth alone, I know: there is a cabbage, there a quartz crystal. I see both by the light of the sun, but on earth I am only interested in the difference between them.

But now I begin to know that I myself, as the second man, am made of that which makes cabbage and crystal visible. It is a most significant leap in consciousness that one takes here—a complete metamorphosis. From this point one says to oneself: If you stand on the earth you see what is physical and connected with your physical man. If you strengthen your thinking the supra-terrestrial spatial world begins to concern you and the second man you have discovered just as the earthly, physical world concerned you before. And, as you ascribe the origin of your physical body to the physical earth, you now ascribe your ‘second existence’ to the cosmic ether through whose activities earthly things become visible. From your own experience you can now speak of having a physical body and an etheric body. You see, merely to systematise and think of man as composed of various members gives no real knowledge. We only attain real insight into these things by regarding the complete metamorphosis of consciousness that results from really discovering such a second man within.

I stretch out my physical arm and my physical hand takes hold of an object. I feel, in a sense, the flowing force in this action. Through strengthening my thought I come to feel that it is inwardly mobile and now induces a kind of ‘touching’ within me—a touching that also takes place in an organism; this is the etheric organism; that finer, super-sensible organism which exists no less than the physical organism, though it is connected with the supra-terrestrial, not the terrestrial.

The moment now arrives when one is obliged to descend another step, if I may put it so. Through such ‘imaginative’ thinking as I have described we come, at first, to feel this inward touching of the second man within us; we come, too, to see this in connection with the far spaces of the universal ether. By this term you are to understand nothing but what I have just spoken of; do not read into it a meaning from some other quarter. Now, however, we must return again to ordinary consciousness if we are to get further.

You see, if we are thinking of man's physical body in the way described, we readily ask how it is really related to its environment. It is doubtless related to our physical, terrestrial environment; but how?

If we take a corpse, which is, indeed, a faithful representation of physical man—even of the living physical man—we see, in sharp contours, liver, spleen, kidney, heart, lung, bones, muscles and nerve strands. These can be drawn; they have sharp contours and resemble in this everything that occurs in solid forms. Yet there is a curious thing about this sharply outlined part of the human organism. Strictly speaking, there is nothing more deceptive than our handbooks of anatomy or physiology, for they lead people to think: there is a liver, there a heart, etc. They see all this in sharp contours and imagine this sharpness to be essential. The human organism is looked upon as a conglomeration of solid things. But it is not so at all. Ten per cent., at most, is solid; the other ninety per cent. is fluid or even gaseous. At least ninety per cent. of man, while he lives, is a column of water.

Thus we can say: In his physical body man belongs, it is true, to the solid earth—to what the ancient thinkers in particular called the ‘earth’. Then we come to what is fluid in man; and even in external science one will never gain a reasonable idea of man until one learns to distinguish the solid man from the fluid man this inner surging and weaving element which really resembles a small ocean.

But what is terrestrial can only really affect man through the solid part of him. For even in external Nature you can see, where the fluid element begins, an inner formative force working with very great uniformity. Take the whole fluid element of our earth—its water; it is a great drop. Wherever water is free to take its own form, it takes that of a drop. The fluid element tends everywhere to be drop-like.

What is earthly—or solid, as we say today—occurs in definite, individual forms, which we can recognise. What is fluid, however, tends always to take on spherical form.

Why is this? Well, if you study a drop, be it small or as large as the earth itself, you find it is an image of the whole universe. Of course, this is wrong according to the ordinary conceptions of today; nevertheless it appears so, to begin with, and we shall soon see that this appearance is justified. The universe really appears to us as a hollow sphere into which we look.

Every drop, whether small or large, appears as a reflection of the universe itself. Whether you take a drop of rain, or the waters of the earth as a whole, the surface gives you a picture of the universe. Thus, as soon as you come to what is fluid, you cannot explain it by earthly forces. If you study closely the enormous efforts that have been made to explain the spherical form of the oceans by terrestrial forces, you will realise how vain such efforts are. The spherical form of the oceans cannot be explained by terrestrial gravitational attraction and the like, but by pressure from without. Here, even in external Nature, we find we must look beyond the terrestrial. And, in doing this, we come to grasp how it is with man himself.

As long as you restrict yourself to the solid part of man, you need not look beyond the terrestrial in understanding his form. The moment you come to his fluid part, you require the second man discovered by strengthened thinking. He works in what is fluid.

We are now back again at what is terrestrial. We find in man a solid constituent; this we can explain with our ordinary thoughts. But we cannot understand the form of his fluid components unless we think of the second man as active within him—the second man whom we contact within ourselves in our strengthened thinking as the human etheric body.

Thus we can say: The physical man works in what is solid, the etheric man in what is fluid. Of course, the etheric man still remains an independent entity, but he works through the fluid medium.

We must now proceed further. Imagine we have actually got so far as to experience inwardly this strengthened thinking and, therefore, the etheric—the second—man. This means, that we are developing great inner force. Now, as you know, one can—with a little effort—not only let oneself be stimulated to think, but can even refrain from all thinking. One can stop thinking; and our physical organisation does this for us when we are tired and fall asleep. But it becomes more difficult to extinguish again, of our own accord, the strengthened thinking which results from meditation and which we have acquired by great effort. It is comparatively easy to extinguish an ordinary, powerless thought; to put away—or ‘suggest away’—the strengthened thinking one has developed demands a stronger force, for one cleaves in a more inward way to what one has thus acquired. If we succeed, however, something special occurs.

You see, our ordinary thinking is stimulated by our environment, or memories of our environment. When you follow a train of thought the world is still there; when you fall asleep the world is still there. But it is out of this very world of visible things that you have raised yourself in your strengthened thinking. You have contacted the supra-terrestrial spatial environment, and now study your relationship to the stars as you formerly studied the relation between the natural objects around you. You have now brought yourself into relation with all this, but can suppress it again. In suppressing it, however, the external world, too, is no longer there—for you have just directed all your interest to this strengthened consciousness. The outer world is not there; and you come to what one can call ‘empty consciousness’. Ordinary consciousness only knows emptiness in sleep, and then in the form of unconsciousness.

What one now attains is just this: one remains fully awake, receiving no outer sense impressions, yet not sleeping—merely ‘waking’. Yet one does not remain merely awake. For now, on exposing one's empty consciousness to the indefinite on all sides, the spiritual world proper enters. One says: the spiritual world approaches me. Whereas previously one only looked out into the supra-terrestrial physical environment—which is really an etheric environment—and saw what is spatial, something new, the actual spiritual world, now approaches through this cosmic space from all sides as from indefinite distances. At first the spiritual approaches you from the outermost part of the cosmos when you traverse the path I have described.

A third thing is now added to the former metamorphosis of consciousness. One now says: I bear with me my physical body (inner circle), my etheric body (blue) which I apprehended in my strengthened thinking, and something more that comes from the undefined—from beyond space. I ask you to notice that I am talking of the world of appearance; we shall see in the course of the next few days how far one is justified in speaking of the etheric as coming from the spatial world, and of what lies beyond us (red) coming from the Undefined. We are no longer conscious of this third component as coming from the spatial world. It streams to us through the cosmic ether and permeates us as a ‘third man’. We have now a right to speak, from our own experience, of a first or physical man, a second or etheric man, and a third or ‘astral man’. (You realise, of course, that you must not be put off by words.) We bear within us an astral or third man, who comes from the spiritual, not merely from the etheric. We can speak of the astral body or astral man.

Now we can go further. I will only indicate this in conclusion so that I can elaborate it tomorrow. We now say to ourselves: I breathe in, use my breath for my inner organisation and breathe out. But is it really true that what people think of as a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen enters and leaves us in breathing?

Well, according to the views of present day civilisation, what enters and leaves is composed of oxygen and nitrogen and some other things. But one who attains ‘empty consciousness’ and then experiences this onrush—as I might call it—of the spiritual through the ether, experiences in the breath he draws something not formed out of the ether alone, but out of the spiritual beyond it. He gradually learns to know the spiritual that plays into man in respiration. He learns to say to himself: You have a physical body; this works into what is solid—that is its medium. You have your etheric body; this works into what is fluid. But, in being a man—not merely a solid man or fluid man, but a man who bears his ‘air man’ within him—your third or astral man can work into what is airy or gaseous. It is through this material substance on the earth that your astral man operates.

Man's fluid organisation with its regular but ever changing life will never be grasped by ordinary thinking. It can only be grasped by strengthened thinking. With ordinary thinking we can only apprehend the definite contours of the physical man. And, since our anatomy and physiology merely take account of the body, they only describe ten per cent of man. But the ‘fluid man’ is in constant movement and never presents a fixed contour. At one moment it is like this, at another, like that—now long, now short. What is in constant movement cannot be grasped with the closed concepts suitable for calculations; you require concepts mobile in themselves—‘pictures’. The etheric man within the fluid man is apprehended in pictures.

The third or astral man who works in the ‘airy’ man, is apprehended not merely in pictures but in yet another way. If you advance further and further in meditation—I am here describing the Western process—you notice, after reaching a certain stage in your exercises, that your breath has become something palpably musical. You experience it as inner music; you feel as if inner music were weaving and surging through you. The third man—who is physically the airy man, spiritually the astral man—is experienced as an inner musical element. In this way you take hold of your breathing.

The oriental meditator did this directly by concentrating on his breathing, making it irregular in order to experience how it lives and weaves in man. He strove to take hold of this third man directly.

Thus we discover the nature of the third man, and are now at the stage when we can say: By deepening and strengthening our insight we learn, at first, to distinguish in man:

the physical body which lives in solid forms on the earth and is also connected with the terrestrial kingdoms,

the fluid man in whom an ever mobile, etheric element lives and which can only be apprehended in images (Bilder)—in moving, plastic images,

the astral man who has his physical copy or image (Abbild) in all that constitutes the stream of inspired air.

This stream enters and takes hold of our inner organisation, expands, works, is transformed and streams out again. That is a wonderful process of becoming. We cannot draw it; we might do so symbolically, at most, but not as it really is. You could no more draw this process than you could draw the tones of a violin. You might do this symbolically; nevertheless you must direct your musical sense to hearing inwardly—i.e. you must attend with your inner, musical ear and not merely listen to the external tones. In this inward way you must hear the weaving of your breath—must hear the human astral body. This is the third man. We apprehend him when we attain to ‘empty consciousness’ and allow this to be filled with ‘inspirations’ from without.

Now language is really cleverer than men, for it comes to us from primeval worlds. There is a deep reason why breathing was once called inspiration. In general, the words of our language say much more than we, in our abstract consciousness, feel them to contain.

These are the considerations that can lead us to the three members of man—the physical, the etheric and the astral bodies—which find expression in the solid, fluid and airy ‘men’ and have their physical counterparts in the forms of the solid man, in the changing shapes of the fluid man and in that which permeates man as an inner music, experienced through feeling. The nervous system is indeed the most beautiful representation of this inner music. It is built from out of the astral body—from out of this inner music; and for this reason it has, at a definite part, the wonderful configuration of the spinal cord with its attached nerve-strands. All this together is a wonderful, musical structure that is continually working upwards into man's head.

A primeval wisdom that was still alive in Ancient Greece, felt the presence of this wonderful instrument in man. For the air assimilated through breathing ascends through the whole spinal cord. The air we breathe in ‘enters’ the cerebro-spinal canal and pulsates upwards towards the brain. This music is actually per-formed, but it remains unconscious; only the upper rebound is in consciousness. This is the lyre of Apollo, the inner musical instrument that the instinctive, primeval wisdom still recognised in man. I have referred to these things before, but it is my present intention to give a resume of what has been developed within our society in the course of twenty-one years.

Tomorrow I shall go further and consider the fourth member of man, the ego organisation proper. I shall then show the connection between these various members of man and his life on earth and beyond it—i.e. his so-called eternal life.

I have described how man must be regarded as composed of physical, etheric and astral bodies, and how we can acquire a deeper insight into this composition by exercising our cognitive powers—powers of mind, heart and will—in a certain way. This composition that we discern in man is also found in the external world. Only, we must be clear that there is a consider-able difference between what we find in the world outside and what we find in man.

When, to begin with, we study the physical world—and we can really only study its solid, ‘earthy’ manifestations—we come to distinguish various substances. I need not go into details. You know, of course, that the anatomist, investigating what remains of the living man after he has passed through the gate of death—the corpse—need not take account of any but earthly substances which he also finds outside man. At least, he believes he need not, and within certain limits his belief is justified. He investigates the elements or the salts, acids and other compounds found outside of man, and he investigates what the human organism contains. He does not find it necessary to enlarge his physical and chemical knowledge.

Indeed, the difference only becomes apparent when we study these things on a somewhat bigger scale, and notice what I have emphasised so strongly, namely: that the human organism as a whole cannot be maintained by external Nature, but is subject to destruction. Thus we can say that, in the solid, earthy, physical realm, we do not find, to begin with. very much difference between what is outside and what is inside man. We must recognise a greater difference however, in what is etheric.

I have drawn your attention to the way the etheric really looks down on us from the world beyond the earth. I pointed out that, from out of the etheric, everything, whether it be a large or small drop, is made spherical, and that this tendency to spherical formation, due to the complex of etheric forces, extends to the etheric body of man. We have really to fight continually to overcome this tendency in our etheric body.—Of course, all this takes place in the subconscious. In its present form the human etheric body is closely moulded to the physical body. It has not such sharp boundaries and is mobile in itself; nevertheless we can distinguish a head part, a trunk part and, indistinctly, limb parts where the etheric body becomes diffuse. Thus, when we move an arm the etheric body, which otherwise conforms to the human shape, only protrudes a little beyond the arm, whereas below it is widely extended. But it has from the cosmos the tendency to take on spherical form. The higher being of man—the astral man and the ego—must oppose this tendency and mould the spherical form to the human shape. So we may say: man, as an etheric being, lives in the general etheric world by building up his own form out of the etheric, whereas the formative tendency of the surrounding etheric is to give spherical form to what is fluid. In man what is fluid takes on human form, and this is due to his inner forces opposing the external, cosmic forces.

This opposition is still stronger in the astral man. As I indicated yesterday, the astral comes streaming in from the indefinite, so to speak. In the earthly realm outside man it streams in (arrows in green circle) in such a way that it develops the plant form out of the earth; and the plant form clearly shows this response to the astral. The plant has only an etheric body, but it is, indeed, the astral forces which draw the plant out of the earth. Now the human astral body is extraordinarily complicated and one really perceives it in the way I described yesterday, i.e. as an inner musical element, a whirling, weaving life, an inner activity and all one might describe as music inwardly sensed. But everything else that is astral is discovered streaming in centripetally; it is transformed into the human astral form, whereby complicated things appear.

Let us say, for example, that something astral is streaming in from this side. The human being moulds it to the most varied forms in order to make it serviceable and incorporate it. One might say, the human being wins his astral body by subduing the centripetal astral forces.

Now, when we turn our psycho-spiritually sharpened gaze to the cosmos, we do gain the conception of the etheric as described, but we also receive the impression that it is due to the etheric that we strive away from the earth. While we are held to the earth by gravity, we tend away from the earth because of the etheric. It is really the etheric that is active in this centrifugal tendency. In this connection you need only think of the following: The human brain weighs approximately 1,500 grammes. Now a mass with this weight, pressing on the delicate blood vessels at the base of the brain, would quite compress them. If our brain actually exerted its 1,500 grammes weight in the living man we could not have these blood-vessels. In the living man, however, the brain weighs twenty grammes at most. It is so much lighter because it floats in the cerebral fluid and loses in weight by the weight of fluid displaced. The brain really strives away from man; and in this tendency the etheric is active. Thus we may say that it is just in the brain that we can see most clearly how matters stand.

Here is the brain floating in its fluid, whereby its weight is reduced from 1,500 to about twenty grammes. This means that its activity shares, to a remarkably small degree, in our physical, bodily life. Here the etheric finds tremendous scope for acting upwards. The weight acts downwards but is reduced. In the cerebral fluid there is principally developed the sum of etheric forces that lifts us away from the earth. Indeed, if we had to carry our physical body with all its forces of weight, we would have a sack to drag about. Every blood corpuscle, however, swims and is reduced in weight.

This loss of weight in a fluid is an old piece of knowledge. You know, of course, that it has been ascribed to Archimedes. He was bathing one day and noticed, on lifting his leg out of the water, how much heavier it was than when in the water, and exclaimed: Eureka! I have found it. He had discovered that every body in a fluid loses in weight the weight of the fluid displaced. Thus, if you think of Archimedes in his bath, here his physical leg and here the same leg formed of water, then the physical leg is lighter in water by the amount that this water-leg weighs. It is lighter by just this amount. Likewise the weight of our brain in the cerebral fluid is reduced by the weight of a mass of cerebral fluid of the size of the physical brain. That is, it is reduced from 1,500 to 20 grammes. In physics this is called ‘upthrust’, and here the etheric acts. The astral, on the other hand, is stimulated—to begin with—by breathing, whereby the airy element enters the human organism and eventually reaches the head in an extremely attenuated state; in this distribution and organisation of the air the astral is active.

Thus we can really see in the solid earthy substance the physical; in the fluid, especially in the way it works in man, the etheric; in the airy, the astral.

It is the tragedy of materialism that it knows nothing of matter—how matter actually works in the several domains of life. The remarkable thing about materialism is just its ignorance of matter. It knows nothing at all about the way matter works, for one does not learn this until one is able to attend to the spiritual that is active in matter and is represented by the forces.

Now, when one progresses through meditation to the ‘imaginative’ knowledge of which I have already spoken, one finds the etheric at work in all the aqueous processes of the earth. In the face of real knowledge it is childish to believe that all that is at work here—in the sea, in the rivers, rising mists, falling drops and cloud formations—contains only what the physicist and chemist know about water. For in all that is out there in the mighty drop of the ‘water-earth’, in what constantly rises in the form of vapour, forms clouds and descends as mist, in all the other aqueous processes—water plays, indeed, an enormous part in shaping the face of the globe—in all this etheric currents are working. Here is weaving the ether revealed to one in ‘pictures’ when one has strengthened one's thinking in the way I have described. Everywhere behind this weaving water the cosmic ‘imagination’ is weaving, and the astral ‘music of the spheres’ plays everywhere into this cosmic imagination, coming—in a sense—from behind.

In man, however, all these conditions are found to be quite different from what they are outside him. If one looks, with vision sharpened in the way I have indicated, at what is outside man, one finds the world built up in the following way: To begin with, there is the physical, in direct contact with the earth; the etheric, which fills the whole cosmos; then the astral, which streams in as living beings. indeed, it is no merely general, abstract, astral weaving that we behold, but actual beings entering space, beings of a psycho-spiritual nature just as man, in his body, is also a psycho-spiritual being. This is what one beholds.

If we now look back to man, we find in him, too, an etheric body corresponding to the external etheric. But this etheric body is not perceived in such a way that you can say: there is the physical man, and here is his etheric body. Certainly, you can draw it so, but that would only be an arrested section. You never see merely the present etheric body; this section which you can draw is seen to be continuous with what has gone before. You always see the whole etheric body extending back to birth. Past and present form a whole. If you have a twenty-year-old person before you, you cannot see merely his twenty-year-old etheric body; you see all that has happened in his etheric body back to birth and a little beyond. Here time really becomes space. It is just as when you look down an avenue and see the trees drawing closer and closer together on account of perspective; you see the whole avenue in space. Likewise you look at the etheric body as it is at present but see its whole structure, which is a ‘time-structure’. The etheric body is a ‘time-organism’, the physical body a ‘space-organism’. The physical body is, of course, self-contained at any given moment; the etheric body is always there as a totality which comprises our life up to the given moment. This is a unity. Hence you could only draw or paint the etheric body if you could paint moving pictures; but you would have to be quicker than the pictures. The momentary configuration that you draw or paint is only a section and is related to the whole etheric body as the section of a tree-stem to the whole tree. When you draw a diagram of the etheric body, it is only a section, for the whole etheric body is a ‘time-process’. Indeed, on surveying this time-process one is led beyond birth, even beyond conception, to the point where one sees the human being descend from his pre-earthly life to his present life on earth, and, just before he was conceived by his parents, draw together etheric substance from the general cosmic ether to build his etheric body.

Thus you cannot speak of the etheric body without surveying man's life in time back to birth and beyond. What one regards as the etheric body at some definite moment is only an abstraction; the concrete reality is the time-process.

It is different again with the astral body. This is apprehended in the way I described yesterday. I can only draw it diagramatically, and in the diagram space must become time for you. Let us assume we are observing the astral body of a person on the 2nd February 1924. Let this be the person.¹ He does indeed make this impression upon us: Here is the physical body, here his etheric body. We can also observe his astral body and this makes upon us the impression I described in my book Theosophy. It is so. But when one comes to the really ‘inspired’ knowledge which appears before empty consciousness—I described such knowledge yesterday—one attains the following insight. One says to oneself: What I am observing as the astral body of this person is not really present today, i.e. on the 2nd February 1924. If the person is twenty years of age, you must go backwards in time—let us say, to January 1904. You perceive that this astral body is really back there, and extends still further back into the unlimited. It has remained there and has not accompanied him through life. Here we have only a kind of appearance—a beam. It is like looking down an avenue; there, in the distance, are the last trees, very close together. Behind them is a source of light. You can have the radiance of the light here, but the source is behind—it need not move forward that its light may shine here.

So, too, the astral body has remained behind, and only throws its beam into life. It has really remained in the spiritual world and has not come with us into the physical. In respect to our astral body we always remain before conception and birth, in the spiritual world. If we are twenty years old in 1924, it is as if we were still living spiritually before the year 1904 and, in respect to our astral body, had only stretched forth a feeler.

That, you will say, is a difficult conception. Well, so it is. But you know there was once a Spanish king who was shown how complicated the structure of the universe is. He thought he would have made it simpler. A man may think like this, but, as a matter of fact, the world is not simple, and we must exert ourselves somewhat to grasp what man is.

To look intently at the astral body is to look directly into the spiritual world. (Only in the world external to man have you around you what is astral.) When you look at human beings spiritually, you look into the spiritual world in respect to their astral bodies. You perceive directly what a man has undergone in the spiritual world before he descended to earth.

But, you will say, my astral body is active within me. Of course it is; that is self-understood. But imagine some being or other were here, and by means of cords mechanically connected, were to produce some effect at a considerable distance away. It is like that with respect to time. Your astral body has remained behind, but its activities extend through the whole of your life. Thus the activity that you notice in your astral body today has its origin in a time long past, when you were in the spiritual world before descending to earth. That time is still active—in other words, it is still there, as far as the spiritual is concerned. Anyone who believes that the past is no longer ‘present’ in the real time-process resembles a man in a railway train to whom one might say: That was a beautiful district through which we have just passed, and who would reply: Yes, a beautiful district. But it has vanished; it is no longer there. Such a man would believe that the district through which he had passed in an express train had disappeared. It is just as stupid to believe that the past is no longer there. As a matter of fact it is always there, working into man. The 3rd of January 1904, is still there in its spiritual constitution, just as what is spatial remains after you have travelled through it. It is there, influencing the present.

Thus, if you describe the astral body as I have done in my Theosophy, you must realise, in order to complete your insight, that what is active here is the ‘radiance’ of something far back in time. The human being is really like a comet stretching its tail far back into the past. It is not possible to obtain true insight into man's being unless we acquire these new concepts.

People who believe one can enter the spiritual world with the same concepts one has for the physical world should become spiritualists, not anthroposophists. Spiritualists endeavour to conjure the spiritual—only somewhat thinner than ordinary matter—into the ordinary space in which physical men walk about. But it is nothing spiritual—only fine exudations. Even the phantoms described by Schrenck-Notzing are only fine, physical exudations which retain in their shape traces of the etheric. They are mere phantoms, not something really spiritual.

If you study the world and man in the way I have described you will realise the presence of the higher worlds in external Nature. In the case of man, a study of the successive worlds will lead you at once to the ‘time-process’ within him. In his case, however, you can go further still and reach a domain which our philistine materialistic age will not recognise as accessible to knowledge.

I have referred to perception, by the senses, of the coarse, tangible physical objects around us as the first stage of cognition.

The second stage was that of ‘strengthened thinking’ in which we apprehend the living, moving images of the world. The third kind of cognition was ‘inspiration’ in which we perceive the beings that express themselves through these images—hear a kind of music of the spheres that sounds from beyond. In the case of man we are led, not merely out of the material world, but out of the present into his pre-earthly life—into his existence as a psycho-spiritual being before descending to earth. This ‘inspired’ knowledge is attained by emptying our consciousness after strengthened thinking.

The further stage in cognition is attained by making the power of love a cognitive force. Only, it must not be the shallow love of which alone, as a rule, our materialistic age speaks. It must he the love by which you can identify yourself with another being—a being with whom, in the physical world, you are not identical. You must really be able to feel what is passing in the other being just as you feel what is passing in yourself; you must be able to go out of yourself and live again in another. In ordinary human life such love does not attain the intensity necessary to make it a cognitive force. One must first have attained ‘empty consciousness’, and have had some experience with it. And then we undergo what many who are striving for higher knowledge do not seek: we suffer what may be called the pain of knowledge.

If you have a wound somewhere, it hurts you. Why? Because, owing to the wound, your spiritual being cannot permeate your physical body properly at the place concerned. All pain comes from not being able, from one cause or another, to permeate the physical body. And when something external hurts you, this is also because you are unable to ‘unite’ yourself with it—to accept it. Now, when one has attained the empty consciousness into which there flows an altogether different world from that to which one is accustomed, then, for such moments of inspired cognition, one is without one's whole physical man; this is then one large wound and hurts all over. One must first undergo this experience; one must endure the leaving of the physical body as actual pain and suffering in order to attain inspired knowledge. Of course, an understanding of such knowledge can be acquired without pain, and people should acquire this understanding apart from suffering the pain of initiation. But to acquire an immediate, spiritual perception—not a mere understanding—of what works into man from his life before birth, that is, of what he leaves behind in the spiritual world, one must cross the abyss of universal suffering and pain.

We can then experience the above identification with, and coming to life in, another being. Only then do we learn the highest degree of love which consists not in ‘forgetting oneself’ in a theoretical sense, but in being able to ignore oneself completely and enter into what is not oneself. And only when this love goes hand in hand with that higher—inspired—cognition are we really able to enter the spiritual with all the warmth of our nature, with all our inwardness of heart and mind; that is, with our soul forces. We must do this if we are to progress in knowledge. Love must become a cognitive force in this sense. When such love has attained a certain height and intensity, you pass through your pre-earthly life to your last life on earth; you slip over, through all you have undergone between your last death and your present life, into your former life on earth—into what we call previous incarnations.

Now, it was, of course, also in a physical body that you then trod the earth. But nothing remains of all that made up that physical body; it has been absorbed into the elements. Your innermost being of that time has become entirely spiritual and lives in you as spirit alone.

In truth, our ego, in passing through the gate of death and the spiritual world to a new life on earth, becomes wholly spiritual. It cannot be grasped with the ordinary powers of every-day consciousness; we must intensify the power of love in the way I have described. The man we were in a previous life is just as much outside us as another human being of today. Our ego has the same degree of externality. Of course, we then come to possess it—to experience it as ourself—but we must first learn to love without any trace of egotism. It would be a terrible thing indeed, if we were to become enamoured—in the ordinary sense—of our former incarnation. Love, in the highest sense, must be intensified so that we may be able to experience our former incarnation as something quite other than ourself. Then, when our cognitive power emerges through the empty consciousness, we acquire knowledge through love intensified in the highest degree, and reach the fourth member of man—the ego proper.

Man has his physical body through which he lives at each moment in the present physical earth. He has his etheric body through which he lives continually in a time-process extending back to a little before his birth, when he drew together this etheric body out of the general cosmic ether. He has his astral body through which his life extends over the whole period between his last death and his last descent to earth. And he has his ego through which he reaches back into his previous life on earth. Thus, when we speak of the various members of man's being we must speak, in each case, of his extension in time. We bear our former ego-consciousness within us today, but unconsciously. How? If you want to study how you must realise that man, here in the physical world, is not only a solid body, a fluid man and an airy man, but an organism of warmth as well. This is also the way to approach the ego. Everyone knows this, at least in a very partial way. If we measure a person's temperature we get different degrees of fever in different parts of the body. But there are different temperatures throughout man's whole organism. You have one temperature in your head, another in your big toe, another inside your liver, another within your lung. You are not only what you find drawn in definite outlines in an anatomical atlas. You have a fluid organism in constant motion. You have an organism of air which permeates you continually, like a mighty, symphonic organism of music. And, in addition, you have a surging organism of warmth, differentiated with respect to temperature. In this you yourself live. Indeed, you feel that this is so. After all, you are not very conscious of living in your shin-bone, or in any other bone, or in your liver, or in your vascular fluids. But you are very conscious of living in your warmth, though you do not distinguish between your ‘warmth-hand’, ‘warmth-leg’, ‘warmth-liver’, etc. Nevertheless this differentiation is there, and if the temperature differences proper to the human warmth-organism are absent or disturbed, we feel this as illness, as pain.

When, with developed consciousness, we attain the picture stage—‘imagination’—we perceive the etheric as weaving pictures. When we perceive the astral, we hear the music of the spheres which sounds towards us or, we might say, from out of ourselves. (For our own astral body leads us back to our pre-earthly life.) And when we advance farther to the form of cognition that attains the highest degree of love—when the power of love becomes a cognitive force—when, to begin with, we see our own existence flowing from a former life on earth into this present life, we feel this former life in the normal differentiation of the ‘warmth-organism’ in which we are living. This is real intuition. We live in this. And when some impulse arises in us to do this or that, it does not only work, as in the astral body, out of the spiritual world, but from still farther back—from our former life on earth. Our former life on earth works into the warmth of our organism, and kindles this or that impulse. Thus we see in the earthly, solid man the physical body, in the fluid man the etheric body, in the airy man the astral body, and in the warmth element the ego proper. (The ego of the present incarnation is never complete; it is always developing.) It is the ego of the former life on earth, working in subconscious depths, that is the ego proper. And when you perceive a man clairvoyantly you are led to say: lie is standing here and I see him, to begin with, with my external senses. But I also see what is etheric and what is astral; then, behind him, the man he was in his previous incarnation.

In fact, the more this consciousness is developed, the more clearly do we see, in a kind of perspective, the head of his last incarnation a little above the head of his present incarnation, and, some-what higher still, the head of his second last incarnation. In civilisations in which there was still a kind of instinctive consciousness of these things, you will find pictures which show, behind the clearly drawn countenance of the present incarnation, a second countenance less clearly painted; behind this a third that is still less clear. There are Egyptian pictures like this. You understand such pictures if you are able to perceive, behind the present man, the man he was in his last and second last incarnations. Not until one can extend man's life in time to include previous incarnations can one really speak of the ego as the fourth member of human nature.

All this acts in the ‘man of warmth’. ‘Inspiration’ approaches you from without or from within, you yourself are within the warmth; here is ‘intuition’, true intuition. We experience warmth within us quite differently from anything else.

Now, if you look at it in this way, you will get beyond what should be a great riddle to the man of today, if he gives attention to his soul in a really unprejudiced way. I have spoken of this riddle. I said, we feel ourselves morally determined by certain impulses given us in a purely spiritual way. We want to carry them out. But we cannot, to begin with, understand how that to which we feel ourselves morally bound shoots into our muscles. If, however, we know that we bear within us, from our last incarnation, our ego which has become entirely spiritual and now acts upon our warmth-man, we have the required connection. Our moral impulses act indirectly, through the ego of our last incarnation. Here the connection between the moral and the physical is first found. It cannot be found by merely studying the present world of Nature and man as a section of it.

You see, if you study the present world of Nature, you may say: Well, there outside is Nature; man takes in its substances and builds up his organism—one does actually picture it in this naive way. Thus man is a portion of Nature, being compounded of certain of its substances. Good! But you suddenly realise that there are moral impulses and you should act in accordance with them! How, I would ask, can a portion of Nature do that? A stone cannot do it, nor can calcium, or chlorine, or oxygen, or nitrogen. But man, who is compounded of these, is supposed to be able to do so! He experiences a moral impulse and is expected to act in accordance with it, although he is compounded of all these substance which cannot do so.

But in all that is thus welded together in man there arises—especially indirectly through sleep—something that passes through death, becomes more and more spiritual, and enters a body again. It is, of course, already in the present body, for it comes from the last incarnation. It became spiritual and now works into the present incarnation. What is compounded of earthly substances will work into the warmth-man of the next incarnation. Here the moral element flows from one earth life into another; here we can grasp the transition from physical to spiritual Nature and from spiritual to physical Nature again. We cannot understand this transition with one life alone, if we are honest with ourselves and do not close our eyes to the whole psycho-spiritual problem.

What we can regard as the earthly elements—the solid, liquid, gaseous and warmth elements—is permeated everywhere by what can be designated as the etheric, the astral and the ‘ego-like’, i.e. what is of like nature with the ego. In this way we see the connection between man's members and the universe, and gain an idea of the extent to which man is a ‘portion’ of time, not only of space. He is only a portion, or section, of space in regard to his physical, bodily nature. For spiritual perception the past is continually present; the present moment is, at the same time, a real eternity.

What I am explaining to you was once the content of instinctive forms of consciousness. If we really understand ancient records we find a consciousness of this fourfold composition of man and his connection with the cosmos. But this knowledge has been lost to man for many centuries; otherwise he could not have developed the intellect he has today. But we have now reached the point in human evolution when we must again advance from the physical to the really spiritual.

• 1. A sketch—not reproduced—was made.

When we study human life on earth, we see it proceed in a kind of rhythm expressed in the alternating states of waking and sleeping. It is from this point of view that one must consider what was said in the last lectures about the constitution of man. Let us look, with ordinary consciousness, and in what might be called a purely external way, at the facts before us. In the waking man there is, first, the inner course of his vital processes; but these remain subconscious or unconscious. There is also what we know as sense impressions—that relation to our earthly and cosmic environments which is mediated by the senses. Further, there is the expression of the will—the ability to move as an expression of impulses of will.

Now, when we study man with ordinary cognition we find that the inner life-process, which runs its course in the subconsciousness, continues during sleep; sense activity and the thinking based upon it are, however, suppressed. The expression of the will is also suppressed; likewise the active life of feeling that connects willing and thinking, standing between them to a certain extent.

Now if we simply study, in an unbiased way and without succumbing to preconceived opinions, what we have just found by ordinary consciousness, we are led to say: The processes described as psychical, and the processes taking place between the psychical and the external world, cease in sleep. At most we can say that the dream life finds expression when man sleeps. But we must certainly not assume that these psychical processes are created anew—out of nothing, as it were—every time we wake. This would doubtless be a quite absurd thought, even for ordinary consciousness. On unbiased consideration we must assume that the vehicle of man's psychical processes is also present in sleep. We must admit, however, that this vehicle does not act on man during sleep, i.e. that which evokes in man's senses a consciousness of the external world, and stimulates this consciousness to think, does not act on man in sleep. Moreover, that which sets the body in motion from out of the will is also absent; likewise, what evokes feeling from the organic processes, is not there.

During waking life we are aware that our thoughts act upon our bodily organism. But, with ordinary consciousness, we cannot see how a thought or idea streams down, as it were, into the muscular and bony systems so that the will is involved. Nevertheless, we are aware of this action of our psychic impulses upon our body, and have to recognise that it ceases while we sleep.

Thus even external considerations show us that sleep takes something from man. The only question is, what? If, to begin with, we look at what we have designated man's physical body, we see that it is continually active, in sleep as in the waking state. Moreover, all the processes we described as belonging to the etheric organism continue during sleep. In sleep man grows, he carries on the inner activities of digestion and metabolism, he continues to breathe, etc. All these activities cannot belong to the physical body as such, for they cease when it becomes a corpse. It is then taken over by external, earthly Nature and destroyed. But these destructive forces do not overpower man in sleep; therefore there are counter-forces present, opposing the disintegration of his physical body. Thus we may conclude, from mere external considerations, that the etheric organism is also present during sleep.

Now we know from the preceding lectures that this etheric organism can become an object of knowledge through ‘imagination’; one can experience it ‘in a picture’, just as one experiences the physical body through sense impressions. And we know too that what may be called the astral organism is experienced through ‘inspiration’.

We will now go further—Of course, we could go on drawing conclusions in the above way. But, in the case of the astral body and ego-organisation, we prefer first to study how they actually appear to higher consciousness.

Let us recall how we had to describe the activity of the astral body in man. We saw that it works through the medium of what is airy, or gaseous, in the human organism. Thus we must recognise, to begin with, the astral body in all the activities of the airy element in man.

Now we know that the first and most essential activity of the astral body within the airy element is breathing; and we know from ordinary experience that we have to distinguish between breathing in and breathing out. Further, we know that it is the act of breathing in that vitalises us. We deprive the outer air of its life-giving power and return, not a vitalising, but a devitalising element. Physically speaking, we take in oxygen and give off carbonic acid. But we are not so much concerned with this aspect at the moment; it is the fact of ordinary experience that interests us here: we breathe in the vitalising and breathe out the devitalising element.

The higher knowledge which, as discussed in these last few days, is acquired through ‘imagination’, ‘inspiration’, and ‘intuition’, must now be directed to the life of sleep. We must actually investigate whether there is something that confirms the conclusion to which we were led, namely: that something is lifted out of man when he sleeps.

This question can only be answered by putting and answering another. If there is something that is outside man in sleep, how does it behave when outside?

Well, suppose a man, by such soul exercises as I have described, has actually acquired ‘inspiration’, i.e. a content for his emptied consciousness. He is now able to receive ‘inspired’ knowledge. At this stage he can induce the state of sleep artificially; this, however, is no mere sleep but a conscious condition in which the spiritual world flows into him.

I should now like to describe this in quite a crude way. Suppose such a man is able to feel, as it were, in an element of spiritual music, the spiritual beings of the cosmos speaking ‘into’ him. He will then have certain experiences. But he will also say to himself: These experiences which I now have, reveal something very peculiar; through them what I had to assume as outside of man during sleep no longer remains unknown. What now happens can really be made clear by the following comparison.

Suppose you had a certain experience ten years ago. You have forgotten it, but through something or other you are led to remember it. It has been outside your consciousness; but now, after applying sonic aid to memory or the like, you recall it. It is now in your consciousness. You have brought back into your consciousness something that was outside it, though connected with you in some way. It is like that with one who has a more inner consciousness and reaches inspiration. The events of sleep begin to emerge, as memories do in ordinary life. Only, the experiences we recall in memory were once in consciousness; the experiences of sleep, however, were not there before. But they enter consciousness in such a way that we really feel we are remembering something not experienced quite consciously before, at least in this life. They come to us like memories. And, as we formerly learnt to understand and experience through memory, we now begin to understand what happens during sleep. Thus into ‘inspired’ consciousness there simply emerges the experience of what leaves man and remains outside him during sleep, and what was unknown becomes known. We learn to know what it is really doing while he sleeps.

If you were to put into words what you experience with your breath during life, you would say: That I am inwardly permeated with life is owing to the element I breathe in. I cannot owe it to the element I breathe out, for that has the forces of death.

But when, as we saw just now, you are outside your body during sleep, you become extremely partial to the air you breathe out. When awake you did not notice what can be experienced with this exhaled air; you have only heeded the inhaled air which is the vitalising element while you and your soul are within the physical body. But now you have the same—indeed a more exalted—feeling towards the air you so anxiously avoid when you find it accumulated in a room. You express your dislike of the exhaled air. Now the physical body cannot bear it, even in sleep, but your soul and spirit, outside the body, actually breathe in—to put it physically—the carbonic acid you have exhaled. Of course, it is a spiritual, not a physical process; you receive the impression made by your exhaled air. In this exhaled air you remain connected with your physical body. You belong to your body, for you say to yourself: There is my body and it is breathing out this devitalising air. You say this unconsciously. You feel yourself connected with your body through its returning the air in this condition. Youfeel yourself entirely within the air you have exhaled. And this air you breathe out brings you continually the secrets of your inner life. You perceive these, although this perception is, of course, unconscious for the untrained sleeping consciousness. This exhaled air ‘sparkles forth’ from you and its appearance leads you to say: That is I myself, my inner human being, sparkling out into the universe.

And your own spirit, streaming towards you in the exhaled air has a sun-like appearance.

You now know that man's astral body, when within the physical, delights in the inhaled air, using it unconsciously to set the organic processes in action and induce in them inner mobility. But you also realise that the astral body is outside the physical when you sleep and receives, in its feelings, the secrets of your own human being from the exhaled air. While you ray forth towards the cosmos, your soul beholds unconsciously the inner process involved. Only in ‘inspiration’ does this become conscious.

Further, we receive a striking impression. It is as if what confronts the sleeping man stood out against a dark background. There is darkness behind, and against this darkness the exhaled air appears luminous: one can put this in no other way. We recognise its essential nature, inasmuch as our everyday thoughts now leave us and the active, cosmic thoughts—the objective, creative thoughts of the world—appear before us in what is flowing out of ourselves. There is the dark background, and the sparkling radiating light; in the latter the creative thoughts gradually arise. The darkness is a veil covering our ordinary, every day thoughts—brain thoughts, as we might call them. We receive a very clear impression that what we regard as most important for physical, earthly life, is darkened as soon as we leave the physical body. And we realise, much more strongly than we could have believed in ordinary consciousness, the dependence of these thoughts upon their physical instrument—the brain. The brain retains these, by an adhesive force as it were. Out there we need no longer ‘think’ in the sense of everyday life. We behold thoughts; they surge through what appears to us as ourself in the exhaled air.

Thus inspired knowledge perceives how the astral body is in the physical during waking life, initiating, with the help of the inhaled air, the functions it has to perform; how it is outside during sleep and receives the impressions of our own human being. While we are awake the world on which we stand, the world which surrounds us as our earthly environment and the vault of heaven above, form our outer world. When we sleep what is inside our skin, and is otherwise our inner world, becomes our outer world. Only, to begin with, we feel what is here streaming towards us in the exhaled air; it is a felt outer world, that we have at first.

And then something further is experienced. The circulation of the blood, which follows closely the process of respiration and remains unconscious during waking life, begins to be very conscious in sleep. It comes before us like a new world, a world, indeed, that we do not merely feel but begin to understand from another point of view than that from which we understand external things with ordinary consciousness. With ‘inspired’ consciousness—though the will as a life process is present in the unconsciousness of every sleeper—we perceive the circulatory process, just as we perceive external processes of Nature during earthly life. We now come to see that all we do through that will of which we are ordinarily unconscious, involves a counter-process within us.

With every step you transport your body to another place, but something else occurs as well: a warmth-process takes place within you, setting the airy element in motion. This process is the furthest extension of those general processes of metabolism that, like it, occur inwardly and are connected with the circulation of the blood. With ordinary consciousness you observe externally a man's change of place as an expression of his will; but now you look back upon yourself and only find processes occurring within you, and these make up your world.

Truly, what we here behold is not what the theories of present-day science or medicine describe on anatomical grounds. It is a grand spiritual process, a process that conceals innumerable secrets and shows of itself that the real driving power at work within man is not his present ego at all. What man calls his ego in ordinary life is, of course, a mere thought. But it is the ego of man's past lives on earth that is active in him here. In the whole course of these processes, especially of the warmth-processes, you perceive the real ego, working from times long past. Between death and a new birth this ego has undergone an evolution in time; it now works in an entirely spiritual way. You perceive all these metabolic processes, the weakest as well as the most powerful, as the expression of just the highest entity in man.

Moreover, you now perceive that the ego has changed its field of action. It was active within, working upon the breath provided by the mere respiratory process; but now you perceive, from without, the further stages of the warmth-processes that the ego has elaborated from the respiratory processes. You behold the real, active ego of man, working from primeval times and organising him.

You now begin to know that the ego and astral body have actually left the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. They are outside, and now do and experience from without what they otherwise do and experience from within. In ordinary consciousness the ego and astral organisations are still too weak, too little evolved, to experience this consciously. ‘Inspiration’ really only consists in inwardly organising them so that they are able to perceive what is otherwise imperceptible.

Thus we must actually say: Through ‘inspiration’ we come to know the astral body of man, through ‘intuition’, the ego. During sleep, intuition and inspiration are suppressed in the ego and astral body; when they are awakened, man, through them, beholds himself from without. Let us see what this really means.

You remember what I have already said. I spoke of man in his present incarnation (sketch, right centre), and of the etheric body which extends back to a little before birth or conception (yellow); of his astral body which takes him back to the whole period between his last death and his present birth (red); and of ‘intuition’ that takes him back to his previous life on earth (yellow).

Now, to sleep means nothing else than to lead back your consciousness, which is otherwise in the physical body, and to accompany it yourself. Sleep is really a return in time to what I described as past for ordinary consciousness, though nevertheless there. You see, if one really wants to understand the Spiritual,

one must acquire different concepts from those one is accustomed to apply in ordinary life. One must actually realise that every sleep is a return to the regions traversed before birth—or, indeed, to former incarnations. During sleep one actually experiences, though without grasping it, what belongs to one's pre-earthly state and earlier incarnations.

Our concept of time must undergo a complete change. If we ask where a man is when asleep, the reply must be: he is actually in his pre-earthly state, or has returned to his former lives on earth. When talking simply we say: he is ‘outside’ his body. The reality is as I have explained. It is this that manifests as the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping.

All this becomes quite different at death. The most striking change is, of course, that man leaves his physical body behind in the earthly realm, where it is received, disintegrated and destroyed by the forces of the physical world. It can no longer give rise to the impressions I described as being made upon the sleeping man through the medium of the exhaled air. For the physical body no longer breathes; with all its functions it is now lost to man. There is something, however, that is not lost—and even ordinary consciousness can see that this is so. Thinking, feeling and willing live in our soul, but over and above these we have something very special, namely: memory. We do not only think about what is at present before, or around, us; our inner life contains fragments of what we have experienced, and these re-arise as thoughts. Now those people, often somewhat peculiar, who are known as psychologists have developed quite curious ideas about memory. These investigators of the human soul say something like this: man uses his senses; he perceives this or that and thinks about it. He has then a thought. He goes away and forgets the whole thing. But after a time he recalls it; the memory of what has been, re-appears. Man can recall what is past and has been out of his mind meanwhile; he can bring it to mind again. On this account, these people think that man forms a thought from his experience, this thought descends somewhere, to rest as it were in some chest or box and to re-appear when remembered. Either it bobs up of its own accord, or has to be fetched.

This sort of thing is a very model of confused thinking. For the whole belief that the thought is waiting somewhere whence it can be fetched, does not correspond to the facts at all. Just compare an immediate perception which you have, and to which you link a thought, with the way an image of memory, or a memory-thought, arises. You make no distinction at all. You receive a sense impression from without, and a thought links itself thereto. The thought is there; but what lies behind the sense impression and calls forth the thought, you usually speak of as unknown. The memory-thought that arises from within you is, indeed, no different from the thought that emerges for outer perception. In one case—representing it schematically—you have man's environment (yellow); the thought presents itself from without in connection with this environment (red); in the other it comes from within. The latter is a memory-thought (vertical arrow). The direction from which it comes is different.

While we are perceiving—experiencing—anything, something is continually going on beneath the mental presentation, beneath our thinking. It is really as follows: Thought accompanies perception. Our perceptions enter our body, whereas our thought ‘stands out’. Something does enter our body, and this we do not perceive. This goes on while we are thinking about the experience, and an ‘impression’ is made. It is not thought that passes down but something quite different. It is this something that evokes the process which we perceive later and of which we form the memory-thought—just as we form a thought of the outer world. The thought is always in the present moment. Even unprejudiced observation shows that this is so. The thought is not preserved somewhere or other as in a casket, but a process occurs which the act of memory transforms into a thought just as we transform outer perception into a thought.

I must burden you with these considerations, or you will not really come to an understanding of memory. That the thought does not want to go right down, is known to children—and to grown up people, too, in special cases—though only half consciously. So, when we want to memorise something, we have recourse to extraneous aids. Just think how many people find it helps to repeat a thing aloud; others make curious gestures when they want to fix something in their minds. The point is that an entirely different process runs parallel to the mere process of mental presentation. What we remember is really the smallest part of what is here involved.

Between waking up and falling asleep we move about the world, receiving impressions from all sides. We only attend to a few, but they all attend to us. It is a rich world that lives in the depths of our being, but only some few fragments are received into our thoughts. This world is like a deep ocean confined within us. The mental presentations of memory surge up like single waves, but the ocean remains within. It has not been given us by the physical world, nor can the physical world take it away. When man sheds his physical body, this whole world is there, bound up with his etheric body. Upon this all his experiences have been impressed, and these man bears within him immediately after death. In a certain sense, they are ‘rolled up’ in him.

Now man's first experience, immediately after death, is of everything that has made its impression upon him. Not only the ordinary shreds of memory which arise during earthly consciousness, but his whole earthly life, with all that has ‘impressed’ him stands before him now. But he would have to remain in eternal contemplation of this earthly life of his if something else did not happen to his etheric body, something different from what happens to the physical body through the earth and its forces. The earthly elements take over the physical body and destroy it; the cosmic ether, working (as I told you) from the periphery, streams in and dispels in all directions what has been impressed upon the etheric body. Thus man's next experience is as follows: During earthly life many, many things have made their impression upon me. All this has entered my etheric body. I now survey it, but it becomes more and more indistinct. It is as if I were looking at a tree that had made a strong impression upon me during my life. At first I see it life-size, as when it made its impression upon me from physical space. But it now grows, becomes larger and more shadowy; it becomes larger and larger, gigantic but more and more shadowy. Now it is like that with a human being whom I have learnt to know in his physical form. Immediately after death I have him before me as he impressed himself upon my etheric body. He now increases in size, becomes more and more shadowy. Everything grows, becomes more and more shadowy until it fills the whole universe, becomes thereby quite shadowy, and completely disappears.

This lasts some days. Everything has become gigantic and shadowy, thereby diminishing in intensity. Man sheds his second corpse; or, strictly speaking, the cosmos takes it from him. He is now in his ego and astral body. What had been impressed upon his etheric body is now within the cosmos; it has flowed out into the cosmos. We see the working of the universe behind the veils of our existence.

We are placed in the world as human beings. In the course of earthly life the whole world works upon us. We roll it all together in a certain sense. The world gives us much and we hold it together. The moment we die the world takes back what it has given. But it is something new that it receives, for we have experienced it all in a particular way. The world receives our whole experience and impresses it upon its own ether.

We now stand in the universe and say to ourselves, as we consider, first of all, this experience with our etheric body: truly, we are not only here for ourselves; the universe has its own intentions in regard to us. It has put us here that its own content may pass through us and be received again in the form into which we can transmute it. As human beings we are not here for our own ends alone; in respect to our etheric body, for example, we are here for the universe. The universe needs us because, through us, it ‘fulfils’ itself—fills itself again and again with its own content. There is an interchange, not of substance but of thoughts between the universe and man. The universe gives its cosmic thoughts to our etheric body and receives them back again in a humanised condition. We are not here for ourselves alone; we are here for the sake of the universe.

Now a thought like this should not remain merely theoretical and abstract; indeed it cannot. If it were to remain a mere thought, we would have to be creatures of pasteboard, not men with living feelings. In saying this I do not deny that our civilisation really does tend to make people often as apathetic towards such things as if they really were made of pasteboard. Civilised people today often appear to be such pasteboard figures. A thought like this preserves our human feeling and sympathy with the world, and leads us directly to the point from which we started. We began by saying that man feels himself estranged from the world in a two-fold way: on the one hand, in regard to external Nature which, he must admit, only destroys him as physical body; on the other hand, in regard to his inner life of soul which, again and again, lights up and dies away. This becomes for him a riddle of the universe. But now, as a result of spiritual study, man begins to feel himself no mere stranger in the universe. The universe has something to give him, and takes from him something in turn. Man begins to feel his inner kinship with the world. He now sees in a new light the two thoughts that I have put before you and which are really cosmic thoughts, namely:

Thou, O Nature, canst only destroy my physical body.

I, myself. have no kinship with thee, in spite of the thinking, feeling and willing of my inner life. Thou lightest up and diest down; and in my inner being I have no kinship with thee.

These two thoughts, evoked in us by the riddles of the universe, now appear in a new light, for we begin to feel ourselves akin to the cosmos and an organic part of its whole life. Thus anthroposophical reflection begins by making friends with the world, really learning to know the world that, on external observation, repulsed us at first. Anthroposophical knowledge makes us become more human. If we cannot bring to it this quality of heart, this mood of feeling, we are not taking it in the right way. One might compare theoretical anthroposophy to a photo-graph. If you are very anxious to learn to know someone you have once met, or with whom you have been brought into touch through something or other, you would not want to be offered a photograph. You may find pleasure in the photograph; but it cannot kindle the warmth of your feeling life, for the man's living presence does not confront you.

Theoretical Anthroposophy is a photograph of what Anthroposophy intends to be. It intends to be a living presence; it really wants to use words, concepts and ideas in order that something living may shine down from the spiritual world into the physical. Anthroposophy does not only want to impart knowledge; it seeks to awaken life. This it can do; though, of course, to feel life we must bring life to meet it.

In the last lectures I have already drawn your attention to the way the Science of Initiation must speak of the alternating states of sleeping and waking, which are known to us from ordinary consciousness and through which we can really find a path of approach—one path of approach—to the secrets of human life. It is a life that finds expression while we sleep—soul life, dream life, a life that ordinary consciousness, if free from mystical or similar tendencies, does not take seriously at first. This attitude is certainly justified; the sober-minded man does not take his dream-life seriously and, to a certain extent, he is right, for he sees that it shows him all kinds of pictures and reminiscences of his ordinary life. When he compares his dream-life with his ordinary experience, he must, of course, hold fast to the latter and call it reality. But the dream-life comes with its re-combinations of ordinary experiences; and if man asks himself what it really signifies for the totality of his being, he can find no answer in ordinary consciousness.

Let us now consider this dream-life as it presents itself to us. We can distinguish two different kinds of dreams. The first conjures pictures of outer experiences before our soul. Years ago, or a few days maybe, we experienced this or that in a definite way; now a dream conjures up a picture more or less similar—usually dissimilar—to the external experience. If we discover the connection between this dream-picture and the external experience, we are at once struck by the transformation the latter has undergone. We do not usually relate the dream-picture to a particular experience in the outer world, for the resemblance does not strike us. Nevertheless, if we look more closely at this type of dream-life that conjures outer experiences in transformed pictures before the soul, we find that something in us takes hold of these experiences; we cannot, however, retain them as we can in the waking state, when we have full use of our bodily organs and experience the images of memory which resemble external life as far as possible. In memory we have pictures of outer life that are more or less true. Of course there are people who dream in their memories, but this is regarded as abnormal. In our memories we have, more or less, true pictures, in our dreams, transformed pictures of outer life. That is one kind of dream.

There is, however, another kind, and this is really much more important for a knowledge of the dream-life. It is the kind in which, for example, a man dreams of seeing a row of white pillars, one of which is damaged or dirty; he wakes up with this dream and finds he has toothache. He then sees that the row of pillars ‘symbolises’ the row of teeth; one tooth is aching, and this is represented by the damaged or, perhaps, dirty pillar. Or a man may wake up dreaming of a seething stove and find he has palpitation of the heart. Or he is distressed in his dream by a frog approaching his hand; he takes hold of the frog and fords it soft. He shudders, and wakes up to find he is holding a corner of his blanket, grasped in sleep. These things can go much further. A man may dream of all kinds of snake-like forms and wake up with intestinal pains.

So we see that there is a second kind of dream which gives pictorial, symbolic expression to man's inner organs. When we have grasped this, we learn to interpret many dream-figures in just this way. For example, we may dream of entering a vaulted cellar. The ceiling is black and covered with cobwebs; a repulsive sight. We wake up to fund we have a headache. The interior of the skull is expressed in the vaulted cellar; we even notice that the cerebral convolutions are symbolised in the peculiar formations constituting the vault. If Nye pursue our studies further in this direction we find that all our organs can appear in dreams in this pictorial way.

Here, indeed, is something that points very clearly, by means of the dream, to the whole inner life of man. There are people who, while actually asleep and dreaming, compose subjects for quite good paintings. If you have studied these things you will know what particular organ is depicted, though in an altered, symbolic form. Such paintings sometimes possess unusual beauty; and when the artist is told what organ he has really symbolised so beautifully, he is quite startled, for he has not the same respect for his organs that he has for his paintings.

These two kinds of dream can be easily distinguished by one who is prepared to study the world of dreams in an intimate way. In one kind of dream we have pictures of experiences undergone in the outer world; in the other, pictorial representations of our own internal organs.

Now it is comparatively easy to pursue the study of dreams as far as this. Most people whose attention has been called to the existence of these two kinds will recall experiences of their own that justify this classification.

But to what does this classification point? Well, if you examine the first kind of dreams, studying the special kind of pictures contained, you find that widely different external experiences can be represented by the same dream; again, one and the same experience can be depicted in different people by different dreams.

Take the case of a man who dreams he is approaching a mountain. There is a cave-like opening and into this the sun is still shining. He dreams he goes in. It soon begins to grow dark, then quite dark. He gropes his way forward, encounters an obstacle, and feels there is a little lake before him. He is in great danger, and the dream. takes a dramatic course.

Now a dream like this can represent very different external experiences. The picture I have just described may relate to a railway accident in which the dreamer was once involved. What he experienced at that time finds expression now, perhaps years afterwards, in the dream described. The pictures are quite different from what he had experienced. He could have been in a ship-wreck, or a friend may have proved unfaithful, and so on. If you compare the dream-picture with the actual experience, studying them in this intimate way, you will find that the content of the pictures is not really of great importance; it is the dramatic sequence that is significant: whether a feeling of expectation was present, whether this is relieved, or leads to a crisis. One might say that the whole complex of feelings is translated into the dream-life.

Now, if we start from here and examine dreams of this (first) type, we find that the pictures derive their whole character chiefly from the nature of the man himself, from the individuality of his ego. (Only, we must not study dreams like the psychiatrists who bring everything under one hat.) If we have an understanding of dreams—I say, of dreams, not of dream-interpretation—we can often learn to know a man better from his dreams than from observing his external life. When we study all that a person experiences in such dreams we find that it always points back to the experience of the ego in the outer world.

On the other hand, when we study the second kind of dream, we find that what it conjures before the soul in dream pictures is only experienced in a dream. For, when awake, man experiences the form of his organs at most by studying scientific anatomy and physiology. That, however, is not a real experience; it is merely looking at them externally, as one looks at stones and plants. So we may ignore it and say that, in the ordinary consciousness of daily life, man experiences very little, or nothing at all, of his internal organism. The second kind of dream, however, puts this before him in pictures, although in transformed pictures.

Now, if we study a man's life, we find that it is governed by his ego—more or less, according to his strength of will and character. But the activity of the ego within human life very strongly resembles the first kind of dream-experience. Just try to examine closely whether a person's dreams are such that in them his experiences are greatly, violently altered. In anyone who has such dreams you will find a man of strong will-nature. On the other hand, a man who dreams his life almost as it actually is, not altering it in his dreams, will be found to be a man of weak will.

Thus you see the action of the ego within a man's life expressed in the way he shapes his dreams. Such knowledge shows us that we have to relate dreams of the first kind to the human ego. Now we learnt in the last lectures that the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies in sleep. Remembering this, we shall not be surprised to learn that Spiritual Science shows us that the ego then takes hold of the pictures of waking life—those pictures that it otherwise takes hold of in ordinary reality through the physical and etheric bodies. The first kind of dream is an activity of the ego outside the physical and etheric bodies.

What, then, is the second kind of dream? Of course it, too, must have something to do with what is outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. It cannot be the ego, for this knows nothing of the symbolic organ-forms presented by the dream. One is forced to see that it is the astral body of man that, in sleep, shapes these symbolic pictures of the inner organs, as the ego the pictures of external experience. Thus the two kinds of dreams point to the activity of the ego and astral body between falling asleep and waking up.

We can go further. We have seen what a weak and what a strong man does in his dreams; we have seen that the weak man dreams of things almost exactly as he experienced them, while the strong man transforms and re-arranges them, colouring then by his own character. Pursuing this to the end, we can compare our result with a man's behaviour in waking life. We then dis-cover the following intensely interesting fact. Let a man tell you his dreams; notice how one dream-picture is linked to another; study the configuration of his dreams. Then, having formed an idea of the way he dreams, look at the man himself. Stimulated by the idea you have formed of his dream-life, you will be able to form a good picture of the way he acts in life. This leads us to remarkable secrets of human nature. If you study a man as he acts in life and learn to know his individual character, you will find that only a part of his actions proceeds from his own being, from his ego. If all depended on the ego, a man would really do what he dreams; the violent character would be as violent in life as in his dreams, while one who leaves his life almost unchanged in his dreams, would hold aloof from life at all points, let it take its course, let things happen, shaping his life as little as he shapes his dreams.

And what a man does over and above this—how does that happen? My dear friends, we can very well say that it is done by God, by the spiritual beings of the world. All that man does, he does not do himself. In fact, he does just as much as he actually dreams; the rest is done through him and to him. Only, in ordinary life we do not train ourselves to observe these things; otherwise we would discover that we only actively participate in the deeds of life as much as we actively participate in our dreams. The world hinders the violent man from being as violent in life as in dreams; in the weak man instincts are working, and once more life itself adds that which happens through him, and of which he would not dream.

It is interesting to observe a man in some action of his life and to ask: what comes from him, and what from the world? From him proceeds just as much as he can dream, no more, no less. The world adds something in the case of a weak man, and subtracts something in the case of a violent man. Seen in this light, dreams become extraordinarily interesting and give us deep insight into the being of man.

Many of the things I have been saying have, it is true, dawned upon psycho-analysts in a distorted, caricatured form. But they are not able to look into what lives and weaves in human nature, so distort it all. From what I have put before you today in a quite external way, you can see the necessity of acquiring a subtle, delicate knowledge of the soul if one wants to handle such things at all; otherwise one can know nothing of the relations between dreams and external reality as realised by man in his life. Hence I once described psycho-analysis as dilettantism, because it knows nothing of man's outer life. But it also knows nothing of man's inner life. These two dilettantisms do not merely add, they must be multiplied; for ignorance of the inner life mars the outer, and ignorance of the outer life mars the inner. Multiplying \(d \times d\) we get \(d\)-squared: \(d \times d = d^2\). Psycho-analysis is dilettantism raised to the second power.

If we study the alternating states of waking and sleeping in this intimate way, we can perceive and understand so much of the essential nature of man that we are really led to the portal of the Science of Initiation.

Now consider something else that I told you in these lectures: the fact that man can strengthen his soul forces by exercises, by meditations; that he then advances beyond the ordinary more or less empty, abstract thinking to a thinking inherently pictorial, called ‘imagination’. Now it was necessary to explain that man, progressing in ‘imagination’, comes to apprehend his whole life as an etheric impulse entering earthly life through conception and birth—strictly speaking, from before conception and birth. Through dreams he receives reminiscences of what he has experienced externally since descending to earth for his present life. ‘Imagination’ gives us pictures which, in the way they are experienced, can be very like dream-pictures; but they contain, not reminiscences of this earthly life, but of what preceded it. It is quite ridiculous for people who do not know Spiritual Science to say that imaginations may be dreams too. They ought only to consider what it is that we ‘dream of’ in imaginations. We do not dream of what the senses offer; the content represents man's being before he was endowed with senses. Imagination leads man to a new world.

Nevertheless there is a strong resemblance between the second kind of dream and imaginative experience when first acquired through soul exercises. We experience pictures, mighty pictures—and this in all clarity, we might say exactness. We experience a universe of pictures, so wonderful, so rich in colour, so majestic that we have nothing else in our consciousness. If we would paint these pictures, we should have to paint a mighty tableau; but we could only capture the appearance of a single moment just as we cannot paint a flash of lightning, but only its momentary appearance, for all this takes its course in time. Still, if we only arrest a single moment we obtain a mighty picture.

Let us represent this diagrammatically. Naturally, this will not be very like what we behold; nevertheless, this sketch will illustrate what I mean.

Look at this sketch I have drawn. It has an inner configuration and includes the most varied forms. It is inwardly and outwardly immense. If, now, we become stronger and stronger in concentrating, in holding fast the picture, it does not merely come before us for one moment. We must seize it with presence of mind; otherwise it eludes us before we can bring it into the present moment. Altogether, presence of mind is required in spiritual observation. If we are not only able to apply sufficient presence of mind in order to seize and become conscious of it at all, but can retain it, it contracts and, instead of being something all-embracing, becomes smaller and smaller, moving onward in time. It suddenly shrinks into something; one part becomes the human head, another the human lung, a third the human liver. The physical matter provided by the mother's body only fills out what enters from the spiritual world and becomes man. At length we say: what the liver is we now see spiritually in a mighty picture in the pre-earthly life. The same is true of the lung. And now we may compare it with the content of the second kind of dream. Here, too, an organ may appear to us in a beautiful picture, as I said before, but this is very poor compared to what imagination reveals.

Thus we gain the impression that imagination gives us some-thing created by a great master-hand, the dream something clumsy. But they both point in the same direction and represent, spiritually, man's internal organisation.

It is but a step from this to another and very true idea. When, through imagination, we discern the pre-earthly human being as a mighty etheric picture, and see this mighty etheric picture crystallise—as it were—into the physical man, we are led to ask what would happen if the dream-pictures, those relating to the inner organs, began to develop the same activity. We find that a caricature of the inner organs would arise. The human liver, so perfect in its way, is formed from an imaginative picture that points to the pre-earthly life. If the dream-picture were to become a liver, this would not be a human liver, not even a goose-liver, but a caricature of a liver. This gives us, in fact, deep insight into the whole being of man. For there is really some similarity between the dream-picture and the imaginative picture, as we now see quite clearly. And we cannot help asking how this comes about.

Well, we can go still further. Take the dream pictures of the first kind, those linked to outer-experiences. To begin with, there is nothing resembling these in imaginative cognition. But imaginative cognition reaches back to a pre-earthly experience of man's, in which he had nothing to do with other physical human beings. Imaginative vision leads to an image of pre-earthly experiences of the spirit. Just think what this implies.

When we look into man's inner life we receive the impression that certain symbolic pictures, whether they arise through imagination or in dreams [of the second kind], refer to what is within man, man's internal organisation; on the other hand, the imaginations which refer to outer experiences are connected, neither with man's internal organisation nor with outer life, but with experiences of his pre-earthly state. Beside these imaginations one can only place dream experiences of the first kind, those relating to external experiences of earthly life; but there is no inner connection here between these imaginations and these dreams. Such a connection only exists for dreams of the second kind.

Now, what do I intend by all these descriptions? I want to draw your attention to an intimate way of studying human life, a way that propounds real riddles. Man really observes life in a most superficial manner today. If he would study it more exactly, more intimately, he would notice the things I have spoken about in this lecture. In a certain sense, however, he does notice them; only, he does not actually know it. He is not really aware how strongly his dreams influence his life. He regards a dream as a flitting phantom, for he does not know that his ego is active in one kind of dream, his astral body in another. But if we seek to grasp still deeper phenomena of life, the riddles to which I referred become more insistent. Those who have been here some time will have already heard me relate such facts as the following: There is a pathological condition in which a person loses his connection with his life in memory. I have mentioned the case of an acquaintance of mine who one day, without his conscious knowledge, left his home and family, went to the station, bought a ticket and travelled, like a sleep-walker, to another station. Here he changed, bought another ticket and travelled further. He did this for a long time. He commenced his journey at a town in South Germany. It was found later, when the case was investigated, that he had been in Budapest, Lemberg (Poland), etc. At last, as his consciousness began to function again, he found himself in a casual ward in Berlin, where he had finally landed. Some weeks had passed before his arrival at the shelter, and these were quite obliterated from his consciousness. He remembered the last thing he had done at home; the rest was obliterated. It was necessary to trace his journey by external inquiries.

You see, his ego was not present in what he was doing. If you study the literature of this subject you will find hundreds and hundreds of cases of such intermittent ego-consciousness. What have we here? If you took trouble to study the dream-world of such a patient you would discover something peculiar. To begin with, you would find that, at least at certain periods of his life, the patient had had the most vivid dreams imaginable, dreams that were especially characterised by his making up his mind to do something, forming certain intentions.

Now, if you study the dreams of a normal person you will find intentions playing a very small part, if any. People dream all sorts of wonderful things, but intentions play no part, as a rule. When intentions do play a part in a dream, we usually wake up laughing at ourselves for entertaining them. But if you study the dream-life of such people with intermittent consciousness, you will find that they entertain intentions in their dreams and, on waking, take these very seriously; indeed, they take these so seriously that they feel pangs of conscience if unable to carry them out. Often these intentions are so foolish in the face of the external physical world that it is not possible to carry them out; this hurts such people and makes them quite excited. To take dreams seriously—especially in regard to their intentions (not wishes)—is the counterpart of this condition of obliterated consciousness.

One who is able to observe human beings can tell, in certain circumstances, whether a person is liable to suffer in this way. Such people have something which shows they never quite wake up in regard to certain inner and outer experiences. One gradually finds that such a person goes too far with his ego out of his physical and etheric bodies in sleep; every night he goes too far into the spiritual and cannot carry back into the physical and etheric bodies what he has experienced. At last, because he has so often not brought it completely back, it holds him outside—i.e. what he experiences too deeply within the spiritual holds the ego back and he passes into a condition in which the ego is not in the physical body.

In such a radical case as this it is especially interesting to observe the dream-life. This differs from the dream-life of our ordinary contemporaries; it is much more interesting, but of course this has its reverse side. Still, objectively considered, illness is more interesting than health; from the subjective side—i.e. for the person concerned, as well as from the point of view of ordinary life, it is another matter. For a knowledge of the human being the dream-life of such a patient is really much more interesting than the dream-life of an ordinary contemporary.

In such a case you actually see a kind of connection between the ego and the whole dream-world; one might say, it is almost tangible. And we are led to ask the following questions: What is the relation of the dream pictures that refer to internal organs, to the imaginations that also refer to internal organs?

Well, viewed ‘externally’, the pictures of man's inner organisation that are given in imagination, point to what was within man before he had his earthly body, before he was on the earth; the dream-pictures arise when once he is here. The imaginations point to the past, the dream-pictures to the present. But though an ordinary dream-picture that refers to an internal organ would correspond to a caricature of that organ, while the imagination would correspond to the perfect organ, nevertheless the caricature has the inherent possibility of growing into a perfect organ.

This leads us to the studies we shall be pursuing tomorrow. They centre in the question: Does the content of such an imagination relate to man's past life, and is the dream the beginning of the imagination of the future? Will a dream-picture of today evolve into the imagination to which we shall be able to look back in a future life on earth? Is the content of the dream perhaps the seed of the content of the imagination?

This significant question presents itself to us. What we have gained through a study of dreams is here seen in conjunction with the question of man's repeated lives on earth. You see, moreover, that we must really look more deeply into the life of man than we usually find convenient; otherwise we shall find no point of contact with what the Science of Initiation says about the being of man.

By such a lecture as this I wanted especially to awaken in you some idea of the superficial way man is studied in the civilisation of today, and of the need of intimate observation in all directions. Such intimate observation leads at once to Spiritual Science.