The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[I am speaking to you today] to show how one can understand the difficult subject of the rounds according to [the book] “Ancient Wisdom” by Annie Besant.

First of all, I want to warn against speaking too abstractly about the Logos. It is so tempting to speak in general terms of first, second, third Logos. Especially beginners are very keen to talk about “Logos” right away and want to discuss the whole world with arguments about what the first, second, third Logos have for a task. That is not what we want to do.

We want to make clear to ourselves what task the individual beings have within the development of the world [as a whole], whereby they become a certain link in the Logos. For it is self-evident that we must be clear about the fact that when, for example, one evolutionary epoch develops into another - for example, the lunar one develops into the terrestrial one - [that] therefore [ for example, everything that took place during the lunar evolution goes through a pralaya and reappears, and that everything goes into an inverse pralaya. What happened earlier goes back into the Logos and becomes a void. It thus rests, as it were, in the Logos, not sleeping, but ready to receive a new task.

Now, the best way to clarify this is to ask ourselves: what will become of everything that is gradually forming during the various rounds and races of our present terrestrial development, for example? What will become of all this? When earthly evolution is over, the sum of all these beings, the sum of these entities, will be a coherent mass of new seeds, which will develop further in the next epoch. They return once more to the Logos. All that develops during our earthly epoch, what remains, what passes through a pralaya, will be a second logos for the next epoch. The result of a passing epoch is a second logos for the next epoch.

I ask you to consider that it is better to ask yourself: What will the second logos be like? Instead of simply saying: first, second, third logos. You stay with the concrete and realize that everything that comes from one epoch into the other is the second logos for the next epoch.

And now we divide the whole evolution during our earthly development into two parts. We are dealing with seven rounds. First, we take the first three and the first half of the fourth round. That is half. Just up to this point, when only half of the fourth round has elapsed, everything that has connected with the second Logos as the third Logos has developed and been expressed. The third logos is something that [gap in transcript]. Logos [is] not used in general yet, is something that has been added recently.

Take plant seeds, put into [the] earth. The seeds you sow are the second logos. The bed, the stuff from which the new forms arise, that is the third logos. The third Logos is used to swell up forms during the first half of the round development. This is what Annie Besant calls the development of form, the involution. [It is] what I would call world dust, if you would call it the substantial bed. [The second with the third Logos build the forms, from the outside in.]

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The human being is built up from the outside. The Pitris - second Logos - have come over. They have fertilized the third Logos. From the fertilization of the third Logos by the second Logos arises the animal foundation of the human being. [That is] until the middle of the fourth round the Lemurian/Lunar race.

And now the second fertilization occurs from what has been created so far. From the second and third logos, the first logos now connects directly, creating the further second part. This is how the second half of the fourth round and the three following rounds come about.

So we have to imagine: [the] second logos is what comes from outside, [it] structures itself [with the help of the third logos] into form, swells. All the shells are built.

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And now [the] fertilization comes from the first Logos. It radiates from within. That is the fertilization of the first Logos. That is what can be seen in the aura.

Up to the fourth round, the aura is cloud-like [from the outside], up to the Lemurian race. In the middle of the Lemurian race, the radiating image of the aura begins. And this is the inflow of the first Logos. And this is what Annie Besant calls the development of life or evolution. Life or evolution begins from within. [Third Logos: Evolution of Life.]

[The] man of the Lemurian race formed [a] physical shell, [an] astral shell [and a] Kama-Manas. All of this has built itself up. Now a black dot is emerging. In the middle, above the head, indicating, as it were, the place from which the inflow of the first Logos radiates.

Each evolutionary epoch has a very specific intention of the Logos to carry out. Our current round - terrestrial epoch - has intended man from the outset and has to bring man to completion. The present [round] has the specific task of predisposing man from the outset and bringing him to development.

For this purpose, there is always a twofold fertilization. The first consists in [that] the result of the previous epoch fertilizes itself. That which emerges from the fertilization are the facts of the first half of evolution. Then [the] second fertilization [by the] first logos occurs. These are the facts of the second half of evolution. One half goes from the outside in and forms the form. The other goes from the inside out and forms life.

I call [the] third logos cosmic dust because everything that is cast off from the other worlds is absorbed into it. In order for [plant] seeds to grow and flourish, matter must first be drawn to them. The [plant] seed must be sunk into [the] soil that has been prepared for it, so that it can draw out the strength it needs. It is the same with [the] third Logos. It consists of substance filled with [source] power. The kamic entities attract the substance and form a cosmos.

The eighth sphere releases the material and is absorbed into the new development when a new cosmos is created. [The eighth sphere, the corpse of each cosmos, provides the material for the future.] Each world body turns light purple at the end of its development and disappears. All seeds are contained in it and / gap in the transcript]

You have to free yourself from the idea of space. It does not reflect everything.

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From the third round onwards, no new forms are formed. Externally, people have reached the most perfect form. The next thing people will achieve is to make the other covers more perfect from within.

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Now the effect on the astral body has already begun. The fourth round will be complete, the fifth will come, and then more and more will be done to the astral body. And on the fifth sphere/round the astral body will be like this.

[From the middle of the fourth round, the forms are complete; now the influence on the astral body begins from within.] He will have wheels in his astral body. The chakras move, as they already do in those who can see spiritually. The chakras rotate.

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During the sixth round, the mental body is formed. Not only the chakras move, but the mental body also shines more and more radiantly from within. Now it is the radiant mental body. This is complete on the sixth sphere.

In the seventh round, the causal body develops to its greatest perfection. [It transcends the boundary of the astral body until, at the end, there is nothing but the causal body.] Namely, the rays become more effective causal bodies.

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At the end of the seventh round, there is nothing but the causal body.

The uppermost layer is formed in the fourth round. In the uppermost brain, the tool is given for independent activity. Until then, the third logos works from the outside. From the brain, the forces can then flow out and set the chakras in motion again.

We call that which comes from the previous development Prakriti, that which comes from the second half, Mahat, and that which comes from the third, Purusha.

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The body is Mahat, soul is Prakriti, spirit is Purusha. [In the seed, Mahat and Purusha have disappeared; Prakriti is carried forward.

The body is prepared by the spirit within it. The body would not make mistakes if it were not tempted by the spirit. There is no physical sin. All sin is of a spiritual nature. Only a person who has given up on controlling Kama can be cruel. Only from the middle of the Lemurian race onwards is there a “good and evil”, not before. Mind and body are two perfect parts. In the middle of the two lies Kama, the soul, it is the carrier of imperfection.

[The body is the mind from the outside, Mahat. The soul is Prakriti.]

There is nothing as perfect as your lungs, your stomach, your heart. If the mental faculties were as perfect [as the organs], you would have attained [the] mental perfection. The physical does not err, the mineral does not err at all. It cannot err.

Since Theosophy speaks only from its experience, it starts from one source, from our Logos. To call what man today sees as a ball of fire the sun is an idiosyncrasy of our materialistic age. Six centuries ago, people still said: This is a body; and to it belongs a sun soul and a sun spirit. The spirit of the sun is now the Logos; the physical body of the sun is its lowest manifestation. What reigns in it is the spirit. One imagines that the spiritual powers would be in contact with these. The sun-atma would be the sun-logos, and the other principles follow, down to the physical body, as with us. For the ancients, light was the body for a soul. The human perfection of intelligences is reduced to seven: the seven white brotherhoods; the seven spirits before the throne of God; the seven hierarchies - one great spiritual body each, enclosing many cells. The Seven Saints before the Lord are the one fundamental life of the cosmos. When the fourth round came, it was presided over by the Lord of Form, Yahweh.

The other intelligences are below these seven – the Lipika are so highly developed that they can or must be counted among the “touch-me-not” circle. ... The angels veil their faces from the mystery of birth; they themselves have no insight into it.

The seven Laya centers are the seven series that form a solar system [...]: the “office” of the fraternities.

The leading seven are therefore always the result of the white fraternities of the previous evolution. The Sun is the sthula sharira of the Logos.

Seven stages and states. In the fourth round arupa, rupa, astral, physical.

The inner life of human beings develops completely different states of consciousness. The waking consciousness is the best known state. Below this is first the state of dreaming people - it is now that of most animals, varying slightly, despite the waking sensory activity.

The next lowest is the consciousness that our body has while we sleep, which is completely absorbed in physical functions – it is that of the plant, identical to ours while we sleep. The lowest is that of the trance - that of the whole mineral nature; it lives with all nature, therefore extends to the whole environment; therefore perception of things that are cognitions of the world building; the universe is a descending and screwing down. When we descend very deeply, we become omniscient at the expense of our higher consciousness. Above waking consciousness, there are states similar to the previous ones, in which we move freely on the astral plane, the psychic plane, initially in full consciousness. On the devachan plane, where the spiritual archetypes work in us and the physical becomes a cavity, the physical disappears if we want it to.

The astral world is a duplicate, the spirit world builds in from the outside. - The spiritual consciousness, where one begins to have a cosmic vision, is the highest within our earthly development. —Each round has the task of developing a state to normal. In the third round: highly developed dream state of consciousness. The effect originated from the Mahat through rapport. Before that, they had plant consciousness, and the spiritual beings took care of them. During the first, everyone was in the deepest trance. So the consciousnesses have gradually developed from the lowest to the highest.

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The deeper the human consciousness, the more real are the powers that surround people. The more independent a person becomes, the more they withdraw. In the next three rounds, the next three states are developed; Jonas in the shark and the swimming turtle: physically conceived devachanic experiences.

In the second round, there is no clear boundary between humans, animals and plants – beings that are everything in one. In the third, the plant is isolated, but humans and animals are not yet separated. During the fourth, the full differentiation occurs.

Eight days ago, we followed man through the various stages of the so-called spirit land, the Devachan. We saw how man's destiny unfolds in the spirit realm, in the Devachan, between two embodiments. We have seen that, depending on the degree of their development, human beings are able to soar ever higher and higher or ever longer and longer into the realms of this land of causes, in order to bring abilities into this earthly world from this land of causes for ever higher and higher development. The actual causes lie in his work and creativity in this spiritual realm. For those whose minds are open and awakened, in order to observe the spiritual conditions that always surround us, which I have described to you, during their embodiment, the three parts of the human being whose destiny we have come to know, always lie open before the mind's eye. These three parts of the human being, of which I have spoken as gradually enveloping themselves, as it were, leaving the earthly, the carnal shell – the one in so-called Kamaloka, the place of desires, of wishes ; the second in Devachan or the spiritual realm; and the third in the uppermost region of Devachan, where the deepest self is able to develop and unfold, in order to then return with increased power. These three parts of man are his so-called astral body, the body that encompasses all his desires, wishes and passions, everything that man has in common with the animal, everything that forms the mediation, so to speak, between his own spiritual nature and the sensual nature, everything that he lays aside in the land of purification, of cleansing, in Kamaloka.

And then he ascends to the land of the actual spirit, to the land of the spirits or to the Devachan, in order to discard his second body there as well, the body of the world of ideas, of the higher human abilities, which still chains him to the human and inhibits him, in order to then, as it were, be freed of the body, depending on the state of development, to linger for a longer or shorter time in the actual disembodied state of mind. We call that body of man, who rises up to these uppermost regions of the spiritual realm, who spreads his wings to unfold, we call this body the cause-bearer or causal body. This causal body, which we preserve between two incarnations, which we bring with us again and again, this body, which forms the cause of what we have brought upon ourselves, which carries us from one incarnation to the next, that is the one that lives in the uppermost region of Devachan. The other is the one who is in the second region of Devachan, who then immerses himself in the realm of desires, and that is the astral body, in order to then move into the carnal body. Every human being has these three bodies within them.

I have already spoken about the so-called aura. I have already said that the human being visible to physical eyes is enveloped in a cloud of light, in an oval shape that presents the most diverse light phenomena to those who are receptive to it. The egg is smaller and larger depending on the degree of development. It is small in the one who is still at the lowest level of spiritual development. In this case the aura is only a faint glow of light that spreads around the body, but it grows larger and larger the more incarnations the person has undergone and the higher and later the person's stage of development. Then this aura shows the most diverse light and color phenomena. This aura is threefold, and the view for this aura can also be threefold.

There are people with so-called “psychic vision” who are only able to see what is happening in the astral realm. They see only that as a light phenomenon, which can also be perceived in animals. They see what lives in a person in terms of desires, cravings and passions in the form of light phenomena. A person can also rise above this realm. Then the body of representation becomes visible to him, the higher spiritual possibilities of development as a second, finer substance, as an aura that radiates through and permeates the first.

And finally, there is that which spreads out as an even more ethereal substance within this second aura. This is present in a very weakly developed state in people at the lowest levels, but it is developed more and more highly and appears in a wonderful way in the high spiritual beings of our culture. This is what carries over from incarnation to incarnation, the causal body. It is also present in undeveloped people, but only small, like a small halo above their heads. The more a person develops, the more it expands and becomes, as it were, a sun. And the more it illuminates and glows through the being, the better one can see these three bodies distinctly, when one's spiritual vision is opened.

One can direct one's eyes only to the astral world, one can subtract what belongs to the lower and higher spheres and direct one's gaze only to the astral aura. Then one sees only the instincts, desires and passions as color phenomena in front of oneself. If you then focus your attention on the body of representation, you see the mental body. And if you look at the eternal, at the body of causes, you see the most luminous aura of the human being. This bearer of causes is only visible to those whose spiritual eye is awakened in the highest regions of the spiritual world.

This cause carrier, seen externally in its light appearance, shows us the most diverse sights in the most diverse people. If you look at an undeveloped person, be it a negro in Africa, or even an undeveloped person in our areas, a person who has not yet formed many thoughts, is not able to live much in the imagination, knows nothing of higher ideas or spiritual interests, who only lives in his animal instincts, in satisfying his hunger and his physical well-being, then, if we disregard all other auras and only look at the causal aura, it appears to us as a more or less dark oval. This indicates that the causal body is still underdeveloped, that the real self still has a long way to go before it develops. These are the people who show nothing but a few greenish or dirty indigo stripes in their brown ovals. These few stripes are the only indication of the causal or cause body. This is the sight that fills those who can observe the aura with sorrow, because it shows those who can observe how much we still have to do with undeveloped people. We can see how rays of light emerge in them when we transmit spiritual culture to them.

But even the lower mental body, the body of imagination of the undeveloped person, still shows the brownish form and a few developed greenish areas, which alternate with reddish areas or with areas that play into the bluish. These greenish and bluish parts become more and more frequent the more ideas are formed in the person concerned. And then, when we examine such a person for his astral body, we are suddenly confronted with appearances of almost terrible effect in the glaringly bright colors; we are confronted with blood-red clouds that fill almost the entire astral body, billowing about in confusion. Only at the upper or lower layer of the oval we see a greenish or indigo base, and that alternates with the brownish colorings, but also alternates with all kinds of formations, which differ according to the different temperaments. In the angry people we see red flashes flash through the astral body, in others we see bluish-gray clouds.

This is the aura of an undeveloped person. Then we have to look at the aura of a person at a higher level, that is, a person who has received a good education here in our area. In such a person, the causal body appears as a form that is already more endowed with colors, as a form that is permeated by beautiful colors. In this case, it is the green colors, green-yellow and yellow color nuances. These are the nuances that the European has. Only when these colors expand a little further does the lower spiritual body appear. And when we look at the astral body of a person, it generally appears to be somewhat similar in design to the astral body of an undeveloped person. Only the colors have different nuances. The undeveloped person has blackish colors; the more developed the person is, the brighter the colors. They are illuminated from within, they attract the gaze and have a sympathetic effect on the gaze.

And if we go to the highly developed spiritual person, to the one who has developed higher spiritual abilities within himself, who has already devoted himself to a spiritual life through many incarnations, then the astral body also appears in completely different transformations. It no longer appears interspersed with cloud-like formations, but radiates from within on a blue background. The cause body has a more or less light or dark blue coloration, and the eternal man radiates into this. The purer and nobler he develops in the spiritual, the more he shows the coloration of the spiritual. We see a beautiful golden-yellow radiance from the inside out, merging into radiance verging on rose-red, and these merge into beautiful bluish-violet radiance. The causal body is permeated by radiance, expanding more and more, taking on larger and larger dimensions. The adept rests in the midst of this causal body, which fades from golden yellow rays within to violet rays without, so that he is surrounded by this flood of light, enclosed by it, so that he can become so great that he can often exceed his human form ten, twenty, thirty times in length from top to bottom.

These are the causes of great leaders and guides of people. And if you then look for the body of the imagination of lower people, you will still find forms there, but you will find that they have become luminous, sparkling, radiant from within. We may well conclude that this is because what such people want and feel is shaped by the spirit, by spiritual abilities. These are the faculties that reveal themselves to the spiritual eye when it observes its surroundings. It sees what is transient and what is permanent.

All the bodies that I have mentioned, especially the astral body, which appears flooded in reddish shades, are completely lost in Kamaloka and Devachan. In the lower parts of Devachan and the astral plane, the finer parts dissolve. Man loses what he contains of lower sensual values. The astral body can completely dissolve in Kamaloka and only passes with the causal body, the spiritual body, to Devachan.

In the fourth region of Kamaloka, what we call human selfishness and human egoism is completely absorbed by matter. Whatever still chains itself to the world is lost in the fourth region. Man feels the worthlessness of base selfishness and begins to realize that he must stretch his wings, that he must comprehend what does not concern him. And when he arrives in the spiritual realm, his feelings, emotions and perceptions, which can be summarized by the word selfishness, have disappeared. He has reached the stage where he can experience, “That is you!” and “I am Brahma”. He can hand over the lower spiritual bodies to dissolution and take his self over into the higher realms of the spiritual realm, where it can fully unfold. Here everything appears to a person in its true form. Here he appears as what he is, as what has embodied itself.

The bluish oval appears as the actual body of the person, and within the bluish oval shines that which we must call the actual essence of the person. A person cannot yet have this body. It is woven from the three finest substances of the spirit world, and these show up in their pure bluish color. I emphasize that this pure bluish color can only be observed if one completely disregards what else the person has and only looks at the spiritual. So he appears only in his bluish oval, permeated by his essence.

This is what the Platonic philosophy called the so-called luminous man, the sparkling, the shining one. This is the same thing that the initiate Paul called the so-called spiritual body. This means nothing other than what we find here in the highest regions of Devachan. This fine blue body is woven from the finest fabrics of the spirit land, of Devachan. That which radiates and sparkles in it does not come from any of the worlds we have mentioned so far. What sparkles in this body comes from even higher worlds.

If you take the earthly world, the astral world and the spiritual world, the Devachan, you have the three worlds within which a person incarnates in the world. He always returns to develop new abilities there, which he then applies in the earthly world. These are the three worlds that Paul speaks of: the spiritual world, the soul world and the body world. Everything is woven into the physical body from these three. When we come into the physical world, we spread the physical covering around us. We take substances from physical matter, from the physical world. We live in some world with those substances taken from that world, so that when we descend from the spiritual realm, we first surround our real self with the body that is woven from the lower parts of the spiritual realm; this then descends into the astral world and forms the astral body. This finally attracts the physical materiality, and then the person is embodied again.

But what expands within the actual blue spiritual body, within this sparkling structure, is not from these three worlds. The real self does not come from these three worlds. What is wrapped around it as a blue oval is the uppermost, the finest, which is taken only from the spiritual realm. But that which is embodied, the self, comes from even higher realms. It comes from the actual divine home of man, from the regions which the theosophist calls the Budhi region and the Nirvana region. Man comes from these two regions.

The human being's essence rests in this spiritual body, which was present before man began to incarnate and which will again be present in other worlds when man ceases to incarnate. This is the actual, eternal, heavenly, divine essence of man. It is what Giordano Bruno called the eternal monad, which passes eternally through all embodiments, the heavenly self of man. This now participates in the manner indicated in what is gradually emerging. At first it radiates in a beautiful golden-yellow color, then it expands more and more, and in the outermost parts it takes on a violet-reddish color, depending on the various character traits that the person has acquired, because all of these exert their effects on the self. In a person who has developed the qualities of pride or ambition in his previous incarnations, we see how this golden, radiant part of the person takes on an orange-reddish coloration. This shows the effect that pride has had on the self. And in another way, other qualities show the influences that must be balanced. This is what has descended from even higher worlds to incarnate in our earthly world. This is what comes from Budhi and Nirvana; this is what we call Atma-Budhi, which is composed of the highest essence, which comes from the divine Being itself.

Last time I spoke about the fact that gradually, as a person passes through many incarnations, he ascends to the three higher regions of the spirit land, that is, each person will have to spend a more or less long time between two incarnations in the first higher region. Even the undeveloped savage experiences a glimpse of his Self in the spiritual realm, and his stay in this realm is getting longer and longer. And when the qualities of compassion, the higher spiritual qualities, are developed, then he ascends to the second region between two embodiments. And when he then returns to our earth, he has become what we call an emissary. Then he has become someone who can speak about the intentions of the world, then he is someone who, between two incarnations, has participated in the unveiling of the impulses of life, then he knows why the animal, the plant, and the human being develop. Then he can talk about the Earth, where it came from and what will happen to it in the future, then he can speak from experience about what theosophical wisdom reveals to us. When he has become a so-called initiate – that is, in the embodiment – then he knows from his own experience the nature of higher life and is able to recognize good. Then, in the next incarnation, he ascends to the highest region of the spiritual realm, where those who have the causes of world events clearly in view, even when embodied in the earthly world, reside.

And then the region is reached into which the structure of the higher worlds, the world of Budhi and the world of Nirvana, shines. Just as Budhi shines into our spiritual world, so the highest of things shines into it, the germs of the human self shine into it. These germs are there and enter the third world to envelop themselves in the substance of the third region. You may ask whether a seer, when he enters the third region of the spiritual world, can also see human beings in the state of germination. Yes, he can, because in this region that which belongs to prehistoric times has long since ceased to exist. The state of affairs is laid bare as if it were happening now, the state in which human souls have now begun to fulfill their development.

What Jacob Böhme expressed has come to pass with this man: if someone were to say to me, “Were you there when what you have told us about the beginning of earthly existence came about?” I could say, “Yes, I was there.” For in him the sense had long been opened that he could say that he had been there at the beginning, that he had really participated in the creation of the world.

What I have now related shows you that we are dealing with three worlds: the spiritual world, the astral world and the earthly or physical world. But this also shows that there are still higher worlds, which are the actual home of the human self. These three worlds are themselves created, formed, they have emerged from a spiritual essence. The sense world has a different origin in the spirit, and the astral world around us has its origin in the spirit. But as we develop more and more in the spiritual, we can investigate the causes of things. We can investigate what underlies the astral as spirit, and we can observe in the highest region of Devachan. But as long as what shines in the budhi does not shine in, we cannot speak of anything that belongs to what we call the deepest truths of world existence. We cannot speak, and we have no power to speak about the cause of evil, about the cause of imperfection, as long as we dwell in these three worlds. Within this world, we have evil alongside good, imperfection alongside perfection. It belongs to this world. It is grounded in this world that evil is added to good and imperfection to perfection. Answering this question requires that one recognize the meaning of existence. There is a meaning of existence, of life and of all becoming. One cannot recognize this if one remains only within the three worlds. And there is the question: Why is good mixed with evil and the perfect with the imperfect within the three worlds?

These three worlds are created from nirvana and budhi, and when we can see beyond that, in nirvana and budhi, then we see how evil, as it were, lies in the divine world order, from which good springs. Ultimately, all evil dissolves into good. According to the sayings of all great minds, good is the actual origin of the world. The world originates in the good. But how it does so, we cannot recognize in the three worlds. If we look beyond our three-worlds circle – I developed this in the first lessons – at the boundary of these three worlds, as it were from Budhi, some mysterious writing becomes perceptible. The Akasha writing appears. This is what is also communicated to us from the external world that does not belong to our three worlds. It contains the destiny of every single person and of all humanity. In this writing, the deeds of people are recorded, and the things that people themselves have entered in the book of guilt through their lives are recorded. Why man can become guilty in the succession of incarnations, that only becomes known at the sight of what has shone forth from the other spheres, when it is possible to read what is recorded in the akasha cloth. In it is written the law of karma.

This law can only be fully understood if one knows how all evil and imperfection dissolves into good, how even evil only contributes to the increase of good. When the highest self shines forth in man, then the great law of world justice is revealed, then the meaning of existence, the meaning of the world, is revealed to him. The world has its meaning from outside the three worlds, and man fathoms this meaning of the world when he rises above the three worlds of Devachan. It requires modesty. When man has found his innermost nature, when he has found in himself the living spirit that comes from the other worlds, when the shining spark has lit up in him, then the source of the shining spark is also revealed to him, and with it the reason for his existence. Then Budhi flows together with that which is above him, with that which is the meaning of the corporeal world. Then man begins to know what is one of the highest secrets of existence, why man is incarnated in this or that body.

With higher vision, we can easily see why a person forms a spiritual body around themselves and why they wrap themselves in an astral body. But now the mystery of earthly incarnation begins: why a person is born into this family, this country, this people. We know very specific human germs. That which is guided by entities of the highest order begins, by entities whose entity rests entirely in Budhi and Nirvana, by the entities we call Lipika, which govern the physical existence of the world, which determine the self to be born in this or that family. This is something that is connected to the deepest meaning of existence. Only when man has risen to the point of fathoming this meaning, do the scales that conceal the answer to the question “How is it that man is born in this body and carries this or that suffering, this or that imperfection through this or that body?” also disappear.

Man is equipped for a certain fate through his physical existence. This is one of the great questions of existence, which is connected to the whole meaning of existence, which is revealed when one knows the decrees of Lipika, the lords of fate. Christian esotericism has understood how to express this in a very beautiful way. Incidentally, you can find this secret in every religion. You just have to know how to read it. The Christian religion has also expressed the veiledness of this secret. You know the beings that live in the spiritual realm: angels or messengers. They have their task within Devachan, within their spiritual realm. The fact that they have their task here, not beyond Budhi or Nirvana, means that their views are bound to what is going on within the actual spiritual realm. But within the spiritual realm, the mystery of why this self dwells in this physical body and that in that is not revealed. That is why the Christian religion expresses it with the words: “The angels veil their faces from the mystery of the Incarnation and only say, ‘Holy, holy, holy’.”

This is just one example of how much can be found in the esotericism of the great religious beliefs if one only knows how to read them. Thus we have followed man through the three worlds and have reached the boundary where the destiny of these three worlds is written in monumental letters: that is the Akasha Chronicle. What shines from this Akasha Chronicle into these three worlds from the outside, as it were, appears to us when we are within these three worlds, in much the same way as when we look out into the starry sky and see, as it were, a heavenly writing in the constellations. Man comes to decipher this writing when he is able to work his way up to the highest regions of Devachan.

The initiates are able to read this Akashic writing and then, when man is able to read more or less of this Akashic writing, then he becomes a participant in the destiny of humanity, then he becomes one of the spiritual leaders of humanity, directing the forces for centuries to come, sending spiritual currents that do not come from the three worlds, but are sent into these three worlds from even higher worlds.

What a person experiences in the third spiritual world, what is known as the “bliss of Devachan”, what lives and flashes in us when we spend the interim between two embodiments in Devachan, that is the subject of the next few hours. I would like to explain why Devachan is called the “land of delights”, why it is called the heavenly region. This will be the subject of our next meditation.

I would like to add that from the boundary of this highest realm of Devachan, exalted masters of Budhi and Nirvana send great impulses to humanity, sending that which has an effect for centuries and making them the greatest guides in human history. They give the impulses, they create out of the mysterious, or according to Christian esotericism, out of that which causes the angels to veil their faces. They are the Messiahs, the greatest of all human leaders. They are named after the kingdom from which they come, from Budhi Buddha. Therefore, those who can teach what flows in from Budhi are called Christ. Buddha, Christ, they are the ones who send the truths from the higher regions into our three worlds. Such a one knows the world. He knows what lies beyond the three worlds. There lies that which we call the secret of evil. This is revealed at the boundary of devachan. There one comes to know the meaning of the world, what I have called the “Worv”. That is what gives the secret its sound. That is why Christ is called: the incarnate Word. That is why it is said: All things are made by the Word. That is why it is said in the Gospel: All things are made by the Word.

This is the sixth step, where the intentions and tendencies of humanity are determined. This is because the one who sends the great and high impulses into human history from this realm, because he knows and must know the secret that lies above the secret of good and evil, can be said to know more than the angels. This is also expressed by Christian esotericism: “Christ makes the angels his messengers.” Those who understand the depths of the Christian religion become theosophists, and true theosophists will not want to contribute to anything other than to the deepening of the core of truth in the great religions of humanity.

I have tried to reconcile the theosophical view of rounds and races, as stated in the “Ancient Wisdom”, with the Bible, and have suggested that the Genesis, the presentation of the Mosaic creation document, is to be taken in a truly literal sense, and that one then fully obtains the theosophical view. It should be noted that the true, great religious documents receive their original and real meaning through Theosophy.

To give an idea of what the Mosaic creation document means, I would like to repeat again: we have to distinguish seven rounds and in each round seven races. In the first round we have the archetypes of the mineral kingdom, in the second round the archetypes of the plant kingdom, in the third round the archetypes of the animal kingdom, in the fourth round the archetypes of man. When our present fourth round is over, the archetypes of man will have been formed. We have not even reached the archetypes yet. When our round is over, we will have expressed the human archetypes. The mineral kingdom will have already reached its completion in the round. It will dissolve again, regress. In the next round, the fifth, the plant kingdom will find its completion, in the sixth the animal kingdom, and in the seventh round the human kingdom.

In the seventh round, humanity will be the complete image of the deity in earthly development. What the deity was at the beginning, humanity will be at the end of the seventh round. The deity will have completed its task and will then rest. Nirvana will have been achieved. It will be able to hand over its task to the Masters and to the Master Lodges, to the Brotherhoods, which will then have developed into the complete image. This is described to us in the Biblical record.

The seven days of Creation signify in the esoteric sense seven rounds, so that the first chapter is to be understood in the following way.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: Then God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. [Genesis 1:1-5]

I ask you to visualize exactly what I have described as the first round was. It was initially a reddish, brightly glowing sphere that then went through various stages of development to become a violet sphere, then disappeared into the pralaya, only to emerge again as a red sphere. The first day is thus complete. During this round, the archetypes of the mineral kingdom were formed.

Now the second round begins.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” Before the mineral kingdom came into being, there could be no firmament. The waters represent spiritual substances. These did not separate from each other until the archetypes of the mineral kingdom had been formed, so that chunks now appeared in them. Then God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. God called them heaven and earth. Only the mineral kingdom was pushed into the earthly, the other was still heavenly.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into separate places, so that the dry land may be seen. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit whose seed is in itself, and upon the earth:” And it was so. The earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light on the earth: and they did so. And God saw the light, that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Here it is emphasized that the completion of the mineral kingdom comes on the fourth day. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. That is yet to come. Now the mineral kingdom will reach its completion. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. This is expressed by saying: the plant idea will reach its completion. Everything that is now connected with the peculiar life that is in the mineral kingdom will be fully expressed in the fifth round. In the fifth round the mineral kingdom will gradually dissolve, and man will have a completely different relationship to the environment. The plant idea will have been realized. The relationship to the mineral kingdom will no longer be there, so that instead of being surrounded by a world of minerals, in the fifth round we will be surrounded by a world of plants. Everything that man leaves behind today will then be a plant product. There will be no more minerals; then human beings will live in the plant nature as they now live in the mineral nature. Man will be master over the plant kingdom; he will have dominion over the plant kingdom. This is how Genesis expresses it:

And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in all directions under the open heavens.” So God created the great whales and every living creature that moves with which the water swarms, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the water in the seas, and the birds shall multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning – the fifth day.

In the sixth round, we are dealing with the complete dissolution of the plant kingdom. A high, living animal thought has been realized, so that a difference between living and non-living will no longer exist. One will only live among the living. There will be no element at all as a medium; there will only be animal-like living entities. In the sixth round, everything related to sexual reproduction has long since disappeared; in the sixth round, we are only dealing with living things. Reincarnation ceases in the middle of the fifth round.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the image of ourselves; let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, and all the earth and all the creatures that creep on the earth.” So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. God said: See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. These shall be for food for you and for all the beasts of the earth, for all the birds of the air and for all the creatures that move along the ground; I have given you every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. [Genesis 1:24-31]

Everything culminated in animal existence. After the fourth round, the mineral; after the fifth round, the plant; after the sixth round, the animal. In the seventh round, everything had passed into the human. God created man as man and woman, no longer bisexual, but unisexual, and so God rested on the seventh day.

That is the story of the seven rounds. The first three days are over, the fourth day is the present round, and the last three are yet to come. The second chapter presents the story of the fourth round as such. Specifically, the fourth round shows how heaven and earth came into being, that they were created by God, who made heaven and earth and so on. Man was not yet there when the plant was made.

Then came the description of the fourth round. We had the red ball first, which then turns orange, yellow, and turns into a fog. Now the fog turns into the physical. God breathed a living soul into man after he had made him out of the clod of earth - the first two races. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, and put the man he had made there. This is the man who is still asexual. We are still very much in the first two races.

Previously, the plant and animal kingdoms were not so strictly separated. Man had a continuation that merged into the plant world. Then the plant world separated and then the animal kingdom. Even during our fourth round, there was a time - at the very beginning, when the first animals had split off - when humans were still connected to the center of the earth, similar to certain aquatic plants that hang from a long stem. Originally, men were plants, in the days when they had not yet descended into animality. They were still more plant-men, men who had not yet set the plant kingdom free from themselves.

Such a man was called Adam Kadmon. The man who still contains the plant and animal kingdoms within himself, and only later expels them, is Adam Kadmon. Then, in a new verse, on the one hand we have the Tree of Life and on the other hand an increase of consciousness, the Tree of Knowledge.

The Lord God formed man - Adam - out of dust from the earth and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. So man was a living soul.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was divided into four heads. [...] And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may eat from every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.” [Genesis 2:7-17]

Verse 16: Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Now the incarnation begins. The incarnation begins at the moment when Kama-Manas enters. That was in the middle of the third race, and it ends in the middle of the fourth race of the fifth round. Then the text also describes the individual races. But it describes the fourth race in particular.

Among the original Turanians, a kind of betrayal of the deeper secrets occurred. The priests allowed themselves to teach people what were priestly secrets. The soul of man is expressed as the feminine. The incarnated will is the masculine. The soul, the feminine. The initiated priests have now united with the human soul and handed over the secrets to it. This was in the fourth race of the Atlanteans. This betrayal is described in the sixth chapter of Genesis.

But when men began to multiply, the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which were fair [Genesis 6:1-2]...

... for they are flesh. Now God decides on the downfall, the flood, the downfall of Atlantis. That Noah took a pair of each animal into the ark is based on a real event. It shows how theosophy is becoming infinitely relevant to our culture. Not so long ago, Darwinism and the history of creation were still at a different point of view than they are today. In recent years, science has undergone important transformations. It was thought that animals develop through the struggle for existence and through selection; the imperfect perish, the perfect remain. Naturalists are already talking about the powerlessness of the struggle for existence. De Vries, the Dutch naturalist, has shown that the so-called mutation plays the greatest role in the descent of living beings. It has been found that living beings, when placed in different living conditions, quickly develop into completely different forms. You have to put them in completely different living conditions, that is the only real method of producing new species. It is mutation that causes new breeds to emerge. This does not happen gradually, but in leaps. The tomato, for example, emerged rapidly from a plant that did not have the red fruit. It originated in one place and then spread throughout the earth. All other forms of reproduction and development are secondary to mutation.

Now, science wonders: how could mutation once play such a major role? The Atlanteans knew the secrets of the germination power of seeds well enough to accumulate it, even to use it as a driving force. But they also understood how to cross the seeds of animals and bring forth new forms. What lives on Earth now has come about through conscious methods of crossbreeding, through actual cultivation, so that humans have actually created the animal species. From the few animal species, the Atlanteans created the entire living animal world. It is rooted in human nature that he who possesses greatness is inclined to abuse it.

A few specimens were selected from the animals and taken to the Gobi Desert - an ark. The rest perished. This is the basis of the story of the flood. The aberration of the Atlanteans, the segregation of the animals that arose from the mistakes of the Atlanteans, and the rescue of the same with the pure priests in the Gobi Desert. We must now ask: Who bred the races? Theosophy answers: the Atlanteans. But time is also pressing. The wheat, for example, came directly from a world body, from Venus. So we have to make a connection here between science and theosophy. [...]

After man had enjoyed knowledge, he had to die, he could no longer live, he could not at the same time also enjoy the side of life.

In connection with the ancient occult sentence, I would like to show how the entire doctrine of the round is still connected in a very specific way with the thoughts we expressed last time. First of all, I would like to emphasize the following: Every great religious teacher, even if he is not a religious teacher but has only participated in the work of humanity, starts from the guiding principles. And one of the guiding principles is: the human being corresponds to the processes in the great world, the macrocosm.

Now I ask you to consider that when we look at the development within the rounds, when we look at the seven rounds, we have a kind of descending development during the first three rounds, because the whole earth and also the human being move away from the deity, as it were. Man was close to the deity in the beginning, in a childlike, innocent state. During earthly development, he gains experience and reaches his lowest point during the fourth round, in order to ascend again in the following three rounds, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh round. The question is always asked whether there is a purpose to moving away from the deity and then approaching it again. I would like to talk about this in a later lecture, if there is a purpose.

Let us consider the first stage, then all the middle stages and then the last stages of the gap in the transcript]). During the first three stages, man is formed from the outside, so to speak. Man is built up in such a way that by the fourth round he is ready to have his entire physical body built. This physical body is built around the self. The self is inside, and the physical body is around it. It took the first three and a half of the fourth round to build the body around the self. Think about what man was before. He was a purely active being before. He was a being that was not designed to receive impressions from the outside, but a being that was completely dependent on itself, however strange that may sound. When man, in the course of his earthly development, wanted an object, he made it himself. He was active. This is still the case today at the higher levels of existence. Today, initiation happens in such a way that the person concerned first learns to form the so-called “Mayavi-Rupa body”. This is not a body that is formed around us, but when the self escapes from the body, it must be able to form the mayavi-rupa body. You have to be able to form it yourself, while the other body is formed around us, whereby we remain passive. This passivity comes into consideration for the human being when the body is not formed by us. This is what everyone first has to do in the descent. He did not do this himself, but they were formed for him.

The student must learn to do what has been done to him himself. We form the mayavi-rupa body ourselves. We put it around us. The student first learns to form this body. In the second half, the self works its way out again and gradually learns to form this body. The substance of the devachan provides the substance for the mayavi-rupa body. When a person sleeps, the self leaves the body. But the mayavi-rupa body is not formed. The substance is there. It is called the mental body when it occurs in the devachan. In the case where it is thoroughly organized, it is called the mayavi-rupa body.

The situation is as follows: we have built up the three bodies during the first three stages and during half of the fourth stage. Then the self feels trapped in these bodies. It is passive, but becomes more and more active. If you want to prepare yourself for this point of activity in a dignified way, you have to recognize that you are now passive and that you have to become more and more active.

Being trapped in your body means being passive. This is the meaning of the Buddhist teachings. For Buddha, suffering does not mean feeling pain, but being passive. Being born and dying is being passive. You can only be sick in the body. The mind cannot be sick. The astral body and the Mayavi-Rupa body can still be sick. Being separated from what is loved, being united with what is unloved, is being passive. You can only desire what you cannot attain if you are in the body.

So you can see that Buddhism is not a religion that understands suffering in its deepest sense, but rather that suffering is a vehicle. It does not recognize pain or suffering as the essence of the world. There is a prohibition in Buddhism that shows how far Buddhism is from regarding suffering and life as suffering. One commandment says: If a monk murders or incites murder, or if he publicly preaches that dying is better than living, he is unworthy to be a Buddhist monk. A murderer, or one who incites murder, who preaches that suffering is not worth living, is not worthy of being a Buddhist monk. Strive to be active, says Buddha. Buddha also took this out of esoteric Buddhism, to make man an image of the whole evolution.

The first stage is when the first wave of evolution is formed, when the thought is there before existence begins. In the first state lies the thought of how existence should be, which is about to realize the sentence: Man should put himself in the state in which the deity was when it says: It should become light.

The second state is that the whole will is born. First there was the thought, then the release of the thought, then the sinking into [space].

The third is what is called: the voice resounds. Not only is the thought let out, but the thought begins to sound. The fourth stage is where not only voice is there, but where real action begins, where action begins. [Fifth:] After action comes life; the middle state [sixth]. And when that is achieved, it goes up again. [Seventh: the upward striving.]

After the seventh round is the transition to nirvana, after the sixth [gap in the transcript]. [Looking back at the entire previous illusion.] You should strive for this cosmic development. This is your path, your eight-part path. So you should live like the cosmos. It is important that you cultivate right thinking; then, secondly, right resolve; and thirdly, right speech; fourthly, right action; fifthly, right livelihood; sixthly, right effort; seventhly, right mindfulness; eighthly, right concentration. There you have the whole cosmic evolution, which the disciple should endeavor to emulate in his path. The eightfold path is a repetition of cosmic development.

When the Buddha was about to found a religion, he said to himself: “I must make cosmic truths the goal of aspiration.” How does a person become a founder of a religion? By making cosmic truths into precepts. The founder reads in the cosmos what he sees. Therefore he says: “I and the Father are one.” What he gives is the same as what is written in the stars. This thought, this harmony gives Buddhism a deeper character. I doubt that the Sinhalese recognizes this. But it does not matter. The Buddhists recognize the legitimacy of the esoteric. The Buddhist strives for the eightfold path. He does everything to fulfill it.

The priest, the monk who leads the religious community knows it, and it is not customary to communicate everything to the outside world. It is the same as in Catholicism. Catholicism is a religion of sacrifice. The priest knows. He knows the esoteric. The believer only does the prescriptions. It can also be a high priest or an administrator without being an esoteric. This is more consciously a Dominican and Franciscan order, and therefore also structured in certain ways. What can you bring in?

A moral code is approved by a seemingly subordinate monk. He has written a book. The bishop has approved it and put his name to it. This book is now used in all schools. Who has the real spiritual influence? It depends on the right person writing the book, someone who feels called to do so. The bishop does not write a book himself. Why doesn't the monk become a bishop? He wants no distraction, no external position, he wants to devote himself to the inner life.

And the Pope, he knows esotericism. It may happen that there is no one. Leo was an esoteric, Pius IX was not. The present one is probably quite harmless.

The correspondence of the eightfold path with the cosmic law - when it is carried out, evolution is perceived. When man makes himself a microcosm, he also perceives the macrocosm. This is not just a penance, it is an expansion of the being of the whole person. The reproduction of the human being brings him together with the macrocosm.

Now something else: we have described the state where man is furthest removed from the divine. That is the state where one sees the other from the outside. When one sees the other from the outside, then the self is always closed off by a shell. This looking is called “looking in tamas, in darkness.” So one sees, in complete passivity around oneself, “in tamas.”

When we begin to feel with each other, then we perceive something of the self of the other through feeling. Also, through desire, we seek to spread our self beyond ourselves. By desiring a plate of broad beans, I am already reaching beyond myself. This reaching beyond oneself in mere feeling and desire, which concerns only the astral body, is called “life in rajas.

And the next higher state is when one goes out not only with feelings and perceptions, but with thoughts. There the barriers really fall even in life when one goes out in thought. We become calm through thoughts. It stops being deceived by desires. When I rise to the thought, I am no longer deceived by desires. I think according to the higher meaning. That is the “life in Sattva”. This is the state that can be achieved through thinking.

Then there is the state of intuition. These are the ones in which wisdom guides us through the world, in wisdom. This is the higher state. This is the Durga state. “Living in the Durga state” is the state of life that the chela strives for: to have a divine mission for all his actions. Man usually always asks himself: Is it good or evil? Various such logical impulses have been employed. But he who is to become a disciple must no longer act according to logical and moral impulses, but he must also ask himself whether there is a divine mission for him. Imagine a monk. There are many right actions. Suppose he is supposed to write a book, no one can blame him if he does not write a book. He writes the book because he is carrying out the divine order to write the book. That is acting in the Durga state. There is an inner urge to do so.

Only on a geometric and mathematical basis can humanity be raised to the Sattva state. That is why Plato demanded that every student have a mathematical preparation. Because only in mathematics is the Sattva state achieved. All other things are explored in a kind of selfishness.

Once people have come to terms with this, they will also face everything else as objectively as one faces mathematical truths today. Due to the way Western science relates to mathematics, the way it studies, it cannot arrive at deeper truths. Our science has only made it so far in mathematics to attain objective truths. That is why it is a kind of ideal state.

Do you remember the introduction I once gave when I talked about the immortality of the soul? I said that in the mysteries, only the students were prepared and that they wanted neither one nor the other. Today you can find people saying, “I don't want to be reincarnated!” or “I want to be reincarnated!” These were not allowed to enter the mysteries because they were deemed incapable of objectively grasping the higher truths. People first had to unlearn desiring. It is the same with Kamaloka. We must have no desires, for that makes objective observation impossible.

And now a few words about how Buddhism is to be understood in terms of its position in the world. When Buddhism was founded by Buddha, it was not a new religion, nor was it intended to be a new religion. The Buddha wanted the religion, which at that time was only priestly wisdom, to be made accessible to all people; he was to make it popular. He wanted even those who could not be initiated not to fall prey to mere image worship, but to be introduced to certain truths of salvation, so that by participating in the truths of salvation they would not be lost as they would be if it were mere image worship.

The Brahmans then possessed very high wisdoms that would have been quite impossible to proclaim to the people. Nobody would have understood them. Gradually, the people had taken the images for realities, just as in Catholicism. We can see this when we come to Tyrol, where the images of saints are worshipped like a kind of fetish. The Buddhist said to himself: There is too great a distance between the people's worship of images and the high wisdom of the Brahmins. Let us take only the two highest sentences of Brahmanic wisdom.

The first is: “That art thou!” That means: There is only one essence, and my body and this slate are exactly the same distance away from me. This slate is just as foreign to me as my own body. The whole sensual world is one. No part of it should be closer to us. The piece of flesh that I carry around is no closer to me than any other object.

The second sentence is: “I am Brahman!” I am the real divine being, a spark of the deity.

I must elevate myself so that I recognize everything as 'you' and the divine Brahman as 'I'. These are the two guiding principles. Everything else are explanations to them. The Brahman is completed by a shell, it becomes my Brahma or Atma - these are elaborations of the two sentences.

All the theosophical teachings that we know were essentially from the lower teachings. Karma and reincarnation were Brahman teachings. It is not surprising that this Brahman teaching, which goes back many millennia before the birth of Christ, has something peculiar about it. And what is it that is peculiar about the Brahman teaching? Imagine you learn Theosophy to a certain degree. If you then penetrate into the Brahmin teaching, you will find that everything that Theosophy has can already be found in the Brahmin teaching. What Jakob Böhme said is already a step higher. But if you go back to the Brahmin teaching, you will find that That was already there too. They go further, they become chelas, go back to the Brahman teaching and find that this is already in it. We finally come to the conclusion that we cannot determine how deep the Brahman wisdom is. And when we come across even deeper wisdoms, it is likely that we will find even deeper ones in them.

Now, however, Buddha said to himself: The teaching of the Brahmins must be made as popular as possible. But popularizing wisdom is only possible with individuals - through initiation. It is not possible to bring about wisdom through research. Rather, we should shape it through life. And now imagine that there were a method of telling people how to live, that would be a substitute for initiating them. I can accept anyone as a student and initiate them step by step. In doing so, I work on the intellect, on the intuition and, little by little, on the higher realms of spiritual life. But I can also do it differently. I can arrange their life in such a way that it gets better and better. Then he will naturally strive towards the treasure of wisdom. He will meet wisdom halfway. Just as two tunnels were bored from either end and met in the middle when the Gotthard tunnel was being dug, so does Buddha want it. Therefore, he gives no insights into the treasures of wisdom. He does not want to talk about the treasure of wisdom, he wants to teach the people. The people are to be taught about the best way to live. We do not want to concern ourselves with the wisdom treasure at all. Buddha differs only in method. He did not recognize a single sentence of the old teaching. But he says: It is useless at first to bother the people with teachings. We have to get the people to the point where they learn by living. He does not say: Teach the sentence “You are Brahma,” but he says, “Do not cling to matter!” If you experience the sentence “Do not cling to matter,” then it will be easy to understand the sentence, “I am Brahma.”

We also see this from the following: The Buddha once had a conversation in which he said, roughly translated, “Here is a cart. The chariot consists of the wheels, the seat, the shaft and so on. The wheels are not the chariot, the seat is not the chariot, the shaft is not the chariot. Each individual part is not the chariot, and yet the chariot consists of the individual parts. Just as the chariot is not in any single part, so the soul is not in any single part of a human being. Not your physical body, not your physical body's garment, not your desires, not your imagination are your soul!” So when Buddha said what is not the soul, he wanted to lead people to experience what the soul is. That is why he did not say, ‘I am Brahma,’ but rather, ‘Death, birth, desire, and so on, is passivity.’

Anyone who recognizes the sentence, “I am Brahma,” knows all of this. So Buddha says, “Free yourselves as much as possible from all that is subject to birth, death, old age, and disease!” The old Brahmin told people what is permanent. That is why he does not say, “Seek your higher self,” but rather, “Free yourselves from the lower self, cast off the fetters of the lower self!” And there are ten of them. Just as the Brahmin said, “I am Brahma,” so the Buddha says, “I will enumerate the ten fetters, and then the higher self will emerge from you.”

The first fetter is the deception of the lower self-awareness. Buddha does not say, “Recognize the higher self,” but rather, “The lower self is an illusion, a composition of temporary principles:

1. Physicality, 2. Perception, 3. Feeling, 4. Desire, 5. Consciousness.

These five things make up the lower self. The higher self is in there, but Buddha does not speak of the higher self. He only says that these five things are illusions; you must recognize that! And he is convinced that when he tells people, “This is the sheath of the sword,” they will also realize what is inside.

The second fetter is that one could believe that there is no moral world order, that is, disbelief in a moral world order. Buddha did not say, “Believe in divine beings!” He said to himself, “Man has nothing to gain from that. He should believe in a moral world order and free himself from the belief that something could be unjust that could affect us. It only seems unjust to us because we cannot see through it. For example, a brick may fall on my head. If I did not deserve this in the past, I will experience compensation in the future.

The third fetter is the belief that our rites and ceremonies can have a meaning, can be something other than parables. Those who take the symbol for reality suffer from the third fetter of existence. Symbolism is beautiful and sublime – but it must not be taken as reality.

The fourth fetter is the belief in sensuality, the opinion that the sensual is real. Imagine this book! The moment the temperature is a hundred degrees higher, we and this book will no longer be here. The moment our temperature is no longer here, the whole physical world is no longer possible.

The fifth fetter is that which imprisons us in our sensuality, which teaches us the belief that we may be special beings, that we encounter other beings with antipathy, may hate them. This fetter is antipathy towards other beings. Because we have antipathy towards other beings, we indulge in the illusion of separation. This is the fifth fetter.

The sixth fetter is love of sensual personality.

The seventh fetter is the longing for the preservation of personal existence. This is particularly pronounced in Christianity, the longing for the preservation of personal existence in the earthly personality. According to Buddha, this is the seventh fetter.

The eighth fetter is pride, the struggle for the elevation of personal existence.

The ninth fetter is the belief that one can achieve something in the world without karma, through self-righteousness. The Buddha refers to karma in everything. He says: “No one can achieve anything without karma.”

The tenth fetter is something that only Buddhism has developed, and by emphasizing the tenth fetter, Buddhism indicates that it is one of the most sublime religions that has ever been taught. The Buddha calls religious ignorance the tenth fetter.

Christianity has thoroughly misunderstood the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. “Blessed are the ignorant,” the Christian translates. But Buddha says: “There are many kinds of dirt. But the greatest dirt that can cling to you is ignorance!” Christianity regards those who want to know as being possessed by demons. The Protestant is content with being united with God by faith. But the wise man is united with God by wisdom.

This is what Buddha taught. The religion of the Brahmans remains in its entirety; it is the highest. But we cannot bring it to the people for the time being. Therefore, we teach the people how to free themselves from the bonds of the transitory existence. The Brahmans taught: “How can one recognize the eternal?” Buddha wanted to teach: “How can one overcome the transitory?” Buddha has only changed the method. We do not want to teach the eternal, but we want to teach how to live to overcome the transitory.

The second truth is: Recognize that in the impermanent is the cause of passivity! The third truth is: Kill attachment to the impermanent! This allows the eternal to break through by itself.

What I have said today refers to the four great truths and to the doctrine of the ten fetters and to the fact that the cause of all suffering lies only in ignorance. All of this is called 'the creation of a divine future'. Knowledge, realization, is called the creation of a divine future. The Buddhist lives for the sake of what a person becomes. And life and its application in this sense, he calls 'Dharma'.

And now he is convinced of the following:

Firstly: that Buddha is not a god, but that he is enlightened, that Budhi, the realization, has arisen in him, because Buddha is also a transient. To regard the Buddha as something eternal would be superstition in the Buddhist sense. So the Buddhist says: “I believe in the enlightenment of the Buddha!”

The second is: “I believe in Dharma”.

And the third is: “I believe in the brotherhood,” in “Sangha,” in the brotherhood of those who have gone so far as to overcome their separateness, that is, I believe in the possibility that they have overcome their separateness.

I believe in: first, a cause - karma; secondly, in life - dharma; thirdly, in what has been achieved - the Sangha brotherhood; the same: “I believe in the community of saints.

Today I would like to present to you a kind of lecture on the opening words of Genesis, as they were cultivated in the first times of Christianity in secret places. What I am going to say has been said many times, but always in secret places to a few people and has never really been popularized. It is not something that relates specifically to Genesis, but to the Lemurian Age. So I will not say anything different from what has been said over and over again in occult lodges. First of all, we have to realize that we have passed through two great catastrophes, one that led from the Atlantean era to our own time, and another that led from the Lemurians to the Atlanteans. We go back in time to before these catastrophes, to a time when humans already existed but did not yet have warm blood. They had cold, white blood. This cold, white blood was the reason that these beings could live in a watery element. At that time, the separation between air and water was not yet the same as it is today. All water was still a kind of fine mist or haze, so that everything that was earth was covered with this fine mist or haze. Air and sea were not yet there, only water and fog, which settled like steam over the earth, and this steam was also something that contained the life germs for everything that could live on earth at that time. The germs of life were themselves vaporous; they were not small grains, not small seeds, but vaporous, swirling forms in the general life of the world. Such a vaporous form, like a denser cloud, was at first still man himself. Man had a form that was composed of such condensed vapor. Within this vapor moved a thin liquid. And that which was most prominent about man was an organ on his head, which in its front part protruded far over his body, an organ that had a stalk and at the end of the stalk a kind of ball. This was an organ that could perceive not light but heat. What was particularly important at that time was the different degrees of warmth. One had to know that it was too hot here and too cold there; one had to be able to avoid that, and for that the warmth organ was necessary. One could perceive the degrees of warmth with the organ and could thus turn this way or that. The organ was later completely lost. But it was the organ that served man at that time for complete orientation.

The state at that time was called the “unfathomable depth.” It was so named because these beings could see nothing, hear nothing, speak nothing, understand nothing. They did not yet have all these abilities. The Secret Doctrine refers to this whole area with all the living beings in it as “the waters,” because in these waters the beings were not yet conceiving for themselves. They could not yet conceive. The entire earthly body was endowed with a single faculty of imagination. It was one great living being, which was regarded as the spirit. Individuals of the human race existed, but their imaginations were still common. Regarding this commonality of the world of imagination, the secret schools said:

“The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the deep.” [Genesis 1:2]

That is, this area had a common idea, and this idea hovered over the waters, it had not yet entered into the people.

So we have two things side by side: first, the “unfathomable depth” and, second, the “idea that Genesis calls the ‘Spirit of God’.

The next thing is this: The outgrowth on the front of the beings that we have described has shrunk. And this organ that has shrunk today, which arose from this outgrowth, is the pineal gland. Back then, humans did not yet have bones. They were vapor humans, fish humans. If you look at the germinating human being in the first weeks of pregnancy, you will find this fish human hinted at in the human germ. The human being really repeats these conditions in the first period of pregnancy. The small fish body that the human being has there possesses the small organ that then shrivels up. It is one of those regressed organs, like the spleen, the function of which is unknown to today's doctors. The more this stalk-organ regressed, the more the pair of eyes developed inside the human organism. The eyes arose, two eyes formed in place of the original stalk organ. Just as the stalk organ was a warmth organ, so the eyes became a light organ. This unfathomable depth worked in all beings and, by withdrawing the warmth organ, singled out the pair of eyes. In The Secret Doctrine, this unfathomable depth is also called the “forefather.

In the beginning, human beings only felt warmth and cold. Now, however, they perceive objects through their eyes, that is, the forefather allowed the ability to perceive not only warmth but also light to arise from within them.

And God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light.

Now we have come so far that these beings could perceive the light around them and consequently also the limited objects. Now I ask you to consider the following. Before that, the unfathomable depth was there; everything was contained in it. There was the idea and then the light. The light was limited by the eye or the ability to see around it, what eyes could see: the visible. Everything else had not become visible. That was beyond the visible. [The boundary of the visible was the firmament.]

And God set a firmament where the visible ends and the invisible begins. [Genesis 1:6-7]

Furthermore, man began to perceive the visible, so that a completely new state of affairs arose for him. You have to imagine what it would mean for you if you could not see and could not hear. Hearing, however, was out of the question at that time. The people of that time were themselves a fluid in a liquid element. And by swimming around like that, you would not perceive the exact boundary between yourself and the other. You only perceive boundaries when there is something visible.

The individuals were held together by the idea. The individual was not so sharply defined. Each being felt that it belonged to the whole, to the general. It would be as if today your stomach were to feel independent; it must feel that it belongs in the body. Only at the moment when a sensation of light occurs does the possibility arise of perceiving the other as something different. An object is only something outside of us when we see its boundaries outside of us. Light was what distinguished the individual beings from one another. In the moment when humans were distinguished from one another, it became necessary for understanding of the environment to open up. The beings not only had to have the idea outside of themselves, but they also had to be able to have the idea within themselves. An object that I merely look at would be something quite mysterious for me if I could not imagine it myself. This understanding [of the environment] was imparted by entities that were of a higher nature than the beings living on earth. The light-sensitive entities were guided by entities that stimulated the intellect in them. Thus they became endowed with intellect. They became the “Sons of Manas.”

This brings with it the possibility of forming a false or a correct idea. Therefore, the Secret Doctrine says: “Mind and Truth” arose as the second pair. They arose through the influence of the Sons of Manas. [I cannot feel a false coldness or a false warmth, but the mind can form a false idea.] Only now, when the idea, the mind, was within the beings themselves, did the beings hold themselves together in a kind of sense of community. Earlier, the idea was outside; but now a spark of it was within the beings themselves. I have said: warmth and cold were differently outside in the world. The beings draw this warmth into themselves and distinguish themselves as warm and cold beings. A warm being is one that no longer perceives warmth, but generates warmth. Warm blood now originated in man.

So what had happened? Man was formerly born of water. Now that which the Secret Doctrine calls the “blur” had been generated in him. Man was therefore first born of “water”, then of “blood”. And if we could go back even further in time, to before the Lemurian period, we would find, before the water, the “spirit that had not yet become water.” So we have: spirit - water - blood. The warmth that was general then appeared as the warmth of the warmth-bearing beings. Man is born of blood - that is the moment when man becomes a warm-blooded being. This enables him to organize within himself everything that was previously organized outside of him. Warmth and cold were something different outside. Now he differentiates between warmth and cold within himself. Just as creation was outside before, man now became a creator within himself. And the first thing that makes man not only an inner being, but also an inner being that manifests itself outwardly, was the “speech. And with speech, ‘life’ arose. [Man was able to express himself outwardly; what was drawn in pushes outward – that is speech.] Only then is human life present when man is not only present as a being but also expresses himself as such – [an independent, self-contained, differentiated life, not coexistence. The being has become independent, can express itself, can reveal itself.)

The third pair is therefore 'speech and life'. Animals that are unable to produce sounds are cold-blooded. Only warm-blooded creatures are capable of expressing the soul outwardly through sound. A creature that is said to have a voice must differ from its surroundings in warmth. It must have a life that is differentiated from its surroundings. The third pair is therefore “speech - or voice - and independent life”. The fish has the same temperature as the water in which it lives.

Now we have come so far that the being has become independent, that the being can reveal itself and thus appear to its surroundings as an independent living being.

I ask you to take into account that today's concepts must not be transferred to that time. In later times, the cold-blooded creatures also changed in various ways. The fish were much larger at that time and more similar to humans.

The reproduction of the creatures at that time, however, was still such that they simply emerged from one another. You have to imagine that when a new offspring was to arise – copulation or fertilization did not yet exist at that time, nor did incarnation, incarnation has only existed since sexuality has existed, since there have been two sexes [we are not dealing with incarnations, but with materializations] – so when a new being was to arise, the one being allowed matter to emerge from itself into the new being. The determination for this process came from the general world spirit. Through elective affinity a new being was brought forth. A being was overshadowed by a spirit. It is exactly the same as when the medium [at a spiritualistic sitting] provides the material for a spirit that wants to embody itself in matter, to materialize, to manifest itself. Matter was always usable, always virginal, a nourishing process. The original being remained as it was. The process is there as it has been described in the description of its plant aspect. Matter was then depleted, it had become incapable of producing a new order from itself [without new inspiration], and differentiation into sexes occurred. In this way, the descent of the Lemurians essentially occurred; they had lost the ability to have virgin matter within themselves. If a new being was to manifest itself, there had to be a germ to stimulate life. With that [sexuality entered and with that] birth and death and also incarnation. And man became, as one adds, the beginning of “gathering, of ”fraternization.”

From the middle of the Lemurian period, the process of unification begins, the process of fraternization, which must lead to the point where the mystery sites unite, and then live on into a new world epoch. [Now comes the fourth pair: 'Man - the gathering that leads to fraternization'.

This explanation was also given repeatedly in the Pythagorean schools. It was said: Since the spirit has entered into every human being, birth and death came into the world. [And in Genesis it says:] In pain you shall give birth to children, it says now. In the past, they simply emerged through overshadowing.

This is the meaning of blood, water and spirit, as can also be seen from the words: Truly, truly, whoever is not born again of water and the Spirit will not see bliss.

[...]

Today I would like to speak about Genesis again, but in a different sense. I would like to provide some concepts that will enable you to gradually take Genesis literally. To do that, I would first like to refer to a passage in the Epistle of John. You will find a very interesting passage in the fifth chapter of the first Epistle of John, verses 7-8:

There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear record in earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood: and these three are one.

In these words, you have a differentiation of the three upper and three lower principles, as they are to be understood in the sense of Christian esotericism, of Gnosticism. That is the Father, Atma; that is the Word, Budhi, the Creative, the Spirit permeating the whole world; and thirdly, Manas or Mahat, the Holy Spirit. Holy is the Word, which means: not yet subject to the physical. Atma, Budhi, Manas are meant by these three in heaven generating.

In addition to these three, there are the three spiritual elements in man. The spiritual elements are in the entire Jewish Kabbalah, going back to the original books of Moses, and in Christian esotericism: blood, water and spirit. One must only first be clear about what Jewish esotericism means by 'blood'. It is the lowest link of the soul, what we in theosophy call the astral - not our physical blood. Jewish esotericism believes that the movement of blood comes from the astral body, and that is correct. All influences that not only go directly through the soul but also affect something physical are called blood in Jewish esotericism. It is the active, the driving force. We only call the red juice that flows through the body blood.

The second is 'water'. In every kind of secret language, 'kama' is everywhere water. These are the feelings, the passions, the desires, and so on. And now I will tell you why it is called water. You have to familiarize yourself with the idea that today's humanity is accustomed to imagining many things in a more materialistic way than was the case in earlier times. If you imagine an old kabbalist, he saw in this water not only the flowing element, but also a parable. And he came to it in the following way. He said to himself: In the water live those animals which we must consider to be the original ones. From the liquid element originally emerged the animal world: sea animals, jellyfish, amphibians. These then went out of the water onto the land. Nowhere did passions and feelings arise than from the water. It was only later that land emerged, and then what is more highly organized also emerged. The soul, the feeling of pleasure and pain, emerged from the water. Water was the element that gives rise to pleasure and pain in man. That is why he called water the source of what is pleasure and what is pain.

We distinguish the lower soul, which makes the blood surge. The blood is the actual, deeper soul. Where we feel pleasure and displeasure, the actual inner pains, he calls that the water, because he derives this soul element from the water.

Then comes the thinking soul, the spirit. We therefore have the sentient soul, the inner soul, then the reasonable soul, the rational soul, and thirdly the consciousness soul, the higher soul, the part of the soul in which the spirit shines into the soul.

Now the Jew said to himself: Where soul arises, there is soul. The Jew therefore saw in the sea and everywhere where the liquid element was, a parable for the soul. Only because people have unlearned to see the soul do they see the outer physical water.

The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus can give us further insight here.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, you must be born again. The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes and whither it goes. So is every one that is born of the Spirit.” [John 3:1-8]

This is how Jesus wants to make him understand. Because Nicodemus was a minor Mahatma, a master in those days, he said to him: Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Man is born of the mother from blood; he must be reborn from water and the Spirit. What is born of blood is blood, what is born of the Spirit is spirit.

Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Are you a teacher of Israel and do not understand these things?” [John 3:9-10]

Now we can also take the first words of Genesis in the right sense. The first verse can be translated as follows:

In the beginning God begot his karma as heaven and earth.

The concept of creating, as we understand it, is not present in the ancient languages. The Latin word creare means “to create”, but it comes from the Sanskrit word kr, which in turn comes from karma; so it means “to create”, and the sentence means:

The karma of God begins to flow.

Our development on earth was preceded by the development in which the world of Kama, the world of instincts, desires and passions, was able to develop to the highest level it could reach, which in the lunar epoch constituted the actual content of the beings. It had developed to the highest degree. The human beings who are now living in the earthly world have intellect. Our ancestors did not think; they only felt what they had to accomplish. Thinking is what is given to the earth to develop. We have a feeling that stands below thinking. We do not follow feeling directly; we let it be regulated by thought. It is put on the right track by thinking. The inhabitants of the moon could give themselves up to their feelings. They did not need to think about the affairs of their lives. They felt directly what they had to do. This emotional life, which lived in all beings, developed there to an infinite height. Today, when intellectual life is important, we no longer have any idea of the infinite tenderness and kindness and the magnitude of this emotional life. These beings that developed on the moon were elevated to the level of divinity. The masters who developed on the moon were pure wisdom that flowed from feeling. These Masters joined together in great fraternities in those days, and they formed one great unity when the Moon was fading away. Everything had merged into one great unity. This divine Being, who was, so to speak, the pinnacle of the lunar epoch, is addressed in Genesis as God - Yahweh or Jehovah. Here, God is nothing other than the pinnacle of the development of the Moon. Yahweh is a Moon deity and is also called a Moon deity by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She may have emphasized it a little too strongly, but it is so. The great Entity, which had developed the emotional life to the highest degree, that was Jehovah or Yahweh. What came over from the Moon - Kama in its highest perfection, water in its highest perfection, the flood - developed in two directions. On the one hand, it condensed and took on matter, the blood; on the other hand, it diluted and took on spirit. Above, it brightened in the spirit, below, it dawned in the blood. Thus, Yahweh differentiated. The primal water begets heaven, its spiritual pole, on the one hand, and the earth, its physical, material pole, on the other.

So what was the situation? Imagine that the Kama water comes over, the spirit is up, the physical, the blood, is down. The earth was chaotic, the blood was disorderly. Nothing but a confused and wildly intermingling physical-material. That was the one pole.

The earth was formless and chaotic, and darkness was over the face of the deep. Darkness was below the waters, darkness was in the deep. And over these waters was the spirit. The water was the middle. The spirit floated above the Kama waters like an aura.

Be very clear about what this aura is. We have already spoken about it. The physical body is not an aura, and what lives in the physical body is also not an aura, because you can see that with physical eyes. The mind is not an aura either. Only the soul provides an aura; everything that is of a spiritual nature provides an aura. This aura is influenced by the body from within or by the mind from without. Therefore there are three auras: the one clouded by the body, the one illuminated by the spirit and the actual glowing soul light. The one is the area through which the body is reflected in the soul, the other is the area through which the spirit is reflected in the soul. Now you are clear about how the spirit of God hovers over the waters or over the soul, and that the Kama is thereby illuminated by the spirit. The spirit does not have to be light. But when the spirit enters the aura, it intensifies the light.

And God said, “Let there be light!” [Genesis 1:3]

This means: Let the reflection of the spirit arise in the waters.

I would like the first three sentences of Genesis to be taken literally. It is not a matter of interpreting these sentences, but of thinking of the right thing to say with the words. For water: Kama, for God: the most highly developed that came from Kama from the lunar epoch. “This is my blood” - it is the same as what flows in the earth.

The Genesis is derived from the writings of the Egyptian temple mysteries. These had two great [moral] books. One was the Book of the Microcosm, the other was the Book of the Macrocosm. The latter described how the great cosmos is created from water through the word. The former, the Book of the Microcosm, was the Book of the Perfect Man. Both were completely parallel descriptions. It must be implied that man is a microcosm. Only someone who was initiated could have achieved this.

The Master initiates those He loves. The miracle of Lazarus is an initiation. That is why it is also said of Lazarus: 'He whom Jesus loved.

The Gospel of John begins with the same words: “In the beginning was the Word.”

Only then can the great books of the world be understood if one has the confidence that every word is only understood when one really goes deep into things and only objects to things as late as possible. That is the trust we need, because we must have trust in the great books of the world. This is what we must gradually learn again through the theosophical movement: to take these books literally.

"Mountain is the keyword for higher truths, for initiations. Jesus went up the mountain with his disciples when he saw the people. In the Holy Scriptures, we become familiar with the authority with which they were written. We recognize them as masterpieces when we see how everything fits together beautifully and how what we have gained through our masters since the last third of the nineteenth century provides the key to understanding these great books.

In a few days it will be thirteen years since the founder of the Theosophical Society left her earthly existence. She initially worked in secret societies, for it was not through free speech but in secret circles that the theosophical wisdom was presented, behind tightly closed doors.

This is to be taken more figuratively than literally, however. The Rosicrucians have preserved the treasure of wisdom that now flows in popular form in Theosophy. The tactics and diplomacy have been changed by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. [More than in earlier times, people today are compelled to self-introspection and self-knowledge in order to get to know the secret depths of their own hearts. Therefore, the leaders of humanity have decided to bring the truth into humanity and to speak to all people of that which was otherwise hidden in the mysteries. But not only the results came out of the secret brotherhoods, but also the word itself. What we proclaim today is more of a spelling. But it should lead to reading the deepest truths of man.

Important personalities have been connected with these secret societies in some way. In his fairy tales, Goethe consciously draws on the secret knowledge of all times. There is a poem that he wrote to glorify the Rosicrucian spirit, a poem in which he expressed what is now the lifeblood of the theosophical movement. The poem is called “The Mysteries”.

In it, the humble pilgrim Brother Mark seeks a resting place for the human soul, a spiritual Montserrat, which was a high point of human spiritual development. In his search, he comes to a strange monastery. There are twelve hermits in it. The thirteenth is the bearer of the greatest wisdom, a leader of humanity. Each of the twelve hermits symbolizes one of the forces of the nations. Mark, the thirteenth, is to unite what humanity has sought in different ways. The twelve brothers symbolize human opinions. The thirteenth is the one who unites them. If we today activate the attitude characterized in the poem, we are on the ideal Montserrat.

At the entrance to the monastery is the symbol, the cross entwined with roses, [Plato says:] the world cross of matter, on which the world soul is crucified. More than ever, the necessity of self-knowledge weighs on us. We must solve this riddle of man's past, man's present and man's future. This self-examination is to be practised in order to then speak publicly about it in the language that was given at the first stage of secret learning.

A few words about an introductory lecture in the secret schools can be found in one of the monologues in Goethe's “Faust”, which Goethe only wrote afterwards. What he says there is the confession that man must live within the universe and must get his basic rules from it. It is about the scene “Forest and Cave” from “Faust I”, where it says:

Ehrlicher Geist, du gabst mir alles, was ich bat
Du hast nicht umsonst dein Angesicht im Feuer gewendet
Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich.
Kraft sie zu fühlen, zu genießen. Nicht
Kalt staunenden Besuch erlaubst du nur,
Vergönnest mir in ihre tiefe Brust,
As in the bosom of a friend to look
You drive the series of the living
Before me and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water know.
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And neighbor strains squeezing down
And the hillside thunders hollowly with its fall
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself and my own breast
Secret, deep wonders open up.
And as the pure moon rises before my gaze
Soothingly across, silver figures float before me from the rock walls
From the damp bush
silver figures of the ancient world,
and ease the strict pleasure of contemplation,
Oh, that nothing is perfect for man,
I now feel. You gave me the companion for this bliss,
which brings me closer and closer to the gods,
whom I can no longer do without,
can no longer do without, though he, cold and insolent,
humiliates me before myself and to nothing,
with a breath of words, transforms your gifts.
He fans a wild fire in my breast
after that beautiful image,
So I stagger from desire to fulfillment
And in fulfillment I languish for desire.

[Faust I, Vers 3217-3250]

[We first see his deep inner perception of nature, the great view that the world spirit allowed him, and then Goethe continues with the line:]

then show me myself and my own breast
Secret deep wonders open up.

[In the mystery schools, the teachers called their students together in the spring so that they could learn from the facts of nature.] Opening of the inner depths. In spring, when nature awakens, everything is full of wonder. These wonders of nature should not only be marveled at, but also deciphered. Mysticism leads us into nature at all levels, and we can learn how we ourselves as human beings should behave. What theosophical mysticism is is written in nature. If we understand the wonders of nature, we also understand our own wonders [then we understand what is alive in us, the secret meaning of life. The two lower realms of nature, the stone realm and the plant realm, lie chaste and mute before us.

The Stone Kingdom stands before us like a reminder of our distant past. [The Stone Kingdom reminds us of a distant time when we once enjoyed the brightly shining crystal in a dull trance state; the heavens themselves stand before us as a language of memory that we ourselves have gone through. The starry world and the Stone Kingdom remind us of the creative power from which we have sprung.

And the plant kingdom reminds us of another stage. We have left behind not only the crystals, but also everything that appears to be lifeless. With its millions of stars, nature appears lifeless, yet it is majestic. This realm reminds us of the omnipotence of the majestic creative power from which we have emerged. It is not just our Earth, on which we spend a short span of our existence, no, it is all the other worlds that the occultist knows.

[The whole, seemingly inanimate nature of the minerals is majestic. The kingdom of growth and life is based on this.

[Majestic] rock formations and plant formations in blissful serenity can be found everywhere. But only on our Earth does one thing [exist, a realm the seer finds only on our Earth, the realm of the higher animals, where feeling arises, where the living is contained within itself and develops self-awareness.] You cannot find the animal kingdom on other worlds as it exists on our Earth. Where we develop pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow out of blissful serenity, the forms we know arise, and our earth is the only setting for them.

It has often been said that something is expressed on the face of the animals that could only be described as compassion. Animal nature is really rooted in suffering. Animal nature arose so that humans could break free to higher levels. He had to leave animality behind him. He had to separate what lives around us as living animality. [From this follows for us compassion for the animals, which has ethics as its guide.] Man's ascent had to be paid for with the detachment of animality. Those who did not have the ability to free themselves from pain through lofty thoughts fell prey to this. Then man went the torturous path of the ego to cross over into another, higher world. All teaching and learning should only be there to lead us to what lies beyond life, because man's essence is spiritual. Anything that theosophy teaches that cannot be lived would be a futile effort.

[We can learn from nature how it presents us with three virtues in its three kingdoms.] There are three fundamental virtues of man:

- Majesty - in the first kingdom
- Blessed serenity - in the second kingdom
- Suffering and joy [compassion] - in the third kingdom.

What should we learn from pleasure and pain? [To endure pleasure and pain with patience, this is taught by] the doctrine of reincarnation. The animal cannot rise above the state of pain and pleasure. But the essence of man is spiritual. And the spirit seeks a home in that which is pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow.

Patience – that is what follows from the great teaching of reincarnation.

What can we learn from the plant kingdom in its blissful serenity? We learn what can flow to us from the great law, which the theosophical world movement has also given us in a popular form, from the law of karma, the law of the eternal causation of all spiritual things.

It seems to be the nature of plants to painlessly and calmly reproduce their kind in blissful serenity. They are completely devoted to producing their own kind. The sacrificial life of the whole plant consists of sprouting, growing and budding. When we face the world, we do not judge or condemn, but try to understand what it is doing from our own perspective. When we do not judge but seek to comprehend, we immerse ourselves in our fellow beings and draw from them the means to understand them. That is what the second kingdom teaches us. The law of karma teaches us love as the second moral principle. The plant kingdom reminds us of a preliminary stage of love.

[Then we can also understand the chaste, majestic realm of stones. Through our self-knowledge, we learn to appreciate the self in every other person, which faces us just as great as the stone kingdom; and once we have understood this, how we should approach every person with reverence, we have three fundamental virtues that the three natural kingdoms teach us: reverence for every ego, the mineral kingdom; love for every being, the plant kingdom; and patience, the animal kingdom.

Theosophy gives us the secrets of our hearts. We should practice self-knowledge. Then the deep meaning of an apparently simple saying by Goethe will become clear to us: “Know thyself and live in peace with the world.

What says “I” in every human being also says “I” in every other human being. This self-knowledge leads to true, highest respect for people. We must not interfere in the lives of other people, just as we must not or cannot interfere in the lives of the stone realm. The human self must be a sanctuary for us. Reverence for every human ego - that is the third ethical principle that the Theosophical movement wants to bring back into honor.

Patience, love and reverence are the three virtues in the human realm. Through reverence we approach the silent stone realm. From this flows what has been present as a principle in the secret schools. Make the mute, chaste realm of inanimate nature your ideal, so that you stand reverently before every other ego and it would violate your spiritual sense of shame to reach into that which is a human ego with a coarse hand. When that happens to you, then you have understood this highest ideal. This is what has been proclaimed as the sevenfold nature of nature and man. Three virtues in the realm of nature, three virtues in the realm of man. And in between the I. The I stands in the middle and develops in the same but retrograde sequence as nature offers it to us. So we progress through patience, through love, to reverence.