The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Every occultist knows the great dangers that lie in the frivolous popularization of occult truths and insights. On the other hand, however, it should also be taken into account that Theosophy, among other things, imposes the duty of spreading and advocating certain occult teachings that come only from occult research. When we do this, those who have familiarized themselves with such teachings feel the need to learn something about the methods by which such insights are actually gained. Theosophy speaks of the development of humanity and of the world, of races, rounds and so on, of planetary systems and other things. Those who hear these truths will, even if they believe that the intellect can grasp them, still feel the need to ask what the paths are by which such insights are attained.

Now, in general, it is not easy to talk about this path. However, today a few remarks will be made about the nature of what the occultist calls clairvoyance. One must not confuse occultism and theosophy. Theosophy is basically only the external expression for the experiences gained in the field of occultism. Occultism is the source of the theosophical teachings. Today we will talk about one chapter of this occultism.

The experiences on which the theosophical teachings are based are made in completely different states of consciousness than those that are characteristic of the ordinary person. Two such different states of consciousness come into particular consideration. We will start with what the ordinary person experiences. This person has their everyday, waking daytime consciousness – through which they are able to perceive the things around them and to educate themselves about cause and effect and the other laws of this physical world through their mind, through their reason, in short, through their intellectuality.

But this state of consciousness is not the only state of experience for the everyday person. The human experience extends far beyond what is accessible to his consciousness. The normal person has two other states of experience, which are the so-called dream sleep and dreamless deep sleep.

This second state of consciousness, sleep interspersed with dreams, does not plunge the person completely into the unconscious. The person is able to bring something into the waking consciousness. However, what he brings into consciousness is not the content of the actual experience he had during the dream-filled sleep. The experience is something quite different from what he later becomes aware of. It is, so to speak, only a bringing across of individual fragments, of fragmentary mirror images. What a person experiences in a completely different world during dream-filled, not very deep sleep, are coherent, ordered facts. And of these facts, which he experiences but of which he does not become aware, he has some memory. He has brought them into his memory for the waking consciousness and later remembers what happened over there. However, the content is remembered only sparsely and distorted. This content cannot be compared in any way with what is experienced over there.

This is a world that, if it could be seen through, would be filled with the facts of the so-called astral world. Just as the physical world is filled with the facts of the sensual world, here one experiences the spiritual facts. But over there we experience feelings, passions, desires, cravings, instincts as facts. We experience them only as they exist as mental processes, not as they otherwise are in our personal form, refracted through our earthly life. It is simply a different world that the human being experiences there and from which he only brings pieces over into the ordinary waking consciousness of the day. No one should ever characterize the experiences in the so-called astral realm by what he brings over from the content of his dreams into his waking consciousness. This is just as rich, indeed much richer, than the world of the senses, and in terms of the contrasts it offers, it cannot be compared to what goes on in our world of the senses. The manifoldness of what appears good, bright, radiant, and, on the other hand, of the terrible, repulsive, and gruesome phenomena, cannot be compared to what our sensory world offers.

The third state is dreamless sleep. In most people, very little of the experiences that occur during the dreamless sleep state come through into the waking day consciousness. What comes across is usually not consciously perceived. The experience of dreamless sleep appears in the waking 'day consciousness' not in its causality, but in its effect. What is experienced there are the great laws of reality, the true, to a certain extent much more true, original causes and essences of our world. What takes place in the outer physical forms of existence in the animal and plant kingdoms (the mineral kingdom does not belong here, for nothing can be learned about the true nature of the mineral kingdom in dreamless sleep) — the way in which life manifests itself in these kingdoms, how forms develop from one to another, what great laws life actually has – that, if we were to penetrate it in its true form, would suddenly illuminate many connections in life that are otherwise mysterious and obscure in the ordinary consciousness. Man undergoes all this without retaining anything consciously in his waking day consciousness.

This is nothing more than a description of the three states, of which only one is a real state of consciousness that we encounter in people.

Now it is self-evident that none of the experiences gained in this way can be the content of occult teaching. Occult experience begins only when a very specific transformation of the state of consciousness has taken place. This transformation will be briefly characterized.

There is a point in ordinary human consciousness that marks a turning point in the development of every person who is in any way reflective or sensible. This is the awakening of self-awareness. You all know that at first the child does not speak in the first person, but says: “Charles wants,” “Mary wants.” It is a very specific stage in the development of the human being when the possibility arises that he may say “I”. This awakening of self-awareness is different from all other facts that one can experience. It is a very intimate experience. Everyone can say “I” to themselves. You can give any other thing a different name. I can only say “I” to myself and no one can say “I” to another “I”. Only a person can refer to themselves with the very specific name, “I”.

Self-awareness is something completely different. The thought of the ego is exclusive and cannot be compared to any other. There is now a way to work on the ego in such a way that, just as it is only within itself in ordinary self-awareness, its entire world of thought is shaped from the center of the ego in the same way that the thought of the ego usually occurs. When, through diligent and sustained meditation, a person brings himself to face his entire world of thoughts in the same way that an ordinary person faces only the point of the ego, and not only his world of thoughts but the world of thoughts in general, then he is called an intuitive person. Then the world of thoughts emerges from the center of his being itself. He then produces thoughts in the same sense as he previously produced thoughts of the ego.

This stage of ego development can be attained. Through correct meditation in a certain sense, a person can come to relate to his world of thoughts in the same way as he previously related to his ego. Two sentences in “Light on the Path” have the power, when applied in the right way, to bring the ego to this point of view. They are not mere abstract sentences, but are written out of the astral experience of thousands of years. These two sentences, which are an extraordinary means of education, are:

Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.
Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.

There is strength and life in these sentences; they need only be applied in the right way. When man has reached this stage, then something else necessarily occurs: he is able to experience in an orderly way what is otherwise only experienced in dreamless sleep and what otherwise comes only in fragments. In this way, this world, which takes place in the astral, becomes just as real to him as the world of the senses was real to him before. Man then has the memory of the facts of the Kama world.

The next higher level is where the person no longer has dream-filled sleep, but is able to look into the higher world through intuition. This world is full of spiritual clarity; there is no longer any arbitrariness. Two perceptions are associated with this intuitive state. When a person has reached this stage of development, he perceives in his own experience the dangerous enemies of human life: the elemental spirits of birth and death, which continually lurk in the adjoining natural realms, which are always there, which try to seduce the human being, and so on. These elemental beings, which move into the astral body and influence its desires, are always there. In ordinary life, they are hidden by the veil of Maya.

These enemies in the neighboring natural realms are what a person first becomes aware of at this stage of development. And this is of the utmost importance for development in occultism. In this state, which can be compared to dreamless sleep, the person perceives – this is his first experience in this state of consciousness – what the enemies are that pull him down and lead him to the lower realms. It is good that these forces, which thus prevail in man, are hidden from the ordinary person. It is good that a veil is spread over them here. For it is not speaking of them, but really getting to know them, that only those who have attained a certain level of self-confidence and moral strength within themselves can bear. Therefore, no true occultist will give instructions on how to reach such a level before a person has achieved a decisive development of character in the direction of self-confidence, morality and presence of mind, so that he does not run the risk of losing himself, but can hold his powers together. These three qualities are required for every occultist.

That which is hidden from the consciousness of the day in this way, and which confronts man at this stage, is called the Guardian of the Threshold. He guards the threshold because he must not allow the ordinary man to see what is behind it. However, it loses much of its horror if the person has the designated character traits or has acquired them to a certain degree. By the end of the Atlantean era, people had ceased to develop these moral powers sufficiently. Hence the peculiar conditions arose that are known from the description of Atlantis.

In the continuation of this path, man must not only be brought to experience the world of thought as his own, but in order to be able to connect with reality at a higher level, he must also transform the entire world of feeling. Then the ability to see things directly in the higher worlds during the waking day consciousness begins, for example the human aura; initially only in the lower stages. When a person has reached this stage, he has basically already opened up a source of extraordinarily profound experience. Then he lives just as consciously in the spiritual as the ordinary person lives within the sense things.

On the third level, however, he lives where there is no longer any conscious experience for the ordinary person. He experiences the same as the ordinary person in the outer sense world, only on a higher level. He then experiences the laws of the world of causes. There is no longer any difference between the experiences in the so-called unconscious state of sleep and the conscious state of the day. This is the continuity of consciousness, which is gradually and very gradually attained. But relatively soon the separation of the soul will have progressed so far that it can live not only in thoughts but also in sensations. Then he can form concepts from these, as things actually look in reality.

“Light on the Path” gives the right instruction to reach this stage. It requires patience, perseverance and steadfastness in an extraordinary degree. The possibility for this lies in the forces hidden in the next two sentences:

Before the masters can speak, the wound must be unlearned.
Before the soul can stand, the blood of its heart must moisten its feet.

They contain the forces that lead people to direct experience and direct perception.

Those who have reached this stage and are able to say “I” to their world of feeling are now able to consciously experience all the truths related to devachan. The teachings of devachan can be consciously experienced at this level of consciousness.

One may well believe that when man has passed through evolution to this stage, he becomes a dreamer, that he loses his usual soberness and power of judgment. On the contrary, the possibility of yielding to superstition or dogma ceases. Even doubt and skepticism disappear from the soul when man has arrived at a concept of this stage of development. There is now a state analogous to dream-filled sleep and to deep sleep. When man has progressed so far as to see the Devachan, there are still other states into which he can consciously place himself. These are states in which he can experience something much higher. These states consist in the following.

From direct observation, one learns to recognize how the various forms of the universe transform and metamorphose into one another. It becomes clear how a thought form is formed out of mental substance, then encloses astral substance and plastically dominates the astral substance. But it is also learned how the beings of higher planes, from the mental plane through the astral plane, move down to the physical world. The entire sum of possible transformations of form in the universe lies before the initiate. He can answer the question of what forms a plant has undergone in earlier, long-gone epochs. The various forms of transformation that belong to our planetary system are revealed at this level of knowledge. This is called the conscious experience of form development in esotericism.

The state that is analogous to dreamless deep sleep shows how life, the essence itself, pours into the various forms. In this case, the difference is that during the second state, the various forms are perceived in very different colors than in the third stage. When a thought form is perceived, for example, it can appear in bright yellow colors. There are thought forms that are perceived in this way. There are also thought images that have a certain spiritual form. In the third stage, the vital ether flows into these thought forms, which may, for example, have the beautiful light color of a peach blossom. You can then not only see rigid or completely mobile forms that transform into one another, but also perceive how these forms are animated from their center.

The result is that you can place yourself in the various etheric forms of consciousness, so that you can not only recognize the laws of devachanic life, but also the transformations of our earth – only our earth, it does not go further – that it has undergone during the time of the so-called round developments. The process of passing through several planets or globes, of Arupa planets and Rupa planets and the like, is undergone. These transformations can be learned in this state of consciousness. And then the different rounds themselves can be undergone, learned.

Thus, through appropriate exercises, man can learn to understand part of the teaching that the theosophical movement has brought into the world. The further path can no longer be presented. On the other side, the state of consciousness begins, which consists of becoming insensitive to the possibility of external sensation. And with that, the actual life of the adept begins. From the experiences of the adept, only that which goes beyond the designated boundary can be gained.

The purpose of what has been presented here is to indicate the methods that lead to the knowledge that is available in the theosophical textbooks.

After all, the communication and reception of theosophy is partly based on trust. This must also be the case today. But it can be demanded that explanations be given as to the origin of this knowledge, which we in the West have the opportunity to access again. In this, the leading spiritual individuals, the masters, have the opportunity to provide not only the teachings, but also the esoteric perspectives, which, if used correctly, can promote development in a corresponding spiritual direction.

In addition to the significant work of “Secret Doctrine” by H.P. Blavatsky, the book “Light on the Path” has also been inspired, which really is a light on the path that humanity is to follow from now on into the future. When this path is trodden, or at least understood, only then will it be possible to know something of how this knowledge and this will, which are to lead to our goal, can be attained and how they must be attained in the future. For only a few today may the path be passable. This should not be talked about further. But we can be clear about the fact that that human experience in which the appearance of meaning ceases and higher experience occurs cannot be attained other than through a certain development of the spiritual life.

In a more intense way than in any other way, it is precisely through this spiritual development, which should live through teaching and word in the theosophical movement, that the great goal of development can be achieved, which has been expressed in that deep realization, that great esoteric truth, which can easily be said but is difficult to understand, and which belongs to the most ancient wisdom of mankind:

One life dwells in all beings, one and many, like the moon that reflects in many images on the water.

You have seen that we can only understand the Apocalypse correctly if the fundamental essence of the Christian mystical fact is placed in the right light. We have taken up the saying “Blessed are they that have faith, even though they do not see” in order to present the fundamental essence.

What was seen by the initiates in the centuries before Christianity was founded, what took place in the depths of the mystery grottoes and temples, that became, as we have seen, a world-historical fact, that was carried over to the great plan of world history. The story of the suffering, the dying, the resurrection and the ascension, these phases of the mystical life, as the initiate saw them in the mystery temples after the proper preparation, could now be believed by the believer as an historical fact. Thus what had previously been a secret or mystery had become a matter of faith, proclaimed, had become the gospel. So in the gospel there is nothing given other than the content of the old mystery books. Before, the content of the Gospel of John, in particular, from the thirteenth chapter to the end, was proclaimed to the initiated in the hidden books of the mysteries. But now it was proclaimed to the whole world, even to those who could not be directly convinced of the mysteries by psychic, mystical evidence. Blessed were those who did not see and yet believed. Thus the ancient mystery was revealed by Christianity. The gospel had become the revelation of ancient mystery books.

But what was a mystery at one time and was revealed at another time, that is, if it were simultaneous, is the same in content. What was later revealed to the whole world was always proclaimed in the mysteries in the times before, when humanity was not yet ready for it. What had become a revealed mystery in the first centuries of Christianity, at the time of its proclamation, was hidden earlier. For the first times in Christianity, the mystery appears again as a revelation that is supposed to prepare for a very distant future. The record of the events of the very distant future is contained in the Apocalypse of the Theologian John. And now let us see how.

We all know the development of the fifth root race of humanity through the various sub-races. We know that the sub-race of the Aryan race in which Christianity was absorbed was the fourth sub-race, and that we ourselves now live in the fifth sub-race, and that this will be followed by the sixth. To understand what is written in the Apocalypse, let us take a look at the development as we have to imagine it according to our present theosophical apocalypse of the future of the next race and the rest of our own fifth cultural epoch.

Let us return once more to the sentence: “With Christianity, the preceding mysteries became apparent to a certain extent.” The fourth sub-race [the Greco-Latin cultural epoch] was initially concerned with this – and it was its task – to establish this belief in Christianity as a mystical fact, this belief in this great mystery unfolding on the stage of world history. Now the fifth sub-race, our own, has emerged; it is the sub-race of intellect that wants to understand everything. Comprehending, explaining and understanding is the task of our era. This task will have been fulfilled when everything that the intellect is capable of comprehending has been grasped. The leadership of this, our fifth sub-race, will have fulfilled its task when it has been led to the point where the intellect will grasp and understand what was previously believed, so that we can explain it. This apocalypse of our fifth sub-race is presented to us in such a way that we are told: “A time will come when the personality that founded Christianity, the mystical Lamb, will unseal the book with the seven seals. What was mere belief remained sealed. But little by little the seven seals will fall from the Book, which was previously merely a book of faith and therefore a book closed to the mind.

What is in this book? This book contains the secrets of successive developments, the seven secrets that are repeated over and over again in every development of rounds and races, and in all other cyclic developments – including that of man. Let us take a look at how these seven secrets present themselves in man. I will only need to shed a little light on a few of these secrets, and you will immediately see what they are.

Consider the human being as he presents himself to us in seven parts in the theosophical classification. First, the physical body into which he moves in order to fulfill his world career in it. This is the first, the move into the world. The second is the settling into the so-called life principle. In prana, in which beings come to life, they enter the realm of struggle, the realm of war of everyone against everyone, the realm in which particularity stands against particularity. In order for this struggle, this particularity against particularity, to be brought into outer harmony, it is necessary that the will of man brings justice into this realm of struggle. But justice is not the only creator of harmony in the outer world. What must be brought into it occurs on the fourth level, where man not only establishes justice outwardly, but where he permeates external justice with the principle of love, which shines down from above, from the higher principles.

If you compare this with the opening of the seven seals in the Apocalypse, you will see that we are dealing with exactly the same situation:

And I looked, and behold, a white horse; and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.

First of all, there is the materialization of the going out.

And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And another horse went out, red; and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. [Rev 6,3-4]

Here the special fights against the special in the principle of life.

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. [Rev 6,5]

— the scales of justice.

And I heard a voice among the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see that you do not harm the oil and the wine. [Rev 6,6]

And when he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see! And I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was called Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with the sword, and with hunger, and with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth. [Rev 6,7-8]

The lower nature is killed, the higher nature emerges. The lower dies so that the higher spiritual can be redeemed.

If we apply the image not to the individual human being, but to the fifth race, then it has set out to solve the mission, to redeem the second sub-race, which was the warlike one. We thus enter the time of the struggle of the individual peoples against each other. Then comes the Kingdom of Justice, the kingdom that, according to the biblical historian, is reckoned from Abraham. There you will find the gradual ascent of the third principle, that of justice. The fourth principle signifies the advent of Christianity itself. The conquest of death through love is a higher realm than that of mere justice.

Then will come the kingdom that corresponds to the fifth sub-race. This kingdom, when it comes to an end, will understand the whole task of the fifth root race. It will understand from within what previously could only be believed from without. Thus the seals that have closed the rest of the understanding of the world will also fall. The world will become an open book. When the fifth cultural epoch is complete, the world will lie before our minds like an open book.

After that, calm sets in. This is nothing other than the hour in which the sixth sub-race prepares itself. The seals have been broken, the truths lie open before the eyes of men. And that will be the characteristic of the men of the sixth sub-race, that the truths lie open before the eyes of men, that they no longer need to be believed or grasped by the intellect, but that they can be seen with the eyes, be seen with an intuitive spirit. This is how the truths will present themselves to people in the sixth cultural epoch. In this sixth cultural epoch, humanity will have reached a higher level.

On an even higher level, people will once again experience the unveiling, the revelation of the secrets. This renewed manifestation of the secrets is depicted in the Apocalypse as the trumpeting of the angels. How open the truths will be then, not just like in a book, but so that they speak to us from all sides. The truths will not be like a thought, but like a spoken language. That is what the trumpeting of the angels means. And it is like the mood of the sixth sub-race emerging when the trumpeting of the angels is described to us. We will follow this in more detail at another time.

From there, follow the whole development further, and you will see that the Apocalypse also touches on those important points that will arise in the course of the development of the sixth sub-race, including the most important point, which can be characterized by the fact that people will be enlightened about the nature of good and evil in a completely different way. Since the truths will be obvious, the character of good and evil will be obvious to people. They will learn to read in the account book of their karma. That is the important point in time that will occur for the people of the sixth cultural epoch, when the law of karma will take on flesh and blood and the realization of justice will occur. Those who absorb such an awareness will then live to continue the next root race.

In this next root race, a great and significant event will occur. It is already prepared by the knowledge of good and evil, and it will be prepared to a higher degree during the sixth sub-race; for something quite different will occur then, and we must understand this if we want to understand the apocalypse. We remember that the way in which present-day humanity lives is not an absolute one, that it arose once, that it became sexual in the middle of the Lemurian race. It was only in the middle of the Lemurian period that this type of reproduction began in humanity, and also this type of living together, as it is in humanity now. What we now call birth and death only came into humanity then. Before that, the way life was lived was quite different. With birth and death, that individual karma came into being, as did reincarnation or re-embodiment. Everything we are now describing and recognizing as re-embodiment and karma and as the course of the individual human life between birth and death, only started in the middle of the Lemurian period. It was only then that people took on the form in which they currently embody themselves. Before that, they had other forms. This form, which once began, this passing through birth and death and this repeated embodiment, all this will also come to an end. Just as it began in the middle of the Lemurian period, so it will come to an end in the middle of the sixth root race. Then, in a part of humanity that will have already reached the corresponding level of development, in those who are called the firstfruits of humanity in the Apocalypse, the state that existed at a lower level before the Lemurian time will occur again. Then man was still asexual and not yet entangled in birth and death. This will come again after man has gone through his apprenticeship through the reincarnations. For him the time will come when he will again have, at a higher level, the spirituality that had previously been his at a lower level, but liberated from the physical form, the form that is directly present in the here and now.

Now, in Christian esotericism, one calls those entities, which weave and work in the evolution of the world, in the shaping of the world in the most diverse fields, angels. These entities are higher than the present human entities. Man works on earth, but higher entities have worked on man himself. That which must be accomplished in the evolution of the world by higher beings, that is, that which is of a higher nature, is assumed by Christian esotericism to have been brought about by beings it calls angels. In theosophical teachings, we speak of the Dhyanic nature, which in its power and wisdom lies above human development. Now, Christian esotericism calls those formers who are not on our level of consciousness and activity higher beings, angels, and the angel who formed the human form in the middle of the Lemurian period addresses them as the archangel Michael. Michael is the shaper of the human form as it is subject to birth and death, as it is subject to sexuality. Because man has entered birth and death and the angel of form, Michael, has given him precisely this form, the adversary of Michael has appeared on the other side, who always works in the course of evolution and who in Christian esotericism is called the dragon or the serpent. If we understand human evolution since the middle of the Lemurian period as the battle of the archangel Michael with the dragon, then this battle must enter a new phase in the middle of the sixth root race. The purest form must have been achieved in the human form, and the human being must have reached his goal in relation to the human form. Everything that was inhibiting must have been overcome. This battle, which takes place in the middle of the sixth root race, is described in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse.

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; and he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were also thrown down with him. [Rev 12,7-9]

In the beginning, the human being had to enter into the human form and had to take upon itself what the form brings with it and overcome it in the time of development alone. The human being had to take upon itself sexuality, birth and death. As hermaphrodites, as asexual beings, human beings entered evolution and became bisexual, became man and woman. Again, asexuality will have to occur in the middle of the sixth root race.

If you read the Apocalypse further, you will find the whole thing described in more detail in the fourteenth chapter.

Then I heard a voice in heaven, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of a great thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harps playing.

And they sang as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth.

These are the ones who have not been defiled with women, for they are virgins and follow the Lamb wherever He goes. These have been redeemed from among men as the first fruits to God and to the Lamb.

This mystical fact of the return to the Godhead is expressed in this passage of the Apocalypse. Now you will find a description of everything that is necessarily connected with it: that birth and death have been overcome, and that the first new resurrection is celebrated. But the other dead will not come to life again.

In the twenty-first chapter, verse 4, it says:

And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore, for the first has passed away.

When man has developed to the highest flower, then - in these high states - he can no longer suffer. Man will then have reached the highest level of his seven-part division. The specialness that was achieved precisely through the form of matter, as it occurred in the middle of the Lemurian period, will have attained the most robust form. No longer will man be enclosed within this physical form, which can only gain knowledge of the environment through the gates of the senses. He will have other, new senses. You will find this depicted in the Apocalypse in that it is no longer necessary for the sun and moon to shine because a different kind of perception will come into being for people. Then it is further said that a new city will come to earth for people.

What is understood as a new city? People have developed in their present dwellings. There is an esoteric expression for the present dwellings of people. What are the present dwellings of people? It is the sum of all human bodies, and every human body is a house within this one great city of people, in which all live. In Christian esotericism, every body is seen as a house in which the soul dwells. Now the human community in the form in which it existed in the middle of the Lemurian period is called the oldest Jerusalem. The form in which this human city existed at the time when Christianity was founded is called the “middle Jerusalem,” and the form that will then be there in the middle of the sixth root race is called the “new Jerusalem.

The founding of this new Jerusalem is again described in the Apocalypse, and it describes it in such a way that even the most unbelieving must realize what is being described. What kind of answer will we get when we ask: What will the houses be like? The apocalyptic says:

And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof.

And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as great as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.

And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. [Rev 21,15-17]

The city is found to have the measure of man. This is the measure that man will one day have; to this measure man will develop in the sixth root race.

Thus, you see, the Gospel was the revealed mystery of ancient times. The Apocalypse is the new mystery of the early Christian era. Just as the ancient mysteries contained the birth, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of man, and just as this mystical suffering, dying, and resurrection and ascension into heaven was the content of the ancient mysteries that was revealed in the Gospel, so the Apocalypse contains the new mystery of the future of humanity in the early Christian mysteries. The Apocalypse of the Theologian John is nothing other than that which was taught and interpreted in the first Christian mysteries.

Just as you would find in the Greek mysteries, when the pre-celebration of Christ's suffering, death and resurrection is celebrated in the form of the suffering Dionysus, who is dismembered and exalted, in the temple of the mystery, the mystery consists precisely in the fact that the secret is transferred to the initiates, so that they can prepare the time for it. Thus the first Christians, who experienced the great event as world-historical, were taught in the first Christian mysteries what was to be prepared through Christian education.

And this, in turn, is combined with the theosophical view of esoteric Christianity. We know that the description of what took place in Palestine is called the “gospel”, the “glad tidings” and is exoteric. But in addition, the following was also taught in the Christian mysteries: After the resurrection, Christ taught intimate disciples for years in the first Christian mysteries, and the teaching that was given there is contained in the Apocalypse. The interpretation was the one that we are only now able to give again through Theosophy. However, the Apocalypse was interpreted in our theosophical sense. This is the only thing meant by the introduction given by the theologian John himself. He says quite clearly who appears to him: it is he who was the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, he who alone is as pure as man was before he entered the life of development in the middle of the Lemurian time and as he will be again after he has left the process of development in the middle of the sixth root race: that is Christ, the first before the beginning of birth and death and the last after birth and death will be completed. The first and the last also reveal here at the center of development the Christian mystery, the secret of the sixth root race.

I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day and heard behind me a great voice like a trumpet. [Rev 1,10]

He, as an intimate disciple, has been granted the special grace to hear the trumpets already now. At this point in the establishment of Christianity, this is an anticipation. The voice spoke:

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last. Write the things you see in a book and send it to the churches in Asia: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.

And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. When I turned, I saw seven golden lampstands.

And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girded about on the chest with a golden girdle.

His head and hair were white like white wool, like snow, and his eyes like a flame of fire.

And his feet like unto brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.

This description is the one the mystic seer draws, also of the first incarnation, of the first descent into matter, where matter is not yet so densely condensed, where the eyes are still glowing, still active, and not merely gates to the outside world; and then again, where solid matter of the whole body world passed into liquid matter, where it is liquid like glowing metal.

That, you see - we will hear more about the details - is what is embodied in the Apocalypse, in the way one speaks in mystery books. And at the same time, you can see from this the essence of the mystery, which consists in the fact that what is to be revealed to a majority only later is first proclaimed to individual initiates. There are no secrets, no secret truths that do not become a revealed secret, a revealed truth at some time. They can only be revealed when people are ready for them. And in order for them to become ready for them, there must be individuals to lead humanity. These are initiated into the secrets in which only later other people are initiated. Only those who know the goal can lead to it. Only those who knew the goal could prophesy Christianity as prophets. To proclaim the gospel from the mysteries is to prophesy. At the same time, that which can become common property for all in the distant future should be revealed to people.

This is the course of spiritual world history, this is the evolution in world history, shrouded by circumstances that we can no longer speak of today. Humanity's great laws of development were shrouded at first. Over time, they are revealed and evolved. Mystery after mystery is unveiled. What was only known and guarded by initiates will, in the course of time, be revealed. That which was first sealed will be unsealed; that which the eyes have read will later resound in the opened spiritual ear like a revelation from outside, from the outer world, as if through a trumpet.

From the question and answer session

[Mr. Schouten asks some questions about the fourth dimension]

I intend to give a lecture on the fourth dimension and would then like to try to bring about an understanding of this fourth dimension by following up Mr. Schouten's remarks. It will be better if I speak about the fourth dimension in connection with the direct experiment.

Is John the theologian the same as the author of the Gospel of John?

The writer of the Gospel of John is the most intimate disciple of Jesus. This also enabled him to give the deepest form to the teaching. Today it is impossible for most people to understand. In the nineteenth chapter it says:

Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside him, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” [John 19:25-26]

To love a disciple means to be an initiate. Then he says to the disciple:

Behold your mother! And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.

This is a significant passage. It tells us that the mother's name cannot have been Mary. John never refers to the mother of Jesus as Mary. There is another passage from the second chapter that deals with this.

And when the wine failed, Jesus' mother saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.

I would just like to note that this implies that the mother of Jesus is hinting at something very special. She is the spiritual substance from which he creates his work. The old Judaism, which was to become Christianity, referred to Jesus, when he had become a Christian, as his mother. This mission of his people calls him, calls him first when he is to turn the old water into wine. Then he says: Woman, my hour has not yet come. The Jewish people have been handed over to the son of the Jewish people with the words: Behold, this is your mother. It was this John who then also wrote the Gospel and the Apocalypse.

Can't the long time of development actually be shortened by people's brotherly cooperation?

The fraternal cooperation of people can indeed shorten the long time of development. The years are not the same length on the higher planes. Only on the physical plane are the years of equal length. Imagine whether you would have any measure of time at all if you no longer had physical events. Or imagine that the sun would move faster, then the years would become shorter.

Is the Theosophical Society also based on evolution?

The Theosophical Society was founded on the evolutionary point of view.

What do the words mean: What will happen shortly?

This is a passage that says as much as what you will achieve shortly.

What is meant by the “community of saints”?

The “community of saints” is the great brother lodge of the masters, the adepts. It is easy for those who know nothing about them to make mocking remarks, which has been done enough already. The higher individualities are united in brother lodges. These are the anticipation of what all humanity will achieve in the middle of the sixth root race. And it is this principle of fraternization that is to be achieved in the sixth root race. And what can only be achieved by the spiritual emerging from the physical-material. This community of saints is what is presented as the next stage of development. Spiritual evolution has two stages: becoming blessed and becoming holy. Blessed is derived from soul. The eight beatitudes are a guide to becoming blessed in oneself. But to find blessedness outside of oneself, one must become holy. The saints live in absolute community.

We can only understand the Apocalypse if we accept the fundamental nature of Christianity as a mystical fact. This fundamental nature is contained in the words: “Blessed are they that have believed, not seen.” What once took place in the interior of the crypts has now been carried out into the arena of world history itself. The old mystery was revealed in Christianity: that which is a mystery at one time becomes manifest at another. The content of ancient mystery books is reproduced in the Gospels; the record of future events is contained in the Apocalypse of John.

Anyone who wants to understand the spirit of such writings must, above all, know how religions work.

Today, there is a widespread belief that the simple word contains the truth, and there is an aversion to elevating the spirit. Nothing should be said against the simplicity of the word: but the inner strength from which such speech flows springs from the highest heights of the spirit. Not everyone could speak of the revelations of the highest regions. The church father had the strength, the power of the [gap in the text]

A destiny seen in mystery is described to us in the apocalypse. A lower initiation is enough to see beyond one root race, a higher one is necessary to see beyond many. To create an apocalypse, the third degree of chelaship is necessary. In the realm of highly developed astral vision, the destiny of a root race unfolds before us. From the fourth chapter on, the Apocalypse is devachanic vision. He who wrote the Apocalypse overlooked the period up to the middle of the Lemurian race and the future until sexuality ceased. The higher experiences are no different from each other. Never do two initiates report in different ways. The initiates of all times spoke as the apocalyptic did. In the Apocalypse, the author speaks from the Christian point of view.

Let us look back at the formation of the races.

Before the Lemurian race, there was a development of humanity that was quite different. The etheric body had not yet solidified; it did not walk on the ground, but floated through the etheric earth itself. Its organs were luminous. Man incarnated in fiery clouds at the beginning of the Lemurian race. The esotericist describes that transition from fine to physical matter, those beings that developed into physical density, as the eagle state of man. The eagle is therefore the human being who has developed from the ether to physical matter.

In the Atlanteans, man had a strengthened life force, he could control prana, use the seed power. During the present race, for about thirteen million years, he has only mastered physics. Later he will regain control over the etheric body and the astral body.

This second stage, in which man still has control over the etheric body, is symbolized by the lion man.

For the Aryan, who has descended completely into the physical, the symbol is the bull.

Three very definite successive stages of humanity are thus designated.

The symbolic language is understood by everyone who has learned it; they know what is meant by the special signs.

A frequently used character is two interlocking triangles: an eagle at the top, a lion on the left, a bull on the right; in the middle, a human face. This means that there is a triangle below that characterizes past conditions. The three angles therefore remain initially [gap in the text]

In the middle is the inner man, the actual permanent essence. These are the four natures, through which man is actually human, can be seen in the two intertwined triangles.

These three animals appear wherever the development of the human being is discussed. But in the Apocalypse of John, there is still another way of speaking. The apocalyptic overcomes the veils that separate him from the earlier stages. In order to be able to see himself back, the earlier organs must be enlivened. He must draw animals that see and look. Eye, all eye.

The future stages can only be grasped by someone who has an eye for the ascent, the use of the higher bodies. Now we are in the stage of the purely physical mind. This mind requires a certain moral teaching and a certain religion. In essence, the individual must seek his fortune at the expense of the other. Those who strive for the higher must already rise above the rest. In the occult school, there are three words that describe the new age. These are:

Brotherly love: the love of community as a moral ideal.

Pneumatology: the doctrine of the spirit and the spiritual as the decisive thing: scientific ideal.

Free religious principle: self-authority in religious matters.

This will be the sixth race.

A well-known occult law is that in certain time cycles, what has happened before will be repeated. The eagle, bull and lion were repeated in the first three sub-races. The fourth sub-race is referred to as “human”. In it, Christianity emerged.

The people of the first sub-race, the Indian people, had expressed the culture of thought, the highest deification of thought. They had to repeat in brief what the Lemurians had experienced. The Lemurians were people of feeling; the Indians thought in feelings; what thought radiates in feelings we find in the old Vedic culture - thought takes hold of feelings in the Indian. In cultures where thought is served more by memory, we have the culture of heroes, the long catalogs that have led to memory. Much was noted. And from the notes of the ancient Persians, the Magi, the Chaldeans, the calendar books were created. From them developed astronomy, astrology, technology, mathematics, and so on.

Thus man came to the race where he understood what it means: in man himself, the god has come to life.

The first race could fall away most easily. The feeling is not yet strong enough for the thought to really internalize.

Every day that one delves deeper into Vedanta-Alchry is a source of new admiration. On the other hand, the most abject idolatry that the people have fallen into confronts us. But the great virtues of people always have the greatest dark sides as well. The Apocalypticist seeks to make us understand this phenomenon by using the example of the community of Ephesus, symbolized by the sect of the Nicolaitans; it is intended to show us how, in the fifth root race, the most external lives alongside the highest.

Let us visualize how the early Christians viewed their Christianity.

“There are three that begat it on earth, and three in heaven.” Atma, Buddhi, Manas. Father, Son and Spirit.

To speak of the Father would have been rejected by the early Christian. He believed he could only recognize the Father through the Son, through the Word: “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

The highest that man can aspire to is thought, the mental. It is characteristic of man on earth that he lives in three worlds at once: the spiritual, the soul and the physical - but only in the physical consciously.

The highest for all religions was the world-creative will. When man, through the will, wants to express the thought, then it is first through the word. The word is the expression of the spirit through the will. Thus the Christian said: The Father expressed his spirit in the world through the power of the word. This is the second person of the Trinity, the third is the Holy Spirit, and He is expressed in the Word. The world is the embodiment of the Spirit and came into being through the Word of God, as the vibration of air comes through human speech. This Word is to be thought of as the Second Person, as the highest Being, much more personal than a human individuality. This highest being became man for the first Christians in the one whom they recognized as the proclaimer of the Gospel. He who does not understand this, he who wants to dispute the Word made Flesh, cannot place himself in the frame of mind of the first Christians. That the Christian has risen to devachanic vision is clear to him who knows how to read the Gospel.

The Christ-life has something essentially different from the Buddha-life, and this was understood by the first initiates. Time is suspended, the past is present: such is devachan. At the transfiguration of Christ the three disciples are uplifted to devachanic vision.

Here we have something that we do not have in the Buddha life. Buddha became luminous... here it concludes. The Christ life begins its most significant epoch with this fact. Thus the first Christians said: “We well understand the pre-announcement of this, which is fulfilled in the present, through the old religions... But blessed are those who believe, not see.

What had previously been achieved by beholding the great truths of the world in the interior of the crypts could now be experienced by those who merely believed. The mystery was brought out into the open world arena. The cross of Golgotha is the same act, erected before all eyes. The ancient mystery doctrine had to be brought to the world in a popular form. A step has been taken that leads further than the old religions.

Dear attendees!

We have reached an important point in our consideration of the Apocalypse. What more is to be said about it should lead us even deeper into certain hidden truths. We will see how this difficult-to-understand work expresses the theosophical truths in a magnificent form. When we look back at what has already been said here, we have to describe the Apocalypse as the “secret revelation” of what the human spirit is to experience in its future development. But it would be quite wrong for anyone to think that such a predestination suppresses the will of the human being, or to believe that everything must come about in a certain way, regardless of what the human being does. No, that is absolutely not the case. The great universal laws of the spirit are not given in such a way that they are imposed on man from without, but for the purpose of man inwardly absorbing them and developing himself in their spirit. According to a very definite natural law, oxygen and hydrogen must combine to form water; but human will can bring about the conditions for them to combine, and can thus be the reason why the laws take effect. When he immerses himself in the laws of nature, he himself becomes the executor of these laws. He takes them into his spirit and thus becomes a co-creator of nature himself. It is no different with spiritual laws. It is ordained in the world that it should develop in accordance with spiritual laws, as it is grounded in nature, that it should shape itself according to natural laws. And just as man can only become a worthy co-creator of nature by acquiring knowledge of natural laws, so too can he only be active in spiritual life if he makes spiritual laws his own. If we know nothing of the laws of oxygen and hydrogen, we cannot participate in the way they combine. We fulfill our human task through the knowledge and understanding of natural laws. These would be present and valid even without our knowledge. But without our knowledge, nature would pass over us. We would remain in our dullness and could only be will-less tools in its creation.

The great spiritual laws would also be active in the world without our knowledge. What is said in the Apocalypse would be true even if no human being ever grasped it, just as the law of the connection between chemical substances would be true even if no human being ever knew about it. But it is in the hands of man to approach his divine goal by observing these laws. The light that reveals itself through divine power in the world must shine into his soul. In this highest sense, the “childhood of God” must be understood by man. A father does not keep his knowledge to himself, but shares it with the child so that it may develop in the sense of this knowledge. Of course, the child would also grow older if it did not care about the laws and watched idly as the father acts. But the child would remain undeveloped. But the Father's love consists in developing it. And God's love for man consists in revealing his will in the human soul. God has called man to be perfect. God not only creates, but also reveals himself; and man's will must make the revelations of the Godhead the impulses of his will. What is to happen is certainly determined from the beginning; but it is equally determined that man himself should carry out the revelations of the Godhead. God has not excluded human action from his plan of the world, but has included it in it from the very beginning. Certainly everything necessary would be done by the Father if the child were inactive. But then the child would have no part in anything.

The Apocalypse was added to the Gospel. For the Christian, the Gospel represents the joyful message of the incarnation of God or the divine Word. This “Word” has become flesh to dwell among men. This sacrifice of God means the liberation of man from the bonds of matter. Through Christ, man is to be united in spirit with his God. By adhering to Christ, he carries the Spirit of God in his heart. But this Spirit of God is the guide to the will of the Father. And the will of the Father is revealed in the Holy Scriptures, such as the Apocalypse is one. From Christ, the strength shall flow to the Christian to understand what the Father has decided from the beginning of the world. Christ died so that man may live, live in the Spirit. In the Apocalypse lies the spiritual will of the Father. Those who are initiated through Christ in faith receive the strength to reach the Father through Christ. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” But the Christian should also reach the Father, that is, he should recognize the will of the Father in the Revelation. The Gospel is the joyful message of Christ's sacrifice for the sake of man; the Apocalypse is the revelation of the divine will of the Father. Christ said that after his death he would send the 'Spirit'. And the theologian John only faithfully wrote down what the Spirit promised by Christ revealed to him.

When the Christian looks to Christ, uniting himself with him, he receives the strength and the life to understand the will of the Spirit; when he looks to the Revelation, he knows how to apply the strength received from Christ. The Apocalypse is a book. And every book has value only if one has the strength to understand it. Life in Christ should give the Christian the strength to understand the secret Revelation. This strength is bestowed through grace, as all spiritual strength is a gift of grace. But this strength must be developed. Christ wanted to unite people into a community of children of God; but the spirit of Revelation should bring the children of God to full maturity.

Starting from this point, we will delve even deeper into the Apocalypse next time.

Today we will deal with a paraphrase of the sentence that the whole world is meaningful, that the whole world is thought. By seeing creative thoughts in the world, we can find the thought. The mystics never arranged things in an arbitrary way, but in such a way that human institutions are also an image of world thoughts.

The names of the days of the week have a regular pattern. The days of the week are named after the planets. We want to learn to recognize how the names of the days of the week were established by the Chaldean magicians. The ancient Chaldean magicians said: Each day has four parts - forenoon, afternoon, before midnight, after midnight. They had to see these four parts of the day as the first element in time, as the next time period. They related the four-part day to the seven known planets.

[Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn = daily cycle Sun, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn = weekday names]

They had the seven planetary cycles described through the four-part day until they returned to the starting point, a number of days in a row. The ancient Chaldean magicians let the planetary cycles run through the four-part day. They dedicated the first morning to the moon. The end of a cycle coincided with the seventh day. Each planet had completed a four-fold cycle by the end of the week. They named each day of the week after the planet to which the morning was dedicated.

Morning – Moon = Monday
Afternoon – Mercury
Before midnight – Venus
After midnight – Sun

Morning – Mars = Mars Day = Tuesday – Tin
Afternoon – Jupiter
Before midnight – Saturn
After midnight – Moon

Morning – Mercury = Wednesday, Mercury day, Wednesday – Wotan
Afternoon – Venus
midnight – Sun
After midnight – Mars

Morning – Jupiter = Thursday – Donar, Jupiter day
Afternoon – Saturn
Before midnight — moon
After midnight — Mercury

Morning — Venus = Friday, Venus day
Afternoon — sun
Before midnight — Mars
After midnight — Jupiter

Morning – Saturn = Saturday, Saturn Day, Saturday
Afternoon – Moon
Before midnight – Mercury
after midnight – Venus

Morning – Sun = Sunday
Afternoon – Mars
Before midnight – Jupiter
After midnight – Saturn

Commercial culture no longer understood the naming of the days of the week after the stars. It is namely a very specific relationship, namely of four to seven, the fourfold related to the seven principles. The naming of the days of the week is a human institution. However, it was not done arbitrarily, but in the way it was prescribed by the circumstances. The people of that time allowed the cosmic conditions to resonate from everything and allowed the institutions to relate to each other in the same way that the microcosm relates to the macrocosm.

If you look at the environment properly, you will see that it is based on a very specific view of the world and life. It is a kama-manasic view that belongs to the lower mental plan. If people wanted to move on to such determinations, which contain measure and number, they would have to be inspired by the rupa plan of the mental.

Let us note that the time when such a thing could happen had to be inspired by the Rupaplan of the mental. So these labels came from a time when people were inspired by the Rupaplan of the mental.

The next plan they are inspired by is the astral plan. The relation of inspiration to the various plans, as it expresses itself in the various sub-races of the five root races, is as follows.

Let us assume that inspiration emanates from the astral plane and that kama is thus ordered. From the mental plane, inspiration also came about in terms of spatial relationships - for example, the inspiration for the construction of pyramids, whose proportions are based on the orbits of the stars. Kama can be ordered from the astral plane by permeating it with the idea of justice; ordering human instincts and feelings according to justice.

If we descend to a lower level, we come to the physical plane. There, human actions can no longer be ordered according to the idea of justice. There, the principle of action must be placed within each individual person. What used to be justice on the astral plane and measure and number on the mental plane must be placed in the heart of the human being on the physical plane.

The Arupaplan lies above the Rupaplan, measure and number cease; the determination according to very specific relationships and forms ceases; there is only the direct inflow of the divine. Thus, in the time of the Arupaplan, when the mind still allowed itself to be inspired by the Arupaplan - in the first sub-race, the Indian race - there was direct inspiration of the divine. At that time the Rishi culture existed. The Vedas emerged with incredible speed. Afterwards, the influence slowed down to the physical plane and became slower and slower. What was the principle of love in detail on the physical plane is now rising again to take hold of a majority. On the next Rupaplan, community life is now being organized according to measure and number. The peoples themselves determine races and classes according to their own reason. On the Arupaplan, a fully collective consciousness then follows.

These seven periods are in fact spread over the seven sub-races of the fifth root race.

1. The first sub-race, the Indian, belongs to the inspiration of the Arupa plan, the Rishikultur.

2. The peoples who allowed themselves to be inspired by the Rupaplan are the Persian and Chaldean Magi, the Persian race.

3. Inspired by the astral plan are all those who correspond to the same principle, the principle of justice. They were the peoples who gave commandments, the ancient Israelites, all those who prepared Christianity in the time before Christianity, the Semitic-Celtic sub-race.

4. The Greco-Latin race, which in its end developed the principle of love in Christianity.

5. The gradual development of the communal is reserved for our race. But it will only achieve this at the end, the Germanic sub-race.

6. The sixth

7. and seventh sub-races are races of the future, which have to develop socialism out of the spiritual. The nations will give themselves their organization.

In order to bring order into oneself, one must understand something like this. We were embodied in all the races. In the second sub-race, measure and number were involved in us. In the next incarnation, we had to develop measure and number. This will be fruitful as karma of the sixth sub-race, in which man will make arrangements according to measure and number. Likewise, inspiration will emerge on the Arupaplan in the seventh sub-race. We, in the fifth sub-race, live out what was taught in the third sub-race: justice.

The fourth sub-race is a special phenomenon: love. It has an effect in everything, but only expresses its own nature in the sixth root race. True Christianity will only be expressed in the sixth root race. In the sixth sub-race, the forms will be created into which the life of the sixth root race will be poured. Our sub-race has not progressed further than a sufficient sense of right and wrong; this was laid down in the third sub-race. The principle of justice.

The Theosophical Society is to prepare the communal life of the fifth sub-race. This can only come into its own in the second half of the sixth sub-race. The Theosophical Society upholds the principle of love throughout this development. Communal life must be created; that is a physical necessity. But love must be maintained - through the cultivation of humanity.

In the Slavic race live on those who have learned their activity in the second sub-race, in which measure and number were. Personalities like Robespierre were also present in the third sub-race.

In the sixth sub-race, the magicians from the second sub-race live again.

Those in the seventh sub-race will be those who have worked in secret – adepts or masters – during the other sub-races. After the first sub-race, they remain in secret.

That which is being must first have been activity. The activity of the third sub-race becomes being in the fifth sub-race. The activity of the fourth sub-race is complete in itself.

Laocoon is the representative of the old priesthood of justice, which is taken by surprise by Odysseus, whose snake - cunning - is taken by surprise, like Troy by the Greeks, like the third by the fourth sub-race. The saga of the wooden horse was written by an initiate. This is the great karmic question that determines the cyclical nature of human life.

The development through the races proceeded at an ever slower pace until the physical state, but then ever faster. The future events will not be long in coming; a certain number of people will be saved, who will bring culture from the fifth [root race] to the sixth [root race].

From the Question and Answer session

During evolution, man gradually discarded the various lower kingdoms, which then continued to exist alongside him as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms - cold- and warm-blooded animals. The forces from which these kingdoms developed were previously necessary for man himself to develop. But then there came gradual times when these forces would have hindered his development. Therefore, they were stripped away, distilled out of human nature. When this happened, the corresponding faculties looked quite different from the present mineral, plant and animal forms. By stripping away certain natures, man has gradually attained certain higher powers. That is why the other realms, and especially the animal realm, have a very specific relationship with him, which can be traced back to the individual animal species. The horse symbolizes such a connection. In the time of the second race, the Hyperboreans, man acquired the ability to receive intellectual activity by shedding what later developed into the horse in the animal kingdom. He had to shed it, otherwise he would not have been able to receive Manas later. He was ready to receive Manas in the third race, in the middle of the Lemurian period. The horse only developed in the way we know it in the fourth race, in the Atlantean period.

Thus, the development of the mind in humans is in some ways related to the horse, to the nature of the horse. That is why the horse was considered sacred by all ancient peoples and often used as a symbol, for example in the Apocalypse. The ancient peoples, especially the Atlanteans, were aware of these connections without knowing them directly. One figure from the saga, the centaur, actually existed in the transition period when man gradually shed what became the horse nature. The mind was now what enabled man to rise to the higher, divine. Therefore, a horse was given as a symbol to those who had overcome their lower nature, who understood how to fully carry out the elevation, who had become an initiate into the essence of the higher nature.

If we want to understand the migrations of the fifth post-Atlantic races, we must be aware that it is difficult to see clearly in this chaos. Descendants of all previous races have settled here, and we are already working in the fourth [root] race with a population that is spreading out in a radiating manner, as it were, and is itself mixed with descendants of other races. In the fifth race, the situation is most complicated. Everywhere we find remnants of populations that once already had a culture. As far as we look at the peoples of the southern Asian continent, we have remnants of the ancient Lemurian population. In the interior of Australia, their descendants can still be found. In western and northern Asia, in Central Asia and southern Europe, we find remnants of the fourth Atlantic epoch. This is the soil into which the branches of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch sink. So here we have the result of two currents: the Lemurian-Aryan on the one hand, and the Atlantean-Aryan on the other. All these cultures, however, have absorbed an even older one; Siberia, Scandinavia, northern Russia, China even have remnants of the Hyperborean culture. These mixtures are difficult to unravel. Let us try to trace the course of the Aryan cultural impact.

From a point in Central Asia, near the Gobi and Khamo deserts, this cultivation spread outwards in a radius. It was a decidedly priestly culture that prepared a spiritually highly educated race to enter the chaos of nations, to send out colonies from which new civilizations would arise. This small tribal people emerged from the fifth sub-race, the Ursemites of the fourth Atlantic epoch. We must bear in mind that these Ursemites were given their specific task, which is expressed in the Law of Manu, to offer to people in the broadest sense what is expressed in the words of Jesus: 'The kingdom of God does not come with external gestures, but the kingdom of God is among you'. Everything that came before was only a preparation for this point in time. It was what became the guiding tendency of Christianity: the sanctification of the personality, the full descent to the physical plane. This mission first had to be carefully prepared.

From the very beginning, the Manu in the root race placed very little emphasis on what goes beyond birth and death in man. These teachings had played an important role in the past and were now slowly dying out to gradually disappear. The Manu of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch wanted to lead people down to the physical plane in order to understand the physical heart, brain, and lungs. So these teachings, which went beyond birth and death, slowly faded in the first three post-Atlantic cultures. For even a Manu cannot direct fate and events as he wills, but must accomplish everything in accordance with the great laws of nature. Two things were available to him: the culture that still existed from the Lemurian population in southern Asia, and the remnants of the Atlantean culture in Africa. He sent his colonies there with initiated priests. Some to India, others to Africa. He gave them the teaching of non-reincarnation, the teaching [about life] between birth and death. In fact, the oldest Vedas contain nothing of what goes beyond birth and death. He said to himself: “Peoples who know nothing about reincarnation are coming together with those who have a precise knowledge of it. The result will be the right one.

In Egypt, they came together with the Atlanteans, who did not have such a sharp doctrine of reincarnation. For while the last Lemurians had trained them to the highest degree, it had already been distorted by the Atlanteans; with them, everything had come to a head in memory; the memory of the Atlanteans was so sharp that it outweighed everything else, that all that was physical lived in them through inheritance. So in this first excerpt we have two branches: the Indo-Aryans and the Hamites.

In India, the immigrating Indo-Aryans, who came with the old teaching of the word revealed by God - Veda word - took up the doctrine of reincarnation, and in Brahmanism we have what comes out so beautifully as the doctrine of reincarnation. This was brought about by the Manu. Meanwhile, the subjugated Lemurians became pariahs, and the Indians became the four castes. This is the principle of the initiates: the blending of the new with the old, here the powerful manasic spirituality with the doctrine of reincarnation.

In the Hamitic branch – Noah's three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth – the doctrine of reincarnation receded somewhat. It was less clear on the surface. The Egyptians placed more emphasis on the preservation of corpses. The inheritance system was more emphasized, which places the main value on physical continuity. The value of the individual life was emphasized and already transformed the ancient Rishi doctrine. A less decided doctrine of reincarnation mixed here with the doctrine of personality.

The second migration consists in the fact that a new branch was sent out, as it were. We can follow it if we first look eastward to the Medes and Persians and then to the tribe that passed through Chaldea and found its historical expression in the migrations of Abraham - from Ur in Chaldea. On the one hand, the tribe that went west also came into contact with the remnants of the Atlantic culture, namely with the fourth sub-race of the Atlanteans, the Turanian population, who had been engaged in agriculture.

Thus a peculiar mixture arises. Grafted onto that Turanian branch was the practice of magic – and it had to be grafted on firmly! From here came the teachings of the Medes and Bactrians. Here the first Zarathustras were active, endeavoring to use the external techniques of magical time in the service of external culture. The result is a mighty flourishing of agriculture and viticulture; in them we have the revival of the old magical skills.

A colonist branch goes further west and came across remnants of the undrawn Ursemites of the Atlantean race, and these form what is called the ancient Semitic tribe: Chaldeans, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs. They form a new Semitic culture.

The most significant events occurred first among the Medes and Persians. They are contained in an ancient saga that has undergone many transformations and finally comes to us in the form of Cyrus: King Astyages had a daughter, Mandane, who married not a Mede but a Persian. The father dreamt that a tree was growing out of his daughter's womb. The dream was interpreted to mean that the Persian tribe would overshadow the Median tribe. The ancient saga of Cyrus has a uresoteric meaning. Cyrus represents the agricultural Persians in contrast to the non-agricultural Medes, and the [peasant] signifies that agriculture will win out: ancient culture will pass to the farmers.

How this came about can be seen from the institution of the Persian character. Physically strong they should become. There were no Lemurians here; the Atlanteans had prepared the ground for the development of personality. The Persians emphasized personal virtues above all. It is a remarkable trait that they had lessons in telling the truth; this was a main subject for boys, along with gymnastic exercises. And that is very important. They were preparing for what would lead to personal prowess reaching its peak.

Now we come to the point where the original Semitic element mixed with the new. Priest-Rishis migrated over and found decadent Old Semites and also decadent Akkadians. Thus the Manu formed a new branch by combining his immigrants with the decadent Semites, those who had developed arithmetic during their Atlantean heyday. What emerged from this was the Chaldean wisdom. [...] Astrology, astronomy, the observatories, the calendar, weights and measures emerged. The immigrants who had encountered the Akkadians, the ancient trading people, were used to create new colonies in this mixture. These were the Phoenicians.

Another excerpt followed: A colony of Rishis with followers went over to Europe. Here he found the old Hyperborean element, and in the south the Atlantic one. The Hyperboreans had already mixed with the Atlanteans; so only a small remnant of them remained. In the south, Hyperborean was almost non-existent. Here, on the soil of ancient Greece, the Pelasgian population arose with a kind of nature service that is reminiscent of Egyptian practices in many ways; only here it is more of a local cult instead of an ancestral cult: we find sacred trees, sacred caves; it is more closely tied to nature. There was a belief that the sacred is more closely tied to the place than to the tribe - Zeus of Dodona and others. The physical place becomes sacred. That was the new formation.

In Italy, too, a mixture of ancient Atlantean and Rishi culture is being brought into the physical plan again. Here, what had developed in the Atlanteans as a social being and as an attachment to technical culture penetrated: in the social legislation and technical skill of the Etruscans.

In the north, the mixture of Hyperborean and Rishi culture gave rise to the new formation of Celtic culture. What was found was an Atlantean-Hyperborean culture that was of little use. A new influence had to be given, and the result is the Celtic mixture with the Druid culture. This has so much spirituality because it absorbed the highly spiritual, which went beyond the spirituality of the Atlantic and Lemurian. Because it had the Hyperborean element in it, the Celtic could not quite withstand it and was absorbed by the later cultures.

We now come to the third sending forth. It is very complicated. It goes partly into what was previously prepared by the first two. We have preserved it in the representations of different peoples. Wherever the strong, powerful people are already in the foreground in the traditions. Thus, above all, a group of initiates went west and fertilized the already fertilized pre-Semitic element once again. Because it is about summarizing everything that was originally poured into the great idea of state-building. The result of this third sending out according to this poetry is Genesis, the Old Testament.

Another dissemination was the one that went to Asia Minor and formed what is preserved in Trojan culture and its daughter cultures, one of which is Albalong culture. These initiates had the task of taking over state formation as soon as it suited the various peoples.

We have thus become acquainted with three groups of initiates, the first of which had the task of creating the religious culture, the second of creating the material cultural basis - Persia - and the third of forming the state and consolidating the passions. This happens in forms adapted to the different peoples, as in Troy, or Alba Longa, or the theocratic state of Palestine. But essentially these were only preparations, made with peoples who were not called to form states. Among the people who were most called upon to carry the spiritual out onto the physical plane through their culture, the formation of states was least successful: the Greeks are above all the people of art. The highest personal thing brought out onto the physical plane: that is art. The initiate of the third group - in the case of the Greeks - is the hero, the strong man.

Over there in Asia, the peoples had already mixed repeatedly. And those who had received the highest legislation, the Jews, had mixed so much that they had already become hypertrophied. In contrast, in Europe, in central Italy, there had been a simpler mixture. We find a very strong Atlantic element there. The Etruscan colony had cooperated with Alba Longa, the priest state, and brought about Rome. Here there was simple racial formation and a great deal of Atlanticism in it. The two traits were enough to establish what is called the Etruscan-Roman culture, with the priestly influence that had to lead to the institution of the Pontifex Maximus. The conditions were simple, and so the people of the Roman Republic emerged, who developed personal bravery purely for themselves. The Roman citizen, the cives, was the fully-fledged human being who felt entirely as a personality. The Greeks had to feel themselves above all as wise men and artists. When they cultivated what most emerges from the personality, oratory and law, they had to perish. Private law and oratory, eloquence, were only developed to perfection in Rome. The Greek first sensed [...] and then developed the perfect personality by representing it in his gods. The Roman represents in his person the perfected personality as a citizen, as a real human being. The works of Greek sculptors, so to speak, arise in the Romans and come to life.

Thus, in Rome something was being prepared that the Lodge of the Initiates could use to give a further impetus. The highest peak of spiritual life had to be taken for this purpose. This could only be found where most spiritual impacts had occurred, namely in the Near East. There spirit was grafted onto spirit:

1. The self-impact: the fifth sub-race of the Atlantians Ursemites on the first sub-race of the Aryan population.
2. The move into the area of the Euphrates and Tigris.
3. The patriarchal period - the time of the heroes.
4. The theocracy.

This wonderful mixture is expressed in all branches of intellectual life. The new influence there could only come from a personality who came from far away, not from their own country.

The lodge carefully selected the family from which an initiate was to come. The old Rishi culture had prepared, foretold the initiate who must now come. It was written in the Sibylline books.

Thus, in secret, away from Judaism, in Galilee, the Messiah of the fourth sub-race was being prepared. There in Galilee, Judaism had never gained a firm foothold; it had not penetrated there. The Galileans are very mixed in racial character. It was important that He should have nothing of the Galilean, that He should come as from the hidden. That is why the apocrypha tell of him as being a son of his mother, and speak of his unchaste birth. This was Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean. He was initiated to the third degree of a disciple. Now it was a matter of making him the highest initiate for everything that was to be realized on the physical plane. This was done by taking possession of the whole personality by another, who represents the whole fifth root race, by the Christ. In the Greco-Latin culture, the whole fifth post-Atlantic epoch emerged, and this is symbolically represented in the descent of the dove. If one wanted to express the truths at issue here, one could only choose the highest form.

The Manu said to himself, “I will make the fourth sub-race into a union of all the previous impacts and endow it with the spirit of the entire fifth root race. The Christ can do this, who is the actual impact of the entire fifth root race. The Manu prepared it, and Christ, as it were, entered into what had been prepared. The revelation of the actual secret of the fourth race was to take place. Earlier it had only been prepared, the highest initiates had seen it, the others prepared. That was the darkness into which the light came.

If we survey the development, we have results that are prepared by the fact that the first three sub-races are gradually educated to become personalities - until in the fourth the most profound part of the personality is seized, as the equality of all people before God.

Initiates who were sent out were not begotten by the father and mother of the race in question. They were sexless everywhere.

This is really said in the Gospel of John:

He came to that which is His own, but His own did not receive Him. And as many as received Him, to them He gave power to become the sons of God, even to those who believe in His name: <5>they were born, not of flesh and blood, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Christ is the inwardly divine principle; he must pour himself into forms and takes the form of the law from the theocratic state, from Judaism. The Jews could not accept the new forms, they already had their own; that was the highest. But He had to accept them, step by step He had to emerge onto the physical plane. So He expressed His wisdom through the wisdom of ancient Judaism. Now this wisdom had to be understood. This wisdom could be understood where the physical plane had already been conquered, where philosophy existed. That is why the first church fathers came from the Greeks. In their philosophy, they had developed the ability to understand that which emerged on the physical plane. When the will emerged in the personality, they could also understand this personality.

The people who had formed a Zeus, who had incarnated a God in their art of sculpture, could also understand the idea of an incarnated God. This idea could only come to life through the Roman people. The human being who had formed the personality could have this idea. That was the Roman.

The Christ Himself is formed in the Jewish people, He is understood through Greek gnosis and the Greek apostles: Paul and the Greek evangelist John. But all this could not have led to the spread of Christianity on the physical plane, but at most to an understanding. The Romans, who adopt Greek culture, destroy Jerusalem, go to Asia, become Christians.

So:
The Jews form Christ.
The Greeks understand Christ.
The Romans become Christians.

Therefore, Christianity spread only after the destruction of Jerusalem and has a specifically Roman form. In Rome, the physical vessel for the Christ had already been prepared, namely the state, which was already founding the empire, and the priest who could administer it, the Pontifex Maximus. This brings us to the fourth sub-race. We have seen that it was carefully prepared. The fifth sub-race is still in the process of being formed.

We have reached the summit or center. The following teachers are therefore those who have to preserve what has been created in order to apply it again on the particular physical. It is a matter of some initiates specifying these summits for the individuals. Thus we have preserved the Christian tradition in the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail. Christianity is constantly degenerating and degenerating. So it is a matter of continually giving new impetus from what is called the Mount Montsalvatsch, the Grail. These impacts take on a different character. Again, it is the Rishis who experience the actual teaching in a Christian way and only ever want to protect original Christianity from degeneration.

In this way, the most diverse attempts at regeneration have been made. The first attempt can be traced back to an initiate who cannot yet play a historical role because this is still prehistory. However, he is mentioned in legend. He is the German apostle Boniface. He is the source of the original form in which Christianity came from Ireland to Germany, with a mixture of Druidic culture, Indian influence, and the impact of Dionysius the Areopagite.

A new influence was given and a new possibility created by the initiate known as Lohengrin. This initiation proceeded from a very complicated point of view, as all initiations become complicated. For it was necessary to connect the original Christianity, which had developed continuously from Dionysius the Areopagite through Scotus Eriugena up to scholasticism and mysticism. This current could indeed have an effect on peoples through preaching; but gradually it had been lost to the people because it went to the highest heights of thought. Therefore, a fertilization had to be brought from the original spiritual element. A high point had been reached, but it was also an impasse, and in order to have an effect on the initiate Lohengrin, a new fertilization from the Orient had to be brought about through the crusades. The essential thing that emerged from this is the Knights Templar, the actual messengers of the Holy Grail. They build a place of wisdom at the site of Solomon's Temple and after they are prepared there, they become servants of the Holy Grail, are initiated there by the Grail. This happens at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and is prepared in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Now we are in the preparatory stage of the fifth sub-race, the Germanic-English. From the Temple service we can see that it is about the application of Christianity to a new race. The service of the Temple Knights prepares for the transition of Christianity to full externality [...] in Christianity, which later leads to Protestantism. This helps us to understand the actual confession of the Knights Templar and their secret cult. They said to themselves: The Christ represented by the Western Church means nothing to us, because he is the Christ on the cross. But we proclaim the Christ who walked in Jerusalem and received initiation from the Baptist; our teachers about Christ are therefore not church teachers and church fathers, but John the Baptist, the initiator himself. Therefore, the main ceremony consisted of spitting out the crucifix symbol of Western worship and the unconsecrated wafer. This symbolized the contempt of Roman Christianity, the one that had developed into Catholicism, and it was prepared to turn away from Catholic Christ back to evangelical Christ. That was one principle. Another was:

1. We again accept the belief in the elementary forces of the world.
2. We believe that the destinies of men are a result of the interrelationships of the stars and that man himself is born out of the great interrelationships of the stars, the laws of nature.

Out of these two principles the culture of the Anglo-German race has developed: the religious-Protestant on the one hand, the scientific of the physical world on the other.

But this was only the vessel. The content came in a roundabout way

through the Moors. So here we have a Semitic influence again. There were five Semitic influences that provided the content. The mold was always prepared.

The Rosicrucians guarded the common basis of what diverged into a purely secular science and a materialistic religion. They were the ones who wanted to hold together. The Rosicrucians essentially studied evolution in the concrete within the fifth sub-race, prepared social legislation and will be the actual leaders of the sixth sub-race.

The Apocalypse must be regarded as a document by which one of the Christian initiates - who received their teaching after the proclamation by deed - said the most profound thing that was to be revealed only later as a secret. In this teaching, we encounter an agreement with ancient wisdom: the presentation of human development in the Apocalypse. We overlook this profound agreement with the other great wisdom religions in this document.

The other thing that emerges from it is that it has an esoteric and an exoteric content – a content for everyone; that it also offers to those who come to such a form through preparation.

The Apocalypse confirms the old teachings, written in the sense of the saying: “Blessed are those who believe”; but also for those who see. Only those who can penetrate deeper into themselves can understand the Apocalypse. It leads us out, solving the great riddles of the world, through which we can look back into our own inner selves. Although the eye looks out, if it wants to be informed about what is going on out there, it has to turn around and look inside. How is that?

The underlying reason for this is that the human being is a spirit of the general spirit of God, always creating from the past and also in distant years. But if the human spirit is a part of the spirit of God - it is in itself - then look within yourself - you are something related to all creation. “I and the Godhead are one.”

Man lives for himself, but he projects himself into the distant past and into the future. Whatever lives in me, I have been there. Not just to think abstractly with our thoughts, but to express our feelings with them; and when this thought lives in us, then we are also such a force, we must ignite our feelings.

The materialist says: The eye is touched by the light and the eye feels it; the mystic says: By perceiving the light, I know that it comes from outside; but how is it that my eye perceives it? We must say that man has developed organs in himself. In the embryonic state, man repeats everything he has gone through before. Animals that crawl into a dark cave lose their eye light, so that their offspring are born without eyes. So light has once worked that we have organs. Light is a power that creates the eye for us. Light is also from within - and creates the spiritual eye. “If the eye were not solar, how could we see the light?” The light is within us.

We can experience the creative light within us. Plato spoke of the light in us. To understand Plato, one must live deeply within him, one must not criticize him like a student. He says: The eye emits rays, as if the eye were the active one. Plato still knew it, it still lived, the bright light that formed the eye. This light, of which the mysteries speak, is an inner light. From here the light flows, the light of the aeons, the astral light in which we live; it only appears to us from the outside, we illuminate the world with it. We shine into the opaque [...]

Those who experience the creative light within themselves experience the mysteries; mystics experience from such a vision; they become visionaries, as John was – a reality that the materialist doubts.

When we grasp this reality, when we place ourselves in this way before the mystical, we enter into the mood to understand the Apocalypse. The letter kills, but the spirit gives life. But sparks fly from the letter when we read it through the spirit.

Now one understands what it means to “recognize the reality of the symbols.” The seven churches are named by seven chandeliers. Seven stars are the seven angels. Let us take a closer look at this concept.

But are we talking about seven communities in Asia? Everything in time has its representation. The seven sub-races are to be imagined in such a way that one continues while the other begins.

I - Sub-race Indian. This ancient Rishi culture still exists.
II - Persian race
III - Chaldeans, Babylonians
IV

There were already wisdom schools that preserved the secrets of the future.

The seven representatives of the seven sub-races already existed at that time. Such seven brother lodges are called the seven municipalities, they are the seven chandeliers of the seven sub-races, the seven leaders of the seven sub-races. They have nothing to do with the external, but with a realistic / gap in the transcript]

But what do such brotherly lodges mean? When a person presents himself to us, he has organs that together make him up, and in this person the soul can only lead its existence within them, it dwells in this temple – body. If the hand wanted to go its own way, personality would not be possible. A selfless devotion of each organ. Man must become as his organs show him.

The eye does not claim its own life, it gives itself away. The ear is more complicated than the piano. Man is not ready for it. As if the eye wants to experience color within itself, it gives itself away and places itself at the service of the other organs. The organs of man thus live much higher than he himself. [...] Man could not hear through the ear if it wanted to feel for itself. But he must become so. He must give himself to other people, give himself as an organ to yield a spiritual being.

Those who give themselves in this way are called a brother lodge. Just as the soul can sink into the organism, so a higher being can sink into a brother lodge. When people are so united that several of them are the organs, a higher being descends into them; so that a higher soul-being can embody itself. Because they – the people – have become like organs, a higher being can descend into the community in order to embody itself.

Pythagorean School also like that.

Where all feel the same, where each lays what he has on the altar of the community, there the higher being descends.

Those who have had experiences of such descent know that then such higher beings are candlesticks, then they have become guides who take from this community the substance to materialize themselves.

These are the seven angels: this is based on a Christian saying. He said: “I am with you all days until the end of the world.” - This also includes: “When two or three are united in my name.” —

Without community, no higher being can embody itself, individually we are nothing. “When two or three are united in my name, then I am in the midst of them.”

Throughout the ages, this activity was known only to initiates. John recounts that he was on the island of Patmos. This island is the school of mystery; “an angel announced” means: mystical representation of a fact; living reference to the root race. The hand of brotherhood is extended to all sub-races.

To the church at Ephesus:

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These things says He who holds the stars in His right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands: I know thy works, and thy labor, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast labored, and hast not fainted. But I have this against you: You have left your first love. (Rev 2:14)

To leave the first love - the Rishis are meant.

The second race, the Persian, had to lean more towards the practical: Be faithful unto death and so on. Here the devil is already mentioned, as are the devil's creations – the asuras. And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These things says the first and the last, who was dead and has come to life: I know your works and your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich), and the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are of Satan's school. Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I know your deeds, the tribulation you have undergone, the testing by Satan, and the persecution and suffering you have borne because you are a man. But I tell you, do not be afraid. I am the first and the last. I am he who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, amen. Have courage, I tell you. Be faithful, even to death, and I will give you the crown of life. [Rev 2:8-10]

Justice is developed in the third race, the pre-Asian religion.

And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write; These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges; I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth. But I have a few things against you, because you have there those who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put up an obstacle before the children of Israel, to eat food sacrificed to idols and to commit fornication. So you also have those who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans: I hate that. Repent; but if you do not, I will come to you quickly and will make war with them by the sword of my mouth. [Rev 2, 12-16]

Fourth race, the direct worship of Christianity:

And to the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass; I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first. But I have this against you: You let that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, teach and seduce my servants to commit sexual immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols. And I gave her time to repent of her immorality, and she did not repent. Behold, I will throw her into a bed, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of their deeds; and I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he who searches the minds and hearts; and I will give to each one of you according to your works. But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching and who have not recognized the deep things of Satan (as they say), I say: I will not put on you any other burden; but what you have already hold fast until I come. [Rev 2,18-25]

Then the following in the future: [Church of Sardis, Church of Philadelphia, Church of Laodicea]. The leading entities can be understood when it is studied with the whole person, it cannot be grasped with the mind alone, then it is doubted, but they are real realities. One will now ask: Why was such not proclaimed immediately? Because the founders of Christianity experienced the truth [gap in the transcript]

The first way to read the Apocalypse is to accept the word in naive faith. The second way is to look for the allegorical sense in it; this is good because it leads to the third highest way of reading, which is to take everything literally.

We have to be confessors of the doctrine of reincarnation, we have to say: the person standing before me has been here and will come back; to accept the truth in him as the Samsara - the world in which we live, the world of eternal change, the cycle of rebirths. To believe in re-embodiment - I then experience re-embodiment. They taught it and lived in this spirit. It has been taught in all ages; what was taught many centuries ago, the community faith grows out of this faith. That is the deepest essence of theosophy. As we explain this, we feel what happened then. The one who was is sitting next to us, we feel united with the one who comes after us. Thus we rise, thus we can banish the higher spiritual. I wanted to show what community life is – something profound can be drawn from every line of the Apocalypse, the whole theosophical movement can be explained from it.

We understand karma to be something that began in the middle of the Lemurian period and will end at the close of the sixth root race. Individual karma comes into being through birth and death. A being that does not extend into the phenomenal form with a part has no individual karma. A world body passes from one form of appearance into another. But we call that which expresses itself through good and evil karma; only what lies between birth and death belongs to the chain that we call individual karma. How did karma come into the world?

Let us visualize the situation in the middle of the Lemurian period. The formative design was present to such an extent that a human body was there into which thought could enter. But before that, what we call the human soul had connected with this body; it had come over from the moon man, and bodies had been created according to his pattern. Initially, they were endowed with two sexes. Built up, but not perfect. We still have to treat these bodies as perfect animals; they only become human after Manas has moved in. So, just as with animals, we cannot speak of karma in humans either.

The bodies were gradually perfect; likewise, the souls that had come across were shaped according to different degrees of perfection: Solars, Pitris, seven low Pitris; there were also normal ones and those who always remained at one level. So there were seven degrees of development. The most perfect could already use power to control the bodies. The others had not yet reached that stage; people were like a machine that they did not have the power to control. Such Pitris became people of all the most perfect kinds: the first Arhats. They had perfect bodies, perfect kamic creativity, perfect Manas, but few and exquisite: teachers, rulers, rulers. Through pronounced high Arhats, Kamisches was achieved. They had superhuman abilities and perfect insight into what creativity is, almost at the level of earlier stages. As matter, man was much finer and therefore easier to create. They were initiated into nature. The spark of Manas did not help the others quickly, because that can only be when Kama sets the physical particles of the brain in motion. The thoughts are as if in a bed. It was a dream-like thinking that took hold here: dreamers, highly developed animals, dull humans.

They would have continued to exist on earth if a third group had not intervened. Arhats could not build up karma because they surveyed everything and chose good; these because they were unable to recognize.

There were three groups of Pitris who refused to take possession of these bodies and who wanted to wait until they themselves took possession of the bodies, until they could fully control them on their own. The bodies at that time could only move manas automatically. They waited, and from this the third group arose; they waited until they had been prepared by the second, i.e., the iyanic entities, to such an extent that they themselves could control them. So the bodies were there, but were not occupied. They were seized by much lower kamic entities. The consequence was that they descended, that they regressed, becoming like animals, and these are the amanasic entities. This is the original sin, which consists in the fact that manas has not taken possession of the bodies, and therefore something different has arisen than was foreseen in the normal plan of the world. It was an act of freedom.

The Arhats, of course, only inherited perfect qualities, the dream beings inherited human qualities in ever-increasing potency. These inherited a deteriorated human form, and that is original sin. Through this step of freedom, man is a self-determining conscious being. Only these Pitris, whom we call the luciferic ones, have been able to achieve freedom.

It would have been in the will of the Elohim for all to incarnate. These beings came under the influence of those who had remained at an earlier level of dhyan; these refused to incarnate. Now the possibility of illness also arose. These bodies, left to themselves, were subject to elemental influences. When the Pitris had matured, they found their bodies had already deteriorated. The shock of going down into the physical nature must be improved, and that is karma; original sin, one's own sinful body.

The Bible first presents this as the influence of the serpent. Further on, in magnificent images. First, those who had become arhats under the influence of the Elohim; they were absolutely under the guidance of the Elohim. They could use the natural forces that were already there, not learn. The others, who came later and who later inhabited the bodies, had to create according to their own immediate view. They were now further removed from their own creative beings, and this is very beautifully depicted in Cain and Abel.

Without sin there would be no freedom, no possibility for self-conscious man. This is how what we have called the Luciferic principle is linked to the development of man. Man owes the fact that he could use the seed power during the Atlantean period to the Luciferic principle.

Only through the people created in this way could science and art come into the world. What the Arhats taught was unearthly knowledge, the ancient wisdom that our theosophy brings. Earthly knowledge was created by these beings subject to karma.

The mixing of humans with animals: Because the bodies deteriorated, the ape-like creatures emerged, and these mixed with the bodies inhabited by lower Pitris. The most highly developed apes are those people who have lost themselves in a cul-de-sac and missed the connection. They sometimes have more developed astral bodies than lower people because they have guilt-free kama.

The animal species are destined to become human, not the individual animals; pets become faster, monkeys slower. The human generic soul is dhyanic; the generic souls of those Pitris refused and these were Lucifers.

The Arhats are not to be confused with the Buddhas and Boddhisatvas.

From the Q&A

If man had kept what he had rejected, he would not have developed so finely. His high development thanks to / gap in the transcript]

In the folk, ancient facts live, which are not based on arbitrariness but on deep connections. They all know the wooden horse. Odysseus is the clever, cunning representative of the mind, and thus the main characteristic of our fifth root race. At that time, the saga was developed in such a way that Odysseus came up with a wooden horse.

We also find the horse as a representative of the fifth root race. Pegasus; often in the Bible; in Indian legends, in which Vishnu rides on the horse Kalki. All before Christ. In the Apocalypse, when the seals are opened to us, the horse also appears to us, only then /gap in the transcript] then yellow. The horse is depicted as something special, as in connection with the fifth root race. Even with ancient Germans, who received it from Druid priests. There is hardly a nation of the fifth root race that does not honor the horse in a special way. Occult facts.

Certain animals had to be stripped so that certain characteristics could develop. In the past, it was only memory, but now intellectual mental activity was developing. He would not have been able to develop this activity if he had not given the characteristics that prevented him from doing so to odd-toed ungulates. We have to go back to even older times than the Lemurian era. At that time, what was to become odd-toed ungulates was peeled out. At that time, it was designed differently. Every being can only develop as its environment allows. Back then, there were watery air masses, thin water. Everything was fog. Niflheim.

They had to work their way through the states of condensation and thus became what they are today. Their form developed from completely different shapes, and this form arose at the time when the Atlanteans developed their intellect. These were therefore coherent for them. They said to themselves [gap in the transcript]

We must therefore relate to the horse in a very special way. If we had this organization within us, we would never have been able to ascend to our intellectual activity. It is, as it were, the flip side. Thus, in the horse, the human being of the fifth root race worships that to which he owes his intellectual activity. This is the reason for the solution of the seals in the Apocalypse.

Natural science should also be able to recognize this, or prove it, if the occult experience is correct. We would have to find the ancestors of our horse in the debris of Atlantis.

The uppermost layer of the earth is alluvium, under it diluvium, further tertiary layers. Then Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, formations in the rock. There we also find human-like skeletons. If we dig deeper, we come to the chalk, Jurassic formation. Now we find fossilized horse bones in the Eocene layers, and this is the layer of the Atlantic race. Intellectual knowledge is characterized by the fact that it has the object outside of itself and forms concepts about it. This was different with the original Atlanteans and Lemurians. They had an instinctive knowledge that was attached to the brain. This feeling has been lost, only present in pure sexuality, instinctive sense of belonging that man used to have in spirit. They had also perceived the relationship of their minds to horses. Thus man owes his higher qualities to what he has left behind in nature.

If we go back to the time of the Hyperborean race, we find that very specific human characteristics were acquired when very specific animal groups split off. The ancient peoples have always had a vivid awareness of their original kinship with very specific animal forms. The totemism of certain peoples is based on this feeling. They kill everything except certain animals; these are taboo for them. The tribe names itself after this animal and declares the animal to be taboo, not killable. Totemism thus leads occultly back to the splitting off of certain animal entities.

In the latest cultural studies, it has been noticed time and again that certain peoples had Darwinism within them as a feeling. This is not a game of imagination, but rather they have had animal splitting as the content of their memory from a primal consciousness. It is a splitting of forces. In some tribes there is an institution that cannot be explained to modern people, but which can be traced back to the fact that there are interactions that arise from perceptions other than external perceptions: psychic forces. Hence the custom of the man-child bed among some primitive peoples. That original influence of man upon man, which has been completely lost in the fifth root race. Customs are preserved which have lost their meaning. In just this way, an influence went from the whole of nature to man, he felt an original kinship with the animal: totem bear, bear-taboo, inviolable. Naivety does not invent symbols, they are based on facts. This was very clearly demonstrated in the centaurs. Man has withdrawn from the horse and has retained this memory. Odysseus has the cunning within him and he represents it externally, in that which conquers Troy.

Now there is something else underlying the love of the horse. In the next rounds, what had been rejected will be absorbed again. The generic souls will be redeemed again. What the human being develops in the fifth round will again be what will redeem him to the horse. So that the human being now develops his intellect at the expense of the generic soul of the horses. In the sixth round, he creates into the manasical-animalistic. He will give life himself, the qualities he owes to the horse will become activity and world karma in him. The horse carries him over, and it is thanks to the horse that he later becomes manasically creative. This is why Plato uses the image of the two horses that pull the soul; this is why there is Pegasus and the steeds of the sun chariot.

Anyone walking down the street today among the Christmas trees that have been put up might easily be led to believe that the Christmas tree itself is something very old. But it is precisely the Christmas tree that allows you to see the change in people's customs and traditions, because the Christmas tree, which is now found in almost every home, is not even a hundred years old. A century ago, you would not have been able to walk down streets occupied by Christmas trees. You would also look in vain in the poetry of a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago for a song, for a poem that sings of the Christmas tree. But that should be a striking phenomenon for you, because the Christmas tree is something that has been sung about by poets in the time when it was once there. It is a very new phenomenon, something that only became common in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Christmas tree as a symbol of Christmas only appeared around 1800, but Christmas itself is ancient, not just Christian. It was celebrated in the same way in all times of which we can have historical knowledge.

In Christianity itself, Christmas has only been taken as a symbol of the birth of the Christian Redeemer since the fourth century AD. In no way was December 25 celebrated as the birthday of the founder of Christianity in the first centuries of Christianity; it was only in the fourth century that it was understood as such. But a festival was celebrated in the Roman Empire during this time, a festival was also celebrated at the same time by the ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples and with a similar idea already in ancient Egypt and in many other areas. What was celebrated there was something else; it was only in the fourth century of our era that it was linked to the birthday of the founder of Christianity.

Now one could conclude from this that the Christian church would have done something that would historically go against all tradition, and would have wanted to correct something with it, so to speak. But that is not the case. Anyone who truly understands the meaning of Christmas recognizes the ancient wisdom that lies hidden in such a festival. Festivals such as Christmas, Easter and Pentecost are nothing more than dates, dates inscribed in time by our ancestors, with whom they showed us, their descendants, how they understood the relationship between the world and man and the great mysteries of existence. Whoever knows how to decipher the writing that has been laid down for us in the great festivals, whoever knows how to decipher the hieroglyphs that time itself presents to us, will glimpse into the deep and meaningful mysteries of all human becoming. I said – and we will see in a moment in which sense this applies – that Christmas has been celebrated since the time when we have history. The times about which we know historical documents go back to the third sub-race of the fifth root race. The times of our own sub-race, in which physical science and physical culture have developed, go back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. This was preceded by another race, and this goes back to the ninth or eighth century BC, to the times when Homer was singing his poems to the Greeks. This period tells us about the feelings and deeds of the fourth sub-race that preceded us.

Then we come back to the even older times, but these already lead us back to the gray antiquity, to the time of ancient Babylon and Assyria, to the ancient times of the Jewish people, to the times when the Egyptian priests preserved their wisdom and only brought it to the people in an exoteric way. Then the historical tradition ceases. What has been handed down to us from Persian history was only recorded much later. What is communicated to us as the sublime religion of ancient India, what is recorded in the Vedas and in the Vedanta philosophy, these are late records compared to the times in which the great thoughts of the ancient Indian Rishis, which they received directly from the divine spirits themselves, flowed through them to humanity. Thus we look back from the time in which we ourselves live, and which will last for a long time yet, to the Greco-Roman epoch, which is transformed into Christianity, and then to the epoch in which the Egyptian priests were active. But then the paths become lost. Only those who can follow history in other ways can know anything about ancient Persia. We are led even further back into the times that only the occultist can see.

Now, if you want to understand the Christian festival, you have to look back in time to the point where a new wisdom was taught to newly emerging humanity for the first time. We have come back to the time when the ancient Atlantean civilization disappeared due to the tremendous flooding of a large continent and a new human civilization - to which the epochs I have already enumerated belong - was established. A completely new way of thinking and feeling has emerged with this new humanity. Nothing of the actual culture of the Atlanteans, let alone of the even older culture of the Lemurian peoples, who once lived in ancient times and perished in a fire, has been preserved directly. However, what humanity has once gone through must be gone through again briefly when a new turning point in development has been reached. Thus the first sub-races of the fifth root race were destined to briefly repeat three important epochs in the development of humanity.

In ancient India, the wise Rishis looked back to those times when humanity was still at a very different stage, to those times when there was not yet a male and a female

sex, when man was still a unity. Then they looked back to that great unity in the human race, to that primeval man Adam, who is also called Adam Kadmon in various secret teachings, who was man and woman at the same time. They expressed that primal unity of humanity in a spiritual way by hinting at the supreme world being with the indefinite sacred name Brahman. Brahman is originally that out of which, as out of the All, out of the divine ground of unity, all manifoldness has emerged. On the earth itself, this unity was only present for man in a certain way in the times when there was not yet male and female, in the times when the diversity that we have now did not yet exist. What we are confronted with here is a reflection from the spirit of the great Indian Rishis: the divine Primordial Unity of man, the pre-human Adam Kadmon, in whom there was still peace, spirit, clarity and harmony; he speaks from the Vedic word as it flowed from the lips of the Indian Rishis. This was the first epoch of our human race after the great flood. It was not yet the case that there was talk on our earth of a trinity, of a threefold divine person. People only spoke of a primal unity, of Brahman, in which everything is contained, from which everything originates.

Then there came a time when the Persian Zarathustra priests, the wise men of the Parsees, looked back to that epoch when man, of both sexes, was born out of fire, when that man was born who represents a dual, a twofold. And with the birth of man out of the fire, something came into our earthly world that had not been there before; only then did evil come into the world. Evil did not exist in the human sense before the origin of the sexes. These originated in the middle of the Lemurian period. And good and evil have only existed since that time. Good and evil filled the last Lemurian period and the first Atlantean period.

It is interesting to research, according to the spiritual documents called the ‹Akashic Records›, how these two forms of humanity express themselves. In the next issue of the magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis” you will find an explanation of how the duality in man unfolds, how, when man really appeared in two sexes, man's soul and man's physical willpower were initially distributed among the sexes. Even those who today, as occultists, decipher the wonderful records that have been preserved for us in the Akasha Chronicle may be amazed at how fundamentally different the masculine and feminine appeared on our Earth in those early times, because it is so different from our present-day conception. Woman initially developed the soul, under the guidance of the wise leaders of humanity; man developed the will element. This is how a duality of will and soul arises. They face each other in the Atlantic epoch in the two sexes of humanity. Because soul came into the physical body and thereby into humanity, evil came into humanity. And because our humanity had to repeat that epoch, which is characterized by the difference between good and evil, the fire religion, the Parsee religion, the doctrine of Ormuzd and Ahriman emerged. This precedes our history as a Persian cultural period.

The concept of “good and evil” lived on in the religion of Zarathustra. At that time, there was no talk of a trinity. This came only later, at about the time when our historical documents begin. The Akasha Chronicle does not report a trinity in prehistoric times. It was only when people knew how to distinguish between good and evil that they were forced to look to a third party. And so we see the mediator, in the form of the mediator, in the form that most clearly presents itself to us in the so-called Mithras mysteries, which spread from Persia across the whole world. We see the mediator, the reconciler, the redeemer of humanity from evil, the guide from evil to good.

In these ancient times, one must always see in the earthly an image of the divine, an image of what has taken place in the great vault of heaven. If you look at the zodiac, you will see that in this zodiac the signs of Cancer, Gemini, Taurus and Aries or Lamb follow one another. According to certain laws, the sun, or rather the sun's vernal point, advances, so that in ancient times the sun rose in spring in the sign of Cancer, later in the sign of Gemini, still later in the sign of Taurus, and still later in the sign of Aries or the Lamb. Around the time of the eighth century before the birth of Christ, the sun had reached the constellation of Aries or the Lamb in the celestial vault. Now, in our cultural era, it enters the constellation of Pisces.

Depending on what happens in the spiritual realm, what happens on earth takes shape. You are familiar with the sign of Cancer, but its true significance is not always known. This sign of Cancer must be understood; then one will also understand how it points to the dawning of a completely new era. They are two intertwined spirals or two intertwined vortices. When something important happens in the world, when one stage of development is replaced by another, when something completely new enters the world, then two such vortex movements intertwine. In this one vortex you have the end of the Atlantean culture, and in the other you have the beginning of the Aryan culture. Our ancestors saw the outer sign for the rise of the new Aryan culture in the sky above. Then, in later times, the sun entered the sign of Gemini. Gemini is a sign for good and evil; Gemini is the sign of the zodiac that dominated Persian thinking. Then the sun enters the sign of Taurus. This brings us to the third sub-race; it has the worship of the bull, the Egyptian Apis, in Babylonia the service of the bull, and finally in what was later to become Persia the bull sacrifice, the service of Mithras. Man brought the bull sacrifice down from heaven because it was marked there.

The fourth sub-race, which saw the rise of Christianity, begins with the sun entering Aries. An important saga – the bringing of the ram skin by the Greek hero Jason – indicates this important turning point in history. And a further important turning-point is indicated by the sacrifice of the mystic Lamb on the cross. This is the historical expression of the mystery that is indicated by the fact that the Sun, the ruler of the world, has reached the point in the vault of heaven that is signified by the Lamb or the Ram.

But now we have to understand this whole development in the right way. After the duality of good and evil, the trinity appears in human consciousness. This occurs in various religions. We only need to get to know it in what we know in the different countries around the Mediterranean as the Mithras mysteries. Let us look at one of these mystery temples. For those who only participate in the lesser mysteries, a symbolic act takes place. For those who are allowed to participate in the greater mysteries, the same thing takes place as a fact in the astral realm. I can only speak about the lesser mysteries of the Mithras service. The symbolic bull becomes visible. The mediator, the god, rides on it. He then holds the bull's nostrils shut and plunges his sword into its side. A snake comes, a scorpion; above the head of Mithras one sees a bird, and above the whole group, on one side, one sees the genius with a lowered torch and, on the other side, with a raised torch, which symbolizes the sun on its course through the vault of heaven.

Human life, as it was experienced in the consciousness of that time, is thus presented to us. Man had come to seek redemption within himself, the third divine principle, which leads him away from evil and can reconcile evil with good. Evil is the passions, that which pulls man down to earth, all the way to what is symbolized by the bull. But what can lead man up to the higher self, what appears as the immortal, is the mediator who has killed the lower being when he symbolically thrusts the sword into the bull's loins. Thus, as mediator between good and evil, that is, in the third sub-race, a trinity in the divine appears, and with that, humanity has grasped what is called Atman-Budhi-Manas in theosophy. The moment the mediator appears, the mystical secret is fulfilled: the trinity in the consciousness of man awakens.

Thus man was led through the human realization of unity, duality and trinity to Atman, Budhi, Manas. Atman or the spirit is the unity that man is able to perceive within himself when he has developed to it. Budhi or the spirit of life will express itself in man in that evil will be overcome by good, that duality will on the one hand purify the lower instincts or desire and on the other hand reconcile the higher so-called fire instincts or love, in that all evil will be consumed in the fire of love. Manas or the spirit self is the spiritual principle that already governs human development. Just as the Messiah, the redeemer, creates unity in the world, leading from disharmony to harmony, so duality dissolves through the trinity, in which evil is overcome by good.

Thus the human race had come so far that it saw its entire destiny in the trinity. But it sees fate in this trinity as imposed on people as an eternal world order. Man looks up to the threefold aspect of the Godhead, beholds a divine trinity in the world and sees himself as dependent on this divine trinity. He truly experienced that this divine Trinity descended directly to him in a human brother. This was the great event at the beginning of our era. For human consciousness, the Trinity has become something completely new as a result.

But we can only understand the deeper meaning of Christmas if we understand the mediator in the right way. From unity, duality has developed, from duality, chaos, from which harmony is to develop again. This harmony can only develop if the mediator creates this harmony. This harmony can only find expression in an eternal lawfulness, and this eternal lawfulness found its symbolic expression - in the time when the Mithras service originated - in the fact that an image was seen in man himself, this creating the eternal world harmonies of the world law.

In the same mysteries that I have already mentioned here, in the secrets of the Persian religion, you will find a sevenfold initiation for those who were admitted to the sacred secrets. The first degree included those who learned about the very first secrets: this was the degree of the “ravens”, as the symbolic name indicates. The second degree was that of the Occultists. The third degree was that of the fighters or for sacred truth. The fourth degree was that of the so-called Lions, and the fifth degree was that of the Persians. Only the latter was regarded as a full Persian, in whom the consciousness of the highest spiritual in man had awakened, which we call Manas. He in whom this had awakened could be called a fifth-degree initiate, and he was called a Persian. He was a member of a nation in the truest sense of the word. He represented the destiny of his people. And if he was initiated one degree higher, he no longer represented the personality of his people, but that of all mankind. He then represented not the karma of a people, but of all mankind, insofar as it had developed from the middle of the Lemurian race and further into the fifth root race. Then such an initiate was called a sun runner or a “sun hero.” All those whom you find in the books as solar heroes are none other than such initiates of the sixth degree. Then came the “Father”; he was connected with the evolution of the future of humanity.

What does the name Sunrunner mean? If you could look back into the primeval times of our solar system, you would see that this solar system emerged from the struggle of thermal chaos, and that harmony itself has established itself in our world of disharmony, that peace and the laws have developed out of discord and disharmony. But how did they come about? They came about like this: The sun has such a regulated course that we cannot even imagine that the sun could deviate from its path for a moment; our world is so firmly grounded in harmony that the sun is firmly determined in its direction by its path through the world, that nothing can bring it out of this direction. In this course of the sun across the vault of heaven, the ancient Persian initiate saw his own inner destiny in the sixth degree. The sun of his own inner being, the sun of his spirit, had to shine so firmly for him that he could not deviate from the path of good and wisdom any more than the sun could deviate from its path. A person who had reached the sixth degree of initiation had to be so imbued with this lawfulness that he could not possibly deviate from his path; then he was a solar hero, a sun-runner.

All the earlier degrees of initiation had no other purpose than to give the human being this inner security, this inner sun-likeness. Thus, the person who knew something of these mysteries saw a deep harmony between human destiny and the path of the sun across the vault of heaven. The sun – so he said – causes the days to grow shorter and shorter, nature to die towards autumn, everything to withdraw into the interior. And when we approach the time that is celebrated today as Christmas, a new turn occurs: the light emerges, the days become longer in nature, nature can awaken again. The birth of the light – that was the moment celebrated since the times when it was said that the light is the symbol of revelation in the world and in man. So that in the East all peoples of our root race regarded the light as the garment for the wise ordering of the world. In the light they saw the garment for world wisdom. When we direct our eyes into the universe, light appears, harmoniously and firmly imprinted, in the stars outside. In reality, the spirits of wisdom reveal themselves through the light that the ancient religions saw as the garment of wisdom in the world.

Thus the trinity appeared to the ancient religions, that they first celebrated unity, primordial wisdom, then duality, light and darkness, and finally, as a trinity, also the enlightened man, the teacher and mediator, Mithras.

But mankind could not attain salvation in the sense of this consciousness until the consciousness of this universal harmony was born out of human hearts themselves. That which lives outside in the world as light, as the birth of light, must at the point in time we are now approaching arise in the human heart itself. The external mystical fact that has taken place is the founding of Christianity. In Christ, that which has been present on our earth from the very beginning, but which has remained hidden from humanity throughout the ages we have just spoken of, has appeared. During this time, humanity has gradually repeated those three stages. But now a new point of view, a new high point can be reached: the light can be reborn. Just as after the light grows weaker and weaker as we approach autumn, and then, when we come to the winter solstice, the light is reborn, so too was the savior, the Christ, born to humanity in the fourth sub-race. He is the new solar hero who was not only initiated in the depths of the mystery temples but appeared before the world, so that even those who do not see can be blessed by believing! It was therefore a natural consequence that when it was realized that the Divine can descend to the level of personality, one could at that moment replace the birth festival of the Light with the birth festival of the solar hero of the fourth post-Atlantean race.

This happened in the fourth century of our fourth sub-race. What had never been there before was now there, namely, the possibility that man could give birth to the light within himself. He could do so because the light principle had been incarnated in a human being for the first time. With this happening, the winter solstice festival was necessarily associated with Christmas. The entire significance of the preceding sub-races is determined and established with the transfer of the celebration of the birth of Christ to the winter solstice festival. At first, wisdom and light appeared to people from outside, but now the light was to be brought forth from within the human heart. Christ was to be born within man himself. Therefore, the event also had to take place in Palestine, a mystical event and an historical fact.

We are therefore dealing with a historical event, and that is precisely the great mystery that is so little understood: that what happened in Palestine happened literally as it is described in the Gospel of John, and that at the same time it is a mystical fact. Those who do not understand the event in this way do not yet understand it at all. But if you understand it that way, then you will also understand why from this moment on God is to be imagined as a personality, and that the Trinity, which had been imagined differently before, is to be imagined in the form of three divine persons. Christ had now become a person, and with that the proof was delivered that the divine can be realized in man. With that a firstling had appeared on earth, in whom the divine once dwelt. And this could henceforth become a lasting, an undestroyable ideal for mankind.

All the earlier great teachers of wisdom - the Egyptian Hermes, the ancient Indian Rishis, the Chinese Confucius, the Persian Zarathustra - they spoke the word of the divine, they were the great teachers. With Jesus, who was the Christ, the divine itself walked on earth in a living form for the first time. Before that, we only had the way and the truth on earth. Now we have the Way, the Truth, and the Life. That is the great difference between the earlier religions and Christianity, that the latter is the fulfillment of the former, that in the case of Christ we are not dealing with a teacher of wisdom – for teachers of wisdom are also present in all other religions – but with a human personality who must at the same time be venerated as a divine personality. This is why the disciples' message is so important: “We have laid our hands in his wounds, we have heard his message.” This is also why they relied on appearances, on direct sensory impressions; that one should not just listen to the word, but also look at the personality. And this is also the reason for the conviction that he was the world solar hero in a completely unique way. If we grasp this, we also understand that the old festival of the winter solstice used to mean something different from today's Christmas. In Egypt we find Horus, Isis and Osiris, the archetype of what also lives in Christianity. In ancient India we have the birth of Krishna from the Holy Virgin. Everywhere we find echoes of this myth. But what is important about Christianity is what I have just mentioned: the fact that not only the trinity, but the tetrad has become sacred, that the sacred has descended to the personality. Before that, the sacred was divine and enthroned at an inaccessible height above human beings. The old teachers of wisdom, the holy Rishis, revered it as the indefinite, unutterable Brahman; the old Zarathustra disciples saw it in the duality of good and evil; in Egypt, as already mentioned, it is the triad of Isis, Osiris and Horus. But that the Divine dwelt among men, that it became personality, that was the secret of the fourth sub-race. This is the most important event of our human epoch, that Christmas, which has always represented the birth of an initiate, now represents the birth of the greatest solar hero, the Christ Himself. Thus we see the necessity of these two things resonating in the course of the world. If we look at the fourth sub-race and compare it with the point in time at which we ourselves stand, then we see the divine having moved down even further. And it has taken on a peculiar form in our present time, a form that one must understand if one wants to fully decipher the Christmas festival. Go back to the fourth sub-era, to the twelfth or thirteenth century: everywhere you will find full understanding of the real personality of Christ among those who know it; this personality of Christ is so comprehensively described that, for example, in the poetry of 'Heliand', German conditions are transferred to the Christ. The Christ stands so firmly within humanity that the conditions of other countries can be related to his redemptive deed. He is so firmly rooted in humanity as a whole as a personality. But then a different mood sets in. There is a certain shaking of faith in this archetype of humanity. Something occurs that is a step forward on the one hand, but on the other hand a much larger circle of humanity enters into the further evolution of Christianity. But in return, people cease to understand that the center of his thinking, feeling and willing can lie in the individual personality of Christ. There are fewer and fewer people who dare to say that it is not the doctrine but the personality of Christ that is at issue. Finally, it dissolves altogether into the worship of the abstract ideal, which one thinks only spiritually and towards which man strives. In the time of the first sub-race it was Brahman, in the time of the second it was light and darkness, in the time of the third it was the Trinity. Then, in the time of the fourth sub-race, this Trinity had descended and become a person. The personal aspect descended even further, to the level of mere intellect, which has dissolved the human personality and is only worshipped as an abstract ideal.

In our fifth sub-race, however, the moment that must still come is already approaching, and it must bring us faith in the new initiates, in the 'Fathers'. Those initiated in the seventh degree are called the Fathers, and in the spiritual scientific world view we speak of the realization of the Masters, because it is not just one, but because it will be the Masters to whom man will look in gratitude and adoration as the great leaders of humanity. Thus the fifth sub-race connects us with our future. And so this fourth sub-race appears to be placed right in the middle of the great process we are going through, the process of Advent, that is, of the three preceding races, of which the three-week Advent is a reflection, because in a short time people will once again go through the process of how, in earlier times, the light dawned at Christmas time. Then comes the life in the light. That is why Christmas is not something temporary for Christians either, not a commemoration of what has passed; because the Christmas antiphon is not: Christ was born, or Christ was born, but it says: Today Christ was born. Today is always spoken of. That is important and significant. Today is spoken of in the sense that Christ Himself spoke: 'I am with you until the end of days'. This is something that stands before us anew every year and reveals to us the connection between man and heaven. It shows us that what has taken place in heaven must also take place in man. And just as the sun could not deviate from its orbit by a single inch without causing confusion, so too must man keep to his path. He must achieve that inner harmony, that inner rhythm, which is given to him by Christ, who was incarnated in Jesus and who will work in the Fathers, whose guidance man must follow in the times of the future.

This is the connection between man and heaven: the sun should not only move unerringly in the sky and gain new strength at the winter solstice, it should also bring about a birth of light from deep within in man, a resurrection, a solar heroism of the fifth root race. Hence the Christmas saying: “Gloria in excelsis deo et in terra pax”, “Peace on earth to those of good will”. Inner peace will also bring humanity's evolution into a rhythmic process, just as the sun has brought its own process into a regular rhythm. In the sun we have an image of the eternal cycle of the cosmos. It has overcome chaos within itself and brought it to peace. In this sense, Christmas is a festival of peace, from which the mood of peace and harmony should also radiate. Then it is celebrated in the right way, when the power of peace and harmony radiates from this festival. With the Christmas bells, not only the sounds of the Church resound, but the sounds of all striving humanity, which is working and has worked on present-day culture and its further development, ever since the Earth with its spirituality rose again from the great frost.

What the preceding races longed for as their future was born into the fourth post-Atlantean sub-race. And what the three following races must strive for, that resounds from the Christmas sounds. The harmonies of the heavens truly speak to us when we understand what Christmas expresses. Every festival of the year is so firmly grounded in ancient wisdom.

It is no coincidence that these festivals have been set, they have not sprung from arbitrariness, but are drawn from the deepest wisdom of the world, and those who can truly understand and celebrate them with full understanding will find in them the scriptural characters of ancient wisdom for what has happened from the beginning and will happen in the future. In this way the festivals take on a new meaning; they cease to have the conventional significance that they have for many people. To read the great truths of the world is to celebrate the great world festivals in the right spirit. With the heart, with the mind, with the soul you read the primal truths of heaven when you celebrate the great world festivals. Then they are truly celebrated out of the spirit, then they are something for humanity again.

Spiritual science is not mere abstract thought, not a tangle of dogmas. It has a great task and a world mission to revive what humanity has forgotten, to strike the fire out of what has been given to us by our ancestors. Then human selfishness will also cease. They will learn to live in the unified spirit of the world. This is the wisdom that, among many other things, emanates from spiritual science, and it is practical in a good sense; it gives us inner support and secure hope. And that is why the spirit of peace and spiritual confidence that emanates from the Christmas festival can inspire those who strive for spiritual knowledge in their innermost being.

The exalted spiritual leaders of humanity once prescribed this festival for us in primeval times. Let us visualize this as genuine Christmas wisdom at the end of this hour: Advanced human brothers are the leaders of the spiritual movement, advanced human brothers who were already present at the beginning of the fifth root race when the great world festivals were established, and who, as the great teachers of humanity, are still revealing such truths to us today. They do not give us the wisdom teachings out of speculation, out of their own opinion, but because they were there when the things were revealed. They have prepared the peace that shall one day flow over humanity, and they have composed the holy scriptures in the festivals, from which we shall read the message of peace, the message of inner soul bliss, which we shall regain through spiritual science. If we live in the spirit of the masters of harmony, then we live more and more towards the great ideal that they themselves exemplify to us. Spiritual science reminds us of those exalted leaders of humanity when we are seized by the Christmas spirit, which speaks to us of peace and of the sacrifices of the great masters. This peace flows into the future of humanity. We see it completely surrounded by the splendor of this spiritual light and the harmony of feelings. In this glory in which they appear to us, we recognize them as the fathers who lead us towards the future. We follow in their footsteps, and out of our own soul is born a life that is immersed in peace, in harmony and unity - in that harmony that is an image of the sun's path around the world.

The birth of peace at Christmas time is a reflection of the sun's passage around the celestial vault. This is taught by the wise magicians, the great masters, and spoken by those who not only have blind faith in these masters, but who also know and say out of their full knowledge: the masters they are, and the spiritual world movement under the guidance of the masters is the great and lofty peace movement that leads people to that world harmony in which human souls will live with the same harmonious regularity and imperturbability with which the sun moves through the worlds, showing us the way to the radiant beauty of the spiritual sun.

When I last had the honor of speaking here a few weeks ago about spiritual science, I tried to explain the general character and the nature of the research of this spiritual science and also to point out the extent to which this spiritual science is not only in full agreement with scientific research and its discoveries, but also that it must necessarily fit into the aims of the time as a humanities today through the aspects that this natural scientific research has acquired for our general world view, that it must be taken up by the aims of our time.

This evening I will take the liberty of speaking about the mood that can evoke opposition and hostility in the soul towards this spiritual science. But so that we understand each other, so that those who were not present among today's esteemed audience at the last lecture can also follow the remarks, please allow me to say a few words in introduction to what was the subject of the last lecture and what is intended to characterize the general character of spiritual science.

Just as it is true that, on the one hand, spiritual science is a kind of continuation of scientific thinking, of the scientific world view for the spiritual realm, it is equally true, on the other hand, that this spiritual science, because it extends to the realm of spiritual life, of the spirit, of spiritual beings, needs different research methods, a different kind of world view, than the natural science directed towards the outer material existence. The natural scientist uses external instruments and external methods of observation for his research and to obtain his results. He has, so to speak, before him what the objects of his research give him and what the laws of his research allow him to gain. The spiritual researcher is different: he must find the connection to a world that, as the source, as the spiritual source of our existence, underlies all external reality, but which eludes the senses and also the mind, which relies on the statements of the senses, on external perception. The spiritual researcher must penetrate into a realm that is initially not accessible to external perception, to external observation. And the only instrument that is initially available to him, in the sense of true spiritual science, to penetrate into the spiritual world, is only his own soul.

But this own soul, as it is initially found in everyday life and also for external science, is not suitable for penetrating into the spiritual world. This human soul is so arranged for external life that it must make use of the organs, the instruments of the body. Through the sense organs, through the intellect, which is connected to the brain, the external world becomes accessible to it. The fact that the senses and also the intellect, which is connected to the brain, can only penetrate to the physical-sensory existence, was explained in more detail here last time, so it should not concern us today.

Let us first deal with the fact that this human soul, as it is in everyday life, must be transformed in order to penetrate into the spiritual world. It must first become that through which it can penetrate into the spiritual world, and it can only become this through the fact that the human being himself makes it so. And not external events, not experiences that are in the physical world, can advance the soul so that it can penetrate into the realm of the spirit, but only intimate, inner processes of the soul itself. These essentially consist of the soul practicing concentration of thought and meditation, as these things are called. You can find more details in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'.

When the soul, under certain conditions, erases and extinguishes the perceptions of the senses and the thoughts of the ordinary mind, and yet remains aware of itself as a soul, then it is in the state in which it gradually develops into the spiritual world. This state can be compared to the ordinary state of sleep in which a person finds themselves. When the ordinary senses gradually become silent as a person falls asleep, when ordinary thinking, the ordinary impulses of perception, feeling and will cease, then the human soul is indeed no longer using its body as an instrument. But at the same time it becomes unconscious. The darkness of unconsciousness spreads around it. Everything that is silent in sleep must also be silent in the spiritual researcher. But through inner strengthening of the soul life, through the spiritual researcher energetically and patiently over many years often concentrating a soul activity, even if only for a short time, just for minutes, on certain ideas — you can find more details in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'? — by means of which the soul is enabled to contract in inner power so that this soul can develop a life that is not mediated by the body, not by the sense organs.

One can indeed bring the soul into the same state in which it is otherwise only in normal sleep, but which differs from this state in that one is awake, although one does not think and perceive as in the ordinary waking state. One can detach this soul - the expression has already been used here - from the body as if by spiritual chemistry. If one strengthens one's thinking and feeling in the appropriate way, if one makes it increasingly stronger, one attains something in the instrument of one's own human being that can be compared to the separation of hydrogen from water in external chemistry. Just as water reveals nothing of the properties of hydrogen as such, so man, facing everyday life, reveals nothing of the actual properties of his soul.

But when this soul is strengthened by appropriate reinforcement of its inner powers, then it comes to experience itself not unconsciously, but fully aware outside of its body, so that its own body and its otherwise everyday destiny, its everyday experiences, face it like the outside world. Like the table or the chair as an object, the powerfully strengthened soul can face its own body. It expresses itself out of the body through the increased power that it acquires through meditation and concentration, as these exercises to strengthen the soul are called. In this way we can look inside when our soul has been strengthened; we see, as it were, ourselves in the world, but our soul is outside the body, which is very vivid through the method that really makes the soul go out of the body.

The possibility of penetrating into the spiritual world essentially rests on the human soul being able to become alive and perceptive outside the body. The strictest proof of the soul's independence also rests on the fact that the soul can experience and perceive outside the body through the spiritual-scientific method. One could deny that the soul is something outside the body, for example, when the person is asleep. One could say that the soul is nothing other than what is brought about by the machine of the body; when the machine of the body comes to a standstill, no expressions of life are shown. One could claim that when the machine of the body comes to a standstill in death, all soul activity ceases.

But when spiritual science shows that the soul can experience itself and perceive itself when it is outside the body, when it has the body before it, then at the same time proof of the independence of the soul is brought. This proof is possible. It is possible through the strengthening of the same inner powers that we otherwise also exercise in life, but only apply to all external events of life, and through the detachment of these powers from the external events of the day and the strengthening of these powers through meditation and concentration. These proofs — as far as they can be discussed, they were in the last lecture.

When the spiritual researcher has arrived at this kind of body-free perception, when he experiences himself in his soul, so that this soul is outside his body, then he is in fact in the spiritual world exactly as he is in the everyday life in the material world, when he has immersed himself with his soul in his body and makes use of the senses and the ordinary mind. In a spiritual world, the spiritual researcher then knows himself, and he knows himself in the spiritual world in such a way that he not only surveys the life between birth or, let us say, between conception and death, but he also surveys the life after he has passed through the gate of death to a new life. Because one of the most important criteria is the prospect of repeated lives on earth, in which the whole of life on earth is such that a person lives between death and rebirth and between birth and death.

What we experience in our present life is the consequence of previous lives on earth. But between two lives on earth, we spend time in the pure spiritual, in that spiritual in which the spiritual researcher immerses when he brings his soul to experience free of the body. Thus, the overview of human life is expanded through spiritual research. And the subject matter that has just been discussed, together with broader and broader aspects of these connections in the world and their creation, of the source of human life, of that which brings security, hope and purpose to human life, is precisely what spiritual research seeks to encompass and to add to what natural science has to give for the external world.

Now, in our time, there are opponents of spiritual research – but there have been opponents at all times – people who view spiritual research with outright hostility. Today, we will not go into the individual attacks of possible opponents of spiritual science. Something else should be shown. It should be shown where hostility against spiritual science can come from in human nature, what is present in human nature, normally, one would like to say, which, when it occurs particularly intensified and developed in this or that personality, must lead to a real hostility towards the research of spiritual life, towards the methods of the spirit. Spiritual science is, in the true sense, in the genuine sense, that which, where the words are understood, has been called Theosophy. That spiritual science has been called Theosophy does not mean that spiritual research, as represented here, wants to identify with all that is called Theosophy. For today, quite dubious teachings are summarized under the name of Theosophy. If one understands it honestly and righteously, the word theosophy means nothing more than that man can become aware that he carries within himself a soul-spiritual source through which he is connected to the divine-spiritual sources that spring and work through the world, that man can feel within himself what is present through the whole world as the divine-spiritual source. That he can experience it in himself, that he can not only suspect and believe in a divine within himself, but also bring it to realization. This gives the theosophical mood. An anti-theosophical mood would arise if man either completely denied that he can grasp something in the depths of his soul, or that what he grasps is connected with a divine spiritual life that surges through the world. Or an anti-Sophian mood would arise if he at least denied that he recognizes these connections with the divine-spiritual through the powers of human nature.

One can say: the human soul can develop a theosophical and an antisophical mood. And because spiritual science shows, as it were, through the soul's experiment, through soul chemistry: one can experience the soul if one first brings it to the point of view where it is free of the body —, spiritual science must stand on the theosophical point of view and surrender to it. That which can be made free of the body is, when it is free of the body, immersed in a world of spiritual facts and spiritual entities. The life with the spiritual worlds and the spiritual entities is theosophy, is spiritual science. But it will, precisely because it is able to go into the sources of existence, differ from other world views in that it can never become narrow-minded. We experience it in the other worldviews that their adherents simply want to understand and grasp what they themselves assert, and often blindly fight everything else, almost like a folly, and say that it should not be there. Spiritual science, because it tries to penetrate into the very sources of the human soul, can understand, fully understand, where other moods come from than its own, yes, it can even, as we want to show today, fully understand the anti-Socratic mood. Today's reflection is precisely about the fact that the anti-Sophian mood is not only forgivable, so to speak, when it occurs among the enemies and opponents of spiritual science, but that to a certain extent it even corresponds to human nature and its inclinations.

The spiritual researcher is not at all surprised that opponents and enemies of his line of research arise, because he recognizes that this antagonism is basically rooted in human nature. Let us cite a fact from the field of this spiritual research itself, which will also immediately show what is meant by the naturally given anti-philosophical mood.

How should spiritual science view human beings? It has already been stated in earlier lectures that for the spiritual researcher, the entry of human beings into the earthly world is a wonderful mystery. It is clear to the spiritual researcher that when a person enters earthly life through birth, they establish their earthly life on the basis of previous earthly lives that they have gone through. Before birth, he was a spiritual being in the spiritual world. In addition to what the person inherits from his father and mother, from his ancestors, and what he receives through the hereditary substance, the spiritual soul comes from the spiritual world. What comes from the father and mother combines with what comes from the spiritual world. We see first how that which comes from the spiritual world slowly works its way into that which comes through the hereditary tendency. We see first how even the child's facial features are indeterminate, but that they become more and more distinct as the child's soul-spiritual element comes to the fore. The spiritual researcher knows that the soul and spirit are only loosely connected to the physical body at first. So with each step towards a more definite facial appearance, with the emergence of abilities and talents, we see the soul and spirit becoming more deeply embedded in the physical body. If time allowed, I could cite evidence that the soul gradually disappears into the growing physical body, that the soul gives the physical body its three-dimensional shape, that it takes possession of the physical body's movements and skills.

Perhaps I may draw the attention of some of the honored listeners who have already taken a closer look at something like this, to the way children often look when they first enter the world through birth, so that one does not know who they resemble, that they only grow into the similarity over time. This is because two currents oppose each other: that which is predisposed in the physical body, which, so to speak, works its way up as physical strength, and that which comes from the soul and spirit, which permeates the physical body and gradually asserts itself. These currents determine the reasons why a person should be born into this or that family. One is not born into a family for no reason, but because what one brings with one from the spiritual and soul world feels a certain affinity to what is often in the family in question. Even if there is misfortune in the family in question, the soul needs precisely that for its further development, which can happen to it as misfortune. The attraction of the soul and spirit and the attraction of heredity interact. The soul and spirit only gradually grow into what the outside world brings them. Therefore, a balance with what is given in the line of inheritance only takes place gradually.

Spiritual science cannot participate in the discussion of these matters in the brutal way in which the physical experimental method does so. One must be able to look more closely and intimately at the living conditions if one wants to understand them from a spiritual scientific point of view. And so we see the soul and spiritual aspects of the human being descending and connecting with the physical and bodily aspects. We see that in the early stages of a child's development, the body is almost dream-like. Not only does the child have to sleep through a large part of its existence in order to stay healthy, but there is something dream-like about its life. Then comes the time – it is the point up to which one remembers – when self-awareness clearly emerges, when the child learns to feel itself as an ego, to express its self-awareness clearly.

What is this based on? In the early days, before this happens, the spiritual and soul forces are first at work to make the body a suitable tool for the mission, the sending forth. When a person is born, the brain and the finer organs, which are still quite undetermined at first, still have a long way to go. The spiritual soul must immerse itself, must increasingly take possession of the physical body, and grow into the physical body. The forces that descend from the spiritual world do this, they shape the brain plastically, they “organize” the individual members of the human body so that it has an instrument for acting and perceiving in the outside world. This inner work that the soul performs in the body is infinitely significant and important. As long as this inner work lasts, the child must live a kind of dream life, especially as long as this work is still focused on the physical development of the brain and the finer limbs of the nervous system. Then there comes a point, which we remember later. At this point, the inner work is completed to a certain extent. It is difficult to express such things precisely in the ordinary language of everyday life, because our speech is made for the outer world, not for the spiritual world. Therefore, one must try to coin the words in such a way that they point to what underlies them. When, I would like to say, that which the spiritual soul has to do with the physical body is so far worked out that the physical body is condensed and prepared as the human being needs it for his later life, then the forces that used to work within are released. They no longer sink into the physical body, they will be there for themselves. And what is the result of this? I would like to express what the result is by means of a comparison. The parable is not to be used as an analogy to explain anything, but it should only make it clear what is meant here: if we think we have a glass plate and a mass in front of us and we look through the glass, we see what is behind it. If we now take the mass and shape it so that we can place it on the glass plate as a covering, we gradually turn what was a transparent glass plate into a mirror. If we now look into the glass, we seem to be looking at ourselves. What is presented here as a parable, thought out accordingly, makes it clear to us what happens in the first years of a child in a human being.

The child's soul and spirit work together to shape the body, to mold it plastically. We can say that they make it so dense that it no longer takes in spiritual and soul activity and works itself into the body. We can compare this to the fact that you can no longer see through a glass that has a mirror coating. The body will now reflect the spiritual-soul activity, will reflect it back; self-awareness begins. From the moment the spiritual-soul activity is complete, the body becomes a mirror, the nervous system becomes a mirror. And just as you see yourself in a finished mirror, so from that moment on, you experience yourself as an independent I, as a child, using the spiritual and soul forces to make your physical body a mirror. So, just as you perceive yourself in your mirror image, self-awareness begins to feel itself as an I. This is the point to which one later remembers going back. This is the awakening of self-awareness, this is the appearance of the ego in the child. And at the same time, we know from this that the forces that were previously used to organize the body, that brought the body to the density whereby it became a mirroring apparatus, that these are now used for everyday life, for feeling, imagining and thinking. What else comes into play here? This will be shown by the development that the spiritual researcher must undergo. When the spiritual researcher truly forms his soul free of the body, when he truly comes to a body-free experience and perception through the means mentioned in the last lecture and described in Occult Science, then he makes use, precisely in his soul, of the means that the child uses to shape the body plastically. He must reintroduce the means that ceased to be used when the relationship with the outside world began to become conscious. What the spiritual researcher needs for his spiritual method had to be stemmed by the bodily views and ideas.

One can use a precise way of expressing oneself that makes use of a word that is already frequently used today. One can say: That which the spiritual researcher must bring to consciousness is the same as what would be present in the ordinary person if consciousness were to suddenly arise in a state of sleep and the person would still be asleep. The spiritual and soul life in the ordinary person lies in the subconscious, it does not come to consciousness. For what comes to consciousness in everyday life? Not the soul-spiritual itself, but its reflection in the body, just as the person standing in front of the mirror does not see himself standing there, but his image, his reflection. So too, everyday consciousness is not one in which the soul-spiritual perceives itself, but rather what is reflected back from life as a mirror image from the moment self-awareness is awakened.

From this particular point in time onwards, what has ceased to be part of ordinary human experience, and been pushed down into the subconscious, so that the human being can focus his attention during physical life on the mirror image, must be retrieved by the spiritual researcher. This is done by the spiritual researcher in what is a fragment of the human organization itself, which is first worked out during the embryonic period and later during the time after the human being is born, up to the moment when self-awareness occurs. Two things are juxtaposed: everyday life, where man only has to do with the mirror image, while in the subconscious remains the truly real experience of the spiritual and soul. What the spiritual researcher has to do is to bring up that of which one otherwise has only a mirror image in daily experience.

Now we must bear in mind that it is in the nature of man that he is so placed in everyday life that he sends the forces into his body only in the first, most tender childhood, until the moment when the dream life transforms into the fully conscious ordinary day life, when man perceives the reflection of his soul life. Everything by which man is capable in the outer life, by which he stands firm in the social life, by which he accomplishes ordinary science, is based on the fact that he no longer uses the forces for the outer life from the characterized childhood standpoint, which can only be reflected, that he used before this point in time for the development of the physical body.

The forces that a person needs for their external physical body must therefore have the tendency to push back, to push down into the unconscious, everything that the spiritual researcher needs for their spiritual research, but that is there and that shapes the person from the spiritual world, that makes them in the image of the spiritual world. The mood must necessarily develop through this, especially in the person who is immersed in the outer physical life, who is aware of the fact that I have become capable of the outer world through what I have acquired as a human being – and who does not know that there are other forces, namely the forces that have so far worked on his inner being, for him the mood must arise to hold on to the forces that are opposed to the forces of spiritual research. This mood easily gets out of hand in ordinary life. It produces an aversion, an antipathy, to all spiritual research. One instinctively feels that one should apply those powers in the physical body that one needs for physical life. These powers have nothing to do with the powers that the spiritual researcher wants to talk about.

If one wants to state the matter forcefully, it can be characterized in the following way. One can say: Yes, the human being feels within himself the consciousness that he is capable in the physical sense of being through the powers of his body, when he forgets the other power, the spiritual-soul power, which, without his intervention, without him making an effort, has prepared the body in the first years of his childhood, on which the soul then reflects. Man pays no attention to the fact that the forces are alive that have made him what he is and that enable him to be capable. He takes for granted the instruments that he has prepared without effort. He does not think that they are formed out of the soul-spiritual world. He perceives this instrument when it is ready so that it makes him capable in the outer, physical world.

If a person is tuned in this way, if he says to himself, 'How they came into being is not my concern, I just want to use this tool', then he can enter into an anti-Sophian mood. He wants to know nothing of the forces that have formed this tool and that the spiritual researcher must bring forth and bring to consciousness. Do you realize that just at a time when material life makes so many demands on people, at a time when there are such rich and flourishing fields of knowledge, when people are so proud of material progress, that in such a time the anti-spiritual mood must get out of hand? Will you understand that there is antipathy towards Theosophy, towards the power that reigns in secret and must be brought forth by the spiritual researcher, that there is resentment? But these powers lie hidden in the depths of the soul and are brought out through spiritual research. And when they are brought up, these powers become the means by which we are introduced to the real facts and entities of the spiritual world.

Now the anti-sophical mood can be ignited a second time because the path of spiritual research is not particularly easy. What happens when a person comes to release the soul and spirit from the body, to slip out of the physical and bodily as it were? Then perceptions arise in his soul that are no longer the perceptions of the outer senses, thoughts that are no longer thoughts of his ordinary mind. Then, just as in falling asleep, the everyday world of the senses sinks away. So the outer world fades into the indefinite. But not the darkness of sleep emerges, but a new world, a world that must be understood in the right sense if it is not to be misunderstood.

When the spiritual researcher has practiced patience and energy long enough to free his soul, so to speak, to set it apart from the body, then the first thing that happens is not that he is immediately confronted with a multitude of spiritual facts and entities. But he does feel that he is in a different world. From a certain moment on, one knows what it means to be outside one's body in a spiritual-soul state. It occurs when one begins to have dream-like images with a kind of inner soul activity, just as dreams can interrupt the night's sleep, intermingling with it, and we know that they are not caused by external things in the usual way. Images arise that someone who does not understand them will consider to be fantasies, but that the spiritual researcher knows: if his spiritual-soul is developed in the right way, not as today's humanity understands evolution, but in such a way that the soul develops from the depth of its natural being, then he is in a new world. There are images that one has never seen, impressions that one has never had.

Lest I be misunderstood, I must now immediately point out something. Of course, when the soul has emerged from the body and sees a world around it, reminiscent of color images flitting back and forth, a world of sounds. But basically, not everything in this new world is the same as in the physical world. If everything were only a memory, a reminiscence of the sensory world, one could be under the impression that Plato's disciple made when he said, “Socrates knew nothing but what other people also know. Every schoolboy knows that too. Why should Socrates know more than a schoolboy? Certainly, the individual color pictures remind us of the outer purpose in life, but just as the letters of a book convey something completely new to us, even though we know all the individual letters, so the experiences of the soul introduce us to the spiritual world, even though they appear like reminiscences of the outer physical life.

There is only one point that must be overcome. What first appears, what fills our soul's field of perception, is something that the materialist can call images of the imagination, if he does not know that these images are not initially a real perception of something external, but the first manifestation of the spiritual organism. Just as we learn in the course of childhood to form our organs, to feel things in the right way, to see, and only through this do we become aware of our body, so we must, if I may use the expression, become aware of our spiritual body. What these people see as a spiritual world is only what we have to develop like a spiritual body. And in this spiritual body we have to feel, as it were, the real spiritual world. And indeed, what we perceive first is ourselves. In this sense, one can speak of visions, of hallucinations. The materialistic researcher gets to know nothing but this. And because he cannot get to know anything else, he cannot believe that the time will come when the real spiritual researcher needs them. Just as the material scientist needs his hands to perceive the physical, so the spiritual scientist needs what is produced by the senses free from the body, in order to grasp and perceive the spiritual world. First we train the mind's eye and mind's ear, and when we make use of them, we enter through them into the spiritual world.

There, on this threshold of the spiritual world, two things arise that, to a certain extent, make people shy away from really entering the spiritual world. What arises is as follows: First of all, the world of the spirit that we enter is quite different from the physical world. We cannot simply use our concepts, ideas and notions from the physical world to penetrate into this spiritual world. In our ordinary everyday life, we are accustomed to perceiving realities that we perceive with our bodies, that we perceive through our eyes and ears. We are accustomed to calling real that which we can touch with our hands, which we can understand in its laws through our mind, which is bound to the physical brain.

But we have shed this body when we enter the spiritual world as spiritual researchers. There is nothing in it that can be perceived through the body. At first, one experiences oneself in one's soul in such a way that one knows: the body is gone, one is only in the spiritual world with one's soul. What asserts itself is what one can call a complete unfamiliarity with the new situation. While you were used to being surrounded by the body in the world, you now stand there with only your soul and no inner experience. And the same strong feeling arises that can only be compared to what you experienced when you dreamed. You suddenly feel undressed in a place where many people are, full of shame because you feel you don't belong in this world. This dream gives a blurred image, somewhat like a premonition, of what happens with infinite amplification when you enter the spiritual world and feel out of place, so that you say: You stand opposed to that which you have called reality differently, you cannot see or feel what the real world has meant to you so far. What is the point of trying to enter a world that is stripped of what you have really perceived? As soon as you enter the spiritual world and are in a world that contains completely different entities, which are merely spiritual-soul, between which actions take place that lie only in the spiritual world, as soon as you enter, you must first preserve your ego with all your might. If you do not preserve your ego, you will be immersed in this entire spiritual world. Therefore, when you read the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” you will see that all the exercises recommended there are aimed at carrying the ego into the spiritual world more strongly than it is experienced in the outer world. When I see a blue color in the sensory world, I say: I see it. I think it is outside of me. When one enters the spiritual world, one takes on its properties. When one submerges into the spiritual world, one must become one with the spiritual world. The entire inner being spreads out into the spiritual world, flows out into the spiritual world. And the thoughts – one does not feel as though one is thinking them, but rather they think themselves. You are really in this spiritual world so much so that you are like Erl King and his son at the same time: the father full of worries, the son with all kinds of visions surging through his soul. You are both at the same time. You perceive a new world, but you feel as if you are drawn to every thing, to every deed by some indeterminate forces. You feel as if you have been torn out of yourself. This creates a feeling in the soul that one must get to know well. A feeling of fear of being taken from what has so far guaranteed reality.

Both feelings, the feeling of being unaccustomed to the spiritual world and of being exposed in it, the feeling of fear of it, are found in the depths of the human soul. Both feelings would arise and suddenly seize the person if he were to awaken, as the spiritual researcher must awaken when he awakens from his everyday sleep; he would be seized by an infinite fear of being unfamiliar and exposed. But the ordinary sleep immediately corrects these feelings. They do not express themselves. Man numbs himself by the will arising in him to withdraw into his body and thereby wake up. That is why man feels as if he is being pushed by a will impulse towards his body when he wakes up, as long as the body can take him, that is, until death, because the body numbs the feeling of being exposed. Man numbs his feelings of fear by not allowing himself to penetrate into the spiritual world at all at first.

At the moment when man begins to penetrate into the spiritual world through exercises advised by the spiritual researcher, this fear quietly approaches his soul. Man tries to deaden it by keeping away from the spiritual world, by being materialistic, in other words, by developing to the highest degree that which is in him an anti-sophical mood, because man must deaden himself to what would fill him if he wanted to penetrate into the spiritual world. Through the feeling of fear, the soul is anti-sophically tuned. In order not to be anti-Sophian, man must do such exercises that enable him above all not to feel exposed, but to feel clothed by a spiritual body, as he is clothed here by a physical body. To overcome the feeling of fear, man must do exercises that enable him to approach the spiritual world fearlessly and boldly.

Therefore, many people are anti-philosophical. But this is basically not ill will, not something that can be strongly attributed to people, but rather it is the human desire to numb themselves to fear. This is what drives them to anti-philosophical sentiment. It is not a figure of speech when a building is erected for spiritual science somewhere and the opposition asserts itself in the whole environment and continues to do so everywhere. Therefore, the anti-sophistic mood arises from the fact that people want to numb themselves from their own abilities to enter the spiritual world. Because people cannot overcome this fear, they become anti-sophical. Just as people persuade themselves of something in order to avoid facing something else, not to let it enter their consciousness, so too, to put it frankly, they would have to say what is in their subconscious: we are afraid of the spiritual world, therefore the spiritual world must not exist for us. The consequence of this is that the person declares spiritual science to be nonsense, fantasy, dreaming, unnecessary, that he invents all kinds of things to denigrate it. These are means to numb the fear - the fear that one naturally does not understand when one speaks.

We can use the methods of spiritual science to draw particular attention to this fear in the present day and also to point out that it is not admitted, but something is invented to numb it. I would like to draw your attention to a characteristic phenomenon.

A very important physiologist who died some time ago pointed out something that only needs to be looked at in the right way to corroborate the fact just mentioned. However, I would like to point out that when I cite something that is anti-Sophistic, I am not willing to attack opponents whom I do not belittle, but whom I hold in the highest esteem in their own fields. I appreciate Du Bois-Reymond, who gave a famous, spirited speech at a famous natural science conference in the 1870s. The brilliant, outstanding explanations of a person grounded in current natural science find evidence for what he is explaining everywhere, he produces reasons everywhere. Then he approaches the conclusion.

What did he come to? He showed that natural science can only lead to an understanding of the world in which it understands motion of the smallest parts, and that it traces everything back to motion. But as much as all natural science is based on the investigation of the motion of atoms and so forth, it is also true that natural science can never grasp the soul. The naturalist can say that the red color arises from certain movements, but he cannot say how the consciousness of the red color arises in us. No natural science could ever comprehend anything of the soul from movement. If one wanted to comprehend the soul from what is solely justified in natural science, then what he calls supernaturalism would begin. And so Du Bois-Reymond concludes his speech: Natural science must stop at external movement; it can never grasp even the simplest part of the human soul. This soul could only be grasped where supernaturalism begins and natural science ends.

We can go through Du Bois-Reymond's speech and find the most beautiful reasons for what he says everywhere. Only the last assertion is like a shot from a pistol. He does not provide any evidence for it. We have the feeling – and we must have it, because it is justified – that Du Bois-Reymond, in moving from what is the justified field of his science to supernaturalism, no longer presents reasons, but antipathy. The feeling of dislike shoots out of his subconscious, making him look at supernaturalism with antipathy, but he has no reasons for his assertion. Du Bois-Reymond is not alone; I have only mentioned him as a typical representative of this tendency. Wherever there is antipathy towards the communication of spiritual science, i.e., wherever anti-Socratic sentiment arises, we see people everywhere, whether we call them materialists or monists, who give the most beautiful reasons for what they say in the way of positive arguments.

But you see, a hundred and a hundred proofs could be brought for this; where people express their antipathy towards spiritual science, the reasons stop. This antipathy comes from the subconscious, from what has nothing to do with what they know how to justify. To see what arises, we must shine a light into the human soul organization with the means of spiritual science, and here external natural science actually meets spiritual science halfway, as natural science always does when the latter understands itself and does not want to found a comprehensive world view on misunderstood knowledge.

One can examine how his organization works under the influence of thinking, which is directed only at the outer world of sense perceptions and the intellect, through the particular way in which the purely external, purely fact-based scholar, who otherwise only relies on what his thinking gives him about the outer world, investigates. You can see that the nerves are put in the same position as when a person is in a state of fear, only that in the case of a state of fear caused by a sudden shock, can be disturbed in its circulation; it can be drawn from the outer parts of the body and directed to the heart and brain, so that fainting can occur as a result of sudden fright. The scholar attributes what suddenly causes the fear to a long life. He dissolves the states of fear, as it were. When he encounters the world, he is overcome by fear in his entire soul, then he dissolves this fear into the anti-Sophian mood.

The Danish researcher Lange has written a book about the emotions, in which the states of fear are also characterized in psychological terms. But spiritual science can also do this with its means. The whole vascular system is put into a different mood when a person experiences fear or shock. When fear arises in the human soul, even the fluids are put into a different mood. This could be described in detail. It would take up too much of our time, but there is one thing you will all know: when a person is overcome by terror or fear, they suddenly feel insecure. They have the urge to hold on to something, and may even faint. Physically, they seek to hold on.

What one produces through an activity directed purely towards the external world of observation is a fear and terror spread over the years. Slowly and gradually fear is poured into the soul and into the organism that which is the state of fear when one only experiences that which relates to the external sense world. When people are in this state of fear, then that which expresses itself in them, in their field, is what expresses itself in a person who is in fear and terror and says: I am falling over, give me something to hold on to. This is what the person who is so inclined that he rejects the supernatural world says. I will reject the spiritual world, give me something to hold on to. Physical observation, the theory of atoms, is what those who are seized by a subconscious sense of fear hold on to.

This is the answer that science, which is directed towards the external, must produce, which wants to know nothing of this spiritual science, of the conditions that one is supposed to experience without being able to hold on to external knowledge, to physical laws. Just as the fearful want to hold on to the table or chair, so those who are afraid of the spiritual world want to hold on to matter, because they are afraid of sinking into a spiritual powerlessness if they cannot hold on to matter. He numbs himself with this fear by imagining: there is nothing supernatural.

From these remarks, we see how anti-Sophian sentiment must be generated in a natural way, we see how anti-Sophian sentiment must be generated precisely in the forms that this external science takes. You will find all the more anti-Sophian sentiment the more man lets himself be inwardly infected by the sentiment that this science generates, which is directed outwards. Thus, it can be said that something is given to man entirely in his natural disposition, which can be described as an antisophical mood. And the more man places himself in the outer life - be it in practice or in science - the more antisophical mood is stored.

But just as a pendulum, when it swings to one side, must also swing to the other side, so too, when external form swings to the anti-Socratic mood, man must also swing to the other side - theosophical. Man cannot stand there in spiritual peace, just as the pendulum cannot be at rest when it has swung to one side. Man could only then keep his soul at peace if he were to remain completely dull in a spiritual twilight. It can happen, precisely because of the mood of the present, that the soul is carried away by the antisophical mood. All the more reason to note, in the depths of the human soul, for those who can look at it more intimately, that the pendulum wants to swing to the other side, that the theosophical mood is also in numerous human souls. It is a matter of this theosophy being guided in the right direction for spiritual science in particular. It does not have the task of creating the theosophical mood; this mood will arise of its own accord, like the opposite swing of the pendulum. The more we approach the future, the more the theosophical mood will arise in all human souls that understand each other, in contrast to the anti-sophical mood. But the theosophical mood, however little it needs to be created, needs to be guided and directed by spiritual science. It must find the right path through spiritual science, just as the anti-theosophical mood must find its right path. Otherwise, what I want to suggest by way of a comparison could easily happen.

Tasso is known not only through his own poetry but also through the work of Goethe. Tasso spoke of a spirit with whom he converses. He did not speak as the spiritual researcher speaks. The spiritual researcher who brings himself to consciousness and knows what kind of being it is, who can maintain his consciousness, must speak differently than the poet who dresses what he feels in fantasy. The spiritual researcher of the present holds on to the ego and does not allow fear to arise. Tasso did not yet live in the age in which spiritual research began to educate about the spiritual world. Tasso spoke of a spirit with whom he conversed and to whom he owed his best thoughts. Manso, who had written a life of Tasso, always laughed at this strange spirit with whom Tasso conversed. He sees nothing, they say. So Tasso once said to him: “I will make you see and hear him for once.” And once, after they had been hunting together, Tasso suddenly looked towards the window where he was standing with Manso. Manso saw how Tasso began to speak as if to a foreign being. Tasso was holding a conversation with him. And Manso could not content himself with saying that Tasso might have invented it. He spoke in such a way that he gave answers that he could not have given of his own accord. When the conversation was over, Tasso said to him: 'Do you now have proof of the spirit to which I am speaking?' 'Yes,' said Manso, 'I heard you talking to a spirit, but I saw nothing.' Then Tasso said: 'You have seen and heard enough. If you had seen more, then – he broke off. You could not have borne it, we could complete his words in this way.

This is how it could be for souls if they did not, as is natural, have to develop the theosophical mood as a response, as a counterbalance, to the antisophical mood. They could necessarily perceive the spiritual, but one must doubt whether they could bear it. Spiritual science must guide these souls in the right direction. As long as people indulge in anti-sophical moods, it will be there that anti-sophists are, so to speak, the images of Mephisto, the original anti-sophist of modern times. He is the original anti-sophist. When he gives Faust the key to the realm of mothers, he explains that Faust will enter into nothingness. Faust, the theosophist, declares: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” He has overcome fear, he does not need to anesthetize himself in the face of fear.

If we develop this, which leads from the anti-theosophical to the theosophical mood, then again the case is that one can say: With spiritual science, one feels in harmony with all those people who, over time, even if they have not yet been able to embrace spiritual science – for spiritual science can only in our time grasp the soul and stand alongside natural science – with all those who, out of true, genuine spiritual research, represent the progress of humanity, with all those one feels in harmony.

When we consider the human soul with its anti- and theosophical moods, both of which must necessarily be present in the human soul, as we have done today, then we can say that we are fully understanding of all opponents and enemies of spiritual science. We have to defend ourselves against them, but we understand them. And this understanding can even lead to compassion, because in most cases, opposition is nothing more than an anaesthetic for the fear that overcomes a person when they first want to penetrate into the spiritual world and are not prepared. The anti-Sophist does not feel this fear, but it is present in his subconscious. And he places himself on the side of the person who, in the eighteenth century, responded as a philosopher to the antisophical trend. Haller, the great sage, who is also well known here in Switzerland. He is mentioned here, just as other people are mentioned, rather than lesser opponents, because he was one of the greatest in his field. Because in his soul, precisely in order to achieve that in which he had become great, namely as a natural scientist in the external fields, the anti-Sophian mood grew ever greater, he says:

Into the innermost nature
No created spirit penetrates.
Happy he to whom she only
The outer shell rejects.

This is the anti-Sophian sentiment, which cannot penetrate, recognize that man has an inner source of existence, and cannot approach this source scientifically. Goethe opposes this with his theosophical sentiment. He does not speak of theosophical or anti-Sophian sentiment. But he says, with regard to Haller's words:

I have heard this said for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and willingly,
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you most of all
Whether you are the core or the shell.

Man can develop an anti-Sophistic mood within himself. He can come to the frame of mind of saying: I want to get to the core, to that which guarantees my reality when I am only in my shell. What underlies what life hides from me, its core, may remain hidden. This is expressed in the sentence:

No created spirit
Can penetrate the innermost nature.
Happy the man to whom she
Only the outer shell shows.

The theosophist says: Man is, in the innermost part of his being, that which is spiritual and soul-like in him. The spiritual and soul-like triumphs over the body, [it is that] which conquers the body in death and passes through death into the spiritual world, in order to experience the spiritual world through death and to come back to the body again through a new birth for further development! A person can live in their core, and when they live in their core and only experience it, then they experience the spiritual and soul life that flows and surges through the world. Just as we are present in the entire physical world through our body as instruments and forces, so we are present in the spiritual and soul life of the world by experiencing the innermost part of our soul. And even if not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, the soul of man is predisposed to the knowledge of truth. Only a few people need become spiritual researchers. But even if one is not a spiritual researcher oneself, if one only examines one's own ordinary human thinking, one is able to understand everything that the spiritual researcher says, if one applies what has been indicated about soul development.

The spiritual researcher is not limited to speaking only to spiritual researchers. He knows that he speaks to the innermost core that is in every soul. And if external prejudices do not prevent it, every soul can feel the truth of what the spiritual researcher says. This theosophical mood will become more and more a part of life, will increasingly embrace the goals of spiritual life, especially as people come to ever more glorious and fruitful spiritual life. Then the human soul will defend itself against the anti-theosophical mood in its quiet hours, in the moments when it feels, when it becomes aware of how it is connected with the core of all existence. Then the soul will try to awaken such a theosophical mood, which expresses itself in saying more and more in the face of all anti-theosophical sentiment:

Nature has neither core
nor shell;
All at once it is everything;
— Nothing is inside, nothing is outside.
Because what is inside is also outside. —
You, most of all, test yourself
Whether you are core or shell.