The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Goethe, one of the most inspired spirits of the modern age, has indicated in moving words the power of the Easter bells. In the figure of Faust he places before us the representative of aspiring humanity, who has reached the bourn of earthly existence; and he shows us how the Easter tidings, the light kindled by the Easter Festival, are able, in the heart even of one who is seeking death, to vanquish the thoughts and the power of death.

As Goethe portrays it, the inner impulse given by the Easter tidings has streamed through the whole evolution of mankind. And when in a none too distant future men understand through deepened spiritual insight how the festivals are meant to link the soul with all that lives and weaves in the great universe, they will feel that the soul, expanding in a new way during these days at the beginning of spring, comes to realise that the wellsprings of spiritual life can deliver us from material life, from the constriction of an existence fettered to matter.

It is precisely at the time of Easter that man's soul can become imbued with the unshakable conviction that in the innermost core of man's being lies a fount of eternal, divine existence, a fount of strength which enables us to break free from bondage to matter and, without losing our identity, to become one with the fountain-head of cosmic existence. To this inner fount we can penetrate at all times through higher knowledge. The Easter Festival is an outer sign of this deep experience within the reach of man, an outer sign of the deepest Christian Mystery. And so at Easter to-day the outer festival and its tokens are like a symbol of what at the beginning of their earthly evolution men could discover and know only in the secrecy of the Mysteries. Wherever the peoples of the earth celebrated the festival now called Easter—and it was celebrated far and wide among ancient peoples—it was proclaimed from the Mysteries, awakening everywhere the feeling—indeed the conviction—that life in the spirit can be victorious over death in matter. But whatever was thus instilled into the human soul in olden times had to be proclaimed from the depths of the Mysteries.

The progress of human evolution, however, has brought it about that more and more of the secrets guarded in the sanctuaries are now coming to light, that the wisdom of the Mysteries is now emerging to become the common possession of all mankind. Let us devote our studies to-day and tomorrow to an endeavour to show how this feeling, this inner conviction, forces its way outwards from the depths of primeval knowledge into ever-widening circles. To-day we will look back into the past in order to be able to describe tomorrow what is felt about this festival at the present time. As Easter is the festival of the resurrection of the spirit of man and of mankind, we must come together with inner earnestness before we can hope to advance to a wisdom that in a certain sense leads to the very peak of spiritual-scientific understanding.

Our Christian festival of Easter is only one of the forms of the Easter festival of humanity in general. What the wise men of old were able to say out of their strongest, deepest convictions, out of the very ground of wisdom, about life overcoming death—this was woven into the symbolism of the Easter festival. In the utterances of these wise men we shall everywhere find the foundation for an understanding of the Easter festival, the festival of the resurrection of the Spirit.

A beautiful and profound Eastern legend runs as follows: The great Teacher of the East, Shakyamuni, the Buddha, has endowed the regions of the East with his profound wisdom, which, drawn from the fountain-head of spiritual existence, glowed with infinite blessing through the hearts of men. Primal wisdom flowing from divine-spiritual worlds brought blessing to human hearts in times when men were still able to gaze into the spiritual world. This has been saved by Shakyamuni for a later humanity. Shakyamuni had a great pupil, and whereas the other pupils grasped to a greater or lesser extent the all-embracing wisdom taught by the Buddha, Kashiapa—such was the name of the pupil—grasped it fully. He was one of those most deeply initiated into these teachings, one of the most significant followers of the Buddha. The legend tells that when Kashiapa came to the point of death and on account of his mature wisdom was ready to pass into Nirvana, he made his way to a steep mountain and hid himself in a cave. After his death his body did not decay but remained intact. Only the Initiates know of this secret and of the hidden place where the incorruptible body of the great Initiate rests. But the Buddha foretold that one day in the future his great successor, the Maitreya Buddha, the new great Teacher and Leader of mankind, would come, and reaching the supreme height of existence to be attained during earthly life, would seek out the cave of Kashiapa and touch with his right hand the incorruptible body of the Enlightened One. Whereupon a miraculous fire would stream down from heaven and in this fire the incorruptible body of Kashiapa, the Enlightened One, would be lifted from earthly into spiritual existence.

Such is the great Eastern legend—unintelligible, perhaps, in some respects, to the West. This legend speaks, too, of a resurrection, of a transportation from earthly existence, an overcoming of death, achieved in such a way that the earth's forces of corruption have no effect upon the purified body of Kashiapa. Thus when the great Initiate comes and touches this body with his hand, it will be carried up by the miraculous fire into the heavenly spheres.

It is just where this legend deviates from the content of the Western, Christian account of Easter, that there lies the possibility of reaching a deeper understanding of the Easter festival. Such a legend enshrines an ancient wisdom that can only gradually be approached. We may ask: Why does not Kashiapa, like the Redeemer in the Christian account of Easter, achieve victory over death after three days? Why does the incorruptible body of the Eastern Initiate wait for long ages before being transported by the miraculous fire into the heavenly heights?

We hear to-day no more than echoes of the depths here contained. Only by degrees can we gain some inkling of the wisdom expressed in legends as profound as this one. We must remain in reverent awe at a distance and learn through these solemn festivals gradually to look upwards to the heights of wisdom. Nor should we aspire immediately to apprehend with our prosaic intellect what such legends contain. True understanding will be attained only if we approach these truths with adequate, sufficiently mature perceptions and feelings, in order, ultimately, to grasp them with inner fire and warmth.

For present-day humanity, two truths stand like mighty beacons on the horizon of the Spirit, two inwardly allied tokens of reality. They are two focal points for men who seek the spiritual at the present stage of evolution. The first beacon is the burning thorn-bush, and the second the fire which amid lighting and thunder appeared to Moses on Sinai and through which the proclamation is made to him: I am the I am.

Who is the spiritual Being Who then announced Himself to Moses in the two manifestations?

Those who understand the tidings of Christianity in the spiritual sense also understand the words which make known the identity of the Being Who appeared to Moses in the burning thorn-bush, and afterwards on Sinai amid lighting and thunder when the Ten Commandments were given. The writer of the Gospel of St. John himself indicates that Christ Jesus had been foretold by Moses,¹ by pointing to the passages telling of how the Power, which was later called Christ, made Himself known in the burning thorn-bush and then in fire on Sinai. It was Christ and none other Who says of Himself to Moses: I am the I am.

The God Who appeared later on in a human body and Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, wielded earlier an invisible sway, announcing Himself in the element of fire in nature. The message of the Old Testament and of the New Testament is understood only when it is realised that the God heralded by Moses is the Christ Who was one day to come among men. Thus the God Who is to bring redemption to mankind announces Himself, not in a human form, but in the fire-element of nature, in which He is manifest. The same Being Who appeared visibly in the events in Palestine held sway through all the ages of antiquity, and His divine Being is revealed in many diverse forms.

We look back to the Old Testament and we ask ourselves: “Who was it, in reality, whom the ancient Hebrews worshipped? Who was their God?” Those who belonged to the Hebrew Mysteries knew that it was Christ Whom they worshipped; they recognised Christ as the One Who spoke the words: “Say to my people: I am the I am.” But even if this were not known, the fact that during our cycle of evolution God announced Himself in fire, would be sufficiently indicative to enable one who gazes into the deep secrets of nature to realise that the God Who proclaimed Himself in the burning thorn-bush and on Sinai is the same God Who came down from spiritual heights into a human body in order to fulfil the Mystery of Golgotha. For there is a mysterious connection between the fire kindled in the external world by the elements of nature and the warmth pervading our blood. Spiritual science constantly emphasises that man is a microcosm of the great world, the macrocosm. Truly understood, therefore, processes which take place within the human being must correspond with processes in the universe outside. We must be able to find the outer process corresponding to every inner process. To understand what this means we shall have to penetrate into deep regions of spiritual science, for we come here to the fringe of a profound secret, of a momentous truth which gives the answer to the question: What is it in the great universe that corresponds to the mysterious origin of human thought?

In a very real sense, man is the only thinking being on the earth. Thoughts are kindled in him in a way that applies to no other being belonging to the earth, and through his thoughts he experiences a world which leads him beyond and above the earth. What is it that kindles thoughts in us, what process is taking place when the simplest or the most sublime thought flashes through us?—When thoughts flow through our soul, two forces are working together in us—our astral body and our Ego. The physical expression of the Ego, the ‘I,’ is the blood; the physical expression of the astral body is the life of the nervous system. Thoughts would never flash through the soul if there were no interplay between Ego and astral body, coming to expression in the interplay between the blood and the nerves. It will seem strange to science in time to come that the science of our day should look for the origin of thought in the nervous system alone. For thought does not originate only in the nerves. It is in the living interplay between the blood and the nerves, and only there, that we have to look for the process which gives rise to thoughts. When our blood (our inner fire) and our nervous system (our inner air) are in this interplay, thought flashes through the soul.

Now the genesis of thought within the soul corresponds, in the cosmos, to the rolling thunder. When the fiery lightning is generated in the air, when fire and air interact to produce thunder, this is the macrocosmic event corresponding to the process by which the fire of the blood and the play of the nervous system discharge themselves in the inner thunder which, gently, peacefully, outwardly imperceptible, it is true, rings out in the thought. Lightning in the clouds corresponds, within us, to the warmth of our blood, and the air in the universe, together with the elements it contains, corresponds to the life pervading our nervous system. And just as lightning in the action and reaction of the elements gives rise to thunder, so the action and reaction of blood and nerves produces the thought that flashes through the soul. Looking out into the world around us, we see the dashing Lightning in the formations of the air, and we hear the rolling thunder ... and then, looking within the soul, we feel the inner warmth pulsating in our blood and the life pervading our nervous system; then we become aware of the thought flashing through us, and we say: “The two are one.”

It is really and truly so. The thunder rolling in the heavens is not a physical-material phenomenon only. Materialistic mythology alone regards it as such. To one who sees the spiritual weaving and surging through material existence it is truth and reality when, looking upwards, men see the lightning, hear the thunder, and say to themselves: Now the Godhead is thinking in the fire, announcing Himself to us.—This is the invisible God Who weaves and surges through the universe, Whose warmth is in the lightning, Whose nerves are in the air, Whose thoughts are in the rolling thunder. This is the God Who spoke to Moses in the burning thorn-bush and on Sinai in the fiery lightning.

Fire and air in the macrocosm are, in man the microcosm, blood and nerves. As you have lightning and thunder in the macrocosm, so you have thoughts arising within the human being. And the God seen and heard by Moses in the burning thorn-bush, Who spoke to him in the fiery lightning on Sinai, was present as the Christ in the blood of Jesus of Nazareth. Christ, descending into a human form, was manifest in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In that He thought as a man in a human body, He became the great Prototype of the future evolution of humanity.

Thus the two poles of human evolution meet: the macrocosmic God announces Himself on Sinai in the thunder and fiery lightning; and the same God, incarnate in the Man of Palestine, appears in microcosmic form. The sublime mysteries of the life of mankind are derived from the deepest wisdom. They are truth in all profundity, not invented legends. But so profound is their truth that we need all the means open to spiritual science to unveil the secrets bound up with that truth.

Let us now consider what the impulse was that was received by mankind through its great Prototype, through the Being Who descended and united Himself with the microcosmic images of the elements in a human body—through the Christ Being?

Let us look back once again to the knowledge proclaimed by ancient peoples. Right back into the remote past of the Post-Atlantean epoch, all the ancient peoples knew how human evolution takes its course. All the Mystery Schools proclaimed, as spiritual science proclaims again to-day, that man consists of four members—physical body, etheric body, astral body and the Ego, the ‘I,’—and that he can rise to higher stages of existence when, through the activity of his ‘I’, he himself transforms the astral body into Spirit-Self (Manas), the etheric body into Life-Spirit (Budhi) and spiritualises the physical body into Spirit-Man (Atman). Little by little this physical body, in all its members, must be permeated so deeply with spirit during our earthly life that that which gives man his true being as man—the instreaming of the Divine Breath—is itself spiritualised. It is because the spiritualisation of the physical body begins with the spiritualisation of the breath, that the transformed, spiritualised physical body is called Atma or Atman (Atem (breath)=Atman). The Old Testament says that at the beginning of his earthly existence man received the Breath of Life, and all ancient wisdom sees in the Breath of Life that which man must gradually spiritualise, All ancient views of the world saw the great Ideal to be striven for in Atman, that the breath should become divine to such a degree, that man is permeated by the very breath of the Spirit.

But still more must be spiritualised in man. When his whole physical body is spiritualised, not only the breath but also that which is constantly renewed through the breath, the blood, the expression of the ‘I’ must be spiritualised. The blood must be laid hold of by a force that impels it to the spiritual. Christianity has added to the Mysteries of antiquity the Mysteries of the blood, the fire that is enclosed within man. The ancient Mysteries said: Man on the earth, living in an earthly frame, has descended from spiritual heights into physical, material corporeality. He has lost what constitutes his spiritual nature and has clothed himself in physical corporeality. But he must return again to spirituality, he must cast aside the physical sheaths and rise into a spiritual existence.

As long as the ‘I’ of man, with its physical expression in the blood, was not seized by an impulse to be found on the earth, the religions could not teach of the force of self-redemption in the human ‘I’. So they describe how the great spiritual Beings, the Avatars, descend and incarnate in human bodies from time to time when men are in need of help. They are Beings who for the purpose of their own development need not come down into a human body, for their own human stage of evolution had been completed in an earlier world-cycle. They descend in order to help mankind. Thus when help was needed, the great God Vishnu descended into earthly existence. One of the embodiments of Vishnu—namely, Krishna—speaks of Himself, saying unambiguously what the nature of an Avatar is. He Himself declares who He is, in the Divine Song, the Bhagavad Gita. There we find the sublime words spoken by Krishna in Whom Vishnu lives as an Avatar: “I am the
“Spirit of creation, its beginning, its middle and its end;
“among the stars I am the sun, among the elements—fire;
“among the seas—the cosmic ocean; among the serpents—
“the eternal serpent. I am the ground of the worlds.”

The all-powerful Divinity can be proclaimed in no more beautiful or more sublime words than these. The Godhead seen by Moses in the element of fire, Who not only weaves and surges through the world as a macrocosmic Divinity, is to be found, too, within man. Therefore in all beings who bear the human countenance, Krishna lives as the great Ideal to which the innermost essence of man develops from within. And when, as was the goal of ancient wisdom, man's breath can be spiritualised through the impulse given by the Mystery of Golgotha—this is the redemption that is achieved by what now lives within ourselves. All the Avatars have brought redemption to mankind through power from above, through what has streamed down through them from spiritual heights to the earth. But the Avatar Christ has redeemed mankind through what He gathered out of the forces of mankind itself, and He has shown us how the forces of redemption, the forces whereby the Spirit becomes victor over matter can be found in ourselves.

Thus, although through the spiritualisation of his breath he had made his body incorruptible, even Kashiapa with his supreme enlightenment could not yet find complete redemption. The incorruptible body must wait in the secret cave until it is drawn forth by the Maitreya Buddha. Only when the ‘I’ has spiritualised the physical body to such a degree that the Christ Impulse streams into the physical body, is the miraculous cosmic fire no longer needed for redemption; for redemption is now brought about by the fire quickened in man's own inner being, in the blood. Thus the radiance streaming from the Mystery of Golgotha is also able to shed light on a legend as wonderful and profound as that of Kashiapa.

To begin with, we find the world obscure and full of riddles; we may compare it with a dark room containing many splendid objects which at first we cannot see. But if we kindle a light the objects in the room are revealed in all their splendour. So it can be for a man who strives after wisdom. To begin with he strives in darkness. As he looks into the world of the past and of the future he gazes into darkness. But when the light that streams from Golgotha is kindled, everything in the most distant past and on into the farthest future is illumined. For everything material is born out of the Spirit and out of matter the Spirit will again be resurrected. The purpose of a festival such as Easter, connected as it is with cosmic happenings, is to give expression to this certainty. If men are clear as to what they can achieve through spiritual science—that the soul, recognising the secrets of existence can find the way to the secrets of the universe through festivals containing symbolism as full of meaning as that of Easter—then the soul will realise something of what it means to live no longer within its own narrow, personal existence, but to live with all that gleams in the stars, shines in the sun and is living reality in the universe. The soul will feel itself expanding into the universe, becoming more and more filled with Spirit.

Resurrection from individual human life to the life of the universe—this is the call that echoes in our hearts from the spiritual bells of Easter. And when we hear these bells, all doubt of the reality of the spiritual world will vanish from us and the certainty will dawn that no material death can harm us at all. For we are caught up again into life in the Spirit when we understand the message of the spiritual bells of Easter.

• 1. St. John V, 45, 46.

A direct enrichment gained from symbolic seasonal festivals as full of meaning as the Easter festival is that they make our hearts and souls better fitted to penetrate more and more deeply into the riddle of man and his nature. So we will think once again of the Easter legend which gave us an inkling yesterday of its bearing on this riddle, the legend of Kashiapa, the great sage and enlightened pupil of Shakyamuni. With a vast range of vision and after stupendous endeavours, Kashiapa had absorbed all the wisdom of the East, and it was rightly said of him that of those who came after him no-one else was capable, even in the remotest degree, of preserving what he had drawn from Shakyamuni's deep fount of wisdom and—as the last possessor of this primal wisdom—had bestowed upon mankind.

The legend, you will remember, goes on to say that when Kashiapa was on the point of death and felt his entry into Nirvana approaching, he went into a cave in a mountain. There he died in full consciousness, and his body remained immune from decay, hidden from outer humanity and discoverable only by those who through Initiation were able to fathom such secrets. It rested uncorrupted in a cave, mysteriously concealed. Furthermore, it was predicted that a great proclaimer of the primeval wisdom in a new form, the Maitreya Buddha, will appear, and having reached the supreme height of his earthly existence, will go to the cave where rests the corpse of Kashiapa. With his right hand he will touch the corpse, and a miraculous fire coming down from the universe will transport the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa into the spiritual worlds.

The Oriental who understands this wisdom waits for the Maitreya Buddha to appear and perform his deed on the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa. Will these two events come about? Will the Maitreya Buddha appear? Will the uncorrupted remains of Kashiapa then be transported by the miraculous fire from heaven? With true Easter feelings we shall be able to glimpse the profound wisdom contained in this legend if we try to understand the nature of the miraculous fire into which the remains of Kashiapa are to be received.

In the previous lecture we saw how in our epoch the Godhead reveals Himself from two poles: from the macrocosmic fire of lightning and from the microcosmic fire of the blood. We saw that it was the Christ Who proclaimed Himself to Moses in the burning thorn-bush and in thunder and lightning on Sinai; that it was the Christ and no other Power than He Who declared to Moses: “I am the I AM.” Out of the lightning on Sinai He gave the Ten Commandments as a preparation for His coming. Later, He appeared in microcosmic form in Palestine.

In the fire in our blood lives the same God Who had announced Himself in the heavenly fire and Who then, in the Mystery of Palestine, incarnated in a human body in order that His power might permeate the blood where the human fire has its seat. And if we follow the consequences of this event and what it signifies for earth-existence, we shall be able to find the flaming fire into which the remains of Kashiapa will be received.

World-evolution consists in the gradual spiritualisation of all that is material. In the material fire of the burning thorn-bush, and on Sinai, an outer sign of the Divine Power was revealed to Moses; but through the Christ Event this fire was spiritualised. Now, since the Christ Power has penetrated the earth, by what can the flame of the spiritual fire be perceived? By what can it be seen? By eyes of the spirit that have been opened and awakened through the Christ Impulse itself. To the eyes of the spirit this material fire of the thorn-bush is spiritualised. And ever since the Christ Impulse awakened the eyes of the spirit, this fire has worked in a spiritual way upon our world.

When was this fire seen again? It was seen again when the eyes of Saul, illumined by clairvoyance on the road to Damascus, beheld and recognised in the radiance of heavenly fire the One Who had fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha. And so both Moses and Paul beheld the Christ: Moses beheld Him in the material fire in the burning thorn-bush and in the lightning on Sinai, but only inwardly could he be made aware that it was the Christ Who spoke with him. To the enlightened eyes of Paul, Christ revealed Himself from the spiritualised fire. Matter and Spirit are related in the evolution of worlds as the miraculous, material fire of the thorn-bush and of Sinai is related to the glory of the fire from the clouds that shone before Saul who had now become Paul.

Now what were the consequences of this event for the whole evolution of worlds? Let us look back over the great succession of benefactors and saviours of mankind—those great figures who were the outer expressions of the Avatars, the incarnations of the Divine-Spiritual Powers who from epoch to epoch descended from spiritual heights and took human form in order that mankind should be able to find the way back into the spiritual worlds. Such, for example, was Krishna, one of the Avatars of Vishnu. In earlier times man could only find this way by the descent of a Divine Being. But through the Mystery of Golgotha man was endowed with the faculty to draw from his own innermost being the forces that can raise and lead him upwards into the spiritual worlds. Christ descended far more deeply than the other Guiding Spirits, cosmic and human, for not only did He bring heavenly forces into an earthly body, but He spiritualised this earthly body to such a degree that now, out of these earthly forces, men could find the way to the spiritual worlds. The pre-Christian saviours redeemed mankind with Divine forces. Christ redeemed mankind with human forces. These human forces were then made manifest in all their original, pristine power.

What would have happened on the earth if Christ had not appeared? We will ask ourselves this solemn, crucial question. One world-saviour after another might have descended from spiritual worlds, until finally they would have found on the earth below only human beings so entrenched in matter, so immersed in substance, that the pure, divine-spiritual forces would no longer have been able to raise men again out of this corrupted, impure substance. It was with grief and profound sorrow that the Eastern sages looked into the future, concerning which they knew that the Maitreya Buddha will one day appear in order to renew the primal wisdom, but that no disciple will be capable of retaining this wisdom. “If the world continues along this course,” they said, “the Maitreya Buddha will preach to deaf ears; he will not be understood by men wholly engulfed in matter. Moreover, the materiality prevailing on the earth will cause the body of Kashiapa to wither away so that the Maitreya Buddha will not be able to bear his remains into the divine-spiritual heights.”

It was those with the deepest understanding of Eastern wisdom who looked with such sorrow into the future, wondering whether the earth would be capable of receiving the coming Maitreya Buddha with greater understanding and discernment.

It was necessary that a powerful heavenly force should stream into physical matter, and in physical matter should sacrifice itself. This could not be accomplished by a god merely within the mask of a human form; it had to be accomplished by a man in the real sense, a man with human forces, who bore the God within himself. The Mystery of Golgotha had to take place in order that the matter into which man has descended should be made fit, cleansed, purified and hallowed in such a way as to enable the primal wisdom again to be understood. Humanity to-day must be brought to realise what the Mystery of Golgotha actually effected in this respect. What then was the real significance of the Event of Golgotha for mankind? How deeply did it penetrate into man's whole nature and existence?

We will let our mind's eye sweep across twelve centuries—from six hundred years before the event of Golgotha to six hundred years after it—and think of certain experiences that arose in the souls of men during this period. Truly, nothing greater or more significant can come before the discerning human soul than that stupendous occurrence of the gradual enlightenment of the Buddha, as it is preserved in the legend. He comes from a kingly environment. He is not born in a manger among simple shepherds. The emphasis, however, is not to be placed on this, but on the fact that he leaves this kingly environment and then encounters what he had not hitherto encountered: life in its diverse forms and manifestations. He comes upon a child, weak and ailing. Suffering is the child's lot in the existence it has entered through birth. The Buddha feels: birth is suffering. And again with all his sensitivity of soul the Buddha sees one who is diseased. This can be the lot of man when thirst for existence bears him into the earthly world-illness is suffering. The Buddha meets a man decrepit with the infirmities of old age. What is it that life imposes on man so that gradually he loses control of his limbs? Old age is suffering. And then the Buddha sees a corpse. Death stands before him with all the disintegration and destruction of life that are its accompaniment. Death is suffering. And through further observation of life the Buddha is led to the realisation: To be separated from what we love is suffering; to be united with what we do not love is suffering; not to attain that for which we yearn is suffering.

The teaching of suffering rang with power and insistence through human hearts and human breasts. Men without number learned the great truth that freedom from suffering depends upon elimination of the thirst for existence, learned that they must strive to free themselves from earthly, physical existence, to pass beyond earthly incarnations, and that only the elimination of the thirst for existence can lead to redemption and release from suffering. Truly, a sublime goal of human evolution is presented to us here.

And now we will cast our mind's eye over twelve centuries, embracing the whole period from 600 B.C. to 600 A.D. One particular event stands out: in the middle of this period the Mystery of Golgotha took place. We will think of a single feature only from the times of the Buddha: the corpse, and what the Buddha experienced at the sight of it and then taught. Six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha the eyes of countless human souls turn to a Cross of wood on which hangs a corpse. But there issue from this corpse the impulses which permeate life with spirit, which make life victorious over death. This is the very antithesis of what the Buddha experienced at the sight of a corpse.

The Buddha had seen a corpse and had recognised from it the nothingness of life. Men who lived six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha looked up with fervent devotion to the corpse on the Cross. For them it was the token of life, and in their souls dawned the certainty that existence is not suffering, but leads across death into blessedness. Six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha the corpse of Christ Jesus on the Cross became the token of life, of the resurrection of life, the overcoming of death and of all suffering, just as six hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha the corpse was the sign that suffering must be the lot of man driven into the physical world by the thirst for existence. Never was there a greater reversal in the whole course of human evolution.

If, six hundred years before our era, entrance into the physical augured suffering for man, how does the great truth that life is suffering present itself to the soul after the Mystery of Golgotha? How does it present itself to men who look with understanding at the Cross on Golgotha? Is birth, as the Buddha declared, suffering? Those who look with understanding at the Cross on Golgotha, and feel united with it, say to themselves: “Birth, after all, leads men to an earth able from its own elements to provide a raiment for the Christ. Men will gladly tread this earth upon which Christ has walked. Union with Christ kindles in the soul the power to find its way up into the spiritual worlds, brings the realisation that birth is not suffering but the portal to the finding of the Redeemer, Who clothed Himself with the very same earthly substances which compose the bodily sheaths of a human being.”

Is illness suffering? No!—so said those who truly understood the Impulse of Golgotha—no, illness is not suffering. Even if men cannot yet understand what the spiritual life streaming in with Christ is in reality, in the future they will learn to understand it, and they will know that one who lets himself be permeated by the Christ Impulse, into whose innermost being the Christ Power draws, can overcome all illness through the strong healing forces he unfolds from within himself. For Christ is the great Healer of mankind. His Power embraces everything that out of the spiritual can unfold the healing force whereby illness can be overcome. Illness is not suffering. Illness is an opportunity to overcome an obstacle by man unfolding the Christ Power within himself.

Mankind must arrive at a similar understanding about the infirmities of age. The more the feebleness of our limbs: increases, the more we can grow in the spirit, the more we can gain the mastery through the Christ Power indwelling us. Age is not suffering, for with every day that passes we grow into the spiritual world. So too, death is not suffering for it has been conquered in the Resurrection. Death has been conquered through the Event of Golgotha.

Can separation from what we love still be suffering? No! Souls permeated with the Christ Power know that love can forge links from soul to soul transcending all material obstacles, links in the spiritual that cannot be severed; and there is nothing either in the life between birth and death or between death and rebirth to which we cannot spiritually find the way through the Christ Impulse. If we permeate ourselves with the Christ Impulse, permanent separation from what we love is inconceivable. The Christ leads us to union with what we love.

Equally, to be united with what we do not love cannot be suffering because the Christ Impulse received into our souls teaches us to love all things in their due measure. The Christ Impulse shows us the way and, when we find this way, “to be united with what we do not love” can no longer be suffering; for there is nothing that we do not encompass with love. So too, if Christ is with us, “not to attain that for which we yearn” can no longer be suffering, for human feelings and desires are so purified and sublimated through the Christ Impulse that men can yearn only for what is their due. They no longer suffer because of what they are compelled to renounce; for if they must renounce anything, it is for the sake of purification, and the Christ Power enables them to feel it as such. Therefore renunciation is no longer suffering.

What, in essence, does the Event of Golgotha signify? It signifies the gradual elimination of the facts associated by the great Buddha with suffering. There is nothing that affects more deeply cosmic evolution or cosmic existence than the Event of Golgotha. Therefore we can also understand that its influence works on, with positive and momentous consequences for mankind of the future. Christ is the greatest of all the Avatars who have come down to the earth and when such a Being as the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth descends into earthly existence, this marks the beginning of a mysterious and supremely significant process. On a small scale it is the same in the spiritual world as when we sow a grain of corn in the earth; it germinates and blade and ear spring from it, bearing innumerable grains which are replicas of the one grain of corn we laid into the soil. “Everything transient is but a semblance,” and in this multiplication of the grain of corn we can perceive an image, a semblance, of the spiritual world.

When the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished, something happened to the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Through the Power of the indwelling Christ they were multiplied and ever since that time in the spiritual world many, many replicas of the astral body and etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth have been present—with great spiritual consequences.

A human individuality descending from spiritual heights into physical existence is clothed with an etheric body and an astral body. But when something is present in spiritual worlds such as the replicas of the etheric body and astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, a very special occurrence takes place in men whose karma permits it. After the Mystery of Golgotha, when the karma of a particular individuality allowed it, a replica of the etheric body or of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into him. This was so in the case of Augustine, for example, in the early part of our era. When this individuality came down from spiritual heights and clothed himself in an etheric body, a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own etheric body. This individuality bore his own astral body and ego, but into his etheric body was woven a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth.

And so the sheaths that had enveloped the Divine Man of Palestine were transmitted to other men, whose task it then was to carry forth the influence of this great impulse into the rest of humanity. It was because Augustine remained dependent upon his own ego and his own astral body that he was subject to all the doubt, all the vacillation and error which, since they emanated from these still imperfect members of his being, it was so difficult for him to overcome. All the experiences he endured were due to his mistaken judgment and the errors of his ego. But when he had wrestled through, when his etheric body began to operate, he came upon the forces woven into his etheric body from the replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. And then he became the one who was able to proclaim to the West some of the great Mystery-truths.

There were many whom we recognise as the great bearers of Christianity in the West, whose mission was to spread Christianity during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, on to the tenth, in whom the great Ideas could light up as examples. These were persons into whose etheric bodies a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth had been woven. That was the reason why there could arise in them the great visions and prototypal Ideas which were then elaborated and given form by the great painters and sculptors.

How did the prototypes for these pictures that still delight us come into being? They came into being when through the inwoven replicas of the hallowed etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth there came to men of the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries of our era great illuminations of the truths of Christianity which made them independent of historical tradition. In addition to the content of Christ's teaching there had been woven into these men a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, and they needed no longer the historical tradition of the facts of Christianity; they knew through inner illumination that the Christ lives, because they bore within them part of the being of Jesus of Nazareth. They knew that Christ lives, just as Paul knew of Christ as living reality when He appeared to him in the spiritualised fire of heaven. Up till then, had Paul allowed himself to be converted by stories of the events in Palestine? No single one of the events of which he could have been told was able to make Saul into Paul; yet it was from Paul that the most powerful impulse for the outer spread of Christianity proceeded—from one who had remained unconvinced by narrations of events on the physical plane, but who became a believer through an occult event taking place in the spiritual world. It is a strange attitude to wish to have Christianity without the factor of spiritual illumination! For without Paul's spiritual illumination Christianity would never have spread through the world. The early spread of Christianity was due to a super-sensible happening. So again, in later times, Christianity was propagated in the same way through those who were able to experience the Christ in inner illumination. It was the Christ of history, too, because they bore within them what had remained from the historical Christ and His sheaths.

In the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries replicas of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth were woven into other human beings when their karma so permitted and they were sufficiently mature. Francis of Assisi, Elisabeth of Thüringen, for example, and others too, bore within them a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Without this knowledge, the lives of Francis of Assisi and Elisabeth of Thüringen are unintelligible to us. Everything that seems so strange to-day in the life of Francis of Assisi is because the ‘I’ was the human ‘I’ of that individuality; but the humility, the devoutness and the fervour we so admire in him are due to the fact that a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own astral body. And it was so in the case of many other personalities living at that time. When we know this, they become examples for us. How can anyone who really studies the matter understand the life of Elisabeth of Thüringen if he does not know that a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into her? And very many were called in this way by the onworking Christ Power to bear this mighty Impulse forward to posterity.

But there was something else, too, which was preserved for still later times, namely, innumerable replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth. True, his original higher ‘I’ had departed from the three sheaths when the Christ drew into them; but a replica, exalted yet further as a result of the Christ-indwelling, remained present, and this replica of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth was multiplied many times. This replica of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth is present to this day in the spiritual world. Moreover it can be found, together with the glory of the Christ Power and Christ Impulse it bears within it, by men who are sufficiently mature.

Now the outer, physical expression for the ‘I’ is the blood. This is a great mystery; but there have always been men who knew of it and were aware that replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth are present in the spiritual world. There have always been men whose task it was, through the centuries since the Event of Golgotha, to ensure in secret that humanity gradually matures, so that there may be human beings who are fit to receive the replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, just as there were persons who received replicas of his etheric body and astral body. To this end it was necessary to discover the secret of how, in the quietude of a profound mystery, this ‘I’ might be preserved until the appropriate moment in the evolution of the earth and of humanity. With this aim a Brotherhood of Initiates who preserved the secret was founded: the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail. They were the guardians of this secret. This Fellowship has always existed. It is said that its originator took the chalice used by Christ Jesus at the Last Supper and in it caught the blood flowing from the wounds of the Redeemer on the Cross. He gathered the blood, the expression of the ‘I’ in this chalice—the Holy Grail. And the chalice with the blood of the Redeemer, with the secret of the replica of the ‘I’ of Christ-Jesus, was preserved in a holy place, in the Brotherhood of those who through their attainments and their Initiation are the Brothers of the Holy Grail.

The time has come to-day when these secrets may be made known, when through a spiritual life the hearts of men can become mature enough to understand this great Mystery. If souls allow spiritual science to kindle understanding of such secrets they become fit to recognise in that Holy Chalice the Mystery of the Christ-‘I,’ the eternal ‘I’ which every human ‘I’ can become. The secret is a reality—only men must allow themselves to be summoned through spiritual science to understand this, in order that as they contemplate the Holy Grail, the Christ-‘I’ may be received into their being. To this end they must understand and accept what has come to pass as fact, as reality.

But when men are better prepared to receive the Christ Ego, then it will pour in greater and greater fullness into their souls. They will then evolve to the level where stood Christ Jesus, their great Example. Then for the first time they will learn to understand the sense in which Christ Jesus is the Great Example for humanity. And having understood this, men will begin to realise in the innermost core of their being that the certainty of life's eternity springs from the corpse hanging on the wood of the Cross of Golgotha. Those who are inspired and permeated by the Christ-‘I’, the Christians of future time, will understand something else as well—something that hitherto has been known only to those who reached enlightenment. They will understand, not only the Christ Who has passed through death, but the triumphant Christ of the Apocalypse, resurrected in the spiritual fire, the Christ Whose coming has already been predicted. The Easter festival can always be for us a symbol of the Risen One, a link reaching over from Christ on the Cross to the Christ triumphant, risen and glorified, to the One Who lifts all men with Him to the right hand of the Father.

And so the Easter symbol points us to the vista of the whole future of the earth, to the future of the evolution of humanity, and is for us a guarantee that men who are Christ-inspired will be transformed from Saul-men into Paul-men and will behold with increasing clarity a spiritual fire. For it is indeed true that as the Christ was revealed in advance to Moses and to those who were with him, in the material fire of the thorn-bush and of the lightning on Sinai, so He will be revealed to us in a spiritualised fire of the future. He is with us always, until the end of the world, and He will appear in the spiritual fire to those who have allowed their eyes to be enlightened through the Event of Golgotha. Men will behold Him in the spiritual fire. They beheld Him, to begin with, in a different form; they will behold Him for the first time in His true form, in a spiritual fire.

But because the Christ penetrated so deeply into earth-existence—right into the physical bony structure—the power which built His sheaths out of the elements of the earth so purified and hallowed this physical substance that it can never become what in their sorrow the Eastern sages feared: that the Enlightened One of the future, the Maitreya Buddha, would not find on the earth men capable of understanding him because they had sunk so deeply into matter. Christ was led to Golgotha in order that He might lift matter again to spiritual heights, in order that the fire might not be extinguished in matter, but be spiritualised. The primal wisdom will again be intelligible to men when they themselves are spiritualised—the primal wisdom which, in the spiritual world, was the source of their being. And so the Maitreya Buddha will find understanding on the earth—which would not otherwise have been possible—when men have attained deeper insight. We understand far better what we learnt in our youth, when tests in life have matured us, and we can look back upon it all at a later time. Mankind will understand the primal wisdom through being able to look back upon it in the Christ-light streaming from the event of Golgotha.

And now—how can the uncorrupted remains of Kashiapa be rescued, and whither will they be transported? It was said: the Maitreya Buddha will appear, touch these remains with his right hand, and the corpse will be transported in fire. In the fire made manifest to Paul on the road to Damascus we have to see the miraculous, spiritualised fire in which the body of Kashiapa will be enshrined. This fire will rescue for future times all that was great and noble in the past. In the spiritualised fire in which the Christ appeared to Paul, the body of Kashiapa, untouched by corruption, will be saved through the Maitreya Buddha. Thus we shall see the greatness, the splendour and the wisdom of all the past stream into what mankind has become through the Event of Golgotha.

A resurrection of the Earth-Spirit itself, a redemption of humanity—this is what lies before us in the symbol of the Easter bells. To everyone who understood it, this symbol was an inspiration of how through the Easter Mystery man climbs to spiritual heights. It is not without meaning that Faust is called back by the Easter bells from the brink of death to a new life which leads him to the great moment when, blinded and facing death, he cries: “But in my inmost spirit all is light.” Now he can make his way up into the spiritual worlds where the ennobled elements of humanity are in safe keeping.

In the purified spirituality that has poured over the earth and into humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, everything that has existed in the past is rescued, purified, sustained: just as one day, when the Maitreya Buddha appears, the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa, the great sage of the East, will be purified in the miraculous fire, in the Christ-light which was revealed to Paul on the road to Damascus.

Goethe, the inspiring spirit of modern times, describes in a striking manner the power of the Easter bells. He describes how Faust, the representative of striving humanity, had come to the end of earthly life, and how the bells of Easter, the light of the Easter Festival, are able to conquer the impulse of death in the heart of this one who is seeking death. Goethe presented the development of humanity in the same way that he presents to us the impulse of the Easter bells. And when, in the not very distant future, humanity understands the close connection between the soul and all that lives and moves in the world, it will then also be known how the comprehension of the sources of life liberates us from the bondage of matter. At Easter-time mankind will learn something that will give it the unshakeable confidence that in man there dwells the source of Divine existence, uniting with the source of universal existence when we are able through this knowledge to rise to illumination. The nature of the Easter festival shows that humanity has known this deepest Christian Mystery as an external token; for the present festival of Easter is a symbol of what can only be found in the depths of the Sacred Mysteries. This festival was celebrated in the Sacred Mysteries of many lands in order to call forth the conviction that the life in Spirit is able to conquer the death in matter. In ancient times that which was able to give to man this conviction had to be announced from the Mysteries. But the progress consists in this being brought out of the Mysteries and becoming a possession common to all humanity. In this lecture and the next we shall try to show that this perception and conviction is making its way into ever-widening circles.

Since Easter is the festival of the resurrection of the human spirit we must gather together for serious study and try to rise to the greatest height of Spiritual Science.

Our Christian Easter festival is one of the forms of the universal Easter festival, and what the sages possessed as their strongest, deepest conviction was hidden in this Easter festival. A beautiful, profound, Eastern legend relates the following:

The great Teacher of the East, Sakya-Muni, the Buddha, blessed the countries of the East with his profound wisdom. Sakya-Muni preserved for later ages of humanity that which was the source of profound happiness when mankind was still able to see into the Divine world, viz., the Ancient Wisdom. Sakya-Muni had a great pupil, Kashiapa by name, and while the others did not comprehend the great wisdom that Buddha taught, Kashiapa did. When Kashiapa was about to die, he went to a mountain, hid himself in a cave and in this cave his body did not putrefy, but continued as it was. The Initiates alone know of this Mystery, for the body of the great Initiate rests in a hidden place. But Buddha said that when the Maitreya Buddha, the great Teacher and Leader of humanity would come, he would search out that cave, and with his right hand touch the corpse, and then a wonderful fire would descend from heaven and in this fire the body of the great Enlightened One would ascend. Thus this Easter legend also speaks of a resurrection, ‘a being withdrawn’ from earthly existence; it speaks of a victory, so that the forces of the earth have no power over the body, and when the great Initiate touches it with his hand, the supernatural fire will carry it up. Through this legend we shall be able to arrive at a deep understanding of the Easter festival; in it there is a hidden, a primeval wisdom which we shall only be able to approach gradually.

Why is not Kashiapa, like the Redeemer, the victor over death after three days? Why does the Eastern Initiate wait for a long time before he is withdrawn by the heavenly fire into heaven?

We shall gradually gain some idea of the wisdom contained in this. We must control our feelings in order to approach these great truths in all their warmth and fire at such festivals.

For present humanity there stand on the horizon two truths which are intimately connected with one another, two important points for the humanity that is developing and making efforts at the present stage of evolution. These are first, the burning thorn-bush of Moses (Exodus iii) and secondly, the fire that appears on Sinai (Exodus xix) amidst lightning and thunder and announces to Moses, ‘I AM THE I AM’ (Exodus iii, 14). Who is this Being? One who understands the message of Christianity also understands who this Being is who appears to Moses amidst lightning and thunder and gives the ten Commandments. The Gospel of St. John tells us that Moses foretold Christ Jesus (John v, 45 & 46) and, therefore, the power in the burning bush was the Christ. No other Divinity could be imagined when the words were uttered, ‘I AM THE I AM’. He governs invisibly, announcing Himself beforehand in the fiery lightning upon Sinai. And he alone understands the New Testament who knows that the God announced by Moses is the Christ. The God Who was to bring redemption to mankind made Himself known in a form derived from the fiery element in nature; for therein fives the Christ.

The same Being holds sway throughout the whole of the Old Testament and then He appeared visibly through the Event of Palestine.

Whom did the ancient Hebrew people reverence in reality? Those belonging to the Hebrew Mysteries were aware that they reverenced Christ; they recognised Christ in the statement: ‘Say to my people “I AM THE I AM.”’ And even if it were only known that God makes Himself known in fire, that would have been sufficient to enable one to recognise that the God in the burning bush and the God of Sinai is the same as the One who brought about the Mystery of Golgotha through His descent into the human body.

There is a mysterious connection between the fire that is enkindled externally and the warmth of the blood. It has often been said that man is a microcosm; but one must also know the external process that corresponds to each inward process. We shall have to enter deeply into spiritual science if we wish to recognise the meaning of the Easter festival. Here we come in touch with a deep mystery, a great truth.

What is it in the outer world that corresponds to the origin of human thought? Through his thought man experiences a world, and in that form no other being experiences thought. What enkindles thought within us, the simplest as well as the most sublime? Two things co-operate within us when a thought passes through our mind, viz., the astral body and the ‘I.’ The physical expression of the ‘I’ is the blood; the physical expression of the astral body is in the nerves. And our thoughts would never flash through us unless there were this interplay of blood and nerves. In the interplay between blood and nerves (inner fire and inner air) we have thought. And this in the cosmos is the rolling thunder when the fiery lightning is enkindled. Imperceptibly to the external world there rings out as thought that which outside is lightning and thunder. The lightning is like the blood, the thunder like the thought; and as the lightning gives rise to the thunder, so the thunder corresponds to the thought produced by the soul. We see the lightning flash out in the air, we hear the thunder, and we feel the blood, we perceive the nervous system, we perceive the thought flash through us and say, ‘both are one.’ And when the thunder rolls above, it is not a material phenomenon alone; it is actual reality when a person looks up and sees the lightning and hears the thunder and says: God is now thinking in fire in the way He has to announce Himself to us; this is the invisible God Whose thoughts are in rolling fire—the God who spoke to Moses. Where would this God have to dwell if He wished to appear on the earth itself?

That which is in the macrocosm is also in the microcosm. The God whom Moses heard above appeared as Christ in the blood of Jesus of Nazareth. Christ appeared in the whole body of Jesus of Nazareth; He descended into the human form and thought as a man in the human body. And thus, the two poles meet, the macrocosmic God on Sinai and the same God microcosmically as a man incarnate in Palestine.

Truth, profound truth, is contained in the ancient Mystery-Wisdom. It is so deep that we need all knowledge to unveil this truth. And what an impulse did humanity receive through the descending Christ!

In ancient times the course of human development was very well known. It was known that man consists of four principles, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the ‘I,’ and that he can rise to higher stages of existence through the transformation of his three lower bodies into Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man. This physical body, in all its parts, has to be gradually spiritualised, so that that which has made man into man, the in-streaming of the Divine Breath, is spiritualised. And because this begins with the breath (Atem—Atman), the Old Testament says that at the beginning of his earthly existence man received the breath of life, which he has gradually to spiritualise. This can be seen in the whole of antiquity. Still more has to be spiritualised in man if he is to make the whole of his physical body living, viz., that which breath produces, the blood, the expression of the ‘I.’ It has to be laid hold of by an impulse that impels towards the spiritual. Christianity adds the Mystery of the blood, the Mystery of human fire, to the ancient Mysteries.

Regarding the human soul on earth in an earthly form the ancient Mysteries say:—Man’s spiritual being is enveloped by a physical body. It has to return again to the spiritual. As long as the human ‘I’ was not seized by an impulse that could be found on the earth, so long could religion not teach what may be called the self-redemption of the human ‘I.’ The great Avatars incarnate from time to time when mankind needs help. Thus Vishnu descends from time to time. One incarnation of Vishnu is Krishna, who explains what the nature of an Avatar is: He expresses what he himself is in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am the Spirit of Creation, its beginning, its middle and its end.’ The omnipotence of the Divine Being could not be described more beautifully—the Divine Being whom Moses saw in the element of fire, who not only weaves and moves through the world as a macrocosmic God, but who can also be found in the inner being of man. The Krishna-Being lives in all that bears the human countenance as a great ideal towards which the germ of man is developing. And when the breath can be spiritualised through the impulse of Golgotha, we have the principle of redemption through that which dwells within us: The Avatar Christ has redeemed us because He has the power for this, and thereby shows where the victory of the spirit over matter may be found.

Therefore, full redemption cannot be brought to Kashiapa until Maitreya Buddha comes for him. For only when the physical body is so spiritualised through Christ does it no longer need the cosmic fire, but the fire that seethes within man that brings about redemption. Thus we are able to illuminate legends such as these with the light that streams from Golgotha.

To begin with the world is dark. We may compare it to a dark room in which at first we can see nothing; we kindle a light and then all the splendour of the room appears. To begin with man strives in darkness; but when the true light burns, which comes from Golgotha, everything is illumined, even to the farthest future. To express this as a certainty is the purpose of the Easter festival. And when humanity can remember that through Spiritual Science it may really experience the most important symbols of the festival of Easter, the soul will feel itself expanded into an universe and will gradually rise to unite with all that lives there, ever more and more spiritually, from man to the universe. These are the sounds of the spiritual Easter bells, and when we hear them, all doubt about the spiritual world will vanish. Life in the spirit has claimed us again when we understand these spiritual Easter Bells.

One great advantage of such an important time-symbol as the festival of Easter is that it makes our hearts and souls well fitted to see more and more deeply into the riddle of the nature of man.

Let us once more consider the Oriental legend upon which we threw a little light in the last lecture and regarding which we already know that it contains something important for human life—the legend of Kashiapa, the enlightened pupil of Sakya-Muni, who possessed all the wisdom of the East and regarding whom it was justly said that all his followers could not preserve what he had drawn from Sakya-Muni’s fount of wisdom. The legend says that when Kashiapa was about to die he went to a cave in a mountain and died consciously, and that his body did not putrefy, but it could not be found by any human being until he was able to penetrate into such mysteries through Initiation. And it was prophesied that the vehicle of the ancient Wisdom would appear in a new form as Maitreya Buddha, who, when he has reached the zenith of his earthly existence will go to where the corpse is resting and will touch it with his right hand, and fire will come down from the universe and the undecayed body of Kashiapa will be drawn into the higher worlds. Thus the East is awaiting the appearance of Maitreya Buddha and his action on the body of Kashiapa.

Will it be so? Will he appear? Will Kashiapa’s body be withdrawn by the wonderful fire?

We shall be able to get an inkling of the profound wisdom contained in this as an Easter miracle when we inquire into the miraculous fire that is to take up Kashiapa’s remains.

In the last lecture we observed that Christ announced Himself to Moses in the thunder and fiery lightning of Sinai. For it was none other that said to him, ‘I AM THE I AM.’ He gave His blessing in a prophetic manner as a fiery flash of lightning upon Sinai. And then He appeared in the microcosm in Palestine: The God who announced Himself in the heavens appeared in a human body in the Event of Palestine in the fire that dwells in our blood, and through this Event—if we follow the consequences of what it was to the earth—we find the fire which takes up Kashiapa’s remains.

The progress of the world consists in everything material being spiritualised. The fire appeared materially to Moses in the burning thorn-bush and upon Sinai; through Christ this fire is spiritualised. And who sees the burning fire after the Christ-Event? It is the spiritual eye which is opened by the Christ- Impulse itself and which the Christ-impulse has awakened. Thus the fire worked spiritually. It was perceived again when Saul’s eyes had been enlightened, when he became clairvoyant and recognised in the heavenly fire the One who had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus both saw the Christ: Moses saw Him in the material fire; but the Christ spoke to the illuminated eye of Saul from the spiritualised fire. As matter is related to spirit, so in the course of the development of the world is the material fire of Sinai related to the fire that streamed towards Saul or Paul.

And what has come into evolution through all this? Let us consider the figures in humanity which were the expression for the Avatars, such as Vishnu, Krishna, etc., who had to appear in order that humanity might find the way back into the spiritual world. In ancient times humanity needed divine power for this. Through the Mystery of Golgotha the power has been given to man to find within himself the forces which raise him up. Christ descended deeper than all, for He used even this earthly body for this. Christ redeemed humanity with human powers; He placed these powers before our souls in the form in which they can be in their original power. What would have happened if Christ had not appeared? If the Enlightened Ones had been able to descend they would at length have found only human beings so steeped in matter that the spiritual powers would not have been able to bring man up again out of the impure matter. The Oriental sages looked out sadly into the future, for they knew that Maitreya Buddha would appear, but the Ancient Wisdom would then have no disciples. And if it had continued in this way, Maitreya Buddha would also have preached to deaf ears, and that which would have been on the earth would have caused Kashiapa’s body to decay, so that Maitreya Buddha would not have been able to carry up Kashiapa’s remains. They pondered sadly as to whether there would be anyone left who would understand Maitreya Buddha. Something had to sacrifice itself in a physical substance, not a God in human form, but a human being who bears God within him, in order that matter may be made into such a purified substance that for future incarnation the ancient wisdom can be intelligible. And it can be understood that the Event of Golgotha has acted in this way for humanity. How deeply has it penetrated into the nature of man and into human existence!

Six hundred years before the Event of Golgotha we see certain occurrences in the human soul and again six hundred years after. One can scarcely present to the human soul a greater or more important time than that sublime period when Buddha was gradually enlightened. He appeared in a royal palace—not in a stable, among poor shepherds. It should be noticed, however, that he went forth from the palace and observed life in its various forms. He perceived that ‘birth is sorrow.’ He searched further with his soul and found a sick man: thus can man become when he is carried to the earthly world by the thirst for existence: disease is sorrow. He found an old man who had gradually lost the use of his limbs: age is sorrow. He saw a corpse: death stood before him with all that it blots out. To be separated from what one loves is sorrow. To be united with what one does not love is sorrow. Not to have what one desires is sorrow.

The teaching regarding sorrow rang out with sublimity and innumerable people learned that they ought to long for release from this earthly existence, because only deliverance from the thirst for existence can lead to the spiritual.

And now let us allow our vision to sweep over a period of 1,200 years, 600 b.c. to 600 a.d. Notice, one thing in the age of Buddha, viz., the corpse and what Buddha felt and taught when he saw this—and then 600 years after the Event of Golgotha I Innumerable souls then turned towards a wooden cross upon which hung a corpse; but from this corpse proceeds the impulse through which life conquers death. It is the opposite pole of what Buddha perceived when he saw a corpse. It is the certainty that existence is not sorrow. Six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha the body of Christ Jesus on the cross was the token of the knowledge of life, the resurrection of life, the victory over death. Although in 600 b.c. the entry into the physical world was sorrow for man, how do the great truths of life now present themselves before the soul? Is birth sorrow? Those who understand the Event of Golgotha, who feel that they are connected with it, gladly enter upon this earth which Christ has entered; and through the union with Christ comes the knowledge that birth is the door to the finding of the Redeemer who also clothed Himself with physical matter. Is disease sorrow? No! Even though humanity cannot yet understand what the spiritual life is which streams in with Christ, and that the one who lets himself be filled with the Christ-Impulse can overcome all disease by the powers he develops within him; for disease is an opportunity to overcome a hindrance, and this man can do through the strength of the Christ-power developed within him. One has to deal with the burden of old age in the same manner. And death is not sorrow, because through the Event of Golgotha death has been overcome. Can separation be sorrow? No! The souls that permeate themselves with the Christ-power know that love can form ties that cannot be severed, and there is nothing in the life between birth and death and between death and re-birth to which we cannot find the way through the Christ-Impulse; Christ brings us together with that which we love. In the same way, being united with what we do not love cannot be sorrow, because the Christ-Impulse teaches us to love all and when we find the way that leads to this, it can no longer be sorrow, for there is nothing else that we do not embrace in love. This is the case also with desire, for desire is so purified by the Christ-Impulse that one only desires what ought to come to one. If it is withheld, then it is for purification and the Christ-power gives one the strength to feel it as a purification. Therefore again it is no longer sorrow.

There is no greater impulse to anew becoming, and also to further development than the Event of Golgotha, which continues to work on and will positively have mighty consequences to the humanity of the future. Christ is the greatest Avatar and when such a Being descends, as the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, something most profoundly important comes into evolution. We sow a grain of wheat in the earth; it germinates: the stalk and ears of wheat grow and the many, many grains are facsimiles of the one grain of wheat we sowed in the earth. It is exactly the same in the spiritual world, for ‘all things transitory are but symbols’ (as below, so above). When the Event of Golgotha had taken place, something happened to the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth: through the power of Christ they became multiplied and in the spiritual world there have been since that time many, many reproductions of this astral body and this etheric body, and these worked on. When a spiritual individuality descended, it clothed itself with an etheric body and an astral body; and when an individual’s karma allowed it, an image of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into him. This was the case, for example, with St. Augustine in the early centuries of our era; into his etheric body was woven a reproduction of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, but his astral body and ‘I’ were his own.

Thus that which had enveloped the God-Man of Palestine was transferred to other human beings who were then to carry the impulse further in humanity. As Augustine had his own ‘I’ and his own astral body, he was subject to all the doubts and waverings that he had such difficulty in overcoming; this came from these still imperfect parts of his being. When he struggled through, he came upon the forces of the image of Jesus of Nazareth in his etheric body and was thereby able to give out truths as a great mystic for some time—and there were many such. Hence the great archetypal ideas were able to flash out in them. These originated from the interwoven copy of the sacred etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth in certain people of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries a.d. In addition to the contents of the teaching of Christ they received interwoven into them an image of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth; therefore they knew from inner enlightenment that Christ lives. It was the same with Paul when he saw. Was it possible for him to have been converted before then through what could be told regarding the Event of Palestine? No one had been able to make a Paul out of Saul and yet the most important impulse went out through him who at that time became a believer through an occult event. Those who wish to have a Christianity without spiritual enlightenment have a curious idea of it!

Again, reproductions of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth propagated themselves in inner enlightenment in other human beings. They could experience Christ, for they bore within them something which came from the historical Christ. Later, in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, people who through karma were ready for it had interwoven into them images of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Such, for example, were Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth of Thüringen, and others. Many, many were called through the continuous activity of Christ to carry it to posterity.

But something else was preserved for later times, viz., the copy of the I or Ego of Jesus of Nazareth. His I or Ego indeed disappeared from the three bodies when the Christ entered into them, but, through Christ, a still higher image remained and still exists to-day. It can be found in human beings who have made themselves ready for this and thereby at the same time for the splendour of the Christ-power and the Christ-Impulse which it bears within it. The physical expression for this is the blood. It is a great mystery. But there have always been those who knew this, who throughout the centuries since the Event of Golgotha have had to take care that humanity gradually matured to receive images of Jesus of Nazareth in the same way that images can be received in the etheric body and astral body. To this end a Mystery had to be founded, so that this ‘I’ could be preserved in secret. A brotherhood was formed, the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, which guarded this Mystery. This society has always existed, and in it it is said that its Founder took the cup which Christ Jesus used at the Holy Supper and in this cup he caught the blood of the Redeemer which flowed from the cross and collected it in the Holy Grail; that is, he preserved the cup with the Mystery of the image of the ‘I’ or Ego of Christ Jesus in this holy place, in the Brotherhood which consists of the Brothers of the Holy Grail.

To-day the time has come in which, if the hearts of men are opened by a spiritual life, they can rise to the understanding of this great mystery, when looking upon that sacred cup, souls become mature enough to know the mystery of the Christ-Ego, or I that can develop in each human being. In order to receive the Christ ‘Ego,’ or ‘I’ in contemplation upon the Holy Grail one needs to understand that which has here happened as a fact and to take it as a fact. And when mankind has been prepared more and more, the Christ-Ego will develop in them more and more; they will understand in how far the Christ- Ego is the great ideal for humanity. And when humanity has understood this, it will begin to perceive that the certainty of life proceeds from the death upon the Cross of Golgotha. The Christians of the future will understand Christ differently—Christ Who underwent death. They will understand Him as the triumphant Risen One of the Apocalypse, as the Uplifted One Who raises all mankind with Him to the right hand of the Father.

Thus the symbol of Easter points us to the perspective of the whole future of the earth and it shows us that the whole of Christendom will one day from being a Saul become a Paul.

Christ made Himself known to Moses in the material fire on Sinai; He will appear to us in a spiritualised fire. He is with us all the days, even to the end of the world, and He will appear in the spiritual fire to those who have cleared their vision through the Event of Golgotha. They will see Him. Formerly they saw Him differently, but in future they will see the true form of Christ in a spiritual fire. Through Christ having worked down so deeply, even into the physical bony structure or skeleton, He has so purified this physical matter that it will never become what the Enlightened Ones of the East supposed it would, when they thought that the Enlightened One of the future would not find human beings on the earth who would understand Him. Christ was led to Golgotha in order that the fire should not become dross, but that it should be spiritualised. Human beings will understand the fire when they themselves are spiritualised; and thus Maitreya Buddha will find understanding, and humanity will understand the primeval Cosmic Wisdom.

Whither will Kashiapa’s remains be taken and through what will they be rescued? We are told that Maitreya Buddha will touch him with his right hand and he will be withdrawn in a fire.

In Paul’s fire we have to see the spiritualised fire in which will be hidden the body of Kashiapa. In this fire will be hidden all the greatness of the future. We shall see it stream into that which man will become through the Mystery of Golgotha.

A Redeemer meets us in the symbol of the Easter bells; they give us to understand how man ascends or swings himself up to spiritual heights through the Mystery of Easter.

Faust became blind, yet clear light shone within, so that he could work upwards into the worlds where man’s more noble principles will be saved, in the purified spirituality which has flowed into humanity from the Event of Golgotha.

When the spiritual scientific movement began its activity some thirty years ago, its aim was not to satisfy curiosity about the spiritual worlds, but to make spiritual knowledge available to a wider public, and provide insight that will help to solve not only spiritual but also everyday practical problems. One such problem is the subject of today's lecture. It belongs to everyday life and must be of interest to everyone. Knowledge of human nature and problems of education are intimately connected. No aspect of social life can benefit more from spiritual research than education, because it is possible to provide practical guidelines in this realm through supersensible knowledge.

In order to deal with this subject we must look once more at the nature of human beings. That aspect of their being that is grasped by the intellect is for spiritual science only part of their nature. The physical, bodily aspect that we can see and touch a person has in common with the rest of the natural world. The spiritual investigator's research is not based on speculation, but on what is discovered through the higher sense of clairvoyant sight. This reveals the ether body as the second member of a person's being. It is a spiritual organism that is considerably more delicate and refined than the physical body. It has nothing to do with physical ether, and is best described as a sum of forces or currents of energy rather than as substance.

The ether body is the architect of the physical body. The latter has crystallized out of the ether body much as ice crystallizes out of water. We must therefore regard everything that constitutes the physical aspect of a person's being as having evolved out of the ether body. Human being's have this member in common with all beings endowed with life, that is, with the vegetable and animal kingdoms. In shape and size the ether body coincides with the physical body except for the lower part, which differs in shape from the physical. In animals the ether body extends far beyond the physical. For someone who has developed the spiritual faculties that slumber in every human being, there is nothing fantastic about this description of the ether body, just as it is not fantastic for a person who can see to describe colors to a blind person as blue or red.

The third member of a person's being, the astral body, is the bearer of all kinds of passions, lower as well as higher, and also of joys and sorrows, pleasure and pain, cravings and desires. Our ordinary thoughts and will-impulses are also contained in the astral body. Like the ether body, it becomes visible when the higher senses are developed. The astral body permeates the physical and ether bodies and surrounds humans like a kind of cloud. We have it in common with the animal kingdom; it is in continuous movement, mirroring every shade of feeling. But why the name “astral?”

The physical substances of which the physical body is composed connect it with the whole earth; in like manner is the astral body connected with the world of stars. The forces that permeate it and condition a person's destiny and character were given the name “astral” by those who were able to look deeply into their mysterious connection with the astral world that surrounds the earth.

The fourth member of a person's being, the power that enables him or her to say “I,” makes the human being the crown of creation. This name can only be applied to himself; it expresses the fact that what speaks is the soul's primordial divine spark. The designations of everything else we share with others; they can reach a person's ear from outside, but not the name that refers to what is god-like in each individual human soul. That is why in Hebrew esoteric schools it was called the “inexpressible name of God—Jahve,” the “I am the I am.” Even the priest could utter it only with a shudder. This “I am the I am” the soul ascribes to itself.

The human physical body is related to the mineral kingdom, the ether body to the vegetable kingdom and the astral body to the animal kingdom. The “I” humans have in common with no other earthly being; the “I” makes a person the crown of creation. This fourfold entity has always been known in esoteric schools as the “quaternity of man's nature.”

These four bodies develop in each individual in a particular way from childhood till old age. That is why, if we are to understand a person, we must always consider each human being individually. A person's characteristics are indicated already in the embryo. However, humans are not isolated beings; they develop within a certain environment, and can thrive only when surrounded by all the beings of the universe. During embryonic life they must be enveloped by the maternal organism, from which they become independent only when a certain stage of maturity is reached. During further development, the child goes through more events of a similar nature. Just as the physical body while still at the embryonic stage must be enveloped by the maternal organism, so is it surrounded after birth by spiritual sheaths related to spiritual realms. The child is enveloped by an etheric and an astral sheath; the child reposes in them as he did in the womb before birth.

At the time of the change of teeth an etheric covering loosens itself from the ether body, as did the physical covering at physical birth. That means that the ether body is born and becomes free in all directions. Up to then an entity of like nature to itself was attached to it, from which spiritual currents flowed through it as physical currents flowed from the maternal covering through the child before birth. Thus, the child is born for a second time when the ether body is born. Meanwhile the astral body is still surrounded by its protective sheath, a covering that strengthens and invigorates it up to the time of puberty. Then that too withdraws; the birth of the astral body takes place; and the child is born for the third time.

The fact that a threefold birth takes place indicates that the three entities must be considered separately. While it is impossible for external light to reach and harm the eyes of the unborn child, it is not impossible, but certainly highly damaging to the soul, if influences foreign to it are brought to bear on the ether body before it has become completely independent. The same applies to the astral body before puberty. We should, according to spiritual science, avoid all education and training before the change of teeth, except such that have a bearing on the child's physical body; we should in fact influence the ether body as little as we influence the child's physical body before it is born. However, just as the mother must be cared for, because her health influences the development of the embryo, so one should now respect the inviolability of the ether body for the sake of the child's healthy development. This is so important because before the change of teeth only the physical body is ready to be influenced by the external world; all training should therefore be restricted to what concerns the physical body. Any external influence of the ether body during this period is a violation of laws according to which human beings develop.

The human ether body is different from that of the plant world because in a person it becomes the bearer of his enduring traits such as habit, character, conscience and memory, and also temperament. The astral body is the seat of the life of feelings already mentioned, and also of the ability to discern, to judge.

These facts indicate when it becomes right to exert influence on the natural tendencies. In the period up to the seventh year, the child's bodily faculties develop; they become independent and self-contained. The same applies between the seventh and the fourteenth years to habits, memory, temperament and so on; between the fourteenth and the twentieth or twenty-second years is the time when the faculty of the critical intellect develops, and an independent relation to the surrounding world is attained. All these things indicate that different principles of education are required in the various life periods. Special care must be taken up to the seventh year with everything that affects the physical body. This encompasses a great many things. It is a time when all the essential physical organs are gradually developing and the effect on the child's senses is of immense importance. It matters greatly what it sees and hears and generally absorbs. The faculty most prominent at this time is imitation. The Greek philosopher Aristotle¹ remarked that human beings are the most imitative of all animals. This is especially true of the child before the change of teeth. Everything is imitated during this time, and as whatever enters the child through its senses as light and sound works formatively on the organs, it is of utmost importance that what surrounds the child should act beneficially.

At this age nothing is achieved by admonition; commands and prohibitions have no effect whatever. But of the greatest significance is the example. What the child sees, what happens around him, he feels must be imitated. For instance: the parents of a well-behaved child were astonished to discover that he had taken money from a cashbox; greatly disturbed, they thought the child had inclinations to steal. Questioning brought to light that the child had simply imitated what he had seen his parents do every day.

It is important that the examples the child sees and imitates are of a kind that awaken its inner forces. Exhortations have no effect, but the way a person behaves in the child's presence matters greatly. It is far more important to refrain from doing what the child is not permitted to do than to forbid the child to imitate it.

Thus, it is vital that during these years the educator is an exemplary example, that he or she only does what is worthy of imitation. Education should consist of example and imitation. The truth of this is recognized when insight is attained into the nature of human beings and confirmed by the results of education based upon it. Thus, because the ability to understand what things mean is a faculty of the ether body, the child should not learn the significance of the letters of the alphabet before the change of teeth; before then, he or she should do no more than trace their form with paint.

Spiritual research makes all these subtleties understandable and throws light even on details of what should be done. Everything the child perceives, also in a moral sense, acts on the formation of its physical organs. It makes a difference whether the child is surrounded by pain and sorrow or happiness and joy. Happiness and joy build sound organs, and lay the foundation for future health. The opposite can create a disposition towards illness. Everything that surrounds the child should breathe an atmosphere of happiness and joy, even down to objects and colors of clothing and wallpaper. The educator must ensure that it does so, while also taking into account the child's particular disposition.

If a child is inclined to be too earnest and too quiet, it will benefit from having in its surroundings rather sombre, bluish, greenish colors, while the lively, too active child should have yellow, reddish colors. This may seem like a contradiction, but the fact is that through its inherent nature the sense of sight calls up the opposite colors. The bluish shades have an invigorating effect, while in the lively child the yellow-reddish shades call up the opposite colors.

Thus, you see that spiritual investigation throws light even on practical details. The developing organs must be treated in ways that promote their health and inner forces. The child should not be given toys that are too finished and perfect, such as building blocks or perfect dolls. A doll made out of an old table napkin on which eyes, nose and mouth are indicated is far better. Every child will see such a homemade doll as a lady attired in beautiful finery. Why? Because it stirs its imagination, and that induces movement in the inner organs and produces in the child a feeling of well-being. Notice in what a lively and interested manner such a child plays, throwing itself body and soul into what the imagination conjures up, while the child with the perfect doll just sits, unexcited and unamused. It has no possibility to add anything through imagination, so its inner organs are condemned to remain inactive. The child has an extraordinarily sound instinct for what is good for it, as long as only the physical body has become free to interact with the external world, and as long as it is in the process of development. The child will indicate what is beneficial for himself. However, if from early on this instinct is disregarded, it will disappear. Education should be based on happiness, on joy and the child's natural cravings. To practice asceticism at this age would be synonymous with undermining its healthy development.

When the child approaches the seventh year and the milk teeth are gradually being replaced, the covering of the ether body loosens and it becomes free, as did the physical body at physical birth. Now the educator must bring to bear everything that will further the development of the ether body. However, the teacher must guard against placing too much emphasis on developing the child's reason and intellect. Between the seventh and twelfth years, it is mainly a question of authority, confidence, trust and reverence. Character and habit are special qualities of the ether body and must be fostered; but it is harmful to exert any influence on the reasoning faculty before puberty.

The development of the ether body occurs in the period from the seventh to the sixteenth year (in girls to the fourteenth). It is important for the rest of a person's life that during this period feelings of respect and veneration are fostered. Such feelings can be awakened in the following way: by means of information and narration, the lives of significant people are depicted to the child, not only from history, but from the child's own circle, perhaps that of a revered relative. Awe and reverence are awakened in the child, which forbid him to harbor any critical thoughts or opposition against the venerated person. The child lives in solemn expectation of the moment he will be permitted to meet this person. At last the day arrives and the child stands before the door filled with awe and veneration; he turns the handle, enters the room that for him, is a holy place. Such moments of veneration become forces of strength in later life. It is immensely important that the educator, the teacher, is at this time a respected authority for the child. A child's faith and confidence must be awakened, not in axioms, but in human beings.

People around the child with whom he has contact must be his ideals; the child must also choose such ideals from history and literature: "Everyone must choose the hero whose path to Olympus he will follow," is a true saying. The materialistic view that opposes authority and undervalues respect and reverence is utterly wrong. It regards the child as being already self-reliant, but its healthy development is impaired if demands are made upon the reasoning faculty before the astral body is born. What is important at this time is that memory is developed. This is best done in purely mechanical fashion. However, calculators should not be used; tables of multiplication, poems and so on should be committed to memory in quite a parrot fashion. It is simply materialistic prejudice that maintains that at this age such things should be inwardly felt and understood.

In the old days educators knew better. At the ages between one and seven all kinds of songs were sung to the children, like the good old nursery rhymes and children's songs. What mattered was not sense and meaning but sound; the children were made aware of harmony and consonance; we often find words inserted purely for the sake of their sound. Often the rhymes were meaningless. For example: “Fly beetle fly, your father is away; your mother is in Pommerland, Pommerland, fly beetle fly.” Incidentally, in the idiom of children “Pommerland” meant motherland. The expression stemmed from a time when it was still believed that human beings were spiritual beings and had come down to earth from a spiritual world. Pommerland was the Land of spiritual origin. Yet it was not the meaning in such rhymes that was important, but the sound; hence, the many children's songs had no particular sense.

This is the age when memory, habit and character must be established, and this is achieved through authority. If the foundation of these traits is not laid during this period, it will result in behavioral shortcomings later. Just because axioms and rules of conduct have no place in education until the astral body is born, it is important that the pre-puberty child, if he is to be properly educated, can Look up to authority. The child is able to sense a person's innermost being, and that is what it reveres in those with authority. Whatever flows from the educator to the child forms and develops conscience, character and even the temperament—its lasting disposition. During these years allegories and symbols act formatively on the ether body of the child because they make manifest the world-spirit. Fairy tales, legends and descriptions of heroes are a true blessing.

During this period, the ether body must receive as much care as the physical body. During the earlier period it was happiness and joy that influenced the forming of the Organs; from seven to fourteen (in this case boys to sixteen), the emphasis must be on everything that promotes feelings of health and vigor. Hence, the value of gymnastics. However, the desired effect will not be attained if the instructor aims at movements that solely benefit the physical body. It is important that the teacher be able to intuitively enter into how the child inwardly senses himself, and in this way to know which movements will promote inner sensations of health, strength, well-being, and pleasure in the bodily constitution. Only when gymnastic exercises induce feelings of growing strength are they of real value. Not only the external aspect of the bodily nature benefits from correct gymnastic exercises, but also the way a person inwardly experiences the self.

Everything artistic has a strong influence on the ether, as well as the astral body. Music of excellence, both vocal and instrumental, is particularly important, especially for the ether body. And there should be many objects of true artistic beauty in the child's environment.

Most important of all is religious instruction. Images of things supersensible are deeply imprinted in the ether body. What is important here is not the pupil's ability to have an opinion about religious faith, but that he receives descriptions of the supersensible, of what extends beyond the temporal. All religious subjects must be presented pictorially.

Great care must be taken that what is taught is brought to life. Much is spoiled in the child if it is burdened with too much that is dull and lifeless. What is taught in a lively interesting manner benefits the child's ether body. There should be much activity and doing; this has a quickening effect on the spirit. That is true also when it comes to play. The old kind of picture books have a stimulating effect because they contain figures that can be pulled by strings and suggest movement and inner life. Nothing has a more deadening effect on the child's spirit than putting together and fixing some structure, using finished geometrical shapes. That is why building blocks should not be used; the child should create everything from the beginning and learn to bring to life what he forms out of the lifeless. Our materialistic age extinguishes life through mass-produced lifeless objects. Much dies in the young developing brain when the child has to do meaningless things like, for example, braiding. Talents are stifled and much that is unhealthy in our modern society can be traced back to the nursery. Inartistic lifeless toys do not foster trust in spiritual life. A fundamental connection exists between today's lack of religious belief and the way young children are taught.

Once puberty is reached, the astral covering falls away; the astral body becomes independent. With the awakening feelings for the opposite sex, the ability to judge, to form personal opinion, also awakens. Only now should appeal be made to the reasoning faculty, to the approval or disapproval of the critical intellect. That is not to say that the moment the human being has reached this age he is capable of forming independent judgment, let alone do so earlier. It is absurd for such young people to judge issues or to have a say in cultural life. A young person under the age of twenty has an as yet undeveloped astral body, and can no more make sound judgments than a baby still in the womb can hear or see. Each life period requires a corresponding influence. In the first, it is a model to imitate; in the second an authority to emulate; the third requires rules of conduct, principles, and axioms. What is of utmost significance for the young person at this time is the teacher, the personality that will guide the student's eagerness for learning and his desire for independence in the right directions.

Thus, the spiritual scientific world conception provides an abundance of basic principles that help the teacher's task of developing and educating the young generations. We have shown that spiritual science is applicable to everyday life and capable of practical intervention in important issues. We must understand all the members of the human being, and the way they are interrelated in order to know when to influence which member in a truly beneficial way. The embryo will be affected if the expectant mother is not properly nourished; for its sake the mother must be cared for. Similarly, what later still surrounds and protects the child must also be cared for, as that in turn will benefit the child. This holds good on both physical and spiritual levels. Thus, as long as the child still slumbers as if within an etheric womb and is still rooted in the astral covering, it matters greatly what happens in the environment. The child is affected by every thought, every feeling, every sentiment motivating those around him, even if not expressed. Here a person cannot maintain that one's thoughts and feelings do not matter as long as nothing is said.

Even in the innermost recesses of their hearts, those around the child cannot permit themselves ignoble thoughts or feelings. Words affect only the external senses, whereas thoughts and feelings reach the protecting sheaths of the ether and astral bodies and pass over to the child. Therefore, as long as these protective coverings envelop the child, they must be cared for. Impure thoughts and passions harm them just as unsuitable substances harm the mother's body.

Thus, even subtle aspects are illumined by spiritual science. Through knowledge of the human being the educator gains the insight needed. Spiritual science does not aim to persuade; it is not a theory, it is practical knowledge applicable to life. Its effect is beneficial, for it makes human beings healthier both physically and spiritually. It provides effective truth that must flow into every aspect of life. There is no better way for spiritual science to serve humanity than fostering social impulses in the young during the formative years. What takes place in human beings during the time they grow up and mature is one of life's greatest riddles; those who find practical solutions will prove true educators.

• 1. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of his time.

The spiritual evolution of mankind must be brought into a living connection with the whole surrounding world. For many men to-day a great deal has become dead and prosaic; and this is true even of our religious festivals. A great section of mankind has only the smallest notion of what Christmas, Easter and Whitsun signify; it has almost entirely lost that overwhelming richness in the life of feeling which in earlier times men possessed through their knowledge of their connection with the spiritual worlds. Yes, even the festivals have for many men to-day become dead and prosaic. The pouring down of the spirit has become a mere abstraction, and this will change only when men come again to a real spiritual knowledge.

Much is said nowadays about the forces of nature, but little enough about the beings behind these forces. Our forefathers spoke of gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, but to see any reality in such ideas is regarded to-day as sheer superstition. It doesn't matter much, in themselves, what theories people hold; it only begins to be serious when the theories tempt people not to see the truth.

When people say that their ancestors' belief in gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders and the like was all nonsense, one would like to make a rather grotesque reply, and say: “Well, go and ask the bees. They could inform you: the sylphs are no superstition to us; we know well enough what we owe to the sylphs.”—Anyone investigating spiritual forces can find out which force it is that draws the bee on towards the flowers; he sees actual beings leading the bee to the flowers: amid the myriads of bees which fly forth in search of nourishment are the beings our predecessors called sylphs.

It is especially where the different kingdoms of nature come in contact with each other that certain elemental beings are able to reveal themselves. Where moss is growing on the rocks, for example, such beings can establish themselves; or again, in the flowers, in the contact of the bee with the flowers, certain beings have the chance to show themselves. Another possibility arises where man himself comes into touch with the animal kingdom. This does not happen, however, in the ordinary run of things, as for example, when a butcher slaughters an ox or when a man eats meat. It does occur, however, in less usual circumstances, where the contact between the two kingdoms is the result of something more than the mere fact of life. It occurs particularly where a man has that kind of relationship to animals which involves his own feelings, his own concern of soul. A shepherd, for example, may sometimes have such a special relationship to his sheep. Connections of this sort were very frequent in more primitive cultures in earlier times; they resembled the relationship which an Arab has to his horse. And such soul-forces as play over from one realm into the other—as they do between the shepherd and his lambs, or when the forces of smell and taste stream over from the flowers to the bees—these give to certain beings the possibility of incarnating themselves. The spiritual investigator perceives something like an aura around the blossoms, which arises as the bees thrust their way into them and taste what they find there. A kind of flower-aura streams out, and this provides nourishment for certain spiritual beings.

The question why there are beings just here and nowhere else, does not arise for anyone who understands the spiritual world. If opportunities are provided for such beings, then they are there; give them that on which they can live and they are there. It is just as when human beings let evil thoughts stream out from themselves, certain beings then incorporate themselves in his aura; they are there because he allows nourishment to stream to them. The opportunity is given for certain spiritual beings to incorporate themselves wherever different kingdoms of nature come into touch with each other. Where metal is found in the rocks, the miner as he hacks away sees certain tiny beings which were compressed together into quite a small space and now scatter in all directions. These are beings in some ways not unlike man himself; they have the power of reason, but it is reason without responsibility; and so, when they play some mischievous prank on a man, they in no way feel they are doing anything amiss. They are the beings our forefathers called gnomes; they prefer to take up their abode where metal and stone come together. There was a time when they did men good service, as in the early days of mining; the way to lay out a mine, the knowledge of how the strata ran—this was learnt from such beings.

Mankind will land itself in a blind alley if it fails to acquire a spiritual understanding of these things. As with the gnomes, so with the beings we may call undines; they are found where the plants come into contact with the mineral kingdom. They are bound up with the element of water, they incorporate themselves where water and plant and stone come together.—The sylphs are bound to the element of air, and lead the bees to the flowers. Now everything science has to say about the life of the bees is riddled with error from top to bottom, and nowadays the beekeepers are often misled by it; in this direction science proves itself unusable and again and again beekeepers have to come back to old practices.

As for salamanders, these are still known to many people. When someone feels that this or that element of soul is streaming towards him, this mostly arises through the salamanders. When a man relates himself to animals in the way the shepherd does to his lambs, the salamanders are then able to embody themselves; the knowledge the shepherd has in regard to his flock is whispered to him by these beings.

If we take these thoughts farther we shall have to say: We are entirely surrounded by spiritual beings; we are surrounded by the air and this is crowded with these spiritual beings. In times to come, if his destiny is not to be of the sort that will entirely dry up his life, man will have to have a knowledge of these beings; without such a knowledge he will be unable to make any further progress at all. He will have to put the question: Whence do these beings arise? And this question will lead him to see that, through certain steps taken by the higher worlds, that which is on the downward path to evil can through a wise guidance be changed into good.

Here and there in life we meet with the products of decay with waste products. Thus for example, manure is a waste product, and in agriculture it is used as a basis to further plant growth. Things which have apparently fallen away from a higher course of development are taken up again by higher powers and transformed. This happens with the very beings of whom we have been speaking.

Let us consider how the salamander, for example, originates. Salamanders, as we have seen, are beings who require a special relationship between man and animal. Now the kind of ego man has to-day is only to be found in man, in the human being living on the earth; every man has his ego enclosed within himself. It is different with the animals: they have a group-ego, a group-soul; that is to say, a group of animals with the same form have a common group-ego. When the lion says ‘I’, its ego is up above in the astral world. It is as if a man were to stand behind a wall in which there were ten holes, and then to stick his ten fingers through them. The man himself cannot be seen, but every intelligent observer would conclude that someone is behind, a single entity who owns the ten fingers. It is the same with the group-ego. The separate animals are simply the limbs: the being they belong to is in the astral world. We must not imagine the animal-ego to be like the human being of course, though if we consider man as he is as a spiritual being, we can then certainly compare the animal group-ego with him.

In many animal species the group-ego is a wise being. If we think of how certain kinds of birds live in the north in the summer and in the south in the winter, how in spring they fly back to the north—in this migrating flight of the birds there are wise powers at work; they are in the group-egos of the birds. Anywhere you like in the animal kingdom you can find the wisdom of the group-egos in this way. If we turn back to our schooldays we can remember learning how modern times gradually arose out of the Middle Ages, of how America was discovered, and how gunpowder and printing were invented, and later still the art of making paper from rags. We have long been accustomed to such paper, but the wasp group-soul invented it thousands of years ago. The material of which the wasp's nest consists is exactly the same as is used in making paper out of rags. Only gradually will it become known how the one or the other achievement of the human spirit is connected with what the group-souls have introduced into the world.

When the clairvoyant looks at an animal, he sees a glimmer of light along the whole length of its spine. The physical spine of the animal is enveloped in a glimmering light, in innumerable streams of force which everywhere travel across the earth, as it were, like the trade winds. They work on the animal in that they stream along the spine. The group-ego of the animal travels in a continual circular movement around the earth at all heights and in all directions. These group-egos are wise, but one thing they have not yet got: they have no knowledge of love. Only in man is wisdom found in his individuality together with love. In the group-ego of the animals no love is present; love is found only in the single animal. What underlies the whole animal-group as wise arrangements is quite devoid of love. In the physical world below the animal has love; above, on the astral plane, it has wisdom. When we realise this a vast number of things will become clear to us.

Only gradually has man arrived at his present stage of development; in earlier times he also had a group-soul, out of which the individual soul has gradually emerged. Let us follow the evolution of man back into ancient Atlantis. Mankind once lived in Atlantis, a continent now lying beneath the Atlantic Ocean. At that time the vast Siberian plains were covered with immense seas; the Mediterranean was differently distributed, and in Europe itself there were extensive seas. The farther we go back in the old Atlantean period, the more the conditions of life alter, the more the sleeping and the waking state of man changes. Since that time consciousness during the sleeping condition has darkened, as it were, so that to-day man has, so to say, no consciousness at all in this condition. In the earliest Atlantean times the difference between sleeping and waking was not yet so great. In his waking state at that time man still saw things with an aura around them; he did not attain to any greater clarity than this in his perception of the physical world. Everything physical was still filled out, so to say, with something unclear, as if with mist. As he progressed, the human being came to see the world in its clear-cut contours, but in return he lost his clairvoyance.

It is in the times when men still saw clairvoyantly what was going on up above in the astral world that all the myths and sagas originate. When he was able to enter into the spiritual world, man learned to know the beings who had never descended into the physical world: Wotan, Baldur, Thor, Loki.—These names are memories of living realities, and all mythologies are memories of this kind. As spiritual realities, they have simply vanished from the sight of man. When in those earlier times man descended into his physical body, he got the feeling: “Thou art a single being.” When he returned into the spiritual world in the evening, however, the feeling came over him: “Thou art in reality not a single being.” The members of the old tribal groups, the Herulians, the Cheruskans and the like, had still felt themselves far more as belonging to their group, than as single personalities. It was out of this condition of things that there arose such practices as the blood-feud, the vendetta. The whole people formed a body which belonged to the group-soul of the folk.

Everything happens step by step in evolution, and so it was only gradually that the individual developed out of the group-soul. The accounts of the patriarchs, for instance, reveal quite other relationships which confirm this fact. Before the time of Noah, memory was as yet something quite different from what we know. The frontier of birth was no real frontier, for the memory streamed on in those through whom the same blood flowed. This onstreaming of memory was in earlier times something quite different from what we possess; it was far more comprehensive. Nowadays the authorities like to have the name of each individual recorded somewhere or other. In the past, it was what man remembered of the deeds of his father and grandfather that was covered with a common name and called Adam or Noah; what was remembered, the stream of memory in its full extent, was called Adam or Noah. The old names signified comprehensive groups, human groups which extended through time.

Now we must put ourselves the question: Can we compare the anthropoid apes with man himself? The vital difference is that the ape preserves the group-soul condition throughout, whereas man develops the individual soul. But the ape group-soul is in a quite special position to other group-souls. We must think of a group-soul as living in the astral world and spreading itself out in the physical world, so that, for instance, the group-soul of the lion sends a part of its substance into each single lion. Let us suppose that one of these lions dies; the external physical part drops away from the group-soul, just as when we lose a nail. The group-soul sends out a new ray of being, as it were, into a new individual. The group-soul remains above and stretches out its tentacles in a continual process of renewal. The animal group-soul knows neither birth or death; the single individual falls away and a new one appears, just as the nails on our fingers come and go.—Now we must consider the following:—With the lion it is entirely as we have said, that every time a lion dies, the whole of what was sent out by the group-soul return to it again. It is not at all so, however, with the apes. When an ape dies the essential part does return to the group-soul, but a part does not; a part is severed from the group-soul. The ape detaches substance too strongly from the group-soul. There are species where the single animal tears something away from the group-soul which cannot return to it. With all the apes, fragments are detached in each case from the group-soul. It is the same with certain kinds of amphibians and birds; in the kangaroo, for example, something is kept back from the group-soul. Now everything in the warm-blooded animals that remains behind in this way becomes an elemental being of the kind we call a salamander.

Under entirely different conditions from those on the earth to-day, the other types of elemental beings have detached themselves in the past. We have here a case where cast-off products of evolution, as it were, are made of service under the wise guidance of higher Beings. Left to themselves, these would disturb the Cosmos, but under a higher guidance the sylphs, for example, can be used to lead the bees to the flowers. Such a service changes the harmful into something useful.

Now it could happen that man himself might entirely detach himself from the group-soul in becoming an individual and find no means of developing further as an individual soul. If he does not accept spiritual knowledge in the right way, he can run the risk of complete severance.

What is it that protects man from an isolation which is, without the direction and purpose which, earlier on, the group-soul had given him? We must clearly recognise that man individualises himself more and more, and to-day, he has to find a connection once again with other men out of his free will. All that connects men, through folk, race and family, will be ever more completely severed; everything in man tends more and more to result in individual manhood.

Imagine that a number of human beings on the earth have come to recognise that they are all becoming more and more individual. Is there not a real danger that they will split away from each other ever more completely? Already nowadays men are no longer held together by spiritual ties. Each one has his own opinion, his own religion; indeed, many see it as an ideal state of affairs that each should have his own opinion. But that is all wrong. If men make their opinions more inward, then they come to a common opinion. It is a matter of inner experience, for example, that 3 times 3 makes 9, or that the three angles of a triangle make up 180 degrees. That is inner knowledge, and matters of inner knowledge need not be argued about. Of such a kind also are all spiritual truths. What is taught by Spiritual Science is discovered by man through his inner powers; along the inward path man will be led to absolute agreement and unity. There cannot be two opinions about a fact without one of them being wrong. The ideal lies in the greatest possible inwardness of knowledge; that leads to peace and to unity.

In the past, mankind became free of the group-soul. Through spiritual-scientific knowledge mankind is now for the first time in the position to discover, with the utmost certainty of purpose, what will unite mankind again. When men unite together in a higher wisdom, then out of higher worlds there descends a group-soul once more. What is willed by the Leaders of the spiritual-scientific Movement is that in it we should have a society in which hearts stream towards wisdom as the plants stream towards the sunlight. In that together we turn our hearts towards a higher wisdom, we give a dwelling-place to the group-soul; we form the dwelling-place, the environment, in which the group-soul can incarnate. Mankind will enrich earthly life by developing what enables spiritual beings to come down out of higher worlds.

This spirit-enlivened ideal was once placed before humanity in a most powerful way. It was when a number of men, all aglow with a common feeling of fervent love and devotion, were met together for a common deed: Then the sign was given, the sign that could show man with overwhelming power how in unity of soul he could provide a place for the incarnation of the common spirit. In this company of souls the same thing was living: in the flowing together, in the harmony of feeling they provided what was needed for the incarnation of a common spirit. That is expressed when it is said that the Holy Spirit, the group-soul, sank down as it were into incarnation. It is a symbol of what mankind should strive towards, how it should seek to become the dwelling-place for the Being who descends out of higher worlds.

The Easter event gave man the power to develop these experiences; the Whitsun event is the fruit of this power's unfolding. Through the flowing of souls together towards the common wisdom there will always result that which gives a living connection with the forces and beings of higher worlds, and with something which as yet has little significance for humanity, namely the Whitsun festival. When men come to know what the downcoming of the Holy Spirit in the future can mean for mankind, the Whitsun festival will once more become alive for them. Then it will be not only a memory of the event in Jerusalem; but there will arise for mankind the everlasting Whitsun festival, the festival of united soul-endeavour.

It will depend on men themselves what value and what result such ideals can have for mankind. When in this right way they strive towards wisdom, then will higher spirits unite themselves with men.

Dearly beloved! For many years now I have been privileged to give one or more lectures here every year on the subject of what I dare call the spiritual-scientific world view. The friends of our spiritual-scientific world view were of the opinion that even in our fateful times such a lecture should be given here in this city again.

You will understand, dear ladies and gentlemen, that from the point of view of the spiritual-scientific world view, a consideration of our time must direct our feelings and emotions to what moves us in our immediate present as its most fateful content. We see various nations of the earth fighting with each other. Above all, we see Central Europe, as if locked in a great, mighty fortress, struggling for the most sacred goods. Every human soul must then, even if it wants to turn its thoughts to the most important, perhaps the highest riddle questions of existence, take with it the feelings that come from the events, which undoubtedly carry something tremendously significant in their womb , demand confidence, strength, hope from us, and above all demand of us that we survey the facts with open eyes, that we also allow the forces to come before our soul with open eyes, which come into play in the present.

Now it is truly not my intention to add yet another reflection to the already overwhelming literature and the abundant lectures on our current events. Tonight's discussion will cover a number of other topics that have often been discussed in our present time. It has already been said, and not without good reason, that one should not allow one's clear and certain view of the conflicting interests at stake in the present to become clouded, to become obscured by all kinds of mysticism, all kinds of metaphysical, that one must be clear about the fact that the present struggle owes its existence to political causes, social causes and the interests of the peoples, and that one should certainly not speak of the fact that the spiritual life can somehow be called fruitful among the causes of the present events.

Now, of course, the spiritual scientist in particular has every reason, my dear audience, to be careful not to fall into all sorts of speculation about how the world spirits themselves came into conflict with each other or the like. But one thing must always be emphasized: Even in those ancient times, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, when our ancestors, our Germanic ancestors, the inhabitants of Central Europe, were confronted with the old Roman Empire, which was coming to an end, even then people could say: It is only a question of the spheres of interest , on the one hand the Germanic peoples of Central Europe, on the other the peoples of Southern Europe, and one should not let one's clear view be clouded by all kinds of considerations of intellectual currents or the like when considering the immediate issue.

Of course, for the immediate present, for the view that only looks at the immediate present, it is so, it is fully justified. Nevertheless, the following may perhaps be considered. One will be able to say: Yes, certainly, just as English and German interests, political interests, are correctly viewed as being opposed to each other and have led to war, so in those days Central European and Southern European interests were opposed to each other; but if one considers the whole history that followed those events, one will still have to say: Yes, Europe was shaped back then as it had to be shaped so that the entire cultural development with all its content that has since taken hold could take place. And everything that happened intellectually afterwards was already in the womb of events back then. The way in which Christianity took root in Europe depended on the validity that the Germanic peoples were able to establish for themselves at the time. All subsequent culture, in which we are only beginning to immerse ourselves, was shaped by what happened at that time.

It is incumbent upon people of the present day not to live their lives only instinctively in the same way as people of that time, for example. Times have moved forward, and now it is a matter of allowing what is happening before one's soul, even from a certain higher point of view – I do not want to say that it underlies the events, I would like to emphasize that – but what is expressed in the tremendous struggle that has never been seen before in human development, to be seen with open eyes, that is, with full consciousness, I want to emphasize that.

This is one thing. The other thing, however, my dear audience, is this: that anyone who considers the spiritual events of the present and the past, insofar as the present has developed out of this past, will see that not only at the present time, but basically for a long time already, a struggle, a wrestling of the peoples of the earth, of the people of the earth for spiritual goods is taking place, a wrestling that has often been neglected in its special nature, and perhaps especially in the last few decades. But what is happening today, what has to be fought for today in blood and death, must remind us to take a look at what is going on in souls and how in what souls strive for and want, there is also a field of battle on our earth.

It is not my responsibility to get involved in political matters. But I may touch on the fact that in the future all the declamations and sophistries that are practiced today about the causes of the war, about what one or the other did to bring about the war, that this will crystallize, especially when deeper and deeper into the future, which may not be so very far away, the situation will be understood, that it is a matter of a defense that the peoples of Central Europe, in particular the German people, have to lead against powerful nations that do not want to let it happen. It is also clear to the objective observer and will become ever clearer that the German people have to fight a defensive battle. I call attention to this for the reason that the word defensive struggle must also be applied to the spiritual goods that are to be given from the depths of the German national soul to the world, but which must be defended against attacks that no longer present themselves as attacks but which are nevertheless attacks in a spiritual sense, so to speak, on the stage of world events.

To illustrate what I actually mean, let me give an example that seems rather remote, but is only an example. For more than a century, our German intellectual culture has included a certain area of intellectual property, the tremendous value of which is unfortunately still not fully recognized. For a long time now, when speaking of a thorough-going Weltanschhauung in harmony with the present time, reference has been made to the idea of evolution. It is said that humanity has advanced to the point of realizing that individual forms of life do not stand side by side, but that individual forms develop side by side. With tremendous magnitude – to use this expression – in a spiritually appropriate way, Goethe, at the end of the eighteenth century, out of the depths of German thinking, of German intellectual research, placed this developmental idea into world development, into world culture. And it may be said that the way in which Goethe has placed the idea of development in the spiritual world culture is one of the greatest things that has emerged in the development of humanity, at least in the spiritual realm, even if one compares it with everything that Goethe achieved as a poet.

Now it must be said that not everything that Goethe gave to humanity has directly flowed into the great stream of spiritual progress. Basically, few have yet recognized the full value of Goethe's spiritual achievement. On the other hand, the idea of evolution has entered world culture through Darwinism, I would say in a purely external, more materialistic-utilitarian form, from a non-German ethnic group.

Of course, one cannot say that there is something like struggle and war when looking at things so externally and superficially. But if you look at them internally, it is clear that something greater has simply been pushed back by the intellectual and external power of a less significant, English-influenced Darwinian idea. That is one thing. But countless examples of this could be cited. Countless things could be cited – we need not concern ourselves here with the deeper reasons – that within German culture impulses have been given that are being oppressed as such, even waged against, that are to be replaced by those who have surrounded them. The intellectual encirclement began long ago. And it will be, one may say a world luck - if the word is not misunderstood - it will be a world luck, if that which we are now experiencing in such a hard way makes us aware that we also need spiritual weapons. The future will teach that we need spiritual weapons to protect the deeper against the less deep. For those who look a little deeper, what is happening today out of blood and death is only a beginning; a beginning of a struggle that will also take place on the spiritual scene.

Now many things can help to find the way in the confusion that has arisen in relation to spiritual currents - the word is of course itself challenged today, but it may still be used because it best describes the present situation. And today's reflection is intended to point the way.

Spiritual science is by no means something - as it is meant here - that is already recognized in wider circles today. Rather, spiritual science is something that is even regarded as folly, as fantasy or reverie in wider circles. But the spiritual scientist does not allow himself to be deterred by this. When Copernicus put forward the new natural scientific world view in relation to their first thoughts, when Copernicus and Galileo appeared, what they had to say to humanity was also seen as fantasy in the eyes of those who wanted to hold on to what corresponded to their habitual thinking. He who observes the way in which truth advances through the world knows that spiritual science today is in exactly the same position as natural science was several centuries ago. And he finds it understandable, indeed self-evident, that it is still regarded by the vast majority of people today as fantasy, as reverie or worse.

Now, in earlier lectures, I have had a variety of things to present here from the field of spiritual science, how the view should be directed to something else. Today I can only present, not prove, but only hint at, some basic ideas that may interest us today, the spiritual-scientific views.

Sometimes we speak of the soul of the nation. However, the soul of the nation is a concept that can, it is to be hoped, be placed in a new light by spiritual science. What is the soul of the nation in our more or less materialistically thinking times? Well, if one wants to raise oneself to the concept of the national soul at all, one says: one looks at the qualities that always emerge in a national community, that is, what a group of people, who are called a nation, have in common, and one then comes to an abstract concept and does not think of anything further, of anything real, when one speaks of the national soul.

The spiritual scientist, however, speaks of the soul of a nation as something very real, as something one can call personal reality, as something personally real. The spiritual scientist speaks from his spiritual scientific research that just as we are surrounded in the physical world by the realm of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, we are surrounded by higher realms of the soul and spirit, by beings of a supersensible world. He does not speak of these beings of a supersensible world as if they were abstract concepts, but he speaks of these entities as if they were real realities. Just as someone in ancient times who had no idea about the nature of the atmosphere could believe that there was nothing around where we live, while the modern person knows, of course, that he is surrounded by air, so the person who is familiar with spiritual science knows that, in relation to our soul and spirit, we are surrounded by spiritual beings everywhere. But not in the sense of pantheism, but in the sense of a spiritual world that is populated by spiritual beings everywhere. And we also count the folk soul among such spiritual beings, we count the individual folk souls of the various peoples. We speak of real and individual beings when we speak of the folk souls of the individual peoples. I can only hint at this briefly today because time is limited.

But what the national soul has as an entity can only be understood by considering the relationship of this national soul to the individual soul within such a nation. And here we immediately come to an area where all of today's psychology is quite inadequate in the face of spiritual research. With this consideration, especially with regard to the contemplation of the soul, one stands at the beginning of a completely new way of looking at things with spiritual science. The person who speaks of the soul in the usual way of soul science today speaks of the soul as if it were a simple thing in which will, feeling and thinking and so on surge up and down. For the spiritual researcher, this is just as if one were to speak of color in general or of light in general. Anyone who has heard a little about physics knows that we can get behind the nature of light by observing the rainbow band of the entire spectrum, by observing how light manifests itself in connection with the phenomena of the world, let us say in a sevenfold or, for the sake of simplicity, in a threefold way. On the one hand, light manifests itself in the spectrum in such a way that we have, so to speak, reddish yellow on the outside, green in the middle, and blue-violet on the other side. And it is precisely through this that we come to understand the way in which light works. This enables us to look at light in terms of the way it works and to know that light really does live in the seven colors of the spectrum.

Just as the physicist today takes this for granted, so too will the science of the soul one day take for granted, but also as a scientific necessity, a threefold mode of action of the soul. And there we call that in the field of spiritual science, which, as it were, expresses itself in the soul as reddish-yellow expresses itself in light; we call that in spiritual science, in relation to the soul, the sentient soul. And we call that which, as it were, constitutes the center of the soul, as green is the center of the band of colors, the mind or feeling soul. And we call that which, as it were, appears on the other side as the manifestation of the soul, as blue-violet appears in the band of colors, the consciousness soul. And spiritual science must stand on the standpoint that one recognizes the soul from this structure just as one recognizes the mode of action of light from the color band. And just as light expresses itself everywhere, in every link, in every nuance of the color band, so the threefold effect of the soul expresses itself through what we call our self, our actual I. Truly, there will come a time when there is a science of the soul, as scientific as today's physics is, when the spectrum of the soul will be characterized as the sentient soul, as the mind or feeling soul, as the consciousness soul.

And if we now look at the individual peoples of Europe, we find: What characterizes them – but now in a real way, not in the abstract way that it is characterized by the previous ethnology – what characterizes these peoples is how the folk soul, the real, real folk soul, relates to the individual soul, the soul of the individual human being who belongs to the community of peoples.

And here we find, first of all, that the whole nature of the Italian people can be understood in a luminous way through this – I cannot go into this in detail now, but if it were described in full, one would see how what was previously ethnology would would step forward in a radiant way. The Italian people are characterized by the fact that the folk soul, insofar as it belongs to their nationality, intervenes in the individual soul of the Italian people, insofar as it belongs to their nationality, in such a way that this intervention occurs primarily in the sentient soul. Everything that has emerged as Italian culture is, comparatively speaking, the expression of a dialogue between the Italian folk soul and the sentient soul of the individual members of the Italian people. And all the one-sidedness, but also all the greatness of the Italian development, is based on the fact that the link of the soul life, the nuance of the soul life, which we call the sentient soul, is inspired and impelled in a one-sided way by the forces of the Italian folk soul.

Now one might think that I am only talking about abstract concepts with all these things. This is absolutely not the case. For spiritual science further shows us that these three members of the life of the soul, which have been enumerated, are really connected with the whole being, the comprehensive being of the human soul. And from the research in spiritual science, we can say that what we call the sentient soul initially forms the expression of all passions, all impulsive aspects of human nature; that it is the expression of the sensations that well up from the center of the human soul. But at the same time, it is also the part of the human soul that, as elementary as it is, as much as it is initially at a childlike stage, so it is connected with that which passes through births and deaths of the human soul, which belongs to the eternal part of the human soul, which passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world after death. Much more than the other aspects of the soul's life is that which unfolds in the sentient soul, that which belongs to the eternal in the soul.

But it also belongs to the eternal that the sentient soul contains only that which is linked to the eternal in the temporal, so that the human being directly lives this eternal as elementary life. If I could expand on this further, which would take many hours, it would point out to us how, precisely through this dialogue and these interactions between the Italian folk soul and the individual soul as a sentient soul, great Italian painting came into being, Dante's poetry came into being, who, let us say, gave a picture of the eternal in his “Divine Comedy”. All these bearers of Italian culture have given these things in such a way that one must say: What they have given is the result of the interaction of the national soul with the sentient soul of the individual, through everything that is accessible to the sentient soul of the individual soul. These things will be characterized in more detail when we turn to other nations and compare their characteristics with those of the Italian people.

But now something very peculiar happens. Apart from the general facts that I have just mentioned, we must also bear in mind that each age, each historical epoch, is assigned, as it were, the effect on a particular part of the human soul as a special mission in the course of time. It cannot be said that the wisdom that rules in the development of the world is always the same in all ages, so that the sentient soul, the soul of understanding or mind, the consciousness soul can work in the same way. That which comes from the human soul must meet the demands of world culture. And now, a deeper consideration of the spiritual development of newer peoples and especially of Europe shows that the activity of the sentient soul was essentially concluded by the middle or end of the sixteenth century, and that therefore the greatness of a people that is based on the sentient soul must be concluded by the sixteenth century. This in turn explains why everything that has been formed within Italian culture since that time, up to the present day, gives the impression of being outdated, and this can be said quite objectively. When we refresh our soul – and this is deeply satisfying for everyone – by drawing on the essence of southern Europe, as so many artists, as Goethe and others have done, it is due to the greatness of the Italian national spirit, which in the sixteenth century; the other is all after-effects, and it could easily be shown how it is prepared in the depths of the historical impulses, that what has since been asserted as Italian greatness must sound so hollow and empty. These things can now only be hinted at, as I said.

Some things, because they have to be briefly mentioned, have to be stated somewhat radically; but if you follow the lines of thought that are presented here, you will see how much more easily they can penetrate into the understanding that we must seek in the present, the understanding of the interrelationships between the peoples of Europe.

If we now consider the French national soul, we have to look for the essential peculiarities in the fact that there is an interaction between the very real national soul and the intellectual or emotional soul.

And everything that French culture has ever achieved can be explained by this peculiar interaction between the national soul and the intellectual or emotional soul of the individuals who belong to the French nation. This also explains why the French are particularly predisposed to combining and assembling facts, and to applying even the most profound concepts only in a way that is convenient for this world. This explains why even in the poetry of the French people, even when it rises to the classical heights, there is still an effort to construct as systematically as possible, for example in drama, to proceed as far as possible according to certain rules; this is the peculiarity of the intellectual soul. This intellectual or emotional soul brings to manifestation in the soul that which, so to speak, half points to the eternal of the soul, but which, on the other hand, points to the completely transitory temporal, which the soul experiences only in the physical world, in connection with the physical between birth and death.

Recently, some psychological societies have once again been pondering why the French mind in particular is so materialistic, why, let us say, even the greatest philosopher of the French people, Descartes – or Cartesius – constructed a philosophy entirely according to the model of mathematics. This is for no other reason than that the whole culture of the French mind comes from the interaction between the soul of the people and the soul of the mind or soul. How often are we Germans quite peculiar when we try to establish harmony between meaning and form in poetry, when we try above all to allow the content to flow into the form in such a way that the content creates its form, how are we when we now look at the same thing in the artistic products of the intellectual or emotional soul of the French, where it is especially important to build rhythm and rhyme in a systematic way. The French have a completely different feeling for rhythm and rhyme than we Germans do. We Germans are quite capable – and Goethe showed this throughout many of his dramas – of creating rhyming rhythms without rhyme. The French, who want to be justifiably French poets, find this quite impossible. Everything that makes up the peculiar character of French poetry, that which makes up the peculiarity of French characters, comes from the interaction of the French national soul with the intellectual or emotional soul of the individual.

If we now turn to the English people, we find that the individual Briton who seeks his connection with the national soul in his nationality is subject above all to an interaction between this national soul and the consciousness soul. Now this consciousness soul is that which, in relation to the outer man, in relation to everything that man is in his dealings with the world of the senses, is the most highly developed part of the soul. But at the same time it is the only thing that is limited to the world we pass through between birth and death. We can, so to speak, look up to the loftiest expressions of the British spirit, we will find everywhere that its expressions come from the interaction of the British national soul with the consciousness soul of the individual British, which, so to speak, is directed into the physical world with its best powers.

This peculiarity of the British character will become even more apparent to us if we now immediately mention the peculiarity of the interaction between the German national soul and the soul of the individual German. There we see – and we shall understand this later through individual expressions of the German nature – there we see that just as light manifests itself in all color nuances, just as reddish yellow, green, blue violet are all expressions of light, so the soul as a whole is the expression of the self, of the I. And that which constitutes the substance of the German people is rooted entirely in the ego, in the self. And the interaction between what we call the German national soul and the individual German, insofar as he stands within his nationality, is the interaction between the national soul and the ego. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul, that it is not one-sidedly attuned to the revelations of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul or the mind soul or the consciousness soul, but that it expresses itself sometimes in this way and sometimes in that; that it strives for universality, for the all-embracing, and that at the same time it strives for inner depth, always wanting to experience more deeply all the different nuances of the soul life in a living way. It can be said that just as the I, the self, is the deepest part of the human being, and the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul are its expressions, so it is with the German, insofar as he belongs to his people , that in relation to the most intimate part of his mind, in relation to the depths of his soul, when he rises to the best that can flow from the German nature, he holds a dialogue with his deepest soul with the spirit of his people. Thus he also has a feeling, sometimes only an instinct, but on the heights of humanity also a clear consciousness of this confrontation with the spiritual powers of the world.

If we now look back again at the peculiarities of the British people, it becomes clear to us – and I would like to give an example that has greatness, because no one will accuse me of citing Shakespeare to denigrate him, and I would of course consider myself to be a madman, like anyone else, would consider myself a fool if I were to doubt Shakespeare's greatness in the slightest; of course I count Shakespeare among the best poets in the world – but it is one thing to recognize the foundations of the world's effectiveness and another to form value judgments.

Let us consider one of Shakespeare's most characteristic works, the work in which Shakespeare's thoughts and feelings can come to us so fully from his soul, let us consider his “Hamlet”. Let us see how real riddles of the world and of humanity are brought to our soul in Hamlet. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” The ghost of Hamlet's father appears; one might say that the dead intrude into the world of the living. But do we recognize Shakespeare's greatness on the one hand precisely in the fact that he is able to present his characters in such a wonderfully sharply outlined way, in a typical and completely individual characterization, showing us precisely that the part of his soul that is called the consciousness soul is directed towards the external-historical. What is solid in the world about the human being on two legs and reveals itself through the human being is characterized by Shakespeare from the consciousness soul with a wonderfully sharp contour. That is the remarkable thing, that he has become one of the greatest, that he was able to characterize a world from the consciousness soul as it stands before us. That is the characteristic.

But let us look at him just at the point where he wants to touch the boundary that leads beyond the sensual world into the supersensible. He wants to touch it. He wants to cross over this boundary. Hamlet's soul shows what happens to a person who wants to cross over this boundary. The question is raised: to be or not to be? He looks towards the other world, but how far does Hamlet get? He only gets to the threshold, he looks into that land from which no traveler has yet returned.

In this we have the entire workings of the consciousness soul in that the poet is great at characterizing what is in the physical world; but uncertainty immediately befalls the soul when it wants to go beyond the physical world. Shakespeare in particular shows us how he also emerged from the interaction of the folk soul with the consciousness soul.

If we now compare this with an episode in the greatest world poem, which is also the greatest German poem and the greatest German intellectual achievement, we conjure up the scene in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” where the question of “to be or not to be” also arises before the human soul, and the spiritual world and the sensual-material world stand before the human soul full of significance. Mephisto is there, he has the key to the spiritual world, but he is the representative of the materialistic view, he is the representative of those beings who only see the material, the transitory, out of the spirit. He has the key, just as science has the key to the higher secrets, but, if it is only filled with materialism, it cannot enter into these secrets. Goethe even depicts Mephisto as having to place himself in relation to the higher mysteries. And Mephisto addresses to Faust a question that touches so closely on the Hamlet question: “You will enter the indefinite, you will come to nothingness.” There is a reference to that which is to assert itself in Faust as spirit. And Faust replies to Mephisto: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.”

You see, this is the answer that comes from the depths of the I, the I that knows it is connected to the world spirit, the I that is directly strengthened by the fact that it is the German I that experiences the interaction between the national soul and what lives as the self in the soul. Doubt alone enters into the one-sidedness of the consciousness soul, the Hamlet doubt, precisely that which is truly experienced as the deepest. Then certainty enters and says: Because I experience the divine that flows and is through the world in my own inner being, I know that I must find the All in your [Nothingness]. That is the significant thing, that precisely this nature of the German essence has been expressed in the greatest German intellectual achievement. And what I have discussed in this one scene from Faust, it goes, like the spirit of Faust, through the whole of Faust. That is the significant thing, that at this point this influence of the folk soul into the depths of the soul is expressed through all the nuances of the soul.

But that is also what is so difficult for other Europeans to understand. It is this that appears to the other Europeans as an enigma. And enigmas that cannot be solved are best banished from the soul by such means as are now being used in the sophisticated and defamatory declamations that are being directed from all sides out of hatred towards the German national character, because it cannot be understood.

But from this interaction of the national soul with the individual soul of the human being, insofar as this human being is rooted in his nationality, follows what I would like to call the ever-rejuvenating power of the German spirit, of the German national soul. For by cultivating his innermost being, by being able to hold a dialogue with the national soul, the German always draws closer to this national soul. And when any cultural period has expired, when a cultural period has become decrepit and dies, then a new interaction of the German national soul with the national spirit occurs, a rejuvenation of the whole being. But through this direct contact with the national soul, the German essence not only rejuvenates that which lives within the German spirit itself, but also that which, as spiritual culture in the world, must also flow into the German essence.

Let us see how Christianity flowed into the old, worn-out cultures at the end of ancient times. Oh, one can observe how this Christianity adopted old forms, ancient forms of religions in the Greek and Roman folk. How that which was Greek philosophy was superimposed like a religious element, superimposed over that which was carried into human development as a living impulse as the deed of the living Christ.

And then we see how Christianity enters into the self-refreshing and rejuvenating spirit of the German being. This can be observed in individual phenomena. For example, let us see how the “Heliand” was written in the ninth century, a German way of presenting the events in Palestine that are grouped around Christ Jesus. If we allow this remarkable ninth-century poem to take effect on us, it shows us above all the peculiarity that here, out of the German spirit, the events surrounding Christ Jesus are described, who has taken Christ Jesus completely into his own mind, who sees a longing, an ideal in it, to live in his own soul life in such a way that the forces of Christ permeate this own soul life. Everything that is German soul should be permeated with Christianity. This is the source of the feeling that arises when reading the Heliand and letting it take effect in one: All this is related to us, the eternal of Christ is described to us in such a way that it does not appear as renewing, as rejuvenating an old culture, but rather that it appears as if the power of Christ itself is absorbed in its youthfully fresh achievement and is directly present, rejuvenating itself.

And then we see how, for example, such profound poetry, which of course did not originate on German soil in its first form, like Parzifal – and I could name others – how such poetry has been seized by the German essence, how it has been deepened, how the adventurous nature that was formerly associated with Parzifal appears to us in the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and later in those of other writers, and how we see Parzifal as a representative of the striving human soul in general. We see in it something that lives in such a way that its striving is intimately connected with the forces in the human soul that strive for the highest, for the path to the spiritual. And we see, for example, how medieval religious spiritual life is grasped so profoundly by the power of what I have just explained. We see, for example, in the work of Meister Eckhart, this profound German mystic, how he constantly speaks of the fact that the divine must merge with the soul itself, that the soul can feel how God lives in it. Yes, that everything the soul experiences as thinking, feeling and willing can be experienced as if God Himself were thinking, feeling and willing in it. To let God rule completely within oneself becomes the ideal of German mysticism, the ideal of Meister Eckhart and others.

And if we follow the course of this spiritual current, we find numerous expressions by him that show us the same way of thinking. One of his expressions, I would just like to present it to you now for the reason that it can show this way of thinking so extraordinarily characteristically. It is a saying by Angelus Silesius:

I die and do not live either. God himself dies in me,
And what I am supposed to live, he also lives for and for.

Here we have direct proof of the intimate union of the individual human soul with the all-embracing spirit of the world. And do we not see in this an expression of an infinitely profound idea of immortality, an idea of immortality that can confront us, so to speak, in gigantic grandeur? Here Angelus Silesius says: I die and do not live either, God Himself dies in me. But when God Himself dies in me, it means that the event of death is experienced by the God who lives in me; then death can only be an appearance, because God cannot die in me! One sees that this profound German mystic grasps even the thought of death in connection with the divine, living permeation of the world, and he comes to the certainty of immortality from the experience of the divine world within himself. This stems from the fact that the German cannot remain with an old realization, but, as is so magnificently expressed in Faust, always strives for the sources of life. And even if he has studied everything, like Faust himself, he strives beyond everything, he strives for direct contact with the spirit of the world. For that is the peculiar nature, that is the essence, that the self seeks interaction with the national soul in German intellectual life. Therefore, out of this nature of its essence, the true German mind also feels in harmony with the eternal forces of the world that lie beyond death.

That is why we find such profound words in the works of Jakob Böhme and later in those of Fichte, in different ways in both, but both striving in the same direction. They said: He who grasps the essence of death from the depths of the human soul actually grasps that which is already immortal within mortal human nature. That which we carry with us through death is the self, which we have within us even while we live here on earth between birth and death. Therefore, Jakob Böhme, and later Fichte in the manner of Jakob Böhme, regards it as the highest goal to become aware of that which passes through the gate of death, that which lives in man as the eternal, to become aware of it already in earthly life, so that that which can be recognized as the fully developed eternal can be carried through the gate of death, out of the mortal body. And here Jacob Böhme expresses in a wonderful way the saying that is so characteristic of the peculiarity of the German national character as described. He says:

He who does not die before he dies
Perishes when he dies.

These are profound words! For it should be said: Those who are unable to unite during their life on earth in the body with the immortal, cannot in a proper way achieve the consciousness of their unity with the spirit freed from the body after death.

He who does not die before he dies
Will perish when he dies.

These words are spoken with such depth of feeling, and they are spoken by someone who wants to unfold her best powers by allowing the spirit and soul of her nation to weave into her own depths what it wants to give her.

In this respect, the Russian national spirit is incomprehensible, quite incomprehensible, precisely in terms of what is most deeply characteristic of the German national soul. This Russian national spirit, whose characteristic peculiarity, however strange it may seem to some, may appear strange to some, but since I can only characterize many things very briefly, sometimes radical words must be used -, this Russian national spirit, whose peculiarity in relation to Western European and, above all, Central European intellectual culture is arrogance, pride. When people often speak of the modesty of the Russian national spirit, this is based, in relation to what we see as characteristic, on a complete misunderstanding of the innermost impulses of this Russian national spirit. If one can see in the Italian people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the soul of the individual; if one can see in the French people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the soul of the mind or emotions; in the British people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the consciousness soul of the individual; and in the German being, a direct experience of the national soul in the self of the individual, then one must say: the Russian being, to this day he lives in such a way, despite all the forces he carries within himself, that the Russian national soul has not yet found its way into the individual soul. That is why someone who is completely immersed in Russian national identity, whether as a philosopher or as an artist, does not experience the kind of intimate coexistence that the German seeks through the characteristics just described within his being.

The Russian person does not know this flowing in of the forces of the national soul into one's own soul, into the individual soul. The Russian person sees something in the national soul that hovers over the individual souls like a mist. A Russian person, even a profound philosopher like Soloviev, who is the greatest philosophical mind of the Russian people, does not speak as a German would, for example, saying: I have my trust in the deepest core of my soul, which is within me, and it can connect with the divine that flows and weaves through the world. And so he is certain of true spiritual progress for humanity because he feels the power within him through which God reigns in him, which finds expression in the great creations of the German spirit.

That conversation, which every German, the simplest, most original German instinctively feels, is basically quite unknown even to a philosophical Russian person. And so we see, especially in the case of the most outstanding spirit of the Russian people, of the Russian world-view striving, in Soloviev, who died in 1900, we see in this great philosopher: when we go through his works, then one has to – forgive the expression – get out of one's Western European skin in order to live one's way into what one encounters there. It has greatness – that should not be denied, greatness should be acknowledged wherever it is to be found in the world – but it has greatness in such a way that when Solowjow, for example, speaks of what should happen through Russian culture should come, it will come as if from the heights of the mist, as a kind of nourishment, as something that should be sprinkled down by grace at a certain time into the deeds of the Russian people. He is waiting for a miracle. When God Himself works from the heights of the beyond into people, then people will move forward.

The Russian sees the folk spirit above the individual souls; he does not see it working in the three characterized soul powers, let alone really being able to grasp that intimate experience of the spirit in the individual soul itself, which is precisely the characteristic of the Central European folk striving. Therefore, we also find in the great philosopher the peculiarity that the folk soul does not grasp with its powers either the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, the emotional soul, or the consciousness soul. We find in Solovyov the peculiarity that these individual soul powers are at work in him. We see how they string together one idea and one sensation after another according to rules that we in Central Europe would never be able to perceive as logic or inner necessity. We see, as it were, the spirit of the people, revered by the Russian people, hovering in airy heights. And we see: there the souls can be active with their chaotically whirling soul forces. That this can be made clear precisely in the case of one of the greatest minds of the Russian world is remarkable.

And again and again we must remind ourselves of the momentous words spoken by Lessing in his Testament. Oh, this Testament of Lessing's, which is called 'The Education of the Human Race'! He explains how the whole development of humanity is a great unity. And he expounds an idea which, through spiritual science, will be elevated to the rank of a scientific truth: the idea of the repeated earthly lives of human beings. There are very clever people today who say: Well, Lessing created great things, but then he grew old. One need not attach so much importance to the fact that he came up with the idea that the soul always carries over again into a later epoch that which can be made fruitful in a later epoch by an earlier one. But Lessing truly did not grow old and decrepit, nor did he become weak-minded, as very clever people say, even if they do not say it in relation to this 'Education of the Human Race'. Rather, it was precisely at this point that Lessing grasped in the deepest sense what the human soul experiences when it can experience the rule of the world spirit within itself as the most characteristic of its deepest experiences. From this consciousness Lessing spoke the weighty word as in a testament: “I feel as a human soul through its own content, through its own essence; I too have surged from time to time, from eternity to eternity.” Through what I am, I am immortal. And now he concludes: “Is not all of eternity mine?”

There is a conception of the spirit, a cultural conception, which is the direct consequence of this ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

Let us compare this with the belief of the great Russian philosopher, Solowjow, that what man can achieve can only be achieved by a miracle giving the Russian people their mission themselves. If we compare these two beliefs, we have every reason to understand why what is Russian in nature cannot understand what is Western European, what is Central European, and especially what is German in nature. And therein lies the entire arrogance, the entire arrogance of the Russian intellectuals, these Russian intellectuals who have been talking for a long time about how what the West has achieved in terms of culture is actually rotten, ripe for destruction, and that it must be replaced by something that could emerge from the forces of the Russian character into world culture. This was not given much consideration in times that were not as war-torn as our present fateful times, but it has always been the basic tenor of Russian intellectual life that Western culture is rotten.

We have seen the most diverse minds, Khomyakov, Katkov, Aksakov and so on, appear in Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth century. They all repeatedly say: Western European intellectualism must perish. One of these minds even went so far as to say: In this Western European culture, everything has been led by the impulses of art to that human-selfish, to that egoistic individualism, which leads people apart and founds everything that is to be established on violence, on servitude and hatred.

According to important Russian minds of the nineteenth century, these are the characteristics of Western European culture: “violence, servitude and hatred”. While, according to the same minds, Russian culture is said to be based on “freedom, concord and love”.

Now, Solowjow was an important mind, an important spirit. And precisely because he was so great, the feeling that he had to develop from his intimate connection with the Russian essence was that he says: the national soul still hovers above us. We have not yet connected with it in our individual souls. God must perform a miracle, must radiate down to us that which is to be our mission.

But he was convinced that it is up to the Russian people to redeem the world, because Western European culture has reached its death throes, because it has become decrepit. So he, Soloviev, says further: We do not want to destroy this Western European culture, but we want to heal it.

What has just been said about Russian culture should not be seen as a special impulse within the spirituality of the Russian people. For precisely in Russia, what is to be mentioned can be counted among the symptoms that arise from the instincts of nationality. Therefore, in Solowjow, as in his Slavophile predecessors (although he fought against them), we see a connection between what they, out of their arrogance, characterize as the mission of the Russian people; we see how they deduce the whole course of future politics from it. We see them, out of these impulses, demanding that Russia expand ever further and further against the West, that Constantinople become a Russian city, that the Sea of Marmara become a Russian lake, and so on. Everything that we are experiencing today, everything that underlies the attack that the Russian essence is also politically waging against the Central European, the German essence, everything is completely permeated, in terms of feelings and emotions, especially in the best Russians, by what has just been characterized, by the haughty conviction that Russia alone can save European culture, indeed world culture.

It is precisely the contrast between the German and the Russian nature that makes it possible to understand what the driving forces of our present world culture are and what struggles the German nature will be drawn into in the future, which will most certainly come.

Dear attendees, one can refer back to Goethe's “Faust” when one wants to show what is mentioned here as the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul, what has been characterized as such. Don't we see Faust standing there – Goethe wrote this scene in the 1770s , the words have become almost trivial, having been heard so often and probably already declaimed by everyone themselves – we see Faust standing there, wanting to escape from everything he has absorbed from the forces of the past, because he wants to connect directly in his soul with living knowledge, we hear his words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,

law and medicine,

and unfortunately also theology

to the full, with great effort.

There I stand, poor fool that I am,

and am no wiser than before!

Goethe wrote this from his own consciousness, from what he himself felt in the seventies of the eighteenth century.

Then came what can truly be called a 'rejuvenation of the German spirit' through German idealism. Goethe himself, like Faust, strove to absorb the sources of life with his thinking, feeling and willing into his soul. Then the great German idealistic philosophy, which had been pushed back precisely by the invasion of the French and also the Russian worldviews, came to Central Europe itself. Then came what must be seen as an achievement: the fact that these struggles again made it possible for the greatness of this German philosophical idealism to be discussed in wider circles.

And so they came, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who tried to present law and medicine to the German people in a rejuvenated way. And they were not only philosophers, for Schelling wrote a yearbook for medicine; Fichte wrote a treatise on the state. And they all wanted to be theologians. The German intellectual powers that emerged from the depths of the German soul after Goethe wrote these Faust words were tremendous.

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
to the full, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am as wise as before!

But let us now assume that Goethe did not write these words of Faust in 1772, but only in 1840, after a new philosophy, a new jurisprudence, a new theology had passed through the German soul. Do you think that Goethe, if he had written the beginning of Faust in 1840, only after emerging from the Faust mood, would have written the words as follows:

Now, thank God,
I have studied with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel;
so there I am, I wise man,
and no longer need to be as stupid as before?

Even in the 1790s, despite all this greatness that had passed through German culture, Goethe would certainly have said:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately theology as well
with great zeal and effort.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am no wiser than before!

And again, just as before, Faust would have longed for the sources of life and sought his refuge in the living spirit that was to appear to him. The German does not crave knowledge that has grown old; he always craves that knowledge that has flowed from the depths of the soul and emerged into the visible world. He craves the rejuvenating power of the German spirit itself, as it lives in the interrelationship between the German national soul and the German soul of the individual.

That is what one must feel, ladies and gentlemen, if one wants to visualize the fundamental character of the German spirit. And one may say: it has actually been felt, felt even by those who now dare to say the most defamatory, hateful and poisonous things about the peculiarity of the German spirit in the most diverse languages.

Let us look, for example, to the West. It is very strange: if we go to the far West, we find an excellent spirit of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, as is natural for an English-writing writer, names the English as the first people in the world. Yet in numerous passages of his writings, he shows us that he values the Germans more than the English. And today, we can reflect on some of what this English-writing writer said, because it would be unpleasant for us to give a characteristic of our own nature in our own words. Emerson, who had a sense of the rejuvenating power of the German national soul, said the following about Goethe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public:

— spoken in English in the nineteenth century, mind you —

that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.

Now, I would like to say: What more could you want? In English, you hear that Goethe is the representative of Germanness, that he expresses something that he has in common with the whole nation: “that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.”

In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of their conviction. In France, people are delighted when they see brilliant ideas, regardless of where they lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts reach. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind possesses neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for the practical, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. What it does have, however, is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself on them. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get his ideas?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

Dear attendees, the entire nature of this presentation shows what I have tried to characterize for you today from the perspective of spiritual science. Emerson senses something of this intimate connection between the self of the individual German and that which passes through the world as the Spirit of Truth, as an ideal that indeed hovers over German development. Emerson also sensed this, as he says in the following words:

For this reason, the distinctive terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and the French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something in his eye that is even better. [...] He has that fearsome independence that springs from contact with the truth.

From many of the hateful words we hear today, my dear audience, if you are sensitive to such tones, you can discern what Emerson calls “the fearsome independence that springs from the truth”. That independence that is so unbearable to those who cannot muster sympathy for such things. One truly does not need to be chauvinistic to express these things. They arise not only objectively for the observer who stands in the midst of the spiritual essence, they also arise for those who can rise above the peculiarities of their nation.

But one also has such feelings in other places, and in order to illustrate to some extent what I have discussed from spiritual scientific research, I would also like to add the following: Perhaps you know that one of those who spoke the most brutal, hateful, venomous words against the German 'barbarians' was the Belgian-French poet Maeterlinck, Maeterlinck, who himself found so much recognition within the German character. I would like to draw attention to a peculiar compatriot of Maeterlinck. And I would like to tell you a little about this compatriot in a very brief way. So, he is a fellow countryman of Maeterlinck, and a Franco-Belgian poet. When he talks about the influence that an archetypally German spirit, an archetypally German soul, has had on him, when he talks about the influence that Novalis has had on him, this Franco-Belgian poet says some very strange and significant things. It was some time ago, but it is still characteristic to hear a Belgian who writes in French talk about what the soul of Novalis has become for him. This Belgian says: “Isn't Novalis, out of his German uniqueness, a spirit who created something that cannot even be expressed, that is not limited to the earthly at all!”

And so this Belgian writer comes up with something special to describe the purely spiritual influence and the deep impression that Novalis makes on him. He thinks of saying: When you read Schiller or Shakespeare, you find everything that is poetically depicted in Schiller and Shakespeare, but it is only of interest to what is experienced by people on earth. But if one wants to characterize what the soul of Novalis wrote, one would have to assume that spirits from the spiritual heights, spirits from other planets would be interested in it. What Schiller and Shakespeare said is only of interest to people on earth; what Novalis wrote must also interest angels, it must also interest beings that have never heard of the earth. So significant, so deeply connected is what Novalis wrote with the spiritual forces of the German national soul. He characterizes the nature of the influence that the original German, Novalis, has had on him very peculiarly, and he says:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the boundaries of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably [only] begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone, there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas [that resemble and are] as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; but [the people I am talking about have come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community [count].

This French-writing Belgian feels impressed by Novalis. He feels the magic breath of the German spirit as it flows from Novalis to him. If one were to believe what Maeterlinck, his fellow countryman, said about German “barbarism” after the outbreak of the war, one would not believe that this Belgian would have said: Oh, these useless screamers, who only resort to phrases, they should remain silent when it comes to matters of the mind!

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak childish voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

Yes well, my dear attendees, the French-writing Belgian whom I have quoted here has already spoken, but I have somewhat mystified you. It is the same person who said what I read about Novalis; it is Maeterlinck himself. He only spoke in this way in the healthy days of his soul. One can only believe when reading that it was said by a completely different personality. This is what has become of those who once felt something of the magic breath of the German soul. Maeterlinck himself wrote about Novalis in this way.

From this we can see what will be necessary to defend the German soul against the misjudgment of its essence, with the weapons that we ourselves must take from it as its members. And this defense will truly become more and more necessary. What good does it do that the German soul, having also become part of external culture, has already been understood! That which separates it from those who have become its enemies will speak ever louder if it is not defended by the German essence itself. And what we hear today, one will have to be convinced, as [what we have heard] is in some respects only a beginning, especially with regard to the deeper currents of human life.

I would like to give another example. Shortly before the outbreak of this war, an Englishwoman wrote a book about Germany. Yes, you see, an Englishwoman who differs from many of her compatriots in that she really got to know the German character. Because she was in Germany for eight years. She got to know universities, clinics, hospitals, educational institutions, all kinds of places. But she also got to know the German character, which, as an emanation of the German soul, must after all be present in every soul, even if it masks and hides itself in ordinary life. The book was written shortly before the war. As I said, not in Berlin, not in Cologne or Leipzig, but in England and in English, the following was said about Germany:

We read a great deal [...] about the new Germany and its new spirit. But there is no new Germany and no new spirit. What exists is the mature work of generations, which has always been. Blinded by the sudden splendor of Germany's prosperity, we are inclined to forget that, except for prosperity, it has rarely occupied a place other than one of the very top among nations. In religion and philosophy, Germany has shone at a time when everything around it was dark; in literature, it has made an epoch-making impact; in music, it has always dominated. [...]

German literature, German religion, German philosophy are books with seven seals for us. What we do know is how many dreadnaughts Germany has and how much its trade has increased. What is really important is not the dreadnaught, but the brain of its builder, the courage and talent of its commander. What is really important is not the increase in sales, but the human qualities that prompted it.

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence, and it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago.

At every border and across the water, the opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, so that they can pounce on her and overwhelm her. Germany knows this very well.

It would be good if those who are now reflecting on the cause of the war were also listened to, if those who say what the mood within Germany should be towards those who lurked in the period leading up to this war were also listened to.

And if we ask, my dear attendees: How do you understand German culture when you would like to destroy this German culture with more or less pride or from other points of view? A few more characteristics on this point at the end. There is, for example, a true Russian intellectual of the present day. If one picks up his latest book, one can get the impression, from the last words he says about Goethe, that he counts Goethe among the greatest in the development of humanity. We know how Goethe is connected with what must be called the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul. We know that his Faust, if not in an artistic sense, then at least in terms of the power of its characterization of humanity, rises above all other works of world literature. We know how nonsensical it would be to characterize Goethe without first seeing the great spirit of modern times that reigns in Goethe and from which his Faust could emerge. Mereschkowski, the Russian intellectual who certainly knows Faust and German culture as well as he can know it, judges Goethe from what I have just called the characteristic arrogance of the Russian intellectual. He judges the same Goethe about whom Emerson speaks as I read earlier, daring to say the following words:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German bourgeois and – may the shadow of the Olympian have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a decent son of the decent Frankfurt shopkeeper.

With certain people, it does not matter that such words may be correct, if one is a pedant, but it does matter whether the person who finds it appropriate to speak such words about Goethe understands the greatness of Goethe at all. Sometimes it does not matter what one says, but whether one is at all capable of saying something specific about a particular object or a particular person.

I said: One must seek the Russian national spirit as if floating above the Russian individual soul. But this means that this individual Russian soul, let us say, can easily live as if “down there” without being touched by its national spirit, without also having that confidence and security that arises from the way of dealing with the national spirit, as we were able to characterize it with the German national soul. Therefore, permeated by poetic values, but nevertheless like a worldview, what Mereschkowski calls the “barfoot worldview” as a newest kind of Russian worldview could arise. Now, we know how this barefoot worldview basically arises from the mood that must come when one feels so completely grounded and cannot find the connection with the folk soul, to see within the spirit, so to speak, to that which man is outside of the spiritual. Materialism has not yet taken this completely seriously, but it is characteristic that this Russian individual spirit has taken it seriously in his world view. And so he denies everything spiritual and comes to what an important Russian poet addresses as a characteristic of man. I would truly not mention this if it only occurred here and there. But it is something that the spirit of the East comes to, which characterizes the impulses that live there.

Yes, what is he to you, this human being? Do you understand? He takes you by the collar and crushes you under the nail like a flea! Then you may feel sorry for him! ... Yes! Then you may reveal all your foolishness to him. He will put you on seven different forms of torture for your pity. He will wrap your intestines around his hand and pull all the veins out of your body, one inch per hour. ... Oh you... Pity! Pray to God that you will be beaten without any mercy, and that's it! ... Pity! ... Ugh!

And Maxim Gorky says that these words are spoken entirely from his soul, because this is how he perceives what a person can find as his value when he looks at himself for what he actually is.

One must put such things together with the many things that have come from the East, the arrogance and the arrogance of Russian intellectualism in the course of the last few years, the outgrowth of which is the mood that speaks today of blood and death.

Among the Russian intellectuals I mentioned earlier, we must also mention Yushakov, who has written books that have not found a large audience but which nevertheless show what has been in the minds of many intellectuals in Russia. Yushakov has the following ideas about the course of world culture. I would like to briefly present these ideas to you. He says: This West, everything that this West of Europe has achieved in culture, is over. If you look over to the East, you find that there is actually still something in it of rejuvenation, of germs from which something can develop. But the West cannot develop this. This West has always shown [...] a gap in the text].

[In contrast, at the end of the nineteenth century, Yushakov writes about the Russian-English question in Asia: As far as Russia's mission in Asia is concerned, what the English are doing there is rotten through and through. What Russia is doing there is infinitely more spiritual.

The English – Yushakov says – have behaved towards Asia as if they believed that the Asian peoples existed only to “clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight each other with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles”.

Russia alone, Yushakov believes, is capable of feeling an affinity with this Asia, which is now lying prostrate, groaning under the rape of Europe, because it cannot yet grasp the inner human being, which has been made sick and aged by the ego, like the European West.

It is an interesting book, published in 1885, about the relations between England and Russia. It highlights the superiority and arrogance of Russian over Englishness. In 1885, Yushakov has the following idea:

This West, it is over for him. If you look to the East, there is still something that can be developed, the West, especially England, have caused the darkening of India, Persia.

What have the English done in Asia? They have arrogated to themselves everything that was once established in Asia by the power of Ahriman. They have crept in where Ormuzd was at work. They have sat down everywhere where there was light to enjoy the fruits of that light. But what have the Russians done? The Russians have gone everywhere where Asia has been impoverished, where Asia was threatened and impoverished, where people had come down, where people were oppressed and oppressed, where people were plunged into poverty and darkness. Russia has taken care of these people. That is why Russia has its mission in Asia. Therefore, the world struggle between Russia and England must break out in Asia. Russia must be reinstated in the rights of Ormuzd against Ahriman, after it has behaved in this way, while the English have only interfered in what has been established in Asia in terms of fertility, greatness and beauty, and have exploited it.

This is how this Russian speaks about England. And he says: England exploits millions of Hindus. Its greatness and power depend on the people there. I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland. I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this sad state of affairs.

Could one not actually wish that the Russians of today, who admire the English, would take a little time to study this book by Yushakov, which was only published in 1885 and deals with relations between Russia and England? It could be interesting at all sometimes if people would get to know something of the driving forces that have worked and will continue to work on the forces that have led to what is now around us, that reaches our souls.

I believe, my dear audience, that what I have said, based on the spiritual-scientific foundations of the nature of the German being, can be substantiated, even if it is illustrated by this or that. And I could cite similar evidence to support what I have said for a long, long time. One could cite such things for so long that no one in the room would be listening.

All of this, however, would illuminate the one truth that is so important now, when we first have to forge the weapons to defend what is also being attacked spiritually and what will be increasingly surrounded, all of this would lead us to the one great truth with which one must come to terms, the truth that the German, by virtue of his immediate national character, could see the direct relationship, the experienced relationship of the individual soul with the national spirit.

And when we see how this German idealism always worked in the whole mood of the German people and its great representatives, especially in the time that we can call the great epoch of the German spirit, how there are seeds, and when we see what is all that is contained in these germs, then we may say to ourselves: We can also trust in the inner strength of the German character, just as we trust in the germs that must unfold into blossoms and fruits in nature; we may have confidence in the German spiritual life. And we know that in many respects it still contains the germs, and that it contains the power of perpetual rejuvenation, that this power is its own. And we know from this what those who, at great sacrifice in the east and in the west, have to defend that which is enclosed as in a large fortress in Central Europe.

But there is also a way to direct the soul's eye to the inner forces of the spiritual world. Then one does not look at this German people as it may be looked at today by the enemies of the German spirit, but rather in such a way that one says to oneself: the German spirit has not yet been fully realized. It has powers within it that are only germinal powers, that must first fully develop in the future. Therefore, from such considerations, however imperfectly they may be presented, as they could only be presented in a lecture in such a short time, nevertheless that which can be summarized in certain feelings emerges, feelings that give the German soul confidence and courage and hope, precisely from the depths of this being.

On the one hand, we are completely convinced today that we have no need to give courage and confidence to those who have to suffer and bleed for the great events of the time based on certain, genuine knowledge and insight – the whole course of events within the realm of the German being, the Central European being, shows that this is not necessary. European being, shows how the Germans went to war, how they knew how to wage this war. No, not to talk about it, but to talk about what reigns and works in the innermost being of the German soul, so that it gives us [and those in the field] certainty about the future and fills us with hope. It is to point this out that today's reflections were made. And that is why I would like to summarize, because the feelings are the most important thing, the feelings that underlie the individual words of this evening. I would like to summarize some of the feelings that, as I believe, can arise for German feeling and sentiment precisely from the contemplation of the German essence and its connection with the German national spirit:

The German spirit has not yet been fulfilled,
What it should bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in future concerns,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerful
Hidden things that must still mature.
How can a wish for his end, without understanding,

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy is still accepted by many people today who are only able to look at it from the outside as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge that a serious scientist should not concern himself with. And it is true that anthroposophy, by developing special powers of knowledge, wants to penetrate into areas of life that are important to people above all else, and to which science, with its great triumphs, which are fully recognized by anthroposophy, has no access. Above all, it must be said that there are already scientists today who take their work very seriously and who are concerned with all kinds of abnormal human soul-body forces. These scientists point out how human beings can develop effects that show that they are rooted in the world in other ways than mere natural science can determine. But it is precisely such serious scientists who find the path taken by anthroposophy fantastic. They see it as being open to enthusiasm or perhaps even superstition. In any case, they do not see it as a path that can be taken seriously scientifically.

Now it really must be said that those people who are prone to enthusiasm, to nebulous mysticism, and who are of the kind that today, as is so common, easily run to anything that somehow calls itself occult or the like, will by no means find any lasting satisfaction in anthroposophy. For this anthroposophy aims to work with the seriousness, the conscientiousness, and the methodology that is absolutely in line with the direction of more recent scientific development. And above all, the healthy, harmonious, human thinking must be applied in this anthroposophy. And so it is that the enthusiasts and the superstitious people soon give it a wide berth. Of course, this does not prevent those people who want to reject everything that is unfamiliar to them with a slight wave of the hand from saying: Only neurasthenics or hysterical people have an interest in anthroposophical research.

Now, my dear audience, it is difficult to explain the nature of anthroposophy in a short evening lecture in the face of this. But I will try to show the paths of this anthroposophy and at least hint at the results that this anthroposophy can arrive at, in order to characterize how this anthroposophy can be, although it is not for dreamers or superstitious people; but how it can be a soul food for all those who, with a healthy common sense in practical life, but who, precisely because of this, need support, security and direction for their soul life, in keeping with the spiritual development of our time, and also certain forces that can only be truly effective in the outer practical, social life if they are drawn from a spiritual, from a supersensible world and carry the human soul out of such a world.

Now, no spiritual research could possibly make any impression or exert any fruitful influence in the long term if it were to contradict the significant developments that have taken place over the last three to four centuries, and particularly in the nineteenth century, through natural science and its practical results. But that is certainly not what anthroposophy wants. It seeks to follow into the spiritual world the very paths that have led to significant results in natural science. It must therefore side with those natural scientists, the level-headed natural scientists, who, after thoroughly pursuing the paths of natural science, speak of the limitations of natural science. These limits soon become apparent when one considers that natural science can only observe the external sense world, can only combine the facts of the external sense world that arise from observation or experiment through the intellect, through the mind, and then can combine certain natural laws from these observations, from these experiments; natural laws in which, however, the human being with his physical corporeality is also harnessed. But the attempts made to go beyond the limits set by the sensory world by mere reason alone — as one also says, by philosophical thinking — always leave the unbiased person unsatisfied. The unbiased person feels: as soon as scientific thinking, as we are accustomed to it today, leaves the paths of sensory experience, experiment and observation, thinking left to its own devices enters into uncertainty. The dispute between philosophical systems testifies to the extent to which thinking left to its own devices enters into uncertainty. Anthroposophical research in particular makes it clear how this thinking, which we have in ordinary life and in ordinary, recognized science, not only binds itself to the sensory experience of the level-headed natural scientist out of habit or arbitrariness, but how it itself is dependent step by step on this sensory experience, so that it only has certainty when this external experience, this sensory experience, guides it.

In short, my dear audience, just when one cannot think in a lay and dilettante scientific way, one sees the inadequacy of this kind of thinking left to its own devices, which somehow wants to philosophically penetrate into the supersensible. Many people in our time therefore do not think much of satisfying their soul needs, their longings for the eternal in the human soul, through such self-abandoned thinking. And in our time, when the old traditions of religious life, of faith, as such are becoming increasingly shaky and shaky, people do need such new supports. Therefore, many deeper minds are found in our time, which understand: a philosophy of life that relies on reason alone cannot give the soul the necessary support and security. That is why such deeply-disposed natures today turn to certain mystical directions.

Particularly when one speaks seriously of what anthroposophy can be for today's human being, one must characterize these two pitfalls that one must avoid in one's research. The one pitfall is the purely intellectual world view that wants to go beyond the supersensible through thinking left to its own devices; the other is certain mystical directions. These seek to penetrate into deeper shafts of the human soul life by means of man, as it were, immersing himself in his own inner being. They seek to bring up from these deeper shafts that which is not present in ordinary life and which connects the eternal in the soul with the eternal world-ruling powers. Anthroposophy must draw attention to these two pitfalls because it must show that it is absolutely serious about not carelessly stopping at either side, when it cannot provide a sure basis for knowledge. Anyone who can observe the inner life of the human soul with an open mind – esteemed attendees – can no more remain with a more or less nebulous mysticism than he can go beyond the limits of knowledge of nature through self-abandoned thinking. We usually do not know how that which lives in the depths of the soul is connected with external sensory impressions. We usually do not know how the human memory works. Decades ago, someone may have unconsciously or subconsciously, without fully realizing it, received some impression from the outside world. It has descended into the soul life; there it has been transformed. He may have connected with human emotional life; connected with human sympathies and antipathies, with impulses of the will. He has become something quite different, but he is still only a transformed external impression. And then, as one says, it is brought up out of the soul through inner contemplation and is thought to come from eternal depths, not from some external world through an external impression. In this way, illusions upon illusions can arise in nebulous mysticism. That is why anthroposophy cannot stop at this mystical immersion in the human interior. If the human inner life is taken as it appears in ordinary life and as it is also used for research in ordinary science.

Precisely because Anthroposophy is fully aware that one cannot penetrate to anything that is not is not already present in some form in this ordinary life, anthroposophy must look for cognitive powers that have yet to be developed, that lie dormant in the human soul – one could also say, if one wants to use a scientific term – that lie latent in it and can be brought forth.

That there are such forces slumbering in the human soul, that they can be awakened, that they can become higher powers of knowledge than those of ordinary life and ordinary science, can only be proved by practice, which I want to talk to you about this evening. But to even arrive at seeking such powers of knowledge through one's own soul development requires something I would call intellectual modesty. At some point in life, this intellectual modesty must say to us: You were once a child with dream-like soul powers, soul powers that were without any orientation towards the outer world, with a soul state that was dull compared to the one you have today. External education and life have brought out of the soul what lay dormant in it. They have developed those powers of perception that are generally recognized today in a person who has had a corresponding education, whether in life or in some other field. Now, for once in your life, you have to say to yourself, with intellectual modesty: from the point of view that you have gained in this way through ordinary education, through ordinary life, you can now take your self-development into your own hands and get further than you were, you can bring further forces out of the soul that lie dormant in it. And it is with such forces, slumbering in the soul of every human being, and which in their development represent nothing other than a continuation of the normal human soul forces, that Anthroposophy seeks to do research. Research into that which lies behind the world of the senses, research into that which is hidden in the human soul as something eternal, and which is connected with the most important longings and life riddles of this human soul. I will not, however, speak to you about external measures that might be taken to develop such forces lying dormant in the soul. I must first speak to you of the intimate exercises of the human soul if I am to characterize the paths that Anthroposophy takes into the supersensible world.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science” and in other books, I have pointed out in detail everything that must be gone through in energetic and persistent soul exercises so that man can come to such supersensible knowledge. I will have to characterize the essence of what is written there in detail.

The first thing that is involved is the development of the soul in terms of [the powers of] presentation and thought. Just as you can strengthen a muscle by using it in work, so you can indeed strengthen the powers of thought of the human soul by using them in a certain way, using them again and again, indeed using them again and again in rhythmic succession, so that they become something quite different from what they initially are. To do this, it is necessary to bring a clearly defined idea or a clearly defined complex of ideas into the center of consciousness, and then to withdraw one's attention from everything else by strong inner volition and to concentrate the entire life of the human soul on this one idea or this one complex of ideas. In order to achieve what is necessary, however, this complex of ideas must be such that it is not taken from our ordinary memory life. I have already indicated how what we bring up from ordinary memory life can put us in illusion, it brings up reminiscences that lie dormant in the unconscious. One cannot know what will come up from the soul if one were to take an idea or a complex of ideas from one's ordinary memory life and make it the focus of one's soul life, and then concentrate on it. Therefore, one should take something that one finds, let us say – this is just an example – in some book by someone else, a saying, a sentence. What matters is not the content, but the fact that one is strengthening one's thinking by working with thoughts, and that one is taking some material that was previously unknown to one, that is newly entering one's soul life. We will see in a moment why. Or else, one can have some experienced person in this field compose such a spell. Because what matters is that what enters into the center of the soul life, and on which one then concentrates the whole soul life, on which one focuses all attention, that it approaches the human being as otherwise only any external sense impression, such as a color or a sound or any other external sense impression. What Anthroposophy strives for in this path of research is quite definitely the outer sensory perception. This outer sensory perception presents itself to us from the outside, compelling us to accept its content. Just as the human being faces external perception as something foreign, and is thus particularly alert to it, so too should the soul life face what I have been talking about here, which should be brought to the center of experience. For the human being should be as alert in their thinking as they are when they are facing an external sensory impression.

In this way, I am already drawing your attention, dear attendees, to the fact that what anthroposophy strives for as a path of knowledge must not be confused, as unfortunately still often happens today, with everything that tends towards the pathological, the diseased side of the soul life. For anyone who can look at human mental life with an open mind, it is clear that even ordinary memory – admittedly, it lies in the realm of the healthy, of course – is connected to the human physical organism, and that when the normal connection between the human soul and the physical organism develops in the direction of the abnormal in the process of remembering , when the soul life becomes more bound, more intimately bound to the physical organism, those pathological conditions arise which express themselves in hallucinations, in visions, in illusions, in easy suggestibility, and so on, and which lie at just the opposite pole from that to which anthroposophical paths of knowledge lead. Everything that presents itself to us pathologically leads the soul life deeper down into the bodily functions, deeper down than the ability to remember lies. What is developed through the described strengthening of thinking makes human thinking more and more similar to the behavior of the human soul when taking in an external sensory impression. Just as the human being is much more alive when absorbing an external sensory impression than in ordinary, more passive thinking, so too should thinking be energized so that it becomes as alive and intense as the experience of an external sensory impression would otherwise be. It is precisely in this coming to life of the world of thought that one notices more and more that one is penetrating into a soul life that is not the ordinary one. You know, my esteemed audience, how pale, rightly called pale, the ordinary thought life is compared to the life in sensual impressions and in external processes in general. Just as one usually lives in sensual impressions and external processes, so should the whole thought life become for those times when one wants to devote oneself to supersensible knowledge.

Now, in order to avoid being misunderstood, I must point out another difference between the abnormal states of mind I have just mentioned: the person who seeks anthroposophical knowledge develops such strength of thought while the ordinary personality continues to exist in its full, healthy state of mind. A second personality develops, so to speak. And the first, the personality with common sense, with healthy criticism, remains controlling next to the developed personality, the personality with the higher cognitive ability. When someone falls into hallucinations, visions, illusions, when they become a medium, when they are exposed to suggestions, then their entire ordinary, healthy personality enters into the state of hallucinating, of illusions, and so on. The radical difference of the thoroughly healthy anthroposophical path is that the ordinary personality always remains as healthy as it is in life, controlling, criticizing, alongside the developed other personality. On this condition, it may be said that – it takes years for some people, depending on their disposition, but only months for others; some can achieve it in a few weeks through meditation and by concentrating on a specific thought content, that is what I call it – it may be said that it can be achieved that a person feels similarly to how they feel during ordinary thinking. In ordinary thinking, he needs the physical organism. In this respect, one could say, anthroposophical spiritual science fully recognizes the validity of materialism.

In order to develop his soul abilities at all in ordinary life and in ordinary science, man needs the physical body. And he only becomes free of the physical body by strengthening his thinking, making it more intense, more alive. Thought becomes free from the physical body to the same degree that external sensory phenomena are free from the physical body. Consider how independent the physical apparatus of the eye is from the rest of the human organism. I cannot characterize it further now, I would just like to hint at it. What happens in the eye under the influence of the outside world is what, to a certain extent, makes man subject to an objective world in the sensory perceptions of the eye. By linking his thinking with this objective world, thinking itself is also introduced into an objective world. Through sensory perception, man comes out of himself in a certain way.

This is not the place for deep epistemological considerations, but what I am saying can be understood by any simple human mind. Man comes out of himself when he does meditation and concentration exercises as I have described them. But then man realizes how he is only now gradually learning to develop the soul life as such independently of the body. However grotesque and paradoxical it may still sound to a modern person, one learns through experience, through the practice of life, what it means to have thoughts outside of the human physical organism. These thoughts are, however, different from the usual pale thoughts, and also from those that deal with natural laws. These developed and strengthened thoughts are as pictorial as the outer sensory impressions themselves. What is fully clear to the anthroposophical researcher must not be missing at this stage of knowledge. In the writings mentioned and elsewhere, I have called this stage of knowledge the imaginative stage. Imaginative not because one imagines something, but because thinking passes completely from the abstract form into the pictorial, into the living, into the intensified form. But what is absolutely necessary for anyone embarking on anthroposophical research to be aware of within this imaginative thinking is that they know: you are now only carrying something with you in your thoughts that lives within your own human being.

You see how carefully the anthroposophical path of knowledge must be described. It must be emphasized that this first stage allows one to experience one's own inner being more intensely, but that one must realize that one is not yet experiencing an external world, but only this human inner being. But we do achieve a first result when we explore the inner being through such a more intensive, pictorial, imaginative process of imagining. For we gradually learn to have before our soul, as in a comprehensive tableau of life, everything that has formed us, that has affected us inwardly, spiritually, from birth to the present moment. We normally carry what we have in our soul only in the form of ordinary memory. The stream from which memories of this or that experience arise, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, essentially runs subconsciously. We know how abstract it is, how shadowy it is compared to the real experiences when we are immersed in these memory images. These memory images should not be confused with what now occurs before imaginative knowledge. It is not mere memories that arise, but rather something that suggests how one has become. Yes, right back to the first years of childhood, one sees the inner forces that have developed the ordinary abilities of life in one. One sees how the moral and intellectual faculties have developed, how they have been integrated into the forces of growth and nutrition. One really looks into the human interior.

You learn to recognize what I have called the formative forces of the human being. You really learn to recognize a second body. But if you want to characterize it precisely, you have to say: it is a temporal body. It is something that is constantly developing in a mobile way. You cannot draw it without realizing that you are drawing or painting it like a flash of lightning. That which is mobile in time can only be captured in a moment, and so it is with this human formative forces body. In truth, it is a unified organization in time, and it must be understood in that way. There have always been older intuitions for such higher insights, and what I call the formative forces body has also been called the etheric or life body. If one learns to recognize it in the suggested way, not through logical conclusions or otherwise, but through direct inner vision with the imaginative knowledge that has been acquired, then one knows once and for all: what is human organization is not only played out by the fact that there is a sum of chemical and physical forces constitute the human physical body, but because a spiritual soul has entered the physical organization at birth or conception, and that a second, a spiritual-soul, a supersensible body, which is not only spatial, which is temporal, which is always mobile, works in us. And one learns to recognize the inner relationship that exists between thinking, imagining and the forces of growth. As long as one only looks at the human being from a physiological and biological point of view, one finds the forces of growth on the one hand and, on the other, through inner observation, for example, the abstract powers of thinking. Through the imaginative contemplation of which I have just spoken, one learns to recognize how a gradual transition takes place between the ordinary forces of growth and the forces of thinking, how, by strengthening itself, imagining itself leads to that which at the same time brings about growth, the development of the inner organic power from stage to stage in the growing human being. Thus imaginative knowledge becomes a first result of anthroposophical inner research.

Now it is not enough to merely concentrate one's soul life on some idea or on a complex of ideas. Although everything I have described and what is explained in the books mentioned aims to enable the person to carry out such exercises in full arbitrariness, with complete inner composure, as one would otherwise only have in ordinary life , and also comes to such concentration, such directing of attention to a certain idea, it is nevertheless the case that one gradually feels surrendered to such ideas, feels too strongly surrendered, if other soul exercises are not undertaken in a different direction. Therefore, one must, just as faithfully as one concentrates on certain ideas, again do exercises so that these ideas in consciousness, whenever one wants, extinguish, are in turn put out of consciousness. Then one comes to establish what one can call the consciousness. Otherwise, empty consciousness is only present in people during the time from falling asleep to waking up. And if one has not gone through any school of practice, then there is a great temptation to fall into a kind of sleep when consciousness becomes empty of external impressions – or even when it is so strongly taken in by external impressions that it no longer distinguishes them. The ability to achieve an empty consciousness is essential for further progress in anthroposophical research. This does not mean that the person enters into some kind of sleep or dream state, but that they can remain fully conscious without introducing anything through their own inner strength, as they would otherwise do with external impressions or with a strongly developed life of thought or feeling or will. And then, when the life of thought has been strengthened in the way described, so strongly strengthened that one is, as it were, inwardly grasped in the direct experience of this memory tableau of which I have spoken, when one's entire previous life on earth stands before one's eyes like a huge tableau, if one's imaginative life is strong enough, then one can also manage, while being completely awake, to dampen, throw out of consciousness, and create an empty consciousness, the individual idea that one has brought to the center of consciousness in this way, or that has placed itself there. Once one has practiced this for a while (again, it varies from person to person depending on their disposition) one can determine whether it takes longer or shorter. I can only say that anthroposophical research is no easier than research in an observatory, laboratory or clinic; one must persistently and diligently undergo such exercises as I am describing now for a long time.

Once you have managed to expel individual ideas from your consciousness after they have been there, and to create an empty consciousness, then you can also remove from your consciousness that which has presented itself to the soul as a tableau of memories, which has appeared to you as a body of formative forces, as a temporal organism. It takes a strong inner soul power to do this. One must first acquire it by attenuating other images until one's consciousness is empty. But in the end one attains this power to attenuate the entire formative body so that it penetrates into the deeper layers of consciousness. Then the moment may come when imaginative knowledge first enters the second stage of supersensible knowledge for the comprehension of human self-life, the second stage of knowledge, inspired knowledge.

Do not be put off by the expression; one must have expressions everywhere. They do not mean anything traditional or superstitious in this case, but only what I am characterizing here. So, after one has first strengthened one's thinking, after one has strengthened one's soul to such an extent that an empty consciousness can be established, then the objective spiritual world can penetrate into this empty consciousness, just as breathing air penetrates into the lungs as something objective.

And now, through direct perception, the human being experiences what he has gone through spiritually and soulfully before he connected with the physical human body as a spiritual and soulful being. In this moment of inner soul-searching, the great and powerful occurs: the spiritual and soulful in itself, in its own essence, appears before the soul's vision; one sees the soul as it was in a purely spiritual-soul world before it united with the physical-bodily substances and forces through birth or conception, which are given to it through the hereditary powers of parents and ancestors.

The essence of anthroposophical research is that it advances to the perception of the real soul-spiritual not through mere thinking, not through mystical contemplation, but through the development of soul forces that otherwise lie dormant within people. Of course, when one hears something like this, it would be easy to say: Well, then only those who advance to such insights can speak with such conviction of the immortality of the human soul – or rather, when I speak of what I have spoken of so far – of the unborn nature of the human soul. Now, firstly, it is possible through books such as I have mentioned for every person to take the first steps towards such supersensory knowledge as I have described. And even if today they are still unusual paths for the soul, anyone who has entered them knows that they will increasingly become the paths of human development. Because they are only now entering the spiritual development of humanity for the first time, they may seem paradoxical to many. But just as little as one needs to be a painter to be enchanted with a good painting with full inner soul, to see through it in its essence, in what the painter wanted, just as little does one need to be an anthroposophical researcher to recognize as true what the anthroposophical researcher asserts. Common sense is quite sufficient, just as ordinary perception of an artistic achievement is sufficient to appreciate it. For there is an original disposition in the human soul for the perception of truth. Therefore, it cannot be said that only those who are spiritual researchers in the way described can recognize the results of spiritual research. It is only that over many centuries of human development, people have become accustomed to not accepting such things at all, which has gradually caused prejudices for the mind, for the intellect, which today still do not allow what characterizes anthroposophical research as its paths and its results to appear as reasonable for the common sense of a healthy person.

I have now described how the human being can come to his or her own immortality by developing in one direction, looking beyond birth or conception through imaginative and inspired knowledge. However, the paths of anthroposophical research must go further. Not only should the power of imagination and the power of thought be developed, but also the human willpower should be developed to a higher level. I will again state the principles of this. Admittedly, that which is the most intimate part of the human soul, human feeling, the content of the human mind, lies right in the middle between thinking and willing. But that which lies at the center of the soul as our emotional life develops into the higher worlds when, on the one hand, the life of thinking develops, as indicated, and on the other hand, the life of will develops.

If, on the one hand, a kind of ideal for anthroposophy is the experience of the soul in outer perception, then, on the other hand, for the development of the will forces slumbering in the soul, the ideal becomes that which takes place in the moral life, above all in the devoted life of love, in the human soul. I know, honored attendees, that when we speak of devoted love, we are mentioning something that many people want to keep far away from all real powers of knowledge. However, it is not the case that love, as it exists and is justified in ordinary life, should be considered any kind of power of knowledge. But just as thinking is developed on the one hand, so too is the ability to love devotedly developed on the other hand, in order to thereby free the will from the physical organism just as much as the life of thought can be freed from the physical organism in the way indicated. Apparently it is not at all exercises of the soul in the ability to love that come into question here. Nevertheless, they lead to an increased ability to love, to the point of insight. Again, I will only hint at the principle. The following exercise develops the will in particular and develops such an ability: Imagine something that you are accustomed to imagining only in a certain way from the earlier to the later, from the beginning to the end, now in reverse order. For example, one imagines a drama backwards from the last event of the fifth act to the first event of the first act. Or one imagines a melody backwards. Or one imagines only the evening after the usual daytime life backwards. But one must go into as much detail as possible, one must imagine in small portions backwards.

What is the point of this? Dear attendees, in our ordinary lives we develop our thinking through the external sequence of events. Thinking is passively devoted to the external sequence of events. In doing so, it also makes itself dependent on the laws of the physical human organism. The physical human organism is devoted to the external sequence of events through the physical senses. Thinking is dependent on this sequence of events. And by bringing up experiences in a pictorial way through memory, it nevertheless remains dependent on the external sequence of facts. Of course, one can object: with logical thinking, man makes himself independent of this sequence of facts. But what does he ultimately aim for when he makes himself independent? Precisely to recognize the external sequence of facts even better. We think logically so that we can see through the spatial and temporal sequence of facts even better. We are lifted out of this dependence on the external world of facts, but also out of the dependence of thinking, by developing thinking in this way, by thinking from back to front, thus in reverse order to the sequence of external facts. But in this way we now develop the will. In the life of the soul, thoughts, feelings and will interact. In abstract thinking we can separate the three; in the life of the soul, the will is present in every thought, connecting and separating the thoughts; and thoughts are active in the will, even if the connection between thoughts is as unclear to the ordinary consciousness as the state of consciousness during sleep at night. But it is precisely the will, when given over to thinking, that develops freely and independently of the world of facts and also of the human body through such reverse thinking.

If one adds to these exercises others that I would describe as intensified human introspection – all of which must be done with absolute inner composure and complete arbitrariness – one performs such introspection in such a way that one observes what one does, what one thinks and feels, the whole way , how if one were to stand beside oneself as another, as a second person, one becomes pensive with regard to the will, then the will gradually breaks away from the physical, if the exercises are only carried out long and energetically, especially if one also actively engages in one's own development. Just consider how people are helped in ordinary life by what life itself provides. Certainly, everyone today is different from what they were ten or twenty years ago in terms of certain finer nuances of the soul life. Life has done that. But if you take your self-development into your own hands, you set yourself the goal: you should incorporate this or that quality; if you work towards incorporating such qualities, you work particularly energetically towards getting rid of certain habits, then you develop that which tears the will away from physical corporeality. And now one arrives at having the will living in the soul, so to speak, only to the extent that it is completely permeated by thoughts everywhere; it is torn away from the body, it has become transparent. Consider how little transparent the will is when we form the thought, let us say, to raise our arm, to raise our hand. The thought, the intention, is clear, and afterwards, when the hand is raised, we see from the sense impression what has happened. The unfolding of the will that lies in between is as hidden from human consciousness as the processes of falling asleep themselves. But now we experience a will in which we are completely immersed, as we are otherwise only in thoughts, a will free of the body, which submits to the imaginative and inspired ideas, free of the body, that we have received before.

And now, honored attendees, as we experience how our will can become body-free, as we can, in a sense, step out of our bodies with our will, we are now experiencing the essence of human immortality on the other side. This stepping out of the body is nothing other than an image of the knowledge that occurs when a person steps through the gate of death. While man is outside of his body, he becomes aware of what he experiences through this strengthened will, through this will that has become deliberate, which I call the stage of intuitive knowledge. While he is outside of his body, it is immediately clear through his qualities as an image of what enters the spiritual-soul world as a spiritual-soul being when man leaves his physical body in physical corporeality. In this intuitive knowledge, one learns to recognize the other side of human eternity, which extends beyond death.

You see, dear attendees, the eternal part of the human soul does not come to light through anthroposophical research, but is pieced together from the prenatal and, if I may say so, the post-mortal existence, from unbornness and immortality. And by getting to know what is eternal, what is immortal in the human soul, one also learns to recognize the worlds that surround this human soul when it is in its pure spiritual-soul nature, by looking at what the soul was before birth or before conception. Of course, there is still another objection possible, the objection: Yes, how do you know that what you are looking at in your consciousness really lies in the time before birth or before conception? Now, just as with ordinary memory, when you remember an experience you had ten years ago, the memory itself contains the time, as you cannot believe that you have something in your consciousness that is only there in the present , just as the content of consciousness itself points to the time in which the experience took place, so that which we experience as spiritual and mental carries within it the time before birth or before conception. But we also become aware of the worlds that are not the sensual ones, because we only perceive them through the human senses between birth and death. But the worlds that we perceive through the soul senses, if I may use the expression, before birth and after death, they are now unlocked. We get to know them as concrete, essential worlds. And by getting to know these worlds, we also get to know the spiritual-supernatural world that always surrounds us, which we cannot penetrate through mere philosophical speculation. We can penetrate it only by developing more and more imaginative, inspired, intuitive knowledge.

This intuitive knowledge, which in a certain respect is the highest level of knowledge for looking at the external spiritual world, already comes to us in ordinary life, albeit in a different form. And I had to point this out as early as the beginning of the nineties — if I may make this personal remark — from my own soul development in my “Philosophy of Freedom” how the moral impulses of the human being — and the moral life gives the human being his actual value and his actual dignity — are drawn from a world that I also called an intuitive world back then, a world of spiritual substance. And I already said in this “Philosophy of Freedom”: The true moral impulses are drawn from a spiritual, supersensible world through pure, sensuality-free thinking. I established freedom in human life by pointing out that the question is usually asked wrongly. One asks: Is man free or unfree? He is just as free as he is unfree. Unfree in relation to everything that are the ordinary actions of life, which are bound to the physical organism, where they are impulsed by instincts, drives. But man develops more and more to freedom by coming to get his impulses for the moral, the ethical life from a spiritual world through pure thinking, even in ordinary life, even if more or less unconsciously. And man is free to the extent that his moral impulses come to him from a spiritual world. Therefore, what man grasps as moral intuitions becomes the model for what must now be asserted in anthroposophical research as the highest level of knowledge, as the intuitive level.

One might be tempted to say: we can learn in our moral life what the cognitive life must also achieve. However, in our ordinary consciousness we are given the opportunity to have such intuitions in our moral life. They are contained in what our conscience offers us. With regard to the knowledge of the supersensible world, to which the human soul with its supersensible part belongs, intuitive knowledge must first be sought after one has gone through imaginative and inspired knowledge. Inspired knowledge first offers the objective, the entry into an alien world. Intuitive knowledge is the complete surrender to the objective spiritual world. One only gets to know the latter objectivity sufficiently when one first admits that imaginative knowledge only leads into one's own subjective world. And when one gets to know a spiritual world in this way, then everything that is there as a sensual world is also revealed in the form of the spiritual. That is to say, one remains completely on the ground of natural science for the field of nature. One does not speak or fantasize about all kinds of spiritual, nebulous entities in nature. One ascends through real knowledge to that which is seen as spiritual entities when the objectively observed sensual things and entities metamorphose before the spiritual gaze in the way that I can only hint at for you today in a few cases.

You see, in the sensory view and in ordinary science, the sun is given with sensory contours. We see it that way for ordinary consciousness. It is given with sensory contours in space. Ordinary science calculates its correct, indisputable position through astronomy and astrophysics in relation to this sun. For the spiritual view that I have described to you, the sun changes. That is, of course, for the one personality, which remains fully intact, as it sees it. Otherwise one would become a hallucinator and not a spiritual researcher. But that which remains so fully intact shows itself at the same time in its supersensible essence. One learns to recognize that the sun is not only the being that stands spatially out there in space, but that a solar element, which is only consolidated and concentrated in the physical space of the sun, fills the entire space of the universe that is accessible to us, permeating all beings in the nature kingdoms and also permeating the human being himself. One gets to know the spiritual, supersensible power of the solar element.

And just as one becomes aware in one's ordinary consciousness that external facts live on in the human being as feelings, as thoughts, as triggers of will impulses, so one comes to recognize that in the depths of human nature the external spiritual-supernatural sun-like quality finds its continuation. One gets to know the sun-like quality in one's own human nature. One would like to say: everything transforms from a sharply contoured form into a becoming, into an ongoing life. And the human being's own internal organs metamorphose before the supersensible eye in such a way that they appear in the process of becoming. While the heart, lungs, brain and other human organs are sharply defined for the ordinary sensory view, so to speak representing things, it happens for the supersensible view that we can only speak of a heart process, a stomach process, a brain process, a lung process. Everything merges into life, comes to life. And as the sun-like essence pours itself into this life, we perceive, at a higher level, everything that is emerging life, that is connected with that which makes us young and keeps us young, what growing, sprouting, sprouting forces are in the human being, but also the sprouting, sprouting forces out there in the realms of nature, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom and also in the mineral kingdom. One now learns to see through the realms of nature and one's own inner human being spiritually and soulfully. The peculiar thing is that otherwise the human being is faced as a whole; his individual organs are individual parts. Now one learns to recognize how the individual organs are assigned to the different areas, the different forces of the cosmos. One learns, for example, to recognize how the brain forces are assigned to the solar forces, in that they are in the first half of life, as other organs, namely the heart, are assigned to the solar forces.

But one also learns how to recognize the solar on the one hand, for example, the lunar on the other. Again, the moon is only sensually seen as a clearly defined cosmic body. A lunar quality flows through the whole of outer space, all the outer realms of nature and the human being itself. This includes all the forces of decline, all the forces of retrogressive development, all the forces through which we age, through which our organs become dulled, become dulled, somehow merge into descending development. One now gets to know this mechanism of the human organism and the external mechanism of nature from a new perspective, by being able to see the solar and the lunar together.

And in the same way, in relation to other celestial bodies, we learn about the force-giving, the sustaining, the process-sustaining, and the becoming. One learns to recognize it in its continued effect within the human being, in its effect outside in nature. But in doing so, one enters a field where it can be shown how anthroposophy can be thoroughly fruitful for other sciences, to which it does not stand in opposition, but which it would like to further develop by fully recognizing what they themselves can achieve, how spiritual science can have a fruitful effect on other areas of life.

By learning to see in this way, the becoming, the process of the human inner organism, one learns to recognize in a more intimate way the health of the human being, the illness of the human being. One gets to know the breakdown of some organic processes, as it occurs in disease processes. One also learns to recognize how one can contribute to recovery through opposing processes. Above all, one gets to know the connection between the outer nature and the human inner being. For example, one learns to recognize how certain degenerative, destructive forces of one organ or another can be balanced by the sun-like, constructive forces, say, in the plant or mineral kingdom. One gets to know the healing powers by following the supersensible in nature and in man. And that can emerge from anthroposophy that has already emerged precisely in relation to medicine.

Physicians have taken up the suggestions that can arise from this kind of anthroposophical research, and medical-therapeutic institutes have been established in Dornach near Basel and in Stuttgart, which are in the process of developing, in a thoroughly exact way, those healing methods and remedies that arise from the suggestions of anthroposophy. This is an example of the kind of cross-fertilization that anthroposophical research can provide for the individual sciences and practical areas of life. What can otherwise only be tried empirically, and only after trying can one say how it works in this or that direction in the human organism, can be understood because the natural process according to the sun and moon and according to the other cosmic processes, and the inner human natural process and soul process and spirit process can be understood. Rational medicine, a medicine of inner insight into the pathological and healing processes, can be substituted for the mere trial-and-error medicine. Similarly, a physics and a biology institute are being established in Stuttgart. That is all I want to mention. The individual sciences can certainly be fertilized by anthroposophy.

But what Anthroposophy provides in this way, by pointing to our own immortality in connection with the spiritualizing of the supersensible in the universe, can also have a fruitful effect on life in other ways. This should be shown by a particular example, the Dornach building, the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach near Basel. Anthroposophy has been practised for a long time now, and the time has come when a number of friends of Anthroposophy have given rise to the building of a home for Anthroposophy. The circumstances, which I do not have to describe here, brought this home for Anthroposophy, this Goetheanum, close to Basel.

If the necessity of building a spiritual movement its own home had been felt in any other field, then contact would have been made with this or that architect. Perhaps a Romanesque, Gothic or Renaissance building would have been constructed or something similar. Anthroposophy could not do that. No matter how much one may dispute the artistic side of what has been created, what some claim it is not in any case. But if one is imbued with what anthroposophy can give as an attitude of the soul, then one is a strict critic oneself and initially describes what one has to describe only as a beginning. The Goetheanum should also be described from this point of view. Because Anthroposophy does not strive for one-sidedness, but because it springs from the whole, full humanity, and in turn wants to place the whole, full human being in the world, it could not be a matter of building a randomly stylized building as a home.

I would like to use a trivial comparison: just as the individual forms of a nutshell are built according to exactly the same laws as the nut kernel – as you can see, the same forces act in the shell in their position and in their mutual relationship as they do inside the nut kernel – so, if anthroposophy is is to be understood not as a theory, not as a collection of dull ideas, but as real life appearing in ideas, then what appears as its framework, so to speak its structural shell, must be made of exactly the same spirit as the ideas in which the supersensible life is presented. Therefore, everything that has been realized in Dornach, whether architecturally, pictorially, sculpturally or in any other artistic way, must come from the same spirit as that which is spoken as the Word on the podium. This appearance of ideas and thought-forms cannot be other than the kernel of the nut to the shell, to that which speaks out of forms that are not straw-like allegories or symbols; there everything has flowed into the truly artistic. And yet, even if the whole is only a beginning, one may still refer with a certain certainty to Goethe and in particular to Goethe's view of art. One need only think of how Goethe put it: “When nature reveals her manifest secret to someone, that person feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” In another saying, Goethe expresses the same sentiment: “Art is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without it.

In that anthroposophy, in the way it has been characterized, really wants to penetrate into the deepest laws of nature, into the laws of the supersensible spiritual world, it also feels inspired for the artistic and knows how to incorporate the living, not the symbolic, into the material. She has just the right feeling for the material, so that she does not feel comfortable in some artistic, symbolizing cloud cuckoo land, but in the most eminent sense, she lets what is her spiritual life be revealed through the art form. In this way, without anything didactic occurring, what goes beyond all theory into the knowledge of the supersensible can at the same time be fruitful for the artistic field.

I can only give isolated examples of the practical effects of anthroposophy. Thirdly, I would like to mention the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which has already found a certain following here too. This Waldorf School was founded by Emil Molt and is run by me. It is run in such a way that it is not intended to oppose the great achievements of pedagogy and didactics of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is mindful of the great pedagogical maxims that are there. But precisely those aspects that are often expressed today in the field of education as a longing for reform show that something is needed to implement the well-intentioned maxims of the great educators in practice in the individual. Anthroposophy does not want to replace old maxims with new theoretical ones in this field, but to serve their practical implementation. That is why the Waldorf School in Stuttgart is definitely not a school where Anthroposophy is to be grafted into children; that is far from our minds. We have therefore quietly entrusted Catholic religious education to the Catholic pastor and Protestant religious education to the Protestant pastor. Only for those children who would otherwise be dissidents have we provided a free religious education. The religious aspect of the world view is not what gives the Waldorf School its specific character. What it seeks to achieve is that anthroposophical knowledge teaches us to recognize the human being in terms of body, soul and spirit, to recognize this in the child; that, based on our knowledge of the human being, we can read the curriculum for each school year, for each month, for each week from the child; that it is only through a true knowledge of the human being that we can truly establish the art of education and the art of teaching. In the practical side of education and teaching, in the “how” of how to carry it out, we should let what anthroposophy can give have its effect. And if people were not so opposed to anthroposophy, purely out of misunderstanding, as they are, then far more consideration would be given to such things as occurred this summer during the anthroposophical congress in Stuttgart.

For example, a teacher at this Waldorf school showed how one-sided everything is that is supposed to be made fruitful for teaching through experimental pedagogy and experimental psychology, especially in recent times. Anthroposophy does not go against what is being done in these experiments either, but it can show that what is learned about the human being in this way can only bear fruit in the right way if one also enters into the soul through inner contemplation into the soul; when the lessons are not based merely on experimental results about memory, the development of the powers of mind and will, about fatigue and so on, which have been obtained externally, where one can stand far from the human soul. Rather, what can be gained from the soul itself will only bear fruit when one also gains the ability to look intimately into the human soul, into this wonderful, enigmatic human soul that develops from the first childlike day, from week to week, from month to month. Only when we have the right sense of insight are we capable of educating. And anthroposophy, because it does not just go to the surface but learns to recognize the whole, the full human being in body, soul and spirit, can create such a higher, inspired, spiritualized art of education.

The art of education is what anthroposophy seeks to practise in the Waldorf school. It is not some kind of world view that is imposed on the children. Now a teacher at the Waldorf school has discussed in a particularly intimate way – the lecture has now been published as a brochure – the significance of experimental psychology and what it could become through deepening. In my opinion, Dr. von Heydebrand has presented something extraordinarily significant here, with regard to the appreciation of a one-sided current of development in the present time. This would undoubtedly have been discussed much more in pedagogical circles if it had not grown precisely on the much-disliked soil of anthroposophy.

And anthroposophy can also have a living effect on the outer social life. Here too is an example, even if it is only a small beginning. Emil Leinhas also gave a lecture at the Stuttgart Anthroposophical Congress, which has also already been printed, and in it he gave a spirited critique of contemporary economics. The title is 'The Bankruptcy of National Economy'. Emil Leinhas shows how this national economy must remain unfruitful for real social life if it is only understood in the pattern of outer, natural scientific thinking, and not supplemented by the knowledge of spiritual, supersensible forces at work especially in human life.

We see, especially in the social sphere, the devastating effect of a way of thinking that would like to apply the one-sided natural science approach to social life as well. Let us look at the terrible devastation that is growing ever greater and greater and that ultimately poses a threat to the whole of Europe, indeed to the whole of the civilized Western world. Let us look at what is happening in the social sphere in Eastern Europe and become aware that the underlying reasons for the emergence of these destructive forces are nevertheless that we have not been able to permeate social life with what arises from a spirit-perceiving consciousness. If we look at people only as the economics teachers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century did, uninspired by spiritual-scientific knowledge, then destructive social forces must ultimately emerge, as they have in Eastern Europe, and must become a threat to the whole educated world in a much higher sense if a spiritual element is not introduced into our social order.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I have only touched on a few areas in which anthroposophy can be fruitful, in scientific and other areas of practical life. Only at the end would I like to suggest something that must be mentioned last, although it is not the last: By leading to the direct beholding of the eternal in the human soul, by leading to the direct knowledge of that which lies beyond birth and death, to the unborn, to the immortal in the human soul, by leading to those worlds in which the human soul lives when it is not clothed with an external physical body. By becoming acquainted with these two worlds, it also becomes acquainted with what is in human nature, deeper than physical human nature, more comprehensive, more intense than that which the soul experiences when it is in the spiritual world before birth or after death. What is found in the human soul is not exhausted in the contemplation of the natural or supersensible world.

After getting to know the two worlds, which of course only appear to be two worlds and in truth interact according to the whole meaning of the presentation, so that one cannot speak of dualism versus monism in anthroposophy; when one learns to recognize something in the human soul which reveals itself as a synthesis of these two worlds, that is the innermost, human, eternal core of being, which goes through repeated earthly lives, so that human life is made up of such pieces that lie between birth and death and between death and a new birth. And by learning to recognize the outer cosmos in terms of its spiritual significance, one also learns to look in a different way at times when man was still more akin to the outer cosmic existence. There were no repeated lives on earth then. And in the future, when man will have found a more intimate union with the cosmos again, the repeated lives on earth will also cease. But for a long period of time we have to observe, through the same powers that I have described, what can be called the contemplation of repeated earthly lives. Through this one is led in a cognitive way to the spiritual world.

As I have already indicated, human feeling and perception are taken along by the development of the powers of thought and will. This human feeling, insofar as it lives and wants to live out in religious devotion, can only deepen when the human soul is also presented with knowledge of that which is eternal in the soul, which is spiritual and supersensible in the cosmos. Anthroposophy certainly does not want to found some kind of sect in the world. It does not want to found a new religion. Take the whole meaning of what I have tried to explain today: it is something that wants to strive scientifically, but which, due to its special kind of scientific striving, can never become a mere specialty because it concerns every human being. Therefore, one cannot say: Anthroposophy is something like botany or zoology or geometry, which in their higher parts can only be recognized by individual specialists. Anthroposophy is something that concerns every human being. And the development of the spirit will bring it about that it will concern more and more people. And every person, through what is in them in body, soul and spirit, can understand and receive what Anthroposophy, albeit as the result of arduous research, has to present to the world, provided they are open to it. But the fact that the supersensible world emerges as a result of research does not in fact take away a person's religious life, but deepens it. Religions have every reason to look to anthroposophy as something that can offer them help, that can give people exactly what they need to come to religious devotion again, after modern life has taken away much of this religious devotion, especially in the modern intellectual life. It is therefore a complete misunderstanding to believe that true, genuine religious devotion, true, genuine religious experience could somehow be endangered by anthroposophy. This is another area in which anthroposophy can be thoroughly fruitful.

Those who see through what is actually at stake may say that anthroposophy in particular accommodates the deepest human longings of the more active minds of modern humanity.

And if I am to briefly summarize in a few words what I have tried to describe as the essence of anthroposophy – although this can only be done insufficiently in a short lecture – I would like to say: the human being stands before us with his physical body. We look at him. His soul and spirit speak from the depths of his being. It speaks from his face, from each of his movements. We do not have the whole person before us if we do not see this spiritual-soul in the natural-physical. Natural science has brought it to a high level of perfection over the last three to four centuries, especially in the nineteenth century. Anthroposophy does not want to rely on laymanship or dilettantism, although it is for everyone. The anthroposophical researcher wants to exclude any laymanship or dilettantism in the field of natural science. He wants to see genuine science and genuine methodology developed in the field of natural science. But in doing so, he is particularly aware of how external natural science, which has rightly celebrated such triumphs and has made such a significant impact on practical life, how this natural science represents something external that can be compared to the physical body of the human being.

Wherever we look with the unprejudiced eyes of a whole human being, equipped with the insights of natural science, we encounter something like the way the soul and spirit appear in human physiognomy and human movements; we encounter something as science, as knowledge of the soul and spirit in the knowledge of nature. I would like to say: through its physiognomy, through the way it develops, the knowledge of nature can point to this spiritual-soul aspect of a particular knowledge. Just as the natural human being reveals the spirit and the soul in the way his body is formed, so true scientific knowledge reveals a higher, supersensible knowledge that goes to the spiritual-soul. What the human soul and human spirit are in the human body, that, ladies and gentlemen, is what the soul and spirit are in knowledge. For a true natural science, the anthroposophical paths and results are what the soul and spirit are in knowledge.

Dear attendees, The remarks I am to make to you this evening can only claim validity today, in the age of the spirit of science, if they are preceded by a certain examination of anthroposophy, as it is meant here, and of this spirit of science itself. It must be shown that today it is impossible to speak of knowledge of the spirit without justifying the methods of the corresponding spiritual research in the face of this spirit of science.

That this justification is possible, that the anthroposophy I am referring to here is not in any opposition to this modern spirit of science at all, but that it is only a kind of continuation of it, I have taken the liberty of explaining in that lecture which I gave here a few months ago in the same place. So if I wanted to give this justification again today, it would mean a repetition for a very large audience. I will therefore assume that which is present as such a support. I will therefore refer, but only in this regard, to the lecture from earlier, but of course in such a way that today's lecture should also be understandable in itself.

Now, when a person focuses his attention on what he calls spiritual life, namely on his relationship to the spiritual world, certain difficulties arise in the soul. But one cannot say that these difficulties arise in relation to the existence of a spiritual life in man himself. For man is well aware that he always has such a spiritual life in his waking state. He is in relation to the outer world through his spiritual life, as a cognizant and active human being. He finds his human worth and dignity included in this spiritual life, which is, after all, his experience, his adventure. And even the most ardent materialist will perhaps say: This spiritual life that appears to you arises only from material processes, from material occurrences, but he will not be able to deny the spiritual life as such. And one may say: The difficulties that arise as riddle questions in the human soul with regard to the spiritual world are based precisely on the fact that man is aware of his spirit, that he must seek his value and dignity in this spirit, and must therefore ask about the nature of this spirit: Is it something temporary, something that disappears? Is it something that is grounded only in material life? Is it something that is connected to some external spiritual world and represents something permanent in the face of a transitory existence? Precisely because man has a spiritual life, because he feels himself to be a spiritual being, he must ask about the nature of this spirituality.

Now there is much that emerges from the depths of the soul for some people who are particularly concerned with these things, fully consciously, but for most people as a general feeling, more or less unconsciously, and ultimately comes together in the enigmatic question: What is the essence of the spirit, and what is the relationship of man to a possible spiritual world? I could cite many things to you that show this question arises from the depths of the soul.

Two examples that are perhaps even neglected in other areas of human life, that rarely come to the full consciousness of the human being, but that have all the more effect in the spheres of feeling of the soul life, that are transmitted to the feeling, that cause a certain uncertainty about the nature of spiritual life. As I said, they are perhaps consciously placed before the soul by very few people, but they determine the happiness and suffering of the innermost soul being. They determine our everyday frame of mind, whether we go through life courageously or dejectedly, whether we are fit for life or unfit for our own life or the lives of our fellow human beings. All this depends on how these feelings creep into our soul life and lead to the enigmatic questions characterized.

First of all, there is something that we experience, as I said, more or less unconsciously, every day of our existence between birth and death, when we pass from the waking state to the state of sleep. Every time we feel how that which stirs, what lives and moves from waking to falling asleep as our experience, our inner spirituality, how it fades down into an indeterminate state, how we have to switch off our consciousness, how we have completely faded down our spiritual life, so to speak, in the time from falling asleep to waking up. And when we then bring this unconsciously experienced life in the human soul to consciousness, we have to say: in it, the human being feels the powerlessness of his spiritual life, the powerlessness of his inner activity, of his inner activity, in which he seeks his own human value and human existence. It fades away every day when he falls asleep. Then most people ask, perhaps only in their hearts, but they do ask: Is it the case that this life of the soul fades and leaves people powerless? Is it so that it has dimmed down when the human being passes through the gate of death, so that the human being can no longer catch up with it, as he does every morning? That is one example of how the characterized riddle is formed.

The other example is, one could say, the opposite pole. When we wake up, we may first pass through the indeterminate, chaotic, illusory dream life, which we know to be illusory in the face of external reality when we are of sound mind. Perhaps we pass through this semi-spiritual being until we fully awaken. But then the spiritual takes possession of the body, of the physical body of the human being. We initially dive into the world of our sense organs. What our eyes transmit to us from the world of colors, what our ears transmit to us from the world of sounds, what our sense organs transmit to us, we experience as physical experiences of the effect of the outside world on us. We experience it with our soul life. We experience how we take possession of our limbs, how we become active with the help of our body. We feel immersed in our corporeality, our physicality, our spiritual being. It works, it weaves at this physicality.

But I have already indicated in the last lecture here the way in which we are unconscious of this submergence into physical corporeality. Let us just take the submergence into our elements of will. We have the thought. Let us take the simple action of raising our arm and moving our hand. First we have the thought, the idea; but how this idea descends into our physicality, what complicated process takes place down there before we raise our arm and move our hand, we know nothing about this in our ordinary consciousness. So we have to say: While we feel the powerlessness of the spiritual life when falling asleep, when waking up, that is, when we descend into physical corporeality, we feel how the spiritual flows down as if into an inner darkness, in which it is then enclosed. So that we can say: if we lose the spirit when it no longer works through the body, it then becomes unconscious; but it withdraws from us even more when it flows into our corporeality and works through our corporeality.

These are all examples of how man enters into an uncertain realm when he wants to educate himself about the nature of the spiritual. Now, because he is led into such an uncertain area, man places himself before the spiritual world to which he seeks a relationship precisely because of the better part of his human feeling and willing and thinking. He places himself before this spiritual world precisely the two most significant enemies of human soul life. One of these enemies is the one to whom many people fall prey today who, whether through their will or their circumstances, cannot join the conscientious, serious methods of scientific life that do not make the demands of this science their own. They often place before their soul, out of their own will, that which we then encompass with the word “superstition”.

This superstition is the one enemy of the human soul. Because man must constantly seek a relationship between himself and the spiritual world, he seeks to conjure up from within, through the will, that which he cannot attain from without through knowledge. But if it has no basis, if it lives as superstition in the human soul, in the way a person imagines his relationship to the spiritual world, then he must see how he comes up against all sorts of obstacles wherever he goes in life. Things have their own laws, the things and facts of life, of nature and of human existence. They take a certain course if you approach this life with superstitious ideas. These ideas do not prove true everywhere. You end up in a state of disorientation and insecurity, also in relation to knowledge. You often imagine in your soul that a spiritual being should work through external phenomena in a certain way. You see that it does not work. You become insecure and weak in yourself. Or else the person who surrenders to such impulses, which are not grounded in the objective external world, has no drive for his actions from them; they give him nothing for his will. Therefore, he not only becomes insecure but also incapable, unable to intervene in life. He cannot place himself in the midst of his fellow human beings, co-operating with them, as does the one who does not place illusory conceptions between his soul and life.

If this is the one enemy that stands before the soul of those who do not engage with scientific results, then the other enemy often enters into the soul life of those who are engaged in science. Anyone who is familiar with today's serious and conscientious scientific methods, by which our thinking seeks to follow the external world through experiment and observation to its laws, learns to recognize how this thinking is tamed – one might say – how all arbitrariness is taken from it, how it is adapted to what appears in the external world as law. But, one might say: in this way, thinking also becomes thin and abstract. It becomes estranged from the human being himself. It then becomes only appropriate to the [conditions of] the outer sense world. And one soon realizes: then no way out of the sensory world into the supersensible world opens up for this thinking, which is so wonderfully suited for comprehending the outer natural phenomena.

And then something very often befalls the scientific man of today, and that is doubt, doubt about the supersensible world, precisely because of the certainty he has acquired in his intellectual pursuit of the sensory world. Doubt also arises in the mind. But when it arises there, it arises with all the seriousness of the human soul, then it sinks into the mind, into the emotional life. And this is precisely what the devotee of anthroposophical science can recognize through this science: how the soul and the life of feeling are intimately connected with the healthy or diseased conditions of the bodily life as well; how what lives in an inharmonious, torn or even in a harmonic, happy soul is reflected in the healthy or diseased bodily life. And it may be said that, to put it bluntly, when doubt infects a person with a mental consumption, this mental consumption also affects the bodily conditions. He becomes weak in relation to his physical life. His nervous system becomes defective. He is unable to withstand the struggles of life. He, too, becomes incapable of helping himself and incapable of working with others.

Thus one can see, especially in superstition and doubt, how man, on the one hand, must always strive, out of deeply justified feelings, towards the spiritual world, to which he must feel he belongs. But how certain difficulties arise in the life of the soul, and how, precisely, strong enemies of this life of the soul place themselves between the spiritual world — which one can initially only assume hypothetically — and between the actual spiritual man. That is why even the serious scientific minds of the present day have turned to abnormal mental life, because they despair of the normal mental life that the grandeur of the sensory world transmits to them, but which, in their view, is quite incapable of transmitting to them what the spiritual world is. So they turn away from normal mental life and turn to all kinds of abnormal mental life. Today one finds enlightened minds in the field of natural science who look to mediumship, who look at some visions or hallucinatory states of abnormal life in order to gain clues in this way to answer the question: Does man have any relationship at all to a spiritual environment other than that which is revealed to his senses? One does indeed come across many things, but one should be quite clear about one thing: what one can learn, for example, through a medium, is after all learned by this medium himself through a tuned-down consciousness, through interrupted sensory contact with the outside world. One must, so to speak, turn to the medium for a morbid, abnormal-seeming physicality. It is the same when we turn to visionary experience.

Wherever you look, if you approach the research with sufficient impartiality, you can say that wherever something visionary occurs in the soul, there is a pathological organization. And how is it possible to exercise control over that which arises from the sick person, which is perhaps extraordinarily interesting in some respects, how is it possible to exercise control over that which arises from an imperfect consciousness that is not as highly developed as sense consciousness? How is it possible to gain a critical result about how much the experiences gained in this way are worth?

Anthroposophy therefore does not address any kind of morbid soul life. It firmly rejects having anything to do with mediumship, hallucinations, visions; it is based entirely on healthy soul and bodily life. She tries to find out what exercises the soul can do to further develop the powers of knowledge that are initially present in normal consciousness, so that we are able to see the spiritual world through supersensible organs in the same way that we perceive colors through our physical eyes. If you review what I have said in my various books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science” and other books about such exercises, you will find that these exercises fall into two parts: firstly, preparatory exercises that a person undertakes to strengthen themselves inwardly, physically and mentally. They are thoroughly suited to lead a person to a healthy physical and mental life. These preparatory exercises are today even appreciated by many opponents of anthroposophy, I dare not say in their value only, but in an outspoken way. But then one does not want to turn to the further exercises, which are supposed to develop dormant powers of cognition in the soul. But how man in this way, as a man who absolutely reckons with the whole enlightened spirit of the present, and yet seeks the way into the spiritual worlds by trying to recognize how man wins such a power of cognition by which he ascend into the spiritual worlds, can be understood more easily by taking up what was attempted in older times to gain knowledge of the supersensible world.

We see today that people who have a strong inner need to feel at least a sense of the spiritual world, who despair of direct knowledge, of a science of the spiritual world, they turn, whether they are learned or unlearned, to the time-honored conceptions that have developed in the course of human history and that are given as traditional creeds or world views. Many philosophies themselves are based on such time-honored conceptions, without the people who believe in them being able to guess it. But today one very often has the feeling that one must accept by faith what is given in such ideas, which have a venerable age, about the supersensible world; one cannot seek such knowledge about the supersensible world as one seeks in our exact science about the sensual world. And one succumbs to all kinds of illusions in the attempt to justify faith in its independent nature vis-à-vis knowledge, when one tries to prove that faith must be a different way of discovering the spiritual, in keeping with human nature, than that which presents itself as knowledge, as science.

Now, anyone who does not use the often rather superficial methods of today's historical science, but rather a certain eye for the spiritual experience of the human being, for that which has taken place in the spiritual experience of human beings over centuries and millennia, with an eye for how this spiritual life has changed from epoch to epoch, anyone who, with such can look with such impartiality at what certain people in more primitive times, than our own, perhaps in very ancient times, sought as paths to knowledge, will come to the conclusion that everything that lives in beliefs and worldviews today, and is often only accepted as historical, as traditional, that it goes back to ancient insights. Yes, everything that people today accept as beliefs once developed in such a way that individual people detached themselves from the general consciousness of people, as scientists do today, and that they sought such knowledge of the supersensible out of the powers of their own soul life. What they then revealed to themselves through such paths of knowledge about the supersensible, about the spiritual, they handed down to their fellow human beings, and this knowledge has then flowed through history to the present day, living in our creeds, in our world views and philosophies. Only, often, people do not seek the sources from which it emerged.

Now, the paths of knowledge of ancient times might seem irrelevant to people today, who have to search in completely different ways. Nevertheless, I will characterize at least two older paths of knowledge, the results of which still live on today in our worldviews. We could characterize many such paths of knowledge. I will pick out two, not to recommend them to anyone for the purpose of attaining higher spiritual knowledge, because they were quite appropriate for an older time, but are no longer so today, as we shall see later. So, not to recommend these things, but to characterize them for the purpose of gaining our understanding of the new, of anthroposophy, through the old knowledge. New paths must be taken today so that people can, through their changed soul life and soul constitution, again attain knowledge of spiritual life and their own spiritual origin.

In ancient times there was one such path of knowledge, which the ancient Indian yoga scholar went through, if I may use the expression. Especially with regard to the characterized qualities, one only gets corrupted ideas today when studying how this path of yoga is sought in oriental countries today. And many of those who, out of desperation, seek ways to find their way into spiritual worlds by resorting to old methods pay the price by damaging their physical and mental lives. For what the human being can practice today, even what is often written about these old ways into the spiritual world, is thoroughly corrupted. But if we look back to the older times of human development, we come to such primitive paths of knowledge that were valid in those days, and on which we can communicate with each other through the modern paths.

What is this yoga path based on? It is based on the yogi taking the breathing, I could give many such details of the yoga path, but I only want to emphasize the breathing process, that the yogi takes the ordinary breathing, which was unconscious, and elevates it to conscious inner activity. How does the ordinary consciousness perceive breathing? It happens in such a way that we inhale, hold our breath, exhale, in a certain rhythmic sequence. At most, we pay attention to this breathing process in pathological conditions. In ordinary, healthy life, this breathing process happens more or less unconsciously. Only scientifically do we have to characterize it, so to speak.

Now, the peculiar thing about the ancient spiritual path of knowledge of the yoga scholars is that they introduced a different rhythm for certain times when they did their exercises in order to gain knowledge of a higher world, that they inhaled, held their breath and exhaled in a different rhythm. What was the effect of this? First of all, it made the yogi fully aware of the breathing process, so that he consciously experienced what one otherwise does not consciously experience. Just as one otherwise experiences inner well-being, inner joy, inner suffering and pain, so the yogi experienced his breathing process, which he had changed at will in accordance with the natural breathing processes. But what happened as a result? What did he gain in terms of knowledge?

From a physiological point of view, we can initially place this before our soul. When we breathe, the breath goes into our physical body, through our spinal canal and up into the brain. The brain is permeated and undulated by the breaths and the rhythm of breathing. As I said, the ordinary act of breathing is unconscious, as is the ordinary soul life. It is always the case that, within our skin, we not only have the physical processes that belong to the nervous organism and that convey thinking, the world of thoughts, to us, but these nervous processes are also permeated by the rhythm of breathing. It is, for example, tremendously interesting to follow what I have at least hinted at in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul), how, in listening to music, the rhythm of breathing merges with what is experienced as a nerve-sense process emanating from the human organs of hearing. But not only in musical perception; in all mental life, the nervous-sensory process is permeated by the respiratory process in its rhythm. That which the human being does not notice in ordinary life was perceived by the old scholar, the yogi. He sensed inwardly how the altered breath permeated his skin, how the respiratory rhythm sank into his thought life. What insights could be gained through this? We can realize this if we put ourselves in the place of the soul life that existed in the people of those ancient times, in which there were yogi scholars who stood out from the general soul being with their special soul being.

It was not like today. Humanity has changed in its soul nature through the centuries and millennia. From today's external science, one cannot even guess how much man's inner soul life and his relationship to the outer world have changed in the course of human history. In those ancient times when yoga originated, people did not perceive the pure colors that we see in the external world, or the pure tones that we perceive when we listen to the external world or have other sensory perceptions. It is only in the course of human development that we have come to see the pure sensual world around us, as we are accustomed to today. But in older times, it was not fantastic for older humanity, as animism today believes, but elementary and natural, that one not only saw the pure colors by looking into the outside world and heard the pure tones by listening to the outside world, but that a spiritual-soul arose in the soul when one looked at the outside world. A spiritual-soul perception was seen in every source, in lightning and thunder, in the drifting clouds, in the whistling wind. They not only saw colors, they not only heard sounds, but, because of their complete conformity with nature, they also perceived a spiritual soul element in everything, just as they perceived color through their senses. In this respect, human beings were not as independent as we have become today. The human soul has also changed in this regard. The inner degree of self-awareness, of awareness of independence, which we today take for granted, did not exist for this older humanity. Man grew by immersing his spiritual soul in lightning and thunder, in clouds and wind, in plants and animals; he grew together with the outside world and felt, to a certain extent, at one with it. The one who became a yoga scholar and practiced in this way, as I have indicated, first achieved, by driving the breathing rhythm into this inner-living thinking, he first achieved what we today take for granted, one might almost say, what we are born with; the yoga scholar entered into abstract thinking, into pure thinking. But through this he came to truly feel the self, the I. He had to acquire the sense of self, the self-awareness that is innate in us, that arises in us in a self-evident way through our education. And the results of this yoga knowledge are expressed in wonderful literature and in wonderful poetic art. The one who ascended into the spiritual world in this way through yoga felt himself as a human being, he felt his spirituality, he felt that he was a living, real spirit. By withdrawing what he otherwise imparted to things in life in terms of spirituality, he felt the reality of his own spiritual self. Therefore we see in such a wonderful poem as the Bhagavad Gita is, how all the delight, all the inner amazement, all the inner feeling of greatness, is described, which these people had, who in this way approached their own spirit through their increased self-awareness, which they had cultivated in this way. In those ancient times, people tried to go on a path of knowledge into the spiritual world. And much of what the yoga scholars have passed on to their fellow human beings has been passed down through the epochs of history; it still lives today as certain sentences, conceptions, ideas about the self of the human being. The religious conceptions adhere to it. The philosophers take it up. They do not know that this was once sought and found by people on a certain path of knowledge.

But we modern people cannot walk this path. This path involves something very peculiar. The one who tries to penetrate into the spiritual world in this way becomes extraordinarily sensitive inwardly. His inner life becomes so active and spiritualized that he must withdraw to a certain extent from the robust outer life and its demands. That is why such spiritual seekers, as I have described them, became lonely people. But in older times people had confidence in such lonely people. That was the peculiarity of that older culture, that one said to oneself: in order to come to real wisdom about the spiritual world, one must withdraw from life, become a lonely person, a hermit. These hermits must be asked if one wants to know something about the spiritual destiny of the human soul. And so one had confidence in the lonely, the hermits.

Today, however, our culture does not encourage this. Today, our culture encourages something different: people today are oriented towards activity. Today, a person must only consider himself capable if he can engage in active life, even if he gains his insights only in a way that is appropriate for participating in life. Today people would not be able to trust someone who has to separate himself from the rest of life in order to gain knowledge. That is why I have characterized these old ways in contrast to the new one, which I will then describe for the sake of understanding. But, as I said, the old path cannot lead to anything equivalent to what an ancient civilization has achieved through the path of yoga, even if this civilization only experienced this way of living in the spiritual worlds in a few hermit specimens of their race.

And now I would like to mention a second path, which has also been taken many times and whose results still live on in our worldviews, our philosophies, our other beliefs, without our being clear about the sources. But this path is already closer to modern man, although it cannot be taken in the same way as it was in ancient times. It is the path of asceticism.

What did the ascetic seek? He tuned down, paralyzed the physical functions of his body. His bodily life had to become calmer than usual. His life had to become one that did not intervene in the external world with all its strength. It even had to become one that inflicted suffering and pain on itself, that carried out asceticism in this way. Such a person came to very specific conclusions, very specific experiences. These experiences should not be misunderstood. One should not believe that by describing these experiences, the view is to be justified that our body, as it exists in a healthy state, is not suitable for our life between birth and death. Yes, just as we carry our healthy body with us, without ascetic weakening, it is suitable precisely for the fully valid life between birth and death. But those who devoted themselves to asceticism in ancient times realized that, however suitable the human body is for the external physical and sensory life, the more it is subdued and paralyzed, the more suitable it becomes for grasping and experiencing the spiritual world. Therefore, through asceticism one can experience the spiritual world. Again, a path that we cannot follow today, again a path that makes us unfit for the outer world. If we weaken our physicality, we also weaken our soul life. We cannot be efficient enough for ourselves; nor can we work for the benefit of our fellow human beings. Therefore, asceticism cannot be our path. But it is extremely important for our understanding that we become aware of the fact that the human body in its healthy state is a kind of obstacle to living oneself into the spiritual world. If this obstacle is removed or weakened, then the human being can live into the will nature of the spirit that underlies the world.

In describing these two paths into the spiritual worlds, I have also had to emphasize that they cannot be ours. Those of you who remember the exercises I described in my last lecture here will have noticed that I have described different exercises. I do not want to repeat them today; you can read about the rest in the various books. However, I would like to quickly characterize a certain aspect of how these exercises work. We do not turn to the breathing process when seeking the path to the spiritual worlds in an anthroposophical way. We approach our thinking, our thought life, directly, not indirectly through breathing. We bring other thought processes into thinking itself, so to speak. In a sense, we leave behind what is particularly useful for all abstract thinking today and celebrates such triumphs. We leave this abstract thinking. We devote ourselves to a meditative life, to a certain resting on images and ideas, in a way we do not otherwise do when we remain in abstract thought. We devote ourselves to a certain inner concentration. In other words, we devote ourselves to a practicing of the life of thought, just as the ancient Indian devoted himself to a practicing of the life of breathing. He allowed breathing to indirectly transform this thinking. We turn directly to the thought. We bring more rhythm into our thinking, whereas in ordinary consciousness we have more logic in it. We gradually attain what I can characterize as the vitalization of thinking.

Yes, we turn directly to thinking with our soul exercises, and we arrive at the thought that the thoughts we otherwise have appear to us more or less dead in their abstractness compared to living thinking. While the ancient Indian yogi was guiding the living thinking, which he and his whole world had in ordinary life, to the abstract thinking that can grasp the self, we in turn start from what we have as self, as abstract thinking in the self, and fully consciously bring this thinking to life, so that we arrive at what I would like to call exact clairvoyance. I beg you not to misunderstand the expression, it is only a term. This exact clairvoyance, which is attained through thought processes, has nothing to do with the vague mystical ideas of ancient times or even of the present. Just as modern astronomy developed from ancient astrology, just as modern chemistry developed from ancient alchemy, just as these sciences have moved more towards the material and have overcome astrology and alchemy, so too, to characterize this, modern exact clairvoyance, as it develops from anthroposoph , leads from the older, more materialistic clairvoyance — since Indian clairvoyance is materialistic —, so modern clairvoyance, by turning first to purely spiritual-soul processes on the side of thinking, leads from the more materialism of older times into the spiritual.

I would like to describe to you how modern thinking, how this living thinking, this exact clairvoyance, leads deeper and deeper into the world, so that within the sensory we can ultimately perceive the supersensory, the spiritual. In doing so, I must come to certain subtle aspects of the human soul life, but if one wants to find real paths to the spiritual world, truthful paths to the spiritual world, one must already engage in soul subtleties.

Let us assume, for example, how the modern human being visualizes a higher animal. He tries to get to know it as far as science is able to do today – but science has ideals to be able to do this better and better, but it will not reach something that I want to characterize right away – with today's abstract thinking we can visualize how the bones, the muscles, the internal organs of an animal are formed, how the individual life processes flow into one another. In short, we can visualize the form and inner life of the higher animal in our abstract thinking, which we are now developing methodically in research in a fully justified way. Then we look at the human being. We do the same with the human being. Again, we visualize how its bone system, its muscle system is formed, how the life processes flow into one another and compose the whole human being as an organization. Then we compare the two. We find that one is, so to speak, a transformation of the other. Depending on our way of thinking and our disposition, we will either say that this human form has developed from the animal form over time, and we will become more materialistic. With more or less justification, we will then become Darwinians. Or, if we are more spiritual or idealistic, we will look for a different context. But such a context arises when we compare the higher animal with the human being itself.

We can do this with the kind of thinking that is abstract and that appears as dead thinking to the mind that has come to exact clairvoyance of living thinking; the kind of thinking through which we can only stand beside external things, through which we can make an inner mental image of every external thing and every external process and compare them in an external way.

With living thinking, as I mean it and as it can be developed in man in the characterized way, we can now also make an inner image of a higher animal. But the living thought is then able to transform itself inwardly, to grow, so that it passes over of itself into the thought of man, without our first having to compare. We arrive at forming a living thought about the animal, which we can then place next to the dead thought of the human being. We gain the living thought that transforms internally, that grows and from which the form of the human being is then formed internally in the soul. That is, after all, the peculiarity of our present-day science when it speaks of development, that it says that one being passes into the other, but that it cannot pass from the thought itself, which it can gain from the one being, to the thought of the other being in such a living way as is only the case with the living thought.

I must therefore draw attention to something that characterizes this vitalization of thought so that I may be better understood in these subtle matters. Let us imagine taking a magnetic needle, placing it in a certain direction, and then turning it this way and that. In all directions, it will behave differently than if we were to place it in just one direction, in the direction that forms the connecting line between the magnetic north pole and the magnetic south pole. This one line behaves differently to the magnetic needle than all the other directions. We see that we do not conceive of space as an indeterminate coexistence, as an indeterminate emptiness, for inanimate nature, for magnetism, but that we have to conceive of this space as being inwardly lived through, so that, for example, for the magnetic direction there is a special spatial direction to which, in a sense, this magnetic direction belongs. So we cannot conceive of space in an undifferentiated way, but rather in an inwardly differentiated, inwardly shaped way. To such a view of space comes living thinking.

We look at the animal. It has its main direction horizontally, which also continues into the direction of the head. Those animals that have an upright head posture are exceptions, which I cannot go into now. Otherwise, I could show that these exceptions confirm what needs to be said about the fact that the animal's organization is such because its backbone lies in a certain spatial direction parallel to the earth's surface, just as the magnetic needle has its calm existence by lying in the direction from the earth's north pole to the earth's south pole.

Now let us take the human being and go over to him with the thought that we form about the animal – with many others, but for example with the only one of this horizontal backbone line. We transform the animal image itself. We imagine the horizontal backbone line vertically. Now the human being is different in space; he acquires this vertical line of space. This is only one detail. One must embrace many things in order to experience how thought, by passing over, by simply passing over the phenomena, the inner experiences, much that is animal, is not merely transferred to the human being, but is inwardly and vitally transformed , by living from animal to human being, and not just by developing the thought in the human being itself, in this way one goes from the thought, which one has vividly developed in the animal, to the thought of the human being in an inwardly vivid way. What do you get out of it? You get out of it that you now have an inwardly living thinking that not only presents itself and compares the facts and things of the world, but that submerges into the things themselves. Our thought itself lives inwardly in the same way that growth lives in the animal, in the human being. We immerse ourselves in the spirituality of the world. But this is something that can very easily be opposed, and it is precisely the peculiar thing about anthroposophical spiritual science that one likes to bring these objections to one's soul. For what anthroposophy has to say about the world should be certain and exact. That is why I myself point out what they could point out when I speak of living thinking. I point out that we have, for example, in the wonderful spiritual life of an Oken and a Schelling, that these thinkers had lively thoughts, but in a certain respect only imaginative, lively thoughts, that they, so to speak, thoughts they developed from a fact, an entity, shaped them out; thoughts about other facts, other entities, thus making thinking alive, capable of growth, transforming, as the beings of the world themselves transform and are growing. But there is one thing we do not find in these thinkers that fully guarantees the reality of what is given by this living thinking. But anthroposophical science must point this out, because it is simply experienced, by coming to living thoughts, to this exact clairvoyance, in the way that the various books describe as anthroposophical science.

Yes, my dear attendees, if you really set about developing such a supersensible world view and the thoughts of an animal, of another being, of a process, and inwardly experiencing the thoughts themselves, metamorphosing them – a process that Goethe already strove for, and he also already came a long way to a certain degree, anthroposophy continues to develop Goetheanism —, if one continues to develop this further, one notices very soon: something connects with this living thinking in the inner soul life, which very much authenticates reality. With each such step, in which we allow the thought to arise from the other thought in a living way, suffering and pain are laid upon the inner soul life. And it is absolutely necessary for anyone who truly wants to achieve an exact clairvoyance to go through pain and suffering. The living thought does not penetrate in the same way as the thought “I want to move my arm, move my hand”, that is, without me feeling it. The living thought permeates all human existence down to the physical. But the experience remains in the soul. It is an experience of suffering, and this suffering, this pain must be overcome. Only then does that arise in man which now fully guarantees supersensible knowledge. But the one who has truly acquired such knowledge, you can ask him what he thinks about his life's destiny. He will always tell you: My joys, the things I feel with relish in life, what I experience as happiness, I gratefully accept from fate. My insights, the things that really enlighten me about the innermost structure and nature of the human being, I owe, even in ordinary life, to my sufferings, my pains, by overcoming them and transforming them into knowledge.

Thus, for someone who is prudent in this way, even the ordinary pain of life prepares them for the suffering that they must experience through the influence of living thought on their entire human existence. But they must overcome this suffering, this pain. As a result, they now become, if I may use the paradoxical expression, a sense organ as a whole human being. Just as we have otherwise buried the individual sensory organs in our organism, and perceive the sensory world through them, so we become a sensory organ as a whole human being when we overcome the painful experience associated with the living thought. You can see this if you consider the following.

Take the wonderfully formed eye. Among other processes, something arises that acts like destruction when we see colors through the effects of light. If we were to experience the subtle processes that take place in a person when perceiving light, they would also appear in us as a quiet pain. However, we are so robustly organized in the present stage of human development that we simply do not perceive what is a quiet pain at the bottom of our sensory life. This is overcome and sensory perception is felt neutrally. In this way, the supersensible knower also struggles through pain and suffering to become a sense organ. The expression sounds paradoxical, but it is justified because with this sense organ, which we become as a whole human being, we perceive a spiritual world around us, just as we perceive the physical world with ordinary sense organs. In this way, the human being becomes a sensory organ, an explorer of the spiritual world. In this way, what he elevates through suffering and pain by overcoming them unites within him with what is living thought.

When this life, this connection between living thought and overcome suffering and pain, comes to life in us, then we see in a different way — let us say, to highlight one example, the most important example — we see in a different way the person standing before us as a physical figure than we did before. We look at him in such a way that our outer eyes see the physical configuration of the space, see the colors through which the person reveals himself in the physical world. We see everything that is revealed externally in the human being between birth and death, we see it through our senses and through the mind, which understands the language of the other, which can summarize in conformity to law what the senses see. But when one has struggled to the realization that I mean, then one sees the physical-sensory of man embedded in a soul-spiritual form, in an auric structure, in a human aura, which now represents the spiritual-soul of man. This spiritual-soul aura, which now reveals to us the real spiritual-soul in man, is not attained through all kinds of fantasies. It is attained today, too, on serious paths of knowledge, on those serious paths of knowledge that awaken the thought to liveliness, that bring the contemplation of the real to assurance by overcoming suffering and pain, to spiritual sensitivity of mind, if I may use this paradoxical expression. And when we see the spiritual soul of the human being before us, the auric, then we do not only see the present human being. Then we look back at how the human being was spiritually and soulfully before he descended from a spiritual and soul world in which he lived before this earthly existence and connected with what had been prepared in the mother's body to become a physical human being. Just as we look at a person today, how he grows, and how we know when a person is an adult, that this adulthood leads back to childhood, so we see in what we reveal in the human being today as the human aura, going back and seeing it currently going back. The child does not exist alongside the adult human being. The spiritual soul in which the human being lived in the spiritual soul world before descending, stands before us in vitality. It stands before us in such a way that we cannot only speak of it in an abstract way, but in such a concrete way that I can characterize this view for you in the following way.

When we are here on earth, we look out into the external world, we see the wonderful starry sky above, we see the clouds passing by, the realms of nature, we look out of our sense organs, out of our eyes, we perceive the external world through our sense organs. But we do not perceive what lives within the human being in the same way. I have already hinted at this today and last time, how little we really understand this. We can look at the outside world. What lives within us, we can visualize it through anatomy and physiology, but there we do not look at the living human being, but at the human being who has become dead.

Anthroposophy teaches us about what lives inside the human being – I would even say inside the human skin itself, as the physical embodiment of the human being. The air circle that extends around the earth is wonderfully certain when we follow it with everything that happens in it. Even if today's meteorology can only explore a little of it, we have a wonderful law in this air circle. Basically, all life on earth is grounded in it. We look into wonderful secrets when we see through the laws of the air circle. But what we can reveal, what lives in the human lungs, is much more wonderful. If the air circle is large and the lungs are small, size is not important. Here, inside the human being, an organ lives, if we know its laws, it is more magnificent and powerful than that of the air circle. And if we look at the sun, the source of light and warmth: everything that comes from the sun, everything that affects the living beings on earth, and everything else that is in space, is wonderfully powerful. But if we look into the human heart, it is smaller than what we see outside in gigantic size, but it is more wonderfully designed and carries a more powerful law within itself.

And so there lives in the inner being of man a microcosm, a small world compared to the great world, here between birth and death. We see the cosmos, we do not see this inner lawfulness. Our spiritual soul, as it was before it descended to physical life on earth, did not see as we see the cosmic outer world through our eyes, but it saw the inner being of man, that was its world. And it prepared itself to now unconsciously rule this inner being of the human being between birth and death in this earthly existence. We now look with a different understanding at the indeterminately formed brain of the child and how it develops plastically. This is shaped out of what our soul looked at before it descended. It sees the human being within. It sees the world that is given to him in the human interior. And because our spiritual soul lives in us between birth and death, and therefore does not see this interior because it lives in it, but sees the outside world because it does not live in it, the spiritual soul sees the interior of the human being as its world before birth.

This is initially one side of the extraterrestrial existence of man. The other refers to what human action is, what human behavior is. We look at it in a more or less external way through our senses and our mind. We find how man lives from childhood to later years. We then find how a stroke of fate comes about, how one person finds another. People find each other, they exchange their inner experiences, so to speak. This exchange becomes decisive for the rest of their lives on earth and perhaps for much further afield. This is how it appears on the surface. You see it, so to speak, higher knowledge shows this as the blind see color, one sees it in its true essence. And as the blind are operated on and live into the world of color and see something completely new in it, so he whose spiritual eyes are opened in the way described today sees something completely new in what man accomplishes in his deeds. He observes how the child takes its first steps in life, how sympathy and antipathy arise, how the child grows up, how sympathy and antipathy develop, and how the human being, by continually living in sympathy and antipathy, is led to the blows of fate. Then one no longer speaks of the fact that people only found each other by chance. Then one becomes aware of the deep wisdom that lies in something like what Goethe's friend Knebel said out of mature experience. He said, addressing Goethe with this age-ripe wisdom: When you look back on your life as a human being and survey what has happened to you since childhood. It is as if we had progressed in a well-planned manner from our first childlike step and had selected through inner longing what we had come to last.

It turns out for exact clairvoyance that the child is guided and driven from the first step by sympathy and antipathy, that in fact an inner longing lives unconsciously for the ordinary consciousness, that we lead ourselves to the blow of fate that is decisive for life. By broadening this, as we look at an adult and look back at his childhood, we look back at what is revealed through the auric in man, and we see the passage of the entire human destiny through repeated earthly lives.

We become aware that just as our development as an adult is dependent on our development in childhood, so what we build for ourselves as fate is the result of a previous life on earth. And in connection with this, it becomes clear to us, especially when we become completely one with our sense organ in the way described, that we can also know how we can live when we no longer have the body, when we pass through the gate of death and discard the body. We learn to see without the body. The essence of this spiritual sense of meaning consists precisely in the fact that we see as a spirit in the spiritual world. Therefore, we learn to recognize what we will be like when we have discarded our physical body. And just as we can describe in concrete terms how we look into the inner being of a person before birth, we also learn to recognize how something develops in us that passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world again in order to continue life without the body.

Here we are at the point where genuine modern knowledge, which still seems quite fantastic to most people today, but which is just as precisely founded, where modern knowledge connects with religious, pious-religious life in the same way that ancient knowledge developed into religious life. If we start from such insights, which appear to be purely scientific, we arrive at the deepest experiences, at the fulfillment of the deepest longings of the human soul.

If we can suggest how something of the soul and spirit detaches itself from the physical by returning the body to the earth as a corpse, then we also become aware of how something else detaches itself from physical existence. We see how people form friendships, how they are attached to one another in love, how spiritual and soul bonds extend from heart to heart in the family. We see how this human life creates bridges and bonds from person to person. By being able to look into the spiritual world, we also really gradually learn to see how the soul detaches itself in death – however strange it may sound to people today, it can be spoken of as a truly accurate insight – we learn to look into the spiritual world in such a way that what is physical about all the bonds of friendship and love ties, in family ties, in all that has become dear to us in our life together with our fellow human beings, we learn to look at what is physical about it and at what is spiritual about it, and we learn to look at how the soul detaches itself in death, how human souls find each other again. The hand that we have extended to another, the warmth of which was the expression of what is experienced from soul to soul, the beating of the heart in joy when we feel togetherness in friendship and love, these physical accompanying facts die with our physical body. That which has been lived in you as spiritual and soul, as spiritual and soul together in friendship and love, escapes from the earthly existence, as the spiritual and soul escapes from the physical earthly body.

We do not arrive at this certainty only through religious belief, but through sure paths of knowledge, that those who were together in spirit here on earth will be reunited in spiritual companionship. We learn to recognize that what is lived out in earthly life is but the image of a spiritual vision. If we value and hold dear, we also learn to recognize how this valuing and cherishing of earthly life is only the basis for a further experience that follows when the earthly must be relinquished and the spiritual wrests itself from the earthly. And a religious feeling, a religious experience, a true piety then arises out of a truly earnestly striven-for realization. But this will give something to modern life, which, as I believe, every unbiased person must admit, already lives in the longings of many souls today, and also lives in the souls of those who do not admit it, yes, who, when one speaks of it, perhaps turn away unwillingly and as opponents; it also lives in them. For in all that is preserved for men today from ancient times of spiritual ideas, there is already something that makes him uncertain. In all that he believes in, he finds something uncertain. He longs again for knowledge of the spiritual.

One may say: What does all this concern those who do not experience it themselves? Yes, first of all, in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' and other books, I have described what needs to be done, and today anyone who has the necessary patience and energy can enter into the spiritual world to a certain extent. You can enter and check whether what I have described today is fantasy or reality. But even if you cannot do it yourself, you can still, for the benefit of today's culture and for the good of social life today and in the future, convince yourself through common sense, without being an anthroposophical spiritual researcher, of the truth of supersensible experience, which today, however, individual people must strive for just as individual people only become astronomers, just as individual people only become natural scientists. But it will be possible to gain trust, as in the old days people gained trust in hermits, in those who can justify themselves by speaking about the supersensible worlds. Just as one need not be a painter to recognize the beauty of a picture through healthy human understanding, so one need not be a spiritual researcher, but only have a straightforward, unbiased human understanding, unhampered by prejudice, to see through healthy human understanding what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher reveals to the world as the results of the spiritual path of knowledge. Today, people can let the results of spiritual science approach them with a healthy understanding of the human being, just as one lets the results of astronomy or chemistry approach, without being an astronomer or chemist oneself.

However, the spiritual researcher today must not withdraw from life. He must place himself in the midst of life. For one can only have trust in someone in whom one sees: intervenes in life and intervenes in life in the same way as other people. Today, life must prove itself in life, and anyone who has something to say about life must also put themselves into life with all their might. That is why today we need different methods of knowledge of the higher worlds from those I have described comparatively, in order to lead to understanding, as those of the older times.

But what do we gain from the fact that such knowledge of the supersensible world is spreading again? Today, if we are not immersed in the most blind materialism, we also have concepts and ideas of a spiritual world. We have them, but we are aware that we have ideas, concepts, images of the spiritual world that are dead. If we look back to older times, we do not want to conjure them up, because humanity must progress. What was experienced in social and other respects in ancient epochs cannot be more appealing to us; as free human beings, we must go beyond them. But when we look back, we must admit to ourselves as unbiased observers of history: Where the ideas originated, to which so many still cling today, there were not only abstract thoughts and ideas present, there people knew, by turning to the spiritual in thinking, feeling and willing, that the spiritual itself descended into human nature; it is a fellow-member of the world in which we live. Not only thoughts, ideas of the spiritual, these people have had according to their consciousness, but the gods, the spirits themselves walked among them. Such knowledge, such knowledge, we need again. We have beautiful, great thoughts about the spiritual, but they are thoughts of a spiritual that is alien to man, that he only visualizes in abstract thoughts.

Anthroposophy, in turn, seeks to introduce the spiritual element itself into these thoughts, so that the human being in turn becomes aware, as he was aware in the best epochs of religious creativity: not only are thoughts in the human being from the spirit, but the spirit itself walks around with us. Just as we human beings live here on earth in a physical body and carry a spiritual and soul element within us, an immortal element that escapes the physical in the way we have described today, so we walk here among the invisible beings of the spiritual world. We are here as human beings, and in turn we become aware of the spiritual world as a living entity. Such an awareness that the spiritual world is our living companion, that we are not dependent on abstract, powerless thoughts from the spirit, has a different effect. This spiritual world has a different effect on us. It transforms our knowledge into something that in turn fills us with religious, artistic, and fully human content, so that we can fully engage with all of life on earth, and indeed with all of life in the world. We get a sense of what we, as temporal human beings, mean for eternal existence. But we also receive impulses for action that are stronger and more powerful than those that are mere ideas.

And this is something that can also be observed today in social life, that people no longer carry a living spirituality within them, and therefore, when they speak of social life, they sink down into instincts and drives. In the East, we see terribly how people, because they have lost a living spirituality, develop a destructive social life that also hangs over Europe like a threatening specter. It must be conquered. But it can only be conquered if people become aware of the living spirituality that can be taken up into thought and into the will and with which man can live as with something living and not with something dead, cognizing for himself, but also as a social being among social beings, with whom he can establish, as with spiritual impulses that are given to him from the spiritual world of which he is aware, that which the serious souls hope and long for as ascending forces of our culture; our culture, which has so many forces of decline within it, but which must be defeated. What can work as a rising force in our time, what can flourish for us from the spirit that we take up in a living way, that is what the earnest souls long for and hope for today, what humanity needs in order to be able to live in the present in the right way, in order to live out of this present into the complicated future of humanity.

For the present and the future, for the progress of our culture, which we must strive for with all our might, we need the living spirit. Anthroposophy does not want to be something fantastic, but, even if it is perhaps still weak today, it wants to be a path to the living spirit. It wants to fathom the relationship between man and this living spirit, so that man may find what he needs at this moment to find the rising forces in the face of the declining forces for the present and especially for the future of humanity.

Nowadays, anyone who lectures on the Christ runs into quite a variety of viewpoints. These fall roughly into two main groups, and a speaker must take them into account, especially if he plans to talk on the subject in the sense intended for this evening's lecture. That is, in the same sense in which other questions and other problems have been dealt with here before. I am referring, of course, to the spiritual scientific or anthroposophical viewpoint.

The first group of views is one that bases itself firmly on the premise that Christ is a real force in life. This might be called the religious viewpoint, which all the Christian confessions share in common. We will find on closer study however that no matter how liberal and tolerant it may seem in some respects, it has little use for any but its own view of the Christ. The various proponents of the religious standpoint are simply unwilling to grant that any progress in thinking about Christ is possible.

The other viewpoint is also one held by thoroughly dedicated modern searchers after truth. In accordance with a certain scientific trend, it maintains that a study of the Christ event, of what is reported to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era, if pursued with the same reliable historical methods that are applied to the study of other events, does not bear out the assumptions made about the Christ.

We realize that this way of looking at things has long been gaining favor. We also know that in the course of recent centuries increasing emphasis has been laid on comparing the Gospels, and that the discrepancies people have discovered in them have forced them to conclude that the Gospels could not be taken as historical documents. After a long period of trying to distill a somewhat reliable picture of Christ Jesus from the Gospel accounts, there have come to be many people today, both in Germany and elsewhere, who cannot reconcile speaking of a historical Jesus or of a historical Christ Event with their scientific consciences.

So we find present day positions ranging all the way from a separating out of those facts in the Gospels that can be historically proven, to out-and-out rejection of the historical Christ Jesus. This has given rise to the opinion that, though Christ may still live today for religious-minded people who feel that their faith lifts them to Him, for an ever more rigorously developing science the Christ idea, the concept of Christ, must vanish entirely. Many people are presently convinced that the Christ force will not continue to play any role at all in future, though these same people do not by any means believe that the day will ever come when religion will be lost to humanity.

Certain facts of the time, however, make it seem unlikely that the belief I have referred to will be proven true, for we can note a strange phenomenon. In our day, it is by no means only the religious-minded and people of feeling, for whom the Gospels have shown themselves a source of uplift and of schooling, who speak of something in the nature of a Christ idea. Earnest, educated, truth-loving men are putting their whole souls into pointing to something that can only be identified as Christ. It is characteristic that the modern American freethinker, Ferguson, voicing what many of his contemporaries feel, can say that Christ is again “the pioneer of a new age” who will unite Europe and America and look with profoundest understanding into the soul of every human being—that He is the one and only right man for the present. Ferguson, a person otherwise famed for his free-thinking views, speaks of Christ exactly as though He went about from one man to the next wielding direct influence upon us. Freethinking spirits are thus beginning to feel the Christ Being directly related to modern humanity. Even though little attention is paid to it as yet, we will find that this tendency, this searching for a force that can only be called the Christ, will make sure headway. John Fiske, a man who did his utmost to further Darwinism in America, stated that all religions assert two basic truths. The first is that all things are related. This is a truth proclaimed by every religion, one that no thoughtful person can deny. The second truth is that what we call good and evil derives from forces external to the human spirit.

I quote these men expressly because they are both personalities whose whole thinking and feeling are firmly rooted in the present, but they do not rest satisfied with an external view of things. Instead, they have worked their way through to deeper forces of existence. The forces at work in the world are not just physical and chemical: they are also spiritual in nature.

For one who takes his stand on a spiritual-scientific view of the world, the concept of Christ just characterized appears to be merely a first dawn glimmering, a preparation for something quite different still to come. I hope I will not be misunderstood in speaking as I have of this preparatory, Twentieth Century form of the Christ concept. Spiritual science has to steer clear of any taint of sectarianism and other such attitudes because they simply do not belong to this age. The spiritual scientist takes the same attitude in speaking of what is to come in human evolution as does the natural scientist who predicts an eclipse of the moon or a transit of Venus: he is not assuming a prophetic role. There are forces in life that can be spiritually investigated in exactly the same sense that natural forces operative in the physical world can be investigated.

It will be helpful to gain a perspective on the past history of the Christ idea, which has indeed undergone tremendous changes through the centuries. If we follow it back to its origin, we come upon a strange fact of the early days. We find popular Christianity spreading through the regions ruled by Rome in a way that enables us to say that, while the old Roman culture developed among the upper levels of the population and then grew decadent, we see those on whom life left its mark, those whose lot it was to suffer, slowly and gradually finding their way into popular Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth is increasingly idealized, to the point that he is looked on as divine. The various confessions that made up this popular Christianity tended more to feeling than to thoughts and concepts. But alongside this popular form we find those most enlightened spirits of the time who concerned themselves with Christianity devoting their loftiest ideas, their most significant concepts, to answering the question, “Who, actually, is this Christ?”

Let us single out, from the abundance of answers given by these illumined spirits, one or two for consideration here.

In Gnosticism, a form of thought to which anthroposophy by no means advises returning but simply studies as a phenomenon of past history, we find many different shadings of certain lofty concepts, all centering in an attempt to grasp the Christ idea. In the main, it can be characterized by saying that this Gnosticism, this longing to grasp the Christ idea with the help of the Ioftiest concepts, is a most marvelous form of spiritual development. Of course, those who adopt the modern view that every last facet of humanness gradually evolved from nature's lower orders, from animals, and rose by stages from the most primitive to ever higher animal forms, are bound to consider the Gnostic doctrine a fantastic dream. But Gnostics, too, traced evolution back even further than does the modern natural scientist. They said that we find a period in ancient times in which all animals, even the highest, were present on the earth, and man could have seen them if he too had been there at that time. The Gnostics, however, had in mind a period of evolution in which the human kingdom had not yet appeared, but they did not conclude from this that men developed out of animals, but rather that they descended later from the spiritual world. They maintained that animals. plants and minerals had also descended from the spirit. had materialized out of spiritual realms, so that we have to ascribe a spiritual origin to animals, plants and minerals as well. But there was a period when man had not yet taken on physical form, a time when he was still waiting in the spiritual world for the moment when the earth provided certain other conditions such as would make human life possible here.

This does not mean that man was not in existence at that time. Man did exist: not, however, as a visible entity, but as a spiritual one. He lived in the spiritual environment of the earth, but had not yet descended onto it, for the conditions of that ancient time were not such as would have made human development possible. Thus, the Gnostics assumed that there was a most important moment, later than that of the descent of the other kingdoms when titan descended to the earth. It was the Gnostic conviction that if man had incarnated with the other lesser kingdoms, one all-important facet of his being, that is the capacity we know as free, independent human thinking would not have developed. In short, man would lack his true human ego that works front a central focus outward into the world and develops between birth and death. The animal's development is kept within certain limits, but man is capable of progressing in an entirely different way as a result of education and experience. In order to achieve this, said the Gnostic, man entered into a more intimate connection with the element of matter than he would have done if he had remained an unfree being, dependent, as the other creatures around him were on his endowment at birth. Man plunged more deeply into matter in order to become less dependent on what he brought into existence with him. Gnosticism held that this deeper involvement in matter took place at a certain moment in very early times, that is, the moment the Bible pictures as the Fall, meaning thereby the fall into matter just described. But by no means every impulse inherent in human nature was believed to have joined in that descent; instead, something of a superhuman element remained in the spiritual world. While mankind was experiencing all this, something that was part of man but did not accompany him in his descent because he plunged so deeply into physical embodiment stayed on in spiritual worlds. Thus, there was still present in the world above a part of man that had dwelt there when all humanity still lived as one in realms of spirit.

On the basis of these assumptions the Gnostics then proceeded to study the Christ Event. A certain moment, described in the Bible as the baptism by John, was of special interest to them. They felt that the human being whose development brought him to that baptism was indeed a most extraordinary man, but nevertheless just a human being. After he had been baptized, something occurred that is hard for modern minds to grasp. Perhaps we can think of it in the sense that many a person has had something happen to him at a certain moment about which he could only say that his whole life was changed in consequence. Many people date their lives from such a moment, feeling it to have been one in which they were spiritually reborn. This is something that can happen to any and every human being. If one pictures this experience raised to a unique and ultimate peak, one understands how the Gnostics felt about the baptism by John in the River Jordan. That element of humanness that had been part of man front the earliest beginnings of his race but which had been waiting in the spiritual world, now left that realm and made its way down to earth, to take up its abode in the unique human being, Jesus of Nazareth. For the next three years Jesus of Nazareth was not just a changed human being. He was one in whom that reserved element of humanness, held over from the very beginning of man's earth life, had come to dwell for the eventual fructification of humanity. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth became the bearer of the superhuman being, Christ for the three years of His earthly life. So the Gnostics held that what had hitherto dwelt in the spiritual world had come into a human body, like a seed planted in the earth. Like a planted seed, which must decompose in order to germinate, this spiritual impulse entering the earth had to pass away in order to spring, seed-like, into hundred-arid thousand-fold fruitfulness. This spiritual element had to pass through death exactly as a seed dies. Far from failing to bear, it poured itself into earth's spiritual-evolutionary stream, where it will be found living on in many kinds of fruiting.

So we find in the Gnostic doctrine a pre-history of mankind leading up to the moment of Christ's coming and a post-history following upon the Event of Golgotha. It is history centered in the living action of the Christ impulse as Christ enters into human souls. To the Gnostic, the Christ impulse was history indeed history's whole content and the source of its ongoingness. If this view sounds alien to the contemporary mind, it must be stated that precisely modern natural science, whose ideas are colored by materialism only now at the outset, will press forward ever more vigorously to an understanding and eventual grasping of the reality that underlay the Gnostic concept.

In order to show how close the present is to taking up again what Gnosticism offered, let me just point out the following—something that is of course only an elementary first step. Science has thought for a long time that it stands on a solid footing. Basing itself on a truly impressive Darwinism, it felt impelled to assert that everything human developed out of animal origins, and that the driving force behind that development was the “struggle for survival.” It said that all the various creatures were launched into life together, but fell to fighting, with the not too surprising result that, as time went on, the more perfect species got the better of the less perfect. Man was the final product of this perfecting process. “The survival of the fittest” became the slogan of the Darwinists. Now, however, researchers are finding themselves forced to adopt quite a different concept in their honest searching of facts. They are now saying that as we study man afresh and compare him with the most developed animals, we can by no means assume that he evolved in straight-line descent from these species. Instead, we have to trace him back to a primeval form no longer to be found upon the earth. These researchers now believe that such a primeval form once existed and that while man and animal both evolved front it, they did so in two different directions. Outstanding investigators have brought forth a further fact. They put the question: How could man develop as differently as he has when all the while animals, too, were evolving? Strange to say, they have not hit upon a “fight for survival.” They assume that man and his form were in a specially protected place where he could continue under the same conditions which originally brought forth that form, whereas all other creatures were caught up in a downward trend. Thus, man today is being traced back to an invisible primeval form that developed as it did because it was protected in a realm where man did not have to take part in a struggle to survive. These researchers subscribe to only one remaining fiction. They believe the protecting realm to have been a physically perceptible locality.

Gnosticism, too. assumes just such a primeval form. But instead of picturing it as having existed on the physical plane, it assigns it to the spiritual world, which was, in fact, able to afford it protection.

If one can conceive the idea that man was a late-corner to the earth, one can also conceive the following thought. Tracing the course of history, we find that a hitherto undivided human race split up into various nations and races and that many different confessions came into being, each shaped in accordance with the feeling of a particular group. In earlier times humanity was so constituted that a person could develop only what was implanted in him by virtue of belonging to a certain tribe. The spiritual force, however, the spiritual being that made man human in the first place, enables him to find the human being in his fellow man instead of what heredity has made of him. Man had to have this capacity restored to him. It was an impulse that could be taken up again only when humanity grew ripe for it.

So we encounter lofty and remarkable concepts of evolution in the first Christian centuries. It must be said that what we are witnessing in present-day natural science as the beginning of something that must eventually outgrow the Chrysalis stage, was already anticipated by the Gnostics in the grandiose conceptions reached by them as they thought about these matters. This could happen only because there is such a thing as evolution in man's history.

If we look back to a period that lies still closer to the time of man's descent to earth, we come upon a wholly different kind of soul life. Comparing it with the soul life of the present we must say that the latter is oriented toward a sense-based and brain-conditioned way of experiencing, whereas earlier times brought us a marvelous heritage of knowledge in the form of pictures. The fact that this heritage exists proves what spiritual scientific research also discovers to be true that human souls did not always perceive their surroundings as they do today, but were once clairvoyant. At that time man did not feel himself so involved with his own ego. Instead, he felt that he was part and parcel of everything around him. A dreamlike state of consciousness brought him into profound contact with the world about. Primeval man's way of knowing things was through a dreamlike clairvoyance that revealed their mysteries to him. His was an experience akin to dreaming as we know it today. Thus, it was possible for a humanity recently descended from spiritual heights to experience the secrets of the spiritual world in what may be called a clairvoyant dream-state.

Evolutionary progress meant, however, an ever-deepening descent of man into physical existence, accompanied by an ever further loss of that ancient clairvoyant capacity, though this need not be thought of as a tragedy. For if man had not lost his old clairvoyance he could never have advanced to the stage of free self-awareness that alone provided the basis for conscious personal experience.

The loss of the old clairvoyant insight that once gave access to secrets of the spiritual world came about gradually. Even when mankind had become thoroughly at home in the physical world, clairvoyant knowledge was still kept alive in sanctuaries that preserved the heritage of the ancient Mysteries, the treasure of wisdom that had come down to them through the ages. After the Christ Event had taken place and entered the stream of earth-evolution, the Gnostics still hoarded that age-old treasure of wisdom won by humanity's clairvoyant insight, and they formed their idea of Christ in accordance with it. Their concept may, therefore, be described as a reminiscence of knowledge gleaned in olden times, not as the product of free, conscious selfhood. They simply applied what men of ancient days had known to explain the Christ phenomenon. The period during which Gnosticism flourished coincided with the dimming of clairvoyant insight. This made it impossible for those who followed after. in the Middle Ages, to go on working with the heritage of Gnostic wisdom as a means of understanding Christ.

Instead, something else took the place of Gnosticism. We find people who lived in the centuries after its demise just as eager to grasp the Christ phenomenon, but wanting henceforth to rely on their own human powers of understanding, on a scientific approach. And we see the most enlightened spirits of the Middle Ages turning from Gnosticism to the teachings of Aristotle for the basis of their understanding of the Christ.

They found themselves forced to say that Aristotle's world conception brought them to a standstill at a certain point, that true spiritual understanding of the Christ was out of reach of human knowledge.

In one respect, however, the view of the world held in the Middle Ages rests on one of Aristotle's main ideas. Aristotle would never have thought of going as far as modern materialism has gone. When we look into his idea of the way soul and body work together, we do not find him subscribing to any such belief as that a man's inner life is conditioned by the heredity that comes to him from parents, grandparents, etc. His view was rather that every person born into the world is given a drop out of the ocean of divinity to unite with his body, that a soul-spiritual core always detaches itself front the universal spirit and enters human beings at their birth. But Aristotle, who was distinguished by a quality seldom met with in our day, that is, the habit of drawing the real consequences of his musing and investigating, does not stop at this point. He goes on thinking, and comes to believe that when a soul passes through the gates of death it does so as a now well- established entity, and as such ascends into the spiritual world. Though prior to birth it did not exist as a separate being, after death it lives on in the world of the spirit as an individual.

What kind of after-death experience does this soul now undergo, as Aristotle sees it? None whatever, since it lacks a body to make that possible. Now its sole content is the memory of its life on earth. It lives on in eternity looking back on its earth-life with the good and evil it has done, wholly given up to memory pictures.

Here, in Aristotle, may be found the origin of the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell. lt began in his concept and made its way into Catholic dogma during the Middle Ages. But let me say at once that it was not possible for Aristotle as a man of his time to do other than picture the soul as an unchanging entity doomed to gaze forever at its earthly deeds.

Modern spiritual science, anthroposophy, recognizes, of course, that the soul can do more after death than just look back as though in memory-pictures on its previous earth-life. It knows that the soul does not have to stay forever in that state. Instead, it sees man taking with him into the spiritual world as the finest fruit of his earth experience the possibility of transforming or building further on the good and bad deeds he committed here: nor does he stay forever in the spiritual world. Rather is he born again into a new incarnation and has opportunities to work out some karmic compensation for what he did or failed to do in previous lives. The soul passes through the gates of death taking with it the impulse to seek further incarnations for the sake of working out a balance. Aristotle could not accept such an idea because he had always thought that every birth meant a detaching of spiritual substance to form the soul. But spiritual science bears witness to the fact that our present lives derive from past incarnations.

So Aristotle may be said to have stood in the way of his own insight. He whom wise men of the Middle Ages called “the precursor of Christ in understanding nature,” did not get as far as the reincarnation concept. We see how he stopped short of the mark in regard to the question of immortality and how for him life's fruit was just eternal contemplation. The inevitable outcome of this was that people could not see into the spiritual world or gain any understanding of the nature of the Christ. For the thinking of the Middle Ages, Christ disappeared into the realm of belief which is closed to knowledge. The age-old tradition of Gnosticism was finally lost. Aristotle could not serve spiritual understanding of the Christ. Thus, a line came to be drawn between what can be known and what must remain a matter of belief. One consequence of Aristotelian thought that lived on was the idea of eternal suffering in hell.

It remained for people of more recent times to take the third step in a gradual weakening of faith. They have come to rely more and more on what can be grasped with the physical senses. The effect of this on the Christ concept has been to make Christ an ever less important figure and to render the prevailing idea of Christ more and more materialistic. Where Gnostics once assumed a spiritual principle, and where the Middle Ages in their turn experienced Christ in a mood of purest faith and devotion, the present sees at the beginning of the Christian era not a human being ensouled with a cosmic element but, increasingly, “the simple man of Nazareth,” a man more or less like any other human being. Nobody remembers anything of what the Gnostics had divined. People want to think of Christ in the same materialistic way they think about other historical events. The fact that they regard Him as a mere human being makes it necessary to apply the same methods to the study of His appearance that are generally applied in ordinary historical research.

It might have been recognized that the historical approach to the whole question is the easy way out because what could possibly be easier than to take the Gospels and show how they contradict each other! This reduces things to simplest terms. But then wouldn't the researchers have had to assume that their predecessors were the greatest dunces ever for having failed even to notice such obvious contradictions?

At any rate, the Gospels were certainly not taken as a schooling, a schooling that enables the soul to lift itself to spiritual perception of the Christ. So it is not surprising that history was pressed into service as a yardstick and that a movement has grown up, associated here in Germany with the theologian, Drews, that denies Christ completely. This happened at the very moment when spiritual science entered the contemporary scene.

Spiritual science bears witness to the fact just referred to, that human beings and what they carry within them are not products of a single life, but of many past lives. Man once lived wholly in the spiritual world. Then he left it to descend to earth, but he was to have more than one life in a physical body. When he had digested the fruits of an incarnation during an interval spent in the spiritual world, he descended again into physical embodiment. The law that pertains here has often been the object of our study. It teaches us how deeply involved man is in the whole ongoing process we call history. Life only begins to make real sense when we assume that we have all been living on the earth in order to take what was given us in the beginning, make it our own, and then go on developing with the march of the centuries toward ever greater perfection. A closer study of these matters brings something quite remarkable to light, to be described here as man's mission on the earth.

I must stress again today, as I have so often done before, that the consciousness that man has thus far developed has by no means reached its final form. Man can really take his development in hand: the right spiritual training can lift him to spiritual perception. That is quite within the realm of possibility if he schools his soul in meditation. Just as one can put oneself, by staring intently at a shining object, into a state where one is aware of nothing else (though this is not a recommended practice!), so do we achieve a single-minded, but in this case quite free condition, when we deliberately concentrate all our attention on some soul-spiritual content to the exclusion of all else. Then forces begin to ray out in our souls through which we attain what may be called a body-free condition. Such a person is then really able to say from experience, “I am no longer perceiving with my eyes or thinking with my brain. I am experiencing as a spiritual being, independent of a body, I perceive what lives and has its being in the spiritual world.”

This elevation to the level of spiritual perception can be achieved with proper schooling. The rigorous discipline that leads to it has been described in several of my books.

It is easier to enter the spiritual world if one has trained one's feeling life to avoid all sorts of over-excited and emotional states and reactions. A person who confronts the world with calmness and equanimity keeps unsquandered reserves of feeling alive within him. The spiritual light, which meditation kindles in us, radiates into such reserves. A person full of selfish demands will never make a disciplined spiritual investigator. But those who achieve real empathy with their fellow-men, who know what selfless love is, who are not absorbed exclusively in their own feelings, have a soul-surplus that can be charged with forces garnered from spiritual schooling. The light of clairvoyance is engendered in feeling that keeps itself free of egotism.

When a person has progressed to the point of being able to live in the spiritual world he can gradually learn to clothe his experiences in ordinary concepts. Handed on in that form, any healthy mentality can grasp them. It is no more necessary for everyone to be a spiritual investigator than for each of us individually to make laboratory tests to see whether what science says is true or not. Those charged with communicating the results of spiritual-scientific research do not shy away from commonsense thinkers. Really healthy minds readily see the truth of statements made by the spiritual investigator. The only people who dispute his findings are those who approach them filled with prejudice. This holds true in the case of spiritual science, which is the fruit of clairvoyant research. It enables human beings to gain access to a world of spiritual experience.

The insight that spiritual scientists can presently achieve by means of a heightened consciousness will—to some degree at least, and in certain fields f be attainable by all men in future. It will fall to the lot of Twentieth Century humanity to realize that the soul develops, that it passes through life after life in the course of earth's evolution, and in so doing absorbs from the various cultural epochs what each such epoch has to offer.

If one looks nowadays with a more than ordinarily perceptive eye at the human race all over the earth, one becomes aware that it possesses two human qualities that were simply not present in antiquity. This is a fact susceptible of proof. The two new qualities are commission and conscience, and they will go on developing more and more fully as man submits his soul-life to spiritual schooling. Compassion and conscience were new acquisitions at a certain point in evolution.

Much that is called compassion is not worthy of the term. True compassion is the capacity to forget oneself and enter another's being so completely that one feels his suffering as he feels it. One's own ego is quite forgotten in such fellow-feeling; one lives entirely in the other's experience. Suppose for a moment that nature were so to arrange matters that at the moment when a person freed himself from narrow self-concern he had the same experience morally that comes to him every day when he falls asleep. When he can no longer maintain control of his body and his brain ceases to serve his soul as its instrument and he goes to sleep, consciousness disappears. A person can, of course, also fall unconscious from compassion. But that would be egotistical in the extreme, for then he could not surrender himself wholly to another's feelings. In that sense, falling unconscious would amount to a moral failing, whereas compassion is one of the two means whereby a person breaks free of himself without losing consciousness. Conscience is the other. It speaks to our innermost being; the listener follows the bidding of a voice that penetrates to where his ego lives. He subjects the self to something larger than itself. Compassion and conscience are thus forces that man is presently engaged in developing. Consciousness will build further on the foundation of the forms that compassion and conscience have thus far taken, going on to develop the spiritual vision that was previously attainable only in abnormal states of consciousness. To say this is not to make a prophecy but to state a fact determined by strictly scientific means.

As he realizes what effect compassion and conscience have upon the human soul. Twentieth Century man will have a certain direct experience in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness. He will understand something that might be put in the following way. We see that at birth man inherits something from his ancestors. Spiritual being though he is, he must incarnate physically in a given family and clothe himself in hereditary qualities. Long before we had such a thing as science, people were familiar with heredity, but they gave it an entirely different name. Their term for it was “original sin.” Anyone who understands what the Old Testament meant by original sin knows that the term conveyed a much fuller meaning than science has as yet ascribed to it because it applies to moral as well as physical qualities. Those in whom compassion and conscience have borne fruit will say, however, that although birth saddles us with predispositions that cannot be thrown off, we are also endowed with something that is not bound up with matter and that enables us to rise above ourselves and enter the spiritual world. There is one realm—the realm of one's own soul—where there will be direct spiritual vision. Human beings will affirm that although they are tied on the one hand to physical matter, on the other the soul harbors a radiant helper capable of lifting us beyond ourselves, it is a feeling that suggests the following comparison. Suppose there were someone who found it hard to believe that air everywhere surrounds us and fills every empty space. All he has to do to convince himself is to create a vacuum and observe how the air rushes into it. Just such an empty space is created in the soul by compassion and conscience, both of which detach us from our ego. Into that vacuum streams the spiritual entity whom we know as the Christ. This gives us personal experience of the fact that we can receive Christ into ourselves. Christ Who is present in the spiritual atmosphere just as air is present in the physical atmosphere and flows into every Space it finds empty.

On this high level, normal consciousness can indeed become spiritual vision, and no one who has this experience will consider it subjective. He will instead recognize that there must be such a possibility. He will realize that there was a time when it was still unknown and a moment when it became possible for the first time. He will be aware that what he is experiencing made its way down to earth from spiritual realms and united with it as the Christ impulse. This Christ impulse will inevitably come to be looked upon by Twentieth Century man as a force that entered earth evolution at a particular moment in time as a real historical event. That will usher in a period when it will no longer make sense to say that Christ is merely an idea. Instead, people will say that the Christ experience can be conceived as taking place only in this or that individual soul, just as philosophers maintain that there could be no such thing as color without eyes to perceive it. But colors do not owe their existence to perceiving eyes; the truth is rather that eyes are created by the light-world. The fact ought therefore to be stated thus: “No eyes without light.” It is equally true that without the historical Christ human beings could not experience Christ or the Christ-power within them. So they will know Christ to be a spiritual being and realize that this Being once actually lived on earth as a fact of history and sacrificed Himself to become one with the earth. They will be able to make their way into the spiritual world and discover Christ there.

Goethe often found just the right way of putting some fact or other, and perhaps we might borrow one of his sayings to express what we have been discussing here; it can serve us as a pointer. Goethe said that the eye was built by light to perceive the light: the eye was conjured forth by light from organs that were originally indeterminate. He goes on to make a further statement that calls attention to the impulse we harbor to discover God within us:

“Were not our eyes profoundly of the sun
How could they behold the light?
Were not our strength from God's own being won.
How could we feel so in Things divine delight.”

Just as the eye is conjured forth by light, so man's power to see God is conjured forth by God Himself as He lives and moves within and all about us. Those whose own Christ-likeness enables them to experience the Christ in beauty of feeling and insight will know that this is possible only because Christ once descended to earth and lived here, an historic figure. Just as the sun's light conjures forth eyes in human bodies so does the historic Christ conjure forth Christ-life in the souls of men.

“Unless the soul of man were Christ-like, how indeed could it experience the Christ? lf Christ had not lived as an historic figure how could man's soul ever come to know that most glorious feeling: feeling for the Christ?” Such will be the tenor of Twentieth Century comment. At the very moment when orthodox science reaches the point of denying Christ any historical reality, spiritual science will say without relying on documents that because man can experience Christ he knows that Christ did indeed live historically as a life-giving force, as the sun in that spiritual realm whence human evolution draws its nutriment.