The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is regarded by many people who have only been superficially introduced to it as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm of the world by way of knowledge, a realm that a serious scientist should not concern with. For in fact, anthroposophy seeks to find the means to penetrate through real knowledge into those supersensible worlds in which the immortal germ of the human soul is rooted, and from which the human soul can learn its true nature. Now it is well known that even today quite serious scientists are already dealing with all kinds of abnormal soul abilities that occur in many personalities, which indicate that in the human being, indeed, quite different world connections are revealed than those that can be mastered with the recognized scientific methods.

But these personalities, who preferably turn to the abnormal human soul and bodily abilities, which then register what comes to light through observation in a completely scientific way, seek laws for this, which alone only truly give the anthroposophical spiritual paths. Since it seeks to lead the ordinary, normal human cognitive faculties beyond their ordinary measure, the anthroposophical path of the spirit often appears to them as something fanciful, as something fantastic, and sometimes they even categorize it as superstition. But it cannot be said that those of a visionary, nebulous and mystical nature could find particular satisfaction in what is considered anthroposophy today.

This anthroposophy certainly does not want to take its scientific attitude and conscientiousness any less seriously and methodically than the recognized sciences themselves. And even if it is true that there are a great many people today who, simply because of a certain dissatisfaction with life, run to everything that is somehow called occult, it must be said that very soon such natures in particular will not be able to find satisfaction in the strict, methodical thinking that is sought in anthroposophy as well as in other fields of science. This does not, of course, prevent some people from simply dismissing it with a slight wave of the hand because of something unusual in anthroposophy, since those who are interested in anthroposophy belonged to the neurasthenic or hysterical types! And so it is somewhat difficult to speak briefly about the actual essence of anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. I would like to do it by attempting to subject the research paths of anthroposophy to a consideration before you today and then hint at some of the essential results.

From these words alone, you will have gathered that, at least in spirit, anthroposophy seeks to emulate and live up to the ideal of the strict scientific method that has emerged in the last three to four centuries of scientific research. Anthroposophy does not want to be in opposition to the legitimate paths of scientific knowledge. It only wants to extend what science gives for the sense realm into those realms that can be described as the supersensible world, but in doing so, if it does not want to proceed in a dilettantish manner, it faces two very formidable obstacles that hinder human knowledge.

The first shows how strict scientific knowledge comes up against certain limits, how it can indeed lead to satisfactory results when it deals with facts, but how it immediately encounters unsatisfactory ones when it wants to go beyond the realm of facts that can be perceived or combined by the human mind. We know that the most serious natural scientists are very particular that these boundaries should not be crossed by all kinds of fantasies. It is precisely in this respect that Anthroposophy initially places itself squarely on the ground of scientific thinking. It is clear, however, that the thinking that humans apply in ordinary life and in science is by no means only suitable for the realm of external facts. Now, some try to move on to pure thinking in order to fathom what lies behind the world of sense perceptions. But human thinking does not dwell only on facts. Rather, having been educated through the social culture of the last few centuries, it has gained its own character from these facts, and by leaving philosophical speculation, it enters into unsatisfied areas, into a kind of emptiness. This is the source of the many disputes among the philosophical systems of worldview. And it is the source of the feeling that if one philosophizes into the world with thinking that has escaped from facts, one can subjectively guide the direction and current of thinking, and therefore what can be achieved must remain unsatisfied because it must carry an element of subjective arbitrariness of the human being. That is the one pitfall of philosophical world view speculation.

But there are people who, out of the deepest longings of the human soul, who strive for the knowledge of the eternal, feel unsatisfied with mere knowledge of nature, who understand the unsatisfactory nature of philosophical speculation left to its own devices, and therefore turn to a more or less unclear mysticism, in the belief that they can penetrate into the depths of the human soul through inner contemplation and, through this inner contemplation within human nature, recognize the eternal of the human soul beyond death and birth.

Those who look at these often sincerely meant mystical aspirations with an open mind will also be able to see through the deceptions into which man falls precisely through these mystical contemplations. After all, what man takes in for his ordinary consciousness are only external impressions and perceptions. These communicate with the soul, they are presented. They are felt and sensed, and the results of them ignite the impulses of the will. But after all, everything that is in the soul through ordinary consciousness is a result of external perceptions. And those who believe that they can already bring something eternal out of the depths of the soul with this ordinary consciousness cannot examine the inner life of a person in an unbiased way. Those who know how impressions that the human soul felt decades ago, impressions that it was not fully aware of, are processed internally, transformed in the realm of ideas and imbued with emotional content, how then these ideas can be brought out of the soul after many years, having undergone a complete transformation. If one is not conscientious, one might succumb to the illusion that one has brought something divine out of the depths of the soul, when in fact one has only drawn up something transformed that had been slumbering there for a long time.

I had to mention these two pitfalls at the outset because, in an introductory lecture, I can only create a sense of the strictness with which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible world and how it seeks to avoid illusory paths in both directions. Thus, Anthroposophy recognizes that one can penetrate into supersensible worlds in a satisfactory way neither by the path of left-to-itself philosophical speculation nor by mysticism. By clearly recognizing this precondition for its own task, anthroposophy comes to say: Man, who is sometimes guided so surely by the practical tasks of life from birth to death and who is led by them into the triumphs of science, cannot, if he understands himself correctly, believe that he can penetrate into the supersensible worlds through all of this. Therefore, Anthroposophy does not appeal to these ordinary powers of knowledge, nor to abnormal ones either, but says to itself, there are dormant cognitive abilities in every human soul that can be brought up through conscientious, strictly regulated, methodical inner soul exercises. You have to have intellectual humility. You have to be able to say: I look back: what was I like when I was a very young child, when the world passed before my soul like a dream, how did I have to develop my abilities from week to week, from year to year, how did I have to bring them out of the depths of my human nature.

Now anthroposophy shows that it is possible to take all the soul abilities that have developed since childhood and, as a mature human being, to take their development into one's own hands and lead them to higher abilities. This is what distinguishes anthroposophy from the other fields of knowledge: the latter take the ordinary cognitive abilities into account, but anthroposophy begins where these sciences end, by developing these abilities into supersensible cognitive abilities.

This does not happen through some fantastic method, nor through external action, but rather in such a way that the same strict method prevails in its training, which is otherwise only known when one truly understands the essence of science. Developing anthroposophy is no easier than conducting research in an observatory or medical clinic. The exercises take years of soul-searching for the individual. I have described these in more detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science”. The main thing is to develop the human thought life of ordinary life, to strengthen it inwardly. Just as one can strengthen a muscle when it is used for work, so one can strengthen the imaginative life of the soul when it is directed in a certain direction. The strengthening of the human imaginative life should be brought to the center of your consciousness so that it occupies a manageable complex. It is necessary that the human being experiences this imagination as he otherwise only regards an external sensory perception. We must look at this external perception impartially, objectively, we must take it as it is. Exactly the same relationship must exist in the soul towards that which is practiced as meditative, concentrating thinking.

For this reason, it is good if the person does not bring any ideas from memory to these soul exercises, because these have become intertwined and transformed, but takes a completely new sentence or saying from some source. Then the content of the image is incorporated into the soul life, and all the soul activity seeks to concentrate on this single content. All the powers at work in the soul are directed towards this content, and this applies to all exercises. They must be subordinated to the human will; there must be nothing of suggestion or dream-like in the activity. As strictly as one is consciously devoted to a mathematical operation, so must one concentrate on a particular thought. This enables us to concentrate on a particular thought in a way that is otherwise only possible with external sensory impressions, so that the inner idea acquires exactly the same vividness and vividness as an external experience. Through these deliberate efforts of thought, one comes to face thought itself quite differently. Only now do we learn to recognize that our ordinary thought life, devoted to external facts or memories, is bound to the human organism. This new thinking is inwardly pictorial. One's soul life leads into a pictorial experience, into an experience that I have called imaginative, not because mere imaginings are to be achieved, but because the human soul can indeed enter into an inner plastic image life and because it feels in it how it becomes more and more free from the body and gains more and more disembodied soul life.

But one thing must be clear: at first everything that is attained is an inner subjective experience. Those who approach anthroposophy seriously will see the enormous difference between this new thinking and the morbid, hallucinatory. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of anthroposophy point out, in a misleading way, that the higher soul abilities that are praised can be nothing other than what predominates as dream-like soul experiences in visions and so on. In truth, anthroposophy is directed towards the opposite pole of what is pathological. There, the person loses their ordinary consciousness; the hallucinator lives in their hallucinations; the suggestible person lives solely in the experience of this dream-like, illusory state. Those who direct their soul life towards real imagination know that at first they only experience images, but they always have a second personality, a consciousness, alongside them, just as they do in ordinary life and in science. They have their human personality with everyday, healthy common sense, which can constantly control and subject to criticism what arises as a second, imaginative consciousness.

But what must go hand in hand with such exercises, so that not only the concentration of thoughts is practiced, the directing of the soul's abilities to some complex of ideas, so that one may gain an inner strength, is the same arbitrariness in the opposite activity. One will soon notice when concentrating in this way that these thoughts take up one's attention, that one can become absorbed in them. Now one must learn to use one's free will in such a way that one can bring such ideas out of one's consciousness again and suppress them just as arbitrarily as one has taken them in. On the one hand, we see the invigoration of the soul life in the absorbed complex of ideas, and on the other hand, the redirection of the same. This empty consciousness is not a state of sleep, but a full consciousness that has consciously eliminated a mental image.

Once you have done these exercises, you will be able to survey your life from birth onwards, but inwardly. We have a current flowing in the depths of our soul from which we can bring up one or the other memory, but usually only in fragments and temporal fragments. But by reaching into the imaginative life of the soul, we grasp the individual elements of it all at once in a tableau, we have before us the basic forces that form it and how they have been working in man since birth. It is as if the time during which we usually review our memories had become a single moment. This is the first supersensible experience we have. We see through the entire stream of our life on earth. Man feels within himself a second supersensible body that cannot be developed with the physical one, it can only be recognized through imagination. Furthermore, it is something that is not limited as a single form in space, but something that runs in time, although it can be seen in a single tableau. I would like to call this second supersensible corporeality of the human being the formative forces body, the etheric body. One comes to see oneself inwardly, how one inwardly guides one's abilities, how one comes to one's moral forces, and so on. One learns to recognize oneself as a whole human being in the course of time. One cannot paint this formative body other than as a flash of lightning that can only be captured in a moment, as everything in constant motion allows only a momentary reproduction, as one cannot philosophically speculate on what one directly perceives if one continues in the described manner.

Once the soul faculties have been strengthened, it becomes possible to suppress everything comprehended in its totality, as previously the individual pictorial components, so that one now produces an empty consciousness and becomes capable of exposing oneself to a world and waiting to see what now enters into this world. What enters the human soul is quite different from what is present in the world we are accustomed to in the senses. For what now enters the empty consciousness is the supersensible, the eternal spiritual of the human soul. One has received the power to survey the spiritual-soul realm! One experiences the moment of each individual memory, as it was before the soul had connected with a body through conception or birth. One experiences the spiritual-soul as it was when the human being was still rooted in the spiritual-soul. In this way, one gains an insight into what is given to the human being not only as a result of his physical body, but also in terms of the forces of heredity. One sees how these forces work their way into the physical body, but what was already there before it took possession of the body, before the first appearance of the body in a spiritual-soul world. We arrive at the creative aspect of the soul-spiritual by juxtaposing the mortal human body and that which works into the forces of inheritance. Then we will come ever closer to an understanding of the immortal part of the human being. This level of knowledge is the inspired one. Just as the breath is first in space and then processed in the body, so the spiritual-soul enters into the human mortal body, and by recognizing it, we speak of inspired knowledge.

In this way, the human being has gained the preparation not only to strengthen his world of thoughts, but also to advance his world of will through a spiritual training that goes beyond what is possible in ordinary life. On the one hand, it must be pointed out that one can only penetrate into the supersensible worlds by transforming the thinking of ordinary life, and so one recognizes that anthroposophy begins where ordinary science must end.

However, one only reaches one side of the supersensible existence. Just as the life of feeling is found between will and thinking in the complete human soul, so too must this life of feeling and will be further developed in a similar way. Again, it must be practiced with strict conscientiousness, just as one can also tear the will away from the human body. This then takes us to the other side, to the side of death, which leads beyond death to the human soul. The exercises of the will strive into the supersensible realm, and must therefore be linked to those parts that already fall from the supersensible into ordinary life. This, in turn, can be achieved in a wide variety of ways; I refer the reader to the books already mentioned. I would like to give only a few examples here, by means of which the liberation of the human will from its bondage to the body can be achieved.

In human life, the impulse of the will is permeated by our instinctual life. But we can arrive at exercises of the will precisely by considering how everything that is isolated in the intellect becomes a unified whole in the soul. When we think, the element of the will lives in our thinking. If we consider how our inherited thinking unfolds in ordinary life, we find that It adheres to the sequence, the course of events. We abandon ourselves to our thinking, more or less passively, to the course of events. Even if we free this thinking logically, it happens in such a way that we want to understand the course of events logically with our logic, but we do not move away from it! Only when we tear thought away from its usual mode of activity, when, for example, we imagine a drama piece by piece from the last scene to the first, or when we review the day in the evening backwards to the morning, going into as much detail as possible, so that we fully engage our soul life, or when, for example, when climbing several floors, we follow the staircase backwards to the first one, and thus gradually make a strong willpower a habit, you also tear the will away from ordinary life and achieve a transformation of the soul's will, until you learn to watch your own actions as you can watch a foreign personality. One must acquire a certain skill in walking alongside oneself and controlling oneself like a stranger, in exercising the will to undertake things that one then conscientiously carries out. In this way one comes to detach this will so completely from the physical that one knows: You now want outside of your body! The life of feeling then connects on both sides, it transforms like the life of thought and will.

But since it is the most intimate part of the human soul, it should not be artificially developed, but this life of feeling follows human development into the supersensible world.

We learn to develop the necessary enthusiasm for what we encounter in the spiritual worlds, seemingly for objective reasons. When the will is freed in the above way, one reaches the third stage of supersensible knowledge, which is called intuitive. There the word is applied when the soul is truly able to place itself in the spiritual world, free of the body. By ascending to this intuition, man becomes acquainted with that which continues to have an effect in him after it has come into the human body as his soul and spirit through conception and birth. He learns how the soul detaches itself from the human being, what is spiritual and soul-like, what is independent and immortal, what enters the gate of death when the body is left to decay – then what is intuitively seen enters the spiritual and soul world.

In the nineties, I tried to address the problem of freedom in my “Philosophy of Freedom” and to show that the question is not posed correctly. The truth is that man is dependent for a large number of actions, but that he stands out, develops into a free personality by learning to shape his will impulses, grasped in pure thinking. Only in these areas, in the impulses that underlie our truly free actions, do we have a presentiment of what also lives objectively in the human being and what enters the spiritual-soul world after death. In “Philosophy of Freedom” I called this the moral intuition. A higher stage of development is formed by cognitive intuition, in which we gain a complete overview of immortality, that the spiritual soul enters through the gate of death to further paths in the spiritual-soul world. After recognizing the eternal nature of the human soul in this way, one also gets to know the soul's environment before it enters the body and after it has left it. Not only does the outer world of the senses open up, but the developed powers of the senses can penetrate into the human soul. They are able not only to bring up what is nebulous and mystical, but also to see the truly eternal in the human soul. By having the spiritual and soul life of the human being concretely before us, we can distinguish the two worlds from each other, what belongs to the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. By getting to know these two worlds, one learns, precisely through the characterized intuition, to know something else in the human being, which connects with human feeling and is recognized as the essence of human feeling. Then the observation extends to the past, in that one not only beholds the soul before birth. Rather, one looks at the repeated earth lives, at what the spiritual world has gone through. One gains the confidence that worlds will continue to be experienced in the future, in repeated earth lives of progressive development. This becomes clear to him who beholds the affiliation of the human soul to the supersensible world.

And he recognizes that which rises to a higher existence of forces, which carries the acquisitions of both worlds from life to life. But he recognizes not only the human entity, but also the spiritual-soul entity, free of illusion, which lies within the sense world, but which is not recognizable to the ordinary faculty of perception.

By developing these abilities over time, one learns to look at this physical-sensory world, not as if one could no longer fully trust common sense, but by developing the second personality alongside it, which has spiritual-soul senses that can see what it sees physically-sensually, also in a soulful way. One also learns to look at the cosmos differently. However, I am coming to something here where anthroposophy is even more antipathetic!

For example, in our ordinary lives we face the sun as a limited spatial being, we describe it in science in the familiar way. If we now acquire the higher cognitive abilities, then the sun presents itself to us in a different way. We learn to speak of something that is not limited within its contours. We get to know the sun-like, which permeates everything, which belongs to the human environment, which fills and permeates the world, which penetrates into human life. We can also clearly recognize this transformed sun-like quality in ourselves. It proves to be as related to us as any external object of perception. We come to understand how much that is sunny enters into the human being, how it strengthens all growth forces, how it makes us young, keeps us young, accompanies us through life, makes our nourishment a process, permeates us in ascending development — that is the result of the spiritual-sunny.

In contrast to this, we recognize the lunar. It permeates everything that is already stored in us from birth as the forces of aging, withering, dying, as descending life. From the mid-thirties onwards, the disintegrating forces in the human being gain the upper hand, the degenerative, retrogressive, morbid — all this lies in the lunar. We learn to recognize how everything in the cosmos affects the human being. In this way, we can see what we recognize from the relationship between man and the cosmos, beyond the stars. We arrive at a spiritual-soul cosmos through direct observation, not through analogical conclusions! There are no illusions here. Life immediately distinguishes reality from fantasies. Just as one can philosophically distinguish the mere idea of the heat of steel from the concrete touch of the hot iron rod, so does experience in the spiritual realm distinguish the merely conceivable from that which really is. And just as one progresses from imagination to inspiration, so one knows that one is progressing to a real world.

Thus, in a systematic development of the human powers of knowledge, the spiritual-soul cosmos with its immortal beings enters the ordinary world of the cosmos of the senses. In this way, by beholding the deeper-lying forces of the world and of human nature, one also comes to recognize how that which is in human nature transforms. As supersensible knowledge is attained, what otherwise appears in sharp contours dissolves. The human heart, lungs and so on dissolve into processes. One can only speak of the brain-lung-heart process. What is otherwise sharply defined in space becomes mobile. In this we see the sun-like and moon-like forces at work, and here the potential of anthroposophy is extended to include the fertilization of the individual sciences.

By looking into the process of becoming and building up in the human organism, into the becoming and degenerating plant and animal beings, by discovering the forces of the supersensible in the realm of dead stone, we find the relationships of the inner human being to the inner forces of the cosmos. There is a way in which anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the medical element. This is why we were able to start therapy with pathology. In Stuttgart and Dornach, we have a therapeutic institute based on anthroposophical principles. And it is possible to gain insights into irregular degradation processes and to recognize how this disease can be healed by building up forces. Instead of a medicine that only tries things out, we have a healing art that, on the one hand, takes in both the healthy and the diseased and, on the other, the healing. Here we have an example of how anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences. [There is also a physical and biological institute in Stuttgart.] On the basis of scientific research, the supernatural is incorporated into the results. These forces also have a significance for technology and for practical life in a new form.

Anthroposophy also has a fruitful effect on the artistic side. This is manifested at the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science near Basel. When Anthroposophy draws on the deeper human soul forces, it has an effect on and from the whole person. Just as the nut is governed by the same forces within as it is in the shell, so the artistic framework that Anthroposophy needs must be like the shell around the kernel, arising out of the same impulses from which ideas flow when they are born of spiritual insight. This is how the new architectural style in architecture, sculpture and painting came about. In a further progression, it realizes what Goethe felt in his soul when he said: When nature begins to reveal its true secrets to us, we feel the deepest longing for its deepest interpreter, art. — Art is a secret manifestation of the deepest laws of nature. Not through allegories or abstract symbols, but through the creation of real art forms, it shows that anthroposophy is not a theory, but direct life that can have a fertilizing effect in all areas.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart shows what can be achieved in the knowledge of the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. The great educators do not stand in opposition, but by grasping the full human being in the child, the highest pedagogical achievement in education is already achieved. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view, and religious education is also given in the various denominations. The Waldorf school is an institution in which the practical implementation of teaching from morning to evening is realized with pedagogical and didactic skill based on anthroposophical knowledge. Teachers know what is developing in each human being at each age, they can read the curriculum and teaching objectives from the human being, they do not graft anything into him, but they develop in the child what already resides in the human being.

Finally, I would like to point out how the scientific world view, due to its one-sidedness in social terms, has reached a kind of dead end. What is to take effect in social life cannot, as Marx says, work according to abstract laws; one must look at the whole human being, the fully developed human being. Today, the one-sidedness that comes from the man of sense and intellect has already become a fact, as we see in Eastern Europe. It is this that makes us long for an understanding of the whole human being, of body, soul and spirit. Only that which has a real effect on life in the social sphere can have a healing and salutary effect.

Anthroposophy will continue to develop in this direction. During the various presentations at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart in the summer of 1921, it was shown how experimental education must be supplemented by the results of spiritual anthroposophical research, and how a complete education can only be formed from this. The bankruptcy of national economics was demonstrated by Director Leinhas. He showed where the real life-giving forces for a healthy social organization must flow from. Anthroposophy does not want to lead to a mystical, nebulous cloud-cuckoo-land, to those who despise ordinary everyday life, but the spirit is so powerfully grasped that we can also work creatively in the physical-practical , because the spirit that created matter should not flee from it, it, which is life practice, can submerge everything in the physical-material existence, so that it becomes more and more perfect in its further development.

And so anthroposophy wants to offer the knowledge that a large part of our contemporaries yearns for, even if unconsciously. I would like to summarize everything that has been said so that I can characterize the essence of anthroposophy.

When we have the whole human being before us, we look at him through our senses themselves as a sensual being according to his outer form. But he does not stand before us in the one-sided revelation of a new being. In him lives a soul permeated by spirit. The human being needs a conception of life that permeates him from the spirit. In the last few centuries, we have achieved great things in the field of natural science. However, we are still far from realizing its ideals. While we fully recognize the achievements of science, anthroposophy recognizes that this science is concerned with the outer formations of the world. Just as the soul permeates and spiritualizes the human being, science also needs something that is inspired by the spirit. Anthroposophy further develops science. For it wants to be nothing other than the spiritual, blissful element for the body of natural science. And just as we encounter people in life with souls permeated by life and spirit, so anthroposophy strives for natural science to achieve knowledge that can gradually become a soul permeated by spirit.

Somebody who speaks about spiritual science today cannot count on general approval. Since all habitual ways of thinking of our time have grown out of a ground which is different from that of spiritual science.

Since the aurora of modern natural sciences, the essential progress of human mind is based on the observation of the outer world and on the application of the reason to this outer world. Spiritual science has completely to acknowledge natural sciences and their results. However, today we live again in a time in which mind and soul of the human being long more and more for an answer of those questions that exceed the sensory view and rise to the creative powers of existence, and look for them in the spiritual.

Spiritual science is based not only on quite different requirements but also on another way of research than natural sciences apply. However, one must not believe that spiritual science contradicts natural sciences in any sense. On the contrary. Even if it takes its starting point from quite different requirements and research methods, spiritual science—understood properly—completely complies with the scientific results.

Natural sciences are based on the outer view. They have achieved great things also with the development of those tools that enable us to look into the physically smallest things. However, if natural sciences want to do their task, they have to limit themselves to that which approaches the human being from without which one can grasp with the senses and understand with the reason. Knowledge of spirit can establish only on an inner deepening of the human soul by which the soul discovers cognitive abilities and forces in itself that exist neither in the usual day life nor in the outer science. Yes, if this usual science were intermingled in ambiguous way with spiritual-scientific methods, it would get only to unjustified results in its area. Still one will find if one deeper invades into the matter that the same kind of thinking, the same logic that our natural sciences apply one also applies in spiritual science. However, we have to realise that the human soul itself is the only instrument to invade into the supersensible world. It is not allowed to stop at the everyday life, but requires that it can deeper invade into the things from the point of view of the everyday life. So that this can happen, so that the human being can become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary that the soul behaves in its whole inner life different than it was accustomed before it entered the way to spiritual research.

Our soul life proceeds in such a way that we think and feel certain things, that we have mental pictures in our soul. Which sense and purpose do we connect with this soul life? We mostly connect the purpose with it to get to know the outer world and to orient ourselves in this sensory world. The spiritual researcher is concerned with something else. He has to select single mental pictures, sensations, ideas, or impressions that can be useful for him. I would like to take a comparison.

Let us assume that we compare the whole soul life that proceeds in manifold mental pictures, which change at every moment, with many corns that exist in ears on a field. The owner of the field selects some of the corns. While he lets the other corns achieve their goal to serve as food, he selects single ones that should serve as seeds and have to produce new fruits.

In a quite similar way, the spiritual researcher has to behave with his soul life. While, otherwise, the mental pictures proceed without surveying them, he has to select single mental pictures that he does not use for the outer cognition of the world. One calls that concentration, meditation, and contemplation. Which sense does one connect with these words? We want to figure out the process that the spiritual researcher carries out.

At certain times, the spiritual researcher must try to turn away his attention completely from the outside world. Then he also suppresses all worries of life, all desires, affects, and passions. He has to empty the soul, to cause a kind of empty consciousness. He selects single mental pictures of his soul life or of spiritual science whose contents do not matter and is engrossed in these mental pictures—not in their contents, they do not matter. However, the spiritual researcher behaves in such a way that he moves a mental picture arbitrarily in the centre of his consciousness, and calls all soul forces and retains this one mental picture in his consciousness, namely for longer time and with all inner strain. It only matters that the soul makes an effort that everything is concentrated upon one point. If you have to do any work where you have always to strain your arm and if this work has a purpose, you must exert yourself constantly to fulfil the purpose of this work. However, if you want to strengthen your muscles, it may just mattes not to reach this or that purpose, but to evoke the forces that exert the muscles, so that they develop. That also applies to the soul forces with meditation and concentration, namely with forces which are different from those which one applies in the usual everyday life. We never exert our souls, so to speak, concerning the forces that we consider here if we live in the everyday life. We have to evoke deeper soul forces to concentrate on a mental picture. That is the point that we strain the soul in such a way that we also have the inner will for it.

If we get a mental picture because we can be stimulated from without, then the mental picture is caused in our soul without our assistance. It is there—we have not produced it. The mental pictures that are attached to worries, to desires, and passions originate without any effort. They are to no avail to us if we want to make our soul the instrument of the higher world. Not that is the point that we have a mental picture, but that we exert ourselves to move the mental picture in the centre [of our consciousness]. If the human being calls his deepest soul forces in patience and perseverance this way, something new happens for the soul. You can find the details about that in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. This is something that today many people do not want to believe that for the soul something new can happen. We can compare this new to a moment which takes place in the human soul life [at a certain time]. The little child lives up to the second, third years consciously, but not self-consciously. One may say in a way that the consciousness of the child sleeps, before in the child the moment comes where it knows: I am an ego. This is a kind of awakening. It is a kind of awakening also if in the described way the soul is raised to another level of existence if it is made an instrument to behold into the spiritual world.

What you experience in your soul if you carry out such exercises can be compared with something with which it is similar on the one hand and from which it is, on the other hand, quite different: with falling asleep. How does this usual sleeping state approach the human being? I do not go into the details of the scientific hypotheses of sleep. Without special scientificity, I talk only about that which the human being experiences in the everyday life falling asleep.

We know that at the moment of falling asleep the senses no longer deliver impressions. The mind starts darkening. The human being transitions into a state in which his body is not active. At first spiritual science has to say—what logic already confirms—that the whole human being does not exist in the sleeping human being, but that the real human being leaves the body in sleep and is free from the body, that the human being is beyond his body. Now this is a hypothesis at first, but spiritual science verifies this hypothesis as a reasonable truth. Natural sciences more and more approach that which spiritual science has to say at this point. Du Bois-Reymond states that natural sciences can understand the sleeping but never the conscious-wake human being.

If one does not want to be so illogical to state that every evening all desires and passions disappear and originate anew in the morning from nothing, one has to suppose that they are still there. However, within the physical body they do not exist. This means that the human being is with his inner being beyond his body. However, this inner being is of supersensible nature, hence, one cannot see it.

There may be people who say that just certain things take place in the human being and cause other processes so that the soul life takes place.—Someone who speaks that way is in the same position as someone who believes that one can understand the nature of the air investigating the lung and its activity. One can understand the air if one investigates it beyond the body. Then it penetrates into the human body; the lung is there to use the air. Natural sciences will just discover more and more that one can compare the inner activities of the human body during sleep with the inner activities of lung and heart. It is an inner bodily work. However, just as little as the lung produces the air, just as little is that which penetrates as soul life the organism more and more a product of the body; rather it penetrates into the body, and it is beyond the body from falling asleep up to awakening.

One can still argue many things against that. One can understand these things only really, if one can prove by facts that that is something essential which leaves the body in sleep as one supposes it.

This just happens with the spiritual researcher if he does those soul exercises that I have discussed just now. Thereby he causes that soul condition which is free of the body. While the spiritual researcher refrains from that which his body provides for him, he causes that—completely awake—he leaves the body unexploited. During the soul activity, the body must not be active like in sleep. The senses must be quiet; the worries and passions that the outer life stimulate must be quiet as they are quiet, otherwise, only in sleep. The spiritual researcher causes a completely empty consciousness. Then, however, he puts one single mental picture in the centre of his soul life. For it, he needs forces that slumber, otherwise, in the depths of the soul and that he strengthens now by exercises so that he can perceive them.

What the spiritual researcher experiences he has just to experience if it should be conceded as fact. It resembles the sleep under the mentioned circumstances: it is connected neither with the movements of the body nor with the outer senses and the reason. While such state is caused, otherwise, only in sleep, the spiritual researcher gets around to getting to know his soul from a new side with his exercises. He knows, there is an inner life of the soul, even if the soul renounces everything that comes from the body. One may prove ever so much with some outer reasons that the human soul cannot live free of the body—the insight that, nevertheless, it is able to do it originates only if the body-free state is caused. Then one knows that one has a soul life that is completely different from the former soul life that the body has caused. One would like to say, this is a basic experience which the spiritual researcher attains if he has done such exercises long enough if he has already conjured up strong forces from his soul. In my book How Does One Attains Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, you can read up further details about that. I would like to describe the typical of this experience.

If one has carried out the exercises long enough, a particular inner experience appears. Either one awakes from the depth of sleep, or, one feels tempted to pause in the middle of the day life. What happens then is a kind of pictorial experience. Then you have the feeling that something goes forward, as if a lightning has struck you. What goes forward?

The human being thinks possibly that way: now you feel what you have always felt as your body, filled with physical elements, and is taken away from you.—Indeed, you realise now that strong forces are necessary to keep upright compared with such an experience. One feels that which one has always called approaching the gate of death. One is vividly acquainted with that which appears at death. Indeed, now changed feelings and mental pictures appear in the soul. Now you know what it means to stand no longer by yourself as it was the case before. Now you feel the soul transformed so that you know, it is not dark and quiet, but is internally active if you renounce any co-operation of the physical body.

This experience is very significant. It is a dramatic experience for the soul. It is something about which the soul says, whatever I have experienced up to now in life, I cannot compare the significance of this experience that sometimes shakes the soul. A lot of that which I have felt up to now only as slumbering in the backgrounds of existence of which I believe that I can only anticipate it, takes place before my eyes. Hence, I know now: yes, the human being is connected in his innermost core with that world which is behind the sensory world and which, actually, the sensory world veils only.

However, you know something else. You know that it was necessary to do such exercises, to strengthen the soul. You know this, because you realise that to the experience of the described a certain faculty of judgement is necessary and a kind of moral courage to maintain yourself. The soul forces that you have taken out of its depths give this courage and faculty of judgement. You find the further details of this way again described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. If you have arrived at this point, you just know: unless you have prepared yourself, you would approach this event with two qualities which are doubtful to the highest degree if they appear in the context with these experiences and which you get to know only at this point of soul development: self-love, or more precisely, self-sense, and a certain fear and insecurity of those regions which are behind the sensory world. Self-sense or self-love plays a big role in the usual life, but the soul can always master them. Bad habits appear in our souls, and we can change them. Unless we want to change them, we can at least feel that we could change them. Compared with a force of nature, flash and thunder, we do not have the feeling that we can change it. If we entered without preparation into the state that I have just described, you would realise that you have strengthened, indeed, your soul forces, but that you have also brought out something else, namely reinforced self-love. Only if you have also strengthened the other soul force, you are able to decrease this self-sense. Just as little as you are able to resist flash and thunder, just as little you are able to resist self-sense, to snatch it away from the soul life.

However, if you have made the soul an instrument for the spiritual world in the right way, then the survey of the picture enables you to recognise this self-sense in its true form. Since this picture shows something else than one could describe it with few words. It shows everything that we have called our ego, our soul up to now as put beyond ourselves. It shows what we have wanted up to now from which you suffer, with which you are pleased. Now you know: I have to place down all that from myself if I want to develop that out of myself, which can lead me into the supersensible world.

You get to know yourself as soul at this point of existence only. You know now what it means to face yourself with true self-knowledge; you know that you retain nothing of that for a higher knowledge which you have called your ego up to now—you have to cast off it and retain it as something external. Facing yourself objectively, considering yourself as another person or as an object is a preparation for penetrating into the spiritual world. However, this requires that you have also developed the strong forces to defeat the reinforced self-sense. Someone who has not done this would experience infinite pain if he realised that he has to cast off and renounce everything that he has suffered in order to behold into the spiritual world.—Nothing of that which serves to you in the world seems suitable to lead you into a higher world.

Hence, it is necessary that you defeat self-sense. Something else yet appears. If the human being does this experience, he notices that his whole security of life was contained in that which you have to set aside from yourself, which you ignore now. There fear seizes you, because you must leave behind for a while what gave you security up to now. Now it is as if you lose ground. Only if you have attained other forces, you do not have fear but courage to penetrate into the unknown land of spirit. What lives there in the soul as fear appears quite different to you. The soul life is something very complex. Only a part of it is aware; another part rests always down in the depths of the soul that the spiritual researcher brings out with his power. The human being only knows a part of his soul life; other parts work into the usual soul life. However, the human being knows nothing about them. Yes, the usual soul life often is there to blanket what rests in the concealed depths of the soul. The human being helps himself to get over them, while he deceives himself. For that who knows the soul a phenomenon is very interesting which appears to the human being of the present paradoxical, but it is true.

In the present, we see people, materialists, who do not want to search the spirit in its true figure on the way of spiritual life. Why does one become a materialist? If you understand, why this is the case, you become tolerant on one side towards the materialist because you realise that under certain conditions the soul cannot be different if it does not receive the suggestion to come out of materialism. Since that who investigates the soul of the materialist notices that in its depths nothing but the fear of the spiritual world prevails.

It is that way. Even if the materialists resent that, it is in such a way. They are afraid in the depths of their souls without knowing it; they are afraid of the spiritual world because they have a dark feeling of the fact that they lose ground if they leave the sure ground of reason. They are afraid of it, and, therefore, they blanket this fear with materialist theories, as one dazes himself against fear. The materialist monism is nothing but dazing fear in the depths of the soul. The true psychologist will be able to recognise this always. In the materialist-monistic theories is not only that which the materialists say, but always fear is visible between the lines. The reinforced soul power must overcome this fear, and then the human being dares to jump over the abyss and to penetrate into the spiritual area.

Then the human being becomes aware that, indeed, his soul life splits for the experience of the spiritual world in a way. What does this splitting mean? Expressly I would like to emphasise that the true spiritual researcher should not be a dreamer or romanticist who wants now to leave the sensory world completely and to live in the spiritual world. He has to attract that again about which he knows that he must cast off it for the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must manage to move about freely between beholding the spiritual world and living in the sensory world, otherwise he is no spiritual researcher but a daydreamer for the outer world. He reaches this if he takes a healthy soul life as starting point.

Hence, you can convince yourselves that the real spiritual researchers are sober in the everyday life because they have realised objectively, not only subjectively that it is necessary to consider everything soberly to be no romanticists. They position themselves in the usual life as practical people. They know how to keep the balance between the usual life praxis and the life in the spiritual world. It is very important just to stress this point because the soul life must split, as well as a big number of corns are separated from a few which are not consumed, but are used as seeds.

Thus, the human being realises that his soul life is not completely separated from himself. He sees as it were a part of this usual soul life beside himself; he feels it as something that cannot place him in the spiritual world: the corns that serve as food. However, the other part bridges the abyss. This is that part which develops from concentration; it is that part which is used as seeds for the soul life that goes to the spiritual world. So that it develops healthily, it is necessary that the spiritual researcher is able at this point to behave different from that who—with a pathological soul life—has reached this special point which he learns to feel as very painful.

That which approaches the spiritual researcher if he has fulfilled all preconditions is that he does no longer need from a certain time on to concentrate upon certain mental pictures, but they appear spontaneously from his empty consciousness which show a new world. A new world fills his consciousness. For the outer viewer this world becomes very similar to the pathological hallucinations. However, they are only externally similar. A pathological soul life leads to hallucinations. The healthiest soul life of the spiritual researcher leads to the world of pictures or Imaginations. We realise with that who sees an imagery emerging with an unhealthy soul life that he believes with an inner force in their reality that he believes that his delusions are true. Many of us know that one can dissuade a person who is ill this way often from that which he sees with the eyes but not from the “reality” of his hallucinations. Why is this the case? Because just in such pathological soul life which appears with such strong force also the self-sense increases. The person concerned is one with his mental pictures; he produces them from his soul; they are the silhouettes of the soul life, they are compressed imagination. Because he himself is that, he believes so firmly in them. Since the human being must believe absolutely in himself if he wants to stand firmly in the world—and then he believes in his visions like in an objective world.

The spiritual researcher has to attain defeating the self-sense that he has now to remove that imagery arbitrarily again which can work so blissfully on him. If anybody does the exercises in the right way about which I have spoken, he attains the ability to extinguish this imagery—which appears really as a spiritual world as in the morning the sun appears on the horizon. The exercise has to consist of the special will training that one not only gets around to evoking this imagery but also to extinguishing it again—any knowledge is based on it in the higher world. This is the difference compared to the pictures of the pathological soul life. If the exercises are done, the human being attains the peculiar force to make his will gradually stronger and then to diminish it again. One does not have this ability in the usual life. One can make efforts and refrain from them. One has to learn this only by training that one makes the will as strong as I have described it. If the whole imagery has emerged, one must consciously weaken the will more and more which has conjured up this world and must be able to let sink this whole world. However, one is able to do this only after defeating the self-sense.

Think only what you demand from your soul. You demand that you assert yourself at first to evoke such a world; then, however, you must extinguish it again. You cannot enjoy it. You must see the whole world, which we have developed by external strains, sinking in the depths of your consciousness as mental pictures that you have forgotten. If you have attained this, you enter only into the true spiritual world, the world of spiritual beings and facts. The spiritual researcher knows by the preceding exercises that he lives now in the spiritual world. If he did not have acquired this ability to let disappear all that again, he could not be a free observer of the spiritual world. You can compare that with a situation where you look at a thing and cannot turn away from it. Turning your attention to and away from something corresponds in the area of spiritual observation to attaining the impressions and removing them. If the human being has come to this point, not only the splitting takes place which I have already described but he faces two separate areas as it were. From one area he experiences that he has to set aside it from himself; he feels, it is that which he has estimated up to now as his only possession about which he also recognises that he casts off it at death. A certain courage is necessary to grasp this in real knowledge. Since the human being recognises that he must learn to deprive himself of something willingly to which he is attached and which is snatched away from him usually only at death.

Then he gets to know that as it were the fruit that is chosen as seed is the human essence which is not taken up in the physical body, but which is only the basis of it. The essence is due not to the ancestors, but originates from the spiritual world; it uses what the parents give to the external-bodily existence.

Spiritual science points out that in the human being probably the qualities of the ancestors live that, however, it is an inexact consideration if one says that the human being is only composed of that which he inherited from the parents. Physically the human being bears the characteristics of his physical heredity, but something spiritual-mental can come only from something spiritual-mental. You can get to know the spiritual-mental core this way. Because the human being is an internally closed individuality, you are not concerned with something generic. That is, the spiritual-mental core is rooted in the individual of the human being. However, with it we realise that teaching of repeated lives on earth.

This spiritual-mental that we bear in ourselves and through the gate of death is rooted in a former life on earth and further ones, until there comes a time when it lived for the first time. What rests in this part of our being walks through the gate of death and lives then in a supersensible existence. From this, the human being enters into a new earthly life while he proceeds towards the line of heredity.

You realise, the logic is completely the same as in natural sciences. He who wants to fight against it does only not know about which he talks, actually. Since if that who stands on scientific ground wanted to say: nevertheless, one can prove that the qualities are inherited from the parents—, one must answer to him: as far as natural sciences can prove it, one can only say: it is true!—If, however, the materialist monist says, because one has inherited these qualities from the ancestors, they could not be due to that which the human being has acquired in a former life as forces which appear in his current life again, then one has to answer, one can say just as well, the human being is wet because he has fallen into water.—The one is true because the other is true. It is true that the human being has inherited certain qualities from his ancestors—it is true, however, also that he was attracted by these parents because he has to appropriate the forces which he can get just from these parents. Something spiritual causes something spiritual only.

Someone who wants to look properly at this matter admits that today spiritual science has to go forward as Francesco Redi did who had to establish the sentence as a scientific truth: life can only originate from life.—Spiritual science will experience the same destiny with reference to the acceptance of this truth. People did not accept this sentence with pleasure. Only by the skin of the teeth, Francesco Redi escaped from the destiny of Giordano Bruno. Today one does no longer talk of heresy, but today one calls the persons daydreamers who have to announce something new. Today one has milder methods than burning at the stake to prevent what must come into our civilisation. However, it will happen in such a way as it always happened in such cases. What one called pipe dream at first becomes self-evident afterwards.

I have already said, one is not surprised about opposition. The thing is in such a way that not only those who deal a little with these things, but also those who want to enter into the spiritual world with good will do not yet want to understand the teaching of the repeated lives on earth.

With the teaching of reincarnation, we face the question of immortality quite unlike if one judges it concerning an infinite time. Then you face immortality in such a way that you see it establishing link about link. One speaks of the fact that the soul lives on because one realises that in one life on earth the seed of another life is enclosed

We see a human being growing up from his earliest childhood in affectionate surroundings, and we see another human being growing up in surroundings that can work only badly on him. Why is it that way? There we must consider the one and the other life caused by a former life on earth. Even if it sounds hopeless, on the one hand, that every misfortune is self-inflicted, one has to say, and nevertheless that good luck and misfortune concern something else if one considers good luck and misfortune from the only entitled viewpoint.

What I mean with it, I would like to show by an example. An eighteen-year-old young man whose father was very rich led a loose life. He wanted to learn nothing, enjoyed life only, and was on the way to become a scapegrace. Then his father died, and at the same time, his property got lost. The young man was thereby forced to learn something, to work, and he became a capable person. There he had to say to himself, what seemed to be misfortune was good luck for me.

Thus, we have to say to ourselves in a misfortune, we have determined ourselves for this misfortune from a former life; we have led ourselves to this destiny. Then it is unjustified to judge a misfortune, while we experience it. One has to consider it as the result of a former imperfection. We have to say to ourselves, the soul would not be able to develop completely if it did not experience this misfortune. The misfortune can be a school of perfection.

If anybody has already here attained a knowledge that he has gained in life, and we ask him, you have experienced grief and pain, joy, and bliss—which experience would you rather give away?—If the human being contemplated about the true issue, he would answer: I accept joy and bliss gratefully; but from the sufferings, I have just received my knowledge: I would never have become that who I am.—One judges suffering different from the viewpoint of the usual sensations. Thus, one must not call the teaching of repeated lives on earth hopeless. What is given to us with this teaching? The question of immortality and the question of destiny. The question of immortality is solved because we know that this life carries the seed of the following life in itself. Thus, the whole life combines to an immortal one quite scientifically. The question of destiny is solved because destiny is necessary for development. Trying to understand death and pain means strictly speaking that you develop interest for the big riddles of life.

In 1909, a great scholar, Charles W. Eliot, held a lecture about the future of religion. He admitted that the human being has to get from the natural processes to assuming spirit and soul; however, he also demanded that the future worldview must not take death and pain as starting point. He said, the worldviews of the past talked about pain and grief. The sufferings are reduced with joy. A worldview should talk only about joys and overcome pains.—One would like to agree with him, because, indeed, it would be desirable that the human being could speak also about a joyful material life. However, if the human being wants to refrain from death and pain and says, I do not want to build up a worldview on grief and pain, I want to accept a joyful life only, then one must answer to him, even if you accept a joyful life, death and grief come automatically, they approach you, they enter into your life. Only such a worldview can really cope with the riddles, which, like spiritual science, encompasses suffering and joy because both are means of perfection. A worldview can only cope with death if it understands that the spiritual-mental core has to cast off the cover that it has around itself as the plant seed has to cast off the withering leaves and blossoms. To enter into the next life we have to develop the spiritual-mental core that has to cast off the body, has to go through death.

There one copes with death because one recognises that one can get to a new life with it. One recognises death as the root of the immortal life. Not because one copes with the world riddles grief and death that one closes the eyes before them as Charles Eliot means, but that one recognises them as necessary like luck and life. I have just said that in the present many preconditions are not yet there to penetrate into these things. I would like to quote a man who tried to settle deeply in spiritual problems who delivered some wonderful, however, also often mystically-blurred things, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949, Belgian author). He approached the question of immortality in the last time. He got to know the teaching of reincarnation and karma. You can literally read in the translation of his newest work (La mort, On Death, 1913) about that which he regards as “faith.” He regards spiritual science as faith. He says: “Since there never was a faith, which is nicer, fairer, purer, more moral, more fertile, more comforting and more probable in a certain sense than this.”—He means the “faith” of theosophy.—

“With its teaching of gradual atonement and purification it only gives a meaning to all physical and spiritual dissimilarities, to any social injustice, to any outrageous injustice of destiny. However, the goodness of a faith is no proof of its truth, although 600 million people follow this religion. Although it is closest to the origins wrapped in darkness, although it is the only religion that is not spiteful and not vulgar, it would have had to do what the others did not do: to give us unquestionable proofs. Since what it gave us up to now is only the first shade of the beginning of a proof.”

There you see such a person who has approached spiritual science who finds, however, no possibility to provide a proof—what he calls a proof.

One has to say to that first: if he does not regard anything as proof, it does not mean that this view cannot be proved, but it means that this view has not penetrated him. It is typical for the present that it is so hard for people to find their way to something that once will be a matter of course.

Secondly, one has to say, if you just find such a statement like that of the brilliant Maeterlinck and you figure it out deeper, the thought suggests itself automatically: should this view of repeated lives on earth be proven? As well as I have today discussed that—even if sketchily—I have given what you can call a rationale. However, it may be that anybody demands something of a proof that one cannot demand at all from a proof.

I would like to remind of something else. There were always people who dealt with squaring the circle. Those persons who invented proofs over and over again have gradually become a real scourge of mathematical societies. Since they received a number of such proofs every year, which all were nonsense. However, one always believed that the proof would be found once. Finally, the Paris academy did not know how to escape and cast them into the wastebasket. Nevertheless, it was not allowed to suppose that the proof could not be found. Once one could reflect on squaring the circle, now no longer, because meanwhile one proved that this proof could not at all exist. The squaring the circle is not possible. Nevertheless, there are very simple means to transform the circle into a square. One takes a paper, cuts a circle out, carves it into small pieces; and puts them into a square. Then one has not done it with calculation but with an action. One cannot calculate it, but one can go forward this way. Nevertheless, the thing is true and reasonable, but one has searched the proofs in the wrong way. Maeterlinck does it that way. He demands something that requires a wrong way of thinking.

We realise from it which difficulties even today exist to acknowledge spiritual science. We realise just in this newest work of Maeterlinck that also such a man manages hard [with these thoughts]; we realise that it is difficult to introduce spiritual science into humanity.

One cannot say, well, if the thing is in such a way as you have told, then only the spiritual researchers can enter into the spiritual world. That is not the case. To be a spiritual researcher is only necessary to search the things in the spiritual world. If one has found them, however, one has to transform them into a thought-image as I tried it in my book Occult Science. An Outline. If then this thought-image is properly created, the common sense can understand it, and then one does not need to prove it in such a way, as Maeterlinck believes it. Everybody can understand spiritual science who considers that unbiasedly which the spiritual researcher has transformed into thought-images. As you do not need to be a painter to understand a picture, you do not need to be a spiritual researcher to understand the spiritual facts that the spiritual researcher has received from the spiritual world. The common sense is able to do this if it is not bound to prejudices. The soul needs that which the spiritual researcher has transformed into a picture for its security and strength. The spiritual researcher has still nothing of the spiritual world if he only walks around there; he has something only if he transforms that which he beholds into thought-images and ideas.

Although in our time everybody can become a spiritual researcher to a certain degree as I described it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, so that he can convince himself directly of that which I have said today, it is not necessary that everybody is a spiritual researcher. It is as with a riddle that you have to solve; you have not to prove the solution if you find it out for yourself. If you face spiritual science properly, you combine with it from understanding, as well as one can find the solution of a riddle.

He who delves into spiritual science settles in it. Because the soul is destined for truth and not for error, we know if we have penetrated into the spiritual world by the messages of the spiritual researcher: we have understood it.—If the solution of a riddle is told to us, we believe not only that it is in such a way, but we also know it. This is the case with the understanding of spiritual science. It cannot be accepted only on authority, but as soon as it has been informed to us, our soul adjusts itself so that we also understand it. The spiritual researcher has a little bit more of this understanding if he has transformed the spiritual facts and truths into thought-images. Every human being who approaches spiritual science has the same for his soul; he has a new relationship to the riddles of life, to the question of death. This understanding is not only theoretic, but can serve as an elixir of life. If a human being is so educated that the spiritual-scientific concepts live in him, he will also feel towards age in such a way that he can probably understand the Goethean word “one becomes a mystic in old age.” Then he says to himself, if my limbs start withering if my body pines away, I am like the plant seed whose leaves wither. The spiritual-mental core arises in me. One will not only know about this essence, one will feel it as a force that goes through the gate of death and through a spiritual world to prepare a new life again. This solution of the question of immortality is practical for life. The human being will experience the immortal in himself.

Spiritual science will become an elixir of life this way; it will be able to give the human being strength and security. We know that today life is more complex because of the triumphs of natural sciences than it was once. We also realise that the soul sometimes needs a support that it cannot have from that which you can get spiritually from the past. Natural sciences continue to lead humanity from triumph to triumph. However, with it the human being will be torn more and more. Strong inner forces have to be there. Only spiritual science is able to strengthen the human beings enough not to get nervous by the effects of modern life. If, however, anybody really penetrates into spiritual science, he rises more and more to those viewpoints to which the true spiritual researcher rises already today.

In August 1831, Goethe sealed away the second part of his “Faust” as his spiritual testament to humanity. The importance he himself attached to this work is evident from the words he addressed to Eckermann: “Now I have actually fulfilled my life's work, whether I do this or that in the years that may now remain to me, it no longer matters.” The yearning thoughts and interests that he put into this life's work go back to the poet's earliest youth. It is said that not everything I will say about it today is in it, but it has worked and lived in his soul in his creative power. In 1827, he said that he had made sure in his second Faust that the soul-related aspects of the external images, the theatrical aspects, were such that they could appeal to the external, sensual view, but that for those with a deeper insight, the esoteric meaning would become quite clear. It is the predispositions, the moods, it is the whole constitution of his soul from which emerged what became image, figure in Faust. From his birth, Goethe was attuned to what may be called man's penetration into the spiritual world. Not to remain with what the outer senses and the mind bound to them give as knowledge and worldly wisdom, but to penetrate through the veil of the sensual world of observation, of the world of the mind, to the invisible, supersensible foundations of existence!

We cannot find in young Goethe the mature wisdom that has found its way into the second part of “Faust”; he could only give the most mature, profound and profound things at the end of his life. To those who later find his works incomprehensible, such as “Pandora” or “The Natural Daughter”, the youthful Goethe appears as a naive poet who has expressed great and powerful things in his works, including the first part of “Faust”. That is something that powerfully moves people; in the second part, he has woven quirks and incomprehensible stuff into it.

Then they praise Faust
And what else

In my works roars
In their favor,

The old Mick and Mack
Is very happy;

It means the pack of rags,
It would no longer be!

We want to follow how “Faust” grew out of Goethe's life, how he always tried to penetrate to the spiritual sources of external nature. Even as a boy, he sought to approach what he then understood as the great God of nature, as the spirit that rules over all natural phenomena. As a seven-year-old boy, he took a music stand, laid minerals, rocks, plants from his father's herbarium on it to hold the realms of nature together. — This expressed a feeling in the mood, the representatives of what nature is. For the seven-year-old Goethe, this was the altar at which he wanted to make his sacrifices to the great god of nature. He placed a small incense stick and a burning glass on top and waited for the rising morning sun to collect its rays and ignite the small incense stick to a sacrificial fire before the great god of nature.

We then see how his soul gradually matured to the mood – after the move from Frankfurt to Weimar – that he enthusiastically expressed in the prose hymn “Nature”. Here he expresses his reverence for the spiritual realm, in the words:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – unable to step out of her, and unable to get deeper into her. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms.

He knew himself so at one with everything excellent and everything seemingly deformed in nature that he said:

Even the most unnatural is nature, even the most clumsy philistinism has something of her genius.

And the other:

she invented death in order to have many lives.

What lies between these two times? Frankfurt and Weimar. How did he ascend to what we find in the powerful lyrical outburst in that prose hymn? From step to step, sometimes in unconscious urge, he has ascended in life. In his innermost being, at first unconsciously, he felt an irrepressible, invincible urge to know, which could not be hindered by anything, and which was connected with the whole of his life at every moment, pouring out, as it were, into the whole of his life, so that there can be no theory, no world of ideas for him at all, without his whole world of feeling and emotion being impregnated with his heart's blood. During his student years in Leipzig, he studied natural science, although he was destined for jurisprudence. In nature, he saw a kind of writing, in the natural world and natural facts, parables that express, speak like a writing, something that reigns as a secret in the outer sensual nature. Not through flashes of inspiration and fantasies did he want to penetrate the secrets of existence – he was born to the quiet walk through the world, which goes from step to step, from appearance to appearance. He did not want to grasp the phenomena of the world with a fanciful philosophy, even if the outer life, the passions, often rule more stormily and make invisible, so to speak, the actual, inner, calm, sure striving — this was always present in Goethe's life as a deep foundation. Now, towards the end of his time in Leipzig, a life event of the most serious kind occurred that immensely deepened his quest for knowledge: He fell dangerously ill. Where must knowledge lead us if it is to be true knowledge? It must lead us to where we penetrate into the secrets of life, as if led through closed gates, to those gates that life itself locks. Knowledge that would recoil from the problem of death could not satisfy the earnest striving of the human soul. The passing of death, which puts an end to everything that lives within the human mind and can be perceived with the external senses, imbued him with the seriousness in his quest for knowledge that his soul demanded.

In Frankfurt, where he now returned, it was other important experiences that strongly influenced him and about which he gives us hints in his autobiography “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. He came into contact with circles that were characterized by the earnest striving to connect what lives as spirit in ourselves with the great spirit of the world. At the center of those circles, which aspired from the depths of their souls to the depths of the world, was Susanne von Klettenberg. He turned to the study of very strange works, for example, “Aurea Catena Homeris”. Some of today's intellectuals would find only the most extravagant nonsense in it. Goethe did not. He did not find the kind of information one would find in a book on natural science, but rather things that affected him in such a way that he felt forces well up in his soul that he had to assume were otherwise dormant in man. He felt like a blind person born blind, in relation to the physical world, when he is operated on and his eyes open so that he can now perceive what was previously also present but not perceptible. He found symbolic thoughts in those books. The dragons, triangles, signs of the planets awakened in him a hunch that our soul can become like an organ for spiritual worlds.

He was still in this mood when he moved to Strasbourg. The first mood pictures of “Faust” emerged from this mood. So it is part of his soul, of his heart's blood, when we see Faust at the very beginning, how he has studied all the sciences - like Goethe in Leipzig - and then, unsatisfied by this, tries to penetrate into the supersensible world through a special method of spiritual research. Nostradamus, Sign of the World Macrocosm. He now lets Faust experience that his soul is still too small to develop within itself a sense for the great world. He seeks to evoke within himself the mood with which he can penetrate into what lives as a spiritual being, beyond earthly existence. He conjures up the earth spirit. From the answer that this gives him,

In the flood of life, in the storm of action I surge up and down, weaving back and forth! Birth and grave, an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life, that is how I create at the whirring loom of time and work the living garment of divinity.

It is clear that the earth spirit is a creative, productive force, that life is expressed in the elements of earthly existence, but one thing is missing: there are no passions or desires in it – only birth and death. He, the earth spirit, appears as an entity that expresses the higher, desire-free, purified forces of human nature in his character. It is an important law of the spiritual world that knowledge is not independent of moral endeavor. Knowledge in the higher sense can only be attained when our soul sheds that which is connected with desires, affects, inclinations, passions. The passions slumber in the depths of the soul, pervading the world of thought and knowledge. Goethe knew that the purity of the earth spirit is an ideal, but he also knew how difficult it is to fulfill. When the earth spirit then calls out to Faust:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me,

sounds like the echo of his own inner being, which is aware of how far removed it is from the actual spirit of knowledge.

The body also hinders its materiality from revealing the pure forces that can approach the spirit. Faust feels: I am held down by what I do not see in my outer corporeality, not by the material forces, but by what is supersensible in corporeality. The embodiment of this supersensible in the physical is Mephistopheles; that is the spirit that he grasps for the time being. All the scenes in which he portrays how this companion and fellow attempts to lead Faust through the whole life of sensuality arise from him, always trying to pull him down from the regions of spiritual life into that which man as spirit and soul can only experience within the body. Step by step, Faust seeks to overcome Mephistopheles. Through the development of his own soul, he wants at all costs to penetrate into the spiritual world. But not through artificial, tumultuous means - spiritists - but seriously, piece by piece, [Goethe] lets the world affect him until he sees in all the details of nature something like characters that express the mysterious life of nature. After all that he had seen in the way of minerals and plants, he wanted to make a journey to India to look at what he had discovered in his own way, to read it again with the powers of the spirit that had now become his own. Appearance after appearance, fact after fact, he wanted to let it work on the soul, so that through the spiritual eyes and ears developed for the soul, the spiritual natural reasons for existence would leap out of the facts.

In Italy he examines everything to see if it can be a sign in the great cosmos. When he saw the works of art, he wrote, who had previously been a follower of Spinoza's theory:

There is necessity, there is God!

because he felt that there is a spiritual force behind art, that each individual work of art is a letter and that letter by letter, work of art by work of art, they fit together to teach us to read what, as a spirit, stands behind creative humanity in relation to art. Nature, plants, animals, everything, even in the mineral world, does not belong to dead material, but to the written character for the spirit behind it.

When Faust addresses the earth spirit:

Exalted spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in fire

etc., it is as if he wanted to say: I now have a different relationship to the exalted spirit, which at the time touched me like a presentiment that made me unhappy because I could not realize it. I am beginning to understand you! The difference between the Promethean urge of the young Goethe and the overarching wisdom of the old Goethe is expressed in the fact that he does not want Faust to translate the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” In contrast, in Pandora-1807, he writes:

From heaven descend
Word and deed, blessing each other,
Gift descends, unimagined before.

Man is more than what he locks up in himself, he is something that great cosmic forces fight for, forces of good and evil – prologue in heaven. The human soul is the theater of their struggle. The soul world is a world of spiritual colors and sounds: the new day is already born for spiritual ears, it trumpets, it sounds, the unheard does not hear itself.

Yesterday I endeavored to show how what is to be presented here about Goethe's innermost and most intimate opinion and view of the development of the human soul can be gained and that nothing in his works and especially in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is arbitrary, that nothing has been arbitrarily secreted into it. I have tried to show how the whole basis for the explanation of the “fairytale” and Goethe's world view can be gained from an historical consideration of Goethe's life, from the historical pursuit of Goethe's most important ideas and impulses. An attempt has been made to substantiate what is to be given on the subject today in a more freely formulated way.

If we allow the fairy tale we discussed yesterday to come to mind, it does indeed seem to us to be completely immersed in mystery, and one might say: either we have to assume that Goethe wanted to incorporate many, many secrets into this fairy tale, as in Faust, according to his own words, or that we could regard this fairy tale as a mere play of the imagination. If the latter were not already excluded by Goethe's whole way of thinking and being, one would have to say that such an assumption is particularly prohibited by the fact that Goethe placed this fairy tale at the end of his story “Conversations of German Emigrants”. For it is the same thought that is characteristic of Goethe's entire life, which also lies in his conversations with German emigrants, and from what immediately precedes it, we can once again take the theme for this fairy tale.

We are presented with the conversations of people who have been forced to emigrate due to events in their French homeland, which look back in the most diverse ways on their sad experiences. The whole story is focused on showing what people who have been uprooted from their environment can go through as a result of this uprooting, in terms of the loneliness of the soul; what people in this situation can gain by reflecting on their psychological experiences, by observing themselves. We can only highlight a few examples to show how Goethe wanted to focus everything on revealing how the soul that wants to observe itself, that asks: What kind of guilt have I accumulated, how have I blocked the paths to development? First of all, we meet an Italian singer who is to reveal her destiny to us because in this destiny a human soul appears before us that must cling to the surface of the world view, which, although it follows what is going on around it attentively because it is forced to do so by is forced by the processes of life to do so, but is not yet mature enough to distinguish between what may be called chance and the spiritual necessity of things, a soul that does not know how the phenomena of life must be connected, if we assume the spirit in the environment. She has behaved towards a man in such a way that he has become seriously ill as a result of her repulsive manner and is dying because of her behavior. She is summoned to his deathbed, but she refuses to come. He dies without having seen her. After his death, all kinds of things happen that give the soul just described food for thought. 'How should I behave towards this?' she wonders. After the man's death, something very strange happens. She hears very strange things in the room, the furniture dances, she is slapped in the face by an invisible hand, and she is always forced to ask herself: Is the dead man somehow there, wanting to assert himself because I refused him? The top of a cupboard bursts, and at the same moment a cupboard in her own apartment in France, made by the same carpenter, goes up in flames. Goethe did not want to express that there was anything in such events that could give rise to the assumption of hidden spirits or the coming of the dead, but he only wanted to say that there could be such spirits that interpret all kinds of events in such a way that they are not sufficiently superstitious to say that the dead are certainly rumbling; they only come into an indefinite feeling and cannot get over it. What happens to the souls in the outside world according to their level of development is what Goethe wants to draw attention to. He then shows how one comes to the position of healing a lady from sensuality and passion; he takes the path of asceticism. This is again an indication of what the soul can go through in order to experience development. Goethe then leads upwards in stages. First a soul digging in the dark, then a more real thing in the lady just described, because many come to a cleansing of their soul through fasting. We are already entering more into a reality. And through the third of the things mentioned by Goethe, we enter completely into reality. He shows how a person is initially somewhat unscrupulous, he is in a subordinate soul development and says: What belongs to my father also belongs to me. He commits theft. Then conscience awakens, the soul rises, and precisely through the unrighteous deed he becomes a kind of moral center for all the people around him. He shows a soul development that signifies an ascent from a subordinate level to a higher level of knowledge and world view.

We are dealing with soul forces that are represented by the figures, the beings of the “fairytale”, and with the play of soul forces that is to be purified into harmony, into a symphony of soul forces in the deeds that the persons perform. At first we are confronted with will-o'-the-wisps that are ferried across the river by a ferryman. These will-o'-the-wisps are initially filled with gold, but the ferryman does not want their gold as a reward because everything would end in wild tumult. He much prefers to have fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three artichokes and three large onions. The will-o'-the-wisps have the ability to create a golden haze around themselves. They meet the snake, the aunt of the horizontal direction. For her, the gold is fertile and beneficial. She becomes inwardly radiant through the gold pieces. She can now illuminate what she could not see before.

When I tried more than twenty years ago to gain access to this fairy tale in every possible way, it was above all a rewarding thought in the tangle of questions of the “fairy tale” when it became clear that above all one had to follow the gold. Gold plays a role in different ways. The will-o'-the-wisps scatter it around. There it is not something blessed in a certain respect. In the snake, it becomes beneficial. Then we encounter gold again in the golden king, on the walls of the hut of the old man with the lamp; the will-o'-the-wisps lick it down, making themselves thicker. Once we are pointed to the human soul quality that gold has something to do with when we are pointed out that the golden king represents the giver, the bringer of wisdom. Goethe himself tells us: the golden king, in comparison to the others, represents the giver of wisdom. So gold must have something to do with wisdom. Gold is what makes the king wise, what enables him to endow the youth with wisdom:

Recognize the Most High!

Gold is something that the giver of wisdom is able to instill in man. The will-o'-the wisp must therefore represent the powers of the soul that are capable of receiving wisdom and that can also shake wisdom off. It must be shown how the gold can be stored; it is stored for a long, long time in the walls of the hut. We will have no choice but to see soul forces in individual persons, because we know how well it is founded. We can describe the will-o'-the-wisps as the abstract mind, the abstract thinking, which is capable of acquiring a certain amount of wisdom. Now we also understand why knowledge in the pure power of reason plays such a role in will-o'-the-wisps. Those who absorb what science is with their bare minds absorb it in order to have something personal about it, in order to be able to use it personally.

Goethe often congratulates himself on not officially representing science as a teacher. He congratulated himself on being able to give of his wisdom to the world only when he was inwardly compelled to do so, rather than being forced to cast it aside, as is necessary when one is destined to be a teacher or mere abstract dispenser of wisdom. Goethe presents such people in the will-o'-the-wisps, who have abstract knowledge. The abstract intelligence can absorb a vast amount of knowledge, but it leads to vanity. It is also spoken in Goethe's sense: However cleverly we think, however many abstract concepts we have, as long as we have ideas that are not drawn from the depths of life, they are unsuitable for ultimately leading us into the secrets of the eternal riddle of existence. Where we need something that goes straight to the heart of the eternal ideas of existence, we need something other than abstract concepts. When we come to the boundary of the physical world and the realm of spirituality, we are repelled by all abstract concepts and ideas. Indeed, all these abstract concepts and ideas are not even capable of making us understand, so to speak, what is closest to us. How far removed the abstraction is from even the most mundane things that surround us. It is incapable of giving anything to the stream through which we must pass if we want to enter the supersensible world. And if we want to approach the very source of life, it rears up when we come up with mere intelligence. The will-o'-the-wisps are from the vertical line, while the snake is from the horizontal line. This indicates that man, with abstract ideas, removes himself from the ground, from the ground of everyday life. We see how vividly the will-o'-the-wisps are formed. But are ideas and concepts, philosophical expositions, under all circumstances that which separates us from the true source of existence? No, it is not that; for if man has the ability to live in such a way that he combines his own life forces with things, that he does not rise up into the realm of abstract concepts and ideas, but moves quietly in things, such a spirit becomes, as Faust is one when he says:

Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything
I asked for. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature of a kingdom,
The power to feel and enjoy it. Thou dost
You only allow coldly amazed visitors,
Allow me to look into their deep chests,
As into the bosom of a friend,
You lead the line of the living
Before me and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.

Where man truly enters into communion with nature, the same concepts that alienate him from the world when he deals with abstractions serve him to penetrate ever deeper into existence. We must not simply turn around and say: because the abstractionist distances himself from reality, concepts and ideas are worthless in general. If there is a soul-power in them, which lives in and with things, then they become full of light at the same time. This is why gold becomes such a blessing for the snake, which lives in crevices and has a horizontal direction, and does not become alienated. When man loves things, when he mystically immerses himself in things, then ideas are the light that can help him through. Therefore, it can be experienced that sometimes scholastically presented philosophy seems frosty and sober. But when we encounter the same ideas in lonely nature lovers, in herb and root gatherers, and so on, we see how, in fact, in the serpents, in those who make contact with things, the ideas become full of light, which are sober in the abstractions. The snake thus points to the power of the soul, which has the mystical urge to submerge itself mystically in things everywhere. This is represented when the snake moves through the crevices. Man, who does not move in abstract things, comes close, like the snake, to the underground temple. If a person has a sense for the mysterious workings of the forces of nature, he comes to the heart of nature; he can experience something of what lives outside in nature in things, even if he does not have the ideas. The snake shows us the people who can live without ideas in an emergency, but who, by lovingly immersing themselves in things, come to grasp the riddles of the world. But when a balance is created, in that ideas and concepts are immersed in these mystical soul forces, then it comes about that the person who is lovingly inclined towards things can also illuminate with his own light what was previously only sensed from the sources of existence. Goethe says meaningfully:

If the eye were not solar,
How could we behold the light?
If not the divine power of God lives in us,
How can we be enraptured by the divine?

He immediately points out how we must respond to the light of nature's secrets if these secrets of nature are to shine back again. Man must have the inner sense, the open heart, he must have cultivated the recognition of the spiritual. Only then can he also see the spiritual in his environment. Then the snake enters the underground temple. Such underground places exist for the life of the soul. These things can only be characterized if they go into the strange workings of the human soul in development in a little more detail. Can it be felt that before the soul is able to perceive the spirit in the outer world, it has the inner certainty: Yes, there is a primary source from which everything flows? It can have this certainty and still not be able to see the spirit everywhere. Oh, it is a great goal to see the spirit everywhere. [Feeling: I myself have emerged from the spiritual. To do this, man must awaken.] Man must first develop the highest soul powers within himself. He must first evoke in himself the supersensible that sleeps in ordinary, normal consciousness. First he must ascend to higher levels of development.

First, the human being must have an inkling that something like this exists. Then he comes to another realization: I can only achieve my ultimate goal if I see how my whole existence is permeated by the spirit. I have been crystallized, born out of the spiritual, out of the supersensible, without my being involved in this birth out of the supersensible, which I can ultimately achieve through knowledge. In a mysterious way I am born out of the land that I can only reach again in the end. This characterizes the land of the beautiful lily, from which man also comes. The ferryman brings him over. Man is brought over by secret powers. The ferryman who brings to this shore must never bring anyone back again. The same real way by which we are brought over from the supersensible through birth cannot be the way by which we consciously return. Other paths must be taken.

Then the will-o'-the-wisps ask the snake how they can enter the realm of the beautiful lily, that is, how a single soul force can ascend to the highest. Two means are indicated: firstly, when the snake crosses the river at noon. But the will-o'-the-wisps do not like to travel there. It is quite beyond the scope of the Abstract Being, who wants to live entirely in ideas and inferences, to cross over in the way represented by the snake, through devotion to things, through mystical communion with things. This mystical communion cannot always be achieved. A great mystic of the Alexandrian school confesses that he has only achieved a few moments in which the spirit of the infinite has entered the soul, where the God in the breast is experienced by the human being himself. These are moments at midday when the sun of life is at its highest, when something like this can be experienced. For the Abstractlings, who say to themselves: Once you have the right thinking, it must lead to the highest, such midday hours of life, which one must await as a grace of life, are not hours in which they can travel; for them, what they are looking for must be achievable at any time. Then the snake points out to them that the shadow of the giant, who is powerless by himself, will fall across the river, and that is when they can cross over. If we want to understand the giant, we must bear in mind that Goethe was well aware of the powers of the soul that lie below the threshold of consciousness, which in the normal person only emerge in dreams, but which belong to the subordinate clairvoyant powers. These are powers that are not acquired through the development of the soul, but that occur particularly in primitive souls in intuitions, second sight, in all that is connected with less advanced souls, from which a primitive clairvoyance emerges.

Through such clairvoyant powers, man arrives at some notions of supersensible worlds. Many people today still prefer to come to the supersensible world through such intuitions or through spiritualistic shadow images than through the actual development of the soul. Everything that belongs to the realm of the subconscious, to the realm of the soul, that is not illuminated by clear understanding, by the light of insight, of self-control, everything that expresses itself like dream-like knowledge, is represented by the giant. In truth, one can recognize nothing through this consciousness, for it is very weak compared to real knowledge. It is something that one cannot control. It is best personified by a person who cannot carry weight, because through this realization nothing can be recognized that has weight for a worldview. But the shadow of this subconscious plays a great role in life. Only one word needs to be said to characterize this shadow: superstition. If countless people did not have superstition, the shadowy image of the subconscious that operates in the twilight of knowledge, they would have no idea of the supersensible world. For countless people today, superstition is still the shadow of the subconscious that leads into the supersensible. I need only emphasize how people can say that Theosophy, spiritual science, is something that only those people can grasp who put a lot of effort into raising the soul to a higher level. That is an uncomfortable thing. If the spirits want to be there for us, they should descend to us. This is where all the abundant superstitions in the field of modern superstition come from, which even today scholars pay homage to, who absolutely do not want to admit that the soul can become part of the spiritual through development. They are readily available to a medium who can give them some gift from the spiritual world. This is not to say that these things cannot be based on truth, but the distinction between error and truth is extremely difficult here and only possible for the initiated.

Goethe wants to point out this shadow of the subconscious, this realm in the human soul, but not like a polemicist, which Goethe never was. Goethe is clear that every power of the soul has its significance at its level; he even finds it useful here to have the snake give advice to the will-o'-the-wisp. But superstition plays a major role in drawing attention to and directing the human mind to the supersensible world. Goethe, who wanted to depict the entire spectrum of the soul's powers in their symphonic harmony, shows how this superstition has its good basis in the soul, in the powers that do not always come up with sober, clear concepts, but say to themselves, the things are rich, we just want to sense secrets for now, not frame them in sharp contours. This intuitive sense is something tremendously important that is to play a role in the overall consciousness and life of our soul development.

What was so clearly expressed in external nature for Goethe plays into the development at a higher level.

Goethe saw a certain law in all natural activity like a leitmotif. It is a law of balance that nature has a certain measure for all things and can give rise to all possible beings from unity. Goethe sought the law in all of nature in order to see in harmony everything that is embodied one-sidedly in the external world. When Goethe uttered this sentence, he was seen as just a poet, an amateur. The sentence only caused a stir when Cuvier, in his dispute with Geoffroy St. Hilaire, also drew attention to this law. Goethe, who lived in an understanding of nature that saw one-sidedness everywhere and wanted to grasp the whole by harmonizing the one-sided, also saw something in the soul that he wanted to combine by harmonizing. There are people who represent one-sided soul forces. The false prophets, who want to apply their wisdom everywhere, are the will-o'-the-wisps; then there are serpents and so on. He wanted to show that man can reach higher levels by representing the type of human being within himself. Thus, the sense that senses the supersensible in the sensible must be connected with abstract intelligence. One must not let the sober intelligence be subjugated by the sense, but nor should one emphasize the abstract concepts one-sidedly and refuse to understand how full of content is that which lives and moves in things. Goethe wanted to show how man can become one-sided, but how he must strive for the beautiful lily, for the inner, balancing human soul.

After the snake has received the inner glow, it enters the temple. The powers that must inspire the human soul give the strengths that man must have within him if he wants to ascend to higher existence. Goethe shows that there are certain powers of the soul that the soul must have if it is to ascend to higher levels. But if a person wants to attain the higher levels without having found the right path at the right time through inspiration, through the world powers, then this world view is something that can kill him, confuse him in his soul, paralyze him. Therefore, the youth who is not mature will be paralyzed at first, or even killed by complete exposure. So, what wants to free the mind without giving us control over ourselves, that has a killing effect, says Goethe. All our striving must be directed towards making us mature, towards shaping us so that the soul receives the highest in the right mood, in the right state. So the youth is killed at first. He is to be prepared by the endowment of soul powers by the kings. We have already seen from the golden king that he is the spiritual power that can be kindled in the soul and that gives wisdom in the right way when it harmonizes with the other soul powers. The silver king represents piety. For Goethe, beauty and the cult of art are closely related to piety. Beauty is that which makes us inwardly pious. The power of the soul that draws us through our feelings to the spiritual world is represented by the second king. The power of the soul of will [to do good] is represented by the brazen king.

But these soul powers must enter into the soul in such a way that we can distinguish them, that they enter into us in the right way, that we can master them, separate them; the life of feeling from the life of wisdom, and likewise the life of will from the life of feeling and the life of wisdom. These powers, which thus appear separately, condition the higher life of wisdom. The lower life is represented by the mixed king. Every human being has these three soul powers within them, but mixed. A higher age in the development of humanity will only begin when this chaotic mixing of soul forces ceases, when they are no longer mixed in such a chaotic way as in the fourth king, but are clearly separated from each other, with the area of soul power permeated with wisdom, and that permeated with beauty, and that permeated with the will to do good. Then the time comes when man may say to himself: “It is time.” Something else must precede this. A soul that has been led unprepared through wisdom, beauty and power would hardly see anything special.

Another soul force must guide us, which is represented by the man with the lamp. The lamp can only shine where there is already light. It is the light of faith that radiates from our hearts, even if we have not yet penetrated into things. It is what is brought as faith to things. It is a light that can only shine where there is already another light: religion can only generate faith where it is adapted to what people feel in a particular climate, in a particular cultural epoch, and so on. There the serpent, which wants to penetrate to wisdom, beauty and strength through the mere inner soul power, must encounter the light of faith that prepares the soul. Thus Goethe shows that the right time must approach, that first the soul must be guided by the light of faith, and that we can then come up to a direct grasp of the soul forces in being separate and in direct interaction. On this side of the river, then, man must prepare himself. On the other side it is shown how man, if he connects with the soul forces unprepared, damages his soul.

A strange figure is the old man's wife with the lamp, who is described as human, all too human, vain and so on, who is chosen to pay the ferryman with the fruits of the earth. This is primitive human nature, which has the power to be connected to the light of faith. We are shown: that the light shining from the lamp of the old man transforms stones into gold, wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones. The pug is transformed into a precious stone. This shows the power of faith, this very wonderful power of faith, oh, how it is able to show us all things in such a way that they really show us their divine in a certain way, show us what is in them. Dead stones turn to gold, showing themselves to be endowed with wisdom. Faith already senses this in things, how all things are not what they appear to us through the senses. This is shown by the transformation through the lamp. Man, when he remains in his healthy nature, when he cannot attain to science, has something within him that leads much more to the boundary of the supersensible. The scientist becomes a doubter, a skeptic, and one tries to see how certain some original nature, represented by the old woman, is able to give facts to the flow as the will-o'-the-wisps cannot. Such natures have an original feeling that connects them to the supersensible, which weaves and lives in everything; and one can see in such people how a compassionate smile appears when scientists talk, saying, we know something that you cannot know, that brings us together with what we are created from. This is shown by the fact that the woman can pay.

The temple must be transported from below the earth up into the upper realm, it must rise above the river. And it is conceivable that a soul has gone up the steps in such a way that it can experience, feel the midday moments of life; so that it is achieved through a higher soul development, that not only special spirits can cross the river. That is what is achieved in the new culture through spiritual science. And Goethe behaves like a prophet in the new culture by pointing out that not only special minds can find the transcendental realm, but that there is a soul development that everyone can undergo; so that everyone can walk over and across when what is the actual secret has occurred.

“How many secrets do you know?” – “Three,” replied the old man. “Which is the most important?” asked the silver king. “The obvious one,” replied the old man.

The expression “the revealed secret” often occurs in Goethe because, like all true mystics, he believed that the connection between the material and the spiritual is evident everywhere; therefore, it is not so important for man to seek the spiritual in all sorts of detours, but to really connect with things as the snake connects with them. The revealed secret of all three is that which can be found everywhere, and which requires only a certain maturity of soul. The three secrets are simply these: wisdom, piety and virtue. A fourth is still needed for this, the snake whispers into the old man's ear; the old man cannot know that. But he can know that it is now time. What does the snake say now? That she is willing to sacrifice herself to be a bridge over the river. There you have the whole secret of the sacrifice of the lower soul forces. You can find this sacrifice further in Goethe's words:

And so long as you do not have this,
this dying and becoming,
you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

First, a person must go through all that has led him through life. But what he has gained, what he has experienced through the lower soul life, he must be able to sacrifice in order to ascend.

Jakob Böhme, whom Goethe knew very well, expressed this secret beautifully:

He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies.

He who enters the supersensible world before he has died for the lower self would not yet be able in this embodiment to see correctly the spiritual after death.

He who does not die before he dies, will perish if he dies.

The soul protects itself from ruin in the lower self, says Goethe, when it becomes like the snake that sacrifices itself, that is, there is a soul force in us that can connect with the forces of nature and that must be sacrificed: that which, as lower selfishness, is necessary to achieve human freedom. Therefore, that which has led us becomes the way into the beyond. We enter the supersensible world through that which we have sacrificed ourselves. The will-o'-the-wisps are now able to unlock the door of the temple. Science has the key to the realm of the supersensible, but it cannot lead into the real secrets, because it only leads to the gate of the temple, just as Mephisto has only the key to the realm of the mothers, but cannot penetrate it himself. So we see how the will-o'-the-wisps actually fulfill their role to the end and how Goethe captures the meaning of soul development in each individual case.

What remains of religious belief? The tradition in our cultural processes. Go to the libraries, look up how much of the gold is stored there, and see how the abstractions lick the gold down and make new ones out of the old books, as a librarian once said. Goethe shows that the will-o'-the-wisps can feed on that. How many scholars walk around full of what comes straight from these sources. The pug dog dies from it, it makes him feel worse. But he can be revived by the lily, as he has passed through death. Whoever wants to endure contact with the lily must first have passed through the lower death. The youth is only ready to unite with the beautiful lily when he has suffered the last misfortune, is completely dead, has fully felt the effect of what happens when one unites with the supersensible while still immature. The snake sacrifices itself, which has an immediate effect on the details of natural existence. When all this has happened, the youth can then be led into the temple. Then the soul is led upwards to the realization that everything is permeated and animated by the spirit. Then the temple is led upwards, the soul endowed with that which leads to the supersensible. Wisdom gives him that which is characterized by:

Recognize the Highest

and by the oak wreath; the golden king gives that. The silver king says:

Feed the sheep,

in memory of the pious shepherd,

Feed my lambs;

is an expression of piety. The iron king gives him a sword and a shield and says:

The sword on the left, the right free!

Stand strong and firm on your feet when it comes to defending human dignity and human dignity, but do not be aggressive. Now the young man is allowed to connect with the lily. The powers of the soul may be illuminated with truth and love, which the soul only finds when it connects with the spirit. The young man feels the love, of which it is said last: wisdom, beauty, piety and virtue, they promote the development of the soul, love forms the soul, harmonizes everything. When man ascends into the temple in which knowledge can be experienced, he comes, in holy awe, to see, like a small temple in the great temple, the highest, the secret of man himself, who passes from the spiritual world into the world of this world. The ferryman's hut is placed as a small world in the great temple; when the soul advances to higher knowledge, then it attains what Goethe felt as Spinozian love of God, it comes to the riddles, the secrets of the world. But as the highest of the mysteries, as that which he in turn sees like a small temple in the great one, that is the mystery of the existence of man himself in connection with the divine being.

The giant comes last and becomes something like an hour hand that indicates the time. Our knowledge becomes spiritual, shedding all that is external consciousness as we ascend; all forces that work mechanically, that are a remnant of the subconscious. All this may remain only in one, when we look up at what is the most external for our inner being. Thus, the merely mechanical, which has not yet been elevated to higher knowledge, has a right to exist. Goethe could have had in mind all the superstitions that have been practiced with the art of numbers and all the prevailing beliefs from old worldviews. But one thing remains behind, to form a kind of chronometer for what knowledge gives it. Thus everything is transformed into a plastic image, right down to the last detail, which Goethe felt was the law of human education.

Today I was only able to explain the main features, but if you read the “fairy tale” with this in mind, you will find that every page, indeed every half-sentence, can be proof of its correctness. One can only hint at this symbolically, in richly symbolic images. We must be aware that what is contained in Goethe's “Fairytale” is infinitely richer than what could be said, and that everything said today is only a suggestion of how to search and feel about a symbolic fairy tale. It is not possible to give more than a hint. But perhaps you have gained a sense of the great and immeasurable productive power with which Goethe created, how right he was when he said that only beauty and art can be an expression of truth. This is also what lived as a conviction in Goethe and led him from stage to stage in restless pursuit. But this is also what led us so to Goethe. Goethe is one of those minds that work in a way that only the greatest minds can. You read a work by Goethe and think you have understood it. Each time you read it again later, you believe that you have finally understood it correctly. Finally, you say to yourself: I still don't understand it, I have to wait until I become more and more mature. This is only the case with the most exquisite minds. This assures us that in Goethe we have one who belongs to the leaders of mankind. Thus, in summarizing what is to be characterized here, one may say of Goethe's spirit:

They shine like stars
in the heaven of eternal being
The spirits sent by God.
May all human souls succeed
in the realm of earthly becoming
To see their flames of light.

Report in the “Frankfurter Nachrichten” of January 21, 1906

“The wisdom at the core of religions” was the subject of the third Theosophical lecture, which Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin gave in the Gutenberg Hall on Friday.

All religions have certain similarities; they all have something fundamental in common. Only the theosophical school of thought, which is so much misunderstood, was called upon to shed new light on these mysterious things, for one of its main tasks is to research the wisdom teachings of all the religions of the world.

What is religion? The word means connection; through religion, the human soul is connected to the divine, it is the bridge between the soul and its spiritual-divine origin. All religions have become, have developed; they used to be different from what they are today. Recent natural science is convinced that a mainland once existed between Europe and Africa, between Africa and America – we call it Atlantis after the ancients – on which lived different people than we do today. They did not have the same intellectual powers as we do, but they had others that we lack, which are similar to the abilities that our soul develops in dreams. Their imagination was not based on sensory perception of things; instead, the outside world appeared to them in images, symbolically, as it does in dreams. They also felt their divine origin, because they felt at one with all life, with that of plants and animals.

This view of the Atlanteans is peculiar to all the early beginnings of religions. The soul's experience of all of nature, this empathic feeling for natural forces in higher spiritual vision, gave rise to the belief in the “Great Spirit”, which is revealed in every sound of nature. Then came the time when, out of the soul's dream state, out of symbolic contemplation, intellectual life in the modern sense developed. People scattered to different countries and adapted to their climate and other conditions. What had previously been felt as a spirit now had to take on a different form; religion had to be proclaimed in different forms to correspond to the changed circumstances. The Atlanteans developed the images from the soul world, but now the outside world approached man and was different everywhere. Consequently, the bond between the soul and its divine origin had to be knitted in new forms. Hence the diversity of religions, but also their common ground, the agreement regarding the basic truths, regarding the core of wisdom.

Spiritual leaders and guides of humanity, the “Brotherhood of Initiates”, have always existed, even among the Atlanteans; and it was they who proclaimed the wisdom core of the original religion to all times and all peoples and thereby preserved it. All the founders of religions, the authors of the Vedas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the magi of the Chaldeans, the priests of the Babylonians, the world sages of the Greeks, the Zarathustras, Confucius, yes, the German mystics, Paracelsus, Angelus Silesius and Jakob Böhme – they were all, together with the greatest initiate, Jesus Christ, such guardians of humanity, such proclaimers of the religious core of wisdom. He explained what speakers understand by this core of wisdom using the example of the doctrine of the Trinity, which returns more or less developed in all religions.

Today and tomorrow evening, we will have much to talk about, in reference to Goethe, that may interest the student of spiritual science with regard to the inner workings of the human soul, its development and its relation to the world. Since our task in these two lectures will be to consider the above questions only in the light of Goethe, it seems to me expedient to speak now, independently of Goethe, as we are accustomed to doing, from the sources of spiritual science, about the inner life of the human soul, its development, and its relationship to the world. It will be necessary for me to assume that you are somewhat familiar with the basic elements of the human soul life.

When we consider the human soul in its development, we must objectively distinguish between the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul. When we speak of the sentient soul, we do not just mean that part of our soul that is able to connect with the outside world through perception, through sensory impressions, but we also mean the seat of everything we can call instincts, desires, passions, and also the seat of everything that are impulses of will in the human soul. It is most useful, if we want to form an idea of what the sentient soul actually is within our mental life, to imagine how everything volitional, everything that gives us impulses from within , is seeking a relationship with the outside world, is the essential part of the sentient soul, and how it is attached to the sentient soul that it is the most important mediator of receiving external impressions of perception. That is why it is called the sentient soul. When a person receives a sound or a color impression, the sentient soul is in control. Even when passions arise, in the case of affects, anger, fear, anxiety, it is essentially the sentient soul that rules.

What we call the intellectual or mind soul first works its way out of the sentient soul and is, in certain respects, somewhat more serene than the sentient soul. The abilities to clothe in ideas what is felt in the sentient soul, to clarify what is experienced as instincts, as affects, into a more human form of soul life, are already present in the mind soul. When, for example, affects that otherwise only aim at self-preservation are clarified into goodwill, or even loving behavior towards the environment, we are already dealing with the soul of understanding or mind. In the soul of understanding, the I reveals itself to us as the actual center of our soul life.

In the further development of the I, where we feel ourselves to be truly inwardly human beings, asserting ourselves in the center, we form our perceptions and thoughts into great ideas with which we comprehend nature, or into ideas of duty or moral ideas. We speak of the consciousness soul in everything with which we relate to ourselves in this way. There are no dividing walls between the individual soul members, but it is necessary to distinguish between these three members because each relates to the outside world in a different way.

If you take the consciousness soul first, for us humans this is the highest soul element for the time being, but at the same time it is the soul element that has, to a certain extent, separated itself the most from the whole rest of the world. It is the most independent soul element.

When a person delves into the consciousness soul, he can be most lonely in his soul life, shutting himself off from the outer world. It is the soul element that, by its very nature, has erected the most barriers to the environment, so that it is most strongly predisposed to fall into error and error. It is most detached from the universe. But this part of the soul can only fall into error to a limited extent. This is the most important thing in what we call the consciousness soul. It expresses itself above all as logical thinking, as the dissection of concepts, and also proceeds as computational thinking, as everything that man has in a certain respect as an ability of his own, and which is not found in animals.

The powers of the sentient and rational soul play up into the consciousness soul. The drives, desires and passions, the volitional impulses of the sentient soul, the feelings and intellectual judgments of the rational soul penetrate into it. But in the consciousness soul, all this is processed by logical thinking. That is why it is excellent in the consciousness soul that we form our opinions. And because the consciousness soul is the most isolated, people are so very separate from each other in terms of opinions. When we speak of what we have in common because it is formed within our community, our family circle, because it is common practice in our environment, we speak of such things that are located in the intellectual or emotional soul. But even the things that are only located in the consciousness soul migrate into the intellectual soul, for example, an opinion we have formed can become a habitual opinion. Or an ability can be transformed into skill, into habit. Then they have descended into the mind soul.

The consciousness soul is also the most isolated because through the consciousness soul, the human being directly extends the horns of feeling into the environment. When we consider what we want to do, we live in the mind soul. When we look at what is around us, we extend the horns of feeling of the consciousness soul directly through the senses and come back to what makes us the most isolated being. Because of what our senses offer us, we become the most isolated beings. Thus man isolates himself precisely because, through the consciousness soul, he must relate to the outside world in a very local and temporary way. But opinions cling most intensely to the consciousness soul. An opinion asserts itself first and becomes firmly established in the consciousness soul. Therefore, in terms of opinions, man is an isolated being. In terms of habits, people understand each other better. Man is most independent, but also most isolated, in the consciousness soul, therefore we cannot really find access to what is in the consciousness soul of another person. We do not even know whether everyone sees the color red or blue in the same way as we do.

But leaving that aside, let us now just assume the content of the consciousness soul, which consists of opinions. If we take something that may seem extremely logical, something that we can imagine we base these opinions on in the most logical way possible, these logical reasons cannot be applied to our fellow human beings. Logical arguments do not initially have an effect on external life, and it is even normal for them not to have an effect. Therefore, it is easy to convert people to our opinions at a young age, in childhood. Later on, this is less and less the case. This is because the child not only confronts us with his consciousness soul, but also with his mind soul and his sentient soul. He confronts us with his entire personality. And the way we convince them depends more on all the other soul aspects than on the consciousness soul. The will and feelings are involved. If people's direction of will and feelings differ, then the most diverse points of view can be justified in the most logical way. Nevertheless, in the present cycle of human development, people are only truly independent with regard to the consciousness soul, and less so with regard to the other soul aspects. Consider how opinions are formed: the human being is completely free to form this or that conceptual context as his opinion. He is less free when the content of the intellectual soul comes into play. Here the human being does not feel at all free, otherwise his feelings and perceptions could not play many tricks on him. We can be completely in agreement with ourselves in our opinions that this or that should actually displease us, but the mind speaks differently, allowing us to take pleasure in the matter after all. The fact that the mind can be in discord with opinions can show us that man is not as free in terms of feeling as he is in terms of opinions. The strongest unfreedom the human being feels is in regard to everything concerning the will and so on, everything that is in the sentient soul. The discord is sometimes very great between the most glorious intentions, between the opinion that this or that is not good, and the urge, the affect towards it. A drastic example is the following: A teacher who has an angry child realizes in the soul of understanding that the anger must be expelled. Since he does not succeed in doing so in a good way, he throws the inkwell at the child's head, and he himself becomes angry. There we have the most beautiful discord.

What is it in the life of the soul that happens, that this discord can come about? It is the case that we are actually only isolated and independent in relation to the consciousness soul in our present state of development, but that between the consciousness soul, at the boundary to the mind or feeling soul, there is an influence on the soul, an influence of higher superhuman beings. And again, at the boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul, we have such an influence of external forces of superhuman entities, likewise between the sentient soul and the sentient body.

I am now describing the state that presents itself in our time, in our century. It is different for other times. Man can also easily be convinced that other forces come into play where the will comes into play. When we think, we are with ourselves. We can sit down in a corner and be with ourselves in thought. When a person has to exercise a volitional impulse, he has to move his hands and feet, he has to produce a physical action, an act. If you move from one thought to another, your consciousness remains present. Today, people have no idea of the transition that takes place when, for example, they grasp the thought: I want to grab the watch – and then carry out this thought. Here we have a completely different context than in the transition from one thought to another, where the whole sequence can be followed by the consciousness. This is an example of how other forces intervene to help us. At the boundary between the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, entities intervene that we call angels or angeloi. They are the ones who condense what would otherwise only be conscious in opinions and concepts, and condense them into what can be called sensations and feelings. The term 'sensation' fluctuates somewhat. What is felt and sensed internally is already a condensation of thought. There are forces behind us that help us.

Let us now turn to the other boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul. Here we have even higher beings that intervene. They are the ones who stir our will, who strengthen our thoughts into willpower: they are the archangels or archangeloi. But when we enter into relationship with our environment on our own initiative, then it is the spirits of personality; there we already feel the resistance of the world when we intervene in its structure. Thus, in the intermediate realms between the individual soul forces, there are guiding spiritual entities that permeate us and have the task of transforming into deeds and forces what, left to himself, a person can only experience within himself as thoughts.

Now, when we enter into these subconscious regions of the soul's life, there is indeed the possibility that the struggles that take place and must take place within the spiritual world will also enter the arena of our consciousness. Where the angelic beings intervene, the luciferic beings, who are the opponents of the angels, are also close behind. If only the angels were to intervene, our minds would reach out to what is beautiful, only to what corresponds to our human dignity. The luciferic beings lead us to what we ourselves do not agree with in calm reflection, but which carries us away. Where the archangels intervene, the Ahrimanic beings can also intervene, leading us to transform our judgment into error and our search for truth into falsehood. As human beings, we are given free will to think logically. But the moment we develop feelings and impulses of will, other beings, including those that counteract the emerging beings, intervene. This is the point that everyone who is in any way familiar with occult research should basically educate themselves about.

Where man stands in normal life today, it is already so arranged that the forces of the luciferic and ahrimanic entities, which counteract the angels and archangels, are nevertheless directed towards the good in all their effects. We need not seek to be wiser than the Ruling Power of the World and ask: Why do human beings need the entities of Lucifer and Ahriman? Man could not be so free if he were not given a counterpoise in these two powers to balance the angels and archangels. Man must have the opportunity to tell a lie so that he can arrive at the truth independently. As an independent being, he must gain truth for himself, and so Ahriman must be there. Man must resist Ahriman and take the path to truth. In this way man has become an independent being, in whom the sense for truth is inherent. The highest rulers of the world have already arranged matters so that the opponents, Lucifer and Ahriman, do not have too much to deal with. They are there to drive people to a strong degree of impure urges, desires and also incorrect judgments for the sake of their freedom and development of consciousness, but these can be balanced out in the course of karma and cannot disrupt the earthly mission. It is one of the most beautiful and profound insights that man gradually comes to through occult studies and esotericism, that he realizes: that everything that is untrue and bad can ultimately be transformed into good.

The question that everyone must ask is: apart from this circumstance, is there any reason why man must go through all incarnations and only reach perfection through every error? Yes, there is a reason. It would be going too far to show that man has become such through his previous lives on earth that he can only mature gradually. Now he is only independent with regard to the consciousness soul. But a time will come when, despite all his tendency to err, man will have a firm direction in his actions and work. If people did not yet have this, they would be in constant dispute and quarrel. As humanity is now, it is ripe to acquire the freedom for the consciousness soul, but people are not yet ripe to become free in relation to the mind soul and sentient soul. Progress arises from the fact that development can never take place in a completely straight line. We can see in all cultures how some souls are ahead of the pack, taking the lead, anticipating what other souls will only be able to acquire in later times. Today, human souls are only mature enough to become free in relation to the consciousness soul. But spiritual wisdom gradually leads to the mind and sentient soul also being freed and isolated, so that people no longer have to look to tradition and habit to find the good, but that the impulse for good flows from their own soul. This is also a necessary interpretation of Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me.” When the Christ lives in people, they will also be allowed to be free in relation to the intellectual and sentient soul. People have already achieved a certain dispassion when it comes to the most trivial logical matters and mathematical calculations. Here passion has already been banished so far from the human heart that people can find the truth for themselves. But for that which is within the mind and sentient soul, people are still very much in tune, even considering the tuning as the essential, because there Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play a role everywhere.

You will understand that with such a movement, which is built on the foundation of spiritual wisdom and where the deeper powers of the human soul are to be awakened for the purpose of isolation, not only curiosity about the spiritual worlds may be connected – that may not actually be the impulse for spiritual research – but also a sense of responsibility. Through this movement, every ability of human beings to shape the future is brought into our time. A germ of the future is being called forth that is not yet ripe in the general public. We must bear this in mind and be clear about how we have to be careful to ensure that, even if the soul may be beautiful and sympathetic within the spiritual movement, we must still be vigilant in the face of impending dangers and must awaken the feeling of responsibility. If the soul approaches spiritual things immaturely, there is still danger. Not everyone notices this danger. Those who are a little more deeply involved in the movement know and must know – if they do not want to break down under the unbearable – how they must always be on guard to say only what has passed through their soul not once or ten times, but a hundred times! It is difficult to find words that are adequate with regard to spiritual matters. A definite opinion must form in the whole circle of Anthroposophists: the opinion that they demand of those who represent the movement that they take the truth in this sense seriously. One must not believe that as a speaker every evening one can simply stand there without letting these truths pass through one's soul again and again, so that they are properly shaped down to the last word. The difficulty that lies in being able to open one's mouth only for spiritual truths is one thing. The other is that those who are in such a movement must, in a certain way, even make sure that this feeling is present in the representatives of the movement. But even those who are not yet deeply involved have to be careful that certain things do not happen to their soul, and people should ask themselves again and again: Am I mature enough to represent a spiritual movement? Do I have to place myself in the movement in such a way that the things of the spiritual world have an even stronger effect on me? No one should be discouraged, but everyone should awaken the feeling in themselves: Even if I have done what is good and right through the compulsion of tradition and education, there is a limit beyond which not only the angels, archangels and spirits of the personality stand when the right is represented, but where Lucifer and Ahriman also stand. Time and again, we see people who were truthful begin to tell lies when they are confronted with spiritual truths, because they have not sufficiently said to themselves: Above all, you must prepare yourself, you must let the spiritual truths take effect on you, you must not let yourself speak! — One must be aware of such responsibility. But it would be cowardly to say: Then I do not want to place myself in the spiritual movement. It is not by evading the duty to observe caution that one behaves correctly, but by observing this duty correctly. Much of what has been said at all times characterizes the progressive spiritual movement.

There are the great lights that are supposed to help people move forward. But where there are strong lights, there are often very strong shadows as well. Hence the not always unjustified accusations against those who are supposed to bring down the truths of the spiritual world to the physical plane. In every such movement, those who wanted nothing more than to let spiritual truths flow down into the physical world were joined by those who did not want to exercise self-criticism, who did not want to tame pride and vanity. They became like those we see so abundantly within spiritual movements, and to whom one must say: Unfortunately, the outside world cannot always distinguish between such bearers and those who are the true bearers. The opposite also sometimes happens. Our spiritual science movement should call on people to judge freely and sweep away everything that merely relies on external authority. As long as society still feels that it depends on the mouth through which it speaks, our ideal has not yet been achieved. We should only listen to what this mouth speaks because the things make sense to us when we listen to it with a sense of truth and unbiased logic. Our movement is highly suited to nurturing and developing people's free judgment; but there is a strong tendency, which can be called 'laziness' with regard to faith, that runs through our time. The laziness of faith creates great obstacles for the spiritual science movement. Believing something because someone has said it delays free judgment, the free human soul life, and independence in relation to the mind soul. It is so convenient not to have to think and just accept some truth because someone has said it; it is much more convenient to believe the person than to examine what the person is saying.

I have often said: It is only possible to make suggestions within the spiritual movement. But take everything we can find in history, for example, about Zarathustra: none of it will be refuted by what is said here about Zarathustra, if you really take everything. It can be examined, and the more rigorously it is examined, the more pleasing it is to those who want to represent the spiritual movement in an objective way. The will to examine is what they want. But it is infinitely more convenient to believe, to simply refer to what this or that clairvoyant said. This is a danger for the real or so-called clairvoyant if he is not yet really established. There is already a temptation to say what people believe. It is easy for him to slide into that, into which it is generally easy to slide when it concerns the ascent into the supersensible world. One ascends into a world in which it really cannot be controlled as easily as in the physical world. If you want to check with the mind, the angels and archangels intervene at the border areas, so it takes quite a lot to check it out. When it comes to faith, it often depends only on the impression one has of the person. How easily people can be influenced in terms of faith can be seen from mass suggestion.

Mass suggestion is something about which the most wonderful discoveries can only be made in the future. In earlier times it was quite different because the consciousness soul was not yet free. Today man is in the liberation of the consciousness soul, but is still completely in the bondage of the mind soul. How is suggestion made? Not only by what is pleasant or unpleasant about a personality; but also, for example, by the fact that someone has taken up an office, has five children to care for and now feels compelled to remain in office. Today, people often prefer to listen to everything that is obtained from the supersensible world in a charlatan-like manner rather than to what is based on solid research. For the former has two characteristics. First of all, it is tremendously trivial. For example, what writing mediums write down is usually such that one could just as easily think of the subject oneself, only it is made credible to man by the way it is taught to him. Man then believes that something is playing into it from the spiritual world. It is precisely their triviality that makes these things pleasant for people. Or they have the other property of being so incomprehensible that no one can understand anything about them. The things that are particularly incomprehensible are then often considered particularly mystical. At the borderline between the supernatural and the sensual, the charlatanry can be combined with what is based on serious research. It must be emphasized that only he is doing his duty who is alert to his own soul, who is especially careful about everything that can dull the instincts, so that we believe we are promoting the affairs of humanity when we are only promoting our own, or that the untruth, the lie, the temptation of Ahriman, is inadvertently mixed into what we say.

Only those who are constantly vigilant with regard to all this, only those who always say to themselves: 'If you join a spiritual movement, there is a great danger that you will become vain and proud' – only they can make progress. That goes without saying. Therefore, you cannot reproach a person for that, only if the person in question does nothing at all to suppress these traits. There is a tremendous temptation not to be completely truthful when you are dealing with people who believe you. You can make up all kinds of stories if they believe on authority. Then it is easy. You must not reproach anyone for the fact that when approaching the spiritual world, the tendency to lie arises in him, but that should not excuse him from himself, rather he should make every effort to expel it from his soul. That is the meaning of: know thyself. You have to seek the lonely hours when you can come to say to yourself: there is a danger looming again, so be on your guard. If you do not have these lonely hours, if you are uncomfortable with not being able to confess something good to yourself, if they are not the starting point for fighting your faults with all your might, then you are on the slippery slope, then you will roll down instead of climbing up.

These are the things we have to face if we want to recognize our position in occult research, the research that is the highest gift of grace flowing into the physical world from the spiritual worlds, for which we should have the greatest sense of responsibility.

The duty to enter the spiritual world with a part of humanity, because only in this way is progress possible, and at the same time the feeling of responsibility should awaken in us, the feeling: it is a duty, once I have learned the matter, to participate in it. It is often said that the representatives of spiritual science do not pay enough attention to moral considerations. They are often made, as they are today, so that in the progress of our spiritual movement, through which we are to be led to the spiritual sources, we may also hear of the impulses that come from those spiritual sources.

Today there are still many people who maintain that a spirit-soul life may exist after death, but they wonder why we should concern ourselves with it now. We can simply live on earth with all that it offers and simply wait and see whether other forms of existence do come about after death!

Spiritual science shows, however, that during life between death and rebirth man encounters certain beings. Just as here he meets the many beings of the various kingdoms of nature, so after death he meets the beings of higher hierarchies and certain elemental beings. If a person goes through life without any sense of judgment, this is due to the fact that between death and rebirth he was unable to meet those beings who could have given him the appropriate forces to enable him to be morally and intellectually effective in this life. But the possibility and the ability to meet certain beings between death and rebirth depends on the last life. If during earthly life we do not occupy ourselves with thoughts relating to the super-sensible, if during our life we have been completely immersed in the external sense world, if we only lived in our intellect inasmuch as it was directed to the physical world, then we make it impossible for ourselves between death and a new birth to encounter certain beings and to receive abilities from them for a subsequent life. The realm beyond remains dim and dark for us, and we are unable to find the forces of higher hierarchies in the darkness. Man, then between death and a new birth, passes by those beings from whom he should receive forces for his next earthly life.

From whence comes the light by means of which we can illumine the darkness between death and rebirth? Where do we find it? Between death and rebirth no one gives us any light. The beings are there and we can only reach them providing we have kindled the light in our last earthly life by means of our interest in the spiritual world. After death we are unable to penetrate the darkness unless we have taken the light with us through the gate of death.

This shows how incorrect is the statement that we need not concern ourselves with things of a spiritual nature, but that we can afford to wait for what happens. In fact, if we wait and see, we shall only encounter darkness!

Earthly life is not merely a transitional stage. It has a mission. It is a necessity for the beyond, as indeed the beyond is for earthly existence. The lights for the life beyond must be carried upward from the earth. It may also happen that down here people remain dull to the super-sensible world, that they simply miss the opportunity to develop certain faculties, that they fail to create instruments for the next incarnation.

A person who lacked a certain ability in this or that sphere during life goes through the gate of death. Now you see what a hopeless situation it all makes. If nothing were to intervene, the person would become less and less able. For if a person has deliberately dulled himself toward the spiritual world in one incarnation, he will be even less able in a following life to prepare organs for himself. If nothing else were to occur, things would take their course along an ever steeper slope of decline.

Something else, however, does intervene. A man who goes through life with deliberate dullness in one incarnation will find that Lucifer approaches him with his powers in the spiritual world after the second earthly life. If Lucifer did not approach him at this point, he would stumble through the thickest darkness. Because he has lived as described, Lucifer can approach him and can illumine the forces and beings needed for the next earthly incarnation. The result is that they are colored with luciferic light. Now following the dull existence, and after having been led by Lucifer between death and rebirth, he enters a new earth existence. He is now fully equipped with talents and abilities which prepare his organs so that everywhere he is open to luciferic temptations on earth.

Now such a person may be clever, but his cleverness will be cold and calculating; above all it will be permeated by selfishness, by egoism. This manifests itself to the seer in many instances where people are clever but actually cold and selfish in their activity. When one meets them they are always seeking their own advantage and do all they can to place themselves in the limelight. A consideration of such people shows that in the spiritual world they were led by Lucifer. In the pervious incarnation they led a dull existence that was followed by a stumbling in the darkness after death and this was preceded by yet another life on earth during which they deliberately closed themselves to the spiritual world.

Such an insight reveals a sad prospect for materialists. Our contemporaries who are materialistically inclined and reject all concern for the spiritual world and consider the soul life as ending with death, can expect an existence as just described. It is of little consequence to gather abstractly certain thoughts about the interrelations of various earth lives. An exact, concrete survey reveals the most manifold connections between former and later earth lives and the life in the spirit that follows each incarnation. We should hold onto the fact that life on earth is of considerable importance for life after death.

Life on earth has yet another significance. It is only on the earth that we can meet certain beings, and man belongs above all among them. Unless the link is established between man and man on earth, it cannot occur in the spirit world. The relationships between human beings are forged here and continue in the spiritual world. If we miss the opportunity to meet certain individuals on earth who were predestined to be in incarnation, we cannot make up for it during the period between death and rebirth.

Let us take the example of Gautama Buddha. He was that human personality who lived during the sixth century B.C. as the son of a king, and who rose in his twenty-ninth year from the rank of bodhisattva to that of Buddha. This means that he became a Buddha and no longer needed to incarnate in physical human form. The Gautama Buddha thus accomplished his last earthly life. A considerable number of people met this individuality on earth during that time, and also in earlier incarnations people had been in contact with the Bodhisattva. All these connections could be continued later in the spiritual world. The connection to Gautama Buddha, which bore the character of a pupil to teacher relationship, could be continued in the spiritual world. But there were souls who during the evolution of humanity never made a connection with Gautama Buddha on earth. These souls, even if they now have reached a considerable degree of development, cannot at all easily come in contact in the spiritual world with the being of Buddha, with the soul of the one who was incarnated as Gautama Buddha. For Gautama Buddha what may be called a replacement appears; he has a replacement if one has been unable to make a connection with him on earth.

The Buddha has had a special destiny since he rose to buddhahood and no longer needed to return to the earth thus continuing to dwell in a pure spiritual region. He remained in touch with earthly happenings, however, and worked from the spiritual worlds down into the earthly sphere. We know that the being of Gautama Buddha radiated into the Jesus child spoken of in the Gospel of St. Luke. The super-sensible being of Buddha streamed into the astral body of the Luke Jesus child. It worked from the super-sensible down into earthly realms. Human beings on earth could no longer find access to him. Only those could make a contact with the being of Gautama who, like Francis of Assisi, for instance, had gone through a higher form of development. Before he entered life on earth, and previous also to the last life between birth and death, the being of Francis of Assisi lived in a mystery center situated in the southeast of Europe. In this center there were no physical teachers, but teachers belonging to the super-sensible hierarchy of whom Buddha, or more accurately, of whom the soul that had been incarnated in Buddha, was one. The pupils in such mystery centers had already developed lofty faculties for beholding the super-sensible world. Such pupils are able to be taught by teachers who work only from the spiritual world. Thus Buddha taught in that mystery center, and Francis of Assisi in a former incarnation was his faithful and devoted pupil. At that time Francis of Assisi absorbed everything that later enabled him to receive the light-filled impulses of the higher hierarchies, and that then allowed him to appear in incarnation as the great mystic who was to exert such a strong influence on his age. This was all due to the fact that the soul of Francis of Assisi, through the higher faculties he possessed at the time, was able to establish a connection with the Gautama Buddha after the Buddha was able to work down from the super-sensible world upon him.

For ordinary human beings who are dependent on life as it unfolds through the senses and the intellect, such a meeting is not possible. In that case what has been said earlier applies. We cannot meet a person in the spiritual world unless we have first met him on earth.

The exception that we have just considered in relation to the Buddha brings forth yet another. Although it is impossible for ordinary individuals to meet others in spiritual realms with whom they have not had a previous connection on earth, yet if a person has received the Christ impulse and permeates himself with it, he can nevertheless meet the Buddha after death. For the position of this being is a special one.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century another planet was involved in a crisis of development similar to that of the earth when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. As the Christ appeared on earth from higher realms at the time of Golgotha, so Buddha appeared on Mars during the Mars crisis of the seventeenth century. After Buddha had completed his incarnations it was no longer necessary for him to return to the earth, but he continued his activities in other realms. The Buddha wandered away from earthly affairs to the realm of Mars. Until then Mars had been the chosen center of forces designated by the Greeks as fearfully warlike. This mission of Mars came to an end in the seventeenth century. Another impulse became necessary and the Buddha accomplished a Buddha crucifixion there. The Buddha Mystery on Mars did not take the same course as the Christ Mystery on earth, but Buddha, the Prince of Peace, who, during his last earthly life had spread peace and love wherever he went, was transferred to the belligerent realm of Mars. The fact that a being who is fully permeated by forces of peace and love was transferred to a realm of strife and disharmony may in a sense be regarded as a crucifixion. For the seer two happenings come together in a most wonderful way. One beholds, on the one hand, the eighty-year-old dying Buddha, and this death has a deeply moving, deeply stirring quality. Buddha died in 483 surrounded by silver rays on a wonderful moonlit night, radiating peace and compassion. That was his last earthly hour. And then he was active again in the way described. The seer discovers him kindling the compassionate, silvery moral light of Buddha on Mars at the beginning of the seventeenth century. These two wonderful events are deeply related in the course of world history.

The human souls who have received the Christ impulse into themselves in the corresponding manner here on earth travel through the cosmic universe after death. We all go through these cosmic realms. To begin with, we go through the planets of our planetary system. We experience a Moon period, a Mercury period, a Venus period, a Sun period, a Mars period, a Jupiter period and a Saturn period. Following these we go into the surroundings of our planetary system and then later commence our return journey. Now we encounter those forces and the beings from whom we must receive what we need to build up our next earthly life. He who has received the Christ impulse on earth can also receive what streams from the Buddha in his passage through the Mars sphere. This belongs to the exceptional case in which souls who have not been together with Buddha in earlier incarnations nevertheless have the opportunity of meeting him between death and rebirth.

Supersensible perception reveals that a number of personalities who lived during the seventeenth century owed their remarkable talents to the fact that during their prenatal life in the spiritual world they received an impulse from Buddha. At present the ability to receive such talents is still limited among human beings because it is only comparatively recently that the Buddha accomplished the Mystery on Mars. In future, human souls will be more and more capable of receiving the Buddha impulse from the Mars sphere. But in the nineteenth century there were already some personalities—and this was disclosed to those able to perceive it—who were able to develop their faculties here on earth as a result of the influences they received from Buddha through their passage in the Mars sphere. The course of life between death and rebirth is indeed complex and wonderful.

Unless man is able to take with him the light to illumine his experience between death and rebirth, he stumbles in the dark. This also holds good for this exceptional case. A person who departs from the earth through the gate of death without having taken the Christ impulse into himself, who wished to know nothing of it, will not have the slightest intimation of the influences of Buddha during his next life in the spiritual world as he passes through the Mars sphere. For him it is as if the Buddha were not present. It should be borne in mind that we encounter the beings of the Higher Hierarchies, but whether or not we perceive them and establish the right connection with them depends on whether we kindled a light in our last earthly existence so that we do not pass them by and are able to receive impulses from them. That is why it is a complete fallacy to maintain that it is unnecessary to concern oneself with the beyond during earthly existence.

You will gather from the foregoing that from a higher aspect life on earth really constitutes a special case. We live embodied within a special organism on earth between life and death. Apart from an earthly incarnation one can speak of an “embodiment” between death and rebirth, or rather of an “ensouling.” What I have elaborated in connection with the spiritual world also applies to the earth. Consider that a human being living between death and rebirth may pass through the Mars sphere without entering it in the slightest connection with the beings who inhabit Mars. He does not see them, and they are not aware of him. This is true of the earth also. Beings belonging to other planets, just as man belongs to the earth, are continually passing through the earth sphere. The inhabitants of Mars spend the normal course of their life on Mars, and during their experience, which corresponds on Mars to the period between death and a new life but yet is different, they pass through the planetary spheres. So that in fact inhabitants of other planets are continually passing through our earth sphere. Human beings are unable to establish any contact with them because they live under quite different conditions and because they will in the main not have made the least connection with these beings on Mars.

What would be the conditions necessary in order to meet the beings from other planets as they pass through the earth sphere? One would have had to develop points of contact with them in their own planetary realms, but this is only possible if on earth one has already reached the stage of being able to contact beings other than those of the earth as a result of the development of super-sensible powers.

Thus the possibility is there for those who have undergone a higher development to encounter the beings who wander through from other planets. It may sound peculiar and yet it is so, that for those who have intercourse with the wanderers from Mars and learn to know of the nature of that planet, the strange theories that physics and astronomy weave about Mars inhabitants appear most comical, for the facts are quite different.

I bring forth these things so that you can widen your gaze from earthly existence into other realms extending beyond the visible beings that surround us to be beings who cannot be perceived unless we develop the organs to behold them. But between death and rebirth we also cannot establish a connection with conditions belonging to the mission of the earth unless we have first contacted them by way of the earth.

What is spiritual science or anthroposophy from a cosmic aspect? He who weaves theories might easily believe that spiritual science is something that can be taught and learned in all realms of the cosmos, but that is not the same. Each realm has its own particular task and it does not repeat itself in other realms. The creative powers have so made the earth that only here can certain things arise. Spiritual science can only arise on earth. Nowhere else can it be learned. It is a revelation of the super-sensible world but in such a form as can arise only here on earth.

One might well say that supposing all this to be true, surely one could be instructed about the super-sensible in the spiritual world in a form other than that of spiritual science! One can certainly think this, but it is not true. For if a person is at all predisposed to gain a genuine connection with higher worlds, he can do so only by means of spiritual science. If he fails to draw near to spiritual science or anthroposophy on earth, no other form of existence will help him to get to know it. But no other form of existence will help him to gain a genuine human connection with the super-sensible worlds, either.

This need not plunge us into despair about the many people who are still refusing to know anything about anthroposophy. They will return and establish a connection with it at a later stage. Anthroposophy has been established on the earth in such a way as to impart to people what has to be known about the super-sensible worlds in accordance with the nature of man. Only one form of communication is possible and that is by way of human beings. If a person goes through the gate of death without having heard anything of spiritual science on earth, he can become familiar with it through the fact that he knew a person who had a connection with spiritual science. This is a round-about path but a possible one.

Let us take the example of two people who were on friendly terms during their earthly life. One has made a connection with anthroposophy, the other not. The latter dies. The former can help him considerably by reading to him, by making him familiar with what surrounds him after death. A person can read an important work of spiritual science with the dead and, as the seer will confirm, the dead listens attentively.

It is also a fact that a simple person who has only just come in touch with spiritual science may be better able to read to a deceased person whom he genuinely loved than the seer who, though able to find the soul of the dead, had no affectionate connection with him in this life. From time to time it may also happen that seers give themselves the task of reading to the souls of the dead whom they have not known. Yet more often than not one is unable to read to a dead person with whom one has had no previous connection on earth.

These facts will impress upon you the importance of spiritual communities such as the anthroposophical one because here we find to a certain extent a replacement for what may be called a kind of living together and getting in touch.

Should such communities not exist, each soul after death would have to rely entirely on being read to by people close to them. Only such spiritual communities where spiritual ideals are commonly fostered can expand this sphere. Thus it can and does happen that one meets an anthroposophist who, because of what he has previously learned, is able in a special way, to read a spiritual content with much concentration or to let such thoughts pass through his soul. One might approach him, mention to him that a person who dies was also an anthroposophist, belonged to the same society, and show him a sample of the writing of the deceased. It may suffice that by seeing the writing or by hearing a favorite verse of the deceased, the more developed anthroposophist is able to read to such a soul in a most fruitful manner, though he did not know him on earth. It is indeed a fine task for a spiritual community to bridge so strongly the gap between the living and the dead.

Today anthroposophists still conceive of many tasks that lie merely on the physical plane because materialistic ways of thought are still prevalent among them, though theoretically they may have absorbed the science of anthroposophy. The true spiritual tasks will present themselves when spiritual science will have penetrated the soul more deeply. People will be found to take on the task of helping the dead so that they may evolve. A beginning has been made within our movement and what already has been achieved in this sphere can give us a high degree of satisfaction.

In fact, in certain circumstances when an anthroposophist goes through the gate of death carrying spiritual thoughts with him, he may be able to serve the dead and could become their teacher. This, however, is more complicated than is usually imagined. It is easier to do this from the earth because the communities that are formed after death depend entirely on the groups that were formed before death.

If two people, for instance, lived with one another on earth, the one an anthroposophist and the other not, the one who had an aversion towards spiritual science will long for it after death. If may happen that the anthroposophist who remains behind on earth concerns himself until his death with the departed soul by reading to him. Now after a certain period of time the anthroposophist also goes through the gate of death. He is then re-united with the other in the spiritual world. An echo of the earlier connection on earth is now felt, and this presents a difficulty. There was no difficulty as long as the one was on earth and the other in the spiritual world. Dissonances arise again as they did in the earthly relationship now that they are once more united. Just as on earth the one soul did not wish to know anything about spiritual science, so it becomes again the case in the world beyond. This shows to what extent the relationships after death are dependent upon the previous earthly connections. These matters are exceedingly complex and cannot be merely thought out intellectually.

Such instances clearly reveal the mission of spiritual science. The gulf between the living and the dead must be bridged. Under certain conditions the dead can also work into the earthly sphere, as the living are able to send their influence into the spiritual world, and we can investigate how the dead work into the physical world.

As a matter of fact, people know little of what surrounds them on earth. How do they view life? The events of life as they unfold are strung on a thread, as it were. Some are considered to be causes, others effects, but beyond this little thought is given to the matter. It may sound strange that the actual things that happen form the smallest content of real life. They only represent the external content. There is yet another sphere of life apart from the things that happen, and this is of no less importance for life.

Let us take an example. A person is in the habit of leaving home punctually every morning at eight. He has a definite way to go, across a square. One day circumstances are such that he leaves three minutes later than usual. He now notices something strange on the square, under the colonnade where he used to walk every day. The roof of the colonnade has collapsed! Had he left at the accustomed time, the falling roof certainly would have killed him.

There are many such instances in life. We often find that had circumstances been different, this or that might have taken quite another course. We are protected from many dangers. Much of what could happen does not come to pass. In life we consider the external realities, not the inner possibilities. Yet these possibilities constantly lie concealed behind the actual events. The events of a particular day only constitute the external reality of life. Behind them lies an entire world of possibilities.

Take the sea as an example. In it there lives a multitude of herring but for them to arise, not only as many eggs as herring had to be present. An endless number of eggs are destroyed. Only a relatively small number of herring come to life. So it is with the whole of life. What we experience from morning until night constitutes only a portion of an enormous number of possibilities. We are continually led past certain possible events that do not actually happen. When a possible event passes us by, this marks a special moment for us. Consider the instance of the man. If he had left his house at the usual time he would have been killed by the roof of the colonnade. Such possibilities constantly accompany us in life. Such a moment, when a man would have been struck had he arrived three minutes earlier, marks an opportune occasion for the spiritual world to light up in him. He may then have an experience that can bring him together with the dead. Today people are not yet aware of such occasions because fundamentally they only live on the surface of life.

Spiritual science aims gradually to become a life elixir. Man then will not only behold external reality but he will pay attention to the stirrings in his soul life. There he will frequently find the voices of the dead who still want something from the living.

As we have an example of how the living can influence the dead by reading to them, so we also see how the dead can influence the living. A time will come when man will converse spiritually with the dead. People will speak with the dead, and they will listen to the dead. Death only marks a change in the outer form of man; his soul develops further. At present we experience as yet a most imperfect condition of mankind inasmuch as men are unable to communicate with their fellow men who dwell in another form of life. When spiritual science is no longer a theory but has permeated souls, a living communion with the dead will continually be possible. In fact, conditions, which in a sense obtain only for the seer at present, will gradually become the common heritage of the whole of humanity.

You may say, “Well, that may be so for the seer. He can find human beings between death and rebirth.” Actually, this presents considerable difficulties today because the general lack of belief in the spiritual world, the lack of connection to the spirit, creates hindrances also for those who could establish a relationship to the spiritual world.

There are certain things that can take place unhindered only if they belong to the common possession of humanity. A man may be an outstandingly gifted master-builder. If nobody engages his services, he will not be able to build. This also can be the case for the seer. He may possess the faculties to ascend spiritually to the realm of the dead but if this process is hindered owing to the fact that communion with the dead is impossible for most people, the seer will only be able to succeed in establishing a contact in a few exceptional instances.

My dear friends, I wished to show you how spiritual science can be a life-giving impulse. More than anything we may learn theoretically, it is important to cultivate a feeling for the task of spiritual science in relation to the future of humanity. This enables each one who belongs to the anthroposophical movement to gain an impression of what he is really doing. He gains an impression of the tremendous task that has to be achieved by spiritual science or anthroposophy. This also enables one to connect oneself earnestly and worthily to spiritual science, not in a light-hearted way, as to something that is to refresh one but as an impulse which will become of ever increasing importance as mankind advances into the future. I wished to evoke a feeling for this by today's considerations.

It has to be emphasized repeatedly that Theosophy must be lived, that, by way of Theosophy, the human being not only learns this or that, but that he learns to think differently, to feel, to perceive emotionally in regard to his whole environment. This will become a reality for someone who accepts the theosophical impulses in the right spirit. He has to learn to feel empathy, to experience living with all beings, but mostly this needs to apply in relation to other human beings. However, we learn best to empathise with human beings when we first learn to do this with the rest of the world.

Slowly man learns to know the whole world that surrounds him. He slowly learns, that he is surrounded everywhere by spiritual beings, that he walks through spiritual beings everywhere. He learns to understand this in regard to feeling and in regard to sensation. He learns to know what surrounds us in the three realms of nature. He learns to know the beings in the mineral realm, the plant realm and the animal kingdom. He strides differently through the meadows and forests, over the fields and open country from someone who has not gone through theosophical training.

When looking at the other beings, one could at first believe that the animal beings do not have a soul like human beings. The Ego of man, man’s soul, is certainly different from an animal’s Ego, in that the Ego of man lives on the physical plane. When we look at an animal as such, then each individual animal has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. Human beings have in addition to these three bodies an Ego. During his waking state man’s Ego is contained in him. The animal, however, does not have an Ego on the physical plane. For this, we have to go a bit deeper into the so called astral world. On the astral plane we will find a population of animal Egos, just like we have a human population here on the physical plane. Just as one man meets another here, a clairvoyant is able to meet self-contained personalities on the astral plane—these are the animal Egos.

One has to imagine it thus—imagine the ten fingers of a human being stretched through a wall. They are moving. We can see the ten fingers moving, but not the human being himself. He is hidden behind the wall. We are not able to explain to ourselves how the ten fingers can get through the wall and move. We have to assume that there is some being to which they belong. It is the same with animals in the physical world. All animals of similar shape have one group-Ego. Here in the physical world we see the animals roam about, and what we are seeing has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. If we see here in the physical world, for example, lions, then these lions are externalized organs of those lion-Egos that live in the astral world. The lion-Ego, the group-Ego of physical lions, is a similarly self-contained being on the astral plane as we are self-contained beings here. Thus each group of animals has an Ego on the astral plane: a lion-Ego, a tiger-Ego, a vulture-Ego are on the astral plane. The single animals exist here in the physical world like fingers stretched through a wall.

When we observe the individual animals here, many of them appear to be extraordinarily smart. These animals are being managed from the astral plane where the animal-Egos, the group-Egos, are located. The population of the astral plane is much more clever than human beings. The animal group-Egos on the astral plane are very wise beings. Observe the bird-migration, whereby the birds migrate through the various regions, how their flight is arranged, how during autumn they move to warmer regions and how they gather together again in spring. If we deeply look into these wise arrangements, we have to ask ourselves: who is hidden behind the wall, who arranges all of this?—These are the group-Egos. When we watch a beaver building, then we will see that the beaver built more wisely than the greatest engineering art.

One has observed the intelligence of bees at work by giving sugar instead of honey to them. Then they were watched. They cannot take along the sugar, so they go and fetch other bees. First they fly to a source of water, from which each bee carries a drop of water, drenches the sugar with it and transforms it into a kind of syrup. This is then carried to the hive. The spirit of the beehive is behind the work of the bees. The individual bees belong to a single bee personality, just like our limbs belong to us. Only it is the case that each bee is more separate from the others, and our individuals limbs are closer together, more compact. We walk everywhere through entities invisible for us, through the animal group-Egos, who evade physical observation.

As we begin to empathise with beings of which man has not the slightest idea, we can also empathise with the plant souls. The plant-Egos live in an even higher world than the animal-Egos. The plant-Egos, those self-contained group-Egos, to each of which a series of plant belongs, are on the so-called Devachan plane. We can also tell the place where these plant-Egos actually are—all plant-Egos are at the centre of the Earth. The animal Group-Egos are circumventing the Earth like the trade-winds, while the plant-Ego’s are in the centre of the Earth. They are beings that all penetrate each other. In the spiritual world the law of permeability holds sway—one being passes through another. We see the animal group-Egos pass across the Earth like the trade-winds and observe how they, out of their wisdom, perform what we consider to be the deeds of the animals. When we observe the plants, then we see the head of the plant, the root, is extended to the centre of the Earth, because there, at the centre of the Earth, is their Group-Ego.

The Earth itself is an expression of soul-spiritual entities. The plants appear to us, from a spiritual viewpoint, to be something like the nails on our fingers. The plants belong to the Earth. One who observes the individual plants, can never see them completely. Each plant belongs to the sum of entities, that make up the plant-Egos. Thus we can immerse ourselves into the feelings and emotion of the plants themselves. The part of the plant that grows out of the earth, that strives from within the earth to the surface, has a different nature from what grows under the earth. If you cut off the bloom, stalk and leaves of a plant, then that is something different from pulling out the root. If you cut off a plant this will create a certain type of well-being, like a pleasure for the plant soul. This pleasure it similar to what is felt, for example, by a cow whose young calf suckles at its udder. The plant part that grows out of the earth really is something similar to the milk of animals.

When we walk through the fields in autumns and the stalks are falling under the scythe of the reaper, when the scythe strikes the sheaves, then feelings of well-being, akin to ecstasy, breathe across the fields. It is something immensely significant when the reaper goes through the field with his scythe, and we not only can watch the falling sheaves with our physical eyes, but we can see feelings of pleasure stroking the Earth.

However, when you rip out a plant by its root, this causes pain for the plant soul. The laws that apply in the physical world are not the same as those in the higher worlds. We will gain different insights when we ascend to the spiritual worlds. Sometimes also here in the physical world the principle of beauty contradicts the principle of pain or joy. It is possible that someone, driven by beauty concepts, rips out a few white hairs, although it will hurt him. This applies to plants too. It might look more tidy to rip out a plant by its root, it might be more beautiful, but it will still hurt the plant.

The stones are also lifeless only in the physical world—in the higher worlds they too have their group-Egos. In the upper areas of Devachan, the group-Egos of the minerals exist. They too experience joy and pain. We will not find out anything about this by way of speculation, but only through the Science of the Spirit.

If we observe a worker in a quarry breaking up stone by stone, we could believe that this would cause pain to the stone soul. But this is not so. Just when a stone is blasted, then feelings of pleasure burst forth from the stone in all directions. Out of the quarry, where rock is blasted apart, strong feelings of well-being stream out on all sides. When we have a glass of water and add salt to it, and the salt dissolves, then feelings of desire and pleasure will stream through the water. Joy streams through the water when the dissolution of salt is being observed from a spiritual viewpoint. But if we allow the dissolved salt to settle and harden again, then this happens under pain. Likewise, it would cause pain to the stone soul if we could amalgamate the rock again that was blasted apart.

In their secret writings, in their religious scriptures, the seers have always shared their secret knowledge with human beings. But the people have lost the ability to understand these secret scriptures. Let’s imagine ourselves back into the ancient periods of time of our earthly evolution. We see the stones of our solid mountain ranges, that are built up from various clay strata, basaltic stones and so on. When we go even further back, we find that things on Earth become more and more soft. Then we come back to a time, where the Earth was filled with mighty masses of fiery warmth, where the iron, where all metals, all minerals, were dissolved in the spiritual. The human being was also a spiritual being at that time. To allow man to develop further, to receive his current shape, those soft masses needed to solidify. The mountain ranges emerged, the mineral masses dissolved out of the soft substance, and the Earth became the dwelling place of today’s human beings. The lifeless rock masses crystallised themselves out of the fiery liquid Earth like the salt out of the salt solution. Everything shaped itself so that the firm masses were formed out of the liquid state. This did not happen without pain. The whole hardening process of the globe was connected with the pain of the stone soul.

In the future Earth will become spiritualised again. The Earth will again fragment, as is already indicated by radium today. The process of dissolution of the Earth will begin, a spiritualisation, a deification, an adoption in the place of children will happen. Let us hear what the Apostle Paul says, “The whole Earth, all beings, are sighing under pain, waiting to be adopted as children”.¹

What we have got here is a representation of what happens on Earth, where the stone soul suffers under pain until the condition occurs when the stone soul will be adopted in place of a child. One could feel pain within one’s soul when those, who are announcing the religious scriptures to man, dream all sorts of things into them, because they do not want to make an effort to penetrate deeply into these records. Those people who are leading mankind are really violating their duty if they do not want to penetrate deeply into the religious scriptures.

The apostle Paul knew what the processes on Earth meant. Theosophy must lead mankind in our modern time into the depth of religious scriptures. It is sad if those who are called upon to be the representatives of the scriptures, make no effort to immerse themselves in them—they do not even have the will to understand them. All the arrogance of the present that says, “we’ve finally made such magnificent progress”,² must disappear. There are so many who believe that our ancestors knew nothing! Then people come and interpret the scriptures of Paul—religious scriptures—as they want to, but filled with arrogance they feel that they know more than our ancestors. But how do these words affect us, “All creatures are sighing under pain, awaiting to be adopted as children”? when we allow the insight of the feeling stone soul to affect us, how it awaits in pain to be adopted in place of a child? Human beings with a materialist mindset believe that when they walk outside they walk through air, wind and fog, through oxygen and nitrogen. But a person who has spiritual knowledge, knows that he is walking through spiritual beings everywhere, that with every breath he takes in spiritual beings and absorbs them.

So we have seen, how the animal-Egos circumvent the Earth like the trade-winds, how the plant-Egos are gathered together in the centre of the Earth, how the Earth itself feels something when we rip out plants, and how the Earth itself is alive and ensouled and has feelings. Everything outside is ensouled and imbued with life.

In the same way as the physical body is born out of the physical substances and powers, our spiritual limbs are born out of the vast cosmos. Then we begin to see a small world within us that rests inside the vast world. This creates a blissful feeling in us. Only when we learn to empathise with the minerals, plants and animals, will we learn to feel how our Ego rests within the whole cosmos.

Thus we can see how Theosophy leads us into the spiritual foundations of existence. It is something that transforms our sense of life, our life impulses in such a way that through it we become different human beings. The theosophical concepts are seeds, will-impulses for real experiences.

• 1. St Paul says, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain.” In Luther’s translation it literally says: “The creatures are fearfully awaiting the revelation of the children of God”, Letter to the Romans, VIII,19
• 2. Goethe, Faust I, Scene 1, night; “Excuse me, but it is a great delight, On the spirit of the ages to set our sight, To see how wise men have thought before us, and we’ve finally made such magnificent progress.”

We have repeatedly to emphasize that knowledge of the spirit must become a living knowledge—by which we mean that a man should not simply come to know various things through spiritual science, but learn to think, feel, perceive, differently about everything around him. This begins when, in the right way, a man takes into him theosophical impulses. He must learn to feel with, and live with, every being. This, certainly, must apply most of all to his fellowmen, but we learn to have sympathy with other men when we can feel for the rest of the world. A man gradually gets to know the whole surrounding world; gradually he learns that everywhere around him there are spiritual beings, that all the time he is actually walking through them. He realizes this through his feeling, his perception. He learns to recognize what surrounds us in the three kingdoms of nature, learns about the beings in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. Then as he goes about in meadows and woods, through the ploughed fields and open country, he experiences it all in a different way from the man who knows nothing of what spiritual science can tell.

Looking at the other beings it might at first be thought that those of the animal kingdom had no soul such as man possesses. It is true that the human ego, the human soul, is different from that of the animal. The human soul lives on the physical plane. When we study the animal as such, each single animal has a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. Besides these members, each man when awake has an ego within him. The animal does not have its ego on the physical plane; for that, indeed, we must look deeper, into the so-called astral world. As here on the physical plane the population consists of human beings, we find the astral plane to be populated by the egos of the animals. And just as down here a man meets other men, the seer on the astral plane meets the egos of the animals—as separate personalities. We may picture it in this way. Imagine a man's ten fingers thrust through a screen and in movement. We see the moving fingers but not the man, for he is hidden by the screen. We cannot imagine that the fingers have come through the screen and move about on their own. We have to assume the intervention of some kind of being. So it is with the animals in the physical world. All animals of the same formation share a Group soul, a Group ego. Here on the physical plane we see the animals moving around, and each has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. What physically we see, lions for example, are the outwardly projected organs of the lion ego living in the astral world. The lion ego, the Group ego of all physical lions, is just as much a separate entity as is the human being when on earth. Each group of animals has an ego on the astral plane; on that plane is found the lion ego, the tiger ego, the ego of the vultures, and so on. The single animals here on the physical plane are like the fingers thrust through a screen. When we watch the single animals many of them appear extraordinarily clever, but they are directed from the astral plane where the animal group egos are to be found. The astral plane is populated by beings who are far cleverer than man; these animal egos are very wise beings. Look at the birds in flight, how they sweep over the different regions, and how well-ordered they are; how in autumn they go off, in their flocks, to some warmer climate, coming back again with the Spring. When we see the wisdom in this ordering, it prompts us to ask: Who is thus in command behind the screen? The answer is the group egos. If we watch a beaver building, we see there is more wisdom in what it builds than in the greatest engineering feat. And the intelligence shown in the way the bees work has also been the object of study. For instance, when given sugar in place of honey it is seen that, as they cannot take up sugar, they fetch other bees and fly off to the nearest water. Each bee brings a drop of water to dissolve the sugar, thus transforming it into a kind of syrup which is then carried into the hive. And behind this work is the spirit of the beehive. The single bees all belong to one personality, in the way that our limbs belong to us—only the bees are more spread out than our more closely connected, more compact limbs. We are walking about all the time through beings we do not see, through the animal egos invisible to our physical eyes.

Just as this describes what we begin to feel with regard to these unsuspected beings, so it is where the souls of the plants are concerned. The plant egos dwell in a higher world than the animal egos. The separate group egos of the plants live on what we call the devachanic plane. We can even state the place where they actually are—in the very centre of the earth, whereas the animal group souls circle round the earth like trade winds. All these plant egos at the centre point of the earth are mutually interpenetrating beings, for in the spiritual world a law of penetrability prevails and all beings pass through one another. We see the animal group souls moving over the earth like trade winds, and how in their wisdom they carry out what appears to be done by the animals. Studying the plant we see that its head—the root—is directed towards the center of the earth where its group ego is to be found. The earth itself is the outward expression of soul and spirit beings. From the spiritual point of view the plants seem like the nails of our fingers. The plants belong to the earth, and when we look at them singly we do not see a complete entity, for the single plant is just one among the whole number of beings constituting a group ego. In this way we can enter into what the plants themselves feel. The part of the plant that springs up out of the earth, what from within the earth strives up to the surface, is of a different nature from what is growing under the earth. There is a difference between the cutting off of blossoms, stalk, leaves, and the tearing up of a root. The former gives the plant soul a feeling of well-being, of pleasure, just as it gives pleasure to a cow, for example, when the calf sucks milk from her udder. There is actual similarity between the milk of animals, and that part of a plant which pushes its way out of the earth. When in late summer we go through fields where corn is being cut, where the blade is passing through the corn stems, then the whole fields breathe out a feeling of bliss. It is an intensely significant moment when we not only watch the reaping with our physical eyes, but perceive the feeling of contentment sweeping over the earth as the corn falls to the ground. But when the roots of the plants are pulled up, then that is painful for the plant souls. In the higher worlds the same laws do not hold good which are valid in the physical world. When we rise to the spiritual worlds our conceptions become different; even here on the physical plane there is sometimes opposition between the principle of beauty and that of pain or pleasure. It is possible that, impelled by a feeling for beauty, someone might pull out their white hairs, that indeed would be painful. And it is like that in the case of the plants. When the roots are pulled up this may make for neatness—yet the plants suffer.

Even stone is without life only on the physical plane. All minerals have their group egos in the higher worlds, on the higher devachanic plane, and these, too, feel pain and pleasure. Only spiritual science can teach us about these matters; speculation is of no avail. Looking at a quarry, and watching the splitting off of each block of stone, one might imagine this to cause pain for the stone ego. But it is not so. With the actual splitting of stone, there gushes out in all directions a feeling of pleasure. Out of the quarry from which the blocks are being cut there streams deep satisfaction on every side. And if we put salt into a glass of water so that it dissolves, then, too, a feeling of pleasure flows through the water. We see this pleasure stream through the water if, with eyes of the spirit, we watch the salt dissolve; but when the salt is becoming crystallized again the pleasure turns to pain. And it would be painful for the stone ego were we able to remold the severed blocks into their original bed.

These mysteries have always been made known to the people by the seers, out of the secret writings of their ancient religious records; but people have lost the capacity for understanding them. Let us think ourselves back into long past ages of our earth evolution. We see rocky masses of mountains, heaped up in layers of clay, basalt, and so on; and as we go further and further back we find everything on earth becoming softer. At length we come to a time when the earth was just one mass of fiery warmth, when iron, all metals, all minerals in fact, were merged in the spiritual. At that time man also was a spiritual being; if he was to go on evolving to his present form, these soft masses had to solidify. Thus the mountain ranges came into being, the minerals detached themselves from the soft substance, and the earth became the fit dwelling place for human beings as they are today. The mighty heaps of lifeless rock crystallized out of the fire-streaming earth, just as dissolved salt turns again into crystals. It has all been one great process of transformation, the passing over of the fluid condition into solidified masses. That did not happen without suffering. The densification of our earthly globe has been closely bound up with pain for the soul of the rock.

In the future the earth will become spiritualized again. It will be entirely broken down into fragments—as radium can already show us today. A process of dissolution will arise for the earth, a spiritualizing process, a becoming divine—in effect, the assuming of a childlike state. Let us hear what the Apostle Paul has to say: how the whole earth and all beings groan in pain for the “glorious liberty of the children of God.” In Romans VIII, verse 19, we read “For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God”; and in verse 22, “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”

In those words we are given a picture of what happens on earth, when the soul of the rock suffers pain until the coming of the state of “Children of God.”—It is enough to sadden one when those who should instruct others concerning the ancient religious documents just allow their fancy to run away with them, because they won't take the trouble to penetrate to the real meaning of what has thus been handed down. This unwillingness to get to the heart of the ancient teachings is considered by the leaders of mankind to be an absolute violation of duty. Paul, the Apostle, recognized what such processes on earth signify. In this later period of ours, spiritual science is destined to lead men into the depths of these old records. It is indeed sad when those whose very calling should entail the upholding of them, make no effort to study, and have no will to understand, their meaning. Present-day arrogance, summed up in the words: “We have made such wonderful progress”—this must all go. How many people there are who believe that our forebears knew nothing! And there are those who expound the epistles of Paul, and all religious documents, quite arbitrarily, with a feeling of pride that they know more than their forefathers. But how then are we to take the words: “the whole creation groaneth in pain waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God”? And what effect does it have upon us when we know how the soul of the stone suffers while awaiting that manifestation?—People of materialistic mind think that, there outside, they walk only through air, wind, mist, through oxygen and nitrogen. But those who have spiritual knowledge realize, everywhere, that they are breathing spiritual beings in and out—merging with them.

Thus we have seen how the egos of the animals encircle the earth like the trade winds; how the plant egos have their common dwelling place in the center of the earth; and how the earth—being in itself alive, with a soul capable of feeling—is affected by the uprooting of the plants. Everything outside is ensouled and filled through and through with life.—In the same way as the physical body is produced out of physical substances and forces, do our spiritual members come forth out of the great whole. From that we begin to perceive our self as a small world resting in the great world; and this arouses in us a sense of being blessed. It is only when we learn to feel with the minerals, plants, and animals, that we can also experience this feeling of being at rest within the whole vast universe.

And so we see how spiritual science leads us into the spiritual foundations of existence. It is something which transforms our feeling and our will for life, so that, as men, we become different. Anthroposophical conceptions are seeds, impulses of will on the road to true experience.

Answers to Questions after the Lecture

The Death of Animals

An animal's death is quite different from that of a man. In the case of man death has to do with the bringing down of his individual ego on to the physical plane and the identification of it with his physical body. A man speaks of his physical body as “I”—feels himself to be “I”. When at death he loses his physical body it is a perceptible process, and he feels he is losing something of value. For those accustomed to look upon the physical body as valueless, the loss is less severe.

The single animal has no such sense of “I am”. That is experienced by the group soul. The more a being is individualized, and the deeper its descent on the physical plane, the more difficult its regeneration becomes. The group soul feels the death of an animal as we should the loss of a finger—as something to be compensated for or replaced.

After long periods the animals on earth change. Species evolve. Darwinism has elaborated this hypothetically, but the following is really the case. When an animal species changes there is also a change of group soul; and when the species becomes extinct this, for the group soul, is similar to death. For example, the seer today can discern a kind of death rattle in the group soul of the ibex. But the group soul evolves and becomes, on the extinction of one animal species, the group soul of another—which is like a rebirth.

The Significance of Killing Animals

The higher evolution of the earth consists in killing ceasing altogether. Therefore the ideal from the standpoint of spiritual science is to refrain from killing.

The Effect of Transplanting a Yew Tree

It means terrible pain for the tree when it is uprooted. It is not possible, however, in the course of world evolution, entirely to eliminate pain. All higher beings are born in pain, without which there could often be no evolution. The spiritual leaders of mankind have allowed this suffering so as to enable men to arrive at their present state.

The most important part of esoteric life is our exercises, through which we gradually work our way up into the spiritual world. The way we do them and our accompanying attitude is important as we work with higher worlds and beings.

We should have no greed for spiritual knowledge, but a mood should spread out in us like we feel in compassion and moral actions. Otherwise an esoteric is in great danger of becoming morally worse in exoteric life than he was before. That's why accessory exercises for the strengthening of intellectual and moral qualities are always demanded in addition to the actual meditations.

Another danger lies in wait for an esoteric in connection with the karma that he's trying to control and make good. Here one almost always finds that the one working intensively on his inner life becomes careless with respect to outer karmic phenomena and conditions. Previous karmic mistakes that an esoteric has become burdened with and that then between death and rebirth have given him a strong urge to make them good put him in situations and bring him in contact with people so that he can fulfill his karmic obligations towards them. In normal exoteric development, karma would unwind slowly or become partially worked out.

If a pupil is working at his esoteric development too much and does not pay attention to the outer situations that make up his destiny, then karma breaks in on him And what otherwise takes place in years or in various incarnations must now work itself out in a concentrated way with severe upheavals. Here one can get to the edge of despair and can also wreak havoc on one's surroundings and draw them into the karmic eruption. But even in the simplest initial exercises he has the consolation that there's forces that hold and support him also. We may and should always think of this.