The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When a man of our time goes through an occult training which leads him to such experiences as were described in the last two lectures, he enters by means of this training into the spiritual worlds; and there he experiences certain facts and meets with certain beings. The phrase, “To see the Sun at Midnight”, is fundamentally only an expression for spiritual facts and for the meeting with spiritual beings who are connected with the Sun-existence. But when this man of our time ascends into the higher worlds, he goes through certain experiences which one cannot describe otherwise than by saying: A man experiences much that is significant in the higher worlds through such an ascent, but he also feels himself forsaken and alone. He feels that he can gather up his experience in some such words as these: “Much, very much, you are seeing here, but the very thing you must long for above all else, after all you have gone through—that you are not able to experience.” And he would like to question all the beings whom he meets after such an ascent concerning certain secrets he longs to understand. That is the feeling he has. But all these beings, who unveil much that is immense and powerful, remain silent when he wants to learn from them about those mysteries which he must now regard as the most important of all. Hence the man of our time, when he has thus mounted to the higher worlds, feels it to be above all painful that in spite of all the splendour, in spite of his meeting with those glorious beings, he has an immense emptiness in his inner life. And if nothing else were to happen, a protracted experience of this loneliness, this forlorn condition in the higher worlds, would finally bring about something like despair in his soul.

Now at this point something can happen—and usually does happen if the ascent has been undertaken according to the true rules of Initiation—which may be a protection from this despair, at first, though not permanently. Something like a remembrance may arise in the soul, or one might say a retrospect into far-off times of the past, a kind of reading in the Akashic Record about long-past happenings. And what is then experienced (one cannot characterise these things except by trying to clothe them in approximate words) might be put in the following way: “When as a modern man you ascend into these higher worlds, you are met by forlorn-ness, despair. But pictures call up for you long-past happenings, showing you that in distant times men ascended into the worlds into which you now wish to rise. Yes, from these memory pictures you may well come to recognise that in earlier incarnations your own soul took part in what these men experienced when formerly they rose into the higher worlds. It might even appear that the soul of a present-day man, in contemplating these pictures, looks at experiences of his own, gone through in times long since past. Then in those remote ages this soul would have been an Initiate. In other cases, the man would know only that his soul had been connected with those who as Initiates had then risen into the higher worlds; but his soul now feels lonely and forsaken, whereas those once initiated souls did not feel lonely and forsaken in the same worlds, but experienced innermost bliss. He will recognise further that this was so because in those ancient times souls were differently constituted, and for this reason they experienced differently what they beheld in the higher worlds. What is it, then, that is really experienced?

The experience now in question is such that it brings before the soul beings of higher worlds who are working upon the sense-world from the super-sensible worlds; beings are perceived who stand behind our sense-world; conditions are seen such as were described yesterday. But if one tries to summarise all one sees, it can be characterised in some such way as the following: The seer feels himself to be in the higher worlds, and gazing down, as it were, into the sense-world; he feels himself united in some way with spirits who have passed through the Gate of Death, and, with them, too, he gazes downward, and sees how they will again employ their forces in order to enter physical existence. He looks down and sees how forces are sent out of the super-sensible worlds in order to bring about the processes of the different kingdoms of nature in the sense-world. He sees the whole current of events which are prepared for our world out of the higher worlds. Because in the course of a sojourn of this kind in the higher worlds he is outside his physical and etheric bodies, he looks down upon them and sees also those forces in the Cosmos, in the whole spiritual universe, which are working on the physical and etheric bodies of man. And through the activity of the beings into whose company he has entered, he learns to understand how physical and etheric bodies come into existence within the physical world. He learns to understand this thoroughly. He comes to understand how certain beings who are associated with the Sun send their activity into the Earth and work on engendering the physical and etheric bodies of man. He learns also to know certain beings associated with the Moon-existence, who work down out of the Cosmos in order likewise to co-operate in bringing about the physical and etheric bodies of human beings.

Then, however, arises a great longing, a longing that becomes terrible for a man of the present time. It is the longing to know something of how the astral body and the ego are born out of the Cosmos, how they come into existence. Whereas the seer can discern exactly how the physical body and the etheric body arise out of the forces of the Cosmos, completely hidden from him is everything that could point to how the astral body and the ego of man are brought into being. In deepest darkness and secrecy is veiled everything that has to do with the astral body and ego. Thus the feeling grows: What you are in your innermost nature, what you yourself really are, is veiled from your spiritual sight; and that in which you sheathe yourself when you are living in the physical world is disclosed to you precisely enough!

All this is experienced by a man of the present time when he rises to higher worlds in the manner described. It was experienced. also by those who in ancient times undertook the ascent. But they did not feel the great longing we have spoken of: they had no need to behold their innermost being, for they were so constituted that they felt a deep inward satisfaction in perceiving how the spiritual beings whose company they had reached were at work in building physical and etheric bodies on the Earth. In contemplating how these beings worked down from the Sun to accomplish this task, the souls who were initiated in past times found their highest satisfaction. It must be added that the work performed by these beings presented itself under a different aspect in those times; hence the satisfaction it could afford. In our time the work appears in such a light that one asks: Wherefore all this preparation of the physical and etheric bodies, if one cannot understand what these sheaths conceal? That is the difference between a person of the present time and a man of old. And the period in the past which was connected particularly with these experiences is that in which Zarathustra initiated his pupils and guided them up into the higher worlds. If aspirants were to be led up into the higher worlds in the same way today as they were by Zarathustra, they would feel that emptiness and loneliness to which reference has been made. In the time of Zarathustra those who were to be initiated experienced the working of Ahura Mazdao on the physical body and the etheric body, and in the unveiling of this wonderful mystery they felt bliss and satisfaction, for they were so disposed that they felt inwardly stirred when they saw how the sheaths which man needs if he is to accomplish his Earth-mission are brought into existence. In this they found satisfaction.

Thus it was with the Zarathustrian Initiation. For the initiates could “See the Sun at Midnight”; that is, they were not looking upon the physical form of the Sun but upon the spiritual beings who are linked with the Sun. They saw emanating from the Sun the forces which play into the physical body; saw how the forces which the Sun is able to send forth mould the human head and form the different parts of the human brain. For it would be folly for anyone to think that a marvellous construction such as the human brain could come into existence merely through terrestrial forces; solar forces must work into it. These forces bring together the complex lobular formations of the human brain, poised above the human face. Engaged in this task are quite numerous beings; Zarathustra gave them the name of “Amshaspands”. They furnish the stimulus for the forces of the Cosmos which make possible the building of the human brain and the upper nerves of the spinal cord, with the exception of the lower twenty-eight pairs of nerves. Then Zarathustra also pointed out how other currents flow from beings who are linked with the life of the Moon; he showed how wonderfully the structure of the Cosmos is adapted so that from twenty-eight groups of entities—“Izeds” as they are called—currents proceed which build up the spinal cord with its twenty-eight lower pairs of nerve fibres. Thus are physical and etheric bodies formed out of currents which stream forth from cosmic beings.

They were powerful impressions that the initiates of Zarathustra received in this way. And in receiving them as an expression of the work of Ahura Mazdao, they felt an inner bliss concerning all that is thus accomplished. in the world. If a modern man were to raise himself in the same way into the higher worlds, he would of course also be capable of wonderment; he, too, would be able to begin to experience the same bliss. But gradually he would pass on to the feeling which one cannot clothe in words other than these: “What is the purpose of it all? I know nothing about that being who passes from incarnation to incarnation! I know solely about those beings who in each new incarnation build up sheaths out of the Cosmos, but they build only sheaths.” That was precisely the essence of the Zarathustra Initiation: its revelation of the connection between the earthly part of man and the life of the Sun. It was characteristic of the time of Zarathustra that men were able to absorb into their occult knowledge those mysteries we have now described.

Again, it was in a different way that souls in ancient Egypt entered the higher worlds at Initiation—souls, for example, who went through the Hermes Initiation. We have already spoken about all these things; but in these lectures they will be presented in rather more detail than was possible previously. When in ancient Egyptian times souls were raised into the higher worlds through the Hermes Initiation, then—as it must always be after Initiation—they felt themselves to be outside their physical and etheric bodies and knew that they were now within a world of spiritual facts and spiritual beings. Wide was the circuit of vision through which these souls were then led. They were shown the individual beings and facts, as can happen also with the soul of today. But one must not think of it as though they went about on physical feet; it was their vision that was guided, as if a person's sight were to be led all round a region as wide as the universe. Thus it was in this Initiation.

Then came a moment of experience wherein the initiates felt as though a traveler in a country encircled by the sea had reached the shore. They knew they had come to the farthest point attainable. In the Egyptian Initiation they experienced what one cannot clothe in other words than these: “In your vision you have been led far and wide through cosmic realms and have come to know the beings and forces that work on your physical body and your etheric body. But now you are entering the most holy place. You are entering a region where you can feel yourself united with the Being who works with others on the part of you that goes from one incarnation to another, and on your astral body.” It is a significant experience that occurs at this point, for after it all things become in some sense different.

For the initiate, after that, one possibility is closed. In the world he has now entered, on the shores of cosmic existence, he is no longer able to make use of his former ways of thinking and judging. If he cannot cast off all this earthly, physical power of judgment; if he cannot disregard what has guided him so far, then he cannot have this experience on the borders of existence; he cannot feel himself united with that Being who is active when the human being as spirit and soul approaches his birth into a new incarnation, and seeks nation, family and parents in order to clothe himself with new sheaths. All the beings whom he has already come to know, and who make it clear to him how the etheric and physical sheaths arise and are formed out of the Cosmos, are unable to explain what kind of forces are working in that Being with whom he now feels himself united, and who is building and weaving in the innermost astral being of the man himself. It becomes quite apparent to the seer, as it was to the Egyptian soul who was going through the Hermes Initiation, that now, after the soul is outside its sheaths and has passed through the “cosmic existence” already alluded to, it feels itself united with a Being. The soul can feel the qualities of this Being, only it feels itself as if it were within these qualities and not outside this Being, and it can know that this Being is really there, but that it is at the same time within this Being. And the first impression that the aspirant receives of this Being is such that one says to oneself: In this Being lie the forces which bring the soul from one incarnation to another, and also the forces which illuminate the soul between death and a new birth. All that is there within. But when there surges towards you a force like unto spiritual cosmic Warmth, one that conveys the soul from death to a new birth; and when there presses towards you the spiritual Light that illumines souls between death and a new birth, and when you feel how this Warmth and this Light stream out from the Being with whom you are united, you are now in a quite peculiar situation. You have had to drink the waters of Lethe, to forget the art of understanding which formerly guided you through the physical world, to lay aside your former power of judgment, your intellectuality, for here these would only lead you astray; and as yet you have gained nothing of a new kind. In your experience of the cosmic Warmth which brings the soul to a new birth, you are within the ocean of forces which illuminate the soul between death and a new birth. You experience the force and the light which issue from this Being. You behold this Being in such manner that you can do no other than ask of it: “Who art Thou? For Thou alone canst tell me who Thou art, and only then can I know that which takes the essential inward part of me as a human being from death to a new birth. Only when Thou tellest me this can I know what my innermost nature is as man!” And mute remains the Being with whom the aspirant knows himself to be united. He feels with the deepest part of himself that he is united with the deepest part of the Being. The urge towards self-knowledge arises, to know what a man is—and yet the Being remains silent. The aspirant must first have stood for a while before this silent Being, and have felt deeply the longing to have the riddle of the universe solved after a new manner, as it never can be on the physical Earth; he must have brought into this world, to this Being, as a force out of himself, the deep longing to have the riddle of the universe solved in a way foreign to physical existence, and the soul must entirely live in the longing to have the cosmic enigma solved in this manner. Then, when he has felt himself united with the mute spiritual Being, and has lived in him with longing for the solution that we have indicated, then he feels that there streams forth into this spiritual Being with whom he is united, the force of his own longing. And because this force of the aspirant's own longing for the solution of the riddle streams out into the spiritual Being, after a time it gives birth to something like another being projected from it. But what is born is not after the manner of an earthly birth, as the aspirant knows at once through his own vision. An earthly birth arises “in time”; it enters into the stream of time. But concerning the birth from this Being, the aspirant knows: It is born from Him, it has been born from Him since primordial times—always, and this birth continues from primordial ages up to the present. Only this birth-process of one being from another has hitherto not been visible to man; until now it has been withheld from his sight. This birth-process consists in his: it is really continuous, but man, owing to his having prepared himself by means of his yearning for the solving of the riddle, now sees it—it is now perceived in the spiritual world. The aspirant knows this. Thus he does not say: Now a being is born, but: From the Being with whom you have united yourself, ever since primordial times, a being has always been born; but now the process of the being's birth, and the being itself who is born, are perceptible to you.

What I have now pictured to you, as far as it can be done in the words of our language, is that to which the Hermes Initiator led. his pupils. And the feelings that I have just described (I might say with stammering words, for the things contain so much that the words of our tongue can express them only in a stammering way)—these feelings were the experiences of the so-called Egyptian Isis Initiation.

When the aspirant who was going through the Isis Initiation had reached the furthest shore of existence and had gazed upon the beings who build up the physical body and the etheric body, when he had stood before the silent Goddess from whom Warmth and Light come forth for the innermost of the human soul, he said to himself: “That is Isis. That is the mute and silent Goddess whose countenance can be unveiled to no-one who sees only with mortal eyes, but only to those who have worked themselves through to the shores which have been described, so that they can see with those eyes which go from incarnation to incarnation and are no longer mortal. For an impenetrable veil hides the form of Isis from mortal eyes.”

When the aspirant had thus gazed upon Isis and had experienced in his soul the feeling described, he understood what has been described. as the birth. What was this “birth?” He understood that it can be designated as “The resounding through all space of the Music of the Spheres,” and as the merging of the tones of this Sphere-music with the creative cosmic Word—the Word which permeates space and pours into the beings everything that has to be so poured into them, as the soul has to be poured into the physical and etheric body after passing through the life between death and a new birth. Everything that has to be thus poured out from the spiritual world into the physical world, so that what is poured out acquires the inward character of soul, is poured in from the Harmony of the Spheres resounding through space. The Harmony of the Spheres gradually assumes such a form that through the inner significance it expresses it can be understood as the Cosmic Word—the Word which ensouls the beings that are vitalised by the forces of Warmth and Light which pour into those bodies that arise from the divine forces and beings perceived with the vision already attained.

Thus did the aspirant look into the world of the Harmony of the Spheres, the world of the Cosmic Word; thus did he look into the world which is the veritable home of the human soul during the time between death and a new birth. That which is hidden deep in the physical earthly existence of man, but lives between death and a new birth in the splendour of the Light and Warmth; that which deeply veils itself in the physical world as the world of the Harmony of the Spheres and the Cosmic Word, was experienced in the Hermes-Initiation as coming to birth from Isis. There Isis stands before the aspirant, Isis herself on the one side, and on the other side the being she has borne, whom one must speak of as Cosmic Tones and the Cosmic Word. The aspirant feels himself in the company of Isis and of the Cosmic Word born of her. And this “Cosmic Word” is in the first place the appearing of Osiris. “Isis in association with Osiris”: thus do they appear before direct vision; for in the very oldest Egyptian Initiation it was said that Osiris was at the same time spouse and son of Isis. And in the older Egyptian Initiation the essential thing was that the aspirant, through this Initiation, experienced the mysteries of soul-life, which remains united with man during the period between death and a new birth. Through the union with Osiris it was possible to recognise oneself in one's deeper significance as man.

So it was brought to pass that the Egyptian Initiate met the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Tones as the elucidators of his own being in the spiritual world. But that was up to a certain point of time only in the old Egyptian period. After that it ceased. There was a great difference—this is shown also by the Akashic Records when one looks back into ancient times—between the experiences of the Egyptian Initiate in the ancient Egyptian temples and what he experienced later on.

Let us bring before our souls what the Initiate experienced in these later times. He could still be led through the vast spaces of the universe to the confines of existence; there he could meet with all the beings who build up the physical and etheric bodies of man; there he could approach the shores of being and could have the vision of the mute, silent Isis, and could apprehend in her the Cosmic Warmth which contains for man the forces that lead from death to a new birth. There he could also become acquainted with the Light which illumines the soul between death and a new birth; and the longing arose to hear the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony; longing lived in the soul when it united itself with the silent Isis. But the Goddess remained dumb! In that later age no Osiris could be born, no Cosmic Harmony resounded, no Cosmic Word expounded that which now showed itself only as Cosmic Warmth and Cosmic Light. And the soul of the aspirant could not have expressed. these experiences otherwise than by saying something like the following; “Thus, 0 Goddess, do I look up in grief to thee, tormented by the thirst for knowledge, the yearning for knowledge, and thou, thou remainest silent and speechless towards the tormented and sorrow-laden soul. And this soul, because it cannot understand itself, seems to itself as though extinguished, as if it must lose its very existence.” And through her mourning countenance the Goddess expressed her powerlessness to bring forth the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony. The aspirant saw in her that she had been deprived of the power to bring forth Osiris and to have him at her side, Osiris as Son and Spouse. He felt that Osiris had been torn from Isis.

Those who went through this Initiation and came back into the physical world had a serious but resigned world-outlook. They knew her, the Holy Isis, but they felt themselves as “Sons of the Widow”. And the point of time between the old Initiation, wherein one was able to experience the birth of Osiris in those ancient Egyptian Mysteries, and that wherein one met only the mute, mourning Isis and could become a Son of the Widow in the Egyptian Mysteries; the point of time which separates these two phases of the Egyptian Initiation—when was it? It was the time in which Moses lived. For the karma of Egypt was fulfilled in such a way that not only was Moses initiated into the Mysteries of Egypt, but he took them with him. When he led his people out of Egypt he took with him the part of the Egyptian Initiation which added the Osiris-Initiation to the mourning Isis, as she later became. Such was the transition from the Egyptian civilisation to that of the Old Testament. Truly, Moses had carried away the secret of Osiris, the secret of the Cosmic Word! And if he had not left behind the powerless Isis there could not have resounded for him, in the way that he had to understand it for the sake of his people, that great, significant Word, “I AM THE I AM”, (“Ejeh asher Ejeh”). So was the Egyptian Mystery carried over to the ancient Hebrew Mystery.

We have tried now to show, using such words as are available for these matters, what the experiences were like in the Mysteries of Zarathustra and of Egypt. These things do not lend themselves to intellectual presentation. The essential point is that the soul goes through experiences corresponding to what I have endeavoured to describe. And it is important to enter into what took place in the soul of the aspirant in the later Egyptian Initiation: to feel how he raised his soul into the higher worlds and met Isis with the mourning look and sorrow-stricken countenance, the result of her having to look on the human soul which was well able to yearn and thirst for knowledge of the spiritual worlds, but could not be satisfied.

Thus also certain Greek Initiates experienced the same Being of whom the Egyptians spoke as the later Isis. Hence the seriousness of the Greek Initiation, where it appears in its solemnity. What had been experienced in earlier times in the super-sensible worlds—that which gave significance to those super-sensible worlds in that they resounded to the Cosmic Word and Cosmic Tone—was no longer there. It was there no more ... The super-sensible worlds were as though desolate and forsaken by the Cosmic Word, those worlds into which in earlier Initiations man had been able to enter. The Zarathustrian Initiate could still feel satisfied when in these worlds he encountered the Beings already described, for he felt himself fulfilled by the Cosmic Light, which he perceived as Ahura Mazdao. He perceived it as masculine, of solar nature; the Egyptian perceived it as feminine, lunar. And at a higher stage in the Zarathustrian Initiation he perceived also the Cosmic Word, not so concretely as if born from such a Being as Isis; but he experienced it and he knew the Harmony of the Spheres and the Cosmic Word.

In the later Egyptian time—and also in other lands during this late Egyptian time—when a man raised himself into the higher worlds, his feelings were quite similar to those of a present-day man, as described at the beginning of the present lecture. He rises up into the higher worlds, becomes acquainted with all the Beings who co-operate in building up the physical and etheric bodies, but he feels himself forsaken and alone if nothing else appears, because he has something in himself that longs for the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony, and the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony cannot resound for him. today such a man feels lonely and forsaken; in the later Egyptian Age he did not only feel forsaken and desolate, but, if he was a true “Son of the Widow” and was out of the physical and etheric bodies and in the spiritual worlds, he felt himself as a human soul in such a way that be was constrained to clothe his feeling in the words: The God is preparing to leave the worlds which you have always trodden when you felt the Cosmic Word; the God has ceased to be active there. And ever more and more did this feeling condense itself into what one may call the super-sensible equivalent of that which one encounters in the sense-world as the death of man—when one sees a person die, when one knows that he is passing out of the physical world. And now, when the Initiate of the later Egyptian Age rose up into the higher worlds, he was a partaker in the gradual dying of the God. As one feels with a person when he is passing into the spiritual world, so did the Initiate of the later Egyptian period feel how the God took leave of the spiritual world in order to pass over into another world. This was the significant and remarkable part of the later Egyptian Initiation—that when the aspirant raised his life into the spiritual worlds, it was not into rapture and bliss, but in order to partake in the gradual passing away of a God who was present in these higher worlds as Cosmic Word and Cosmic Harmony. Out of this frame of mind there gradually condensed the myth of Osiris, who was torn away from Isis and conveyed to Asia, and for whom Isis mourned.

With this lecture we have placed ourselves on one bank of the stream which separates the evolution of humanity into two parts. We have come from the direction of this evolution as far as the bank; we stand upon it, and what this standing there signifies has been brought home to us through the frame of mind, of the later Egyptian Initiate, the “Son of the Widow”, who was initiated in order to experience mourning and resignation. It will now be our task, in the boat of Spiritual Science, to cross the stream which separates the two shores of human evolution.

In the last lecture we shall see what is on the other shore—when we push off our boat from the place where we have experienced the mourning for the God who is dying in the Heavens, when we leave that place in order to traverse the stream and arrive at the other bank. When the boat of spiritual science has carried us across, with the remembrance that we have previously experienced the dying of a God in the Heavens, we shall see what is offered to our view on the other side.

In the last lecture we spoke of the experiences of the human soul in relation to the Mystery-principles of ancient times, the Eastern and Egyptian Mysteries. In a certain sense this brought us to the last step in the stages of Initiation, for in the first lecture we described as characteristic of the nature of all Mysteries these four steps: Approach to the Boundary of Death; Becoming acquainted with the Life of the Elementary World; Beholding the Sun at Midnight; Standing before the Upper and the Lower Gods.

This Standing before the Upper and the Lower Gods comes about when the aspirant has to apprehend the forces which rule everything that belongs to the physical side of man, the part which remains behind in sleep as physical and etheric body—here we have to do with the Lower Gods in the widest sense of the word. We have to speak of the Upper Gods in relation to all the forces which are concerned with the innermost being of man; with that which passes through the various incarnations, the ego and the astral body.

In the preceding lectures I was able to describe the experiences of a modern man, acquainted with the nature of the Mysteries, when he looks back in the Akashic Record at the experiences undergone by human souls within the Mysteries of ancient times. We had to point to the tragic impression made on Egyptian souls when in the course of their Initiation they came face to face with the changes that had affected the Cosmic Power known as Isis in the Egyptian Mysteries. From the Osiris legend we learn that the spouse of Isis was overcome by the enemy and torn away from her. But we have also come to know the results in the higher worlds of this changed situation in the life of Isis. The soul which in later Egyptian times had raised itself into spiritual worlds became a participant in the fate of Osiris, the God who was dying to the higher worlds and descending into the earthly region. For that is how it was experienced.

Now it is extraordinarily difficult to speak in ideas and concepts concerning the further development of this “fate of Gods”. But since we have become accustomed to bring in pictures as a help in connection with the most intimate things of the higher worlds, where our ordinary speech, which has already become so secular, fails us, let us express in a readily understandable picture something that is to form, as it were, the leit-motif of the exposition to be given today.

Let us enter into the tragic mood of one about to be initiated during the Egyptian epoch. We transpose ourselves into this mood and find. that it originated from experiences that the aspirant could express only by saying to himself: “Formerly, when I entered the spiritual worlds, I found Osiris permeating cosmic space with the Creative Word and its meaning, which represent the ground-forces of all being and development. Now the Word has become mute and silent. The God who was called Osiris has forsaken these realms. He is preparing to penetrate into other regions; he has descended into the Earth-region in order to enter into the souls of men.”

The Being who had been known spiritually to human souls in earlier days first became manifest in physical life when Moses heard in the physical world the Voice that in earlier ages had been heard only in the spiritual worlds: “Ejeh asher Ejeh!”—“I AM THE I AM, Who was, and is, and will be”. And then this Being who, as the Creative Word, had gradually become lost to the experience of the candidate for Initiation, transferred His life into the Earth-region so that He could gradually come to life again in the souls of earthly men; and in this new life, rising to ever higher and higher glory, would consist the further development of the Earth, even to the end of the Earth-evolution.

Let us try to transport ourselves as vividly as we can into the frame of mind of one of these candidates, and realise how in the spiritual regions to which he could first attain he felt the Creative Word disappearing, sinking down into the Earth-region and becoming lost to spiritual sight. Let us follow the evolution of the Earth, and we shall see that for spiritual sight this Creative Word now goes forward somewhat as a stream which has been on the surface and then disappears for a certain time below the Earth's surface, in order to reappear later at another place. And so there reappeared That which the souls who were being initiated in the later Egyptian Mysteries had seen sinking tragically out of sight. It reappeared, and could be looked upon by those in later times who were permitted to participate in the Mysteries. And they had to bring into the picture what they could see arising again, but arising now in such a way that henceforward it belonged to Earth-evolution.

How did That reappear which had become submerged in ancient Egypt? It reappeared in such a way that it became visible in the Holy Vessel which is spoken of as the “Holy Grail”, guarded by the Knights of the Holy Grail. In the rise of the Holy Grail can be found That which had sunk down in ancient Egypt, and in this arising of the Holy Grail there stands before us everything that went into the post-Christian renewal of the principle of the ancient Mysteries. Fundamentally speaking, the phrase the “Holy Grail”, with all that belongs to it, involves a reappearing of the essence of the Eastern Mysteries,

Everything that appears at a certain time in the evolution of humanity, in order to bring this evolution forward, must include a kind of repetition of what has gone before. In every later epoch the earlier experiences of humanity must appear again, but in a fresh form. We know that in the third post-Atlantean epoch the emphasis was on the Sentient Soul; in the fourth, the Graeco-Latin epoch, it was on the Intellectual Soul, and the development of the Consciousness Soul is the special task of our own epoch, the fifth. For the candidate for Initiation all these things are important, because in a given epoch the most important forces of Initiation must proceed from the soul-principle which is specially connected with that epoch. The Egyptian Initiation was connected with the Sentient Soul; the Graeco-Latin Initiation with the Intellectual Soul; and the Initiation of the fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch must be connected with the Consciousness Soul. But in the dawn of this fifth epoch there must also be a repetition of what the Initiates once went through out of the forces of the Sentient Soul; and equally a repetition of what was gone through in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Then something is added, something new which must come from the Consciousness Soul to provide supporting forces for the candidate. Hence the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, with its special emphasis on the arising of the new Initiation, must have centres where there can be recalled to human souls the secrets poured into human evolution through the Egyptian-Chaldaic soul, and the secrets poured. out in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin time, during which the Mystery of Golgotha took place. And to that must be added a new element.

As in earlier ages, so also in this later age, that which was enacted in the depths of the Mysteries finds expression in the most varied legends, and these correspond more or less closely to secrets in which the human soul has participated. Hence it was necessary that the secrets of the Egyptian-Chaldaic period should appear as a kind of repetition before the souls of the fifth epoch. They were secrets related to the Cosmos, to the in-pouring of the forces of the Zodiac and of the Planets, but particularly to the secrets connected with the co-operation of the Sun and Moon, and to the shifting influences of the Sun and Moon as they pass through the signs of the Zodiac. (I am speaking of the apparent movements, because they sufficiently characterise the processes involved.) But there had to be a difference between the way in which these secrets had emerged in the third epoch and the way in which they were presented in the fifth epoch. Everything now had to work right into the Consciousness Soul, into that which makes for and constitutes human personality. This took place in a quite special way through the fact that those inspiring forces which were seen when in the third epoch souls were transported into spiritual regions of the Cosmos, and which simultaneously streamed out of cosmic space into the Earth—during the fifth epoch these forces inspired certain individuals. In the dawn of the fifth epoch, accordingly, there were persons who, not exactly through their training but through certain mysterious influences, became the instruments, the vehicles, of cosmic influences issuing from the Sun and Moon during their passage through the signs of the Zodiac. The secrets that could then be won for the human soul through these individuals were a repetition of what had once been experienced through the Sentient Soul. And the persons who expressed the transit of the cosmic forces through the signs of the Zodiac were those called “The Knights of King Arthur's Round Table”. Twelve in number, they had around them a band of other men, but they were the principal Knights. The others represented the starry host; into them flowed the inspirations which were more distantly distributed in cosmic space; and into the twelve Knights flowed the inspirations from the twelve directions of the Zodiac. The inspirations which came from the spiritual forces of the Sun and Moon were represented by King Arthur and his wife Guinevere. Thus in King Arthur's Round Table we have the humanised Cosmos. What we may call the pedagogical high school for the Sentient Soul of the West proceeded from King Arthur's Round Table. Hence we are told—and the legend here refers in pictures of external facts to inner mysteries which were taking place in the dawn of that epoch in the human soul—how the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table journeyed far and wide and slew monsters and giants. These external pictures point to the endeavours of human souls who were to make progress in refining and. purifying those forces of the astral body which expressed themselves for the seer in pictures of monsters, giants and the like. Everything that the Sentient Soul was to experience through the later Mysteries is bound up with the pictorial concepts of King Arthur's Round Table.

What the Intellectual Soul was to experience in this later time has in turn found legendary form in the saga of the Holy Grail. Everything that had to be recapitulated from the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place was concentrated in the influences that streamed forth from the secrets of the Holy Grail. And these influences could work on the Intellectual Soul in persons who had gained understanding of the Holy Grail and wished to understand their own epoch. In the present day also the human soul must be open to these influences if it is to be initiated, if it is to have understanding for the spiritual nature of our times. The Holy Grail is surrounded by many, many mysteries. Today, naturally, we can give only a sketchy outline of these mysteries; but it may provide a starting-point for more detailed studies which may one day be undertaken regarding these mysteries of the Holy Grail. In the Holy Grail, if understood in its true nature, there was embraced everything which characterised the secrets of the human soul in later times.

Let us take an Initiate of later times when, having freed his ego and astral body from his physical and etheric bodies and come forth from them, he looked down at them from outside, and let us picture what he saw in them. He saw something which could be very disturbing, if he had not learnt to understand it thoroughly. And he still sees it today. The physical and etheric bodies have woven into them something which flows through them like streams or strands running in various directions. As the nerve fibres run through the physical body, so is there woven into the physical body something finer than the nerves, of which occult sight reports: That is dead—so dead that there really is something like a piece of dead substance in the human body. It is now condemned to be dead throughout the time between birth and death, but during the Eastern period of human evolution it was still living. Yes, one has the experience that in human bodies there is something dead which once was alive. And one sets out to discover what it really is. “Dead” is to be understood here in a relative sense; the dead part is indeed stimulated by its environment, but there are tendencies and currents in the human body which, in comparison with the life that animates it, have always a disposition toward death. We investigate how this has come about, and we find that the origin of it is as follows.

Once in ancient times men's souls possessed a certain faculty of clairvoyance, and in the latter part of the Egyptian-Chaldaic civilisation this clairvoyance still existed to such a degree that a man, when gazing into the starry heavens, saw not merely the physical stars but also the spiritual beings united with them. And so, when in the intermediate state between waking and sleeping the human soul looked out into the universe and saw something spiritual, the impression received was different from the impressions made upon the human soul today, when people study science in the modern way or are living mostly in the ordinary consciousness of the times. But all the souls living and embodied today were also incarnated in the Egyptian-Chaldaic epoch. All the souls present here today once looked out from their bodies into starry space, took part in the spiritual life of the universe and received its impressions. This sank into our souls and became an intrinsic part of them. All the souls of today once looked out into the universe and received spiritual impressions in the same way as they now receive impressions of colours and sounds. It is all there still, in the depth of our souls, and the souls created their bodies in accordance with it. But our souls have lost remembrance of it! For modern consciousness it is no longer present in the souls of men. And that which corresponds to the old up-building forces which the souls used to receive, cannot now build upon the body, with the result that the corresponding part of the physical and etheric bodies remains lifeless. If nothing else were to happen, if men went on living merely with those sciences which are concerned with the outer physical world, then men would deteriorate more and more, because their souls have forgotten those former impressions of the spiritual world which go with the vivifying and building up of the physical and etheric bodies.

That is what the candidate for Initiation sees today. And he can say to himself: Souls are thirsting to vitalise something in the physical and etheric bodies which they have to abandon as lifeless because the impressions they once absorbed do not penetrate into modern consciousness. This is the disturbing impression received today by the candidate for Initiation.

Thus there is something in man that is withdrawn from the sovereignty of the soul. I beg that you will take these words with all earnestness; for a characteristic of modern man is that something in his nature is withdrawn from the rule of the soul, something that is dead in contrast with the life of the organism that surrounds it. And by working upon this dead part, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces exercise on man a very great influence in a quite special way. While on the one hand men can acquire more and more freedom, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces insinuate themselves precisely into that part of the organism which has been withdrawn from the sovereignty of the soul. That is why so many people in modern times feel (and quite rightly say they feel) as if there were two souls dwelling within their breast, and as if one wanted to tear itself away from the other. Much of what modern man finds so baffling in his inner experience lies in what has just been said. The Holy Grail was and is nothing else than that which can so nurture the living portion of the soul that it can become master of the dead part. Montsalvat, the sanctuary of the Holy Grail, is the school in which one has to learn, for the sake of the living part of the human soul, something that there was naturally no need to learn in the Eastern and Egyptian Mysteries. One needs to learn what has to be poured into the still living part of the soul in order to become master of the part of the physical body that has died, and the part of the soul that has become unconscious. Hence, in these secrets of the Grail, the Middle Ages saw something related to a repetition of the Graeco-Latin period in the Intellectual or Mind-soul, for in the Intellectual Soul are rooted mostly those parts of the soul which are now forgotten and dead. Thus the secrets of the Grail referred to the permeation of the Intellectual or Mind-soul with new wisdom.

When the Initiate of the Middle Ages wanted to present in picture form what he had to learn in order to permeate with the new wisdom the part of his soul that had remained living, he spoke of the Castle of the Holy Grail and of the new wisdom—which is in fact the “Grail”—that flows out from it. And when he wanted to indicate that which is hostile to this new wisdom, he pointed to another domain, the domain wherein dwelt all the beings and. forces which had made it their task to gain access to the part of the body that had become dead, and to the part of the human soul that had become unconscious. This domain, into which were justly transferred (“justly” is here used in an occult sense) all the successors of the evil spiritual beings of earlier times who had preserved the worst forces of oriental magic (not the best forces, which also had remained)—the domain which was the most vicious and hostile to the Grail was Castle Merveil, the gathering-place of all the forces which attack man in this part of his body and soul and have undergone a karmic fate such as has been indicated. Spiritual wisdom can be carried anywhere today, because we have reached a transition stage leading towards the Sixth Epoch and these things are no longer tied to particular localities, but in the Middle Ages it had to be sought in certain definite places, as I have shown in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. Hence when in earlier times it was said that one had to travel to a particular neighbourhood in order to receive a certain teaching, this was not meant in any figurative sense. In our own time it must be said that wisdom has less of a local character; for we are living in a time of transition from life in space and time into more spiritual forms of time.

Whereas it has been said that the Castle of the Grail is situated in the West of Europe, the stronghold of hostility to the Grail must be located in another place, a place where, on account of certain spiritual forces there, a person can have just as great and powerful and good an impression as he can have also of its opposite, through other forces which have remained there to this present time like an Akashic after effect from those opponents of the Grail of whom we have been speaking. For at that place one can speak of the very worst forces, and they are still perceptible in their after-effects. At one time evil arts were practised in that place, arts which penetrated right into physical life and thence launched their assaults on the part of the human soul that had become unconscious and on the portion of the human organism that had become dead.

All this is closely connected with a figure who glimmers across from the Middle Ages as a legendary being, but is well known to anyone acquainted with the nature of the Mysteries: a personality who was quite real in the middle of the Middle Ages, Klingsor, the Duke of Terra de Labur, a district we have to look for in what is now Southern Calabria. From there were carried out the incursions of the enemy of the Grail, especially over to Sicily. Even as today, if we tread Sicilian soil and have occult sight, we are aware of the Akashic after-effects of the great Empedocles still present in the atmosphere, so we can still perceive there the evil after-effects of Klingsor, who allied himself from his Duchy of Terra de Labur, across the Straits of Messina, with those enemies of the Grail who occupied the fastness known in occultism and in legend as Calot bobot.

In the middle of the Middle Ages, Calot bobot in Sicily was the seat of the goddess called Iblis, the daughter of Eblis; and among all evil unions which have taken place within the Earth's evolution between beings in whose souls there were occult forces, the one known to occultists as the worst of all was between Klingsor and Iblis, the daughter of Eblis. Iblis, by her very name, is characterised as being related to Eblis, and in Mohammedan tradition Eblis is the figure we call Lucifer. Iblis is a kind of feminine aspect of Eblis, the Mohammedan Lucifer, and with her the evil magician Klingsor united his own evil arts, through which in the Middle Ages he worked against the Grail. These things must needs find expression in pictures, but in pictures that correspond to realities; they cannot be expressed in abstract ideas. And the whole of the hostility to the Grail was enacted in that fastness of Iblis, “Calot bobot”, whither the remarkable Queen Sibylla had fled with her son William, in 1194, under the rulership of the Emperor Henry VI.

Everything that was undertaken by a power hostile to the Grail, and whereby also Amfortas was wounded, is finally to be traced back to the alliance which Klingsor had contracted with the stronghold of Iblis, Calot bobot; and all the misery and suffering which we see embodied in the Grail legend through Amfortas is an expression of that pact. For this reason the soul must still be strongly armed even today when it comes into the neighbourhood of those places from which can emanate all hostile influences related to the Mysteries of the Grail and the advancing evolution of humanity.

Viewed thus, we have on the one hand the Kingdom of the Grail, and on the other the evil Kingdom, Chastel Merveille, with all that came from the pact between Klingsor and Iblis playing into it. And here we can see, expressed in a wonderfully dramatic form, all that the most independent and innermost of the soul-organs, the Intellectual or Mind-soul, has had to endure in face of attacks from without. In the fourth post-Atlantean period this soul-principle was not yet as inward as it had to become in the fifth. It withdrew itself more from the life in the external world that had prevailed in Greek and Roman times, back into the inner part of man, and became freer, more independent. But on that account (for reasons already given) it was much more open to attack by all the powers than it had been in the Graeco-Latin epoch. The whole of the change which had taken place in the Intellectual or Mind-soul is portrayed haltingly, in a legendary way, and yet it stands so dramatically before us in the antithesis between “Montsalvat” and “Chastel Merveille”. We feel an echo of all the sufferings and all the conquests of the Intellectual Soul in the stories connected with the Holy Grail. All that had to be changed in the human soul in more recent times is revealed to him who has come to know the nature of the Mysteries. In this connection we need only take a concrete case.

We often find that persons who have not gone far enough into the matter will ask how a man such as Goethe can on the one hand bear within him certain secrets of the human soul, and on the other hand be so often torn by passion, as he is found to be by those who read his life-story in a rather superficial way. In fact, there was in Goethe something that can be called, in a crude sense, a double nature. To a superficial view the two sides can hardly be brought into harmony. On the one hand there is the great, high-minded soul who could bring forth certain portions of the second part of Faust, and gave expression to many deep secrets of human nature in the Fairy-Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; and one would like to forget everything one knows from biographies of Goethe and pay homage only to the soul who was capable of such achievements. On the other side, there appears in Goethe, tormenting him and often causing him pangs of conscience, his other nature, “human, all-too-human”, in many respects. In earlier times the two natures of man were not so widely separate in their development; they could not diverge in this way. A person with a biography comparable with Goethe's could not rise to such heights as are revealed in certain passages of the second part of Faust or in the Fairy-Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, and at the same time be so divided in his soul. That was not possible in earlier times. It has become possible only in later days, because there now exists in human nature something we have already spoken of—the part of the soul that has become unconscious, and the part of the organism that has died. The part that has remained alive can be so elevated and purified that the impulse which leads on to the Fairy-Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; can be nurtured there, while the other part may remain exposed to the attacks of the outer world. And because the forces described are able to make their abode there, circumstances may arise in which there is very little agreement with the higher ego of the person. It should be understood that the soul living in Goethe had once belonged to an Egyptian Initiate, and had then lived in Greece as a sculptor and a disciple of philosophy; then, between this Greek incarnation and the one as Goethe, there comes an incarnation (probably only one) which I have not yet been able to find. If we keep this in mind, we can see how a soul who in former incarnations could rule the entire man can be led downwards, and then has to relinquish a part of the total human nature, which then lies open to the influence of evil forces.

That is what is mysterious and so hard to understand in a nature such as Goethe's; but by the same token it brings to light many hidden aspects of the human soul in modern times. Everything brought about by the duality of human nature lays hold, in the first place, of the Intellectual Soul, and the Intellectual Soul divides into those “two souls”, whereof one can sink fairly deeply into matter and the other can rise into the spiritual.

Thus in the “Knights of King Arthur's Round Table” we are presented with a repetition of all that the candidate for Initiation had in a certain sense to experience through the Sentient Soul. In all that was grouped around the Holy Grail we are shown what can be experienced in modern times by the Intellectual Soul. Everything that a man must now go through, so that he may make one part of his double nature strong enough to penetrate into the mysteries of the spiritual worlds in modern times, must be enacted in the Consciousness Soul. This is the new thing that has to be added. And that which has to be enacted in the Consciousness Soul is crystallised in the figure of Parsifal. All the legends connected with King Arthur and the Round Table represent the repetition of the experiences of earlier ages in the Sentient Soul; all the legends and narratives which are directly connected with the Holy Grail, apart from Parsifal, represent what the Intellectual Soul had to go through; and all that finds expression in the figure of Parsifal, this ideal of the later Initiation in so far as this later Initiation is dependent on the Consciousness Soul, represents the forces which must especially be made our own through the Consciousness Soul. So the interaction of the three soul-principles in modern man is presented in a threefold legendary form. And just as we can discern deep secrets of the human soul in old legends, so can we now also sense in them deep secrets of the Mysteries of the modern age.

It is false to suggest that the nature of Initiation has not changed since olden times, as though a present-day Western man had to go through the same stages as did a person belonging either to the ancient or to the more modern East. Things are so that a characteristic belonging to an earlier epoch will persist into a later time for certain peoples. A much more important point is that the whole nature of modern Initiation has a more inward character, makes greater demands on the innermost part of the human soul; but in a certain sense it cannot directly approach the external part of human nature. Much more than in the old Initiation, therefore, the external must be cleansed and purified through the strengthening of the inner, so that this inner part becomes lord over the outer. Asceticism and external training belong more to the character of the old Initiation; a direct evolution of the soul itself, so that it develops strong forces in its inner being, belongs more to the nature of the newer Initiation. And because external circumstances are such that only in the course of time will the lifeless elements of human nature be overcome—the elements which can so greatly disturb the Initiate of today—we must say that in our time and on into the far future there will still be many natures similar to that of Goethe, persons who with one part of their being rise up into the heights, while with the other part they are connected with the “human, all-too-human”. Persons who in earlier incarnations showed no sign of these peculiarities, but on the contrary displayed a certain harmony between the outer and the inner, may enter fresh incarnations in which a deep disharmony can show itself between the external and the inner organisation. Those who know the secrets of human incarnations will not feel confused in face of this disharmony. For in proportion as these things increase, the human faculty of judgment grows also, so that the old principle of authority comes to an end. Hence there will be an ever more insistent call to test the fruits of the Mysteries. It would be more convenient to pay heed only to the external characteristics of those who have to teach, for then one would not need to ask whether the facts concerning them—what they have to say and teach and do in a spiritual sense—are in line with human understanding and impartial logic. The duality of human nature is not in the very least to he defended; on the contrary, we must insist in the strictest sense on the rule of the soul over externals, but it must still be said that the facts which have been indicated are absolutely true for modern evolution. For the after-effects of Klingsor and Iblis are still always present, even though in another form.

A special feature of our time is that these attacks from Klingsor and Iblis, as they gradually lay hold of people, are insinuating themselves into intellectual life, particularly the intellectual life that bears on education, with its popularisation of modern science. Consider what people have been learning for quite a long time now and what they think it right to instill into children; consider what is accepted as the basis of modern education—all this should not be judged in accordance with the views of someone who, believing he is very clever, says he understands these things and knows they are entirely correct. No, all this should be judged in accordance with how it influences and fructifies the soul, and in terms of the impressions it produces on the soul. And when a person becomes cleverer and cleverer, in the sense in which it is fashionable to call people clever today, he develops in his soul certain forces which in this incarnation may make him very well able to dominate the conversation in circles wedded to materialistic or monistic ideas; but then certain vital forces necessary for the human organism are worn away. And when such a person has taken into himself only these typical dregs of modern education, in his next incarnation he will lack the forces that are required for properly building up the human organism. The “cleverer” a person is by the standards of the time we are now facing and the closer his intellectual attunement to it, the more of an imbecile will he be in a later incarnation. For those categories and, concepts which relate only to the sense-perceptible outer world and to the ideas which hold it together—these concepts set up in the soul a configuration which may be ever so fine intellectually but lacks the force to work intensively on the brain and to make use of it, And to be unable while in the physical body to make use of the brain is to be an imbecile.

If it were true, as the materialists maintain, that the brain does the thinking, then one could certainly give them some comfort. But this is as false as the assertion that the “speech-centre” has formed itself. It has acquired its form through human beings having learnt to speak, and so the speech-centre is the result of speech. Similarly, all cerebral activity, even in the historical past, is the result of thinking—not the other way about. The brain is plastically modeled through thinking. If only such thoughts are developed as are customary today, if the thoughts are not permeated by the wisdom of the spirit, then the souls occupied with thinking only about material things will find in later incarnations that they are unable to use their brains properly; their brain-forces will be too weak to lay hold of things. A soul which today is occupied merely with calculating debit and credit, let us say, or with the usages of commercial and industrial life, or absorbs only the ideas of materialistic science, is filling itself with thought-pictures which in later incarnations gradually darken the consciousness, because the brain would be an unformed mass—as today in cases of softening of the brain—and so no longer capable of being taken hold of by the forces of thinking. Hence for anyone who looks into these deeper forces of human evolution, everything that can live in the soul must be permeated by a spiritual comprehension of the world.

So in this modern time the nature of man may still be twofold. The forces belonging in particular to the Consciousness Soul must be infused with inner spiritual knowledge. Man must overcome the two regions through which Parsifal went; he must overcome “apathy and doubt” in his own soul. For if he were to carry apathy and doubt with him over to a later incarnation, he would not make a success of it. Man must come to have knowledge of the spiritual worlds. Only through the fact that life widens out in the human soul, the life called Saelde by Wolfram von Eschenbach, the very life that pours out spiritual knowledge over the Consciousness Soul—only by this means can human soul-development advance fruitfully from the fifth epoch onwards into the sixth.

These are among the fruits of the newer Mysteries; they are the important and significant results which must be drawn from these Mysteries, which are an after-effect of the Grail Mystery. But, unlike all ancient Mystery-wisdom, they can be understood by the generality of people. For gradually the unconscious and dead forces of the soul and of the organism must be overcome through a strong permeation of the Consciousness Soul with spiritual knowledge; that is, with a knowledge that has been understood and grasped spiritually, not a knowledge built up on authority.

Even such things as have been said in these lectures—if a person takes into account all that modern knowledge and education are able to give—can, when they are heard, be thoroughly understood and grasped; though they can be discovered only by one who gets to know the Mysteries through occult sight. And they should be most thoroughly grasped. Now it may perhaps be true of many a modern man who is striving to attain to higher worlds that in the shape of his outer life something will still be visible of the “human, all-too-human”, or of his efforts to raise himself out of it. Yes, it may well be that the “fool's motley” is still discernible through the raiment of the spiritual, as with Parsifal. But that is not the point. What matters is that there should be present in the soul the impulse toward spiritual knowledge, spiritual understanding—that impulse which is inextinguishable in Parsifal and brings him at last, in spite of everything, to the stronghold of the Holy Grail. In the whole picture drawn of Parsifal, if rightly understood, we can find all the different methods of training the Consciousness Soul which are necessary to evoke from it the right effects, so that the person can gain control of the forces which whirl in confusion and strive against one another in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. The more present-day man looks into himself and tries to exercise honest self-knowledge, the more will he find how conflict is raging in his soul; it is a conflict within the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. For self-knowledge is a harder thing than many people suppose, and it will indeed become more and more difficult. Someone tries to acquire self-knowledge, but even if he is able to discipline himself in many respects and to build up his character, he will very often notice at critical moments how in his innermost depths the most deeply hidden passions and forces are raging, and how they tear apart the domain of the Intellectual Soul. And how is it with a modern man who devotes himself seriously to knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge? The difficulties of the inner life may perhaps never dawn on people who believe that real knowledge is to be found in external scientific work and its fruits. But anyone who takes the search for knowledge seriously and from worthy motives will be in a different situation once he looks with real insight into his inner being. He seeks in this or that field of knowledge, seeks and seeks, and seeks also in life to come to terms with the diverse aspects of human living. After searching for a while, he thinks he knows something; but then he searches further. And the more he searches with the means normally available today, the more does he feel himself torn into pieces, the more does he feel drawn into doubt. And. a person who, having acquired a present-day education, confesses to himself that in spite of all this education he really knows nothing, is often just the person who strives most earnestly and worthily for spiritual knowledge.

In truth there can be no one with any depth of soul today who does not experience this gnawing doubt. And it is something he ought to be familiar with. For only then will he immerse himself in that spiritual knowledge which is right for the Consciousness Soul and must pour itself out into the Intellectual Soul in order to be master there. Hence we must try to penetrate with rational understanding into what is brought to the Consciousness Soul from out of occult knowledge. By that means we shall draw into our inner being such a self as will be a real lord and master there; and then, when we come to know the nature of the modern Mysteries, we shall stand confronting ourselves.

Anyone who approaches the Mysteries today must. feel that he is confronting himself in such a way that he will strive after the virtues of Parsifal, while knowing that—because of the modern conditions already described and because he is a man of modern times—he is in fact someone else also, the wounded Amfortas. A man of our time carries within him this double nature—aspiring Parsifal, wounded Amfortas. That is what his self-knowledge must lead him to feel. Then from this recognition will flow the forces which out of duality must make a unity, and so should bring man a little further on in the course of world-evolution. In our Intellectual Soul, in the depths of our inner life, there must be a meeting between Amfortas, wounded in body and soul, and Parsifal, whose task is to cultivate the Consciousness Soul. And it is entirely true to say that in order to gain freedom for himself, a man must go through the “wounding” of Amfortas and become acquainted with the Amfortas within himself, so that he may also come to know Parsifal. Just as it was right for Egyptian times that one should rise up into the spiritual worlds in order to know Isis, so is it right for our times to start with the spirituality, the spiritual nature, of this world, and through it to rise into the higher spiritual worlds. A wish to deny the Amfortas-nature is not a true characteristic of our time. It is because modern man is so fond of surrounding himself with Maya that he wants to deny Amfortas. For how delightful it sounds when we hear it said: “Humanity is always advancing!” Yes, but this “advance” follows a very tortuous path. And in order to develop the forces of Parsifal in human nature, the Amfortas-nature in man must be recognised.

So in this cycle of lectures, using legends from which I have tried to call forth pictures of deep soul-processes, I have sought above all to lead your deeper premonitions, at least in some degree, towards the nature of the modern Mysteries. Perhaps one day we shall have opportunity to speak in still clearer words, if that can be, of what the nature of the modern Mysteries discloses concerning the dual nature which man bears within himself: concerning Amfortas and Parsifal.

I have to speak to you on a subject which may be important to many at the present day; it is important to all who try in any way to make Theosophy not merely a theory, but to take it into their hearts and minds so that it becomes a vital thing to them; something that enters into the whole of their life as human beings of the present day. It will be important, not only for true esotericists, but also for those who wish to take up theosophical thoughts into the forces of their soul, to know of the changes which take place in the whole human being when the exercises are carried out which are mentioned in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, or those which are mentioned briefly in the second part of my book An Outline Of Occult Science, or when merely the theosophical thoughts are absorbed in heart and mind and made one's own. Theosophy, when taken up seriously, whether esoterically or exoterically, brings about certain changes in the whole organisation of man. It may be boldly affirmed that the student becomes a different man through Theosophy, he transforms the whole construction of his being. The physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the true Self of a man are all in a certain way transformed through his really taking Theosophy into his inner being. In their order we shall speak of the changes which these human sheaths undergo under the influence of esotericism, or even through the earnest exoteric study of Theosophy. It is especially difficult to speak about the changes in the physical human body, for the simple reason that although the changes that take place there at the beginning of the theosophical or esoteric life are indeed important and significant, they are often indistinct and apparently insignificant. Important, significant changes take place in the physical body, but they cannot be observed externally by an external science. They cannot be observed, simply because the physical is that which man has least of all under his control from within, and because there would at once be danger if esoteric exercises or theosophical effort were to be so directed that the changes in the physical body went beyond the measure of what the student is able fully to control. The changes in the physical body are kept within certain limits; but still it is important that the pupil should know something about them, and that he should understand them. To begin with, if we wish to describe briefly the changes which the human physical body undergoes under the conditions just mentioned, we might say: This human physical body becomes more mobile and inwardly active. More mobile—what does that mean? Now in the normal life of man we see the human physical body with its several organs in communication with one another, and in a certain way connected with one another. The activities of the several organs pass over into each other. When the pupil takes up esotericism or Theosophy seriously, the several organs become more independent of one another. In a certain sense the collective life of the physical body is suppressed, and the separate life of the organs strengthened. Although the extent of the suppression of the collective life and of the strengthening of the separate life of the organs is extremely small, yet we must say that through the influence of esotericism and Theosophy the heart, the brain, the spinal cord and other organs all become more independent of one another, they become inwardly more active and more mobile. If I were to speak in a learned manner, I should say that the organs pass from a stable condition to a more mobile condition of balance. It is well to know this fact, because when the pupil perceives something of this different state of equilibrium in his organs he is very easily inclined to ascribe it to sickness or indisposition. He is not accustomed to feel the mobility and independence of the organs in this manner. He only becomes aware of or feels his organs when they do not function normally. He can now perceive that the organs become independent of one another, even though at first this may be hardly perceptible, and he might think that it was an illness. Now you see how careful we must be when dealing with the physical human body. Obviously, what may at one time be an illness, may at another time be merely a phenomenon pertaining to the inner theosophical life. Hence it is necessary to judge each case individually; although what is here attained through theosophical life will really come without this, in the normal course of the development of humanity. In ancient periods of human development the several organs were still more independent of one another than they are now in external life, and in the future they will again become more and more independent. As the pupil of Theosophy must always, to a certain extent, anticipate in the various realms of life and knowledge the stages of development which will only in the future be reached by the general mass of humanity, he must not mind at this stage of development if his organs become more independent of one another. This change may take place quietly and gently in the several organs and systems of organs. I will give a particular example.

You are all acquainted with the fact that when a man is a ‘stay-at-home,’ when his calling does not allow of much travelling, he becomes in a way attached to his immediate environment, and does not wish to leave it. If you go into the country among the peasants you will find that this exists to a much greater extent than among those who live in towns, and who indeed frequently sojourn in the country; the people have grown one with their soil and climate, and when for some reason they are transported into another district or into a different climate they find it difficult to acclimatise themselves; you will find in their soul, in the form of a home-sickness which often cannot be overcome, the longing for their native soil. This is only to show how necessary it is for the pupil to do something which we see to be necessary in another respect when a man comes into a different region, that is, he must adapt his whole organism to this region, to this climate. Now, in our normal life, this adaptation actually does take place within the whole human organism. Everything is sympathetically affected, in a certain way, when we go from the plains to the mountains, or when we travel to a somewhat distant place. Now, in the esotericist, or in one who seriously takes up Theosophy, it is noticeable that all the organism is not equally affected sympathetically, but the blood-system separates, and the circulation of the blood is severed, as it were, from the rest of the organism, and when the student goes from one district to another the circulation of the blood is the most affected. One who has become sensitive to these things can observe an appreciable difference in the pulsation of the blood, in the beating of the pulse, when simply taking a journey from one place to another. While in the case of a person who is not permeated with esotericism or theosophical life, the nervous system is strongly affected by the necessary acclimatisation; in one who does take up esotericism or a serious theosophical life, the nervous system is but little affected. The intimate union between the nervous system and the blood-system is weakened and divided through the theosophical life, the blood-system becomes in a way more sensitive to the influences of climate and country, and the nervous system becomes more independent of them. If, my dear theosophical friends, you wish to have proofs of this, you must look for them in the most natural way in which they are to be found, that is, when you find yourselves in a similar position, when you yourselves journey to a different place. Try to observe yourselves, and you will find these facts of Occultism confirmed. It is extremely important to bear such facts in mind, simply for the reason that these things gradually develop into a very definite power of perception. A man who has become a Theosophist at heart can tell the character of a strange town by his blood. He need not go very much into other things, he can tell by his blood how the various regions of the earth are different from one another.

On the other hand, the nervous system separates from the whole organism in a different way. A man who studies Theosophy in the right way will gradually notice that he perceives the difference between the four seasons of the year—the difference between summer and winter, for instance—in quite a different way than does the ordinary man of the day. The latter only feels in his own physical body, as a rule, the difference in temperature. One who has taken Theosophy into his soul in the recognised manner, not only perceives the difference in temperature, but, apart from that, he has a particular experience in his nervous system, so that, for instance, it is easier for him in summer to think certain thoughts that are connected with the physical brain than it is in winter. Not that it is impossible to think one thought or another in winter, but one can experience quite distinctly that it is easier to do so in summer; such thoughts flow more easily, as it were, in summer than in winter. We can notice that in winter it is easier to form abstract thoughts, while in summer it is easier to make them concrete and ‘picture-like.’ This is because the nervous system, the instrument for the physical plane, vibrates in a more subtle manner in harmony with the change of the seasons, and more independently of the whole organism than it otherwise does.

But one fundamental change in the physical body is that the student begins to feel his physical body more strongly than before, and this can take very serious forms, the body becomes more sensitive to the soul-life, it becomes harder to bear. It is extremely difficult to explain this clearly. Imagine a glass of water in which a certain substance, salt for instance, has been dissolved, yielding an opaque solution. Suppose in the normal condition of man his etheric body, astral body, and Self to be the fluid, and his physical body dissolved in it to be the salt. Now cool down the fluid in the glass. The salt gradually hardens, it becomes heavier as it grows more independent. In the same way the physical body hardens from the whole structure of the four principles of the human being. It shrinks, though only to an insignificant degree. This must be taken quite literally. It shrinks together, in a certain sense. Now you must not picture this too intensely, the student need not fear that through his theosophical development he will grow very wrinkled. This shrivelling is an inward densification. But through this the body is really felt as something harder to bear than it was before. It is felt as being less mobile than before. On the other hand the other principles are more flexible. The pupil feels something that—when he was quite healthy—he never felt before at all; something which he had quite comfortably addressed as ‘I’ he afterwards feels as something within him which seems to have become heavier, and he begins to experience it as a whole. And he becomes especially aware of all those parts in his body which from the beginning, lead, as it were, a certain independent existence. And here we come to a question which can really only be fully understood in this connection. We come to the question of meat-diet—of course, we are not advocating any ‘cause,’ our business is only to present the truth of the matter.

Now, as we are dealing with the physical body, we must describe the nature of animal food, plant food, and food as a whole. This forms an item in the discussion of the influence of theosophical life upon the sheaths of man, which may be described as the perfecting, the regeneration of the physical body from outside, through the external substances he consumes. The relation of man to his food is only properly understood when the relation of man to the other kingdoms of nature, and above all to the plant kingdom, is borne in mind. The plant kingdom, as a kingdom of life, carries the inorganic substances, the lifeless substances, to a certain stage of organisation. In order that the living plant may develop, the lifeless substances must be worked upon in a certain way, as if in a living laboratory, and carried to a certain stage of organisation. In a plant we have a living being which brings the lifeless products of nature to a certain stage of organisation. Now man is so organised physically that he is in a position to take up this process where the plant left it, and to carry it on further from this point, so that the higher human organisation comes into being when man organises further that which the plant has already brought to a certain stage. Things have been so arranged that there is really a perfect continuation when a man plucks an apple or a leaf and eats it. That is the most perfect continuation. If all things were so arranged that the most natural thing could always be done, we might say that man should simply continue the process of organisation where the plant left off, that he should take the organs of the plants which he finds outside him and organise them further within himself. That would be a straight line of organisation which would not be broken through anywhere in any way: from the lifeless substance to the plant up to a certain stage of organisation, and thence to the human organism.

Let us now take the grossest case, when a man eats animal flesh. In an animal we have a living being which carries on the process of organisation further than the plant, it carries it to a certain stage beyond the plant organisation. We may therefore say of the animal that it continues the process of organisation begun by the plant. Let us now suppose that a man eats the animal; what then occurs is, in a sense, as follows: It is not now necessary for the man to exercise the inner forces that he would have had to exercise if he had eaten a plant. If he had been obliged to organise the food from where the plant had left off, he would have had to use certain forces. These forces are not used when he eats animal flesh, for the animal has already carried the organisation of the plant to a certain higher stage, and the man need only begin at this point. Thus we may say that he does not continue the work of organisation from the stage at which he might have done, but he leaves unused forces that are within him, and only continues the organising process from a later stage; he lets the animal do part of the work that he would have had to do if he had eaten the plant food. Now the well-being of an organism does not consist in its doing as little as possible, but in its really bringing all its forces into activity. When a man eats animal flesh he does with the forces which, if he were to eat plant food alone, would develop organic activities, exactly what he would do if he said: ‘I will do without my left arm, I will bind it down so that it cannot be used.’ Thus he fetters his forces within him when he eats animal flesh, forces which he would call upon if he were to eat plant food, and condemns them to inactivity. But, through their condemnation to inactivity, it comes about that the organisations in question which would otherwise be active remain fallow, they are crippled and become hardened. So that when a man eats animal flesh he kills a part of his organism, or at least disables it, This part which thus becomes hardened he carries with him through life as a foreign body. In normal life a man does not feel this foreign body, but when his organism becomes more inwardly mobile, and when his various systems of organs become more independent of one another, as happens in theosophical life, then his physical body, which even without this feels uncomfortable, begins to feel still more uncomfortable, because it now has a foreign body within it. As already mentioned, we are not promulgating any special cause, but are only concerned with presenting the truth; and we shall learn other effects of animal food; we shall go into this subject more minutely in the course of these lectures. Hence it comes about that progress in the inner theosophical life gradually produces a sort of disgust for animal food. It is not necessary to forbid animal food to Theosophists, for the healthy progressing life of instinct gradually turns against animal food, and no longer likes it; and this is much better than becoming a vegetarian from any abstract principle. It is best when Theosophy leads a man to have a sort of disgust and loathing for animal food; and it is not of much use, with respect to what may be called his higher development, if a man gives up animal food for other reasons. So that we may say: Animal food produces in man something that is a burden to his physical body, and this burden is felt. That is the occult fact of the matter looked at from one side.

We shall describe it from a different point of view later on in these lectures. As another example, I might mention alcohol. The relation of man to alcohol also alters when he seriously and earnestly takes up Theosophy. Alcohol is quite a special thing in the kingdoms of nature. It proves itself to be not only a burdensome product in the human organism, but it shows itself positively as producing within it an opposing power. When we observe the plants we find that in their organisation they all reach a certain point, with the exception of the vine, which goes beyond this. That which other plants save up solely for the young germ—that is, all the productive force which is usually saved up only for the young germ and is not poured into the rest of the plant—is in the case of the grape poured in a certain way into the flesh of the fruit as well; so that through what is known as fermentation, the transmutation of that which is thus poured into the grape, of the force already developed to the utmost in the grape itself, something is produced which has actually within the plant a power only comparable occultly to the power which the ego of man has over the blood. Thus what arises in the making of wine, what is always developed in the production of alcohol, is that in another kingdom of nature the same thing is produced as that which a man must produce when he works upon his blood from his ego. You all know the inner connection between the ego and the blood; this is expressed externally by the fact that when shame is felt by the ego, a blush rises to the face, and when fear or anguish is felt by the ego the face grows pale. This usual effect of the ego on the blood is occultly quite similar to the effect which appears when the plant process is reversed, and what is contained in the fruit substance of the bunch of grapes, or generally speaking, that which comes from the plant-nature, is transformed into alcohol. As we have said, the ego must normally produce in the blood—speaking occultly, not chemically—a process very similar to that produced by the reverse process, the retrogression of organisation through the mere chemicalising process when alcohol is produced. The consequence of this is that through alcohol we take into our organism something which from another direction works just as the ego works on the blood. This means that with alcohol we take into ourselves an opposition ego which is a direct opponent of the deeds of our spiritual ego. From the opposite side, the blood is influenced by alcohol precisely as it is influenced by the ego. Thus we kindle an inner war, and in truth we condemn to powerlessness all that proceeds from the ego when we take alcohol, which is its opponent. That is the occult fact. A man who takes no alcohol ensures for himself the power to work freely upon his blood from his ego; one who drinks alcohol is like one who wishes to knock down a wall and beats on one side, at the same time placing people on the other side who beat against him. In exactly the same way, through taking alcohol, the activity of the ego on the blood is eliminated. Hence one who makes Theosophy the element of his life feels the work of alcohol in his blood as a direct battle against his ego, and therefore it is natural that a spiritual development is only easy for him who does not create this opposing condition. From this illustration you will see how that which is also present normally becomes perceptible through the change of equilibrium which comes about in the physical body of the Esotericist or the Theosophist.

In many other respects also do the several organs and systems of organs of the human physical organism become independent; among others, the spinal cord and the brain become much more independent of each other. We shall say more in the next lecture about food, about the occult physiology of nutrition; for the present we will keep rather to the subject of the independence of the organs. The independence of the spinal cord of the brain may become evident, because through filling his soul with Theosophy the student gradually becomes able to feel in his physical body as if this physical organism obtained greater independence within itself. This again may give rise to very uncomfortable situations. Hence it is all the more necessary that one should know these matters. It may occur, for example, that whereas normally one has oneself in hand, as it is called, the more advanced student may suddenly find himself saying several words without really having intended so to do. He goes along the street; suddenly he notices that he has said something which may perhaps be a favourite expression of his, but which he would have refrained from expressing if he had not undergone what is known as the separation of the spinal cord from the brain. What is usually restrained now acts as mere reflex phenomena through the spinal cord becoming independent of the brain.

And in the brain itself certain parts become more independent of the other parts. For example, the inner parts of the brain become more independent of the outer, surrounding ones, while in normal life they work more in harmony. This is manifest in the fact that to the Esotericist or the true Theosophist, abstract thinking becomes more difficult than it was before, and opposition is gradually raised in the brain. As he develops it is easier for the pupil to think in pictures, to conceive of things more through the imagination; it is more difficult to think abstractly. This can very soon be noticed, particularly in ardent Theosophists. They appear to have predilection only for theosophical activity. They now begin to like to read Theosophy and to think on theosophical subjects, not merely because they are ardent Theosophists, but because it is easier for them to think along these more spiritual lines. So far as the physical plane is affected, these more spiritual ideas require the middle parts of the brain, while abstract thinking requires the outer parts; hence the disinclination of many over-ardent Theosophists to abstract thought and abstract science. Hence it is again that some Theosophists notice with some regret that while formerly they were very well able to think abstractedly, this abstract thinking now becomes more difficult. Thus the various organs become relatively more independent, and even certain parts of these organs become more living and independent. You will see from this that something fresh, as it were, must appear in one who experiences this. Formerly it was benevolent Nature which, without his doing, brought his organs into the right connection; now these organs, having grown independent, are more disconnected, he must now have within him the strength to re-establish harmony among them. This is attained in an orderly theosophical training, because all that upholds the lordship of man over his organs which are becoming independent is continually emphasised. Therefore, remember, my dear theosophical friends, why in our literature such a great role is played by something which many people simply describe by saying, ‘Oh! but it is so frightfully difficult.’ I have often had to give a very characteristic answer when I have been told that, ‘for beginners the book Theosophy is really too difficult.’ I have had to say: ‘It must not be easier, because if it had been, people would have taken certain theosophical truths into their souls, which would also have had the effect of making the several parts of the brain independent; but this book is built up as a regular structure of thought, so that thereby the other part of the brain should be brought continually into play, and not be left behind, as it were.’ This is the characteristic feature of a movement resting on an occult basis, not only to pay attention to what in an abstract sense is correct and simply impart this in any way one pleases, but it is essential to impart it in a sound and healthy way, and honourably guard against these matters being made known for the sake of popularity in such a way that they may do harm. In Theosophy it is not merely a matter of imparting certain truths in books and lectures, but it does matter how they are written and how they are imparted. And it is all the better if those who wish to be the vehicle of such a movement do not allow themselves to be turned aside from carrying out this rule for the sake of popularity. In Theosophy, more than in any other realm of thought, the point in question is the acknowledgment of pure and honest truth. And the very going into such a question as the change in the human sheaths through theosophical life makes us observe how necessary it is to bring Theosophy before the world in the right way. I might remark that these lectures are to be taken as a whole, and hence many difficulties that may arise in various souls with respect to what has been said in this first lecture will be smoothed out later.

To a theosophist the effects of Esotericism or Theosophy on the etheric and astral bodies and the Self are naturally much more important than the effects produced on the physical body. Nevertheless, we shall gain a foundation for the next lectures, when we have to consider the more spiritual principles of the nature of man from this point of view, if we also bear in mind what may be said about the changes in the physical body. It should, however, be expressly noticed that the changes dealt with here do not refer to the highest stages of initiation, but rather to the early stages of the esoteric or theosophical life, and are therefore of a certain general importance.

You will have gathered from the last lecture that under the influence of Esotericism, or the serious study of Theosophy, the physical body of man becomes more alive, in a certain way, more filled with movement inwardly; and it may on that account become more uncomfortable. It is more felt than in the external, exoteric, so-called normal life of man. We shall have to speak later of the difference between vegetable and animal food in connection with the other sheaths; but in the construction and organisation of the physical body, the difference between vegetable and animal food is greater to an amazing degree. Emphasis must always be laid upon the fact that it cannot be our mission to make propaganda for any particular system of diet, but only to state what is right and true on this subject; and as the soul develops, the matters now under consideration become matters of personal experience. Above all, it becomes a matter of experience that when meat is eaten our physical body has more to bear, more to drag about, as it were, than when we eat vegetable food.

We emphasised in the last lecture the fact that in the course of development the physical body seems to shrink; it separates from the higher, spiritual principles. Now, when animal food is taken, this is felt—as was described in the last lecture—in the human organism as something like a foreign substance, as a thorn in the flesh—if we may use a common expression. In an esoteric or theosophical development we feel the weight of the earth in animal food more than we usually do, and above all, we experience the fact that animal food inflames the instinctive life of the will. This more unconscious life of the will, which flows more in emotions and passions, is inflamed by animal food. Hence the observation is an absolutely correct one which declares that warlike peoples are more inclined to animal food than peaceful peoples. But this need by no means lead to the belief that vegetable food must take away all courage and energy. Indeed, we shall see that all that a man loses in the way of instincts, aggressive passions and feelings through refraining from animal food—all of which will be dealt with when we speak of the astral body—all this is compensated for from within the soul. These things are all connected with the whole position of man and the other kingdoms of nature towards the Cosmos, and we gradually gain—though perhaps not yet through higher clairvoyance—a sort of proof, a sort of confirmation of what the Occultist affirms regarding the relation of human life to the Cosmos. We gain a sort of proof of this when, through experiencing the more mobile and living processes of the physical body, we ourselves learn to a certain extent the nature and properties of those substances of the earth which are used for food.

It is interesting to compare three kinds of food with respect to their cosmic significance. These are: milk and all connected with it; the plant world and all connected with that, and the foods prepared from it; and animal food. We may learn to compare milk, plants and animals as nourishment when, through theosophical or esoteric development, we become more sensitive to the effects of these foods; and it will then also be easier for us to observe the verification obtainable from a rational observation of the outer world.

If you were to investigate the cosmos as an occultist, you would find milk-substance on our earth, but on no other planet in our solar system. That which is produced in a similar manner within the living beings on other planets in our solar system would appear as something quite different from earthly milk. Milk is specifically earthly; and if you wished to speak about milk you would have to say that the living beings on each planet have their own special milk.

If the plant system belonging to our earth be investigated by the occultist, and compared with that of other planets, with what there can be compared with it, we must admit that the forms of the plant nature on our earth do indeed distinguish them from the plant nature on other planets in our solar system, but yet the inner being of the plants on the earth is not merely earthly, but belongs to the solar system; this means that the plant nature on our earth is related to that of the other planets of our solar system. Thus there is in our plants something that can also be found on other planets of our system.

As far as the animal kingdom is concerned it follows, indeed, from what has been said about milk, and, apart from that, it can easily be proved by the occultist, that the animal kingdom of our earth is radically different from any corresponding kingdom to be found on other planets.

Now let us consider the experience of milk-food. To the vision and experience of the occultist this milk-food appears in such a way that to the human body—we will only consider man—it signifies that which binds him, as it were, to the earth, to our planet; it connects him with the human race on the earth as a member of it belonging to a common family. Owing to the production of nourishment by the living for the living in the animal nature, mankind, as regards the physical system of sheaths, forms one whole. And we may say that all that is carried into the human organism through milk prepares man to be an earthly human creature, it unites him with earthly conditions, but it does not really chain him to the earth. It makes him a citizen of earth, but does not hinder him from being a citizen of the whole solar system.

It is different with animal-food. Animal-food which is taken from the kingdom that is specifically earthly, and which is obtained not, like milk, directly from the life-processes of the human or animal living being, but from that part of the animal substance which is already prepared for the animal—this animal-food chains man specially to the earth. It makes him into a being of earth, so that we have to say: To the extent that a human being fills his own organism with the effects of animal-food, he deprives himself of power to become free from the earth at all. Through animal-food he binds himself in the highest degree to the planet earth. Whereas milk renders him capable of belonging to the earth as the temporary scene of his development, animal-food condemns him—unless he is uplifted by something else—to make his sojourn on earth permanent, a residence to which he adapts himself exactly. The resolve to live on milk diet means: ‘Though I will stay on the earth, and fulfil my mission there, I will not be attached exclusively to the earth.’ The will to eat meat means: ‘I so pledge myself to the earth-existence that I renounce all heaven, and prefer to be wholly and solely engrossed in the conditions of earthly existence.’

Plant diet is of such a nature as to bring into action in the organism those forces which bring man to a certain cosmic union with the whole of the planetary system. That which a human being has to accomplish when he continues the assimilation of plant nourishment in his own organism is to call forth forces contained in the whole solar system, so that in his physical sheath he becomes a partaker of these solar forces; so that he does not become alienated from them, he does not tear himself away from them. This is something which the soul developing theosophically or esoterically is really able gradually to experience within; with the vegetable food it takes into itself something not pertaining to the heaviness of the earth, but in a certain sense the peculiar property of the sun, that is, of the central body of the entire planetary system. The lightness in his organism which he obtains through a plant diet lifts a man above the heaviness of earth, and gradually develops a certain inner perception of taste in the human organism, so that it is as though the latter really in a way shared with the plant the enjoyment of the sunlight, which accomplishes so much work in the plant.

From what has been said you will gather that in the case of occult, esoteric, or theosophical development, it is extremely important not to chain oneself to the earth, as it were, not to make the heaviness of earth a part of our nature through the enjoyment of an animal diet, if, according to individual conditions and conditions of heredity, it can be dispensed with; the actual decision can, of course, only be made according to the personal conditions of the individual.

It would facilitate the whole evolution of a man's life if he could refrain from eating meat. On the other hand, serious consequences might ensue if a person were to become such a fanatical vegetarian that he avoided milk and all milk-products. In the development of the soul towards the spiritual, certain dangers may easily step in, because in avoiding milk and all milk-products, a person may very easily acquire a love of striving to get away from the earth and lose the threads uniting him to his human tasks upon the earth. Therefore it should be carefully noticed that in a certain sense it is well if the earnestly striving theosophist does not allow himself to become a fanatical spiritual dreamer by creating the difficulty in his physical sheath, which will separate this physical sheath from all that relates it to what is earthly and human. In order that we may not become too eccentric when striving for psychic development, in order that we may not become estranged from human feeling and human effort on the earth, it is well for us to load ourselves in a certain way like travellers upon the earth, by the use of milk and milk-products. And it may even be a really systematic training for a person who is not in the position to be always living only in the spiritual world, as it were, and thereby becoming estranged from the earth, but who, besides this, has to fulfil his duties upon the earth, it may be part of his training not to be a strict vegetarian, but to take milk and milk-products as well. He will thereby relate his organism, his physical sheath, to the earth and to humanity, but not chain it to the earth, and weight it with earthly existence, as he would were he to enjoy meat.

Thus it is interesting in every way to see how these things are connected with cosmic secrets, and how through the knowledge of these cosmic secrets we can trace the actual effect of food substances in the human organism.

As people interested in occult truths, you must gradually realise more and more that that which appears on our earth—and our physical body belongs above all to our earthly existence—is not merely dependent on the forces and conditions of the earth but is also absolutely dependent on the forces and conditions of supra-mundane life, of cosmic life. This comes about in various ways. Thus, for example, if we consider the animal albumen contained, let us say, in hens' eggs, we must clearly understand that such animal albumen is not merely what the chemist finds by analysis, but that it is in its structure the result of cosmic forces. When we speak of albumen, this in its construction is the product of cosmic forces. Essentially, the cosmic forces really only work upon this albumen after they have first worked upon the earth itself, and, moreover, chiefly upon the moon which accompanies the earth. Thus the cosmic influence upon animal albumen is an indirect one. The cosmic forces do not work directly upon albumen, but indirectly; they work first upon the earth, and the earth reacts upon the construction of animal albumen with the forces it receives from the cosmos. Chiefly the moon takes a share in it, but only in such a way that it first receives the forces from the cosmos, and only then, with these forces that it rays forth from itself, reacts upon the animal albumen. In the tiniest cells of animals, and thus also in albumen, one who is able to look into these things with occult vision can see that not merely the physical and chemical forces belonging to the earth are to be found there, but that the smallest cell in a hen's egg, let us say, is built up of the forces which the earth first obtains from the Cosmos. Thus the substance we call albumen is indirectly connected with the cosmos, but this animal albumenous substance as we know it on the earth would never come into being if the earth were not there. It could not originate directly out of the cosmos; it is absolutely a product of what the earth has first to receive from the cosmos.

Again, it is different, for example, with what we know as fatty substance of earthly living beings, which also forms part of the foods of those who eat meat. We are speaking of animal fat. What we call fatty substance, whether a person eats it or whether it forms part of his own organism, is formed according to entirely different cosmic laws from those forming albumen. While the cosmic forces proceeding from the beings of the Hierarchy of Form are concerned with the latter, pre-eminently those beings whom we call the Spirits of Motion are concerned with the building-up of fatty substance. Now, it is important to relate these things, because only in this way does one really gain an idea how complicated is such a matter, which external science may conceive of as infinitely simple. No living being could have either albumen substance on the one hand or fatty substance on the other if the Spirits of Form and the Spirits of Motion did not work from the cosmos—even though indirectly.

Thus we can trace the effects proceeding from the beings of the various Hierarchies even into the substance of which our physical sheath consists. Therefore, in the experience which comes when the student undergoes a theosophical development, the experience which he has in respect of the albumen and the fat which he bears in his physical sheath becomes more differentiated, more mobile in itself. This is one perception. The forces which in a man living the ordinary life are combined in a single sensation, namely, that which in his organism makes the fat and that which makes the albumenous substance, are now felt separately. As the whole physical organism becomes more mobile, the evolving soul learns to distinguish two different sensations in his own body, one which so pervades him inwardly that he feels: ‘This constructs me, and gives me stature’ ... he is then perceiving the albumenous substances within him. When he feels: ‘This makes me callous to my inner limitations, this uplifts me in some sense, above my form, this makes me more sluggish with respect to my inner human feelings,’ when he disdains those perceptions of his feelings (in theosophical development these perceptions differ very greatly)—this last sensation is aroused by his experiencing the fatty substance in his physical sheath.

Thus his inner experience, even as regards his physical body, becomes more complex. This is perceived very strongly when the experience of starch or sugar is in question. Sugar has especially distinct characteristics. In a classification of tastes, sugar stands out very strongly amongst other substances. This appreciation of difference can easily be observed in ordinary life, not only in children, but also very often in older people, in their preference for sweet substances; but usually this does not go beyond the taste. When the soul undergoes development, it then experiences all the sugar it takes into its body, or already has within it, as something giving it inner firmness, supporting it inwardly, permeating it to a certain extent with a sort of natural sense of selfhood. And in this respect a sort of eulogy might even be pronounced on sugar. In passing through a soul development a person may even often notice that he needs to take sugar, because the psychic development inevitably tends to make him become more and more selfless. Through an orderly theosophical development the soul of itself becomes more selfless. Now, in order that a man—by virtue of his physical sheath, having an earthly mission—may not lose, as it were, the connection of his Ego-organism with the earth, it is well to create an counterpoise in the physical, where, indeed, realisation of the Ego is not of such great importance as in the realm of morals. It might be said that, through eating sugar, a sort of blameless ego-sense is produced, forming a counterpoise to the necessary selflessness in the spiritual realm of morals. Otherwise there might all too easily be the temptation not only to become selfless, but also dreamy and fantastic, to lose the healthy capacity for judging earthly conditions. An addition of sugar to the food gives the power, in spite of the ascent into the spiritual world, to stand firmly on the earth with both feet, and to cultivate a healthy estimate of earthly things. You see that these matters are complex; but everything grows complex when one begins to penetrate the actual secrets of life. Thus to the student as his soul progresses in theosophy it becomes evident now and then that in order not to acquire a false selflessness—namely, a loss of his personality—it is necessary at times to eat sugar; and then his experience when eating sugar is such that he says: ‘Now I am adding to myself something that, without lowering myself morally, gives me, as though automatically, as though by higher instinct, a certain firmness, a certain sense of my Ego.’ On the whole, we may say the consumption of sugar intensifies physically the character of the human personality. We may be so certain of this that we may even say that it is easier for those who take sugar to imprint the character of their personality upon their physical body than for those who do not; but it stands to reason that this must be kept within healthy limits.

These things may even lead to the understanding of something that can be observed externally. In countries where, according to statistics, little sugar is eaten, the people have less character as personalities than where more sugar is eaten. If you go to countries where the people have more personality, where each one is conscious in himself, as it were, and then from there go into countries where the people have more of the common race-type and have less personality as external physical beings, you will find that in the former a great deal of sugar is consumed, and in the latter very little.

If we wish to have still more obvious ideas of this experience of various substances we can do so by considering the so-called luxuries, such as coffee and tea, of the effects of which we have already become vividly aware in external life. The experience of a normal person is greatly heightened in a theosophical student. As said already, all this is not an agitation either for or against coffee, but simply a statement of things as they are, and I beg you to take it only in this sense. Even in an entirely normal human life, coffee and tea act as stimulants, but these excitations are felt more vividly by the soul that is undergoing a theosophical development. Of coffee, for example, it may be said that it so works as to cause the human organism to lift its etheric body out of the physical body, but in such a manner as to feel the latter as a solid foundation for the former. That is the specific action of coffee. When coffee is taken, the physical body and the etheric body are felt as differentiated, but in such a way that the physical body—especially in its qualities of form—seems under the influence of coffee to radiate into the etheric body, like a sort of solid basis for what is then experienced through the latter. Truly this ought not to be considered as an agitation for the use of coffee, for it rests upon a physical basis; a person relying too much on the use of this substance would become a completely dependent being; we are only concerned with describing the influence of this food or stimulant. But as logical, consecutive thinking depends very much upon the structure and form of the physical body, so through the peculiar action of coffee, which, as it were, gives a sharper emphasis to the physical structure, logical accuracy is assisted physically. By drinking coffee logical accuracy, the arrangement of facts in logical sequence is promoted by physical means. And it can be said that even though there may be healthy doubts about drinking much coffee, yet for those who wish to ascend to the higher regions of spiritual life, it is not amiss; it may be very good, occasionally, to obtain logical accuracy by means of coffee. We might say that it seems quite natural for one whose profession necessitates a good deal of writing, and who cannot readily find the logical sequence from one sentence to another, and has to get it all out of his pen, to make use of the stimulus of coffee. This seems quite comprehensible to one who understands how to observe these things in their secret occult foundations. Though such a drink may be necessary for us for a time as citizens of the earth, according to personal and individual conditions, it must also be emphasised that the use of coffee, with all its faults, can contribute a great deal towards the acquisition of stability. Not that it is to be commended as a means of developing stability, but it must be said that it has the power of so doing, and that if, for example, a student's thoughts have a tendency to stray in the wrong direction, we need not take it amiss if he makes himself somewhat more stable by drinking coffee.

It is different in the case of tea. Tea produces a similar effect—viz., a sort of consciousness of difference between the physical nature and the etheric nature; but the structure of the physical body is disconnected in a certain way. The etheric body appears more in its own fluctuating nature. Thought becomes volatile when tea is taken, less fitted to keep to the facts; indeed, fancy is stimulated by it, very often in a way neither sympathetic to nor in conformity with truth or with sound proportion. Hence one may say that it is comprehensible that in gatherings where flashes of thought and the development of sparkling mentality are in question, the stimulus of tea might be preferred; on the other side, it is also comprehensible that when tea-drinking gets the upper hand, it gives rise to a certain indifference to the demands arising through the healthy structure of the physical earthly body. So that dreamy fancy and a certain careless, nonchalant nature, a nature that likes to overlook the demands of the sound external life, is awakened by tea-drinking. And in the case of a soul undergoing a theosophical development we feel tea less suitable, as a beverage, than coffee, since it leads more easily to shallowness. The latter tends to soundness, the former more to charlatanry, although this word applied to these things is much too severe.

All these are things which—as we have said—are experienced through the mobility acquired by the physical sheath of the student undergoing a theosophical development. Only I might add—you may meditate further upon this afterwards or try really to experience such things—that while coffee-drinking promotes something like stability in the physical sheath, and tea-drinking favours shallowness, chocolate promotes prosaic thought. Chocolate can be felt by direct experience as the true beverage of the commonplace merry-maker, when the physical sheath becomes more mobile in itself. Therefore, chocolate may well be recommended for commonplace festivities, and thus we can now understand very well—excuse this aside—that at family festivals, birthday festivals, christenings, especially in certain circles, on certain festive occasions, chocolate is the beverage.

Then when we bear in mind these things which are means of enjoyment, the case appears to us still more significant, because that which usually is experienced concerning the means of nourishment throws its rays upon the ordinary so-called normal life; moreover, not only in such a way as to bring to notice the material substance from which the body is constructed and continually renewed, but also—as was mentioned in the last lecture—the inner disconnection, the separation of the organs from each other. That is important; that is significant.

And here we must bring specially into prominence the fact that occult observation makes clear the experience of the relation between the physical sheath and the physical heart. The physical human heart is to the occultist an extremely interesting, an extremely important organ; for it can only be understood when we bear in mind the entire mutual relationship, including the spiritual relationship, of the sun and the earth. Even at the time when, after the Saturn period, the ancient Sun was a sort of planetary predecessor of the earth, even then began the preparation, as it were, of the relation which now exists between these two heavenly bodies, the Sun and the Earth. And we must so bear in mind this relation between Sun and Earth that we thereby really comprehend how the earth of to-day, being nourished, as it were, by the solar activities, takes in these solar activities and transmutes them. What the solid substance of the earth takes in as solar forces, what the earth takes up in its envelopes of air and water, in its changing conditions of heat, what it takes up in the light that encompasses the earth, what it takes up in that part of the earth which is now no longer physically perceptible in any way—the Earth-part of the harmony of the spheres—what the earth receives as life-forces directly from the sun—all this is in connection with the inner forces that work upon the human heart through the circulation of the blood. In reality all these act upon the circulation of the blood, and through this upon the heart. All external theory with respect to this process is radically wrong. External theory calls the heart a pump that pumps the blood through the body, so that one has to look upon the heart as the organ regulating the circulation of the blood. The reverse is the truth. The heart-circulation responds to the impulse given by the circulation of the blood, which is the original source of action. The blood drives the heart; not the reverse, the heart the blood. And the whole of this organism just described, which is concentrated in the activity of the heart, is none other than the human microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic activities first received by the earth from the sun. The impulse received by the earth from the sun is reflected in that which the heart receives from the blood.

It is different with the brain. Some details of the correspondence of the brain were given in the last lecture. The human brain has very, very little to do directly with the solar activities on the earth. Directly, I say. Indirectly, as an organ of perception it is concerned with them; it perceives the external light and colour, for instance; that, however, is only perception. But directly, in its construction, in its inner mobility, in the whole of its inward life, the brain has little, scarcely anything, to do with the effects of the sun upon the earth; it is much more concerned with all that streams to the earth from outside our solar system; it is concerned with the cosmic relationship of the whole starry heavens, but not with the narrower relationships of our solar system. However, in a more limited sense, what we have to describe as the brain-substance is connected with the Moon, though only in so far as the Moon does not depend upon the Sun, but has preserved independence of it. So that what goes on in our brain corresponds to activities lying outside the forces which are imaged microcosmically in our heart. Sun dwells in the human heart; all else besides the sun in the cosmos dwells in the human brain.

Thus man, as regards these two organs, is a microcosm, because through his heart he is given up to the influences exercised by the sun on the earth, and reflects these, as it were; but through his brain he has an inner life directly connected with the cosmos outside the sun. That is a connection of extreme interest and significance. The brain is only connected with the effect of the sun on the earth through external perception. But just this very thing is overcome in theosophical development. Theosophical development surmounts the external sense world.

Hence the brain is set free for an inward life so cosmic that it is unsuitable for the specialised influence of the sun itself. When the student surrenders himself in meditation to some imagination, processes take place in his brain which have nothing at all to do with our solar system, but correspond to the processes outside it. Hence, in fact, the relationship between the heart and the brain is like that between the sun and the starry heavens, and this manifests, in a certain respect, in the experience of the soul developing through theosophy through the fact that while this soul is devoted seriously and deeply to purely theosophical thought, the heart forms, as it were, an opposite pole, and comes in opposition to what one might call the starry-brain. This opposition is expressed in the fact that the student learns to feel that his heart and brain begin to go different ways; while previously he had no need to give attention to both separately, because they were indistinguishable, he must now begin so to do—if he is developing through Theosophy.

It gives us an accurate idea of man's place with regard to the whole Cosmos when we thus consider the physical sheath, and bear in mind the position of man here upon the earth. Through his blood-system and heart there is within him the whole relationship between the sun and the earth, and when his inner powers are devoted solely to that for which on earth he needs the brain as his instrument, then in that brain there are cosmic processes at work extending beyond our solar system. It will be evident that the pupil has an entirely new experience with respect to his heart and brain. His sensations really classify themselves, so that in the serene course of the stars displayed in the heavens at night he learns to feel the processes of his brain, and he feels the movements of the solar system in his heart. In this you see at the same time a path which becomes more important at a higher stage of initiation; you see the doors, as it were, which open from man to the cosmos. The student who, through higher development, steps out of himself—as has been described even in exoteric lectures—and looks back at his own body, learns to recognise all the processes in his physical body; in the circulation of the blood and the activity of the heart a reflection of the hidden forces of the solar system, and in the processes of his brain, which he then sees spiritually from the outside, the secrets of the cosmos.

The matters expressed in this last sentence are connected with an observation which I once made in Copenhagen, and which then appeared in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man. From this you may gather that, in a certain respect, even the structure of the brain is a sort of reflection of the position of the heavenly bodies at the time of a man's birth as seen from that part of the earth where he is born. It is profitable to approach such things from time to time from a different aspect, for in this way you may appreciate the method of occult science and the narrow-mindedness that many critics show when such an observation is made from one aspect or another. Of course, one may explain important facts like this of the mirroring of the world of stars in the human brain from a definite point of view, and it may appear arbitrary. But when other points of view are added, these all support one another. Later you will become aware of what I might call other streams of occult science which combine and flow together, and their meeting will show you more and more clearly what you feel to be a complete proof, even to external reason, of things which, if they were expressed from one aspect only, might often seem open to question.

From this also you may gain an idea of the delicacy of the whole human structure. And if now you reflect that man, in the taking in of food, binds himself completely to earth, and only through some substances, such, for instance, as vegetarian food, releases himself again, if you reflect that precisely through taking in food does man make himself a citizen of the earth, you will then comprehend the threefold division of man with respect to his physical sheath. Through his brain he belongs to the whole of the starry heavens, through his heart and all connected with it to the sun; through all his digestive system and all appertaining to that, he is, in another sense, an earthly being. This also may be experienced, and is experienced, when the external physical sheath of man becomes more mobile within. Through what comes into him from the earth alone, a man may very greatly sin against what is reflected in him through the pure forces of the cosmos. By producing disturbances through his bodily food, by the purely earthly laws which act in the digestion and which work further as sun-laws in the activity of the heart, and as the cosmic laws outside the solar system in the activity of the brain—a man can, because through external nourishment he causes disturbances, sin very deeply against the cosmic activities in his brain; and this can be experienced by the theosophically developing soul, particularly at the moment of waking. During sleep it also comes about that the digestive activity extends to the brain, flashes into the brain. On waking, the power of thought works upon the brain; and the digestive activity in the brain then withdraws. When thinking is at a standstill during sleep, the digestive activity then works into the consciousness; and when a man awakes and notices an after-effect of it, his experience may then very well be a true barometer for the suitability or unsuitability of his food. He feels this extension of his organism, as it were, into his brain as deadening, stabbing sensations, sensations which—if he has eaten something unsuitable—may often seem like little benumbed centres in his brain. All this is experienced in the most delicate manner, particularly by the theosophically developing soul. And the moment of waking is tremendously important, I mean as regards the perception of the conditions of health in the physical sheath depending upon the digestion. In perceptions which gradually become finer and finer, localising themselves in the head, the student perceives whether in his digestion he is placing himself in opposition to the cosmic laws outside our solar system or in harmony with them. Here you see the wonderful relationship of this physical sheath to the whole cosmos, the moment of waking as a barometer showing the student whether through his digestion, he is setting himself against the cosmic conditions or placing himself in harmony with them. These observations will gradually lead us to the changes which take place in the etheric body and astral body through esoteric or theosophical development.

The changes which take place in the pupil through his occult or theosophical development as regards his muscular system, and especially as regards his senses, his sense organs, lead over, as it were, from man's physical system of sheaths to the etheric-system, the etheric body. With respect to the muscular system, the pupil not only feels this muscular system gradually becoming more mobile—as may also be said with respect to the other physical organs—but, besides becoming more alive, he feels this muscular system permeated by a delicate inner consciousness. It is as though consciousness actually extended to the muscular system. And without inaccuracy, speaking as it were in paradox about this experience, we might say that in the course of his esoteric or theosophical development the student gradually becomes conscious of his several muscles and his muscular system in an inner dreamy way; he always carries his muscular system about with him in such a way that he entertains vague thoughts, dreams of its activity in the midst of his ordinary waking consciousness.

It is always very interesting to grasp the reason of this changing of the physical sheath because in this perception the student has something which informs him that in a certain direction he has made progress. When he begins to feel his several muscles, so that when for example, contracting and extending them he is faintly conscious of what is going on, he has a dim feeling of sympathy which means: something is going on in the muscles. When the movements of his muscles become ideas to him it is a proof that he is beginning gradually to feel the etheric body impregnating the physical body; for what he then actually feels are the forces of the etheric body which are active in the muscles. So that when a man begins to have a shadowy feeling of his several muscles, a dreamy consciousness of himself, as it were, just as in text-books on anatomy one may see the picture of a man whose skin has been removed so that only the muscles appear, that is the beginning of the perception of the etheric body. Indeed, when one begins to perceive the etheric entity, it is in a certain sense like this ‘drawing off one's skin’ and having a shadowy consciousness of one's several members as of a jointed doll.

Less comfortable, but nevertheless present, is the sensitiveness when the bone-system begins to draw upon the consciousness. This is a more uncomfortable feeling, because to become aware of this bone-system is to be forcibly struck by the fact of increasing age. It is not precisely pleasant to notice the faculty for sensation with respect to the bone-system—not usually felt at all in ordinary life; but a man begins to feel his bone-system as something like a shadow within him, when he is developing etherically. And he then realises that the symbolical representation of death as a skeleton was in accordance with a certain clairvoyant faculty of mankind in primeval times, for they knew that in his skeleton a man gradually learns to feel the approach of death.

But much more significant than all this is the experience which the student has during his esoteric or theosophical development with respect to his sense organs. Now we know that these sense organs must really be stripped off when the pupil undergoes an esoteric development; they must be silent, as it were. The physical sense organs thereby feel that during esoteric development they are condemned, as it were, to inactivity; they are disconnected. Now when they are disconnected as physical sense-organs, something else comes in their place. The student first becomes gradually conscious of the sense-organs as distinct worlds which penetrate him. He learns to feel the eye, the ears, even the sense of warmth, as if they had been bored into him. But what he thus learns to feel are not the physical sense organs, but the etheric forces, the forces of the etheric body, which act constructively upon the sense organs. So that when he shuts off the activity of the senses, he sees the nature of these sense-organs appearing as so many etheric organisations penetrating him. It is extremely interesting.

To the extent that during his esoteric development the student shuts off his eyes, for example, and no longer thinks of physical sight, to that extent does he learn to recognise something that penetrates his own organisation like organisms of light, he then really learns to recognise that the eyes have gradually come into being through the working of the inner forces of light upon our organism. For during the time that he withdraws from all the activity of the physical eyes, he feels the field of vision to be permeated by the etheric light-forces which organise the eyes. This is a peculiar phenomenon: when one shuts off the eyes themselves, one learns through them to know the forces of light. All physical theories are nothing as compared to the knowledge of the inner nature of light and its activity which the student experiences when he has accustomed himself to eliminate the physical seeing-power of the eyes, and gradually becomes able, in place of the physical use of the eyes, to perceive the inner nature of the etheric forces of light.

The sense of warmth is at a lower stage, as it were, and it is extremely difficult really to shut off sensitivity to heat and cold; this end is best attained during esoteric development, by trying not to be disturbed during the time of meditation, by any feeling of heat. It is therefore good to perform meditation while surrounded by a temperature which is neither hot nor cold, so that no irritation is produced by either feeling. If this can be done, the inner nature of the heat-ether which radiates through space can gradually be recognised, only then does a student feel himself in his own body as though permeated by the true activity of the warmth-ether. Having no longer the external perception of heat, he can learn the nature of the warmth-ether through himself.

By shutting off the sense of taste—of course, it is shut off during the esoteric exercises—but when he attains the faculty of calling up the sensation of taste as a memory, that becomes the means of recognising the so-called chemical ether, still finer than the light-ether. This also is not very easy, but it can be experienced.

In the same way, by shutting off the sense of smell, one may recognise the life-ether.

The shutting off of the hearing yields an unique experience. For this, however, such a power of abstraction must be attained, that even if something audible is going on around, it is not heard. Everything audible must be shut out. Then come towards one, as if piercing one's organism, the forces in the etheric body which organised our organ of hearing. Thereby a remarkable discovery is made. These matters really belong to the secrets of still higher and higher regions. Therefore, there is no difficulty in stating that it is not possible to understand all at once all that is said regarding experiences with such a sense as that of hearing. We make the discovery that this ear, as man bears it in its wonderful organisation, could not possibly have been formed through the etheric forces which play around the earth as such. The light-forces, the etheric forces of light which play around the earth are inwardly connected with the formation of our eyes; even though the foundations for the eyes were already in existence, yet by the formation of the eye, by its position in the organism, it is inwardly connected with the forces of the light-ether of the earth. In the same way, our sense of taste is connected with the forces of the chemical-ether of the earth, out of which for the most part it is developed. Our sense of smell is connected with the life-ether of the earth; it is organised almost exclusively from the life-ether which plays round the earth. But when our organ of hearing is met with in occultism during esoteric development, it shows us that it owes an infinitesimal part of its being to the etheric forces playing round the earth. It might be said that the etheric forces which play round the earth have given the finishing touch to our organ of hearing; but the latter has been so influenced by these etheric forces that they have really made it—not more perfect, but more imperfect; for they can only work upon the ear by their activities in the air, which continually offers resistance to them. Hence we may say—although a paradox—that our organ of hearing is the degenerate manifestation on earth of a much more delicate organisation previously existing; and at this stage, through his own experience, the developing student will know that he brought the ear, the complete organ of hearing, with him to the earth when he made his way from the ancient Moon to the Earth; indeed, he will find that this organ of hearing was much more perfect on the ancient Moon than it is upon the earth. With respect to the ear, we gradually learn to feel—we are often obliged to make use of paradoxical expressions—that we might be saddened by this thought, because the ear belongs to those organs which, in their entire arrangement, in their entire structure, bear witness to past perfections. And one who is gradually approaching the experience we have thus briefly indicated will understand the occultist who really gains his knowledge from still deeper powers, the occultist who tells him: on the ancient Moon, the ear had much greater significance for man than it has now. At that time the ear enabled him to live entirely, as it were, in the music of the spheres which still rang out, in a certain sense, on the ancient Moon. The ear was so related to the sounds of the sphere-music, which, although weak as compared to what it had been before, still rang out on the Moon; it was so related to these sounds that it received them. On account of its perfection on the ancient Moon, the ear was, so to say, always immersed in music. This music on the ancient Moon was still imparted to the whole of the human organisation; these waves of music still permeated the human organisation on the ancient Moon, and the inner life of man was in sympathy with all the music around him, adapted to the whole musical environment; the ear was the organ of communication, so that the outer sphere-music might be imitated in corresponding inner movements. On the ancient Moon, man still felt himself to be a sort of instrument on which the cosmos with its forces played, and the ears in their perfection were at that time on the ancient Moon intermediary between the players of the cosmos and the instrument of the human organism. Thus the present arrangement of the organ of hearing serves to awaken a remembrance, connected with the idea that by a sort of deterioration of the organ of hearing man has become incapable of hearing the music of the spheres; he has emancipated himself from it, and can only catch the reflection of the sphere-music in the music of the present day, which, however, can, in reality, only play in the air surrounding the earth.

Experiences also emerge with respect to other senses, but they become more and more indistinct, and it would be of little avail to follow the experiences connected with other sense-organs, for the simple reason that it is difficult to explain by means of ordinary human ideas these changes which take place in one through esoteric development. For example, of what use would it be as regards what man can now experience on earth if we were to speak of the sense for language—I do not mean the sense for speaking? Those who heard the lecture on Anthroposophy in Berlin already know that there is a special sense for language. Just as there is a sense for sound, so there is a special sense, which only has an organ inwardly but none externally, for the perception of the spoken word itself. This sense has deteriorated still further, so that to-day there remains but a last echo of what it was, for instance, on the ancient Moon. That which to-day has become the sense for language, the understanding of the words of our fellow-men, served on the ancient Moon to enable a man to feel himself consciously in the whole environment, with imaginative consciousness, to move round the ancient Moon, as it were. There the sense for language dictated the movements to be made, showed how to find the way. A gradual acquaintance with this experiencing the sense for language is made when the student acquires a perception of the inner value of the vowels and consonants, as exemplified in mantric sentences. But what the earthly man generally attains in this respect is but a faint echo of what the sense for language was at one time.

Thus you see how the pupil gradually gains the perception of his etheric body; you see how that from which he turns away in his occult development, namely, the activity of his physical senses, compensates him on the other side, for it leads him to the perception of his etheric body. But it is peculiar that when we experience the perceptions of the etheric body of which we have just spoken, we feel as if they did not really belong to us, but as we have already said—as though they penetrated us from outside. We feel the body of light as though it were drilled into us, we feel something like a musical movement inaudible on the earth penetrating us through our ear; the warmth-ether, however, we do not feel as penetrating but as permeating us; and we learn to feel in place of the eliminated taste the activity of the chemical ether working in us, etc. Thus as compared with what is known as the normal condition, the pupil feels his etheric body transformed, as though other conditions were grafted on to it from outside, as it were.

The pupil now, however, begins to perceive his etheric body more directly. The most striking change that takes place in the etheric body, which many do not appreciate at all, and which is not recognised as a change in the etheric body, although it is such, is that as a result of esoteric or theosophical development it becomes very distinctly evident that the power of memory begins somewhat to diminish. Through esoteric development, the ordinary memory almost invariably suffers diminution. At first one's memory becomes poorer. If the student does not wish to have a less efficient memory, he cannot undergo an esoteric development. Especially does that memory cease to be strongly active which may be described as the mechanical memory, best developed in human beings in childhood and youth, and generally meant when memory is alluded to. Many esotericists have to complain of the diminution of their memory, for it soon becomes perceptible. In any case, this depreciation of the memory can be observed long before one perceives the more delicate things which have just been explained. But as the student, by pursuing correct theosophical training, can never suffer injury in his physical body—in spite of its becoming more mobile—neither will his memory be injured for long. But care must be taken to do the correct thing. As regards the physical organisation, while the external body is growing more flexible, while inwardly its organs are becoming more independent, so that it is more difficult to bring them into harmony than before, inner strength must be sought. This is done by means of the six exercises described in the second part of my book, An Outline Of Occult Science (

Now, as regards the memory, we must also do the correct thing. We lose the memory belonging to the external life: but we need suffer no injury if we take care to develop more interest, a deeper interest in all that affects us in life, more concern than hitherto. We must especially acquire a sympathetic interest for the things which to us are important. Previously we developed a more mechanical memory, and the working of this mechanical memory was fully reliable for a time, even without any particular liking for the things observed; but this ceases. It will be noticed that when undergoing a theosophical or esoteric development it is easy to forget things. But only those things fly away for which one has not a sympathetic interest, which one does not particularly care for, which do not become part of one's soul, as it were. On the other hand, that which appeals to one's soul fixes itself in the memory all the more. Therefore, the student must try systematically to bring this about. The following may be experienced. Let us imagine a man in his youth, before he came to Theosophy when he read a novel he was quite unable to forget it; he could relate it again and again. Later, when he has come into Theosophy, if he reads a novel, it very often vanishes from his mind; he cannot recount it. But if a student takes a book, of which he has been told—or tells himself—that it might be valuable, and reads it through once and then tries directly afterwards to repeat it mentally, and not only to repeat it, but repeat it backwards, the last matters first and the first last; if he takes the trouble to go through certain details a second time, if he becomes so absorbed in it that he even takes a piece of paper and writes brief thoughts on it, and tries to put the question:—what aspect of this subject specially interests me—then he will find that in this way he develops a different kind of memory. It will not be the same memory. By using it, the difference can be accurately observed. When we use the human memory, things come into our soul as remembrances; but if, in the manner just described, we systematically acquire a memory as an esotericist or theosophist, then it is as though the things thus experienced had remained stationary in time. We learn to look back into time, as it were, and it really seems as though we were looking at what we were remembering; indeed, we shall notice that the things become more and more picture-like and the memory more and more imaginative. If we have acted in the manner just described—for instance, with a book—then, when it is necessary to bring the matter to mind again, we need only meet with something in some way connected with it, and we shall look back, as it were, at the occasion when we were studying the book, and see ourselves reading it. The remembrance does not arise, but the whole picture appears. Then we are able to notice that, while previously we only read the book, now the contents actually appear. We see them as at a distance in time; the memory becomes a seeing of pictures at a distance in time. This is the very first beginning, elementary to be sure, of gradually learning to read the Akashic Record. The memory is replaced by learning to read in the past. And very often a man who has gone through a certain esoteric development may have almost entirely lost his memory, yet he is none the worse for it, because he sees things in retrospect. He sees those with which he himself was connected, with special clearness. I am now saying something which, if it were said to anyone not connected with Theosophy, would only make him laugh. He could not help laughing, because he could not form any idea of what it means when an esotericist tells him that he no longer has any memory, and yet that he knows quite well what has happened, because he can see it in the past. The first man would say: ‘What you have is in reality a very excellent memory,’ for he cannot conceive of the change that has taken place. It is a change in the etheric body that has brought it about.

Then, as a rule, this changing of the memory is connected with something else, viz., we form, we might say, a new opinion about our inner man. For we cannot acquire this retrospective vision without at the same time adopting a certain standpoint as regards our experience. Thus when at a later date a man looks back at something he has done, as in the case described above about the book, for instance, when he sees himself in that position, he will, of course, have to judge for himself whether he was wise or foolish so to occupy himself. With this retrospect there is closely united another experience, viz., a sort of self-criticism. The pupil at this stage cannot do otherwise than define his attitude towards his past. He will reproach himself about some things; he will be glad he has attained others. In short, he cannot do otherwise than judge the past he thus surveys, so that, in fact, he becomes a sterner judge of himself, of his past life. He feels within him the etheric body becoming active, the etheric body which—as may be seen by the retrospect after death—has the whole of his past within it; he feels this etheric body as included in himself, as something that lives in him and defines his value. Indeed, such a change takes place in the etheric body that very often he feels the impulse to make this self-retrospect and observe one thing or another, so as to learn in quite a natural manner to judge of his own worth as a man. While in ordinary life one lives without being aware of the etheric body, in the retrospective view of one's own life it can be perceived, and this gradually rouses in the student an impulse to make greater efforts when he undergoes an esoteric development. The esoteric life makes it necessary for one to pay more attention to one's merits and demerits, errors and imperfections.

But something deeper becomes perceptible, connected with the etheric body, something that could also be perceived formerly, though not so strongly: that is one's temperament. Upon the changing of the etheric body depends the greater sensitivity of the earnest Theosophist or esotericist towards his own temperament. Let us note a special case in which this can be particularly observed, namely, in a person of a melancholic temperament, inclined to melancholy, a person of such a melancholic temperament who has not become an esotericist, nor studied Theosophy, and goes through the world in such a way, that many things make him surly and morose, many things draw forth his all too disapproving criticism, and he approaches things as a rule in such a manner that they arouse his sympathy and antipathy more strongly than they would perhaps in the case of a phlegmatic person. When a melancholy person of such a disposition, whether of the intense kind inclining to moroseness, turning away from, despising, hating the whole world, or the milder degree of mere sensitiveness to the world's opinion—for there are many grades and shades between these two—when such a person enters upon an esoteric or theosophical development, his temperament becomes essentially the basis from which to perceive his etheric body. He becomes susceptible to the system of forces producing his melancholy and perceives it clearly within him, and, while formerly he merely turned his discontent against the external impressions received from the world, he now begins to turn this discontent against himself. It is very necessary that in an esoteric development self-knowledge should be carefully exercised, and that the student inclined to melancholy should exercise this introspection, which enables him to take this change quietly and calmly. For while formerly the world was very often odious to him, he now becomes odious to himself; he begins to criticise himself, so that obviously he is dissatisfied with himself. We can only judge these things rightly, my dear friends, when we look at what is called temperament in the right way. A melancholy person is such simply because in him the melancholy temperament is accentuated; for fundamentally every human being has all four temperaments in his soul. In certain things a melancholy person is also phlegmatic, in others he is sanguine, in others again choleric; the melancholy temperament only stands out more prominently in him than the phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric. And a phlegmatic person is not one possessing no other temperament but the phlegmatic, but in him the phlegmatic temperament is more prominent, and the other temperaments remain more in the background of his soul. It is the same with the other temperaments.

Now, just as the change in the etheric body of the decidedly melancholy person takes the form of turning his melancholy against himself, as it were, so do changes and new sensations appear with respect to the other temperamental qualities. But, through wise self-knowledge, esoteric development can bring about a distinct feeling that the mischief occasioned by the predominating temperament can be repaired by bringing about changes in the other temperaments also, changes which will, as it were, balance the principal change in the predominating temperament. It is only necessary to recognise how the changes in the other temperaments appear.

Let us suppose that a phlegmatic person becomes an esotericist—it will be difficult for him, but let us suppose that he can be brought to be a really good esotericist. The phlegmatic person who receives strong impressions is sometimes powerless against them; so that often the phlegmatic temperament, if not yet too much corroded by materialism, is in no sense a wholly bad preliminary condition for an esoteric development; only it must appear in a nobler form than its usual distorted manifestation. When such a phlegmatic person becomes an esotericist, the phlegmatic temperament then changes in a peculiar manner. The phlegmatic person then has a very strong inclination to observe himself very carefully, and for this reason the phlegmatic temperament to which this process gives the least pain is not a bad preliminary condition for an esoteric development when such can be entered upon, because it is practically adapted to a certain calm self-observation. What the phlegmatic person perceives within him does not disturb him as it does the melancholic person, and, therefore, when he makes self-observations, they as a rule go even deeper than those of the melancholic person, who is positively kept back by his wrath against himself. Therefore, a phlegmatic person is, as it were, the best pupil for serious theosophical development.

Now, as already stated, every man has within him all the temperaments, and in the case of a melancholy person the melancholic temperament predominates. He has also within him, for example, the phlegmatic temperament. In the melancholy person we can always find aspects which prove him to be a phlegmatic individual towards certain things. Now, if the melancholy person becomes an esotericist, while, on the one hand, he will certainly set to work severely on himself, so that self-reproaches are bound to come, if one is able to guide him in any way, his attention should be turned to the things with respect to which he was previously phlegmatic. His interest must be aroused in things for which he previously had none. If this can be accomplished, then the evils produced through his melancholy are to a certain extent paralysed.

The characteristic of the sanguine person in external life is that he likes to hurry from one impression to another, unwilling to keep to one impression. Such a one becomes a peculiar esotericist. He changes in a very peculiar way through the alteration of his etheric body: the moment he tries to acquire esotericism, or another tries to impart it to him, he becomes phlegmatic towards his own inner being, so that under certain circumstances the sanguine person is at first the least promising—as regards his temperament—for an esoteric development. When the sanguine person comes to esotericism or theosophical life—as he very frequently does, for he is interested in all sorts of things, and so, among other things, in Theosophy or esotericism, though his interest may not be serious or permanent—he must acquire a sort of self-observation; but he does this with great indifference, he does not care to look into himself. He is interested in this or that in himself, but his interest is not very deep. He discovers all sorts of interesting qualities within himself; but he is at once satisfied with that, and he speaks enthusiastically of this or that interesting quality, but he has soon forgotten the whole matter again—even what he had observed in himself. And those who approach esotericism from a momentary interest and soon leave it again are chiefly the sanguine natures. In the next lecture we shall try to illustrate what I am now explaining in words by a drawing of the etheric body on the blackboard; we shall then sketch, in addition, the changes in the etheric body through theosophical or esoteric development.

It is different, again, in the case of the choleric temperament. It is almost impossible, or, at any rate, very seldom possible, to make a choleric an esotericist; if the choleric temperament is especially prominent in him as personality, it is characteristic that he rejects all esotericism, he does not wish to have anything to do with it. Still, it may happen through the karmic conditions of his life that a choleric person may be brought to esotericism; but it will be difficult for him to make changes in his etheric body, for the etheric body of the choleric proves to be particularly dense, and can only be influenced with difficulty. In the melancholy individual the etheric body is like an india-rubber ball (this is a trivial comparison, but it will convey what I wish to say) from which the air has escaped: when one presses a dent made in it, it remains for some time; in the choleric, the etheric body is like an india-rubber ball well inflated, filled with air. An attempt to make a dent in it not only produces no permanent effect, but is perceptibly resisted. The etheric body of the choleric is not at all yielding, but knotty and hard. Hence the choleric himself has a difficult task to change his etheric body. He can do nothing with himself. Therefore, from the outset he rejects esoteric development, which is to change him; he cannot lay hold of himself, as it were. But when the choleric realises the seriousness of life, or similar things, or when there is a little melancholic ring in his temperament, then by means of this melancholy he can be led so to develop the choleric note in his human organism that he now works with all the intensity of his force on his resisting etheric body. And if he then succeeds in producing changes in his etheric body he rouses within him a very special quality; through his esoteric development he becomes more capable than other people of presenting external facts in an orderly and profound manner in their causative or historical connection. And one who is capable of judging a well-written history—which is not, as a rule, written by esotericists—a history which really depicts the facts, will always find the beginning, the unconscious, instinctive beginning of that which the choleric esotericist could do as an historian, as a narrator or describer. Men like Tacitus, for instance, were at the beginning of such an instinctive, esoteric development; hence the wonderful, incomparable descriptions given by Tacitus. As an esotericist, who reads Tacitus, one knows that this unique kind of history-writing depends upon the very special working of a choleric temperament into the etheric body. This appears especially in writers who have undergone an esoteric development. Even though the outer world may not accept it, this is the case with Homer. Homer owed his vivid glorious power of delineation to the choleric temperament working into his etheric body. And many other things could be pointed out in this realm which in external life would prove, or at least verify the fact, that when he undergoes an esoteric development the choleric renders himself specially capable of clearly representing the world in its reality, in its causative connections. When the choleric undergoes an esoteric development, his works, even in their external structure, one might say, bear the character of truth and reality. Thus we see that in the changes of the etheric body the life of man is very clearly expressed; the form it has hitherto taken is more perceptible than is otherwise the case in the present incarnation. In esoteric development temperaments become more strongly perceptible, and it is specially important in true self-knowledge to take this observation of temperaments into account. We shall speak further on these matters in the next lecture.

The more the etheric body of the student alters under influence of his esoteric development, the more does he obtain what may be called a feeling for time. By this feeling for time is to be understood a feeling for the experiences of the consecutive order of facts and events, in time. In ordinary life a man does not usually possess this distinct feeling for time. Now, I have already given a hint of how this feeling for time is aroused, even through the alteration in the physical body, in that through an esoteric or theosophical development the student grows more sensitive with respect to summer and winter; but through the alteration in the etheric body the perception of the external progress of events becomes much more alive and sensitive. And the student who for some time has earnestly tried to bring his soul forward will perceive a distinct difference between the various seasons of the year; indeed, even between part of the seasons; he will gradually learn to feel inwardly a great difference between summer and winter, between spring, summer, and autumn, and he will also feel other shorter divisions of them in the course of the year. Time in its progress becomes in a sense living. He gradually notices that differentiated life can be perceived in the course of time. Just as in the physical body, the various organs are differentiated, just as they become more alive inwardly and more independent of one another, so do the various parts of the forward march of time become to a certain extent more independent of each other. This is connected with the fact that with the development of his own etheric body the student experiences the life in the outer ether which surrounds us everywhere. We are surrounded not only by air, but also by ether; and this ether lives a real life in time. The surrounding ether is, in a certain sense, a sort of living being, and lives with consecutive differences, just as a man's life is different at different ages. The student learns to feel the progressive life of the outer ether. He thus acquires more and more feeling for what the life of the life-ether outside is when spring comes or when summer approaches, when summer has reached its zenith, when summer declines, when autumn is approaching, and when it is actually there. He learns to feel in harmony with this external course, he notices a distinct difference between the life of summer-spring, summer-autumn, and the true winter life.

This difference becomes more and more distinctly perceptible, so at length he can actually say: in its ether the earth lives an independent life, and, inasmuch as a man lives in time, he is actually immersed in and forms part of the alternating life of the ether. At midsummer the student most clearly feels that he with his etheric body is, to a certain extent, thrown back upon himself, and that he and the earth then live separate lives, so that the earth then affects him but little, inwardly; his attention is then, as we have said, directed to himself, as it were, and he gradually forms an idea of what the occultist means when he says: the summer is really the sleeping time of the earth. We here come to a matter which, on account of the external maya by which mankind is continually surrounded, is quite wrongly estimated. In the external life, which is affected by maya, people like to compare spring to the morning, summer to midday, and autumn to evening. This comparison is inaccurate. If we really wish to compare the external course of the earth with something in ourselves, we must compare spring, summer, and autumn in their consecutive order with the sleeping-time of the earth, and autumn, and winter, and spring in their consecutive order with the waking period of the earth. And when we speak of a Spirit of the Earth, we must conceive that in that half of the globe where summer reigns the Spirit of the Earth is during that time in the same condition, so to speak, as we human beings are during our sleeping state. Of course, it is different in the case of the earth: man alternates absolutely between waking and sleeping; this is not so with the earth, where waking and sleeping pass, as it were, from one half of the globe to the other; fundamentally the Spirit of the Earth never actually sleeps, but when waking activity is dormant in one hemisphere, it is then transferred to the other half. But we need not pay much attention to this just now. We will consider the experience man has in common with the earth. Only one hemisphere really comes into consideration here. We have to conceive that during summer the Spirit of the Earth separates in a certain way from its physical body, which in that sense is the earth itself, and that as regards its physical earthly body, this Spirit of the Earth lives the same life in summer as a human being lives during sleep, in relation to his physical body. During the time of sleep the physical body and the etheric body lie on the bed; they live a purely vegetative life.

To occult vision it appears that in the sleeping human body something is unfolded like a delicate vegetation, comparable to a sprouting forth of purely vegetable life, and that the forces which during the waking state become exhausted are again replenished by this vegetative life; so that while a man is asleep he really has his summer-time. And if he were to look at the life of his sleeping physical body when with his astral body and his Ego he is outside the physical body, he would see this sleeping life of the physical body budding and sprouting, just like the plant-life on the earth in spring and summer. He would observe in his physical body during sleep a vegetative summer life budding and sprouting.

But as the part of the earth that we inhabit has its sleeping time during summer, man himself with his etheric body is then to a certain extent thrown more on his own resources, and the consequence of this is that in his esoteric development the student—if he has acquired the capacity of being able to perceive this—can perceive his own etheric body better and more clearly during summer than during winter. He perceives the independence of his etheric body, as it were, and, in our age above all, the independence of the etheric part of the head, that etheric part underlying the brain. It is a very peculiar sensation when through feeling the life of the ether of the earth in summer—the student gradually begins to acquire a sort of inner feeling for that particular part of the human etheric body underlying its most important part, that is the head, and to feel this inner experience as different in spring, different in summer and again different towards autumn. The distinctions in this inner experience are so clearly felt that, just as in the case of the physical body, we speak of a differentiation of its parts, so now we may really speak of varied lives we live through in the course of summer, clearly distinct from one another. The life that unfolds inwardly in spring is different from that which unfolds inwardly in summer, and that in autumn is again different. In speaking of the etheric body, we must in reality make a division, which we shall make to-day; we must, as it were, divide off a particular etheric part, which underlies the head.

It is this which I will sketch with a few strokes. If we imagine a human being diagrammatically (in rough outline) we may think that this etheric body of which I have just spoken can be so perceived—upwards less and less perceptible losing itself in indefiniteness—that it is coincident with time. And we may even learn gradually to feel quite clearly that in this part of our etheric body certain beings were active, creative, replacing one another, as it were, in the various seasons passed through from spring to autumn; it can be observed that the seasons have worked upon this brain-portion of our etheric body, so that our etheric brain is in certain respects a complicated organ. It has been fitted together, as it were, by different Spiritual beings who develop their powers in consecutive periods of time. We now obtain an idea of a very important teaching, and gradually we learn to perceive the truth of this teaching, a teaching cultivated especially in the Zarathustrian schools. This held that the etheric part of the human brain was gradually created from out the Spiritual cosmos by Spiritual beings called the Amshaspands. These Amshaspands worked in such a way that they ruled, as it were, during summer: and indeed they still rule to-day, in succession, the first ruling in early spring, the second in spring, etc., up to the sixth and seventh. Seven—or relatively speaking, six—such Spiritual beings work consecutively in time; and these are the creative Spirits who—precisely by working consecutively, so that when one has finished his activity the next sets to work—construct a principle as complicated as the etheric body, and especially the human brain. Thus into our brain six or seven Spiritual beings are consecutively at work, and the physical brain of man can only be understood when we are able to say: ‘There works a Spirit who can be specially felt in spring: he sends forth his forces which are principally etheric forces; then in later spring comes a second Spirit who in turn sends forth his forces.’ (See drawing.)

The etheric forces of this second Spirit then stream into the same space. The third Spirit in turn sends in his etheric forces, and thus is this etheric part of the human brain developed; the Spirits who follow one another in consecutive periods send their etheric forces into the same space.

Now we must clearly understand that we can only feel certain connections of that which in our brain is related to these Spirits who to-day develop their etheric forces outside us; for Occultism teaches us that what I have just described had taken place during the ancient Moon period; so that we must not think that perhaps these Spirits who as we may say—rule the summer, are still at work to-day and are perhaps formative powers. The rudiments which were really rayed in by these Spirits during the ancient Moon period man brought over with him into his earthly existence; but as he thus bears them within his own etheric body, he can even to-day, when these Spiritual beings no longer have a direct influence on the inner etheric body of our brain, still trace his relationship to them, and this he feels in summer. In early spring the first of these Spirits can be felt, who to-day has a different task outside in the ether; but the student feels that from him comes that which he bears within him, and has received in the ancient Moon period; he becomes conscious of the relationship.

This is the stupendous discovery the pupil can make in the course of his esoteric development; that as time goes on he experiences within himself something like an image of active Spiritual Beings, who to-day have quite a different task from what they had in the past when they were amongst the Spirits working together creatively on our own being. During the development of the earth the physical brain appeared as the image, the impression of what had developed as a kind of etheric archetype even during the ancient Moon period, through these Spiritual cosmic influences. I have depicted this part of our etheric body as being open above, because this is what it is really felt to be. It is so felt that as soon as the pupil perceives it within himself, he has the feeling: ‘Thou open'st thyself to the Spiritual worlds; thou art in connection with Spiritual worlds that are always above thee.’

There is another feeling that is gradually developed in esoteric life regarding this part of the etheric body. It is usually not at all easy to discuss these matters, but I hope that if I try to express them clearly we shall be able to understand them. When a student begins to feel his etheric body, he actually feels himself floating in the stream of time. But as regards this etheric part of the head the student feels in a sense as though he were taking time with him, as if he not only floats in flowing time, but takes it with him. It is in fact the case that we carry with us a great deal belonging to an earlier age in this etheric part of the head, for instance, we carry the ancient Moon period within it; for the most essential part of it arose during the ancient Moon period, and in the etheric body of the brain we carry with us the stream of the ancient Moon-time. And when a student begins to feel this, it is like a remembrance of the time on the ancient Moon. One who forms an idea of the inner experiences which were spoken of in the last lecture as the experiences of temperament, can also understand when it is said that the occultist who thus learns to feel the inner nature of the etheric body of the head, when he specially concentrates upon this etheric part, he always feels this concentration to be connected with a melancholy frame of mind which comes over him; he feels in his esoteric development as if a melancholy mood were poured into his head: from which mood there gradually develops in his inner feeling the understanding of the things presented to our friends in the occult description of the ancient Moon.

Esoteric development must, of course, go much further if one would really describe all the various conditions on the Moon; but from this you will see the rise of what may lead to such a description. You see that in the student himself there appears something that may be described as the melancholy of his head, and within this frame of mind gradually emerges something like a vision of memory into a primeval past, into the ancient Moon period. And it would be desirable if from descriptions such as have just been given, you were to judge how esoteric development really proceeds, how beginning from some particular experience, the student first learns to recognise this experience (in this case as a remembrance of a primeval past, which he has carried along the stream of time with him into the present), and learns to unroll again, as it were, that which has once been lived through. Judge from this that the occultist is truly not speaking of visionary fancies when he sets forth that construction of the universe which goes back to the ancient periods of Moon, Sun and Saturn, but that if the hearer will only wait patiently, he will be able—through the analysis of the discovery of these things—to gain an idea of how it is possible gradually to live into those great, mighty cosmic pictures which truly belong to a far-distant past, but can be called forth again from the life of the present; we need only reach the point of development at which we can experience and then unfold the past phenomena of time which are involved, wrapped up within us.

The part of the etheric body which belongs to the middle part of the human being is experienced in a different way. Proceeding outwardly feeling ceases; inwardly it is perceived approximately in such a way that it may be said: The portion in the middle, which has a sort of oval shape, is felt separated from the rest. If we were to separate this middle portion of the etheric body as a particular experience we should have to say: He who through his esoteric development comes also to experience in himself the differentiated life of this middle portion of man, has the feeling that essentially in this part of his etheric body he floats exactly with the stream of time. And in this part of the etheric body is clearly felt the living in harmony with the etheric life of the earth which has become differentiated in the sequence of time.

A student whose esoteric development has made yet further progress feels in this particular part that in early spring other Spirits work upon him than those of midsummer or autumn. It is a sort of living in harmony with these, as though actually floating along in their company. This part of his etheric body is thereby separated from the other, and, if we are able to go into such matters the feeling we have in this middle portion of the etheric body alternates between the phlegmatic and sanguine moods. It takes on the greatest variety of shades between these two. For example, this part of the etheric body feels itself accompanying the stream of time in spring—in the physical body this is expressed quite differently—and towards autumn it feels more as though it were resisting and repulsing the stream of time.

The third part of our etheric body is felt to fade away below into the indefinite, and though expanding widely, to disappear into the earth. These are the three parts of the etheric body which can, as disconnected one from the other, now be felt; this represents the inner sensation, the inner feeling of the etheric body; it would not present itself in this way to the seer if he were to observe the etheric body of another human being, for this is an inner experience of the etheric body. This experience again is materially modified by the existence of a fourth part of the etheric body, clearly outlined as a sort of oval, which really includes the human being within it. From the various feelings experienced as regards this part of the etheric body, a feeling is gradually acquired, an inner impression of the etheric body, as of an external form.

And then the etheric body appears as though of various hues, and in this part an impression arises of being in a sort of bluish or blue-violet aura. This part which corresponds to the head, is bluish, or violet-blue according to the nature of the person, but gradually fades away below to a greenish colour. The middle portion is a distinctly yellow-red—when one perceives the colour—and the lower part shades from distinctly reddish to deep-red, but rays out and often extends far.

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Now the forces working in these four parts differ distinctly so that the inner sensations they produce are not very definite; but on looking at this outermost aura clairvoyantly from outside, the forces in it appear to compress the upper part; and looking at it from outside the impression is given that the etheric part of the head is exactly of the same form, only a little larger. This applies also to the middle part. The further we go down, the less is this the case. But through the forces working one upon another, seen from without the impression is that the etheric body is a sort of foundation-form of the physical body, but projecting for a certain space beyond it. In the lower part the feeling of the similarity of the physical body and etheric body is gradually lost.

Thus you bear in mind that the inner experience of the etheric body is different in character from the etheric body manifested outwardly to the observation of the seer. This must be borne clearly in mind. When later in esoteric development you learn to regard the mood, according to the fundamental temperaments founded in the etheric body and described in the last lecture, it will appear that with respect to the lowest part of the etheric body the feeling there is perceived to be of a choleric nature. Thus the several temperaments are to be distinguished in the various parts of our etheric bodies. The upper part of the etheric body is of a melancholy nature, the middle part alternates between phlegmatic and sanguine, and the lower has a choleric tone. And I beg you definitely to notice that this description applies to the etheric body. Not to consider this carefully, brings easily a fall into error if these matters are taken externally. But the student who takes this carefully into consideration will be greatly struck by the agreement of what has been adduced with certain phenomena of life. Let us for a moment study a choleric person—it is highly interesting so to do.

According to what has just been said, in the case of the choleric person the lower part of the etheric body would be conspicuous; it would predominate over the other parts. Thereby the person is shown to be choleric. The other parts are also developed, of course; but the lower part would be particularly prominent. Now when the lower part of the etheric body, as etheric body, is particularly developed and has its strong forces there, something else is always evident, that is, the physical body receives short measure in these parts, it manifests a certain lack of development in the parts which underlie this portion of the etheric body. The result of this in pronounced choleric cases, those, for example, who are true to type, is that the anatomic state of certain organs which correspond to this part of the etheric body comes off badly. Please read about the anatomic condition of Napoleon, and you will be struck by the proof it presents of what I am telling you. Only when we begin to study these hidden sides of human nature shall we really learn to comprehend it.

You might now ask the question: How does what was said in the last lecture agree with what has been said to-day? It agrees perfectly. We then spoke of the four temperaments; these are predetermined by the forces of the etheric body. And, in fact, the life of the etheric body is related to time in the same way that the division into members, the differentiation, is related to space. The physical body becomes more keenly alive in space, differentiating its several members as it were; the etheric body becomes more alive, as its parts differentiate themselves in time; that is, as the time-life in its consecutive order is sympathetically experienced in its independent parts and members. The fundamental characteristic of the melancholic person is that he always carries within him something he has experienced in time, a past. He who is able to understand the etheric body of the melancholic finds that it always has within it the after-vibrations of what it experienced in bygone times. I do not now mean what was here referred to in the case of the human brain, which relates to primeval times, but to what is usually called melancholy; the etheric life of the head is particularly stirred at some definite time, in youth, let us say; and then having been thus stirred, it is so strongly influenced, that in late life the melancholic still carries with him in his etheric body the vibrations which were imprinted in his youth, while with the non-melancholic these vibrations soon cease. In the case of either a phlegmatic or sanguine person, there is a sort of floating with time; but in the phlegmatic person there is, as it were, a perfectly uniform floating with the stream of time, while the sanguine person oscillates between a quicker or slower inner experience with respect to the externally flowing stream of time. On the other hand, the choleric person resists—and that is the peculiarity—the approaching time which flows to us, as it were, from the future. The choleric person in a sense repulses time, and quickly rids himself of the vibrations which time calls forth in his etheric body. Hence the melancholic person carries within him the greatest number of after-vibrations of past experiences, the choleric person the least. If you take the somewhat grotesque illustration of the well-inflated ball, which was compared with the etheric body of the choleric, you may also use that illustration here. The ball is only with difficulty impressed by the consecutive events; it repulses them, and therefore does not allow the events which come in the stream of time to leave strong vibrations within it. Hence the choleric does not carry them for long within him. The melancholic person who allows the events to work very deeply into his etheric body, has for a long time to bear the vibrations which he carries with him into the future from the past.

In order to understand the etheric body and the physical body, it is well to conceive that the physical body is pre-eminently a space-body, and the etheric body pre-eminently a time-being. We do not at all understand the etheric body if we consider it only as a space-being. And such a drawing as that before you is really only a sort of pictorial representation in space of the life of the etheric body, flowing in time and having its existence in time. As the life of the etheric body itself runs its course in time and is a time-life, for this reason we also feel time with our etheric body, that is, we experience the external stream of events in time.

When a man goes through an occult development, he also experiences another stream of events in time. In ordinary life this stream of events is scarcely perceived; but it is soon perceived as the soul develops higher. That is, the course of the day. For in a certain way the Spirits of the yearly course also work with lesser forces in the course of the day. It is the same sun that conditions the course of the year and that of the day! He who has gone through an esoteric development will soon find that there is such a relationship between his etheric body and what goes on in the external ether that his attitude towards the Spirits of the morning, the Spirits of mid-day and those of evening is different in each case. The Spirits of the morning so affect us that we feel stimulated in our etheric body to an activity which inclines more to the intellect, to the reason, which can think over what has been experienced, which can work more with the judgment upon what has been observed and still remains in the memory. As mid-day approaches, these powers of judgment gradually decline; a man then feels impulses of the will more active inwardly. Even though towards mid-day the student begins to be less capable of work as regards his external forces than he was in the morning, yet inwardly the forces of his will are more active. And towards evening there come the productive forces which are connected more with fancy. Thus the Spiritual beings who send their forces into the conditions of the life-ether of the earth differ as regards the duties they have to perform.

We may feel convinced that the more we overcome the materialistic sentiments belonging to our age, the more we shall realise that we must learn to take into account the adapting of the etheric body to the sequence of time. There will come a time when it will be considered curious that in school a subject should be studied in the morning which makes special claims on the powers of the imagination. In the future this will be considered just as strange as it would be to-day if anyone should put on a fur coat in August and a thin coat in mid-winter. It is true, we are still a long way off this to-day; but it will come sooner than people really think. There will come a day when it will be the usual custom (there will again be a difference between summer and winter), a time will come when people will see that it is foolish to organise school-hours otherwise than to arrange for several hours' work in the morning, leaving several hours free in the middle of the day, and then devoting several hours again to work in the evening. Perhaps this may not be considered practical according to our present division of time: but it will be some day when attention is paid to the requirements of human nature. The morning hours will be devoted to mathematics, the evening hours to poetry. We are now living in an age when—by reason of the materialistic view which is now at its height—the understanding of these things is completely overwhelmed; so that at the present time that which one day when the whole nature of man is borne in mind, must appear to be the most reasonable thing, now seems to be most foolish.

Another result will be that during winter we shall through esoteric development feel more and more that we are not so shut up in ourselves, in our inner etheric body, as we are during the summer, but that we come more into connection with the direct Spirit of the Earth. The difference is so felt that during the summer we say: ‘We are now living with the Spirits who have worked upon us from primeval times, whose work we bear within us, whilst the direct Spirit of the Earth is farther from us.’ In winter the inner vibrations, which from ancient times we have carried with us, especially in the head, will become more silent; we shall feel ourselves connected with the Spirit of the Earth; we shall learn to understand that the Spirit of the Earth is awake in winter. As in summer He sleeps, so in winter He awakens. During summer the Spirit of the Earth sees the budding and sprouting plant-life come forth, in the same way that the sleeping man sees the vegetative forces shoot forth in his own body. During the winter they withdraw, just as, when man is awake, these vegetative forces in the human body withdraw. In winter the Spirit of the Earth is awake; the earth is united, as it were, with the waking Spirit, just as a human being during his waking period is united with his waking Spirit. The consequence is—that when through his esoteric life the student becomes sensitive to it—he learns to feel that in summer he must think, he must work out his thoughts, but not his inspirations. These come from what is within, from the independent etheric body. In winter one is, however, more easily inspired with thoughts than in summer, so that human thought in winter works more as an inspiration than in summer. In a particular sense human thought flows so easily in winter that it comes of itself, in a certain way. Of course, these conditions are variously combined. They may take a quite individual form in certain people, so that if a person is more inclined to think thoughts tending towards the super-sensible, this may be reversed. Through the fact that during summer it is easier to produce these thoughts of the super-sensible, exactly the reverse may come about. But as regards the experience of the etheric body, what I have just said holds good.

This particular living in sympathy with the external etheric principle becomes more perceptible the more the student progresses in his esoteric development. And if he wishes to develop his etheric body in the right manner, he must gradually—in the same way that he had first to suppress the sensible perception—shut off his thoughts also; he must especially shut off his abstract thinking and gradually pass over to the concrete, picture-like thinking; from thinking he must pass over to thought, and then he must cease to think at all. But when he presents an empty consciousness, and allows all thought to cease, in the manner described in the second part of my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, he feels the thought that lives within him disappearing, and what he has previously by his efforts produced as his thinking melt away; and in its place he feels himself wonderfully animated by thoughts that stream into him as though from unknown worlds for his special benefit. It is a transition in the life of the human soul which may be described by saying—I beg you not to misunderstand the expression—that the pupil ceases to be clever and begins to grow wise. A very definite idea may be connected with this. Cleverness, which is inwardly acquired through the power of judgment, ability—an earthly possession—disappears. The student's inner attitude is such that he does not value it particularly highly, for he gradually feels shine within him a God-given wisdom! I beg you not to misunderstand the expression; for this experience enables one to use the expression without arrogance, to use it in all humility and modesty. With respect to the God-given wisdom, the student constantly becomes more and more humble. We can really only be proud and arrogant about self-attained cleverness, and so-called ability, but when one passes through this experience one gradually feels as though this wisdom, this God-given wisdom, streams into one's etheric body and fills it. This is a very important experience to have, for it affects the student in a peculiar manner; he then feels life going away, floating away on the stream of time. And the stream of wisdom is something that comes towards him, something which—as he swims on with time—pours into him like an advancing stream; and he really feels this influx—this is pictorially described—as streams, but streams flowing against the course of time, which come in through the head and pour themselves into the body and are caught up by it.

What I have just described gradually develops into a very definite experience. The student no longer feels himself in space; for he learns to feel the etheric body, which is a time-being; he learns to move forward in time, and continually to meet, as it were, the Spiritual Beings who come toward him from the other side of the cosmos, who come toward him from the future and bestow upon him wisdom. The feeling of receiving this wisdom can only be attained when the esoteric or occult development has been so directed that one has unfolded a feeling which the soul brings to bear in a special manner upon all future events; when one has developed composure with respect to what the future may bring us, that is, what constant experience brings us. If we still approach what experience brings us with strong sympathy and antipathy, if we have not yet learned to take Karma earnestly; that is, if we have not learned to accept what Karma brings and bear it patiently, then we are not yet •;able to have that special perceptivity for the wisdom that streams towards us; for only from the experience that is calmly undergone does there differentiate within our being the shining, inflowing stream of wisdom. This perceptivity betokens a very definite point in our esoteric experience, the point to which we come, and which we can really only attain when in devoted thankfulness and tranquillity we receive each experience that comes to us. The changing of our etheric body which takes place in a true esoteric development enables us to do this, for among other requirements for development it is also expected that we should acquire tranquillity, and a true understanding of our Karma, so that we do not through sympathy and antipathy attract what is to come, or resist what concerns us, but learn to bear our Karma as a steady stream of experience. This learning to bear our Karma forms part of our esoteric development, and it is this which makes it possible for us so to transform our etheric body that it gradually learns more and more to perceive the outer etheric life surrounding it.

This course of lectures should rightly be considered as an explanation of certain experiences passed through by the student as changes produced in him by his esoteric development, or, shall we say, Theosophy; so that what is described is really to be looked upon as something that can actually be experienced during development. Naturally, only outstanding experiences, typical experiences, as it were, can be explained; but from the description of these characteristic experiences we may gain an idea of many other things we have to notice in the course of development.

In the last lecture we spoke principally of the fact that the student acquires a great sensitivity with respect to what goes on in the external life-ether, or in the ether as a whole. These experiences are connected with many other things, and one which we should particularly notice is the experience we have with respect to our power of judgment. As human beings, we are so placed in the world that in a certain way we judge the things that come before us, we form ideas about things; we consider one thing to be right, another wrong. A person's capacity for judging depends upon what is known as shrewdness, cleverness, discernment. This shrewdness, this cleverness, this discernment, is in course of his development gradually placed in a different light. This was briefly indicated in the last lecture. The student finds more and more that for the actual affairs of the higher, spiritual life, this shrewdness or cleverness is not of the slightest value, although he must bring as much of it as possible at his starting point on the physical plane if he wishes to enter upon the path to the higher worlds. And thus he comes inevitably into a position which may easily seem unendurable to the utilitarian; for while of necessity he needs something at first for his higher development, yet when he has acquired the needful quality it loses its value. To a certain extent the student must do everything possible to develop a sound power of judgment here on the physical plane, one that weighs the facts carefully; but having done so he must quite clearly understand that during his sojourn in the higher worlds this power of judgment has not the same value as it possesses here below on the physical plane. If the student wishes his higher senses to be sound he must proceed from a healthy power of judgment; but for the higher vision healthy judgment must be transformed into healthy vision.

But however highly we may develop, as long as we have to live on the physical plane we are still human beings of this plane, and on this physical plane we have the task of developing our power of judgment in a healthy way. Therefore we must take care to learn betimes not to mix the life in the higher worlds with that of the physical plane. One who wishes to make direct use on the physical plane of what he experiences in the higher worlds will easily become a visionary, an incompetent man. We must accustom ourselves to be able to live clearly in the higher worlds, and then, when we pass out of that condition, to hold again as firmly as possible to what is suitable for the physical plane. We must carefully and conscientiously maintain the twofold attitude demanded by the twofold nature of the spiritual and physical life. We accustom ourselves to the right attitude towards the world in this respect by accustoming ourselves not to bring what belongs to the higher worlds into the everyday course of life; to bring into everyday affairs as little as possible of that which may easily tempt us to say, for instance, when something in a person is unsympathetic to us, that we cannot bear his aura. In ordinary life, when speaking of this or that as unsympathetic, it is better to keep to the ordinary terms; it is better in this respect to remain like one's fellows on the physical plane, and to be as sparing as possible in ordinary life of expressions which only have their true application when used for the higher life. We ought carefully to refrain from mixing into daily life words, ideas, conceptions, belonging to the higher life. This may perhaps seem a sort of pedantic requirement to anyone who, from a certain enthusiasm for the spiritual life, shall we say, finds it necessary to permeate his whole being with it. And yet, that which in an ordinary way in ordinary life may perhaps seem pedantic, is an important principle of training for the higher worlds. Therefore, even if it should seem more natural to describe the ordinary life in words belonging to the higher life, let us translate them into the language most fitted for the physical plane. It must be emphasised again and again that these things are not without consequence, but are full of significance and possess active power. This being admitted, we may also speak without prejudice of the fact that, as regards the life in the higher worlds, the ordinary power of judgment ceases to be of use, and we learn to feel, to a certain extent, that the sort of cleverness we had before is now at an end. And here again the student notices—this is an experience which grows more and more frequent—he notices his dependence upon the etheric life of the world, that is, upon time. How often do we find in our particular age that people, even quite young people, approach everything in the world upon which judgment can be passed, and think that when they have acquired a certain power of judgment they can pronounce opinion about everything in existence, and speculate on everything possible. In esoteric development the belief that one can speculate on all things is torn out of the soul by the roots; for we then notice that our opinions are capable of growth and, above all, that they need to mature.

The student learns to recognise that if he wishes to arrive at an opinion with which he is himself able to agree, he must live for some while with certain ideas which he has acquired, so that his own etheric body can come to an understanding with them. He learns that he must wait before he can arrive at a certain opinion. Only then does he realise the great significance of the words: ‘Let what is in the soul nature.’ He really becomes more and more modest. But this ‘becoming modest’ is a very special matter, because it is not always possible to hold the balance between being obliged to form an opinion and being able to wait for maturity to have an opinion upon a subject, though delusion about these things is possible to a high degree, and because there is really nothing but life itself which can explain these things. A philosopher may dispute with a person who has reached a certain degree of esoteric development concerning some cosmic mystery, or cosmic law; if the philosopher can only form philosophic opinion he will believe himself necessarily in the right concerning the matter, and we can understand that he must have this belief; but the other person will know quite well that the question cannot be decided by the capacity for judgment possessed by the philosopher. For he knows that in former times he also used the conceptions upon which the philosopher bases his opinion, but allowed them to mature within him, which process made it possible for him to have an opinion on the subject; he knows that he has lived with it, thereby making himself ripe enough to form the opinion which he now pronounces at a higher stage of maturity. But an understanding between these two persons is really out of the question, and in many cases cannot be brought about directly; it can only come to pass when in the philosopher there arises a feeling of the necessity of allowing certain things to mature in his soul before he permits himself to give an opinion about them. Opinions, views must be battled for, must be won by effort—this the student recognises more and more. He acquires a profound, intense feeling of this, because he gains the inner feeling of time which is essentially connected with the development of the etheric body. Indeed, he gradually notices a certain opposition arise in his soul between the way he formerly judged and the way he now judges after having attained a certain maturity in this particular matter; and he notices that the opinion he formed in the past and the opinion he now holds confront each other like two powers, and he then notices in himself a certain inner mobility of the temporal within him; he notices that the earlier must be overcome by the later. This is the dawn in the consciousness of a certain feeling for time, which arises from the presence of inner conflicts, coming into existence through a certain opposition between the later and the earlier. It is absolutely necessary to acquire this inner feeling, this inner perception of time, for we must remember that we can only learn to experience the etheric when we acquire an inner idea of time. This develops into our always having the feeling that the earlier originates in ourselves, in our judgment, in our knowledge; but that the later flows into us, as it were, streams towards us, is vouchsafed to us. More and more clearly comes the feeling of what was described in the last lecture, viz., that the cleverness which springs from oneself must be separated from the wisdom which is acquired by surrender to the stream flowing towards one from the future. To feel ourselves being filled by thoughts, in contradistinction to our former experiences of consciously forming the thoughts ourselves—this shows progress. When the student learns more and more to feel that he no longer forms thoughts, but that the thoughts think themselves in him—when he has this feeling it is a sign that his etheric body is gradually developing the necessary inner feeling of time. All that went before will have the attribute of being something formed egotistically; all that is attained by maturing will have the characteristic of burning up and consuming what the student has made for himself. Thus the gradual change in his inner being results in a very remarkable experience; he becomes increasingly conscious that his own thinking, his own thought processes must be suppressed because they are of little value, compared with his devotion to the thoughts which stream to him from the cosmos. The individual life loses, as it were, one of its parts—that is extremely important—it loses the part we usually call personal-thinking, and there only remains personal-feeling and personal-willing. But these too undergo a change at the same time as the thinking. The student no longer produces his thoughts, but they think themselves within his soul. With the feeling that the thoughts have their own inner power through which they think themselves, comes a certain merging of feeling and will. Feeling, we might say, becomes more and more active, and the will becomes more and more allied to feeling. Feeling and will become more closely related to each other than they were before on the physical plane. No impulse of the will can be formed without accompanying development of feeling. Many of the student's deeds produce within him a bitter feeling, others produce an uplifting feeling. As regards his will, he feels at the same time that his own will-impulses must be adjusted in conformity with his feelings. He gradually finds that feelings which are there merely for the sake of enjoyment give rise to a kind of reproach; but feelings which are so perceived that he says: ‘The human soul must furnish the field of work for such feelings, they must be experienced inwardly, otherwise they would not exist in the universe’—such feelings he gradually finds more justifiable than the others. An example shall be given at once, a characteristic example, in order that what is meant may be made quite clear; it is not intended to decry anything, but only to express the essential nature of this difference. Someone may find his pleasure in having good meals. When he experiences this pleasure, something happens within him—this is indisputable. But it does not make much difference in the universe, in the cosmos, when an individual experiences this pleasure in a good meal; it is not of much consequence to the general life of the world. But if someone takes up St. John's Gospel and reads but three lines of it, that is of immense consequence to the whole universe; for if among all the souls on earth none were to read St. John's Gospel, the whole mission of the earth could not be fulfilled; from our taking part in such activities there stream forth spiritually the forces which ever add new life to the earth in place of that which dies within it. We must distinguish a difference in experience between ordinary egotistic feeling and that in which we are but providing the field for experience of a feeling necessary for the existence of the world. Under certain circumstances a man may do very little externally, but when in his developed soul, for no personal pleasure, he is aware that through his feeling the opportunity is given for the existence of a feeling important to the universal existence; then he is doing an enormous amount.

Strange as it may seem, the following may also be said: There was once a Greek philosopher named Plato. He wrote many books. As long as a person only lives with his soul on the physical plane, he reads these books for his own instruction. Such outer instruction has its significance for the physical plane, and it is very good to make use of every means of instruction on the physical plane, for otherwise we remain stupid. The things achieved on the physical plane are there for the purpose of our instruction. But when a soul has developed esoterically, he then takes Plato, shall we say, and reads him again for a different reason; that is, because Plato and his works only have a meaning in the earthly existence if what he has written is also experienced in other souls; and the student then reads not only to instruct himself, but because something is accomplished thereby.

Something must be added to our feeling, enabling us to recognise a difference between egotistic feeling, which leans more towards enjoyment, and selfless feeling, which presents itself to us as an inner spiritual duty. This may extend even into external life and the external conception of life; and here we come to speak on a point which shines, it might be said, out of individual into social experience.

When a person acquainted with the secrets of esotericism observes what goes on in the world—how so many people waste their spare time instead of ennobling their feelings with what comes into the earthly existence from spiritual creations—he might weep over the stupidity which ignores all that in human life flows through human feeling and sentiment. And in this connection it should be noticed that when these experiences begin a certain more delicate egoism appears in human nature. In the following lectures we shall hear how this finer egoism is assumed for the purpose of overcoming itself; but at first it merely appears as a finer egoism, and during our theosophical development we shall find that a sort of higher thirst for enjoyment appears, a thirst for the enjoyment of spiritual things. And, grotesque as it may sound, it is nevertheless true that a man who is undergoing an esoteric development may at a certain stage declare, even though he may not allow this consciousness to grow into pride and vanity, that all that lies before him on the earth in the way of spiritual creations must be enjoyed by him; it is there for his enjoyment—so it belongs to him. And gradually he develops a certain urge towards such spiritual enjoyments. In this respect esotericism will not cause any mischief in the world, for we may be quite sure that when such a desire for the spiritual creations of humanity appears it will not be a drawback.

As a result of this something else appears. Gradually the student feels in a sense the awakening of his own etheric body, by becoming aware that feeling his own thinking is of less value, and by feeling the inflow of thought from the cosmos, interwoven as it is with the Divine. He feels more and more how will and feeling arise from himself; he begins to feel egoism only in his will and feeling, while he perceives the gifts of the wisdom, which he feels streaming through, as connecting him with the whole cosmos.

This experience is connected with another. He begins to feel inner activity of feeling and will, interwoven with inner sympathy and antipathy. A more subtle and delicate feeling tells him that when he himself does this or that it is a disgrace, for he has within him a certain amount of wisdom. Of something else he may feel that it is right to do it, according to his amount of wisdom. An experience of self-control appearing in feeling comes about naturally. We are overcome with feelings of bitterness when we feel a will arising from within, impelling us to do something or other which does not seem to be right, in view of the wisdom in which we have now learned to share. This bitter feeling is most clearly perceived with respect to the things we have said; and it is well for one who is developing theosophically not to pass by inattentively without noticing how the whole of the inner life of feeling may be refined in this respect. While in the case of a person in exoteric life, when he has uttered certain words, when he has said something or other, that is the end of the matter; in the case of a person who has undergone a theosophical development there comes a clear after-feeling regarding what he has said; he feels something like an inner shame when he has expressed what is not right in a moral or intellectual sense; and something like a sort of thankfulness—not satisfaction with himself—when he has been able to express something to which the wisdom he has attained can give assent. And if he feels—and for this, too, he acquires a delicate sensitiveness—that something like an inner self-satisfaction, a self-complaisance with himself arises when he has said something that is right, that is a sign that he still possesses too much vanity, which is no good in his development. He learns to distinguish between the feeling of satisfaction which follows when he has said something with which he can agree, and the self-complaisance which is worthless. He should try not to allow this latter feeling to arise, but only to develop the feeling of shame when he has said anything untrue or non-moral, and when he has succeeded in saying something suitable to the occasion, to develop a feeling of gratitude for the wisdom he now has part in, and to which he does not lay claim as his own, but receives as a gift from the universe.

Little by little the student feels in this way with respect to his own thinking. As has already been said, he must remain a man on the physical plane; and while not attaching too much value to the self-formed thoughts, he must still form them; but this self-thinking itself now alters, so much that he holds it under the self-control we have just described. Regarding a thought, of which he may say: ‘I have thought that and it is in keeping with the Wisdom’—regarding this thought he develops a feeling of gratitude towards the Wisdom. A thought which arises as a wrong, ugly, non-moral thought leads to a certain inner feeling of shame, and the student feels: ‘Can I really still be like this? Is it possible that I have still sufficient egotism to think this, in the face of the Wisdom that has entered into me?’ It is extremely important for him to feel this kind of self-control in his inner being. The peculiarity of this self-control is that it never comes through the critical intellect, but always appears in feeling, in perception. Let us pay great attention to this, my dear friends: A man who is only clever, who only possesses the judgment of the outer life, who is critical, can never arrive at what we are now speaking of; for this must appear as feeling. When he has acquired this feeling—when it arises as if from his own inner being—he identifies himself with this feeling either of shame or thankfulness, and feels that his own self is connected with this feeling. And if I were to make a diagram of what is thus experienced, it is as though one felt wisdom streaming in from above, coming towards one from above, streaming into one's head in front and then filling one from above downwards. On the other hand, a student feels that, as though coming from his own body, there streams towards that wisdom a feeling of shame, so that he identifies himself with this feeling, and addresses the wisdom as something given from outside; and feels within himself a region wherein this feeling, which is now the ego, meets the instreaming wisdom bestowed.

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The pupil can inwardly experience the region where these two meet. To feel this meeting, proves a right inner experience of the etheric world; he experiences the thoughts pressing in from the external etheric world—for it is the wisdom streaming towards him from the external etheric world that presses in and is perceived by means of the two feelings—that is the rightly-perceived etheric world. And when he perceives it thus he ascends to the higher Beings which only descend as far as to an etheric body and not to a physical human body. On the other hand, he may experience this etheric world wrongly, in a certain sense. Rightly, the etheric world is experienced between thinking and feeling, in the manner just described. The experience is purely an inner process in the soul. The elementary or etheric world may be experienced wrongly, if it is experienced on the boundary between breathing and our own etheric body. If the student performs breathing exercises too soon, or in an incorrect way, he gradually becomes a witness of his own breathing-process. With the breathing-process of which he is then aware (the act of breathing being usually unnoticed), he may acquire a breathing which perceives itself. And this feeling may be associated with a certain perception of the etheric world. By means of all kinds of breathing-exercises a person may gain the power of observing certain etheric processes which really are in the external world, but which belong to the lowest external psychic processes, and which, if experienced too soon, can never give the right idea of the true spiritual world.

Of course, from a certain point in the esoteric practice a regulated breathing-process may also begin; but this must be properly directed. It then comes about that we perceive the etheric world, as has been described, on the border between thinking and feeling, and what we thus learn to recognise is only strengthened by our also coming to know the grosser etheric processes which take place on the border between the etheric world and our breathing-processes. For the matter is as follows:—There is a world of genuine higher Spirituality, this we attain through the inter-action which takes place—as we have described—between wisdom and feeling, there we come to the deeds accomplished in the etheric world by the beings belonging to the higher hierarchies. But there are a great number of all sorts of good and bad and hostile and horrible and dangerous elementary beings, which, if we become acquainted at the wrong time, obtrude themselves upon us as if they really were a valuable spiritual world, while they are nothing more, in a certain sense, than the lowest dregs of the beings of the Spiritual world. He who wishes to penetrate into the Spiritual world must indeed become acquainted with these beings, but it is not well to become acquainted with them at the beginning. For the peculiarity is this: that if a person becomes acquainted with these beings at first, without traversing the difficult path of his own inner experience, he grows fond of them, has astonishing partiality for them; and it may then occur that a man who thus raises himself into the spiritual world in a wrong way, especially through such physical training as may be called a changing of the breathing-processes, will describe certain things pertaining to this spiritual world, as they appear to him. He describes them in such a way that many people may think them extremely beautiful, while to the occultist who perceives them in the inward experience, they may be horrible and loathsome. Such things are quite possible in the experience of the spiritual world.

We need not here speak of other processes which a person may undertake as a training, and through which he may enter evil worlds, because in Occultism it is the custom not to speak of that which one comes to know as the dross of the spiritual world. It is not necessary that we should enter spiritually into that world; hence it is not the practice to speak of the methods which go still lower than the breathing processes. Even the breathing-process, when it is not done in the right way, really leads to the dross-beings, which we must indeed come to know, but not at first, as they then make us enamoured of them, which ought not to be. We shall only obtain a true, objective standpoint regarding their value when we have penetrated into the spiritual world from the other side.

If the student now begins in this way to feel streaming out of himself, as it were, responsive feelings towards wisdom, the feeling of shame, and the feeling of thankfulness; if these responsive feelings spring up, as it were, from his own organism, then he thereby becomes first acquainted in the most elementary way with something of which he must learn more in the course of his further occult development. In the last lecture we pointed out that in the course of our gradual experience of the etheric we become aware of what is active in the etheric part of our brain, the Amshaspands, referred to in the teaching of Zarathustra. As regards our ideas we may also say: There we learn at first to form an idea of the active archangel beings and what they have to do in us. Through what is here stored up, through what here arises within us as the feeling of thankfulness or shame, which feeling has a personal character because it comes forth from ourselves—through this we gain the first elementary true conception of what are called the Archai or Primal forces; for we experience in the first most elementary way in the manner described what the Primal forces bring about in us. While the student—when he begins to experience in the etheric—first experiences the Archangels in his head in a shadowy way, one might say, in their activities, in their etheric working, he experiences in that with which the wisdom comes in contact in him, and which reacts to it, the Primal forces permeated with something like will, not entirely of its nature, but the Primal forces which have entered into him and work in the human personality. When he learns to feel in this way, he gradually obtains an idea of what the occultist means when he says: On that primeval embodiment of our earth, Ancient Saturn, dwelt the Primal Forces or the Spirits of Personality at their human stage, so to speak. At that time these Primal Forces or Spirits of Personality were human. They have now developed further, and in so doing they have attained the capacity of working from the super-sensible world. And how do they manifest at the present time, in our earth-period, this power which they have acquired through the progress of their evolution as far as the earth? They have attained the capacity of being able to work from the super-sensible upon our own bodily nature, and so to work on our sheath, that they produce forces in our etheric body manifesting in the manner described. They have placed these forces in us, and if we feel to-day we are so organised that we can develop within ourselves the above-mentioned feelings of gratitude and shame as an inner natural process (and this can become our own experience), we must admit: that this can become an inward experience, that our etheric body should pulsate in this way, and respond in this manner to the Wisdom—to this end have the Primal forces poured forces into it. In the same way man himself in future incarnations of our earth will attain to the ability to imprint capacities such as these into a corresponding covering in other beings, who will be below him; he will imprint them into their inner being. What man is to know regarding the higher worlds will gradually be gained by inner experience, by our ascending, by our passing over from physical to etheric experience.

Let us try to make these matters still clearer. On ancient Saturn—as you know—heat was the densest physical condition, as it were, the only physical condition which had been reached by the middle of the Saturn period. And you may read in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, the Saturn activities in the physical were currents of heat and cold. We may also speak of these currents of heat and cold from the psychic, soul-aspect, and say: Heat flowed in streams, but this heat was the flowing gratitude of the Spirits of Personality; or this flowing heat which moved in a different direction was the flowing feeling of shame of the Spirits of Personality. What we must gradually acquire is the capacity of connecting the physical with the moral activity; for the further we go into the higher worlds the more closely are these two things connected—the physical occurrence, which then ceases to be physical, and the moral, which then flows through the world with the power of the laws of nature.

All that has just been described as something which appears in inner experience through the altered etheric body, brings about something else in the human soul. This human soul gradually begins to feel discomfort in being this individual man at all, this single, personal human being. It is important for us to learn to notice this; and it is well to make a rule of noticing it. The less interest one has developed previously to this stage of esoteric development in what concerns humanity in general, in what is common to humanity, the more disquieting does one find this on pressing forward. A person having developed no interest in mankind in general, and yet wishing to undergo an esoteric development, would feel himself more and more as a burden. For example, a person to whom it is possible to go through the world without sympathy and fellow-feeling with what another may suffer and enjoy, who cannot well enter into the souls of others, nor transpose himself into the souls of other human beings, such a person when he progresses in esoteric development, feels himself to be a kind of burden. If in spite of remaining unmoved by human sorrow and human joy he undergoes a theosophical development, the student drags himself about with him as a heavy weight; and we may be quite sure his theosophical development will merely remain external, an intellectual affair only, that such a person is merely taking up theosophy like learning a cookery-book or some external science, unless he feels that he is a mere weight, if in spite of his development, he cannot develop a heart that truly feels with all human sorrow and all human gladness. Hence it is very good if, during a theosophical, occult development, we extend our human interests; and really nothing is worse during this esoteric progress than not to try to gain an understanding of every kind of human feeling and human sensation and human life. Of course, this does not postulate the principle—this must be emphasised again and again—that we should pass over all the wrong that is done in the world without criticism, for that would be an injustice towards the world; but it postulates something else; whereas before esoteric development we may have felt a certain pleasure in finding fault with some human failing, this pleasure in finding fault with other people entirely ceases in the course of esoteric development. Who does not know in external life people who like to deliver very pertinent criticisms of other people's faults? Not that the pertinence of judgment over human faults has to cease, not that under all circumstances, such an act as was committed, let us say, by Erasmus of Rotterdam when he wrote his book, The Praise of Folly, should be condoned; no, it may be quite justifiable to be stern against the wrongs done in the world; but in the case of one who undergoes an esoteric development every word of blame he utters or sets in motion pains him, and prepares more and more pain for him. And the sorrow at being obliged to find fault is something which can also act as a barometer of the esoteric development. The more we are still able to feel pleasure when we are obliged to find fault or when we find the world ludicrous, the less we are really ready to progress; and we must gradually gain a sort of feeling that there is, developing more and more within us, a life which makes us see these follies and errors in the world with eyes, of which one is critical, and the other filled with tears, one dry and the other wet. This inner dividing into parts, this becoming more independent, as it were, of that which was previously intermingled, also forms part of the change undergone by the human etheric body.

We have now considered the changes in the physical body and etheric body of the student, in so far as they are experienced by him in the course of his endeavour towards development. If we wished to express the fundamental character of these changes we might say that in the course of his development he is more and more conscious inwardly of his physical body and etheric body. With regard to his physical body, we have emphasised that he feels the several organs becoming more and more independent the more he progresses—they become to a certain extent more independent of each other. We might say that the physical body as such feels as though it had more life within; and as to the etheric body, we emphasised that not only does it feel more alive, but grows altogether more sensitive, and permeated by a sort of consciousness; for it begins to sympathise with the course of outer events in a delicate manner. We pointed out that in his esoteric development the student grows more sensitive to the course of spring, summer, autumn and winter; this becomes very pronounced, so that the successive facts of time are more distinct from one another than is the case in the ordinary course of life; they become separate and differentiate themselves. Thus we may say that the student begins to experience sympathetically the processes in the external ether. This is the first beginning of his really becoming free from his corporeality. He becomes more and more independent of his own corporeality as he really begins to experience what goes on around him. He will experience spring, summer, autumn and winter within himself, as it were; but through this living in the outer he ceases to live in his own corporeality.

Now, in the last lecture we laid stress on the close association of all this with a gradual sensitiveness to one's own corporeality. As we become more independent of it, we gradually perceive it to be a sort of calamity; we notice that all that relates merely to our own corporeality becomes a sort of reproach. A very great deal is attained towards a higher development when we begin, in conceptions and feelings such as were described in the last lecture, to be no longer quite at one with our own human personality; and when we experience this to a greater and greater extent, a very great deal has been gained towards the higher spiritual experience.

In this lecture I will endeavour, by making a leap as it were, to strengthen the further progress of our observations—which we so far have followed more from within—by first trying to describe the standpoint of the human being, when with his astral body and his ego he has already become independent of his physical body and etheric body. We will speak of the intermediate conditions in the following lectures, but in order to make this, to a certain extent, easier to understand, I will put forward the hypothesis that ‘while in the middle of sleep’ we experience the moment when we become clairvoyant outside our body, and can look back at our physical and etheric bodies.

So far we have only taken a few steps towards this condition, we have reached the point of coming forth from ourselves to a certain extent, and have thus learned to experience such matters as the seasons of the year and the times of the day; we will now consider the conditions which would come about if, on the one hand, we had the physical body and etheric body, and on the other, we had lifted out the ego and astral body as occurs in sleep; and we will suppose that we could look back at the physical body and etheric body we had left behind. What we look back at then would appear to us in a very different light from that of conscious, ordinary life. For ordinary life, by means of our everyday observation, or by means of external physical science, we look at our material body, and see in it, with a certain justice in a physical sense, the crown of the earthly creation. We so divide this earthly creation that we speak of a mineral kingdom, a vegetable kingdom, an animal kingdom, and the human kingdom; and we see all the sundry qualities which have been spread over the various groups of animals, united, as it were, in this physical crown of creation, the human body. We shall see that external physical observation is, in a way, justified in this view, and the present lecture should not give rise to the thought that what may be seen in looking back at the physical and etheric body, if we suddenly became clairvoyant during sleep, can enable us to come to any final conclusion as to the physical body. It is only a moment of clairvoyant looking back, as it were, firmly retained. Such a moment may give rise to the following: We look back and first of all we see, so to say, our etheric body, which appears something like an articulated cloudy structure, a misty form showing various currents which we will describe more clearly later—a marvellously constructed form, which is in continual motion, never at rest or still in any part; and then we look at what is embedded in this etheric body, that is, our physical body. Now, remember we have been told that our own thinking must be laid aside. So we do not form our own thoughts about what we see there. First and foremost it is a fundamental requirement for this clairvoyant vision that we should let ourselves be entirely inspired, as it were, by the cosmic thoughts which flow into us. So we contemplate what we see there; but this works above all upon our feeling; it affects our feeling and will. As regards our thought, when we have really attained the detachment referred to, we seem to have lost our own thinking. Thus, with the feeling which we still retain, we look back upon what is there embedded in the misty structure, in the ever-moving misty structure of our etheric body, that is: our physical instrument. We first have a general impression. This general impression is such that what we thus see imbues us with infinite sadness, with terrible sadness. And it must be said, my dear friends, that this feeling of the soul, this dreadful sadness, does not depend at all upon the nature of the particular human being experiencing it, for it is quite universal. There is no man when he looks back in the manner described at his physical body, as it lies embedded in his etheric body, who would not be filled through and through with an immeasurable sadness.

All that I am now describing is expressed primarily in the feelings, not in thought. Immeasurable sadness, a feeling of great melancholy, overcomes when we look up to the cosmic thoughts which flow into us. These thoughts, which are not our own, but creative thoughts, weaving and working through the world, throwing light on this structure of our physical body, by the way in which they illuminate it, tell us what it really is that we see there. They convey to us that all we see is the last decadent product of an absolute splendour long passed by. Through what these thoughts say to us we receive the impression that what we see there as our physical body is something which was once mighty and glorious, now dried and shrivelled; a former glory once widely displayed, appears to us as a tiny shrivelled structure. That which is embedded in our etheric body appears as a last remembrance of long-past glory hardened into the physical. We look at the various physical organs which now belong to our digestive system, to the circulation of our blood and our breathing apparatus; we look at them from outside, seeing them spiritually—and behold, they so appear to us that we say: All we have before us in the physical body is the shrivelled, dried-up product of once-existing living beings, living beings with a glorious environment, now shrivelled, and withered. And the life possessed by the lungs, the heart, the liver and other organs to-day is only the last decadent life of a primevally powerful inner life. In this clairvoyant vision the organs gradually assume the form they once possessed. Just as a thought which we can only distantly remember in quite a hazy manner, grows into what it once was, if we take the trouble to draw it forth from memory, so does that which we bear within us, as the lungs, for example, and it appears as the lost remembrance of a primeval splendour and glory. We feel that it goes back again like a present thought to a distant memory, which then develops into what it formerly was. In our vision the lungs develop into the imaginative picture of that which was once known to the occultist as a recognised symbol, which he still knows to-day, as a symbol of the human form—into the imaginative picture of the Eagle. And we have the feeling that these lungs were at one time a being, not to be compared with the Eagle of the present-day animal world; for this, too, represents, though from another side, the decadent products of a formerly mighty being, which occultism designates as the Eagle. The occultist comes, as though in cosmic remembrance, to the Eagle which was at one time there. If we look back upon the heart, we feel in a similar manner that this, too, appears as a dried-up and shrivelled product, something reminding us of a long-past glory; and we feel as though that led back into primeval times, a far-distant past, to a being which the occultist designates the Lion. Then the organs of the lower part of the body appear as a memory of what in occultism is called the Bull, an ancient primeval being once alive in glorious surroundings, now dried up and shrivelled in the course of evolution, and appearing to-day as the organs of the lower part of the body.

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Thus might I sketch what once existed, and what we still see when we observe these bodily organs, clairvoyantly, from outside. They are only roughly sketched; the Bull below, the Lion in the middle, and the Eagle above. Thus do we look upon something which once lived as three glorious, living beings in a primeval past. I will now draw these somewhat smaller, and only sketch them in diagram. (Diagram 2.)

Round these principal organs we can also see the others as they formerly were in a primeval past; and what appears in this way to clairvoyant vision may be compared to almost all the forms in the earthly animal kingdom.

If we once more turn our gaze back to the physical body embedded in the etheric body, looking at what anatomy calls the nervous-system, this also appears as a shrivelled, dried-up product. The nervous system, which at the present time is embedded in the physical body, appears to the retrospective clairvoyant vision as a number of wonderful plant-like beings, embedded in the etheric body, beings intertwined in various ways in and through the other beings known by animal names, so that we see plant-like entities passing through them in every direction. The whole of the nervous system resolves itself into a number of primeval plant-like entities, so that we actually see something like a mighty, outspreading plant, within which dwell the animal beings of which we have just spoken.

As already said, I am relating what is seen by the clairvoyant vision, which has been described as being exercised in a condition similar to sleep; that is, when we look from outside at the physical body embedded in the etheric body. When the student sees all this before him, he then says (that is, he is able to say this because, to a certain extent, the cosmic thoughts give this information, and interpret what he has before him), he says to himself: ‘All that I, as a human being, have within me is the withered and shrivelled remnant of what now appears before me clairvoyantly as though in cosmic remembrance.’ Now, it is important that the pupil should exercise continual self-control, and continual self-knowledge, while developing to this point. Self-knowledge enables him at this point to become aware of and to feel the following: ‘I am outside my physical body. That which appeared to me as my physical body embedded in the etheric body has transformed itself in my vision into what has just been described. What I behold does not now exist; it had to exist in a primeval past in order that my physical body which is there below might be able to come into being. In order that this shrivelled product might be formed, what I now see before me with clairvoyant vision had to exist at one time.’ The physical body makes this sad impression because we recognise in it the last withered product of the former glory, now appearing to the clairvoyant vision. I pray you, do not misunderstand what I am about to say; I am describing facts, and you will soon see how these facts, unravelled, constantly honour the wise guides of the world; we have only to learn the facts, and in the following lectures I will make clear what is in question. If introspection has been carried to this degree of development, the student then becomes aware that in the astral body in which he now is, outside the physical body and etheric body, he cannot do otherwise than recognise himself as an absolute egotist, as a being who knows nothing but himself, and he learns to recognise that there is reason enough to be sad. For the impulse now arises to know why this has come about, why all this has shrivelled up. And, now the question comes: who is to blame for this shrivelling together? Who has made the form which I see clairvoyantly before me, this wonderful plant-being with the animal-like, perfect structure within it—who has made this into the present shrivelled product, the physical body? There now sounds forth from oneself as an inner inspiration: ‘You yourself have brought it to this, you yourself! And the fact that you have become what you now are, you owe to the circumstance that you have possessed the power to impregnate all this glory with your own being. Your being has trickled like poison into this ancient glory, and it has reduced this ancient glory to what it now is!’ Thus it is we ourselves who brought this about, and the possibility of being a self such as we are, we owe to the circumstance that we ourselves sowed the seed of death in all this glory, and so impregnated it that it shrivelled up. Just as you may have a mighty tree growing in its glory and nourishing the various animals living upon it, and you pierce it so that from a certain spot it dries up, withers and shrivels to insignificance and with it die all the beings nourished by it, so the shrivelling of the human physical body is clairvoyantly unfolded before you. This is the awful impression produced by this moment of clairvoyant vision.

More and more the student is impelled in his astral body to understand how this came about. At this moment there actually appears to him among the archetypal animal beings, which he here perceives ... Lucifer at the back of the garden, as it were, twisting in and out. I have drawn it in diagram—Lucifer in a wondrously beautiful form, actually—Lucifer! Here, for the first time, through clairvoyant observation, he makes the acquaintance of Lucifer, and now he knows that this is what happened to the forces, now shrivelled in the physical human body, at the time when Lucifer appeared within this whole being which is now presented to him clairvoyantly.

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And the student now knows that he was present in that far-distant past when all this, that appears to his clairvoyant vision, was a reality; he knows that he then vividly felt himself to belong to all this; he was within it, this was his kingdom, and within this kingdom Lucifer drew him to himself. Man united himself with Lucifer, with the result that the beings of the higher Hierarchies pressed from the back in currents of force which might be sketched in these lines, and pressed out the human being who united himself with Lucifer in these parts towards the front, as is visible to clairvoyant observation. In this part openings were formed; and, in the shrinking up, these openings have developed into our present sense organs. Through these openings the human being who previously lived in this part was pressed out, because he united himself with Lucifer. And because he was pushed out, he now lives in the world outside this structure, and this structure shrank together and is now his physical body.

Now imagine—in order to have a diagrammatical idea—the physical body of to-day growing larger and larger, all the organs becoming larger, all the organs of digestion, circulation and breathing developing as though into mighty, animal-like, living beings in growing larger, and the nervous system becoming plant-like beings, and the human being ruling in this mighty structure. On the one hand now appears Lucifer, and because the human being is attracted by Lucifer, beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies press from the back and press the human being out. By reason of the pushing out of the human being, the whole structure gradually shrinks into the small compass of the human body of to-day, and the human being, with his consciousness, with his whole day consciousness, is outside his body. The result is that man no longer knows, as he did before, what is within his body, only that which is outside. He has been chased out through the openings which are now the senses; to-day he is in the sense-world, and that in which he lived in the primeval past has shrivelled up and forms his inward parts.

I have now given you an idea of how, through clairvoyant observation, the student arrives at what is called Paradise. In fact, this was the conception of Paradise to which the students in the mystery-schools were led. ‘Where was Paradise?’ people ask. Paradise formed part of a world which is no longer present in the sense-world to-day. Paradise has shrunk together, yet multiplied; for Paradise has left behind the physical inward parts of the human body as its last relics; the human being himself has, however, been driven out of it, he no longer lives in these inward parts. He can only learn to know them by means of clairvoyance, as we have seen. A man knows of the objects outside him, he knows of what is before his eyes and about his ears. Previously he knew of what was within; but this within was grandiose, it was Paradise. Try now to form an idea of how man, through having become a being who spreads his consciousness over the external sense-world, actually compressed the world in which he dwelt before he entered the sense-world, into the withered or shrivelled-up product of the interior parts of his body.

Then the beings who first drove man out and then continued to work, made use of Ahriman and other spirits, whose activity they turned into good, forming the limbs, hands, feet, and countenance; these they formed, and thus made it possible for man to use this shrivelled-up Paradise by means of his hands and feet and that which passes through his sense organs into the inner parts of his body.

Thus before our spiritual vision we have seen, enlarged to gigantic proportions, the physical human body, which in its present condition represents the shrivelled-up product of the former Paradise. When we consider this, we may obtain some slight idea of how clairvoyance really progresses. We have seen how the student at first becomes more and more sensitive with respect to his physical body and etheric body. And now, by making a sort of leap forward over an abyss, we have seen what sort of impressions come when from outside the pupil looks back at his physical body embedded in the etheric body. I have said that the etheric body is itself in continual motion; when we look back into it from outside we see nothing really stationary in it, nothing is at rest, everything is in continual motion. Something is continually taking place; and the more we learn through spiritual training to observe what happens, the more does the tableau of these events enlarge, as it were, and everything becomes full of meaning. Just as, in a certain way, the physical body becomes the true Garden of Paradise, so also what goes on in the etheric body becomes significant processes.

We might now make the attempt to describe in a general way what facts and processes are to be observed when we look at the etheric body, and turn our attention away from the physical body. Now, we could really only see the physical body clairvoyantly in the way I have described, if we were suddenly awakened clairvoyantly from the very deepest sleep. Then would the physical body expand into the structure described. But the etheric body can, in a certain sense, be more easily seen; it may indeed be seen if we try in a certain way to seize the moment of going to sleep, so that we do not pass over at once into unconsciousness, but remain conscious for a time after having, with the astral body and the ego, left the physical body and etheric body. We then look principally at the etheric body, and see the moving realities in the etheric body in the form of very vivid dreams. We then see ourselves divided, as by a deep abyss, from what goes on in the etheric body; but we now see everything not as happening in space, but as events in time. When we are outside our etheric body we have to perceive these experiences of movement in the etheric body, as though we had slipped back into it again with our consciousness.

Thus we must feel as though we were separated from our etheric body by an abyss filled, as it were, with ether, with universal cosmic ether; as if we stood on the further shore of the etheric body, and there various processes took place. And as, in this case, all these processes take place in time, we feel like a wanderer returning to our own etheric body. In reality, we are going further and further from it, but in our clairvoyant consciousness we approach it. And in approaching this etheric body of ours we feel ourselves approaching something which thrusts us back. We come, as it were, to a spiritual rock. Then it is as if we were allowed to pass into something. At first we are outside, and then it is as though we were let into something, it seems as though we had first been outside and now were inside, but not in the manner in which we had been within it during the day. Everything depends upon being outside with the astral body and ego, and only looking in; that is to say, we are only inside the etheric body with our consciousness. And now we can see what is going on within it.

In a certain way, everything changes just as the physical body is transferred into Paradise; but that which goes on within the etheric body is in a still more interior connection with the everyday processes in man. Let us consider what sleep really signifies, what this ‘being outside the physical body and etheric body’ means. For we have assumed that the clairvoyant power is exercised at this moment through the person's suddenly becoming clairvoyant during sleep, or remaining consciously clairvoyant on falling asleep. Let us consider what sleep is! That which permeates the physical and etheric body with consciousness is now outside; within the body only vegetative processes take place—everything is done to restore the forces used up during the day. And we perceive all this, we perceive how the forces of the physical, particularly those of the brain, are renewed; but we do not see the brain as the anatomist does—we see how the man of the physical world, of whom we make use for our consciousness during our waking condition, we see how this man, who has indeed been forsaken by us, but who clearly shows that he is our instrument, lies enchanted in a castle, as it were. Symbolised by the brain lying within the skull, our human nature on the earth appears as a being under enchantment living in a castle. We see this humanity of ours as a being imprisoned and enclosed by stone walls. The symbol of this, the shrunken symbol, as it were, is our skull. We see it externally as a little skull. But when we look at the etheric forces which lie at its foundation, the earthly man actually appears to us as if he were within the skull, and imprisoned in this castle. And then from the other parts of the organism there stream up the forces which support this human being who is really within the skull as if in a mighty castle; the forces stream upwards; first the force which comes from that in the organism which is the outspread instrument of the human astral body; there streams up all that makes the human being ardent and mighty through his nerve fibres. All this streams together in the earthly brain-man; this appears as a mighty sword which the human being has forged on the earth.

Then stream up the forces of the blood. These, as we gradually learn to feel and recognise, appear as that which really wounds the brain-man lying in the enchanted castle of the skull. The forces which in the etheric body stream up to the earthly human being lying in the enchanted castle of the brain are like the bloody lance. And then we arrive at a unique perception. This is, that we are able to observe all that may stream up to the noblest parts of the brain. Before this we have not the slightest idea of it.

Thus you see that from a different standpoint I have come back again to what I have already touched upon in these lectures. No matter how much animal food a human being may eat, it is all useless for a certain part of his brain, it is merely ballast. Other organs may be nourished thereby, but in the brain there is something from which the etheric body at once thrusts back all that comes from the animal kingdom. Indeed, the etheric body even thrusts back from one part of the brain, from one small, vital part of the brain, all that comes from the plant kingdom, and allows only the mineral extract to be of value; there this mineral extract is brought into contact with the purest of what comes through the sense organs. The purest of light, the purest sound, the purest heat, here come in touch with the purest products of the mineral kingdom; for the most vital part of the human brain is nourished by the union of the purest sense impressions with the purest mineral products. The etheric body separates from this noblest part of the human brain all that comes from the plant or animal kingdoms. But all the things that the human being takes in as his food pass up also; for the brain also has less noble parts. These are nourished by all that streams up, by which the whole organism is nourished. Only the noblest part of the brain must be nourished by the most beautiful union of the sense perceptions and the highest part of the purified mineral extract. We now learn to recognise a wonderful cosmic connection between man and the whole of the rest of the cosmos. We can now see, as it were, a part of man wherein we perceive how human thought, by means of the instrument of the nervous system which serves the astral body, prepares the sword for human strength on earth; therein we become acquainted with all that is mingled with the blood, and to a certain extent contributes to the killing of the most precious thing in the brain. And this noblest thing in the brain is ever sustained by the union of the most delicate sense perceptions with the purest products of the mineral kingdom. And then, during sleep, when thought is not making use of the brain, there stream to the brain the products which have been formed lower down in the inner parts from the plant and animal kingdoms.

Thus, when we penetrate into our own etheric body, it is as though we had reached an abyss, and across it we could see what goes on in the etheric body; and all this appears in mighty pictures representing the processes of the spiritual man during sleep. The ego and astral body—the spiritual man—descends into the castle, which is formed of that which is only seen symbolically in the skull. Here the human being lies sleeping, wounded by the blood, the man of whom we see that thoughts are his strength—that which must be capable of nourishment by all that comes from the kingdom of nature, that which in its purest parts must be served by the finest, this we have described. All this symbolically represented resulted in the Legend of the Holy Grail. And the Legend of the Holy Grail tells us of that miraculous food which is prepared from the finest activities of the sense impressions and the finest activities of the mineral extracts, whose purpose it is to nourish the noblest part of man all through the life he spends on earth; for it would be killed by anything else. This heavenly food is what is contained in the Holy Grail. And that which otherwise takes place, that which presses up from the other kingdoms, we find clearly represented if we go back to the original Grail legend, where a meal is described at which a hind is first set on the table. The penetrating up into the brain where for ever floats the Grail, that is, the vessel for the purest food of the human hero who lies in the castle of the brain, and who is killed by everything else—all this is represented. The best presentation of this is not that by Wolfram, but it is best represented in an external exoteric way (because almost everyone can recognise, when his attention has been drawn to it, that this legend of the Grail is an occult experience which every human being can experience anew every night), it is best represented, in spite of the profanation which has even crept in there, by Chrestien de Troyes. He put what he wished to say in an exoteric form, but this exoteric form hinted at what he wished to convey, for he refers to his teacher and friend who lived in Alsace, who gave him the esoteric knowledge which he put into exoteric form. This took place in an age when it was necessary to do this, on account of the transition indicated in my book, ‘The Spiritual Guidance of Humanity.’ The Grail legend was made exoteric in 1180, shortly before the transition.

In the outer world these things still appear fantastic ideas, because the only reality recognised by the man of the present day is that which is outside him. Man recognises himself as the crown of creation in a much higher sense, when he sees his physical body in its original, sublime grandeur; and when he sees his etheric body working inwardly upon his physical body to reawaken into life that which has been injured and killed by the sting which I have spoken of as coming from the blood. The etheric body works upon that in order at once, so far as is possible to reawaken it to life; it maintains it throughout its period of human life, although, when born, it is already doomed to death. This the etheric body does by casting out of a small portion of the human organisation all that comes from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, keeping only the purest mineral extract, and bringing that in contact with the purest impressions from the external world of the senses. If this is really felt deeply enough, it enables us to see this noblest part in the human organism as the multiplied Holy Grail. I wished to-day to show by these two indications how typical imaginations appear, and how, to the true clairvoyance, the vision of the physical body gradually passes over into imaginations. And these two, the Paradise-Imagination and the Grail-Imagination, belong to the most sublime imaginations it is possible to experience—at least in this Earth-period.

In the last lecture I referred to two legends, that of Paradise and that of the Holy Grail. I tried to show that these two legends represent occult imaginations which may really be experienced at a certain moment. When the pupil is independent of his physical body and etheric body—as he is unconsciously during deep sleep, and with clairvoyance consciously perceives his physical body, he experiences the legend of Paradise; when his perceptions are aroused by his etheric body, the legend of the Grail presents itself. We must now point out that such legends were given as stories or as religious legends, and so popularised in a definite period. The original source of these legends, which meet us in the form of romance or of religious writings in the external history of the development of mankind, is in the Mysteries, where their contents were established only by means of clairvoyant observations. In the composition of such legends it is especially necessary that the very greatest care should be taken that both subject matter and tone should suit the period and the people to which the legends are given.

In the previous lectures of this course we have explained how through his theosophical occult development the student undergoes certain changes in his physical and etheric body. We shall have now to consider the astral body and the self more closely, and then return briefly to the physical and etheric body. We have seen that when, in order to progress further through receiving the possessions of spiritual wisdom and truth, the student undertakes this self-development, he produces by this means changes in the various part;, of his spiritual and physical organisation. Now, from the information that has been given from the akashic records of various periods of evolution, we know that in the course of the ordinary historical evolution of man these various parts of human nature also undergo a change, naturally, as it were; we know that in the ancient Indian age, the first age of civilisation after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the processes of the human etheric body were conspicuous; we know that afterwards, during the ancient Persian age of civilisation, the change in the human astral body came into prominence, and during the Egyptian-Chaldean age changes took place in the human sentient-soul, and during the Graeco-Latin age there were changes in the human intellectual- or mind-soul. In our times the changes in the human consciousness-soul are more conspicuous. Now, when a legend is given in some particular age—let us say, in the age in which the intellectual-soul undergoes a special change, when the facts in this soul are of special importance—it is important that it should be given in such a way that special attention should be paid to that particular age, and that in the Mysteries from which the legend proceeds it should be agreed that the legend must be so presented that the changes which are going on in the human intellectual- or mind-soul during that age should be protected against any harmful influences incidental to the legend, and specially adapted to its favourable influences.

Thus there can be no question of following his own inner impulse alone, when a person belonging to a Mystery school has the duty laid upon him of imparting such a legend to the world, for he must follow the dictates of the age in which he lives. If we turn our observations in this direction, we shall better understand the changes that take place, more particularly in the human astral body, when a person undergoes an esoteric development.

In the case of an esotericist, or one who seriously undertakes a theosophical development, who makes Theosophy part of his life, his astral body lives a separate life; in the case of an ordinary human being it is not so free, not so independent. The astral body of a student going through development becomes detached and independent to some extent. It does not pass unconsciously into a sort of sleep, but becomes independent, and detached, going through in a different way what a human being usually does in sleep. It thereby enters the condition suited to it. In an ordinary man who lives in the exoteric world, this astral body is connected with the other bodies, and each exercises its special influence upon it. The individually pronounced quality of this human principle does not then come into notice. But when this astral body is torn out its special peculiarities assert themselves. And what are the peculiarities of the astral body? Now, my dear friends, I have often referred to this quality—perhaps, to the disgust of many who are sitting here. The quality peculiar to the human astral body on earth is egotism. When the astral body, apart from the influences which come from the other principles of human nature, asserts, its own peculiar quality, this is seen to be egotism, or the effort to live exclusively in itself and for itself. This belongs to the astral body. It would be wrong, it would be an imperfection in the astral body as such, if it could not permeate itself with the force of egotism, if it could not say to itself, ‘Fundamentally I will attain everything through myself alone, I will do all that I do for myself, I will devote every care to myself alone.’ That is the correct feeling for the astral body. If we bear this in mind we shall understand that esoteric training may produce certain dangers in this direction. Through esoteric development, for instance, because this esoteric development must necessarily make the astral body somewhat free, those persons who take up a kind of Theosophy that is not very serious, without paying attention to all that true Theosophy wishes to give, will in the course of it specially call forth this quality of the astral body, which is egotism. It can be observed in many theosophical and occult societies that while selflessness, universal human love, is preached as a moral principle and repeated again and again, yet through the natural separation of the astral body egotism flourishes. Moreover, to an observer of souls it seems quite justifiable, and yet at the same time suspicious, when universal human love is made into a much-talked of axiom—observe that I do not say it becomes a principle, but that it is always being spoken of; for under certain conditions of the soul-life a person prefers most frequently to speak of what he least possesses, of what he notices that he most lacks, and we can often observe that fundamental truths are most emphasised by those who are most in want of them.

Universal human love ought without this to become something in the development of humanity which completely rules the soul, something which lives in the soul as self-evident, and concerning which the feeling arises: ‘I ought not to mention it so often in vain, I ought not to have it so often on my lips in a superfluous manner.’ Just as a well-known commandment says: Thou shalt not take the Name of God in vain ... so might the following be a commandment to a true and noble humanity: you ought not to utter so often in vain the requirement of the universal human love which is to become the fundamental feature of your souls, for if silence is in many cases a much better means of developing a quality than speech, it is particularly the case in this matter; quietly cultivating it in the heart, and not talking about it, is a far, far better means of developing universal brotherly love than continually speaking about it. Now the advocacy of this exoteric principle has primarily nothing to do with what has been described as the fundamental quality of the astral body: egotism; the endeavour to exist in itself, of itself and through itself.

The question now is: How, then, is it possible to see this in a right light, this quality—let us calmly use the expression—of the astral body which seems so horrible to us, viz., that it wishes to be an absolute egotist? Let us set to work, beginning from the simple facts of life. There are cases even in ordinary life in which egotism expands, and where we must, to a certain degree, look upon this expansion of egotism as a necessary adaptation in life. For example, consider the characteristic of much mother-love, and try to understand how in this case egotism extends from the mother to the child. We may say that the further we penetrate among less developed peoples, and observe what we might call the lion-like way in which the mothers stand up for their children, the more we notice that the mother considers any attack upon her child as an attack upon herself. Her self is extended to the child; and it is a fact that the mother would not feel an attack upon a part of herself more than upon her child. For what she feels in herself she carries over to her child and we cannot find anything better for the regulation of the world than that egotism should be extended in this way from one being to others, and that one being should reckon itself as forming part of another, as it were, and on this account should extend its egotism over this other. Thus we see that egotism ceases to have a dark side when a being expands itself, when the being transfers its feeling and thinking into another, and considers it as belonging to itself. Through extending her egotism to her child, a mother also claims it as her possession: she counts it as part of herself; she does just as the astral body does, saying: All that is connected with me lives through me, to me, with me, etc.

We may see something similar even in more trivial cases than mother-love. Let us suppose that a man has a house, a farm, and land which he cultivates; let us suppose this man loves his house, his farm, his land and his work-people as his own body; he looks upon the matter in such a way that they are to him an extension of his own body, and loves his house, farm, land and people—as a woman may, under certain circumstances, love her gown, as forming part of her own body. In this case the being of the man expands in a certain sense to what is around him. Now, if his care expands in this way to his possessions and his servants, so that he watches over them and resists any attack upon them as he would an attack on his own body, we must then say that the fact of this environment being permeated with his egotism is extremely beneficial. Under certain circumstances, what is called love may, however, be very self-seeking. Observation of life will show how often what is called love is self-seeking. But an egotism extended beyond the person may also be very selfless, that is, it may protect, cherish and take care of what belongs to it.

By such examples as these, my dear friends, we ought to learn that life cannot be parcelled out according to ideas. We talk of egotism and altruism, and we can make very beautiful systems with such ideas as egotism and altruism. But facts tear such systems to pieces; for when egotism so extends its interests to what is around it that it considers this as part of itself, and thus cherishes and takes care of it, it then becomes selflessness; and when altruism becomes such that it only wishes to make the whole world happy according to its own ideas, when it wishes to impress its thoughts and feelings on the whole world with all its might, and wishes to adopt the axiom, ‘If you will not be my brother, I will break your head,’ then even altruism may become very self-seeking. The reality which lives in forces and in facts cannot be enclosed in ideas, and a great part of that which runs counter to human progress lies in the fact that in immature heads and immature minds there arises again and again the belief that the reality can in some way be bottled up in ideas.

The astral body may be described as an egotist. The consequence of this is that the development which liberates the astral body must reckon with the fact that the interests of man must expand, become wider and wider. Indeed, if our astral body is to liberate itself from the other principles of human nature in the right manner, its interest must include the whole of the earth and earth-humanity. In fact, the interests of humanity upon the earth must become our interests; our interests must cease to be connected in any way with what is merely personal; all that concerns mankind, not only in our own times, but all that has concerned mankind at any time in the whole of its earthly development, must arouse our deepest interests; we much reach the point of considering as an extension of what belongs to us, not only what belongs to our family by blood, not only what is connected with us such as house and farm and land, but we must make everything connected with the development of the earth our own affair.

When in our astral body we are interested in all the affairs of the earth, when all the affairs of the earth become our own, we may give way to the sense of selfhood in our astral body. This, however, is necessary, that the interests of mankind on earth should be our interests. Consider from this point of view the two legends I spoke of in the last lecture. When they were given to humanity at a certain stage, they were given from the point of view that the human being should be raised from any individual interest to the universal interests of the earth. The legend of Paradise leads the pupil directly to the starting point of our earthly evolution, when man had not yet entered upon his first incarnation, or when he is just beginning it, where Lucifer approaches him, when he still stands at the beginning of his whole development and can actually take all human interests into his own breast. The very deepest problem of education and training is contained in the story of Paradise, that story which uplifts one to the standpoint of all humanity, and imprints in every human breast an interest which can also speak in each. When the pictures of the legend of Paradise, as we have tried to comprehend them, press into the human soul, they act in such a way that the astral body is penetrated through and through by them; and under the influence of this human being whose horizon is expanded over the whole earth, the astral body may also make its own interest all that now enters its sphere. It has now arrived at being able to consider the interests of the earth as its own. Try, my dear friends, to consider seriously and earnestly what a universal, educative force is contained in such a legend, and what a spiritual impulse lies there.

It is the same with the legend of the Grail. While the Paradise legend is given to the humanity of the earth, inasmuch as it directs this humanity to the origin, the starting-point of its earthly development, while the Paradise legend, as given, uplifts us to the horizon of the whole development of humanity, the legend of the Grail is given that it may sink into the innermost depths of the astral body, into its most vital interests, just because, if only left to itself, this astral body becomes an egotist which only considers the interests that are its very own.

As regards the interests of the astral body, we can really only err in two directions. One is the direction towards Amfortas, and the other, before Amfortas is fully redeemed, leads towards Perceval. Between these two lies the true development of man, in so far as his astral body is concerned. This astral body strives to develop the forces of egotism within itself. But if it brings personal interests into this egotism it becomes corroded, and while it ought to extend over the whole earth, it will shrivel up into the individual personality. This may not be. For if it occurs, then through the activity of the personality, which expresses its ego in the blood, the whole human personality is wounded—one errs on the Amfortas side. The fundamental error of Amfortas consists in his carrying into the sphere in which the astral body ought to have gained the right to be an egotist, that which still remains in him as personal desires and wishes. The moment we take personal interests into the sphere where the astral body ought to separate itself from personal interest it is harmful, we become like the wounded Amfortas.

But the other error can also lead to harm, and only fails to do so when the being who suffers this harm is filled with the innocence of Perceval. Perceval repeatedly sees the Holy Grail pass. To a certain extent he commits a wrong. Each time the Holy Grail is carried past it is on his lips to ask for whom this food is really intended; but he does not ask; and at length the meal is over without his having asked. And so, after this meal he has to withdraw, without having the opportunity of making good what he had omitted to do. It is really just as though a man, not yet fully mature, were to become clairvoyant for a moment during the night, when he would be separated as if by an abyss from what is contained in the castle of his body, and were then to glance for a moment into it; and as if then without having obtained the appropriate knowledge, that is, without having asked the question, everything were again to be closed to him; for then, even though he wakened, he would not be able to enter this castle again. What did Perceval really neglect to do?

We have heard what the Holy Grail contains. It contains that by which the physical instrument of man on earth must be nourished: the extract, the pure mineral extract, which is obtained from all foods and which unites in the purest part of the human brain with the purest sense-impressions, impressions which come into us through our senses. Now, to whom is this food to be handed? It is really to be handed—as appears to us when from the exoteric poetic story we enter into the esoteric presentation of it in the Mysteries—it is really to be handed to the human being who has obtained the understanding of what makes man mature enough gradually to raise Himself consciously to that which this Holy Grail is. Through what do we gain the faculty to raise ourselves consciously to that which is the Holy Grail?

In the story it is very clearly indicated for whom the Holy Grail is really intended. And when we go into the Mystery presentation of the legend of the Grail we find in addition something very special. In the original legend of the Grail the ruler of the castle is a Fisher King, a king ruling over fisher folk. There was Another Who also walked among fisher folk, but He did not wish to be the king of these fishermen, rather something else; He scorned to rule over them as a king, but He brought them something more than did the king who ruled over them—this One was Christ Jesus.

Thus we are shown that the error of the Fisher King, who in the original legend is Amfortas, was a turning aside. He is not altogether worthy to receive health really through the Grail; because he wishes to rule his fisher folk by means of power. He does not allow the spirit alone to rule among this fisher folk.

At first Perceval is not sufficiently awake inwardly to ask in a self-conscious way: What is the purpose of the Grail? What does it demand? In the case of the Fisher King it required him to kill out his personal interest and cause it to expand to the interest in all humanity shown by Christ Jesus. In the case of Perceval it was necessary that he should raise his interest above the mere innocent vision to the inner understanding of what in every man is the same, what comes to the whole of humanity, the gift of the Holy Grail. Thus in a wonderful way between Perceval and Amfortas, the original Fisher King, floats the ideal of the Mystery of Golgotha, and at an important part of the legend it is delicately indicated that on the one hand the Fisher King has taken too much personality into the sphere of the astral body, and on the other stands Perceval, who has carried thither too little general interest in the world, who is still too [unsophisticated, who does not feel sufficient interest in the world. It is the immense educative value of the Grail legend that it could so work into the souls of the students of the Holy Grail that they had before them something like a balance: in the one scale that which was in Amfortas, and in the other that which was in Perceval; and they then knew that the balance was to be established. If the astral body follows its own innate interests, it will uplift itself to that horizon of universal humanity which is gained when the statement becomes a truth: ‘Where two are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them, no matter where in the development of the earth these two may be found.’ (Matthew 18, 20.)

At this point, my dear friends, I beg you not to take a part for the whole, but to take this lecture and the next together; for they may cause misunderstanding. But it is absolutely necessary that the human astral body should in its development be uplifted to the horizon of humanity in a very special way, so that the interest, common to all humanity, becomes its own, so that it feels wronged, hurt, sad within itself, when humanity is harmed in any way. To this end it is necessary that when, through his esoteric development, the student gradually succeeds in making his astral body free and independent from the other principles of his human nature, he should then arm and protect himself against any influences of other astral bodies; for when the astral body is free it is no longer protected by the physical body and etheric body, which are a strong castle, as it were, for the astral. It is free, it becomes permeable, and the forces in other astral bodies can very easily work into it. Astral bodies stronger than itself can influence it, should it be unarmed with its own forces. It would be fatal if someone were to attain the free management of his astral body, and yet were as innocent as regards its conditions as Perceval was at the beginning. That will not do; for then all sorts of influences proceeding from other astral bodies would be able to have a corresponding effect on his.

Now, what we have just mentioned also applies to a certain extent to the external exoteric world. Humanity upon the earth lives under certain religious systems. These religious systems have their cults and rituals. These rituals surround a member of a cult with imaginations obtained from the higher worlds by the help of the astral body. The moment such a religious community admits a man to its membership he is in the midst of imaginations which, while he is influenced by the ritual, liberate his astral body. In any religious ritual the astral body becomes, to a certain extent, free, at any rate for brief moments. The more powerful the ritual, the more does it suppress the influence of the etheric body and the physical body; the more it works by means of methods that liberate the astral body, the more is the astral body, during the ceremony, enticed out of the etheric body and physical body. For this reason also—though it might seem as if I am speaking in ridicule, which I am not—for this reason there is no place so dangerous to sleep in as a church, because in sleep the astral body separates from the etheric body and physical body, and because what goes on in the ritual insinuates itself into the astral body; for it is brought down from the higher worlds by the help of astral bodies. Thus to go to sleep in church, which in some places is strongly attractive to people, is something that really should be avoided. This applies more to churches which have a ritual; it does not apply so much to those religious communities which, through the ideas of modern times, have relinquished a certain ritual or limit themselves to a minimum of ritual. We are not now speaking of these things from any preference or otherwise for one creed or another, but purely according to the standard of objective facts. When, therefore, a person has emancipated his astral body from the other principles of his human nature, the impulses and forces obtained by the help of astral bodies may easily influence him. In this respect it is also possible that a person who has arrived at the free use of his astral body, if he is stronger than another whose astral body is to some extent emancipated, may obtain a very great influence over the latter. It is then absolutely like a transference of the forces of the astral body of the stronger personality to that of the weaker. And if we then clairvoyantly observe the weaker personality, he is really seen to bear within his astral body the pictures and imaginations of the stronger astral personality. You see how necessary it is that ethics should be in the ascendant where occultism is to be cultivated; for naturally egotism cannot be cultivated without really striving to emancipate the astral body from the other principles of human nature; but the most destructive thing in the field of occultism is for the stronger personalities to strive in any way for power to further their personal interests and personal intentions. Only those personalities who absolutely renounce all personal influence are really entitled to work in the domain of occultism, and the greatest ideal of the occultist who is to attain anything legitimate is not to wish to attain anything whatever by means of his own personality, but to put aside as far as possible all consideration of personal sympathy or antipathy. Therefore, whoever possesses sympathy or antipathy for one thing or another, and yet wishes to work as an occultist, must carefully relegate these sympathies and antipathies to his own private sphere, and only allow them to prevail there; in any case he may not cultivate and cherish any of these personal sympathies and antipathies in the domain in which an occult movement is to flourish. And, paradoxical as it may sound, we may say: To the occult teacher his own teaching is a matter of no concern; in fact, the matter of least concern of all to him is the teaching which he can really only give by means of his own talents and temperament. Teaching will only have a meaning when as such it contains nothing in any way really personal, but simply what can be of help to souls. Therefore, no occult teacher will at any time give any of his knowledge to his own age if he is aware that this part of his knowledge is useless to it, and could only be useful to a different age. All this comes into consideration when we are speaking of the peculiar nature of the astral body under the influence of occult development. During the preparation for our age and its progressive development a further complication arises. For what is our own age? It is the age of the development of the consciousness-soul. Nothing is so closely connected with the egotism which accentuates the narrow, personal interests as the consciousness-soul. Hence, in no other age is there such a temptation to confuse the most personal interests with those that belong to mankind in general. This age has gradually to gather the interests of humanity into the human ego, as it were; into that very part of the human ego which is the consciousness-soul. Towards the dawn of our age we see human interests being concentrated into the ego, the acme of the sense of selfhood. In this respect it is extremely instructive seriously to consider whether, for example, what Saint Augustine wrote in his ‘Confessions’ would ever have been possible in ancient Greece. It would have been absolutely out of the question.

The whole nature of the Greek was such that his inner being was in a certain harmony with his outer nature, so that external interests were at the same time inner interests, and inner interests extended into outer ones. Consider the whole Greek culture. It was of such a nature that everywhere a certain harmony between the human inner being and the outer must be taken for granted. We can only understand Greek art and tragedy, Greek historians and philosophers, when we know that among the Greeks that which pertained to the soul was poured into the outer culture, and as a matter of course showed its union with the inner. Let us compare this with the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Everything lives for himself; he searches, digs and investigates into his own being. If we look for the entirely personal, individual note in the writings of Saint Augustine we can find it in them all. Although Augustine lived long before our age, yet he prepared for it; his was the spirit in whose records we find the first dawn, long before the rising of the sun, the first dawn of the age apportioned to the consciousness-soul. This can be perceived in every line written by him, and every line of his can be distinguished by a delicate perception from all that was possible in ancient Greece.

Now, when we know that Augustine was advancing to meet the age when the sense of selfhood—the occupation of man with his own inner being even within the physical body—is as a sort of character of this age, we can understand that one who, like Augustine, has more extended interests as well, and observes the whole of the development of mankind, will truly shudder when a human being comes to him who gives him the idea that, on attaining a certain height, the astral body must naturally develop a sort of selfishness. Purely, nobly and grandly Augustine attacks self-centredness.

We might say that he attacks it selflessly. But he came into the age when humanity had separated itself from the general interests of the outer world. Recollect that in the third post-Atlantean age every Egyptian directed his gaze to the stars, where he read human destiny, how the soul was connected with interests common to humanity. Naturally this could only be attained when the human being was still capable, in the ancient elementary clairvoyance, of keeping his astral body separate from the physical body; therefore, Augustine could not but shudder when in contact with a person who reminded him, as it were, that with higher development comes selfishness. He can comprehend this, he feels it, his instinct tells him that he is living towards the age of egoism. When, therefore, a person confronts him who represents the higher development beyond that in the physical body, he feels: we are moving in the direction of egotism. At the same time he cannot comprehend that this person is bringing with him an interest common to the whole of humanity. Try to obtain a perception of how Augustine, according to his own confession, confronts the Manichaean Bishop, Faustinus—for it is he whom I have described. When he met with Faustinus, Augustine had the experience of a man facing the age of egoism in a noble way, wishing to protect it against egotism by the inner power alone, and who must turn away from such a man as the Manichaean Bishop, Faustinus. He turned away from him because, to him, Faustinus represented something in which he ought not to take part; for he conceals something within him which could not be understood at all in exoteric life in such an age. Thus the Manichaean Bishop, Faustinus, confronts the Church Father, Augustine; Augustine, who is facing the age of the consciousness-soul, meets with a human being who preserves his connection with the spiritual world as it can be preserved in an occult movement, and who thereby also preserves the fundamental quality of the astral body, at which Augustine shudders and, from his standpoint, justly.

Let us pass on a few centuries. We then meet at the University of Paris with a man who is but little known in literature; for what he has written gives no idea of his personality; what he has written seems pedantic. But personally he must have worked in a magnificent way; personally he seems to have worked principally in such a way that he brought into his circle something like a renewal of the Greek conception of the world. He was the personification of the Renaissance. He died in 1518, working until the time of his death at the Paris University. This personality was related to the Greek world—though much more on the exoteric side—in the same way as the Manichaean Bishop Faustinus was related to the Manichees, who above all else had received, among many other things in their traditions, all the great and good aspects of the third post-Atlantean, the Egyptian-Chaldean age. Thus there was this Manichaean Bishop Faustinus, who came in touch with Augustine, and who, through what he was, had preserved the occult foundations of the third post-Atlantean age. In 1518 there died in Paris a man who had carried over, though exoterically, certain aspects of the foundation of the fourth post-Atlantean age. This caused him to impress those who worked around him in traditional Christianity as weird, sinister. The monks looked upon him as their deadly enemy; yet he made a great impression upon Erasmus of Rotterdam when the latter was in Paris. But it seemed to Erasmus as if his external environment were ill-suited to the individuality which really lived within this remarkable soul; and when Erasmus had departed and gone to England, he wrote to this man, who in the meantime had become his friend, that he wished his friend could free himself from his gouty physical body and fly through the air to England, for there he would find in the external environment a much better soil for what he felt in his soul. The fact that the personality who worked at that time could give rise to Greek feeling and sensation in such an evident manner, we see with special clearness if we bear in mind the relationship between the refined and sensitive Erasmus and this personality. Thus, just at the very beginning of the age of selfhood, one might say, lived this personality who died in Paris in 1518. He lived as an enemy of those who wished to adapt the life of human souls to the age of selfhood, and who shuddered, as it were, at a soul who could work in such a way because he wished to conjure up another age, when man was, so to say, closer to the selfhood of the astral body—the Greek age. This personality who was called Faustus Andrelinus affected Erasmus very sympathetically.

In the sixteenth century, in central Europe, we meet with another personality, who is represented as being a sort of travelling minstrel, regarding whom we are told that he deviated from the traditional theology. This personality no longer wished to call himself a theologian, calling himself a man of the world and a doctor; he placed his Bible on the shelf for a time, and engaged in the study of nature. Now the study of nature, in the age when the transition took place from all that was ancient to all that is modern, was also such that it brought to man the astral selfhood, just as did Manichaeism and the ancient thought of Greece. Thus what stood at that time on the border between ancient alchemy and modern chemistry, between ancient astrology and modern astronomy, etc., brought the astral selfhood home to man. This peculiar flickering and shimmering of natural science between the ancient and modern standpoints brought home to man—when he laid his Bible for a time on the shelf—such an astral activity that it necessitated coming to an understanding with egotism. No wonder that those shuddered at it, who with their traditions wished to adjust themselves to the age of selfhood in which the consciousness-soul had already fully dawned; and there arose in Central Europe the legend of the third Faust, John Faust, also called George Faust, an actual historical personality. And the sixteenth century welded together all the horror of the egotism of the astral body by combining the three Fausts, the Faust of Augustine, that of Erasmus, and the Faust of Central Europe, into one—into that figure depicted in popular books in Central Europe, which also became the Faust of Marlowe. Out of a complete reversal of this character Goethe created his Faust, clearly showing us that it is possible not to shudder at the bearer of that which brings home to us the essence of the astral, but to understand him better, so that to us he may be evidence of a development which will call forth from us the words, ‘We can redeem him.’ Whole ages have occupied themselves with the question of the egoistic nature of the astral body, and in legendary stories and, indeed, even in history echoes the horror of man at its nature, and the human longing to solve the problem of this astral body in the right manner, in a manner corresponding to the wise guidance of the world, and to the esoteric development of the individual human soul.

As we approach the processes in the astral body and in the Self of man as experienced in occult development, it becomes more and more difficult to describe them. For the experience in these parts of human nature is far removed from the experience of everyday life. In the ordinary life of the soul we usually experience life in the astral body as the flowing and ebbing of desires, emotions, impulses, passions, etc.; and we also feel as our inward life that which is expressed collectively in the ego. But what is thus experienced is really nothing but the reflection, the mirroring of the self and the astral body in the etheric body and the physical body; it is no conscious experience of the astral body and the self. We cannot through what we experience in the ordinary life of the soul obtain a true idea of the actual experience in the higher worlds in our astral body and self; therefore, when we describe these things, we must have recourse to a kind of representation suited to these higher worlds, we must have recourse to imaginations: and these imaginations are really actually experienced. But one must not imagine that the beholding of the clairvoyant imaginations is the only thing that we experience; in a sense it is not even the principal thing; the principal thing is what we then experience inwardly through it; the processes and inward tests which the soul goes through when it confronts these imaginations.

And this is particularly the case with such an important and powerful imagination as that which has been described as the Paradise-Imagination. One who really experiences this Paradise-Imagination, who can have it before him as a conquest in higher experience, feels himself standing in the middle of an inner surging of the soul, he feels himself laid hold of by an inner soul-wave, and he feels that he himself might err in the two different directions described in the last lecture; he feels himself attracted, vividly attracted by all the passions and emotions which continue to work from the personal life he had previously led on the physical plane; for the personal interests which we have gradually acquired on the physical plane work with ever-increasing strength as numberless magnetic forces of attraction. But, on the other hand, he feels something else. The nearer he comes, the more clearly he sees this Paradise-Imagination, the more power have these forces which draw him down to personal interests. What they bring about in him is that they blot out the Paradise-Imagination more and more, or perhaps it would be better to say that they prevent it from appearing properly; he is as though benumbed: the personal interests, emotions, feelings, sensations, etc., which we drag about with us, are so many hundreds and hundreds of magnetic forces which are so many causes of stupefaction. When the student tries to progress so far in his self-training that he observes his astral body more and more truthfully (for the Paradise-Imagination is experienced outside the physical body and etheric body, that is, in the astral body and Ego), when he has grasped the true nature and character of the astral body, he knows that it is the Egotist. And he alone is in the right position at this point, which he has reached through self-training, if he does not allow his egotistical interests to become personal to his nature and to draw him with numberless forces, but can make the interests of the whole of humanity and the world more and more his own. At this stage of occult development a counter-balance against the egotism of the astral body is felt, something which is the more evident, the more the egotistic forces bestir themselves in the now liberated astral body. There is an ever-increasing feeling of solitude, icy solitude. This icy solitude is also part of what is experienced in the inward surging of the soul. It is this icy solitude which cures one of allowing egotism to have the upper hand, and the student has trained himself correctly if at this point in his occult development he can feel the impulse to be everything through himself and for himself, and can at the same time also feel the frosty solitude approaching him.

It is just as important to have this feeling as to approach gradually to the Paradise-Imagination. And when these two forces, that of the egotism which expands to world-interests and the frosty solitude, work together, the student then draws nearer and nearer to the Paradise-Imagination. And when this latter appears in all its vividness, when it is actually there, the time has also arrived for experiencing the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold in the entirely right way. It is difficult to give a single description of the Guardian of the Threshold—I have done so on different occasions in our theosophical considerations. It is not so much our task to-day to describe the Guardian of the Threshold as to describe the inward experiences in the sheaths of man and in the human self. If the student draws closer to the Paradise-Imagination; that is to say, if it becomes more and more vivid, and he meets the Guardian of the Threshold, he then feels the full force of the magnetic forces just described, and as he confronts the Guardian of the Threshold he feels—and this is a dreadful sensation—he feels as though chained or rooted to the spot. For all the magnetic forces which draw him down to what is personal now exercise their strongest influence; and only if he progressed to the point at which the frosty solitude has become so instructive that he is really able to make the world's interests his own, does he pass the Guardian of the Threshold; and then only does he feel himself united with the Paradise-Imagination, and become one with it. He then feels himself within it. The experience is like a coming into a right relationship with the world-interests, so that he can confess: ‘Now only may I allow my own interests to assert themselves, for they have become the interests of the world.’

But if he does not pass, if he has not yet acquired sufficient universal interests, his personal interests then draw him back and there comes about what in Occultism is described as: not passing the Guardian of the Threshold. These personal interests obscure the Paradise-Imagination; he may obtain separate parts of it, as it were, indistinct impressions, but not perfect ones, and one is dragged back, as it were, into the personal life. It may then happen that he has thereby received the power to have a certain degree of clairvoyant experience; but these are then really maya-experiences; they may be quite misleading, for they are entirely permeated and clouded by personal interests.

Only through such an experience is the student able fully to comprehend—for it now becomes a serious matter to him, as it were—that personal interests must pass into world-interests if he really wishes to see accurately in the Spiritual world. It is actually the case that before attaining this stage he cannot thoroughly believe this, for the personal interests are against it; but now having reached this point he sees it.

We have now reached a very hazardous place in the description of occult conditions; yet the endeavour shall be made to describe the next steps also, as they appear from the experience of occultists, and in the way in which they must be given, reckoning with the fact that our hearers are trying, in a sense, to make these things a possession of their own souls, and to work upon them further; for things such as these cannot be expressed in dry abstract ideas; we must try to portray what appears to clairvoyant vision. Now, this clairvoyant vision should by no means be understood as something that can be rigidly and diagrammatically depicted; but what I shall describe is again a typical experience, like that of the Paradise-experience, and we must really have this experience in order to recognise afterwards what knowledge and occult vision really are. Until this experience comes we can have no real idea, I mean no experienced idea, of occult vision; but still, when such a thing is described, we can understand it, if we bring sound human understanding to bear upon it. It must now be described, as far as is possible, from vision itself.

I will suppose that the student has passed the Guardian of the Threshold and the union with the Paradise-Imagination is accomplished; that he feels within it, as if this Paradise-Imagination had now become his own greater astral sheath. He still distinctly feels his own astral body about him, and knows that it is connected with his Self, but at the same time he knows that this astral body extends its interests to all that concerns the objects and beings of the Paradise-Imagination. When the student knows his union with the Paradise-Imagination is accomplished, he may then have somewhat the following impression: he will perceive his own astral body as belonging to him, and when he has felt sufficiently what has just been described as icy solitude, this feeling becomes a power within him, and it will preserve him from gazing at nothing but himself after his accomplishment of his union with the Paradise-Imagination. He will thereby create for himself, as it were, the organ by which he may behold other beings. His occult vision will first fall on another being, a being who will make a special impression upon him, because it will appear just like himself. He himself feels that he is in his Self and astral body; the other being also at first appears to him with a Self and an astral body. This is because the qualities and powers which the pupil brings with him to such a moment enables him to see just such a being, which presents itself as if in a self and an astral body. The student will now have the following experience—produced by the frosty solitude which he has learned to bear.

The forces of his astral body will be seen endeavouring to flow outwards. If I were to represent this in diagram, I should have to draw it in this manner; but, as I have said, it is only very diagrammatically expressed. I draw the Self something like the nucleus of a comet, and the astral body like the comet's tail spreading out above.

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But that is only a diagram; for the student really sees a being, he sees himself as a being, and this vision is much more complex than the vision of one's own being as physical man. He also sees within his own self the other being to which he looks across. As already said, this is a typical experience. His vision simply falls upon such a being, but he feels that this being is not in such a sphere of frosty solitude as he is himself, and therefore its astral body is seen as though directed downwards. It is extremely important to experience this, to feel oneself as if in an astral body which opens upwards, develops its rays of force upwards, wishes to stream upwards, and yet to see the other being as a Self whose astral body develops its forces downwards.

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With this typical experience there now comes into the self-consciousness something like the following: ‘I am of lower degree, of less value than this other being. What is valuable in the other being is that it can open its astral body downwards, it can, as it were, pour its forces downwards.’ And the student's impression is that of having left the physical world. The forces which proceed downwards from the astral body of the other go to the physical world, and work there as forces of blessing; in short, he has the impression that he is confronting a being that may send down to the earth, as a Spiritual rain of blessing, that which it has acquired in the Spiritual world; whereas he himself cannot direct his astral body downwards, it insists on going upwards. He has a feeling that he is of less value, because he cannot direct his astral body downwards. Further, he has a feeling that this consciousness arising thus within him must lead to a Spiritual act. A Spiritual decision matures. This Spiritual decision is to take his loneliness to this second being and warm his coldness with his warmth; he unites himself with this other being. Now, for a moment he has the impression that his own consciousness is being blotted out, as though he had brought about a sort of killing of his own being, a sort of consuming of his own being as though by fire. Then flashes into the self-consciousness, which had previously felt itself blotted out, something which he now first learns to know: Inspiration. He feels himself inspired. It is like a conversation, a typical conversation, now held with a being whom he has only learned to know because it allows him to share in its inspiration. If a student is really capable of understanding what this being sends in as his inspiring voice, he might translate what it says in somewhat the following words: ‘Because thou hast found the way to the other and hast united thyself with his beneficial rain of sacrifice, thou may'st return to the earth with him, within him, and I will make thee his guardian on the earth.’ And the student has the feeling that something of infinite importance has been taken into his soul through being able to hear these words of inspiration. In the Spiritual there is a being that is more precious than oneself, and that is .allowed to pour its astral being downwards in blessing. Through the impression of being able to unite with this being, and being its guardian when he descends, the student first learns to understand how, as physical human beings who tread the earth, we are really related through our physical and etheric coverings to that which is impregnated as higher powers in the Self and the astral body. In our physical and etheric coverings we are guardians of that which is to develop further and further to higher spheres. Only in this inner experience, when he feels his external being as the guardian of the inner being, does a man really have a true understanding of the relation of the external being to the inner being of man.

Now, when the student has passed the Guardian of the Threshold, the experience which I have just described does not stand alone, but is followed by another. I have described the purely clairvoyant and inspired experience the student may have when, outside the physical body and etheric body, he arrives at union with the Paradise-Imagination, and then obtains the inspiration which first gives an idea of the inter-relationship between the sheaths. But when he has passed the Guardian of the Threshold a second impression is added to the first one; the vision opens past the Guardian of the Threshold down into the physical world. I draw a line to represent the boundary between the higher Spiritual worlds and the physical world; above it is the realm of the Spiritual worlds and below that of the physical.

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He now sees down into the physical world, as it were, and there appears another picture, a picture of himself standing below as man. The student observes his own astral body; but this astral body which now appears as a reflection is directed downwards, it does not try to develop the force to stream towards the Spiritual world; it clings closely, as it were, to the physical plane, it does not raise itself to the heights. He also sees the reflection of the other being, whose astral body streams upwards. He has the feeling that this astral body is streaming into the Spiritual world. He sees himself and he sees the other, and he has the feeling: ‘Thou standest there below once more; in the place of the other being there stands there below a quite different man; he is a better man than thou; his astral body strives upward, it rises upward like smoke. Thy astral body strives towards the earth, it goes like smoke downward.’ He has a feeling of the Self which dwells within him as he thus looks down, and the following dreadful impression comes to him: Within thee a resolve is being formed, a dreadful resolve, the resolution to kill the other whom thou feelest to be better than thou. The student knows that this decision does not come entirely from the Self, for his Self is there above. It is another being that speaks out of the one there below; but this being suggests the decision to kill the other. And he again hears the voice which previously inspired him, but now it sounds as a dreadful, avenging voice: ‘Where is thy brother?’ And from this self bursts forth a voice hostile to the former. Previously the inspiration was as follows: ‘Through having united thyself with the beneficent powers of the other being, thou desirest to pour thyself downwards with them, and I will make thee the guardian of the other being.’ There now bursts forth from this being that one recognises as oneself the words: ‘I will not be my brother's keeper.’ First comes the resolve to kill the other, then the protest against the inspiring voice which said: ‘Because thou hast wished to unite thy coldness with that warmth I appoint thee to be the guardian of that other;’ the protest: ‘I will not be his guardian.’

When we have had this imaginative experience, we then know all of which the human soul is capable, and above all we know one thing: that, if perverted, the noblest things in the Spiritual world may become the most dreadful things in the physical world. We know that in the depths of the human soul, through the perversion of the noblest readiness to sacrifice, may arise the wish to kill our companion. From this moment we know what is meant in the Bible by the story of Cain and Abel—but only from this moment—for the story of Cain and Abel is none other than the reproduction of an occult experience, which has just been described. If the writer of the story of Cain and Abel had been able to describe what took place with man before the time of the story of Paradise from other reasons than those displayed in the course of the development of humanity, he would have described the first experience, the upper one (on the diagram). Thus he begins with the story of Paradise, and describes its reflection; for Cain felt in this manner towards Abel before that period in the development of the earth indicated by the story of Paradise, he felt towards him as it has been shown here above. And after the temptation, and after the loss of the vision which is regained in occult vision through the Paradise-Imagination, Cain's readiness to sacrifice had passed into what appears here below; his readiness to sacrifice had really changed into the wish to kill the other. The cry we read of in the Bible: ‘Am I to be my brother's keeper?’ is the reverse reflection of the other inspiration: ‘I will make thee the guardian of the other here below on the earth.’ From this you will be able to see that these typical experiences are certainly important; for they bring about a certain union between what we may be to-day and the interests common to all humanity. But at the same time they show us very clearly by what we experience in them in our pulsing soul-life, that the principal thing is to feel the colossal leap the development of humanity has made from what I described to you as the first, the pre-earthly imagination, as it were, to that which is presented in the story of Cain and Abel as an event in humanity after the expulsion from Paradise, after the expulsion through which the Guardian of the Threshold has become invisible for man. The knowledge of this leap in the development of humanity really first shows us what this earthly man is; for when we really feel through and through what has just been described, we gradually experience that this earthly man, as he now is here upon the earth, is the perversion of what he once was. And we then know with great certainty what we should have become if nothing else had intervened. If we had simply developed in this earthly evolution without anything further, we should have become aware of what this is the reflection on the earth. We were not to know this to begin with. It is really only in our present age that man is allowed to know of what the story of Cain and Abel is the reflection, that it is the reflection of a lofty sacrifice. All that was above, everything before Paradise was concealed, for the Guardian himself hid it from us, when, in other words, man was driven out of Paradise. This could only come about through the physical body and etheric body of man being now so permeated with forces that he does not carry out what appears as the reflection—for he certainly would carry it out if he were to feel all that is in the astral body. The physical body and etheric body so stupefy the human being that his wish to kill his fellow is not actualised. Consider what is said in this simple sentence: In that the good, progressive, divine Spiritual Powers gave man a physical and an etheric body, so that he cannot look back, something like a sort of stupefaction was at the same time poured over the wish for the war of each against all. The desire for this is not roused in the soul, because the physical body and etheric body of man were prepared in such a way that this desire is benumbed. A person cannot see his astral body; therefore this wish, too, remains unknown to him; he does not carry it out.

If we wish really to describe the interaction of the astral body and the self, we must describe things which not only actually remain hidden to human nature, but which must so remain. But what has been brought about through the stunning of this and similar wishes—wishes connected with the annihilation and destruction of human and other communal life on the physical plane? They have become debilitated; the human soul only perceives them in a weakened form; it only feels them to a slight extent. And the dim feeling of those wishes that would be something so terrible if man were to allow them free expression, as they really are—this is really our human earthly knowledge.

I am now giving you for the first time a definition of the nature of human earthly knowledge. It consists of the dim and dulled impulses of destruction. Shiva in his most terrible form, so far stupefied that he cannot freely find expression but is, as it were, made threadbare, compressed into the human world of ideas—this is the maya of the human being, this is the knowledge of man. Thus knowledge had to be so weakened—that is to say, the impulses and inner forces had to be so weakened—that the original terrible impulse—ruled by Ahriman, that Ahriman's power (for originally it is Ahriman who gives rise to this wish) should be so far weakened that he could not express himself through man, who would have thereby made himself permanently a servant of Shiva. The sum total of these forces had to be so weakened that its expression in man only enables him to transpose himself into the being of another with his conceptions and ideas. When we try to force an idea of our own into the being of another, when we try to imbue another with a conception of our own, this conception impressed into the nature of the other is the blunted weapon of Cain which was thrust into Abel. And because this weapon was thus blunted it was made possible for that which was at a bound reversed into its opposite, to pass over into evolution. And thus by a slower evolution, through ever-increasing strengthening of his knowledge, man reaches at last the experience of something he was not permitted to express in the physical world because it there became a destructive impulse; stage by stage he develops first ordinary knowledge, then imaginative knowledge, which enters more into the being of another, then inspirational knowledge, which penetrates still more into the being of another, till in intuitive knowledge he enters it entirely and lives on spiritually in the other being.

Thus we gradually struggle up to the comprehension of what this self really is. As to its innermost nature, the astral body is seen to be the great egotist; the self is more than that—it not only lives for itself, but wishes to pass over into others as well. And knowledge, such as is acquired on earth, is this dulled passion to enter into another, not merely to expand oneself and all that one is, but further to pass beyond oneself into another. It is egotism intensified and extended beyond itself.

If you bear in mind what the origin of knowledge is, you will then understand that there is always the possibility of misusing it, for if this is a true knowledge in the Self, the moment it goes astray it is misused. Only by progressing, and making this penetration into another more and more spiritual, and the renunciation by the astral body which has expanded to world-interests, of this penetration into another's being, only by leaving his constitution quite untouched and placing his interests higher than our own, can we make ourselves ready for higher knowledge. Moreover, we cannot recognise a being of the hierarchy of the angels, for instance, if we have not reached the stage when the inner being of the angels interests us more than does our own. As long as we have more interest in our own being than in the being of the angels, we cannot recognise them. Thus we must first educate ourselves up to world-interests, and then to interests that go even further, so that another can be more important and of more consequence than oneself. The moment we try to develop further in occult experiences, while yet remaining more precious to ourselves than the other beings we wish to know, that same moment we go astray. At this point, if you follow out this train of thought, you really come to a true conception of black magic; for black magic begins where occult activity is carried into the world without our first being in the position to expand our own interests into world-interests, without being able to value other interests more than our own.

Such things can really only be touched upon, so as to arouse conceptions concerning them; they are too important for more than this. I wished to show how we may gradually come to recognise in its true form, not in its maya, that which dwells within us as astral body and self; for what a man experiences inwardly as his astral body is not the true astral body, but merely the reflection of that in the etheric body. And what a man calls his self is not the true Ego, but a reflection of the Ego in his physical body. A man only experiences reflections of his inner being. If he were to experience the forms of his own inner astral body and Ego before he was sufficiently mature, impulses of destruction would be enkindled within him; he would become an aggressive being; the desire to injure would arise within him. And such things underlie all black magic. Although the paths followed by black magic are many, the effect they aim at is always something like a covenant with Ahriman or Shiva. We can only learn to recognise the astral body and Ego in their true form if at the same time we acknowledge the necessity of developing them and making them worthy of being what they ought to be. The innermost nature of the astral body is egotism; but it should become our ideal to be permitted to be an egotist because the interests of the world have become our own. It must be our ideal to be allowed to enter into another being because we do not intend to seek our own interests, but we find the other being more important than ourselves. Self-education must go so far that we feel this upper picture in all its occult-moral significance; that we so gradually transform this picture which is our self, that we can no longer be warmed by our own emotions, impulses, desires and passions, but that with living our life in the astral body we enter the frosty solitude; we then thereby open ourselves to the warmth, to the warm interest which streams forth from the other worlds, and wish to unite ourselves with the beneficent forces proceeding from this other being. This is at the same time the starting-point for a gradual raising of our self to the higher Hierarchies in their true form. We do not attain to the Beings of the higher Hierarchies if we are not in a position worthily to confront the Imagination and Inspiration which has been described, and to bear seeing its opposite picture; that is, the possibilities in the depths of human nature when it was cast down from the Spiritual into the physical world. If we refuse to look upon the twofold picture of Cain and Abel below—our own self, and the representative of our Higher Self—the mediator between our self and the higher Hierarchies—we cannot ascend. But when we are able to cultivate within our self the feeling indicated here, we then experience our Self, and this provides the entrance to the higher orders of the Hierarchies.