The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. The Idea of Evolution and Involution Underlying Secret Societies

[ 1 ] I have spoken in a series of lectures about secret schools and secret societies, and it now seems appropriate to conclude this cycle of lectures on secret scientific associations before moving on to something else. In eight days, I will speak about the significance of the holidays that follow Christmas in the church year; above all, I will speak about the less significant holiday of New Year's Day and the significant holiday of Epiphany, that is, the holidays that follow Christmas. Today, I would like to give a more concluding lecture.

[ 2 ] You might ask: What is the deeper meaning of such secret scientific societies and their whole purpose in relation to world development? If I were to answer that, it would be that they are connected with the whole way in which beings develop in general, how beings make progress in the world. If you want to develop yourselves, you know that various exercises are necessary and available for this purpose. You have heard of Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, and other exercises; you have heard of various secret scientific societies that have initiated their members in various ways, and so on.

[ 3 ] One might say that all this could also be achieved without such secret societies. But I can reply to that – and you will see in the course of this lecture that this is so – that without such societies, it cannot work in the world. But it is impossible — to put it bluntly — to speak in public in the style of, for example, the Masonic Manifesto that I read to you two weeks ago.

[ 4 ] One cannot attain what is commonly understood as immortality without participating in the secret sciences. However, the results of the secret sciences penetrate the world in various ways. A large part of secret knowledge is present in religions, and all those who live in a religious community with inner participation also share in this knowledge and prepare themselves to participate in full immortality. But it is something else to maintain the knowledge of this immortality and the feeling of belonging to the spiritual world with full consciousness in concrete experience.

[ 5 ] You have all lived many times before, but not all of you are aware that you have lived so many times. You will gradually gain this awareness, and it depends on whether you live your life with full consciousness. That was not the purpose of the secret knowledge, to give people a dull continuation of life, but to impart a full, clear, conscious continuation of life in the spirit as knowledge. And there is a great law, namely a law that states what the progress of consciousness in all future stages of life depends on. For everything that contributes to the development of consciousness is that which man does not achieve for himself alone in order to attain this consciousness. This is apparently a paradoxical statement: everything that a being accomplishes without intending to develop its own consciousness contributes to the preservation [development?] of that being's consciousness.

[ 6 ] Consider, for example, a builder constructing a house. He does not build this house for himself, but sets himself the task of building this house for a reason that has nothing to do with himself. You know that this is rarely the case. Apparently, many people do not work for themselves, but in reality they do.

[ 7 ] Take a lawyer, for example. He appears to work for his clients. Part of his work may be selfless, but the real motive behind it is to earn a living. For the extent to which his entire business is solely determined by his own livelihood, to the extent that a business is merely a means to the end of sustaining life, that much is inevitably lost as spiritual gain. On the other hand, everything that is built into objectivity, everything that is linked to something else, contributes to preserving our consciousness in future development. That is clear.

[ 8 ] Take the Freemasons, for example. In their original form, they impressed upon people: Build buildings that contribute nothing, that have nothing to do with your own livelihood. What remains of the old, good Freemasonry are certain charitable institutions. Even now, after the secret knowledge and the living roots in ancient wisdom have been lost to the lodges, the remaining welfare institutions show a humanity that, although empty, still exists and is maintained through tradition. But that is something that belonged to Freemasonry: selfless activity! What Freemasonry originally did was to encourage its members to work in the service of humanity, to build into the objective world.

[ 9 ] We now live in what we might call the mineral cycle. And our task in it is to permeate this entire mineral world through and through with our own spirit. Let's look at this more closely. You build a house. You take the building blocks from some quarry. You cut them so that they fit into the house, and so on. What do you connect with the raw material you take from the mineral kingdom? You connect the raw material with the human spirit. When you build a machine, you put your spirit into the machine. The individual machine may perish, it may turn to dust, it may one day be crushed. No trace of it will remain. But what it has accomplished does not pass without a trace, but goes right down to the atoms. Every atom bears a trace of your mind and will carry this trace away with it. It is not irrelevant whether an atom has once been in a machine or not. By being inside the machine, the atom has been changed. And this change, which you have imparted to the atom, will never be lost. The other thing is that by changing the atom, you have connected your spirit with the mineral world, that you have left a lasting mark on the general consciousness. This is exactly what we take with us into the other world.

[ 10 ] It is therefore the case that all secret science consists of the knowledge of how one must act selflessly outside of oneself in order to achieve the greatest elevation of consciousness within oneself. Consider that those who knew this very clearly were so selfless that they ensured that their names would not be passed on to posterity. An example of this is the “Theologia germanica.” No one knows who wrote it. On the outside it simply says: “Der Frankfurter” (The Frankfurt Man). He therefore ensured that not even his name could be guessed. He worked in such a way that he merely added something to the objective world without claiming any honor or preservation of his name. To compare this with something else, it should be mentioned that masters are not usually historical figures; they sometimes incarnate themselves in historical figures when necessary, but this is to a certain extent a sacrifice. The degree of their consciousness is no longer compatible with working for themselves. And working for oneself is already the preservation of one's mere name.

[ 11 ] This rule is difficult to understand. But you will now understand that Freemasons aim to do as much as possible in the world in such a way that their deeds are engraved in the great cathedrals, in social institutions and organizations, or that their deeds are present in charitable institutions. For selfless deeds are the true founders of immortality: this is the reflection of selfless deeds in the outside world. They need not be very great deeds. If someone selflessly gives someone else a penny, that is a deed that should be understood in the same way. But only as much passes into immortality as there is selflessness in it. And very few people are selfless. If, for example, it gives you a good feeling, then doing good can be very selfish. Doing good often springs from selfish interests. If a poor man who lives among us has no roast for Christmas, and I feel the need to give him something so that I can feel justified in eating my roast, then that is selfish.

[ 12 ] In the Middle Ages, it was impossible to say who had built or painted many cathedrals and paintings. It is only in our sub-race that we have begun to attach such great value to a single human name. In earlier times, less importance was attached to individual human names. Those times were more spiritual. And spirituality is directed toward reality, while our time is directed toward appearances, which wants to preserve the immediate temporal.

[ 13 ] I just wanted to show you what was important to such secret societies. It was important to them to completely eliminate themselves, insofar as they were personalities, and to let what they did live on in its effects. And now you will also recognize the crux of the secret. It is much less a matter of keeping something secret; it is a matter of keeping one's share secret. By keeping one's part secret, one secures one's immortality. The rule is therefore clear and unambiguous: as much as you put into the world, the world will give back to you in consciousness. This is connected with the greatest laws of the universe.

[ 14 ] You all have a soul and you all have a spirit. This soul and this spirit are destined to reach the highest stages of perfection. But you were already there before your physical body was there; indeed, you were there before you existed in your first physical incarnation. In physical incarnation, you only existed in the previous races at the time of the Hyperborean and Polar races. Before that, however, you were purely soul beings. And as soul beings, you were part of the world soul, and as spirits, you were part of the universal world spirit. The world spirit and the world soul were spread out around you, just as nature is now. Just as the mineral world, the plant world, and the animal world are now around you, so the soul world and the spirit world were spread out around you. And what was outside at that time is now your soul: you have internalized what was first external. What is inside you today was once spread out outside. But that has now become your inner soul. And once upon a time, the spirit was also spread out like this. And what is now spread out around you will become your inner life. What is now the mineral kingdom, you absorb, and it will become your inner being. The plant kingdom will become your inner being; you absorb it. You appear with what surrounds you in nature as with your inner being.

[ 15 ] Now you will understand how this relates to the first example: you build the church for others, not for yourself. You can absorb a large, beautiful, and glorious world if you make it large, beautiful, and glorious. Doing something for the higher self is not selfish because you are not doing it just for yourself. This higher self will be united with all other higher selves, so that it is for everyone at the same time.

[ 16 ] This is what the Freemasons knew. The Freemason knew that when he helped to build the spiritualization of the mineral world—and “building” means nothing other than spiritualizing the mineral world—that this would one day be the content of his soul. That is what is significant: God once created nature for us, which surrounds us as mineral, plant, and animal nature. We will take this in. We cannot help that it is there; we can only make it our own. But what we ourselves create in the world is what will constitute our future being through ourselves.

[ 17 ] We perceive the mineral world as such; what we make of it will be what we become in the future. What we make of the plant world will also be what we become in the future. The same is true of the animal world and of the human world. If you establish a charitable institution or contribute to one, you will become what you contribute. If human beings do nothing that they can absorb into their souls from outside in this way, their souls remain empty. Therefore, it must be possible for humanity to spiritualize as much as possible the three or four kingdoms of nature, for human beings are also part of nature. This has been the task of secret societies throughout the ages: to bring spirit into the entire external world.

[ 18 ] You understand that this must be so. Take a child who is beginning to learn to read and write. At first, the tools are spread out around the child. Today, the child begins to learn to read. There is nothing yet within the child, but the teacher, the primer, and everything else is there. This continues until what was outside enters the child. And the child acquires the ability to read. It is the same with nature. What is spread out around us in nature will later be within us. We are souls, we originate from the world soul and absorbed it when it was spread out around us. The spirit was also absorbed in this way, and nature will be absorbed by us in the same way in order to remain within us as an active ability.

[ 19 ] This is the great idea underlying secret societies, that all progress is based on involution and evolution. Involution is absorption, evolution is expenditure. All states of the world alternate between these two. Now you breathe in nature by seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting it. What you see does not pass you by without a trace. The eye perishes, the object perishes; but what you have seen remains. Now you will understand that at certain times it may be necessary to have an understanding of such things. We are moving toward a time when, as I recently indicated, understanding will penetrate into the atom itself. People will understand—even in popular opinion—that the atom is nothing more than coagulated electricity. The thought itself is made of the same substance.

[ 20 ] In fact, before the fifth saucer comes to an end, we will have progressed so far that we will be able to influence the atom. Once we can understand the materiality between the thought and the atom, we will soon understand how to influence the atom. And nothing will be closed to certain kinds of action: I will be able to stand here and, unnoticed, press a button in my pocket to blow up an object far away, say in Hamburg, just as you can now send a telegraph without wires by producing a wave movement here and expressing it in a certain way at another specific point. This will be possible at the moment when the occult truth that thought and atoms consist of the same substance is realized in practical life.

[ 21 ] It is impossible to imagine what would happen in such a case if humanity had not then attained selflessness. Only by achieving selflessness will it be possible to hold humanity back from the brink of destruction. The downfall of our present root race will be brought about by a lack of morality. The Lemutian race was destroyed by fire, the Atlantean by water; ours will be destroyed by war of all against all, by evil, by the struggle of men against each other. Men will destroy themselves in mutual combat. And it will be desolate—more desolate than other kinds of destruction—because men themselves will be to blame.

[ 22 ] A small group will survive into the sixth root race. This small group will have developed complete selflessness. The others will apply all their ingenuity to working out and harnessing the physical forces of nature, but without having attained the necessary degree of selflessness. They will inaugurate the struggle of all against all, and this will be the cause of the downfall of our root race.

[ 23 ] In the seventh sub-race in particular, this struggle of all against all will rage in the most terrible manner. Strong, powerful forces will emanate from discoveries that will transform the entire globe into a kind of self-functioning electrical apparatus. In a way that cannot be spoken of, the small group will be protected.

[ 24 ] Now you will be able to imagine even more clearly than was the case after what I was able to say about this last time why the good form is being sought and why Freemasonry is coming to the realization that it must erect a structure that corresponds to selflessness. It is easier to carry ourselves into the future with good old forms, to carry ourselves over to the small group of the new humanity, than to carry ourselves out of chaos.

[ 25 ] Today it is easy to mock empty forms, but they have great significance. They are adapted to the structure of our development. Ultimately, we are dealing with necessary stages in human nature and spiritual evolution. Consider this: we are in the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race; we still have two sub-races of the fifth root race to go through. Then come seven sub-races of the sixth root race and seven sub-races of the seventh root race, which we still have to go through. That makes a total of sixteen stages of future development. Human beings still have to go through these sixteen stages. Anyone who learns something about the states that are possible there is, to a certain degree, initiated. The degrees correspond in a certain way to the secrets of future races.

[ 26 ] On our globe, you have seven root races, and each root race has seven sub-races. That makes a total of forty-nine states. On the next globe, you have another forty-nine states. This gives you certain stages for exploring the secrets of the next phases of development. The high degrees of Freemasonry were originally intended to be nothing more than an expression of each future stage of human development. This means that there is indeed something in Freemasonry that has been very beautiful, namely that those who had attained a degree knew how to position themselves in the future so that they could be pioneers of sorts. They also knew that those who had attained higher degrees could have a greater impact. This division into degrees is therefore very useful, because it corresponds to reality.

[ 27 ] So if new content with new knowledge could be poured into these forms, that would be very good. Then Freemasonry would once again be imbued with real spirit. But content and form belong together. Today, however, the situation is as I have described: the degrees are there, but no one has really attained them. Nevertheless, it is not unnecessary that they exist. They will be revived in the future.

[ 28 ] The fifth subrace is a purely intellectual race, a race of egoism. We are now at the height of egoism. The intellect is the most egoistic thing, and the intellect is the basic characteristic of our subrace. We must therefore rise through the intellect to the spirituality that existed in the past ... [gap].

[ 29 ] The secret of the secret is that human beings know how to keep their ego secret, that they do not regard their ego but their deeds as the decisive factor. Their actions and the overcoming of the ego through action are the real secret of the secret. The ego should remain secret in action. This belongs to the first degree: the eradication of the ego from ongoing karma. That which falls back on the ego from karma is thereby eradicated from karma. Nation, race, gender, class, religious affiliation—all these things are something that works on human egoism. Only when human beings have overcome all these things will they be able to become free of egoism.

[ 30 ] In the astral body, you can detect a very specific color for every nation, for every race, for every age. Everywhere you find a basic color that humans have as members of this classification, these differentiations. These must first be stripped away. The Theosophical Society works to balance the colors of the astral bodies of its members. They should become the same color, the same color in relation to this basic color. This basic color forms a certain substance ... [gap].

[ 31 ] In order to achieve this balance, bloody wars will indeed be necessary, followed by wars that take the form of economic wars, wars of exploitation, monetary and industrial ventures, and acts of domination, whereby it will become increasingly possible to set masses of people in motion and simply force them to act through certain mechanisms. The individual will gain more and more power over certain masses of people. For the course of development is not that we become more democratic, but that we become brutally aristocratic, with the individual gaining more and more power. If there is no refinement of morals, this must lead to the most brutal things. This will also come, just as the water catastrophe came for the Atlanteans.