The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] In these lectures, I would like to give you a picture of the nature of the Mysteries and their connection to the spiritual life of humanity. Therefore, as an introduction, it is necessary that we first come to an understanding regarding various experiences encountered on the path to the higher worlds. Although this introduction will have to address matters that have already been touched upon in our anthroposophical work in a certain respect, we will need certain perspectives for our reflections in the coming days that have perhaps been considered less so far, or at least not in the necessary context.

[ 2 ] Everything that is encompassed by the concept of the mystery tradition is ultimately grounded in the experiences of the initiates in the higher worlds. Knowledge must be brought down from the higher worlds, and the impulses for practical action must also be brought down, insofar as this knowledge and these impulses for practical action are relevant to the mystery tradition. Now it has often been emphasized: Just as human development takes on various forms in the most diverse fields during the successive periods of human life, so too is this the case with regard to everything we call the mystery traditions. After all, we do not pass through successive human lives with our soul for no reason. We pass through successive human lives because in each incarnation we can experience something new and add it to what we have connected with our soul in previous incarnations. In most cases, the image of the outer world has completely changed by the time we re-enter human physical existence through birth, after passing through the spiritual world between death and the new birth. Therefore, for easily recognizable reasons, the mystery being—the principle of initiation—must also change in the successive epochs of human history.

[ 3 ] In our time, the principle of initiation has indeed undergone a tremendous change in that, to a certain degree, up to a certain level, initiation can be attained, as it were, entirely without any personal guidance, simply because we are now able to explain the principles of initiation to the public as clearly as has been done, for example, in my book “How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” has been done. Anyone who earnestly attempts to undergo the experiences described in this book can make great progress with regard to the principle of initiation. By applying what is presented there to his soul, he can progress to the point where the existence of the spiritual worlds becomes a realization for him that is just as much a realization as the realization of the outer physical world—for the reason that, through the successive, slow, and gradual application of what is described to his own soul, he can reach the point of making the leap into an understanding of the spiritual worlds. It has now become possible to describe precisely the course of initiation that can be undergone without, so to speak, special events occurring in the life of the soul that lead this life of the soul into particular catastrophes and particular revolutions.

[ 4 ] To this extent, it is possible today to discuss the journey into the higher worlds in public. However, it must be said that even today, if a person is to make significant progress, the journey into the higher worlds is linked to enduring certain sufferings, pains, and very special experiences—which can, however, intervene in a person’s life in a disconcerting and revolutionary way—and for which one must first be made particularly ready. So let one thing be emphasized once again: What has been published, anyone can go through without danger and can thereby come very far. But of course the path to the higher worlds is never complete, and if one goes beyond a certain limit and wishes to continue on the path, then a special maturity is required if it is to proceed without particular upheavals of the soul life—not pathological, but thoroughly inner upheavals of the soul life. Of course, these upheavals also pass by the soul if the entire process of initiation takes place in the right way. But it is precisely necessary that it take place in the right way.

[ 5 ] Now one must be clear about the fact that, for those who wish, as it were, to take the leap into the mystery, everything in the life of the soul must gradually change. Virtually everything in the life of the soul must change. If one wishes to give a preliminary description of this transformation, one could do so in a few words by saying: What appears to be the goal, the purpose, indeed the end in itself of ordinary spiritual life must, for those who wish to penetrate the mystery, become a means to higher purposes, to higher goals. In ordinary life, a person perceives the external world through their senses. They perceive the external world in colors, in forms, in sounds, and in other sensory impressions. In ordinary life, a person lives, so to speak, within the world of these sensory impressions. At the moment when initiation is to take place at a certain level, a person must not, for the rest of their life, merely relate to the external world in such a way that they experience blue or red or other colors; rather, they must be able to make the experience of colors—without losing it—a mere means to higher purposes, to higher goals.

[ 6 ] In everyday life, for example, on a clear day a person looks out into space and sees the blue of the sky. He lives in the sight of the blue sky. If they wish to become an initiate at a certain level, they must reach a state where they can gaze upon the blue of the sky, but it must become completely transparent to them. Whereas it is otherwise a “boundary,” it must be able to become transparent, and the person must see what they actually wish to see through the blue of the sky. It must no longer be a boundary for him. Or take the rose: to the outer eye, the rose is bounded in its surfaces by the red color. At the moment of initiation, the red color ceases to be a boundary. It becomes transparent, and behind it appears that which is actually sought. The color does not cease to act through its nature, but the initiate sees something different when he looks through the sky-blue, something different when he looks through the red of the rose, something different when he looks through the dawn, and so on. Thus, color is already experienced in a very specific way. But in the immediate vision it becomes transparent, is removed by the power of the soul, which has been attained through that training that leads to transparency. So it is with all sensory impressions. Whereas before they are what one lives in, up to which one arrives, so to speak, with one’s experience, after initiation they become a mere means of experiencing what lies behind them.

[ 7 ] The same applies, for example, to the entire realm of thought. In ordinary life, people think. Please do not misunderstand me here. If you compare this with other explanations in the proper sense, you will see the consistency; but it is nevertheless true, one can say: From a certain stage of initiation onward, thinking in the ordinary sense of the word ceases for the human being. Not that the human being—or the initiate—could ever come to regard thinking as meaningless, but rather, what was previously the purpose and goal of the soul’s life must become a mere means. This means that the initiate experiences a new world. In order to experience it, he needs, among other things we will discuss later, to rise above the level of ordinary thinking on the physical plane. When a person lives on the physical plane, he judges things, forms views and opinions about them. From a certain stage of initiation onward, opinions and judgments about things have no meaning, no value whatsoever.

[ 8 ] I must make a remark here, because we are speaking of realms of the soul’s life that differ so greatly from what people are accustomed to that misunderstandings can very easily arise. Once this stage of initiation—which I must characterize for the following considerations—has been reached, then, as a rule, the human being must also gain the ability to lead a kind of double life. For in ordinary daily life, it is simply impossible to do anything other than judge and think about things. On the physical plane, we are simply compelled to judge and think about things; for the most obvious example, where you might wish to begin, will lead you to the conviction that one must think on the physical plane. Suppose you are sitting on a train and you were not thinking; then you would remain seated at the station where you were supposed to get off. If one does not think, it could even lead to a situation where, as an anthroposophist who should carefully keep their membership card, one leaves it in its place in everyday life, which would be contrary to the principles of keeping membership cards. The world is simply arranged in such a way that one must judge and think. But one does not enter the higher worlds from this standpoint of judgment and thinking. There could, so to speak, be a mixing of the two standpoints: one can be so strongly preoccupied with the urge to enter the higher worlds that such a lapse occurs. But on the whole, it must surely be possible to separate these two things from one another: the ability to judge—an absolute, sound ability to judge that takes life’s duties into account—for the physical plane; but then to be clear that precisely what one so energetically cultivates for the physical plane may be merely a means for the higher worlds.

[ 9 ] Thoughts, ideas, judgments—all of these together must be, for the one who wishes to become an Initiate, what colors are, for example, to the painter. For him, they are not an end in themselves, but rather a means of expressing what he wishes to convey in the painting. In ordinary life on the physical plane, thoughts and ideas are an end in themselves; for the initiate, they become the means to express what he experiences in the higher worlds. This can only come about if a certain attitude of mind has been developed toward opinions, views, and so on. Anyone who still has any preference for one view or another, who still prefers that one thing be true rather than another, cannot enter the stage of initiation referred to here; rather, only the one who cares as little for his own opinions as for the opinions of others, who is fully prepared to set aside his own opinions everywhere and to look purely at what is there.

[ 10 ] In general, one of the most difficult aspects of inner experience is to move beyond the standpoint of “opinion,” beyond the standpoint of “standpoints,” and beyond judgment.

[ 11 ] This even touches upon certain difficulties that can arise in the coexistence of those who seek the path upward to the higher worlds with other people. Those who seek the path upward into the higher worlds, or who have already reached a certain stage on this path, will, due to the spiritual state they have attained, behave differently toward very, very many things in life than is otherwise customary. Above all, they will display the characteristic of, let us say, quickly knowing how to behave in this or that situation in life, how one ought to conduct oneself. Then they may be asked by those around them: Why should we do that? Certainly, if they can put themselves in the other people’s shoes, they will always be able to provide this “why.” But first he must truly move from the level where he initially stands—where what is to happen presents itself to him, as it were, in a single leap—to the other level, where he forces himself to go through the thought processes of ordinary life in order to demonstrate how what he perceives in a single leap is substantiated. This rapid insight into widely divergent contexts of life, fraught with many intermediate links, is what appears as a concomitant to the transcendence of judging, of opinion, of holding this or that standpoint.

[ 12 ] Furthermore, what one must strive to attain is also connected to various other inner moral qualities. We will speak of such qualities in the course of these evenings. For now, we shall point out only one quality that has already been mentioned frequently. It is fearlessness. For it must be kept firmly in mind that the experiences one enters into—when the entire life of the soul, as it has been until now, is, so to speak, demoted from “end” to “means”—become quite different from what they were before. One begins to experience things in a completely new way. One truly enters the unknown, and entering this unknown is initially always associated with states of fear. And because the entire experience flows intimately within the soul, these states of fear can also become all manner of inner experiences of the soul. Therefore, part of the preparation for the path upward into the higher worlds is the cultivation of a certain fearlessness.

[ 13 ] It is precisely this fearlessness that one must cultivate, we say, through very specific meditations. It is possible. However, people usually lack the perseverance required for the meditations that are specifically designed for this purpose. A good meditation, for example, is to repeatedly turn one’s thoughts to the idea that simply knowing about something does not change that thing from what it is. If, for instance, someone were to know at this very moment that something terrible is bound to happen in an hour, and they were unable to prevent it, they might be filled with fear and dread. But their knowledge does not change the situation! Therefore, fear and terror are completely absurd if one is aware of the situation. It is a fallacy into which all souls naturally fall due to their inherent disposition, a fallacy that would inevitably befall a person at a certain stage of initiation if initiation did not repeatedly prepare them for fearlessness: Indeed, does knowing about something actually change anything about it?

[ 14 ] The meditator who works his way up to certain stages of initiation comes, at a certain stage, to a very strange realization: the realization that, in a certain sense, things are quite dire within his own human inner being, within his own human soul. There is something beneath the threshold of consciousness that one would truly wish to be different, when one considers the judgments of ordinary life. In a certain sense, there is something terrible, something truly dreadful, lying beneath the threshold of consciousness. And it would be only natural, if a person were led unprepared before the depths of their own soul, that they would be utterly horrified by it. Now one must prepare oneself through the repeated meditation on the thought that things do not change simply by recognizing them. Truly, it is not by stepping before it and looking at it that the terrible thing in the depths of the soul is brought forth. It is always there, even when a person does not recognize it. But it is precisely through the repeated meditation on the thought that things do not change simply by being recognized that one dispels a large part of the fear that must be dispelled.

[ 15 ] As you can see from the few points mentioned above, the moment one sets out to ascend into the higher worlds, the intellectual and moral qualities of the soul converge. For the ordinary external sciences of today, one really needs only intellectual qualities. In this context, I refer to courage and fearlessness as moral qualities. Without them, one cannot attain certain stages of initiation.

[ 16 ] Whether we are speaking of Eastern mysteries or Western mysteries, they all share certain stages. Therefore, certain expressions are meaningful for all mysteries—expressions that can be summarized as follows: First, every soul that wishes to reach a certain stage of initiation, a certain stage of the mystery process, must experience what might be called “coming into contact with the experience of death.” The second thing every soul must experience is the “passage through the elemental world.” The third is what was called in the Egyptian or other mysteries the “beholding of the sun at midnight,” and another is what is called the “encounter with the upper and lower gods.” Everyone who reaches a certain stage of initiation must, so to speak, go through these experiences. One must be able to know from inner experience what is meant by these things, and must be capable of living, so to speak, in two worlds: in the one world in which humanity lives today, the world of the physical plane, and in the other world, in which one can only live if one knows what it means to have “come into contact with death”; one has “passed through the elemental world”; one has “seen the sun at midnight”; one has had an “encounter with the higher and lower gods.”

[ 17 ] Coming close to death! The point here is that, in his waking state between birth and death, a human being—insofar as he lives consciously—truly lives continuously in all that which I have just told you must be overcome; it must become a mere means for the initiate. Try to make it clear to yourself what it is that a human being lives in on the physical plane: in their sensory impressions and in their ordinary soul experiences—that is what they live in. All of this must become a mere means as soon as a human being enters into the realm of the mysteries. What then remains of what a human being feels themselves to be in ordinary life? Nothing remains. Everything sinks down to a second-order reality. Thus, everything that a person experiences inwardly—and consequently also outwardly—in ordinary life, they must cast off.

[ 18 ] So imagine this: the blue vault of the sky becomes transparent, ceases to exist, is no longer there; all the boundaries formed by colors on the surface of things cease to exist, are no longer there; the sounds of the physical world cease to exist, are no longer there; what the sense of touch experiences ceases to exist, is no longer there. But please bear in mind that this becomes an experience! For example, the sensation of standing with one’s feet on solid ground—which is nothing other than an expression of the sense of touch—ceases, and the person feels as if the ground were being pulled out from under them, and they were standing on nothing. But they cannot go down, nor can they go up at first. And so it is with all impressions. In short, everything that the physical body conveys to us—and everything a person experiences in normal life between waking and falling asleep is conveyed through the physical body—all of that ceases. Precisely that state sets in from which a person is spared in ordinary life—the state that would occur if, while sleeping, someone were to suddenly become conscious without waking back into the physical body. You cannot say that in a dream a person has already attained a similar state in ordinary physical existence. No, the dream is, in a certain sense, an extra-physical experience that simultaneously dampens the intensity of the experience to such an extent that the person does not become aware that they are outside of all physical experience.

[ 19 ] This intensity of consciousness — “You stand outside all physical experience” — is in fact only brought about through initiation. That is to say, during the ascent into the higher worlds, there comes a moment when one stands face to face with one’s physical body—the hands of which one can move in waking life, the feet of which one can walk with, the knees of which one can bend, the eyelids of which one can move up and down, and so on— while one now perceives the entire physical body as if it were frozen, as if it were impossible to move the eyelids, use the hands, move the legs, and so on. Furthermore, the moment arrives when one knows: eyes are present in this physical body, but now they do not serve to see anything. On the one hand, all things become transparent, and on the other hand, the possibility of approaching these things at all by the ordinary means one had until now ceases completely.

[ 20 ] Try to grasp what is contradictory in the ordinary sense of the word. When one prepares oneself to reach this point, one arrives at a state where all things become, so to speak, transparent, where one sees behind all things. But the moment it begins—for example, when the blue vault of the sky becomes transparent—the eye ceases entirely to have the ability to see the blue vault of the sky. That is to say, the first moment in the mystery experience consists in reaching the point where one overcomes sensory perception and also thinking; but what one is meant to achieve through this is simultaneously taken away from one at that very moment. One has thus worked one’s way through to the moment when something entirely new is given to one; one reaches precisely the moment in which this new thing is to meet one—but at that very moment it is also taken away! One now knows nothing other than: You have worked your way through so that you stand before the higher worlds, and now the moment has also come when they are taken from you.

[ 21 ] Imagine this experience, and you will have the moment that is described in the mystery traditions of all ages as “approaching the gates of death.” For one now knows what it means: the world is taken from one—that is, the world of all impressions. And one knows that in this moment one is nothing but these impressions, for fundamentally there is nothing else but these experiences, these inner impressions. At the moment when a person falls asleep—when all impressions are taken from them—they also enter a state of unconsciousness in ordinary life; that is to say, they live within their impressions. Now he overcomes these impressions of ordinary life; he knows he has come so far that he can see through all things; but a new world is taken from him at that moment. We will have to speak more precisely about this point; for now, we only wish to make it even clearer what is meant by the terms indicated.

[ 22 ] There is no other way to escape the inevitable standstill, the inevitable inability to move forward, than to develop one’s inner self—before reaching that moment—to the point where one can take with oneself the only thing that can possibly be carried through that point to which one has arrived. One must reach the point where the external world effectively denies one all power, and must have developed oneself internally to such an extent that, at that moment, through training one’s self-confidence, through training one’s self-assurance and presence of mind and other inner virtues— “virtues” here meaning competence—one possesses inner strength, inner energy, so that at the moment when the world is taken from you, you have a surplus of inner energy at your disposal. But this necessitates, at that very moment, a very significant experience, an extraordinarily significant experience.

[ 23 ] Do you think that one reaches a limit—the point one has worked one’s way toward—where the world becomes transparent? Then it is taken away from you. Now you have saved nothing; you can have saved nothing other than a certain inner strength by having trained self-confidence, presence of mind, fearlessness, and similar inner qualities. Through this, you arrive at the significant experience—it is simply an experience that imposes itself immediately: You are alone in the world! You are, after all, quite alone in the world! — And this experience, which I can describe only with the words: You are, after all, the whole world! — this now grows ever larger and larger. It becomes ever stronger and stronger, ever more comprehensive and comprehensive. And this is the peculiar thing: that from this one experience a whole new world can arise in the soul, and indeed must arise in the initiate. One feels: One has reached a limit where one stood facing nothingness, but one has brought a certain strength with oneself. It may be quite small at first, but it grows ever larger and larger, spreading out in all directions. One begins to enter into the whole world, to permeate the whole world, and the further one penetrates the world with one’s own being, the more it appears to one as something ever-changing. One extends the strength one has brought with oneself in one direction or another: depending on which way one extends it, one will always experience something different. But at first, what is experienced there therefore perceived by the human being as horrific, because two things are entirely missing from the experience one can now have—two things whose absence, at a certain stage of cognition, is probably not felt as horrific before one consciously experiences it, because they are always present in the ordinary experience of the physical plane, and because one actually only gets a mental image of them when they are no longer there.

[ 24 ] The one thing that ceases is any sense of materiality, of physical materiality. All material existence has vanished into an indeterminate nothingness; it is not there. The sensation of encountering something hard, or even something as soft as water or as air is—in short, the sensation of being surrounded by matter—ceases; it is not there. One is concerned only with the properties of things, but not with things themselves. Of the heavy, physical, dense bodies, only the density remains, but not the substantiality; of the liquid bodies, only “being liquid” remains, but not the substantiality—the water or the liquid; of the air, only the tendency to expand in all directions remains, but not the substantiality. One grows into the properties of objects, but one has the feeling that one is growing only into the properties, that the objects are slipping away, that all materiality ceases. That is the one thing that ceases.

[ 25 ] The other thing that ceases at the level of experience now being discussed is everything connected with what is called sensory perception in ordinary physical life. This is already evident from the discussion so far. Nothing makes an impression on one; rather, one is everything oneself. The only impression that still exists is, at most, that of “time”: Now you are “not yet” something, and “after some time” you are. — But the idea that there are objects outside of oneself, located elsewhere and making an impression on one, does not exist. One is either something oneself, or there is nothing at all. Everything that comes one’s way, one becomes oneself; one is absorbed in it, becomes one with it, and in the end becomes as vast as the world available to one, becomes one with it.

[ 26 ] I am describing what an experience is. It is what has usually been called, in the places of the Mysteries, the “experience of the elemental world.” One has then indeed gone beyond mere “contact with death,” but one is, so to speak, in undifferentiated unity with the whole world that stands at one’s disposal.

[ 27 ] Now, two things are possible. Either the preparation has been good, or it has not been good. If it has been good, then the initiate, having poured himself out over the world to a certain degree, must still have strength left. If this is the case—you see, today I am describing things that have often been described from a somewhat different perspective, but we need precisely this other perspective right now—that certain energies, which he has previously developed strongly enough, are still there, then he now has the following experience.

[ 28 ] Whereas in the ordinary world a person has an object before them, looks at it, and the object makes an impression on their eyes, so that they then know something about the object, this no longer occurs from the point of initiation that has just been discussed. For one is not dealing with a repetition of the ordinary world—where things confront one as they do in the physical world, which one simply did not see before—but rather, from a certain point onward, one must still have forces at one’s disposal that one can, moreover, pour out from within oneself. So, after one has expended enough forces to become one with the world, one must now still have forces left over to spin forces out of oneself, just as the spider spins its web out of itself. You see that the entire process of the mystery tradition shows how much depends on developing strong inner energies of the soul life; for one must have a great store of reserves so that all this can take place.

[ 29 ] Then the following can occur: Of course, one does not have physical eyes, for these belong to the physical body, which one has long since transcended. But because one has poured something out of oneself and can still pour it out—just as the spider spins its web from within itself—something like organs takes shape, and one can observe: With what one now spins out of oneself, something entirely new emerges. Things then present themselves before one in a manner that can be compared, for example, not to having the clock here and the eyes there, but rather as if the eye were sending forth a ray from itself that could form itself into a clock, so that the clock stands there through the activity of the eye. This is not a matter of constructing or creating a subjective world, but rather of spinning, as it were, soul substance out of ourselves. And the higher worlds into which we live must take this detour so that we can face them and recognize them. They must first make their way through our own soul substance, which we have made available to them. In the physical world, things present themselves to us without our intervention. Nothing presents itself to us in the higher worlds unless we first make our own soul substance available to it. That is why it is so difficult to distinguish between the subjective and the objective in this regard. For what we spin out of our soul substance must be entirely subjective; but what merely uses what has been spun out to come into perception must be entirely objective.

[ 30 ] I have mentioned all these things because they can give you a certain sense—the sense that all training in the Mysteries consisted primarily in an elevation of the soul’s energies. That was what mattered: making the soul strong, vigorous, and energetic. From the very beginning, the initiate had to do without the expectation that the objects and beings of the higher worlds would be handed to him on a silver platter. He first had to develop himself to reach every aspect of the higher worlds. Nothing without effort, absolutely nothing without effort! This is true with regard to what is to be achieved individually in the higher worlds, and it is true with regard to what is to be achieved in the sequence of human development in relation to the higher worlds.

[ 31 ] Let us suppose that some being, who is to work in the course of human development through his spiritual power—for example, the individuality of Moses—is to be incorporated into the course of human development. It would be childish to have a mental image of all that needed to happen being that human development would continue, and that Heaven would send Moses at some point in this development: Now Moses is here, people know that it is Moses, and need only carry out what was carried out when Moses came. If Moses had been sent somewhere in this way, it would have had no other consequence than that those around Moses would simply not have known that it was “Moses.” It did not matter that this or that external personality stood there, but that a number of people could judge what spirituality lived in the person in question. And there would have been no need to tell these people, “This is Moses, or so-and-so,” but it would have been necessary only to prepare their souls in the appropriate way: then the souls, without being told that so-and-so is Moses, would have known: “This is the spiritual being in question, who is to be regarded in such and such a way!”

[ 32 ] So this is what we assume: that the journey into the higher worlds is connected with an energization, with a strengthening of the inner soul forces, and that nothing, so to speak, can be given from the outside alone, but that everything can only be attained through the elevation of the human inner life; for only in this way can the threshold be crossed into those worlds that the human being also passes through between death and a new birth. — That is what I wanted to present first today as an introduction. Tomorrow we will continue by first describing what the worlds are like between death and a new birth, and to what extent it has become necessary and important through the nature of the mysteries to impart to the human being, already during the time of his physical life, something of the knowledge of these higher worlds.