The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] When one delves into the occult documents of various times and peoples—that is, into the truly occult documents—one thing, among others, strikes one time and again. This is something I was already able to point out in my discussion of the Gospel of John, and which I was able to point out later in my discussion of the Gospel of Mark. It is the fact that, as one delves deeper into these occult documents, it becomes increasingly clear that these occult documents are actually composed in a marvelous, artistic manner. I could demonstrate—and you can read about this in the lecture series I once gave in Kassel, which has also been published, on “The Gospel of John in Relation to the Three Other Gospels, Especially the Gospel of Luke”— I could show how this Gospel of John, when one delves into its depths, represents a marvelous composition, a marvelous, artistically dramatic intensification of what is depicted, first rising to a certain point, then again from that point onward like a renewal of dramatic power all the way to the end. The most wondrous intensification of this inner, artistically dramatic composition, which comes to light in the Gospel of John through the fact that the supersensible is depicted from sign to sign in the so-called miraculous deeds or so-called signs, and a continuous intensification takes place from sign to sign up to that sign which confronts us in the initiation of Lazarus. The way this confronts us allows us to see that at the heart of these occult documents, a wondrous artistic composition of beauty is always to be found everywhere. I was also able to demonstrate the same for the structure and composition of the Gospel of Mark. When such documents are then viewed in terms of their artistic composition and their dramatic power, one may well come to the conclusion that these great, occult documents cannot be anything other than, insofar as they are true, at the same time artistically beautiful in the deepest sense. For now, let us merely point to this circumstance as a fact. We may return to this remark again in the course of these lectures.

[ 2 ] The remarkable thing is that in the Bhagavad Gita, too, we encounter the same phenomenon: a wondrous intensification, one might say, a hidden artistic beauty, such that even if nothing else were to affect the soul immersed in this Bhagavad Gita, this wondrous, artistic composition would have to have an effect. Let us first draw attention to some of the main points—and today I will limit myself to the first four cantos—let us draw attention to these main points because they concern both the artistic composition of the Bhagavad Gita and profound inner occult truths.

[ 3 ] First, Arjuna comes before us. Faced with the bloodshed he is about to enter into, he grows weak. He sees his kinsmen, all that is to unfold around him as a fratricidal struggle. He recoils; he does not want to fight against his own kinsmen. And while he is in this state of mind—while fear, dread, shuddering, indeed horror, seizes him at the thought of what is to come—his charioteer reveals himself to be the instrument through which Krishna, let us say for now the God, speaks to him. Already in this first fact, a moment of artistic tension is suggested, but also a profound, occult moment of truth.

[ 4 ] Anyone who finds their way into the spiritual worlds in any way—even if it is only a few steps along the path, or even if what they experience is merely a glimpse of the path—will realize the profound significance of that very moment. We do not usually enter the spiritual worlds without passing through a profound upheaval of our soul. We must generally experience something—something that shakes the very core of our soul, flooding it with feeling and sensation. Feelings and sensations that are otherwise spread out over many moments, over long stretches of life, and therefore have only a faint, lingering effect on the soul, but upon entering the occult worlds, they converge and rouse and overwhelm the soul in a single moment, so that one experiences something so shattering that it can be compared to fear, anxiety, consternation, recoiling from something, perhaps even horror. This, so to speak, is part of the starting point of occult development, of entering the spiritual worlds. That is why such great care must be taken with the advice that must be given to those who wish to enter the spiritual worlds through training. For whoever wishes to enter the spiritual worlds through training must be prepared in such a way that they experience the shock just described—as a soul event, as a necessary experience—in such a way that it does not spill over into their physical being, into their health, insofar as the physical is included, so that the physical is not shaken as well. That is the essential point: that we do not experience upheavals in relation to our outer, physical life; that we learn to endure upheavals of the soul with outward equanimity and composure. But then the ordinary powers of the soul that we need in everyday life—our ordinary intellect, indeed even the powers of imagination necessary for daily life, the powers of feeling, the powers of the will in everyday life—must not be thrown out of balance either. The soul-shaking experience that can be the starting point for the occult life must take place in much deeper layers, so that the human being goes through outer life as he always has, without anything being noticeable about him in the outer physical world, while inwardly he lives through whole worlds of soul-shaking experiences. This is what it means to be ready for occult development: to be able to experience such inner upheavals without losing one’s outward composure and serenity.

[ 5 ] To this end, it is necessary that, during the period in which he strives to mature for occult development, a person above all broadens his sphere of interests; that he turns away from ordinary, everyday life with its narrow concerns—from that which one is otherwise attached to from morning till night—and that he arrives at interests that move within the broad horizon of the world. For whoever cannot experience the shattering impact of doubt regarding all truth, all insight, and all knowledge—and cannot experience this shattering impact with the same intensity with which people otherwise feel the concerns of everyday life— who cannot empathize with the fate of all humanity and does not bring to this fate of all humanity the same kind of interest that is brought in everyday life to the fate that directly affects oneself, that perhaps still affects the closest tribal, family, and national connections—such a person is, in essence, not yet fully suited for occult development. That is why modern Spiritual Science, when pursued with seriousness and dignity, is the proper preparation in our time for a true occult development. May those people who cannot take an interest in what the anthroposophist’s gaze follows across worlds, across planetary destinies, across human races and human epochs—may those people, with the petty material interests of the present day, even mock it: for those who wish to prepare themselves in a dignified manner for occult development, this is the preparation—this lifting of the gaze to those highest points where the interests of humanity, of the Earth, of the entire planetary system grow into their own interests. For where interests are gradually sharpened and broadened through the study of Spiritual Science—which then leads to an understanding of occult truths, even without occult training—there lies the proper preparation for an occult path. Certainly, in our time there are many people—those who stand in the ranks of the intellectuals are often not among them, while those who seemingly lead a simple life in a simple place are often precisely those who are—certainly, there are many people today, living in humble circumstances, who, as if by a natural instinct, have these interests for the whole of humanity: and because this is so, that is why anthroposophy is so timely.

[ 6 ] First, one must learn what must stand at the starting point of occult experience as a tremendous shock to the soul. With remarkable accuracy, such a moment is now placed at the starting point of Arjuna’s experience; only that he does not undergo a process of training, but is thrust into it by his fate. He is placed in the battle without being able to recognize the necessity, purpose, or goal of this battle. He sees only that blood relatives wish to fight against blood relatives, and such a soul—who, like Arjuna, says to himself: “Brother fights against brother”—can be shaken to the core. Is it not then clear that all tribal customs are faltering, that the tribe itself must then wither away, that it must be destroyed, that the morality of the tribe is sinking? Then the laws must falter—the laws that, according to eternal destiny, place people into castes; then the laws of caste division must falter; then man falters, the tribe falters, then the law falters, then the whole world falters, the very meaning of humanity. — That is his feeling; it is as if the ground were about to give way beneath his feet, as if an abyss were about to open up for all his feelings. A man like Arjuna has taken to heart with his feelings what people no longer know today, but which in ancient times was an age-old tradition and teaching: that that which is passed down from generation to generation, from one generation to the next in humanity, is bound to the nature of the woman, whereas the individual personality—that which draws the individual human being out of the context of blood and generation as an individuality—is bound to the nature of the man. That which places the human being more firmly within the line of generations, that which is inherited as a common nature, as the species nature of humanity, is the part that the woman bequeaths to her descendants. That which shapes human beings into something special and individual, that which sets them apart from the line of generations—that is the part that the man imparts. Must not evil enter into the laws of woman’s nature, Arjuna asks himself, when blood must fight against blood?

[ 7 ] And further: Arjuna has come to feel something else, a different sentiment, one that is connected to everything he perceives as the salvation of humanity’s entire development; it is the feeling: The ancestors, the fathers, are venerable, and their souls watch over the generations that follow, and it is a lofty, sacred duty to make offerings to the Manes, the sacred souls of the ancestors, to kindle sacrificial fires. — But what must Arjuna see? Instead of altars standing before him on which the sacrificial fires burn for the ancestors, those who should be kindling the sacrificial fires for the common ancestors are attacking one another. Fighting, they attack one another.

[ 8 ] If one wishes to understand a soul, one must immerse oneself in that soul’s thoughts; one must, even more so, put oneself in that soul’s shoes. For the soul is intimately connected to its feelings, intimately connected to what constitutes its life. And now consider the contrast, the infinite contrast between what Arjuna’s feelings should be and what was about to unfold all around him as a bloody fratricidal battle. That is to say, fate is shaking Arjuna’s soul. An event of the deepest upheaval takes place, which for this soul is as if the ground were being pulled out from under its feet and it were forced to look down into the most terrifying abyss. Such a shock is a source of strength for the soul; it awakens the soul’s deepest powers; such a shock enables the soul to perceive what is otherwise veiled: the occult reality. This is precisely the significant moment of tension in the Bhagavad Gita: that we are not merely presented with a lesson in the occult in an abstract, academic, and, one might say, pedantic manner, but that it is portrayed to us in the most artistic way how what is now emerging must develop out of Arjuna’s fate.

[ 9 ] And now, since it is justified that the deeper occult powers within Arjuna’s soul may emerge—that these powers may be perceived inwardly—what follows is something that is now self-evident to anyone who can see: his charioteer becomes the instrument through which the god Krishna speaks to him. And now we observe in the first four cantos three stages, three levels, each one higher than the previous, each one bringing something new. Right in the first four cantos there is a wonderful artistic and dramatic intensification, besides the fact that this intensification corresponds to a deep occult truth. What is the first? The first is a teaching which, as it is presented, might even seem trivial to some Westerners. That must be readily admitted. I note in parentheses that by “Western”—and I say this specifically out of consideration for my dear friends here—I mean everything west of the Urals, the Volga, even the Caspian Sea, and Asia Minor, that is, all of Europe, of course. The Eastern world lies essentially over in Asia. Of course, America belongs to the Western world.

[ 10 ] So, to begin with, there is a strange—and, one might say, trivial—teaching, especially for some philosophical minds. What does Krishna say to Arjuna at the outset, as a word of encouragement for battle? Look across at those who are to be killed by you, look at those who are to be killed from your ranks, look at those who are to be killed and at those who are to remain alive, and consider this one thing: whatever dies or remains alive among the enemies and among you is merely the outer physical body. The spirit is eternal. And when your men kill those who are over there in the other ranks, they are killing only the outer body; they are not killing the spirit, which is eternal. And those who are killed by you are killed only in body, but the spirit passes from transformation to transformation, from incarnation to incarnation; it is eternal. You do not touch the eternal, deepest essence of man at all in this battle. Rise, Arjuna, to the vantage point of the spirit, and you will be able to look upon that which cannot be killed, that which remains alive. You may sacrifice yourself to your duty; you need not tremble, you need not be desolate, for you do not kill the essential when you kill the enemies.

[ 11 ] At first glance, this is in a certain sense a triviality, but it is a triviality of a very special kind. In many respects, Westerners have a rather limited way of thinking, a rather limited consciousness. He does not even consider that everything is in a state of development. To speak of what I have just stated as a teaching of Krishna—to speak of that as trivial—is roughly equivalent to someone saying: “Yes, Pythagoras is revered as such a great mind, but every schoolboy and schoolgirl knows his theorem.” — That would be a very foolish judgment, if one were to conclude from the fact that every schoolboy knows the Pythagorean theorem that Pythagoras was not a great man precisely because he discovered the Pythagorean theorem. There one merely notices the folly; but one no longer notices it if one does not realize that what all Western philosophers today can parrot as Krishna’s wisdom—about the eternity of the spirit, about the immortality of the spirit—was, at the time Krishna proclaimed it, a profound wisdom.

[ 12 ] Souls like Arjuna did indeed feel that blood relatives should not fight one another, and they did indeed still sense the shared blood in the majority of people; but something entirely new, something that resounded in his soul as something completely new and epoch-making, was the sentence expressed in abstract terms, in intellectual language: The spirit is eternal—the spirit considered as that which is usually thought of abstractly at the center of the human being—the spirit is eternal and passes through transformations, proceeding from incarnation to incarnation. In concrete terms, everyone in Arjuna’s circle believed in reincarnation. In the general, abstract sense, as Krishna taught it, it was, especially given Arjuna’s situation, something entirely new.

[ 13 ] That is one reason why what has just been said must, in a very special sense, be called a trivial truth. But it also applies in another sense. What we today, even when engaging in popular science, regard as something entirely natural to human beings—our thinking, our abstract thinking—was by no means always something self-evident and natural to human beings. It is helpful, when characterizing such a thing, to turn immediately to the most extreme cases. It will seem strange to all of you if I say the following: For all of you, it is a natural fact, for example, to speak of a fish. Among primitive peoples, this is by no means a natural fact. Primitive peoples are certainly familiar with trout, salmon, stockfish, and herring, but they do not know “fish.” They do not even have the word “fish,” because their thinking does not extend to such abstractions, to such generalities. They know birch trees, cherry trees, orange trees, individual trees, but they do not know “tree.” What is entirely natural to us—thinking in general terms—is still not at all natural among primitive peoples today.

[ 14 ] When one considers this fact, one must realize that even what we today call “thinking in general terms”—that is, this particular form of thinking—only emerged in humanity in the course of its development. Indeed, for anyone who reflects a little on why logic first arose in ancient Greece, it should come as no surprise when it is stated, based on occult knowledge, that logical thinking has actually existed only since the time that has elapsed since the original composition of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna points out to Arjuna that logical thinking, thinking in abstractions, is, so to speak, something new that is only now to enter humanity. But this way of thinking that human beings have developed—this way of thinking—is taken today as something entirely natural, yet people hold the most distorted, unnatural views about it. And Western philosophers in particular have the most distorted views of this thinking, for they usually regard it as a mere photograph of external sensory reality; they believe that concepts and ideas arise within the human being, that this entire inner thinking arises in the human being from the physical external world. Entire libraries of philosophical works have been written in Western literature to prove that this thinking is actually nothing other than something that has arisen through stimulation from the physical external world. We are the first to live in an age where this thinking can be properly appreciated.

[ 15 ] Here I would like to address a point that is of the utmost importance, especially for those who wish to undergo an occult development of their own soul. I truly want to do everything I can to bring clarity to precisely what I am about to say. Certainly, medieval alchemists said—and I cannot explain today exactly what they meant by this—they said that one could make gold from all metals, as much gold as one wishes, but one must first absolutely have a tiny amount of gold. Without that, one cannot make gold. But if one has the tiniest amount of gold, one can make any amount of gold. — That is precisely how it is; even if not with making gold, so it is with clairvoyance. No one could actually attain true clairvoyance unless they first had a tiny bit of clairvoyance in their soul. If it were true—as is commonly believed—that people, as they are, are not clairvoyant, then they could never become clairvoyant at all. For just as the alchemist believes that one must have some gold in order to conjure up large quantities of gold, so one must already possess some degree of clairvoyance in order to develop this ability further and further into the infinite.

[ 16 ] Now you might pose the alternative and ask: So do you believe that we are all already clairvoyant, even if only to a tiny degree, or that those among us who are not clairvoyant will never be able to become so? — You see, the point is to understand that the first part of the alternative is correct: There really is no one among you who does not—even if they are not aware of it—possess this starting point. You all have it. None of you are in need, because you all possess a certain degree of clairvoyance. And what is this degree? It is that which is usually not even recognized as clairvoyance.

[ 17 ] Please forgive a somewhat crude comparison: If a pearl lies on the path and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not particularly value the pearl. Most modern people are like such chickens. They do not value the pearl lying there in plain sight at all; they value something entirely different—namely, their own mental images. No one could think abstractly or have real thoughts and ideas if they were not clairvoyant, for the pearl of clairvoyance is present in ordinary thoughts and images from the very beginning. These thoughts and ideas arise through exactly the same process of the soul through which the highest powers arise. And it is immensely important that one first learns to understand that the beginning of clairvoyance is actually something quite ordinary: one need only grasp the supersensible nature of concepts and ideas. One must be clear that concepts and ideas come to us from the supersensible worlds; only then does one see correctly. When I speak to you of spirits of the higher hierarchies—of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones down to the Archangels and Angeloi—these are beings who must speak to the human soul from spiritual, higher worlds. It is from precisely these worlds that ideas and concepts come to the soul; they enter the soul directly from higher worlds and not from the sensory world.

[ 18 ] It was regarded as a great statement by a great Enlightenment thinker, who said in the 18th century: “Man, have the courage to use your own reason.” — Today, a greater call must resound in our souls, namely: Man, have the courage to address your concepts and ideas as the beginnings of your clairvoyance. — What I have just said, I said many years ago, and I said it in full public view, namely in my books *Truth and Science* and *The Philosophy of Freedom*, where I showed that human ideas come from supersensible, spiritual knowledge. People did not understand it back then; which is no wonder, for those who should have understood it belonged, well, to the chickens. But we must be clear that at the moment when Krishna stands before Arjuna, he gives him, so to speak, for the first time in the entire development of humanity, the starting point for the knowledge of the higher worlds through the penetration of abstract judgment. The spirit can be seen right on the surface of the transformations within the outer sensory world. Bodies may die, but the spirit, the abstract, the essential, is eternal. The spiritual can be seen right on the surface of phenomena. This is what Krishna wants to make clear to Arjuna as the beginning of a new clairvoyance for humanity.

[ 19 ] For people today, one thing is essential if they wish to arrive at a truth experienced from within. If they truly wish to experience truth inwardly, then they must have gone through the feeling of the transience of all external transformations; they must have experienced the mood of infinite sorrow, infinite tragedy, and the exultation of bliss all at once; they must have experienced the breath of transience that emanates from things. They must have been able to capture their interest in this breath of becoming, of emergence, and of the transience of the sensory world. Then, having been able to feel the highest pain and the highest bliss in the external world, a person must have been truly alone at some point, alone only with their concepts and ideas; then they must have felt: Yes, in these concepts and ideas, you do grasp the mystery of the world, the course of world events by a thread—the same expression I once used in my *Philosophy of Freedom*. — But one must experience this, not merely grasp it intellectually, and if one wishes to experience it, one experiences it in the most complete solitude.

[ 20 ] And then there is a secondary feeling. On the one hand, one experiences the grandeur of the world of ideas, which stretches across the universe; on the other hand, one experiences with the deepest bitterness that one must separate oneself from space and time if one wishes to be with one’s concepts and ideas. Solitude! One experiences the icy cold. And further, it is revealed to one that the world of ideas has now contracted into a single point, as if into a single point of this loneliness. One experiences: Now you are alone with it. — One must be able to experience this. One then experiences the bewilderment of this world of ideas, an experience that deeply stirs the soul. Then one experiences saying to oneself: Perhaps you are all of this yourself after all; perhaps the only truth in these laws is that they live in the point of your own solitude. — Then one experiences, magnified to infinity, all doubts about existence.

[ 21 ] Only when one has had this experience in one’s world of ideas, when all doubt about existence has weighed painfully and bitterly upon the soul, is one truly ready to understand that it is not the infinite spaces and infinite times of the physical world that have given us these ideas. Only now, after the bitter doubt, does one open oneself to the realms of the spiritual and know that the doubt was justified, and how it was justified. For it had to be justified, because one believed that the ideas had come into the soul from time and space. But what does one feel now? How does one perceive the world of ideas, having experienced it from the spiritual worlds? Now, for the first time, one feels inspired; now one begins—whereas before one perceived the infinite wasteland spreading around oneself like an abyss—to feel as if standing on a rock rising from the abyss, and one feels in such a way that one knows: Now you are in connection with the spiritual worlds; these, and not the sensory world, have gifted you with the world of ideas. — This is the next stage for the evolving soul. It is the stage where, for human beings, what has already become a trivial truth today begins to be taken quite seriously. To carry this feeling in one’s heart is the preparation for perceiving, in the true sense, what is now—after the tremendous, great upheaval of Arjuna’s soul—given to Arjuna by Krishna as the first truth: the truth of the eternal Spirit that lives within transformations. Concepts and ideas speak to the abstract intellect; Krishna speaks to Arjuna’s heart, and what may be quite trivial to the intellect is something infinitely deep and sublime for the heart.

[ 22 ] We see how the first stage immediately emerges as something that necessarily arises from the profound upheaval in life that we observe at the outset of the Bhagavad Gita. And now the next stage. It is very easy to speak of what is often referred to as dogma in relation to the occult—as something that is accepted on faith and proclaimed like a gospel. To explain myself, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it would be infinitely cheap if someone were to come forward and say: “Someone has published a ‘secret science’ and speaks in it of a Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolution.” You can’t verify that; you can only accept it as dogma. — I would understand if something like that were said, for such a thing is understandable given the superficiality of our time; for superficial our time certainly is. Yes, under certain conditions it is even true, but only on the condition that you tear out of the book all the pages that precede the chapter on the Saturn evolution, for example. At that moment, this chapter becomes dogma if someone were to begin the book with this chapter. If the book were to begin directly with the Saturn evolution, the writer would be a dogmatist. But if he presupposes the other chapters, he is by no means a dogmatist, for he shows the path this soul must traverse to arrive at such views. That is what matters. What matters is that it is shown how every single soul, when it grasps itself in the depths, must arrive at such insights. Through this, all dogmatism ceases.

[ 23 ] It may therefore seem natural that Krishna, in his dealings with Arjuna—having sought to guide him into the occult world and having clarified the world of ideas for him—now shows him the next stage, demonstrating how every soul, if it finds the right starting point, can enter the occult worlds. So what must Krishna do? To do this, Krishna must reject all dogmatism. And he radically rejects all dogmatism. We immediately encounter a harsh word at this next stage. That which had been sacred to the highest human beings of those times for centuries—the content of the Vedas—is radically rejected: Do not adhere to the Vedas, do not adhere to the Vedic word, adhere to yoga. — That is to say, adhere to the innermost depths of your own soul. Let us take a close look at what is being said here.

[ 24 ] According to Krishna, the Vedas do not contain falsehood, but Krishna does not want Arjuna to accept what is given in the Vedas dogmatically, as the followers of the Vedas do; rather, Krishna wants to guide him so that he starts from the most primordial stage of the human soul’s development. All dogmatic wisdom must be set aside. Then Krishna might speak to himself—we can create a mental image of Krishna speaking to himself—and say: Even if Arjuna is ultimately to arrive at the same conclusions as those found in the Vedas, I must divert him from the Vedas, for he must forge his own path from the origins of his soul. — Krishna rejects the Vedas, regardless of whether they contain truth or falsehood. For Arjuna is to take the path from the origin of the soul; he is to come to know Krishna from within himself, from an inner quality of his own. For Arjuna, what can be presupposed must be presupposed if one can truly enter into the concrete truths of the higher supersensible worlds. So that, after Krishna has drawn Arjuna’s attention to something that is generally human from this period of the proclamation of the Bhagavad Gita onward, after he has guided him to this, he must also lead him to recognize what he is to receive through yoga. For Arjuna must first undergo yoga. This is the ascent to the next stage.

[ 25 ] We see how—as a second stage—the Bhagavad Gita progresses through these first four songs with a significant dramatic intensification toward the most deeply individual. Now Krishna describes the path of yoga to Arjuna—we will discuss this in greater detail tomorrow— he describes this path that Arjuna must follow to ascend to the next stage, from the everyday clairvoyance of concepts and ideas to that which can only be attained through yoga. The concepts and ideas need only be placed in the right light; he must be led to yoga. That is the second stage.

[ 26 ] The third stage: once again a dramatic intensification, once again the articulation of a profound occult truth. What does this third stage consist of?

[ 27 ] Let us suppose that someone actually sets out on the path of yoga. If they do so, then they will come to—we will describe these things in greater detail later—ascend from their ordinary consciousness to a higher level of consciousness, to that level of consciousness which encompasses not merely the “I” that lies between birth and death, but that “I” which passes from incarnation to incarnation. In an expanded self, the soul recognizes itself; into an expanded self, into an expanded consciousness, the soul grows. The soul undergoes a process that is, in essence, also an everyday one, but one that is not fully experienced in everyday life. After all, every evening a person falls asleep. Then the sensory world around them fades away; they become unconscious to this sensory world. It is now a possibility for the soul to let the sensory world disappear, as it does when falling asleep, but to live in higher worlds as in a reality. There the person ascends to a higher level of consciousness. When a person gradually—and we will be speaking of yoga and also of modern exercises—when a person comes to no longer live, feel, and know with their consciousness within themselves, but to live, feel, and know with the whole Earth, then they grow into a higher level of consciousness, as the ordinary sensory things disappear for them as in sleep. For this, however, it is necessary that the human being be able to identify with his planetary soul, with the soul of the Earth. We shall see that he can do this. We know that the human being not only falls asleep and wakes up, but also experiences other rhythms of the Earth: winter, summer. When a person follows the path of yoga or performs modern occult exercises, they can rise above ordinary consciousness, which experiences the cycles of waking and sleeping, winter and summer; they can rise by learning to view themselves from the outside. Then the person becomes aware that they can look back at themselves just as they otherwise look at things in the external world. Now they also observe the things, the cycles of outer life. Then they see alternating states. They see how their body, as long as they are outside of themselves, takes on a form that resembles the earth with its vegetation in summer. What material physical science identifies as nerves, the human being then begins to perceive as the sprouting of something plant-like when falling asleep, and when he returns to everyday consciousness, he feels how this plant-like quality shrinks back again and becomes the instrument of thinking, feeling, and willing in the human being’s waking consciousness. They feel their going out and coming back into the body analogous to the alternation of winter and summer on Earth; specifically, they feel something summer-like as they fall asleep and something winter-like as they wake up. It is not the case that the opposite is true, as one might easily think based on external, superficial concepts. But from this moment on, he learns to understand what the Earth Spirit is, that it sleeps in summer and wakes in winter, and not the other way around.

[ 28 ] This is what the human being comes to know; he comes to know the great experience of identifying with the Earth Spirit. From this moment on, he says to himself: I do not live merely in my own skin; I live, just as the cell lives in my organism, so do I live in the organism of the Earth. The Earth sleeps in summer and wakes in winter, just as I sleep and wake with the changing of the day. And just as the cell relates to my consciousness, so do I relate to the consciousness of the Earth.

[ 29 ] The path of yoga, particularly in the modern sense, leads to this expansion of consciousness, leading to the identification of our own being with a more comprehensive being. We then feel so interwoven with the entire Earth. But in doing so, we no longer feel bound as human beings to a specific time and place; rather, we feel our humanity as it has developed from the Earth’s origin to its end. We feel the entire infinite sequence of our developments throughout Earth’s evolution. Thus, yoga progresses further toward feeling at one with that which moves from embodiment to embodiment, from incarnation to incarnation, in Earth’s development. This must be the next, the third stage. This is also what leads to the beautiful, artistic composition of the Bhagavad Gita, that this sublime song, in its inner artistic, crescendoing composition, reflects occult, profound truths: first, instruction in the common, everyday concepts of that time; second, guidance on the path of yoga; third, the description of the marvelous expansion of the horizon across the entire earth, where Krishna develops a mental image before Arjuna: Everything that lives in your soul has lived many times before; you simply do not know it. But I have this awareness within me when I look back on the transformations I have lived through, and I want to lead you up so that you may learn to feel as I feel. — A new dramatic moment! Just as beautiful as it is, on the other hand, deeply occultly true. The development of humanity out of everyday consciousness, from the pearl along the path that must first be recognized, from the world of thoughts and concepts that is everyday in the respective time, up to the overview of what is truly within us and lives from earthly incarnation to earthly incarnation.