The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] We have seen that if a person wishes to enter the region where dreams are woven, they must bring with them from the ordinary world what might be called a heightened sense of self-awareness—a surplus in the “I” beyond what this “I” requires for the physical plane, for the physical world. In our present time, this surplus of self-awareness, this excess from our soul, is developed through what we can experience via exercises such as those mentioned in the book *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds*. Thus, a strengthening and invigoration of the self takes place first. Because the human being feels, so to speak, that he needs this, he is also overcome by something like a kind of fear, a kind of anxiety, a kind of hesitation to develop upward into the higher worlds if he has not yet attained this strength within his inner self.

[ 2 ] I have often emphasized that the human soul has passed through a wide variety of stages in the course of evolution. What such a human soul of the present day can attain today through the exercises mentioned—in terms of elevation and the strengthening of self-awareness—it could not actually achieve in the same way in the time to which we must refer the sublime song, the Bhagavad Gita. Instead, in ancient times, something else was present in the human self, in human consciousness: the first, primeval clairvoyance was still present in the human soul. Clairvoyance is also something that one does not actually need, so to speak, for the ordinary self on the physical plane, if one can be content with whatever the physical plane happens to contain at any given time.

[ 3 ] But those ancient times, those people of the era into which we must place the sublime Gita, still possessed the remnants of ancient clairvoyance. On the one hand, we look back to people who were contemporaries of the Bhagavad Gita’s creation. These people could say to themselves: When I look at the physical environment, I receive impressions through my senses, and these sensory impressions can be combined by the mind, which is bound to the brain. But I also possess another power through which I can acquire knowledge of other worlds through clairvoyance. And these powers testify to me that human beings also belong to other worlds, that I, as a human being, still reach into other worlds beyond the ordinary physical world. — But this is precisely the heightened self-awareness that immediately causes the knowledge to spring forth in the soul that this soul does not belong solely to the physical world. It is, as it were, a pressure within the self that is brought about by those, albeit last, remnants of clairvoyant power. And today, too, human beings can develop such powers of inner pressure within themselves if they perform the appropriate occult exercises in their souls.

[ 4 ] One might object—and you know that in anthroposophical lectures such objections are always anticipated at the appropriate point, objections that the true occultist himself is well aware of—one might object: Yes, how does a person in our time come to want to perform such occult exercises at all? Why are they not satisfied with what the intellect, which is bound to the brain, has to offer? Why do people want to engage in such occult exercises? — Here we touch upon a question that is not merely a question, but a kind of fact for every sensible soul in the present cycle of humanity. If human beings truly could attain nothing in their souls beyond what the senses alone show them, what the intellect—bound to the external physical instrument, the brain—provides, then they would certainly be content with their existence, without developing any desire for higher, supersensory worlds. In such a case, human beings would see how things and events around them behave and unfold; they would see them arise and pass away, but would not ask themselves any questions about arising and passing away, but would be undoubtedly content with it, just as an individual animal can be content with its existence. Human beings are, in fact, quite capable of this in the state in which the materialistically minded person of today would have us think of humanity. With its ordinary consciousness, the animal is capable of perceiving only that which arises and passes away before the senses; the animal is also content with what takes place before the senses. But this is not the case with human beings. But why is this not the case with human beings?

[ 5 ] In this context, I am always speaking of people today. For even in ancient Greece, the human soul was not, in essence, as it is today. When we today truly approach the natural sciences with our whole soul, when we acquire knowledge of the natural sciences; when we approach what is taking place in the historical process, when we acquire external historiology and the science of history—then, along with everything we acquire there, something enters the human soul at the same time, it creeps quite stealthily, along with all that, into the human soul—something for which there is actually no purpose or meaning in external physical life. People have therefore used manifold comparisons for that which creeps in there. I would like to mention one such comparison, because it is often made without people actually really reflecting on its deeper meaning. A very famous medical authority once, in the last third of the 19th century, in order to emphasize more meaningfully, so to speak, the dignity of independent science at the Academy of Sciences, drew attention to a Greek philosopher who was once asked: What is the situation, actually, with philosophical reflection on the meaning and purpose of life? How does this reflection relate to the other activities of people who participate in general life through other work, through useful activity? — To this, the philosopher gave the following answer: Let us consider a fair. People come there to buy and sell. They are all busy. But there are also some others who show up; they want to sell nothing and buy nothing, but they want to observe, just watch, what is going on at the fair. — The philosopher meant to say: The fair is life. There, people are engaged in manifold ways. But the philosophers, who are not occupied with what occupies other people, loiter about, walk around, and merely look at everything in order to get to know it all.

[ 6 ] It has already become second nature to so-called intellectual humanity that philosophers—precisely because they do not obviously participate in the practical activities of life, and precisely because of their self-contained, independent science that is entirely self-sufficient—are to be held in particularly high esteem. But this comparison should, after all, give us some food for thought. Perhaps this might seem philistine, but it is not entirely so if one thinks more deeply. For this comparison could indeed give one quite a lot to think about. It is, after all, quite troubling that philosophers are compared to the loiterers at the fairground of life, who are actually aimless, wandering among people who all have a purpose. That, too, would be a valid line of thought. Judgments are indeed often passed that may well be correct at their starting point. But if they drag on for centuries or, as in this case, even for millennia, then they can become quite incorrect. Therefore, the question may be raised: Are all those upon whom such a general judgment is passed really, at first glance, the loiterers of life?

[ 7 ] It all depends on how one judges life. There are certainly people who truly regard philosophers as useless idlers and believe it would be wiser to pursue some useful trade. From their point of view, these people may even be quite right. But the point is that when one views life through the senses and with the intellect bound to the brain, things then sneak into the human soul as if by stealth, things that quite obviously have no connection whatsoever with the external world that surrounds us sensually. One can see this very clearly when reading books that, on a purely materialistic basis, seek to construct a satisfying worldview intended to solve the world’s mysteries. Then it usually turns out that questions only arise at the very end of these books. These books generally raise the world’s mysteries only at their conclusion. A thought creeps in as we take in what these books deal with, as we take in the external world—a thought that compels us to say: Either human beings exist for worlds other than just the physical world, or this physical world deceives us, constantly eludes us, by presenting us with riddles we cannot answer. A whole part of our inner life is meaningless if life were truly to end with death, if human beings had no share in, no connection with, the higher world. And the meaninglessness of what he has—not the longing for something he does not have—that is what drives man to investigate how it is that something enters the soul that is not at all a citizen of our sensory world. And this drives them to develop something—as can happen through occult practices—that is quite clearly unrelated to the external world. We would not say that human beings have a longing for immortality within them, and that is why they form the concept of immortality, why they invent it, but rather: human beings, in the way they live, have taken something from the external world into their soul that would be entirely meaningless, purposeless, and insubstantial if existence were confined only to the period between birth and death. Human beings must ask about meaning and purpose, indeed about the very essence of something they possess, and not of something they do not possess.

[ 8 ] Thus, the modern man is in fact no longer quite in a position—and for this reason he cannot invoke the Greek philosophers in the present day— he is no longer quite in the position of a mere loiterer, a mere idler, but he is in a different position: in the position that he can be compared to a personality who merely gives words to what actually lives in everyone. In ancient Greece, the comparison of the philosopher was indeed fitting. Today it no longer fits; today the situation is different. If we compare life again to a fair, we can also say today: Here come buyers and sellers. When they close up the fair and tally up whether everything is in order, then they find—as wonderful as that sounds, but every comparison is a bit flawed, and this one is even better in a certain sense the more flawed it is—then they find something that is there, but which could neither have been bought nor sold, and whose origin cannot be fathomed. It is not quite like that at a fair, but it is like that at the fair of life. As we live through life, we continually find things that spring forth from life, for which, however, there is no explanation in the sensory world. This is the deeper reason why there are people in the world today who may despair of existence, who may have vague longings: because something is at work in the soul of modern humanity that has no place in the physical world, yet raises questions about other worlds.

[ 9 ] But what we must acquire in our souls today to prevent despair and hopelessness from arising in the face of life—in the face of something that would otherwise be meaningless—a person like Arjuna possessed simply because his soul still stood out from a time when ancient, primitive human clairvoyance still existed. But Arjuna also finds himself at a transitional point—and this is the essential, the significant aspect if the Bhagavad Gita is to be understood—Arjuna finds himself at that stage of historical development where only remnants, the last echoes of that ancient clairvoyance, remained. Around the time the Bhagavad Gita was written, humanity was entering a phase of evolution in which this ancient clairvoyance was gradually being lost. And this is the very deepest underlying theme of the Bhagavad Gita, the breath that is poured over the Bhagavad Gita, so that the tones resound from it that come from that turning point in history when humanity’s ancient clairvoyance was in the process of dying out, where, in contrast to the twilight of the ancient clairvoyance, that night was to begin in which the human power could first be born that the ancient human soul did not yet possess and that the ordinary human soul possesses in our time.

[ 10 ] Thus, Arjuna is a soul of whom one can say: Traces of ancient clairvoyance still linger in his soul, but always in such a way that it seems to be fading away within him, no longer quite willing to remain there, so that it requires a shattering event, such as the one I have described, to be reawakened, to be brought forth once more. What, then, is it that, at the very moment Arjuna stands before Krishna with clairvoyance, what is it that evokes the clairvoyant power from Arjuna’s soul? It is the shattering event I have described. And it brings forth that clairvoyant power which in ancient times was generally characteristic of human beings. What, then, can Arjuna now see and perceive through the fact that the ancient clairvoyant power—which was otherwise already tending toward extinction in his soul—is evoked within him? Strictly and purely historically speaking, Arjuna is to confront the spiritual being whom we must address as Krishna in the sense of the Bhagavad Gita.

[ 11 ] Now, in order to gain a full understanding of what is actually taking place in Arjuna’s soul, it must be pointed out that the elevation of the human soul into the region from which dreams are otherwise woven no longer fully leads, in our time, to a complete understanding of Krishna or the essence of Krishna. Even if we truly develop all the powers that consciously lead us into the region we characterized in the previous lecture as the region of dream consciousness, we cannot, so to speak, make the full discovery of what Krishna is today.

[ 12 ] Let us recall once again what I described yesterday. Let us refer to ordinary, everyday consciousness as this lower region. Above this lies a region that remains unconscious to everyday life, which becomes conscious, as it were, in an illusory form, as Maya, as dream consciousness. But if, as described in the previous lecture, we so to speak extract the dreams and attempt to eradicate Maya, then impressions from another world enter this region of human consciousness.

[ 13 ] In fact, however, everything from the physical environment—which actually belongs, as a kind of surplus in the soul, to other, inner, supersensory worlds—now intermingles with all the experiences a person has; a person can only gain knowledge of these worlds if they develop this very consciousness. There, the human being indeed has an experience that only someone with a materialistic mindset—and who, as such, has no idea what these experiences are actually like—will describe as a reminiscence of daily life. For the world does indeed look somewhat different than it appears when one is surrounded only by the physical plane. One discovers that one sees something that one actually never sees in the ordinary world. Even though one often thinks one sees something—people believe they see light—in truth, on the physical plane, one does not see light, but rather colors, shades of color, lighter and darker colors; one sees only the effect of light, but light itself sweeps invisibly through space. If a person merely looks into the space through which the light passes, they do not see the light. We can easily convince ourselves of this through the very crude experience that when we let light in through a window, we see a sort of beam of light in the room. But then there must be dust in the air. We see the glare, the reflection of the light, but we do not see the light itself. The light itself remains invisible. But now, after such experiences, one really gets to see the light; one truly perceives it. But one can only do this when one ascends into the higher worlds. Then one is truly surrounded by flooding light, just as one is surrounded by flooding air in the physical world. Only one does not ascend with one’s physical body; one does not need to breathe up there. But one ascends with that part of one’s being which needs the light just as the body in the physical world needs air. The element of life up there is light—one might say “light-air”—which is a necessity of existence there, just as air is a necessity of existence for human beings in the physical world. This light is indeed permeated and interwoven with something akin to how the air in our surroundings is interwoven with cloud formations. But those are water. Yet this water on the physical plane can also be compared to something that exists up there. That which meets us there as floating, soaring formations in the flowing light, just as clouds here float through the flowing air—that is weaving, living sound, a weaving sound formation; that is the music of the spheres. And that which one will perceive further on is flowing, weaving life itself.

[ 14 ] So one can indeed describe this world into which one plunges with one’s soul, but the things through which one must describe it must actually be meaningless to the physical world. That is why the one who uses the words most meaningless to the physical plane will perhaps best describe this world, which, though meaningless to the mental image, nevertheless possesses a higher reality. Now, of course, it is easy for all materialistic philistines to refute this. That is why the refutations made by materialists against what the occultist has to say about the higher worlds seem so plausible. He knows full well that these refutations are very easy to make, for one best describes the higher worlds by using words that do not at all fit what people have in mind when speaking of the physical plane.

[ 15 ] One might, for example, speak of “light-air” or “air-light.” These do not exist on the physical plane. Up there, however, there is air-light and light-air. One also comes to recognize, in the world one enters, the absence of the element of life—the necessary amount of light-air and air-light—by feeling oppressed, by feeling a painful touch in the soul: a state comparable to the state on the physical plane when one cannot breathe due to a lack of air. And one also encounters the opposite state there, the state of true, genuine—one might say holy—light-air, the state of living in this pure, holy atmosphere, and of beholding spiritual beings who can make themselves quite noticeable within this light-air and who carry on their activities there. These are all those beings who stand under the leadership of Lucifer. The moment we enter this region without proper preparation—due to inadequate or improper preparation—Lucifer gains the power to deprive us of the light-air. He, so to speak, causes us to experience a spiritual shortness of breath. This does not, however, have the effect of physical shortness of breath, but rather a different effect: namely, that we now, much like a polar bear brought to the south, yearn for whatever can come to us from the spiritual treasure, from the spiritual light of the physical plane. For that is precisely what Lucifer wants: that we not concern ourselves with what comes from the higher hierarchies, but instead cling thirstily to what he has brought into the physical plane, if we have not sufficiently trained ourselves through our preparation. When we then stand before Lucifer, he withholds the light of the air from us; we then experience spiritual suffocation, and we yearn for what comes spiritually from the physical plane.

[ 16 ] But what does this look like in practice? Let us suppose that someone makes preparations that have led them to actually ascend into the higher worlds—that is, to truly reach that higher region. But let us suppose that they do not make the necessary preparations for this, forgetting, for example, that alongside all exercises, a person must also refine their moral sensibilities and feelings, that a person must uproot earthly, ambitious feelings of power from their soul—one can ascend to the higher worlds even if one is an ambitious, vain, power-hungry person, but then one carries earthly vanity and earthly lust for power up into these higher worlds—if a person has not purified their moral sensibilities and feelings in this way, then up there Lucifer takes away the light-air, the air-light. Then one perceives nothing up there of what is actually there; instead, one yearns for what is down below on the physical plane; one breathes, as it were, that which one was able to perceive on the physical plane. One then believes, for example, that one can survey that which can only be surveyed in a spiritual way, precisely in the light-air, can only be surveyed when one breathes light-air. One believes one can survey the various incarnations of various people. But that is not true; one does not survey them, precisely because one lacks light-air. Instead, one sucks up—as if thirstily—what is happening down on the physical plane into this region and describes all sorts of things acquired down on the physical plane as if they were events in higher worlds. There is, so to speak, no better—or rather, no worse—means than to lift one’s soul into the higher worlds with earthly, vain lusts for power. But if one does this, one will never be able to bring down true findings from these higher worlds; rather, what one brings down will be only a mere illusion of what one has conceived, concocted, and the like on the physical plane.

[ 17 ] So far, I have described, as it were, only the general setting. But one also encounters beings that might be called elemental beings. While here in the physical world we speak of forces of nature, up there these forces take on a more substantial character. And above all, one makes a very specific discovery there—one makes the discovery—but now through the facts that confront one—that yes, here on the physical plane there is good and evil, but up there there are good and evil forces. Here in the physical world, good and evil are mixed and united within the human soul—in some people leaning more toward the good side, in others less so—but up there there are beings who, as evil beings, fight against what is brought forth by beings whom one must call good beings. One enters a region there where one can, so to speak, already make use of heightened self-awareness, where one can make use of a sharpened power of judgment that must be connected precisely with this heightened self-awareness. So that one can, for example, truly say to oneself: There must also be beings up there who, so to speak, have the mission of evil, alongside the beings who have the mission of good.

[ 18 ] On the physical plane, one is always asked: Why did the all-wise World Deity not create only good? Why is good not present always and everywhere? — If only good existed, then the world would be convinced that it must take a one-sided direction; then the world would by no means be able to produce all the abundance that it does. Goodness must have a counterbalance. Certainly, one can already see this on the physical plane. But one learns to recognize: One can believe that good beings alone would bring the world to completion only as long as one gets by with sentimentality, with the world of fantasy. One can still get by with sentimentality in the realm of everyday life, but not when one enters the serious realities of the supersensible world. There one knows that the good beings alone could not create the world, that they would be too weak to shape the world, that the forces emanating from the evil beings must be incorporated into the entire evolution. It is a matter of wisdom that evil is mixed into the evolution of the world. Therefore, alongside the things one must break away from and fight against, one must also commit to breaking away from all sentimentality. One must recognize that this is necessary. One must be able to face those dangerous truths fearlessly and courageously—truths one perceives through observing the struggle currently unfolding in this region, which can be revealed to one by both the good and evil beings. All these are the kinds of things one experiences when one prepares one’s soul to consciously enter this region. But only then have we actually entered the dream region.

[ 19 ] But we still live in a region far different from that of human beings, a region for which we, as souls in ordinary life, are so ill-suited that we cannot perceive anything at all within it. This is the region we experience as souls during dreamless, deep sleep, the region into which dreams can never penetrate: the region of ordinary sleep consciousness. Here the absolute contradiction already begins, for sleep is actually characterized by the fact that consciousness ceases entirely. Sleep consciousness, a complete paradox, is the state in which we are from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. Let us call this state, for the time being, sleep consciousness. In normal human life, this sleep consciousness is indeed such that a person ceases to be conscious when entering this state and only becomes conscious again upon waking. But in the ancient times of clairvoyance, this region was also something the human soul could experience. If we go back to those ancient times of our Earth’s development—even to post-Atlantean times—there was indeed a state that, for ordinary life, was akin to sleep, yet in which a world even higher and more spiritual than that perceived in the dream realm could be perceived. We can enter such states that, for ordinary human life, are quite like the state of sleep, yet are not sleep because they are permeated by consciousness. Then, when we have risen so high, we do not see the physical world. We do, however, still see the world of light-air, the world of sounds, the world of cosmic harmony, the world of the struggle between good and evil beings. But this world that we see there is, one might say, even more different, even more fundamentally different from everything that exists in the physical world. It is a world that is therefore even more difficult to describe than the world one encounters when one enters the realm of dream consciousness.

[ 20 ] I would now like to give you a mental image of how consciousness actually functions in this region, how it works. When one describes what I have hinted at—a higher world into which dreams extend—one is dismissed by ordinary philistinism as a fantasist. But if one even begins to speak of experiences from this region, which people otherwise simply sleep through, then people don’t just become spiteful enough to accuse one of fantasizing—no, if they engage with it at all and aren’t malicious, they become quite frantic.

[ 21 ] We have already witnessed a small—or rather, a major—example of this. While, at first, when my books were published in Germany, the so-called scholarly critics naturally judged them with malice and all sorts of unfounded assumptions, the criticism became truly frenzied on one point—so frenzied, in fact, that one might say: A certain kind of criticism, when it becomes too frenzied, simply becomes foolish. This was one such point where attention should be drawn to something that can truly come only from the aforementioned region of the spirit. This was the matter expressed in my book *The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity*, the matter of the two Jesus boys. For those of my dear friends who are not familiar with this, I would like to reiterate that occult research has revealed that at the beginning of our era, not just one Jesus child was born, but two. One descended from the so-called Nathanic line of the House of David, the other from the so-called Solomonic line. These two Jesus children grew up together. In the body of the Solomonic boy lived the Zarathustric soul, which—and this is something of profound significance—passed over into the other Jesus boy in the twelfth year, and lived there until the thirtieth year of that body. It thus lived in the body that had been occupied until the twelfth year by a mysterious soul, until the thirtieth year of that body. From the thirtieth year onward, the being we call the Christ-being lived in this body for as long as it lived on earth at all: three years.

[ 22 ] As I said, the ones who’ve really gone wild are those from the outside world who’ve gotten involved in this story of the two Jesus boys. We can’t really blame them for that, because people naturally want to make sense of things using the science they have. But what they want to criticize comes from a region they simply always overlook. That’s why you can’t really blame them for not knowing anything about it. However, common sense is actually enough to understand this. But people won’t engage with such understanding; they immediately transform the power of this understanding into fury and malice.

[ 23 ] Such truths, such as those concerning the two Jesus boys, which are found precisely in this higher realm, never correspond to sympathy or antipathy. In fact, such truths are always found only in such a way that one never actually “experiences” them—if I may call “experience” that which has to do, so to speak, with the mode of cognition of the physical world, indeed, even with the mode of cognition of that region in which the dream life is situated. There one is, so to speak, present at the very moment of the arising of the insight, just as one is present in physical consciousness. This also applies to the occultist who merely extends his consciousness into this dream region. So that one can say: When the insights of this region arise, one is immediately present. In such a state of presence, truths such as this one about the two Jesus-children cannot be found. When one receives such truths in the higher region—and in such a way that they enter into consciousness—then the moment when one actually acquired them is long past by the time one recognizes them. One has already experienced them earlier, before consciously encountering them—and that is precisely what one should do in our time—one already has them within oneself. So that one comes to the most important, most essential, most significant truths in such a way that one carries within oneself the clear awareness: When one acquired them, one was at an earlier point in time than the present one, where one brings forth from the depths of the soul what one acquired earlier and makes it conscious. One encounters such truths within oneself just as one encounters a flower or any other object in the external world. Just as one can think about a flower or some other object in the external world that is simply there at first, so can one think about the truths once one has encountered them within oneself, once they confront one within oneself. Just as one can only judge in the external world after having perceived an object, so too does one find such truths within oneself objectively, and only then does one study them within oneself. One studies them within oneself just as one studies external facts. And just as it makes no sense to ask: “Is this flower true or false?”—so too does it make no sense to ask, regarding what one actually encounters within oneself, whether it is true or false. Truth or falsity relates only to whether one is capable of describing what one finds, what becomes conscious to one. The description may be true or false. Being true or false does not refer to the fact itself, but to how a thinking being relates to the fact. The words “true” or “false” are not applicable to the facts at all.

[ 24 ] Indeed, arriving at research findings in this field is like looking into a region of the soul where one has lived before, but into which one has simply not looked with conscious awareness. The best way to enter this region as one progresses in occult exercises is to pay close attention to those moments when, in the depths of the soul, not merely judgments but facts arise—facts of which one knows that one did not consciously contribute to their formation. The more one can be amazed by what is revealed there as a completely objective object of the external world, the more surprising it is to one, the more prepared one is to enter this region. That is why, as a rule, one can hardly enter this region with all that one has constructed in one’s mind, with all one’s assumptions. You have no better means of finding out anything—for example, about the previous incarnations of this or that personality—than to reflect on what that person might have been in previous incarnations. If, for example, you wanted to investigate, say, the earlier incarnations of Robespierre, then the best way to learn nothing about him would be to look up historical figures whom you suspect might be previous incarnations of Robespierre. That would be the best way to never find out the truth. One must vigorously train oneself to stop forming opinions, assumptions, and hypotheses. More and more, anyone who wishes to become a true occultist must accustom themselves to judging the world as little as possible. For then they will most quickly find that the facts come to meet them. The more a person remains silent regarding their assumptions and opinions, the more the innermost part of their soul is filled with facts from the spiritual world.

[ 25 ] For example, one could say that someone who has grown up with certain religious prejudices—who has very specific feelings, impressions, and perhaps even assumptions about Christ—would not be well-suited to discover, from the outset, a truth such as the story of the two Jesus boys. It is precisely when one feels somewhat neutral toward the Christ event that this serves as good preparation, provided one also makes the other necessary preparations on the other side. Prejudiced Buddhists will be least able to say anything sensible about the Buddha, just as prejudiced Christians will be least able to say anything about Christ. It is the same in all areas. One must, so to speak, go through all the so-called bitterness of ordinary life, become a sort of double human being, if one wishes to enter this region, which has now been described as a third. One is, after all, a double human being in ordinary life as well, even if one makes no conscious use of one half of one’s being. After all, even in ordinary life one is both a waking and a sleeping human being. Truly: just as waking and sleeping are different, so too is this region different from the physical world—this third region in the higher worlds. This region is something special in itself. It is also an environment, but a completely new world, which we recognize best when we are able to extinguish not only the impressions of the physical external world conveyed by the senses, but also everything we can feel and sense, everything that can arouse us passionately in relation to things of the sensory world. In ordinary life, human beings are so ill-suited to experiencing this world that their consciousness is extinguished every night. They can only attain this if they are capable of truly creating a double self within themselves. And the person who can forget, who can initially shut out everything that interests them in this physical world, can then penetrate into this other, higher world. The middle world, the world in which dreams are also woven, is, as it were, a mixture of the other two worlds. Elements of the higher world—which people otherwise sleep through—as well as elements of everyday consciousness extend into it. That is why no one can recognize the true causes of the physical world unless they are able to penetrate into this third region through their own perception. But if a person today wishes to discover through their own experience who, for example, Krishna is, they can do so only in this third region. And those impressions that Arjuna received, and which are described to us in the sublime song, the Bhagavad Gita, by being placed into Krishna’s mouth, originate from this world. That is why I had to speak today, as a preliminary, about humanity’s ascent into this third region, so that we may understand where the wonderful yet grotesquely sounding truth actually comes from—the truth that Krishna speaks to Arjuna, and which sounds so very unlike what is usually heard. Getting to know Krishna and thus the essence of the Bhagavad Gita—that is to be one aspect of these lectures. On the other hand, however, you should find in the occult foundations of this wonderful song something that, if you truly make use of it, can indeed lead you to the higher worlds. For the path to the higher worlds is open to every human being, if only they are willing to understand that the grain of gold one must first possess consists in the awareness that things in which the highest spiritual beings live and weave are at work in everyday life.