The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] I would like to do everything possible to ensure that we can fully understand the conditions of the spiritual realms we intend to discuss during this lecture series. And for this reason, I would like to begin today’s reflections on this series with a brief story—as a kind of interlude—that will help clarify various aspects of the questions we will be considering and have already considered.

[ 2 ] At a certain time, Professor Capesius was quite tormented and brooding. This was due to the following reasons. You will have gathered from *The Gate of Initiation* that Capesius is a kind of scholar of history, a historian. Now, occult research has revealed to me that a number of renowned contemporary historians have become so precisely because they had some connection to Egyptian initiation during the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch. Either such historians were directly involved with the principle of initiation or approached the temple mysteries in one way or another. You will have noticed that Capesius is a historian who does not rely solely on external written works, but who also attempts to penetrate the ideas of history that play a role in human development and cultural evolution.

[ 3 ] While I was attempting to characterize Capesius in “The Portal of Initiation,” “The Trial of the Soul,” and “The Guardian of the Threshold,” I must confess that his relationship to the Egyptian principle of initiation was always at the forefront of my mind, a relationship that is expressed in greater detail in the seventh and eighth images of “The Awakening of the Soul.” And one should really note that the experiences the Capesius soul had during its Egyptian incarnation underlie all the later destinies that are also in store for this soul in the present. Thus Capesius is a historian, a scholar of history. He has devoted his scholarly life primarily to history, to all that has shaped the development and nature of peoples, cultures, and individual human beings across successive epochs.

[ 4 ] One day, however, Capesius came across some of the literature on Haeckelism. He had familiarized himself with this entire worldview—one he had previously paid little attention to—and subsequently read all sorts of writings on the atomist worldview. That was the reason for his inner turmoil, and a strange mood came over him when, at a relatively late age, he became acquainted with this atomistic Haeckelism. His intellect told him: One cannot really make sense of the phenomena of nature around us unless one seeks to explain them in this way—through a mechanical worldview based on atoms. — In other words, Capesius came to see, in a certain sense, the one-sided validity of atomism, the mechanical view of nature. He was not one of those who fanatically reject such a thing from the outset, for he had to rely on his intellect, and so some aspects of this view seemed necessary to him in order to explain the phenomena of nature around him. Yet this still tormented him. For he said to himself: How barren, how unsatisfying to the human soul is this view of nature! How poorly it treats every idea one seeks to gain about spirit and spiritual beings, about the soul!

[ 5 ] Thus Capesius found himself tossed back and forth by doubts, and so he set out—I might say almost instinctively—on the path he had often taken when his soul was weighed down. He went to the Balde cottage to speak with the good people there, who had so often provided him with such beautiful, soul-stirring comfort. He had often been refreshed by what Mrs. Balde had to offer Capesius in her wonderful fairy-tale stories. And so he went there. Since Mrs. Balde was busy in the house when he arrived, he first met only Felix Balde, Father Felix, whom he had come to love so dearly over time. To him he confided his torments, his doubts, into which he had been plunged by his acquaintance with Haeckelism and atomism. First, he explained to him how necessary it seemed to the intellect to apply such concepts to natural phenomena; and on the other hand, he confided to good Father Felix how bleak and unsatisfying such a worldview was. Capesius was quite troubled when he came to Father Felix, so to speak, seeking spiritual help. Father Felix is simply of a different nature than Capesius. He follows his own steady course. He directly rejected such things as Haeckelism and the atomist worldview by explaining to our good Professor Capesius what they were all about. He told him: Certainly, there must be atoms. It is entirely legitimate to speak of atoms. But one must be clear that if these atoms are to form the world in any way, they must layer and arrange themselves in such a way that this arrangement corresponds to numbers and measures; that the atom of one substance, four of another, three of yet another, and one or two together form a whole; that in this way the substances that exist in the world come into being. — Capesius, who was well-versed in history, found this somewhat Pythagorean; he sensed that the Pythagorean principle reigned within Felix Balde. Felix Balde wanted to make it clear to him that one could do nothing with the atoms themselves, but that measure and number wisely reign within them. And ever more complicated became what Father Felix expounded in ever more complex numerical relationships, according to which the wisdom of the world groups the atoms together and asserts them as a spiritual principle between the atoms. Ever more complicated became the figures that Father Felix constructed for Capesius. Then a strange mood came over the good Professor Capesius, a mood that might be described as follows: he had to strain so hard to keep this complexity together that, even though the subject interested him immensely, he had to suppress a kind of yawn, so that he almost fell into a sort of dreamlike state.

[ 6 ] Just as the good Professor Capesius was, so to speak, about to slip completely into a dreamlike state, Mrs. Balde arrived, having been forced to listen in on the entire discussion about numbers and figures for some time. She sat down patiently. She had a peculiar trait. Whenever she was not entirely taken with something—in a good way, that is—and needed to help herself overcome a well-meaning boredom, she would clench both hands into fists and move her thumbs in circles, and whenever she did that, she was able to completely hold back a yawn. After she had done this for a little while, a pause ensued, and she was now able to rouse Capesius once more with a refreshing story. And so Mrs. Felicia told the good Professor Capesius the following.

[ 7 ] Once upon a time, in a very remote area, there was a large castle. Many people lived in this castle—old and young, from the youngest to the oldest—but they were all related in one way or another, so that they all belonged together in some way.

[ 8 ] These people, who formed a self-contained community, were also, in a certain sense, cut off from the rest of the world, for there were no people or human settlements to be found far and wide around them. So there came a time when a large number of these people began to feel somewhat uneasy. And this had the consequence that some of these people became like visionaries, receiving visions that, given the way they appeared, might well have referred to something real. Then Mrs. Felicia recounted that a larger number of people had the same vision. At first, they had a vision of a mighty figure of light descending from the clouds; a figure of light which, as it descended, seemed to sink warmly into the hearts and souls of the castle’s inhabitants. And one truly felt—as Mrs. Felicia recounted—something illuminating coming in as if from the heights of heaven through this figure of light that came from above.

[ 9 ] But soon, she said, something else began to happen to all the people who had seen this vision of the figure of light. All around the castle, they saw all sorts of blackish-brown and steel-gray figures crawling out of the ground. While the figure of light from above was a single entity, many, many such figures appeared around the castle. While the figure of light touched the hearts and souls more deeply, these beings—one might call them elemental beings—were like besiegers of the castle.

[ 10 ] And so these figures lived in the castle for a long time, and there were quite a number of them—between those who came from above and those who besieged the castle from the outside. One day, however, it became apparent that the figure from above was descending lower than usual, and the besiegers were also entering in greater numbers. An uneasy mood spread among the visionaries in the castle. We must bear in mind that Mrs. Balde was telling a fairy tale. The visionaries, along with the other castle inhabitants, fell into a sort of dreamlike state. The figure from above split into individual clouds of light; but these were seized and obscured by the castle’s besiegers. As a result, the castle’s inhabitants were gradually lulled into a dreamlike state, and thus the earthly lifespan of the castle’s residents was extended for centuries. And they found themselves again after centuries; but now they found themselves scattered across smaller communities and transported to the most diverse places on Earth. They once again inhabited smaller castles that were like copies of the great castle they had inhabited centuries ago. And it became apparent that what they had experienced in the old castle was now within their souls as spiritual strength, as spiritual wealth, as spiritual health. And they were able to carry out all manner of activities in the castles: farming, raising livestock, and so on; they became capable people, capable cultivators of the land, possessing healthy souls and healthy bodies as well.

[ 11 ] After Mrs. Felicia had told this story, the good Professor Capesius was very touched by her account of how this had always happened to him. Father Felix, however, felt the need to add something to explain this image, which Mrs. Felicia had recounted for the first time back then. And Father Felix began: “Yes, the figure that came down from above out of the clouds—that is the Luciferic principle—and the figures that came from outside like besiegers—those are the Ahrimanic principle, and so on.” And Father Felix’s explanation grew ever more complicated. Mrs. Felicia listened at first, then clenched her fists with both hands and rolled her thumbs, but when Father Felix’s explanation grew ever more complicated, she said: “Yes, I have to check on the kitchen myself now; we’re having potato dumplings today, and they’ll get too soft.” — And she slipped out into the kitchen. Capesius was so put off by good Father Felix’s explanations that he could no longer really listen, even though he liked Father Felix, and that he actually didn’t really hear what Father Felix went on to explain.

[ 12 ] Now I must add that what I have just described happened at a time when Capesius was already acquainted with Benedictus—he was, so to speak, a good student of his. And he had often heard Benedictus speak about the nature of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements. Although Professor Capesius is a very intelligent man, he could never quite come to terms with Benedictus’s discussions of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements. There was always something left over; he simply didn’t know what to make of Benedictus’s explanations. So he left this time, keeping the story of the castle that multiplied in his soul, and often, almost daily, had to think of this story. Then he came to Benedictus again, and lo and behold, Benedictus could now perceive that something had taken place in Capesius’s soul. Capesius himself had noticed: Every time he recalled the story of the castle that multiplied, his soul was strangely stirred within. It was as if this story had worked to build up strength in his soul, as if his soul had been strengthened by it. Therefore, he repeated the story over and over again, as if meditating. And now he returned to Benedictus, who noticed that these spiritual powers had been strengthened within him. And Benedictus now explained the following to him in a peculiar way.

[ 13 ] Whereas before Professor Capesius—perhaps precisely because of his erudition—would have had little understanding of Benedictus’s struggles, he now possessed an extraordinary insight. It was as if a seed had fallen into his soul through Felicia’s story, fertilizing his innermost being.

[ 14 ] Benedictus said: Let us consider three things! First, let us consider human thought, human mental images, the ideas that a person can carry within themselves, through which they make sense of the world in all their solitude. To have thoughts, to engage in inner reflection in complete solitude—this is something a person can do entirely on their own. To do so, they need not join forces with anyone else. In fact, they do it best by shutting themselves away in their little room and, in quiet, self-contained thought, using the power their thinking possesses at any given moment, attempting to understand the world and its processes. Now Benedictus said: Yes, when one proceeds in this way with thought, it is always the case with the individual human being that the feeling element of the soul works its way up into the thoughts, into the mental images. Through this, the temptation, the enticement of the Luciferic element, always approaches the human being. It is simply inconceivable that a person could brood, speculate, and philosophize in solitude and seek to understand the things of the world without this influence from their emotional soul entering into their thinking, and thereby a Luciferic impulse entering into their solitary thinking. The thought grasped by the individual human being is always permeated, to a large extent grasped and permeated by the Luciferic element.

[ 15 ] Whereas Capesius had previously understood little when Benedictus spoke of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements, it was now self-evident to him that the solitary thoughts a person conceives within themselves must always contain the temptations of the Luciferic element. And he now understood that Lucifer always finds a foothold in human activity in solitary thought, enabling him to snatch the human being out of the progressive course of world development and lead him—because the human being separates himself from the world in solitary thought—to the isolated island that Lucifer, separated from the rest of the world order, wishes to establish in order to settle there, as it were, everything that separates itself, to settle there, as it were. Thus, Benedictus first directed Capesius toward solitary, personal, inner thinking.

[ 16 ] And now, he said, let us consider something else. Let us consider what appears in Scripture. In the Scriptures we find a remarkable element of human cultural development. If one considers the significance of the thought, one must say: The thought, as it is initially, lives within the individual human being. It is accessible to Lucifer, because Lucifer wants to lead the soul out of the physical world and into isolation. But this individual thought is not accessible to Ahriman, for this individual thought is subject to the entirely normal laws of arising and passing away on the physical plane. With Scripture, it is something else; there, that which is thought is withdrawn from destruction and made enduring.

[ 17 ] I have now pointed out to you how Ahriman is constantly striving to snatch from the current of destruction whatever lives in human thought, to keep it there in the physical-sensory world. This is the characteristic process by which what is written down comes into being. There, the human thought, which would otherwise pass away in time, is fixed and preserved for the time being. It is precisely here that Ahriman penetrates human culture. Although Professor Capesius is no reactionary and does not side with those who, for example, wish to abolish writing or ban it in elementary schools, he nevertheless recognized that, as humanity accumulates written work upon written work everywhere, Ahrimanic impulses enter into cultural development. So he now knew: in solitary thought there is a Luciferic temptation; in written works, in all that is fixed through writing or printing, there is an Ahrimanic element. He knew that human development cannot even take place in the outer physical world without the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces coming into play everywhere. And he now understood that precisely with the progress of culture, as writing gains ever greater significance—one need not be clairvoyant to recognize this, but only to trace development back a few centuries—the Ahrimanic must also gain ever greater significance. Ahriman gains more and more as writing takes on ever greater significance in human development. And today, when it has such great significance—Capesius was clear about this—we have veritable great Ahrimanic strongholds. It has not yet become common practice—Spiritual Science has not yet advanced so far that one expresses oneself in truth in public life—that when a student goes to the library, he says: “I’m going to the Ahriman stronghold now!” — But that is the truth. The large and small libraries are the strongholds of Ahriman, are those fortresses from which Ahriman intervenes in the development of human culture in the most intense way. One must only look the facts boldly in the eye in this regard.

[ 18 ] But then Benedictus explained something else to Capesius. He said to him: Very well, now we have the thought within the solitary individual on the one hand; we have the written work belonging to Ahriman on the other; but in between we have an intermediate state. In the Luciferic realm, we have something unified. Human beings strive for unity when they seek to explain the world to themselves through thought. In the written word, we have something atomistic. Then Benedictus showed Capesius—and Capesius understood this well, his mind having been refreshed by the story of Mrs. Felicia—that between the two, between the solitary thought and the written word, we have the spoken word; the spoken word, in which one cannot be alone, as one is with one’s thoughts. Through the Word, one lives in a community. One can think in isolation, alone. It has meaning when one thinks alone; but one would not need a word if one wanted to go one’s own way in solitude. Language has meaning in community. Thus the Word is drawn out of the solitude of the human personality; it unfolds in community. The word is the embodied thought, but at the same time, on the physical plane, it is something quite different from the thought. One need not go into the clairvoyant findings—I have drawn attention to this in various lectures—but one can already see, from an external historical perspective, and because he was a historian, Capesius understood this very well, one can already see from external history that the word or language was originally intended to have a very different relationship to humanity than it has acquired in the present day. For if one goes further and further back in the development of languages, one notices that one must indeed eventually arrive—as occult observation shows—at a human proto-language that encompassed the entire globe and has since only differentiated itself. Even when one goes back to Hebrew—in this regard, the Hebrew language is particularly remarkable—one notices something different in the words than in the words of Western Europe. The words of the Hebrews are far less conventional; they have, so to speak, a soul, so that one senses their meaning; they express their essential meaning to one more than the Western European languages do. The further back one goes in evolution, the more one finds such languages that were similar to the common proto-language. What is recounted as the Tower of Babel is a symbol of the fact that there really was a proto-language, and that this has differentiated into the individual national and tribal languages. Because the common proto-language has differentiated into the languages of peoples and tribes, the word, so to speak, meets the solitude of thought halfway. Not every individual speaks their own language—for then language would have no meaning—but only groups of people speak the common language. The word has thus become a middle ground between the solitary thought and the proto-language. In the original language, there was a specific word that was understood through the sound it had, through what it was by virtue of its phonetic value. There was no need to further instruct one another conventionally about the phonetic value; rather, one found the soul of the word in the original language. As I said, this has differentiated. And everything that causes separation also plays into Lucifer’s hands, so that by forming differentiated languages, people thereby adopted a separating principle—that is, they entered into a current that makes it easy for Lucifer to lift humanity out of the general world order that was already predetermined before Lucifer existed; that is, to place humanity on an isolated island, to separate it from the rest of the progressive course of human development. Thus, within the element of language, of the word, lies a middle state. If the word had remained what it was meant to be, if the Luciferic had not laid hold of the word, then the word would correspond to the middle divine state free from Lucifer and Ahriman, into which humanity can sail purely in accordance with the progressive divine-spiritual world order. Thus, on the one hand, the word has been influenced by the Luciferic element. While thought, when conceived in isolation, is almost entirely subject to the Luciferic element, the word is, as I have explained, somewhat affected by the Luciferic element on the one hand.

[ 19 ] On the other hand, however, writing also has an effect on the spoken word, and the further humanity progresses, the greater the significance of writing for language becomes. This is due to the fact that dialects, which have nothing to do with writing yet, are gradually fading away, and what is often regarded as the more refined element—what is even called the written language—is emerging. This proves that language is influenced in return by writing. One can see this very clearly in certain regions. I am constantly reminded of something I noticed about myself and my schoolmates. In Austria, where there was such a jumble of dialects, great importance was placed in schools on students learning a written language that they had not previously spoken, at least for the most part. And this acquisition of the written language has a very particular effect. I can speak about this quite impartially, because I myself was exposed to the peculiar effect of this written language—Austrian school German—for a long time in my life and only managed to break the habit with great difficulty—sometimes it still slips out. This peculiarity consists in the fact that one pronounces all short vowels long and all long vowels short, whereas the dialect—that is, the language born of the word itself—pronounces them correctly. For example, if one means the sun in the sky, the dialect says: D’ Sunn. — But someone who has gone through the Austrian school system is tempted to say: Die Soone. — The dialect says: Der Sun for “son”; the Austrian school language says instead: Der Sonn. — So one says: die Soone and der Sonn. This is, of course, an extreme example, but it certainly sticks with one, or at least it used to stick with one.

[ 20 ] Here we see, so to speak, how writing has an effect on language. But it has an effect in general. One need only form a mental image of the progress of culture; one will find that, precisely as culture advances, language loses the vitality, the elemental, the organic—that which has grown from the soil—and that people speak more and more of a kind of bookish language. Here, the Ahrimanic, which is always present in literature, in turn acts back upon the word from the other side. Anyone who wishes to develop naturally will, of course, notice precisely from this example of the three things that Benedictus has now selected for Capesius, how nonsensical it would be to want to eliminate Ahriman and Lucifer from the process of development.

[ 21 ] As Benedictus shows, three things come into consideration: the solitary thought, the word, and the scripture. Now, no one in their right mind—even if they have fully grasped the truth that the solitary thought must be rooted in Lucifer’s influence, and the scripture in Ahriman’s influence— no one will now want to eradicate Lucifer where he is so tangibly at work, for that would mean prohibiting solitary thought. For some—it must be said—that would be the most convenient solution, but openly one would certainly not want to advocate it. On the other hand, one will not want to eradicate Scripture either, but will have to say to oneself: Just as positive and negative electricity represent a contrast in the outer physical world, so the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic represent a contrast that must exist. They are two poles, neither of which may be absent, but which must be brought into proportion in measure and number. Then can the human being move along that middle line in the state of the Word. — For it is indeed the purpose of the Word to contain wisdom, to contain knowledge, to contain mental images and ideas. A person can now say to themselves, for example: I must develop within the Word in such a way that I allow everything that is self-willed, merely personal, to be corrected precisely through the Word, by taking into my soul what has been brought forth in the Word, in the wise Word of all times. — Respect not only for one’s own opinion, not only for what one believes oneself and can recognize as true through one’s own power, but respect for what has emerged through the cultures and through the striving for wisdom of the various peoples in the course of historical development. This means, on the one hand, bringing Lucifer, so to speak, into the right relationship with the Word. Not to eliminate solitary thinking, but also to bear in mind that the Word belongs to the collective and that one must follow the Word through the ages. The more one does this, the more one allows Lucifer to exert the right influence on the Word. One then does not merely succumb to the authority of the Word, but protects the Word that carries the wisdom of the Earth from cultural epoch to cultural epoch. On the other hand, it is incumbent upon the person who correctly understands the facts not to succumb to the rigid, authoritarian principle inherent in the written word, for in doing so—whether the text contains the most sacred or the most profane—one falls prey to Ahriman. One must be clear that, for external material culture, human beings must first have the written word, and that the written word is something through which Ahriman—which is not his task—seeks to extract thinking from the stream of destruction. He does not want to let it flow into the current of death. Here, in the written word, we have the best opportunity to hold back thinking on the physical plane. To face with full awareness the fact that the Ahrimanic element is present in the written work, never to allow the written work to gain power over the human being—in short, to preserve the word in a balanced state so that, as it were, from left and right—from thinking and from writing—the two polar opposites, Lucifer and Ahriman, are at work: this is how one must conduct oneself if one wishes to stand on the right ground. If one grasps this correctly in the eye of the soul, if one is clear that opposites must be at work everywhere, then one stands on the right ground.

[ 22 ] When Capesius heard this from Benedictus and had taken it in with the spiritual powers strengthened by Mrs. Felicia, he now had a completely different attitude toward what Benedictus was explaining to him than he had previously, even when Benedictus had already explained the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements to him. As these soul-strengthening fairy tales, inspired from the spiritual world, took effect more and more, Capesius himself came to experience that his soul powers were growing stronger within him, that his soul capacities were gaining strength from within. This is depicted in the thirteenth image of *The Awakening of the Soul*, where one of the soul forces within Capesius—that which is meant by Philia—truly confronts him in a spiritually tangible way, not merely as an abstract soul force. To the same extent that Philia grew into a being within Capesius’s soul, to that same extent he came to understand more and more correctly what Benedictus actually wanted from him. Back then, when he heard the particularly inspiring story of the castle that multiplied, that grew in number, it had not made an immediate impression at first; he had almost drifted off gently, and in particular he had nearly fallen asleep before when Father Felix had spoken of the atoms. But now this soul of Capesius, having matured to the point of recognizing that a trinity exists within the entire current of world development: the Luciferic on one side—isolated thoughts; the Ahrimanic on the other side—the written word; the third, the middle state, the purely Divine. He now recognized this triad in this significant fact of cultural development on the physical plane, and he could sense how this triad is to be sought everywhere. Now Capesius viewed the law of number differently than before; now, through the Philia awakening within him, he sensed the essence of number in the course of the world, and now the essence of measure also became clear to him: that in every trinity, two elements stand in opposition to one another and must be set in mutual, measured harmony. And Capesius recognized a great, mighty law of the universe, which he now knew must be found in some way, not only on the physical plane but also in the higher worlds.

[ 23 ] We will have to discuss all of this later in our detailed examination of the divine-spiritual world. Capesius sensed that he had penetrated a law that otherwise behaves in the physical world as if veiled, and that he possessed something with which he could cross the threshold. And when he crosses the threshold, he enters the spiritual world, where he must leave behind everything that is merely stimulated by physical experience. Number and measure—he had learned to feel them, to sense them, to experience them. And now he also understood when Benedictus brought in other things, at first still simple ones, to teach him the principle fully. For example, Benedictus said to Capesius: “One can now also find the same operation of the Trinity, of polarity, or of the contrast within the Trinity—that is, of measured balance—at other points of existence.” One can, in turn, consider a thing from a different point of view: thinking, inner mental image. Inner mental image, the working out of the world’s mysteries—that is one thing; the second is pure perception, let us say mere listening. There are people who are more inclined to ponder everything within themselves. Other people, who do not like to think, listen everywhere, accept everything on the basis of listening, on the basis of authority, and even if it is the authority of natural phenomena, for there is also a dogmatism of external experience, namely when one allows oneself to be imposed upon by external natural phenomena.

[ 24 ] Benedictus was now able to show Professor Capesius quite easily: in solitary thinking lies the Luciferic temptation; in mere listening, in mere perception, lies the Ahrimanic element. One can, however, maintain a middle state, so to speak, walking a middle path. One need not merely dwell in abstract, brooding thought, shutting oneself off hermit-like within the soul, nor devote oneself to mere listening and looking at what the ears and eyes can perceive. One can do something else by making what one thinks so vivid within, so powerful, that one has one’s own thought before oneself as something living and immerses oneself in it as vividly as in something one hears and sees outside, so that one’s own thought becomes as concrete as what one hears or sees. This is a middle state. In the mere thought that underlies brooding lies Lucifer’s approach to humanity; in the mere listening, whether through perception or through the authority of human beings, lies the Ahrimanic element. When one strengthens and awakens the soul inwardly so that one hears or sees one’s thoughts, as it were, then one has meditation. Meditation is a middle state. It is neither thinking nor perception. It is a thinking that lives as vividly in the soul as perception lives, and it is a perception that has not external objects but thoughts within the perception. Between the Luciferic element of thought and the Ahrimanic element of perception, the life of the soul flows in meditation as in the divine-spiritual element that bears within itself only the progression of world phenomena. The meditating person, who lives in their thoughts in such a way that they become alive within them, just as perceptions are within them, lives in this divine flow. On the right he has the mere thought; on the left the Ahrimanic element, the mere listening; and he does not exclude one or the other, but knows that he lives in a triad, that the number governs life. And he knows that there is a polarity, a contrast, a contrast between two things, between which meditation flows. And he also knows that the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic elements must maintain a balanced equilibrium here in meditation.

[ 25 ] In all areas, human beings come to know this universal principle of number and measure, which Capesius, once his soul was prepared, learned to recognize through the guidance of Benedictus. Thus the soul that wishes to prepare itself for the insights of the spiritual worlds gradually immerses itself in them, so that everywhere in the world, at every point one can reach, it seeks out number, above all the number three; so that it sees the polar opposites through which everything must reveal itself, and the necessity that these opposites maintain balance as polarities. A middle state cannot be merely a passive flow; rather, everywhere we experience the current in such a way that we must direct the soul’s eye to the left and right and steer our ship through as the third between the left and right polar opposites. Feeling this, Capesius had learned through Benedictus to steer upward in the right way into the spiritual worlds, to cross the threshold of the spiritual world. And so must everyone who wishes to penetrate Spiritual Science learn this, so that true knowledge of the higher worlds may lead them to real understanding.