The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] In last week’s lectures, I pointed out to you how we must strive, with the help of the science of initiation, to move beyond the apparent reality that actually surrounds us constantly and toward true reality. And I drew your attention to the fact that the very pursuit that appeals to most people—the pursuit of a unified, rational theory of the world—actually leads away from reality; that it leads directly into an illusion regarding reality; and that one must rather strive to distinguish between two currents of reality—especially with regard to the understanding of the human being—in order to then vividly combine what can be known from each of these two currents with the other. Let us briefly recapitulate what we have discussed regarding these two currents in the understanding of the human being, and then let us try to establish the necessary requirements for a view of reality on this basis. I told you: Human life actually unfolds in such a way that a person can only comprehend in the second half of life what they go through mentally—and indeed, emotionally—in the first half of life—and I said: The rational aspect is active within us during the first seven years of life, from birth until the teeth begin to fall out; the rational reigns within us, but what reigns there as the rational, and also what we take in through learning during these first years of life—we do not yet comprehend it through our own human faculties if we consider only the one current we are discussing. If human beings were to rely solely on themselves as human beings, as earthly beings, they would only be able to comprehend—at an advanced age, in their late fifties and early sixties—what they think, feel, and will as children up until the change of teeth. Thus, it is only in old age, so to speak, that one matures to self-knowledge with regard to one’s inner childhood life. The powers within a person that are capable of grasping what one experiences inwardly and rationally during early childhood are only born so late in human life.

[ 2 ] Then we have a second stage of life, which lasts from the time the baby teeth are replaced until sexual maturity. Just think—we have described this in the booklet *The Education of the Child from the Perspective of Spiritual Science*—what a human being goes through in terms of imagination, feeling, and will until reaching sexual maturity. Through their own human powers, through human earthly forces, a person would not be able to comprehend what they are experiencing there until the late forties or early fifties.

[ 3 ] And again, what we go through—from sexual immaturity well into our twenties—we would only come to understand through our own human powers in the late thirties and early forties. What we conceive—and, for my part, develop into ideals—the significance of these, their value in life, we would only grasp in our thirties if we were to rely solely on our human life forces. Only what we experience from about the age of twenty-eight to thirty-five stands on its own; that is what we can roughly grasp. This middle phase of the human life course has a certain balance; there we can conceive and comprehend at the same time; in the other stages of life, we cannot.

[ 4 ] You will gain an understanding of human development over the course of a lifetime if you reflect on what we have outlined here; you will gain an idea of how human beings develop over time as earthly beings. Self-knowledge, insofar as we are bound to time, would actually only be possible if we always waited until the corresponding stage of life arrived in order to comprehend what we think at another, earlier stage of life. The whole of human life belongs together. If we were merely earthly human beings bound to time, we would not know anything truly significant about ourselves as personalities unless, in old age, we looked back on what had developed within us during our youth.

[ 5 ] This is one aspect of human nature, one current of human life. In relation to this flow, human beings are entirely subject to time; in relation to this flow, they can do nothing but wait until the time of maturity arrives. But I have already drawn your attention to this: Human life does not appear as we experience it in the state of being; rather, it appears as such when we observe it unfolding over time. Nevertheless, what is said about the temporal course of human life is the true reality. For as for what we otherwise experience between birth and death—as I told you—one can, if necessary and if one wishes to remain superficial, live with it, but one cannot die with it. For everything else we know—what we learn through others teaching us, what we learn through what humanity has acquired in the course of history, in short, what we as temporal human beings learn in any way other than by looking back on our youth in old age—all of that passes away in death; we do not initially carry it through the gate of death from this stream of existence. Only what we have acquired in such a way that it corresponds to this principle do we carry through the gate of death. Do not think, either, that you do not do what I am describing here! Those of you who have reached a later stage of life already look back in your subconscious on your earlier stages of life. What I have described in this way is already taking place, even if it occurs in the subconscious. And you would carry nothing from your outer, temporal life through the gate of death if it did not take place in this way. In the age of materialism, people do not pay attention to this, of course, but everything that the age of materialism can teach a person cannot be taken with them through the gate of death. For the world, the only thing that matters is what you experience in this sense—that in old age you come to understand what took place within your entire being during your youth. That is one current.

[ 6 ] The other current, however, arises from the fact that the human being is not merely a physical-psychic being. As a physical-psychic being, his existence unfolds in time as we have just described. But the human being is also a spiritual-psychic being. And through this spiritual-soul being, they are not merely in the realm of time, as we have just characterized it, but as a spiritual-soul being, they are in the realm of duration. There, however, they are again something entirely different—as we have indeed described—from what it appears to be to them. There, they do not undergo any development; there, they remain the same being from birth to death. But his thinking, feeling, and willing are something entirely different from what they appear to be to him. His thinking—and also a part of his feeling—is a transporting of himself into cosmic regions where a struggle among gods takes place, as I described to you eight days ago; and likewise, his willing—and a part of his feeling—is a transporting of himself into another region of the cosmos where a struggle among gods takes place. To sense, as I told you, means to transport oneself into a certain region of the spiritual realm and to participate in certain struggles of one kind of spirit against another; likewise, to will means to participate in certain struggles, even if in one case or the other these struggles have come to a standstill. It is a profound truth, as you will find described in *The Gate of Initiation*, that while spiritual and soul processes are taking place within us, great cosmic events are unfolding.

[ 7 ] Just as human beings, in this age of materialism, do not wish to have any inkling of their physical-soul aspect—which passes with time—so too do they not wish to know anything about this spiritual-soul aspect, which takes place in the realm of eternity, yet looks entirely different from their thinking, feeling, and willing in ordinary life, and which, when truly considered, unfolds as spiritual struggles. As paradoxical as it may sound to the materialistically minded person: When you form a thought, it is something entirely different from what you yourself perceive it to be in Maya. Let us simply suppose you form a thought—say, one of those we mentioned yesterday: You form the thought of space. The moment you think of space—even in the abstract way that the present age thinks of space—the moment your mind is filled with the thought of space, you find yourself, with your soul, in a spiritual region where Ahriman is waging a mighty battle against hierarchies of a different kind. And you could not have the thought of space without living in a region where Ahriman is fighting against other hierarchies. And when you give rise to a will—when, for example, you say, “I want to go for a walk!”—even if it is such an insignificant desire, as soon as you put this will into action, you find yourself spiritually immersed in a region where the Luciferic spirits are fighting against spirits of other hierarchies. World events, when viewed from the perspective of the science of initiation, are something fundamentally different from the shadowy reflection we perceive of them as we live as human beings between birth and death within Maya. For what we perceive as Maya is nothing other than something comparable to the ripples on the surface of the sea. Yesterday I presented this image to you: the ripples on the surface of the sea are, in essence, something that would not exist if there were not the sea beneath it and the air above it. The forces that give rise to these ripples are within the sea and in the air, and the ripples are merely the reflection of the forces converging from above and below. Thus, our life in Maya between birth and death is nothing other than the convergence of these spiritual struggles—which, in truth, take place in the realm of eternity whenever we think, feel, or will—and of that course of development in time that unfolds in such a way that we only come to grasp in old age what we conceived in our youth. Our life is, in essence, nothing if we do not view it from the confluence and union of these two true realities. Behind our life lie these two true realities.

[ 8 ] Now, it is not only that behind our lives, on the one hand, lies the passage of time—which would force us to wait and wait in order to comprehend something we had previously conceived—and it is not only the processes unfolding over time that play out throughout our entire lives in the same way between birth and death; rather, we ourselves stand within this reality, and our standing within it also appears to us only in its reflection. Our entire relationship to the world appears to us only in its reflection. Recognizing the truth always requires that we summon the strength to recognize it; it does not come to us if we merely wish to remain passive. To recognize the truth means to recognize ourselves as standing within the two currents I have indicated: in the realm of time and in the realm of duration. And as we stand within these two realms—and as a life unfolds within us that, in the face of the true forces, has no greater significance than the ripples of the sea have in the face of the storms in the air or the river surging up and down below—we spend our lives between death and birth, and then again between birth and death. The forces and powers are at work within us as we live our lives in this way. For there are always mighty forces at work: on the one hand, those that strive to tear us away from ordinary earthly life as it unfolds in Maya; but there are also other forces that do their utmost to tear us away from the realm of permanence.

[ 9 ] On the one hand—let’s keep this firmly in mind—we have the course of our earthly lives, in which we only come to fully understand what lies ahead for us in the future at a late stage. There are forces and powers that would limit us to what we are as human beings, that would shape us as human beings in such a way that this is what happens to us. This means, then, that there are forces and powers that want our lives to truly unfold this way, even in the world of Maya, and in the course of our earthly existence, so that as children we experience this or that but understand none of it—leading, as it were, a life of slumber until the age of twenty-eight—then begin to grasp something of what is happening to us in the present, and then, once we are past the age of thirty-five, begin to understand what came before. There are forces and powers that would like to make us merely temporal human beings—human beings who lead the first half of their lives more or less as a plant-like, sleep-like existence, and who, looking back in the second half of their lives, come to understand what took place during this sleep. There are forces and powers that would like to turn a person into a “dreamer” in the first half of their life, and in the second half into a being who remembers these dreams and thereby attains self-awareness only in the second half of their life. In practical terms, if these forces and powers were to act upon us alone, it would mean that we would not truly be spiritually born until the early thirties, or at the latest by the age of twenty-eight. Before that, we would walk around on earth as if in a daze.

[ 10 ] If things were as these beings would have it, we would be torn away from our entire cosmic past. Our present existence is, after all, based on the fact that—in the sense I described in *An Outline of Esoteric Science*—we have passed through a cosmic past encompassing the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras. During this passage through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras, beings of the higher hierarchies—who have a special interest in the emergence of human beings in the cosmos—beings who are the creators of humanity, developed us and placed us into earthly existence. In earthly existence, we are now, according to one current of thought, the kind of human beings described there. There are forces and powers that wish to shape us solely as such earthly human beings. If they were to prevail, they would tear us away from our Saturn, Sun, and Moon pasts. They would preserve us in earthly life; they would make us nothing but earthly human beings. This is what certain powers strive for. These are the Ahrimanic forces. Ahriman strives to make us mere temporal human beings; he strives to tear our earthly life away from our cosmic past. He strives to make the Earth a being entirely in its own right and to make us, along with it, entirely telluric, entirely earthly.

[ 11 ] There are other forces and powers that strive for the exact opposite. They seek to tear us away entirely from this earthly life, to endow us with a way of thinking, feeling, and willing that springs entirely and solely from the realm of eternity. These beings seek, without any effort on our part, to inspire in us—from childhood onward—a certain measure of thinking, feeling, and willing, so to speak, and then to sustain it throughout our entire life. If they were to prevail, our entire earthly life would wither away. We would eventually—indeed, very soon; it would have happened long ago had these beings prevailed—shed and cast off our physical corporeality, our bodily-spiritual being, and we would become pure spirits. But our task would not be fulfilled, insofar as this task stems from our earthly existence. We would be drawn away from earthly existence. For these beings, the Earth is too lowly; they hate the Earth; they do not like the Earth. They wish to lift humanity away from the Earth; they wish to give it an existence purely within the realm of eternity; they wish for humanity to cast off from itself everything that passes away in time, as I have described. These are the Luciferic beings. At first, the Luciferic beings strive for the opposite of what the Ahrimanic beings seek. The Ahrimanic beings seek to tear humanity away from the cosmic past along with the entire earthly existence and to preserve the earthly. The Luciferic beings strive to cast aside the Earth, to cast aside everything earthly from the human being, and to spiritualize the human being completely, so that nothing earthly affects him, so that he is not permeated and empowered by the earthly. They wish to have in him only a cosmic being; they wish for the Earth to fall away from evolution, to be cast aside into the vastness of the cosmos. While Ahriman wants the Earth itself to become independent—in a sense, to become the entire world for human beings—the Luciferic beings strive for the Earth to be cast aside, to be cast away from humanity, and for humanity to be raised up into the realm where the Luciferic beings themselves dwell, where they exist in the pure world of eternity. To achieve this, the Luciferic beings constantly strive to make the intelligence we possess as human beings automatic, and they seek to suppress our free will. If our intelligence were to become purely automated, and if our free will were suppressed, then we would be able to accomplish what is incumbent upon us through automatic intelligence—not out of our own will, but out of the will of the gods. We could become purely cosmic beings. This is what the Luciferic spirits strive for. They strive, so to speak, to turn us into pure spirits—beings who possess no intelligence of their own but only cosmic intelligence, who have no free will of their own, but in whom all thinking and acting proceeds automatically, as in the hierarchy of the Angeloi and, in many respects, in the hierarchy of the Luciferic beings themselves—though in a different sense. The Luciferic beings want to turn us into pure spirits; they want to reject the earthly experience. To this end, they want to create for us an intelligence that is entirely unaffected by any brain, and in which free will plays absolutely no part.

[ 12 ] The beings who gather around Ahriman—the Ahrimanic entities—wish, on the contrary, to cultivate the human intellect in a very special way, and to cultivate it more and more in such a way that it becomes increasingly dependent on all earthly existence; and they wish to develop the human will—the self-willed nature—in a very special way: in other words, everything that the Luciferic beings seek to suppress. The Ahrimanic beings—or rather, the serving spirits of Ahriman—wish to develop precisely this to its fullest extent. It is particularly important to bear this in mind. As a result, human beings would develop a kind of self-sufficiency. They would indeed be dreamers in their youth, but they would become quite intelligent people in their old age and would understand many things through their own experience; yet nothing would be revealed to them from the spiritual worlds. Let us not deny this: Everything that makes one wise in youth arises solely from revelation; one’s own experience only begins in old age. And the Ahrimanic beings want to confine us to this experience of our own. We would be beings with free will, but as spiritual-soul beings we would, at best, not be born until the age of twenty-eight. Just think about it: as human beings, we actually stand within the spiritual worlds, between these two directions of will. And as human beings, we have, in a certain sense, the task of living our way through the world in such a way that we follow neither Ahriman nor Lucifer, but find a balance between the two currents.

[ 13 ] One can imagine that even in our materialistic age, people would feel a sense of dread when they hear what is actually going on at the very core of human nature. Because people are horrified by this, the world order was arranged in such a way that, in ancient times, divine teachers imparted superconscious knowledge to humanity so that people would not have to face this spiritual struggle on their own. The initiates could then remain silent about this spiritual struggle in the face of the outer world. There have always been people who know—or knew—about this spiritual struggle, which, in a sense, takes place within every human being behind the scenes of life. There have always been people who were convinced that life is a struggle to wind one’s way through, that life contains a danger within itself. But more and more, the principle prevailed not to lead people to the threshold of the spiritual world, not to guide them to the Guardian of the Threshold, so that they would not—forgive the trivial expression, but it fits—be frightened. But the times when that was possible are over. For there will come a time in the future development of the Earth when a separation will have to take place between the children of Lucifer and the children of Ahriman—it must be one or the other. But to know that one is in the midst of it and, while in the midst of it, must lead one’s life with awareness—this must be stated today as a necessity of life for the human future and must be understood. There can be no mere science of silence for the future.

[ 14 ] Anyone who wishes to consciously immerse themselves in life must, in a certain sense—I would say—develop a cosmic sensibility. What does it mean to develop a cosmic sensibility? It means that one must learn to view the world somewhat differently than one is accustomed to viewing it from the perspective of Maya. When one walks through the world with the science of initiation, feelings arise that are not present as long as one lives merely within the knowledge of Maya. Feelings arise that the ordinary person regards not only as paradoxical, but as foolish, as fantastical—feelings that are, however, as justified as possible, precisely in the face of true reality. The one who, equipped with the science of initiation, encounters another human being, hovers back and forth between two sensations. “You, human being,” he thinks to himself, “you hover between two possibilities: either you succumb entirely to the temporal, you mineralize, you become rigid by becoming a mere earthly human and losing your cosmic past; or else you evaporate in the spirit into a spiritual automaton, failing to reach your goal as a human being, even though you are spirit.” — One might say: When one stands before such a human being, two human beings actually always emerge from within him—one who is in danger of becoming petrified in his form, of becoming dense and rigid in his form and fusing with the earth, and the other who is in danger of expel everything that tends toward mineralization and hardening, to become completely soft and jelly-like, and finally to dissolve as a spiritual automaton in the cosmos. These two beings actually emerge before those equipped with the science of initiation when one observes a human being. One always has—I would say—a fear—forgive me, one must choose words as the language offers them, so some things sound paradoxical when one points to the realm of reality—that the people one encounters might suddenly all become like those strange figures one sometimes sees on rock faces: knights on horseback, as if carved out of the rock, or other figures in the mountains—sleeping maidens and so on—that people might become something like that and merge with the earth’s rock, continuing to exist only as a mineralized form. Or they could expel that which draws them toward mineralization and become jelly-like: the organs that have contracted could swell up, the ears could grow enormous, even enveloping the larynx, and wing-like organs could grow out of the shoulders and fuse with all of this; all of this as soft as a jellyfish, yet dissolving as if from its own undulating waveform.

[ 15 ] And such feelings—I would call them cosmic feelings—are not limited to one’s experience of human beings when one approaches things with the insight gained through initiation; rather, one eventually extends what speaks through this cosmic feeling to everything. You have surely noticed: the tendency toward solidification, toward becoming rock-like, comes from Ahriman; the tendency toward volatilization, toward first becoming jelly-like and then dissolving, comes from Lucifer. This is not limited to what one encounters in human beings themselves, but extends to everything one encounters in the abstract. One learns to perceive everything linear as Ahrimanic, everything curved as Luciferic. The circle is the symbol of Lucifer; the straight line is the symbol of Ahriman. Let us look at the human head: this human head, with its tendency—as you can see from the skeleton—to petrify, to ossify, to cling to the form given to it by the earth, is an Ahrimanic formation. If the forces at work in the human head were active throughout the whole human being, the human being would take on the form of Ahriman, as you have him over there in our group, and he would be completely permeated—I would say—by stubbornness; he would possess a completely independent intelligence, but an egoistic intelligence, and a completely independent will, so that the will finds expression in the form itself.

[ 16 ] But if we consider the other human being—not the “head-human,” but the “limb-human” in the broader sense—we have the following idea: If the forces at work in the rest of the human being were to permeate the entire human being, then the human being would be shaped just as the figure of Lucifer is depicted over there in the group. And wherever we look—whether in the natural world or in social life—we can, equipped with the science of initiation, look into the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. We need only perceive the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And developing this perception is already inherent in the necessity of humanity’s future development. Human beings must learn to feel: A Luciferic being reigns throughout the world. This Luciferic being also reigns over human coexistence. And this Luciferic being seeks above all to eliminate from the world everything that constitutes lawfulness—everything that human beings have ever established as laws. In human coexistence, nothing is so abhorrent to Lucifer as anything that in any way smacks of law.

[ 17 ] Ahriman wants laws everywhere; Ahriman wants to simply impose laws everywhere. And yet human social life is woven together out of Lucifer’s hatred of lawfulness and out of Ahriman’s sympathy for lawfulness, and one cannot comprehend this life unless one understands it in dualistic terms. Ahriman loves everything that is external form, everything that can solidify. Lucifer—the “Luciferians”—love everything that is formless, everything that dissolves form, everything that becomes fluid and mobile. In life, one must learn to create a balance between that which seeks to solidify and that which becomes fluid.

[ 18 ] Look at the forms of our building: everywhere, the straight is transformed into the curved; balance is sought; everywhere, an attempt is made to dissolve what has solidified back into fluidity; everywhere, stillness is created within movement, but that stillness is in turn set in motion. That is the purely spiritual aspect of our building. As people of the future, we must strive to create something in art and in life, knowing this: down below is Ahriman, who wants to cause everything to solidify; up above is Lucifer, who wants to cause everything to evaporate; but both must remain invisible, for in the world of Maya, only the rippling of waves may exist within. And woe betide us if Ahriman or Lucifer themselves were to force their way into that which seeks to be life! And so our structure has become a state of equilibrium in the cosmos, one that has been wrested free, lifted out of the realm of Ahriman and the realm of Lucifer. It all culminates in the central figure of our group, in this representative of humanity, in whom all that is Luciferic and Ahrimanic is to be extinguished. And the fact that it is so—that it has been extracted from that which is to remain purely spiritual—is depicted in the group, where the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are also visibly set in opposition to one another in equilibrium, so that people may learn to understand it.

[ 19 ] This is the perspective that must be presented to people today so that they may learn to understand how to find a balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. The Ahrimanic always directs us—I would say, even in a soul-spiritual sense—in a straight line; the Luciferic always sets us in undulating or circular motion and multiplies us. If we have a one-sided tendency toward monism—if we strive to explain the entire world as a single unity—then Ahriman tugs at one of our ears; if we become monadists—one-sided monadists—and explain the world solely in terms of many, many atoms or monads, without any unity, then Lucifer tugs at the other earlobe. And when all is said and done, for those who are discerning, the situation presents itself in such a way that when monists argue with pluralists or monadologists, the person engaged in the argument is, for the most part, quite innocent in the matter; for behind him—if he is a monist—Ahriman tugs at his earlobe and whispers into his ear all those fine reasons, all that self-assured logic he marshals in defense of his monism; and if he is a Leibnizian or another kind of monadologist, there is Lucifer, whispering all those fine arguments into his ear in favor of the diversity or multiplicity of spiritual entities. For what must be sought is the state of equilibrium—unity in multiplicity, multiplicity in unity. But that is more uncomfortable than seeking either unity or multiplicity, just as it is generally more uncomfortable to seek a state of equilibrium than something on which one can rest comfortably, as on a lazy chair. People become either skeptics or mystics. The skeptics see themselves as free spirits who can doubt everything; the mystics see themselves as imbued with the divine, lovingly and knowingly embracing everything within themselves. Fundamentally, the skeptics are merely disciples of Ahriman, and the mystics merely disciples of Lucifer. For what humanity must strive for is a state of equilibrium: mystical experience within skepticism, skepticism within mystical experience. It does not matter whether one is Montaigne or Augustine; what matters is that what Montaigne represents is illuminated by Augustine, and what Augustine represents is illuminated by Montaigne. One-sidedness leads people astray toward one current or the other.

[ 20 ] What exactly is this “Luciferic” aspect? The Luciferic is actually there to drive us mad, to rob us of our own intelligence and free will, and the Luciferic spirits—the Luciferic element—actually want us to die as early as the age of twenty-eight; they do not want us to grow old. Incidentally, it is better to say “the Luciferic spirits” rather than “Ahriman,” because even though there are multitudes in Ahriman’s retinue, Ahriman presents himself as a unity—since he strives for unity—while the Luciferic element presents itself as multiplicity, since it strives for multiplicity; which is why it is pronounced as I have already done so in the course of today’s lecture. And if things were to go entirely according to Lucifer, according to the Luciferic spirits, we would become children, young men and maidens, and we would be gradually imbued with lasting knowledge; but at about twenty-eight years of age we would develop sclerosis and soon afterward become mentally stunted, so that whatever we are capable of developing as human understanding would be expelled precisely as sclerosis, and whatever we absorb in our youth could be automatically spiritualized. The Luciferic spirits would like to take us directly into the spiritual world and not let us first undergo the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan stages of development before we become cosmic beings. They regard this as unnecessary; rather, they strive to bring humanity away from Earth to the divine-spiritual goal using what it has already developed through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods. This is a current that wants to move as quickly as possible with humanity; it is a hasty current. The Luciferic spirits would like to rush ahead with us and lead us into cosmic existence as soon as possible. The Ahrimanic spirits, on the other hand, would like to erase our past and take us back with the Earth to the starting point; they would like to wipe out our past, preserve us on Earth, and then return us to where we were as Saturn beings. It is a retrograde movement, a retarding movement. Life is ultimately composed of a forward-moving and a backward-moving movement, and a state of equilibrium between the two must be found.

[ 21 ] Don’t say these things are difficult, because that’s not the point at all. Yesterday I showed you how people in ancient times experienced space and time—how they experienced space concretely, how they experienced time concretely. What we experience so abstractly, they experienced concretely. We must learn to look at our surroundings in such a way that we experience everywhere this interplay of solidification, evaporation, running away and recoil, and the balance between the straight and the curved. One can sleep while simply observing the world. But when one observes it while awake, it threatens—in its very essence—to freeze or vanish the moment it is thrown out of balance. We must develop this feeling, and it must become as vivid in the humanity of the future as the ancient sense of space and time was in the people of the past.

[ 22 ] One can perceive various things in our group. One can sense, at its center, the representative of humanity with his lines, planes, and forms, where everything Luciferic and Ahrimanic has been eradicated. The forms are there, but to the extent that they can be eradicated within the human form, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements have been eradicated. One can find Lucifer and Ahriman captured in their forms. One can sense this opposition within the central human being—between Lucifer and Ahriman—and can walk through the world with this feeling: one will find whatever corresponds to this feeling everywhere in the world. And whoever takes to heart what lives in these feelings—which one can develop through this Trinity—will gain much for a certain self-examination of life. Much will be revealed about the world when one views it in the light of these feelings arising from the Trinity: the Middle Man or representative of humanity; Ahriman; Lucifer. And just as the Trinity revealed itself to the ancient sense of space, and the unity of the Divine to the ancient sense of time, so must the highest of the world’s mysteries be revealed to the humanity of the future, enabling it to grasp concretely the solidifying, the evanescent, the fleeing, the pushing back, the straight-line, the curved, the law-loving, the law-hating, and so on—in a concrete way. To recognize the state of vibration everywhere in life—that is what matters. For life is not possible without such a state of vibration within it. After all, if you have a pendulum clock and want to avoid the oscillations, you can stop the pendulum—but then the clock will be of no use to you; for it to tell the time, the pendulum must swing. So the state of oscillation must be present in life. This must be recognized everywhere. We will continue discussing this tomorrow.