The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we discussed how, in preparation for the forces of his karma, a human being initially spends the time between death and a new birth in what might be called the lunar sphere, and we saw how, in this lunar sphere, a human being encounters those beings who were once his fellow inhabitants on Earth: the great primordial teachers of humanity. This is the one type of beings that a human being encounters, one might say, immediately after death. Along with these beings are those whom you will find listed in my Occult Science under the name of the Angeloi. These are the beings who were never direct inhabitants of the Earth—that is, who never possessed an earthly body, nor even an etheric body such as that which human beings possess. For the other lunar inhabitants of whom I have spoken did indeed possess a human-like etheric body, even if not a physical human body.

[ 2 ] These Angeloi are the beings who guide us from one earthly life to the next. In the current cosmic period of development of our human existence, they are the guides leading us from one earthly life to another. And they begin guiding us as early as the lunar sphere. Now we have seen how human beings, in this lunar sphere, so to speak, determine their karma and absorb the inner impulses that then lead them to live out that karma. But whatever a person has brought with them through the gate of death in the form of wrongful deeds—deeds that cannot stand before the spiritual worlds—all of that must be left behind in this lunar sphere, so that, if I may put it this way, the evil karma is left behind in the lunar sphere. For at the very moment when a human being proceeds further in the life between death and a new birth, it would be entirely impossible for that person to remain burdened by what is the effect, the consequence, of their evil deeds.

[ 3 ] Then, once the human being has moved beyond this lunar sphere, he has once again expanded his inner life to encompass yet another region of the cosmos. He enters the sphere that can be called the Mercury sphere. There, at first, he does not live alongside the beings who inhabited the Earth with him, but rather alongside the beings of the hierarchy of the Archangels. It is there that he comes to know them. Of course, in all these realms he lives alongside those human souls who have now also passed through the gate of death. In the lunar sphere, this is the third type of beings with whom the human being lives: human souls who are disembodied, who, like him, have passed through the gate of death. We will see shortly why the effects—the spiritual effects—of the evil side of karma must remain in the lunar sphere. For now, let us content ourselves with this fact.

[ 4 ] As a person enters the sphere of Mercury, they are further purified and cleansed. For even after a person has, so to speak, shed what is morally unfit for the cosmos in the lunar sphere, they still carry within themselves the spiritual counterparts of their physical shortcomings and weaknesses. They carry within themselves the predispositions to illness and the consequences of illness that they have experienced here on Earth. Now, this may surprise you, but the fact is that we first shed our moral weaknesses during the life between death and the new birth, while the physical weaknesses are shed only later, namely in the Mercury sphere. There, the human being is purified and cleansed in their soul of everything they experienced in the soul during their earthly life: the most diverse disease processes. The human being is thus made completely healthy in the soul within the Mercury sphere. For you must bear in mind that the human being is, after all, a thoroughly unified being. From an occult standpoint, it is entirely incorrect to speak of the human being as a composite of spirit, soul, and body. The human being is not, as it were, composed of these three components; rather, when viewed, they appear on one side as body, on another as spirit, and in between as soul; but in reality, all of this is a single unity. When a human being is ill, the soul also experiences the illness; the spirit also lives through it. And when the human being has shed the physical body in death, the soul initially retains the effects of those experiences that the person went through during the course of the illness. But these are completely shed in the Mercury sphere under the influence of those beings we call the Archangels. Thus, as the human being gradually passes through the Moon and Mercury spheres, they become a being who no longer harbors any moral or physical weaknesses within themselves. In this state—by which time many decades have passed—they now enter the Venus sphere. And in this Venus sphere, what has now passed through the human being via the lunar and Mercury spheres is processed in such a way that, after passing through the Venus sphere, the human being can transition into the solar sphere. And we do, in fact, spend a large part of our lives between death and a new birth in this solar sphere.

[ 5 ] From the information I am providing you, you will see just how well-founded everything actually is regarding the structure of those ancient mysteries, which arose in ancient times from an instinctive yet magnificent and powerful clairvoyant wisdom. In those ancient times, for example, medicine was never studied the way it is today—by simply remaining within the physical world and studying the physical human being in terms of his symptoms of illness, experimenting to see what might help him, dissecting the corpse, studying the changes in the corpse compared to the normal organism, and so on. In the times of ancient mystery wisdom, this would have been regarded as something extraordinarily childish, for back then people knew exactly how to heal a human being. This can only be known when the beings of the Mercury sphere impart this knowledge, for it is given in the context of all cosmic processes. There, the human being is thoroughly healed. Therefore, when one looks into what I have described—from a different perspective—in my Occult Science as the oracles of the Mercury Mysteries, one perceives how things actually unfolded in these Mysteries, which essentially served ancient medicine.

[ 6 ] You see, yesterday we had to speak about the great primordial teachers. They were once fellow inhabitants of the Earth alongside human beings. They were everywhere humans were, for they populated the Earth alongside humans as a sort of second, ethereal human race. But in those ancient times, other beings also descended to be with humanity—beings that now by no means inhabit the Earth—for the sake of human consciousness, which was, admittedly, only a dull, dreamlike state. Of course, what one has to say about such things is not only a paradox but utter nonsense to a person who is so completely devoted to today’s materialistic science. But this “nonsense” is, in fact, the truth. The ancient initiates of the mysteries knew that only the supersensible beings of Mercury could provide insight into the processes of healing. That is why these Mercury Mysteries were organized in such a way that, through an appropriate ritual, inhabitants of Mercury could indeed descend onto the altar of the Mercury sanctuary, and the priests of the Mercury Mysteries could converse with the spiritual beings who descended in this way through the performance of the ritual acts. And what was considered medicine in those ancient times was indeed received in this sense within the Mercury Mysteries. The individual beings—who did not even always have to be the same, though they were perceived as such—who descended onto the altars were called none other than the god Mercury. The ancient mystery medicine was accepted in such a way that it was said: “This is what the god Mercury has communicated to his physician-priests.” And with this, healing took place.

[ 7 ] Even today, spiritual science is based on the fact that, through the appropriate preparation of the initiates, the beings of our cosmos descend to Earth. Those who are initiated into today’s mystery wisdom know very well that, there too, the essence lies in entering into a dialogue with the beings of the cosmos. But in today’s general human consciousness, the opposite prevails of what was certainly present in ancient times. Today people say: “He is a doctor because he earned his medical degree at the university.”—That is not what people said in ancient times. In ancient times, a doctor was someone who had spoken with the god Mercury. In the periods that followed, everything was already in a state of dissolution; all that remained were the traditions of what had once emerged in the mysteries from the dialogues between the priest-doctors and the god Mercury.

[ 8 ] Well, in the Venus sphere, the point is that what actually remains of the human being after he has shed his evil and his unhealthy states is transferred to the Sun sphere. You see, if we want to understand this, we must point to a peculiarity of the entire human being. Here on Earth, human beings always appear to us as a whole. A person must become such a great criminal that he is beheaded; only then, after the beheading, does he no longer appear as a whole in the physical body. But in the case of lesser offenses and crimes, no matter how severely he is punished, he always appears as a whole. Now, this is not the case with the spiritual-soul counterpart that the human being carries through the lunar and Mercury spheres. In a certain sense, the human being is no longer a whole human being when he arrives in the supersensible world with soul and spirit, after having passed through the gate of death and shed the weaknesses of evil and the weaknesses of illness. For the human being is identical with his evil; evil forms a part of his own being. If a person were merely a thoroughly evil villain, with nothing good or human within him at all, then he would have to leave his entire being behind in the lunar sphere; he would not be able to proceed any further; for to the same extent that we are evil, we leave our own being behind in the Moon. We are one, identical with that which is evil in us before the spiritual world, so that, in a certain sense, we arrive in the sphere of Venus as mutilated human beings. Now, in the sphere of Venus, the purest love indeed reigns in the most spiritual sense; Venus is the element of the purest love, and there, through cosmic love, that which has remained of the human being in this way is carried over from the sphere of Venus into solar existence.

[ 9 ] In the solar sphere, human beings must now actively work to bring about their karma. Our present-day physicists would be utterly astonished if they were ever to actually set foot on the Sun. For everything that has been discovered here on Earth about the Sun is incorrect. The Sun is said to be something like a glowing ball of gas. It is not that; rather, the situation is as follows—I’d like to start with a somewhat banal comparison—: If you have seltzer water in a bottle, you have to be very attentive and look right where the water ends if you want to see it; otherwise, it won’t appear to you at all. What do you actually see? You don’t see the water, but rather the bubbles of carbon dioxide, which are less dense than the water. You see the less dense part, and you don’t see the denser part. Now, what about the sun? When you look at the sun, you don’t see it because it is a dense, glowing ball of gas in empty space; rather, you see the sun because that area is particularly sparse. And now you must bring yourself to accept a concept that is not exactly commonplace.

[ 10 ] If you look that way, you’ll see into space. I don’t want to talk about the nature of space. Here you’re looking into the water; the pearls are recessed within the water (see drawing)—they’re thinner than the water. Where the sun is up above, it is thinner than space. You might say: Space is nothing anyway. — But really, where the sun is, there is even less than nothing! Well, people on Earth could, especially in this day and age, know from entirely different perspectives that there is also such a thing as less than nothing. If I have five marks in my pocket, then I have five marks. If I spend them little by little, I eventually have zero. But if I go into debt, then I have less than nothing. People today know what it means to have less than nothing. You see, that’s how it is: Where there is only space, there is nothing; but where the sun is, there is less than nothing. There is a hole in that space; there is no space at all there, and in this hole in space, spiritual beings do indeed live—the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. They live in this hole—though their existence extends everywhere—as the beings Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes, whom you will find described in my Esoteric Science. And together with them, human beings spend the greater part of their lives between death and a new birth. In union with them—and also with those human souls who have passed through the gate of death with them and with whom they have a karmic connection, as well as with other beings of whom human beings can scarcely have any inkling—karma is then worked out through collective effort for the next earthly life.

[ 11 ] Things are different in this region of the Sun than they are here on Earth. Why, then, do our intelligent natural scientists—and they really are intelligent—imagine the Sun as a glowing ball of gas? Because, driven by a certain illusory materialistic instinct, they want to be able to imagine something within the Sun where something physical is taking place. Nothing physical is happening in the Sun at all. That occurs, at most, in the solar corona—but not at all in the solar realm. That is a purely spiritual world. There are no laws of nature there. The materialists would like the laws of nature to prevail in the sun as well; but there are no laws of nature there—they are ruled out. There, the only laws that prevail are those that produce the corresponding karmic consequences from good deeds, and which—when a human being now enters the sun in a mutilated state—work through the love of the Venusian beings to compensate for his mutilation, which is the result of his evil karma. Of course, a person can certainly have respect and reverence for the many things that happen here on Earth, and when one describes life between death and a new birth, people will often have the impression: “We’re there for so long—what are we actually doing there?” — Yes, compared to what is done there so that we may experience the effects of karma in our next earthly life—compared to all these forces that surround us and pass through us during our existence in the Sun—everything that happens in Earth’s advanced civilization is a trifle. It’s just that everything there takes place in a purely spiritual way.

[ 12 ] You see, part of one’s karma is already being prepared in the sphere of Venus; even in the sphere of Mercury, some of one’s karma is already being worked out. In the following lectures, we will get to know a famous figure in world history who experienced their life karma during the nineteenth century because they had prepared part of it precisely in the Venus and Mercury spheres. And such individuals, who begin as early as the Venus and Mercury spheres to prepare the shaping of their karma for the next life, often become extraordinarily significant figures in their subsequent earthly lives. But for the vast majority of people, the main part of what plays out as karma in earthly life is worked out within the solar sphere, where we spend the longest time. We will have to go into more detail later; for now, I want to sketch a picture of how karma is gradually laid the groundwork for in the various spheres. However, to avoid contradicting descriptions I have given from other perspectives regarding life between death and a new birth, you must understand that as a person ascends into these spheres, they enter into entirely different worldly conditions. For example, when one has entered the solar sphere and then steps out of the Sun again and enters the Martian sphere, one has not completely left the solar sphere behind; rather, the Sun continues to exert its influence into this part of the cosmos that is remote from Earth. In the solar sphere, one deals only with what remains of the human being in terms of morality and what remains of the healthy aspects of the human being; the rest has been shed. The rest remains within the human being as a kind of incompleteness; but everything that is incomplete is supplemented in the solar sphere. There, in the solar sphere, we first live out the first half of our existence; there we prepare, in particular, what can then lead to the physical organization of the next human body. In the second half of our existence in the solar sphere, we devote ourselves—in union with the beings Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes, and in union with the human souls with whom we are karmically connected—to the development of the moral aspect, which then blossoms in our next life: the moral part of karma. However, it is specifically this moral aspect and the spiritual aspect of karma—for example, particular aptitudes for this or that—that are developed in the sphere of Mars, which we enter after the sphere of the Sun, as well as in the spheres of Jupiter and Saturn. And that is precisely what is so distinctive: that as we pass through these spheres, we come to recognize what the physical stars actually are.

[ 13 ] A physical star is a contradiction in terms. For what, exactly, is a star? Physicists today imagine that something is burning up there—a gas or something of that sort. If they were to approach the Sun, they would be utterly astonished to find, precisely in the Sun, not something burning, but a hole in space—so much so that they would shatter into dust finer than any dust conceivable on Earth. Only the spiritual would be there. The other stars we see are not that glowing, burning gas either; there is something entirely different there. Adjacent to this Earth that we inhabit—which has its physical substances and physical forces—is the universal world ether. This universal world ether becomes visible to us in that, when we simply look into the ether, our field of vision is limited; it then appears to be bordered by a blue hue. But to still believe at all that physical substances are floating around in the cosmos, as materialistic thinking imagines, is a childish notion. Physical substances are not floating around there at all; rather, where there is a star, there is something entirely different. In fact, as one proceeds further and further into the ethereal realm, one gradually emerges from space entirely into those spheres where the gods dwell. And now imagine very vividly a spiritual relationship between two people that finds physical expression. To put it dramatically, imagine that you are loved by another person; they caress you, and you feel that caress. It would be childish to imagine that, where the currents of caress flow, there is—if you do not look—physical matter. You are not being touched by physical matter at all; there is a process taking place, and what is essential is a soul sensation—that of being caressed. This is how it is when we look out into the etheric spheres. The gods, in their love, caress the world, so to speak. It is a very apt comparison: they caress the world; they touch it at certain points; only this touching lasts a very long time, because the gods are eternal. But this expression of love in the ether—that is what the stars are. That is truly what they are; there is nothing physical there at all. And to see a star means, in a cosmic sense, the same thing as feeling a touch that has arisen from human love. Thus we sense the love of the divine-spiritual beings when we look up at the stars. We must come to understand that the stars are merely signs of the presence of the gods in the universe. Our physical science will have much to learn if it wishes to move from its illusion to the truth. But human beings will not attain self-knowledge at all, nor will they come to know their own nature, until they have—for the sake of the extraterrestrial cosmos—completely transformed this physical science into a spiritual science. Physical science has meaning only for the Earth, for physical substance exists only on Earth.

[ 14 ] And so, as we leave the earth by passing through the gate of death, we enter more and more into a purely spiritual experience. The fact that, at first, our life during this retrograde passage through a third part of earthly existence appears different from physical life stems from the fact that the lunar sphere, with its substantiality, permeates us. This is brought about in a spiritual manner. And among the many things that must take place in the stellar spheres is precisely the working out of karma.

[ 15 ] Now I would also like to explain to you—so that these things may always support one another—how someone who is undergoing the science of initiation today arrives at such observations. I have, in fact, described this on several occasions in recent times—even in public lectures—how a person, when ascending to true supersensory knowledge through the methods you will find outlined in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, first looks back on their earthly life and surveys it as if in a tableau. Everything that is otherwise sequenced internally is present simultaneously as a powerful panorama of life, which one surveys all the way back to the birth of the “I”; yet, in a certain sense, the individual epochs of life remain distinct. One looks upon what one has experienced from birth until the change of teeth; one looks back and surveys as a self-contained sequence the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, then again up to the early twenties, and so on. But as one ascends further in one’s concentrations—that is, as one continues to apply the methods for perceiving the spiritual world to oneself—one comes to not only see what is there, but also, by surveying the tableau of life and first seeing what extends from birth to the age of seven, and later realizing that this human life disappears: one looks, as it were, right through one’s own life. There, in the place of one’s own life that corresponds to early childhood—where one previously saw what had unfolded within oneself from birth to the age of seven—once one has entered into empty consciousness and ascended to the realm of inspiration, the life and weaving of the lunar sphere appear. Thus, the science of initiation, as applied to the standard initiation of today, reveals the mysteries of the lunar sphere when, through inspired insight, one erases the tableau of one’s own life and sees what now shines forth in place of what unfolded in one’s own life from birth to the age of seven.

[ 16 ] If one then looks back on the period one lived through from the age of seven to fourteen, and erases it through inspired insight, one looks into the sphere of Mercury. Everything is linked to the human being itself. The human being is connected to the entire universe. If one truly comes to know oneself and finds one’s way within oneself, one comes to know the entire universe. And now I ask you to consider one thing. One truly develops a great respect for the ancient, instinctive science of initiation. It gave things their proper names, which have remained with us to this day. If only a few things were given names today, one would see chaos. For with today’s understanding and knowledge, no proper names can be formed. But when we look at life with an open mind, we gain respect and reverence for what the ancient science of initiation has accomplished. Out of instinct, it already knew what can now be established through all manner of statistics: that in early childhood, human beings suffer from childhood illnesses, are highly susceptible to disease, die easily, and are just as vulnerable again after reaching sexual maturity. The healthiest years of life are those from seven to fourteen, when mortality is low. This is where the sphere of Mercury is at work. The ancient sages knew this, and today we recognize it anew when we penetrate the mysteries of existence through modern initiatory science. One is moved to kneel before that which can step forth before us from the most sacred traditions of humanity.

[ 17 ] And then, when one looks back on what a person experiences from the age of fourteen to twenty-one and erases it through inspired insight, one penetrates the mysteries of the sphere of Venus. Once again, you see the ancient science of initiation at work in a wondrous way. A person reaches sexual maturity; love emerges. This marks the entry into that phase of life in which the mysteries of Venus are revealed when viewed through the lens of initiatory science. All the things that can be described in the way I have done are part of true human self-knowledge—the deepened human self-knowledge that arises in this way.

[ 18 ] On the other hand, when one looks back on the period from the age of twenty-one to forty-two and, through inspirational insight, erases one’s own imaginative experiences, one gains access to the mysteries of the solar sphere, and, as I have already indicated on several occasions in the discussions just concluded, by looking back on the period between the ages of twenty-one and forty-two, one can experience the insights of the Sun through a deepened self-knowledge. To attain the insights of the Sun, we must look back over a period of life three times as long as that required for the other celestial bodies of our planetary system. — And now consider the concrete reality. When I told you that a figure of world-historical significance had primarily worked through their karma in the spheres of Mercury and Venus, you can now see how such a thing is explored. One gains the ability to look back in one’s own life to the period between the ages of seven and fourteen, and then to the period between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one; then one erases these memories through inspiration, and thereby gains insights into the Mercury and Venus spheres. Through these insights, one sees how such an individuality works together with the other beings of the higher hierarchies and with other human souls, and how, as a result, their earthly incarnation came about—an earthly incarnation in the nineteenth century.

[ 19 ] If, however, certain beings have had to work particularly hard on their karma in the sphere of Mars, this is much more difficult to investigate. For if someone is initiated before the age of forty-nine, they cannot look back to the period of life that is now relevant here—the period from the age of forty-two to forty-nine. One must have passed the age of forty-nine in order to be able to erase what one was during that time; only then can one glimpse into the mysteries of the sphere of Mars. And if one is initiated after the age of fifty-six, one can look back even further to another period—the period between the ages of forty-nine and fifty-six—the period in which the karmic debts of Jupiter are worked out. And now you see the whole connection between these things. Only by looking back on the period of life between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three can the entire context be grasped and spoken of from a place of inner knowledge, for then one can look back upon the extraordinarily remarkable sphere of Saturn. For it is the karmic debts of Saturn that, in the most remarkable way, place human beings back into the world once again. But to grasp these connections through the science of initiation—certainly, one can already understand them through instruction—but to look into them independently and assess the entire context, one must oneself have reached the age of sixty-three. This means, then, that certain individuals appear within a specific earthly life—for example, a great poet, of whom I shall speak to you—who, through his abilities and his creative works, expresses in a very special way that aspect of his karma which could only have been worked through in the Saturn sphere.

[ 20 ] So we may say: Let us look up at our planetary system with the Sun—and we can look up in this way at the other stars as well, for the rest of the starry sky is certainly also connected to humanity; we will speak about that, too—when we look up there, we see human karma taking shape amidst many other phenomena emerging from the cosmos. This Moon, this Venus, this Jupiter are truly not merely what physical astronomy describes them to be. In them—in their constellations, in their mutual relationships, in their radiance, and in their entire existence—we must see the architects of human destiny, the clock of fate in which we can read our destiny. It actually shines down from the heavens in the constellations. This was also known in the past through the ancient, instinctive wisdom of the mysteries; but this ancient astrology—which is a purely spiritual science that worked with insight into the spiritual foundations of existence—has been passed down to posterity in a dilettantish and layman-like form. And only through anthroposophy will something emerge that, within the true spiritual context, will reveal how human life here on Earth is shaped according to the laws of the great clock of destiny.

[ 21 ] But let us consider human karma from this perspective. Let us look at a person whose karma we allow to influence us. It is indeed true that those who, through anthroposophy, are now developing a healthy worldview in contrast to our current, unhealthy one, not only arrive at different concepts and ideas about the world and humanity, but also at different feelings and sensations. For just imagine: When one comes to know a human destiny, one thereby comes to know the mysteries of the entire star system. One gazes upon the mysteries of the cosmos by contemplating a human destiny. Then there are the people of today who write biographies and have no idea what they are actually desecrating when they write biographies in their own way. In times when knowledge was sacred—because it was regarded as a radiance of the Mysteries—biographies were not written in the same sense as they are today. Biographies were written in such a way as to allow the reader to sense what was at work behind them from the mysteries of the starry world. When one surveys a human destiny, one sees within it, first of all, the working of higher beings of the pre-Solar era—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai; the working of higher beings of the Solar era—the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes; the beings who work out the entire karma, which is primarily Mars karma—the Thrones; the influence of those who work out Jupiter karma—the Cherubim; and the influence of those beings who work together with the human being on such karma as Saturn karma—the Seraphim. Thus, by having the image of destiny—a human karma—before us, we see within this human karma the ruling hierarchies. This human karma is, after all, initially a backdrop, a curtain, like a veil. If we look behind this veil, we see that Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi; Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai; Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones are weaving, working, acting, and doing their part within it. Every human destiny is, in truth, actually like something written on a sheet of paper. Imagine, for instance, that there might be a person who looks at something printed on a sheet of paper and says: “There are symbols here—first K-E-I and so on”; he understands nothing more than that; he is incapable of putting these letters together to form words. What an immense task it is to put these letters together to form words! We have, after all, twenty-two to twenty-eight letters—well, thirty to thirty-four, if we count them all—: Goethe’s entire Faust consists of nothing but these letters! Anyone who cannot read cannot read Goethe’s Faust; they have only these thirty-four letters, and see absolutely nothing in Goethe’s Faust. Now, if someone sees something else—because they can assemble these letters into that truly marvelous “Faust”—then even someone who has no concept of reading, a complete illiterate, might be terribly scandalized and say: “Here comes someone who wants to read all sorts of things into this ‘Faust’; they start with: ‘Now I have, alas…’ What a complete fool! — And yet, the entire Faust consists solely of these letters. Yes, you see, just as one usually regards human karma—a single human karma—one sees only letters. The moment one begins to read, one sees within it angels, archangels, archaic beings, and their mutual deeds. And so a single human life, in its destiny, becomes all the richer, just as this little book becomes all the richer from the moment one moves beyond the thirty-four letters and finds Faust within them. That which, from a purely earthly perspective—from cosmically illiterate ignorance—transitions into knowledge becomes immeasurably richer when one sees through what constitutes a destiny, recognizing that the letters are symbols of the deeds of the beings of the higher hierarchies.

[ 22 ] Karma, as the shaping of human destiny, is so immense, so sublime, so majestic to those who perceive it that simply by understanding how karma relates to the universe and to the spiritual cosmos, one grows into an entirely different way of sensing and feeling—not merely into theoretical knowledge. And everything one acquires through anthroposophy should not merely be the acquisition of theoretical knowledge; it should always work step by step to shape our way of thinking and feeling, leading us ever deeper with our hearts—from the earthworm’s sense of existence on Earth to a sense of existence within the spiritual realm. For we humans do not belong solely to the Earth; we belong to the spiritual realm. In that which is enclosed within our skin on Earth, we can indeed observe the interplay of the entire period we spend between death and a new birth. Within what constitutes human skin, all the mysteries of the world are always contained in a specific form. Human self-knowledge is by no means that trivial word people so often speak of, nor is it something sentimental. Human self-knowledge is knowledge of the world. That is why I have often written the following words in a book for friends when the occasion arose:

If you wish to know yourself,
look out into the vastness of the universe.
If you wish to see through the vastness of the universe,
look within yourself.