The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thirteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Let us now turn our attention to aspects of inner life that can bring us close to a form of self-observation in which our personal destiny reveals itself, as it were, like a flash of lightning in the sky of life. After all, when we approach our inner life with a more or less superficial self-awareness, our initial impression is that what is clearly and distinctly present in this inner life—so that we are fully awake to it—is only the sensory impressions and the thoughts we form about these sensory impressions. In fact, what we are fully awake to with ordinary consciousness is limited to these sensory impressions and the thoughts we form about them. Of course, in addition to this life of thought and this life of sensory impressions and perceptions, we also have, at first, our emotional life. But consider how indeterminately fluid this emotional life is, how little clarity and true wakefulness we actually possess within it. And anyone who can impartially compare the various aspects of life will have to admit: when approaching their feelings, everything here is indeterminate compared to thoughts. Admittedly, our emotional life is closer to us—personally closer—than our life of thought, but it is indefinite both in the way it unfolds and, I would say, in the demands we place upon it. When it comes to our thoughts, we do not so easily allow ourselves to deviate arbitrarily from the thoughts of other people when it comes to forming opinions about something that are meant to be true. There we carry within us the vague sense that our thoughts and sensory impressions must correspond with those of other people. With our feelings, it does not seem that way to us. We even grant ourselves the right to feel in a certain more intimate, personal way. And if we compare our feelings with our dreams, we can say: Dreams, to be sure, arise from our nocturnal life, while feelings come from the depths of the soul in our waking life; yet, just as dreams are vague in their imagery, so too are our feelings. And anyone who compares dreams that truly enter our consciousness with our feelings will sense how these dreams actually emerge within us as something just as vague as our feelings. So we can say: It is only in our sensory impressions and in our thoughts that we are truly awake, whereas in our feelings—even when we are awake—we are dreamers. Feelings turn us into dreamers even in ordinary, waking daily life.

[ 2 ] And what about our will! Yes, what good does anything do us—anything we say, “Now I want this!”—in our consciousness? When I want to grasp something, I first have the idea: I want to grasp this; then this idea fades into complete vagueness, and in ordinary consciousness I know nothing about how what lies in the “I want” enters my nerves, my muscles, and even my bones. When I imagine: I want to grasp the clock! — what do I know, in ordinary consciousness, about how it approaches my arm and how my arm then grasps it? I only perceive what is happening again through a sensory impression, through a mental image. What lies between these two impressions, I miss entirely in ordinary consciousness, just as I miss what I experience in the spiritual world during the night. Neither one nor the other comes to my consciousness. So we can say: In waking life, we actually have three states of consciousness that are entirely different from one another. In thinking, we are awake—truly awake; in feeling, we dream; and in willing, we sleep. We always sleep through the very essence of willing, for it lies deep down in the subconscious.

[ 3 ] However, there is something that rises up again and again from the depths of our soul even while we are awake: that is memory. We have thoughts about the present. This present makes a certain impression on us. But the past of this earthly life constantly resonates within this present in the form of thoughts and memories—of remembered thoughts. These remembered thoughts, as you know, are much fainter, much more vague than the impressions of the present. But they do rise up; they mingle with what constitutes our ordinary daily life. And when we allow memory to take hold of all that we have experienced in life, then we see in this workings of memory that our inner life, as it is contained within us, rises up once more. We feel that, in this earthly life, we are in truth actually that which we are able to remember. You need only imagine what becomes of a person when they cannot remember a certain period of their life, when their memory of that period is missing. One can meet such people. I’ll give just one example. A man in a relatively high-ranking position initially—as long as he was leading his normal life—had memories of everything that had happened, memories of what he had done while being raised as a child, memories of everything he had experienced during his student years, and of everything he had experienced in his professional life. But then, one day, his memory fades away. He no longer knows who he was. The peculiar thing—and I’m telling you a true story—is this: his intellect does not fade, nor does his ability to perceive the present, but his memory does fade. He no longer knows anything about who he was as a boy, as a young man, or as an adult; he can only imagine what is currently making an impression on him. And because he does not know who he was as a boy, as a young man, or as an adult, he cannot connect his present life to his past; that is impossible for him at this moment, when his memory is fading.

[ 4 ] It is precisely when one considers such a case that one can so easily see why one does something at any given moment. Not because the present compels one to do so, but because one has experienced this or that in the immediate earthly past. What do you think you would do—or not do—if you weren’t acting out of memory? Human beings depend on this memory far more than they realize. But this man had the misfortune one day of losing his memory, and now he acted solely on the impulses of the present, not on what his memory dictated. He got dressed and left his family, for he was connected to his family only through memory—and that memory had faded. Impulses arose within him that had nothing at all to do with his memories of his family. He had his present-moment awareness; that’s why he chose a moment—because it would have been unwise to do all this if the others had been there—a moment when they just happened not to be there. He was quite clever and sensible among them, only he had no memory. He got dressed, went to the train station, and bought a ticket to a very distant train station. What one can imagine was perfectly clear to him. He boarded the train and continued on his way. But the memory of what he had experienced kept fading away; even his memory of buying the train ticket faded. Only the present was ever there; his memory had been pathologically erased. Yet, at the same time, he was so absorbed in the present that even at the final station he knew: Now he was there; he could compare it to the timetable. What had already become second nature—what was no longer a memory, such as the ability to read—that had remained; only the memory had been erased. He got off. For the next train, he bought another ticket to the next station. And so he traveled around the world without really being himself. And one day, his erased memory returned; yet he knew nothing of what he had done from the moment he bought that first train ticket onward. One day, the memory returned. He found himself at a Berlin shelter for the homeless. There he found himself again. Only everything that had happened on the train and in the places he had been to had been erased; that did not belong to the present. Now imagine how a person becomes confused in such a situation, how a person loses confidence in themselves! Conclude from this how closely connected what we call our “self” is to the treasure of our memory. We simply do not recognize ourselves if we do not have the treasure of our memories.

[ 5 ] Well, what are memories like within us? They are psychological. These memories within us are of the soul; but in the whole human being, they are not merely of the soul—they also exist in another way. They are actually purely of the soul only in a person who has reached the age of twenty-one or twenty-two and continues to live beyond that. Before that, memories do not operate merely on a soul level. We must be very keenly aware of what I have said in recent days: that in the first seven years of our earthly existence, we have actually inherited our substantial physical body from our parents. When the teeth change, it is not merely the first set—the baby teeth—that are shed; rather, that is only the final act of shedding; the entire first body is shed. The second body, which we have until we reach sexual maturity, we build up from our spiritual-soul nature—as we brought it with us when we descended from the spiritual world into physical-earthly existence. But we have, of course, absorbed a great many impressions from our surroundings from birth until the change of teeth. We were absorbed in everything that flowed into us through the process of learning language. Just think how incredibly magnificent it is, what flows into us through language! Anyone who observes this impartially will surely agree with Jean Paul, who said that he was fully aware that he had learned more in the first three years of his life than in his three years of academic study. One can make this quite clear to oneself. For even though the academic years have now been extended to five or six—presumably not because one learns too much during them, but because one learns too little—one still learns only a vanishingly small fraction compared to what one has absorbed of what it means to be human during the first three years of life and in the years that follow the first three, up until the teeth begin to fall out. From a certain point on, this remains in a kind of vague memory. But just imagine how faded and vague these memories of the first seven years of our lives are compared to what comes later! Just try to compare them: Sometimes what comes to mind is like erratic fragments of memory, but it isn’t very coherent. Why is that? Well, what you absorb in the first seven years is fundamentally different from what you absorb later on. What you absorb in the first seven years of life works intensively to shape the structure of your brain; it becomes part of your organism. And there is a great difference between the relatively undeveloped brain we possess when we enter earthly existence and the beautifully developed one we have when we go through the process of losing our baby teeth. And from the brain, this permeates the rest of the body. It is indeed a magnificent thing to witness how this inner artist—whom we bring down from our pre-earthly existence into our physical body—works during the first seven years of life. You see, when we now begin to learn to read—not merely in terms of what a child takes in, such as being able to spell—it is a marvelous phenomenon to observe how, from the very first days of childhood, when everything is so undefined—the facial expression, the gaze, the facial gestures, the movement of the arms, and so on—all of this enters into the child. When we see how the impressions the child takes in enter into it, how magnificently the child’s very being becomes imbued with spirit, this is indeed one of the greatest things one can observe: this spiritualization of the child during the first seven years of life. When we observe this development of the child’s physiognomy or gestures from birth through the change of teeth in such a way that we decipher it—just as we decipher something in a book from its letters—when we know how to connect the successive forms of gesture and facial expression just as we can connect the letters of a word so that we can read the word, then we are looking at the brain at work—a brain that, in turn, is stimulated in its activity by impressions that develop into only sparse memories, because the brain—and thus the physiognomy—must be shaped in a malleable way.

[ 6 ] And as life continues from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, what is at work within the human being remains more or less hidden. Work continues; as I said, work on the development, formation, and shaping of the organism continues until the beginning of the twenty-first year; but from the age of seven onward, less work is done on the physical aspect of the human being than before, and from sexual maturity until the beginning of the twenty-first year, even less work is done. However, something else may take its place. If one has any sense at all in one’s mind for such observations of human beings and allows this sense to mature through this wondrous phenomenon—how the child’s physiognomy reveals itself month by month, year by year—especially if one has an eye for what is revealed in the child’s gestures, how the wonderfully spiritualized movement of the limbs emerges from the fidgeting, — so if one develops a keen eye for all of this, then one can deepen this perception, and one acquires, as it were, a more refined spiritual sensory organism within. One then has the opportunity, with a child who is developing between the ages of seven and fourteen—between the change of teeth and puberty—and whose physiognomy and gestures no longer develop in such a pronounced manner, but rather reveal this development in an even more veiled form— one then has the opportunity, when facing the child, to see through an inner feeling—which acts as surely as a spiritual eye—how the child is now continuing to shape its body in a more secretive way. And through this physical development between the ages of seven and fourteen—if one cultivates an intimate insight into it—one can develop the ability to look into the life prior to earthly existence, the time spent between death and a new birth, before descending into this earthly existence.

[ 7 ] You see, we must bring it back to such things. We must reach a point where we can say to a child in its first seven years of life: “You, human being, are surrounded not merely by nature, which reveals itself through sensory perceptions. In everything that reveals itself to the senses—in color, in form—in all of this, the spirit lives. — But it is wonderful to see the spirit speaking in everything, and then to perceive it reflected, as in a mirror image, in the way a child’s physiognomy takes on an ever more spiritual form. If one experiences this with true inner concentration and, with a certain reverence for life, can repeatedly awaken it in the soul, then—out of this reverence for life—one will come to realize, in the child between the ages of seven and fourteen, how a person’s pre-earthly existence—between death and a new birth—works within them while they are here on earth. And one will intuitively sense this outward physical development of the human being, feel that what now prevails within it is no longer what exists in the earthly environment, but rather that the second physical organism now governs the formation of the human being—an organism we ourselves shape only according to the model of the first. This can be something very great in life. And this is what humanity will have to learn: to look at the human being itself. Then life will experience that deepening without which the further progress of civilization is simply no longer possible. For you see, our civilization has become entirely abstract—totally abstract! In our ordinary consciousness, we can think of nothing at all anymore, and in fact think only of what is instilled in us. We no longer even come to such subtleties of perception as I have just described. That is why people today pass each other by without truly connecting. People learn many things about animals, plants, and minerals, but they learn nothing at all about the subtleties of human development. This entire life of the soul must become more intimate; it must become more refined and delicate within—only then will we once again perceive something of this life. And then—only then—will we look out from within human development itself toward pre-earthly life.

[ 8 ] And then comes what follows sexual maturity—the years between sexual maturity and the ages of twenty-one or twenty-two. Indeed, what does the human being reveal to us during this time? To the ordinary consciousness, he reveals a complete transformation of his life compared to earlier times, though in a rather crude way. We speak of the “rebellious years” or the “rowdy years,” thereby indicating that we are aware a change in life is taking place. The person brings their inner self more to the fore. But if we cultivate a more refined sensibility for the first two stages of life, what the person reveals after reaching sexual maturity will appear like a second person—truly like a second person. It becomes visible even through the physical human being as he stands before us; and what bursts forth in the boorish behavior, but also in many beautiful things, appears as a second, cloud-like human being within the human being. We need this contemplation of that second, cloud-like human being within the human being. Today, the question of this second human being is everywhere. But our civilization offers no answer to it.

[ 9 ] An extraordinary amount has taken place in the spiritual and physical development of the Earth at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ancient Eastern sages had already foreseen this when they spoke of the Kali Yuga—the dark age—coming to an end with the close of the nineteenth century and a new age of light beginning. This new age has indeed begun, though people are unaware of it because their minds are still rooted in the nineteenth century, and the ideas in their hearts and souls continue to roll along so sluggishly. But all around us there is already bright, luminous clarity. And we need only listen to what seeks to reveal itself from the spiritual world; we can hear it. And because the youthful mind is particularly receptive, an indefinable longing also arises in young minds at the turn of the century to get to know human beings more closely, to look at them more intimately. Anyone born around this time—around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—feels quite instinctively: One must know much more about human beings than people can tell you. — One lives and grows up this way, and one feels instinctively: One must know much more about human beings, but no one tells you what you are longing for. — One searches for what it means to be human; one does everything possible to seek it out. As a child or young person, one felt quite uncomfortable around older people, because one wanted to learn something from them, and they knew nothing about what it means to be human. For modern civilization cannot articulate anything; it has nothing to say about the human spirit. Just don’t compare this to earlier eras. Out of sheer sincerity, they knew how to tell young people a great deal about what it means to be human. When concrete ideas were still alive, the elders still had a great deal to say; now they had nothing to say. And so one wanted to run and run, anywhere, to learn something about what it means to be human. People became members of the Wandervogel, they became Boy Scouts; they ran away from the people who had nothing to say to them, wanting to search somewhere for something that could tell them something about what it means to be human.

[ 10 ] The youth movement of the twentieth century has its origins there. What, after all, does this youth movement ultimately want? Yes, it wants to grasp this cloud-like human being who emerges after puberty, who lives within the human being—it wants to grasp this human being! Young people want to be educated in such a way that they can grasp this human being. But who is this human being? What does he actually represent? What, so to speak, emerges from this human body—which we have seen take shape in its physiognomy and gestures, and in which we can also sense how, during the second stage of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, that which had a pre-earthly existence takes form? What now comes to light as something entirely foreign? What bursts forth from the human being when, having reached sexual maturity, he becomes conscious of his freedom, goes out to other people, and seeks connections out of an inner impulse that has given rise to that trait—inexplicable to him and to others—that very specific trait within the human being? Who is this human being, this second human being, who appears? He is the one who lived in the previous earthly life and who now steps, as if in a shadow, into the present earthly life. Humanity will gradually learn to take karma into account in what, in a peculiar way, bursts into human life around the time of sexual maturity. At that moment in life when a person becomes capable of bringing forth a human being like themselves, the impulses that they embodied in earlier earthly lives also emerge within them. But certain things must indeed come to the surface in the human mind so that a clear experience of what I have just described to you can occur.

[ 11 ] Consider the enormous difference that exists, in the ordinary mind, between self-love and love for others. Well, all people understand self-love quite well, because they all love themselves so much! There’s no doubt about that at all. Even those who think they don’t like themselves actually do like themselves. Very few people—and in their case, one must first examine their karma closely—very few people are there who say they don’t like themselves. When it comes to love for others, it’s a bit more difficult. It can certainly be very genuine, but nevertheless, it is very often clouded by an admixture of self-love. You like the other person because they do this or that for you, because they’re with you—for many reasons that are intimately connected to self-love. But you can learn selfless love in life. It does exist. One can learn, little by little, to drive self-love out of love. Then one comes to know what it means to lose oneself in the other, true devotion to the other. Now, you see, through this devotion to the other, through this selfless love, one can once again draw upon that feeling one must have for oneself if one wishes to sense one’s previous earthly lives. For suppose you are a person who was born in 1881 for my sake; you are living now, and you were once a human being in an earthly life—let’s say born in 737 and died in 799 at that time. Now this person, this personality B, is living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; back then, the personality that was you yourself was living in the eighth century. Both are connected by the life between death and a new birth. But if you want to gain an inkling of the one who walked the earth back then in the eighth century, you must love that person only as you would love another. For the one who walked the earth in the eighth century is within you, yet to you that person is, to the same degree, another—has become a stranger, just as another person, a second human being, is to you now. You must be able to relate to your previous incarnation just as you do now to another human being; otherwise, you will gain no insight into that previous incarnation. Nor will you arrive at an objective understanding of what appears within a person as a second, cloud-like being when they reach sexual maturity. But when selfless love becomes a power of insight, when self-love truly becomes so objective that one can observe oneself just as one observes others, then it offers the path to looking back, at least initially with a sense of intuition, into past earthly lives. This, in turn, must be combined with the kind of observation of human beings that I have described, through which the peculiar nature of the human being becomes clear. So, in essence, the urge of humanity—since the end of the Kali Yuga—to understand karma and repeated earthly lives is already clearly visible today. People simply do not express it that way because they do not feel it with such clarity. But imagine, for example, if a completely honest member of today’s youth movement were to wake up one morning with everything experienced during the night standing intensely before their consciousness for a quarter of an hour, and if during that time someone were to ask such a member of the youth movement: “What, exactly, is the essence of what you want?”—then that member would say: “I want to finally understand the whole human being who has gone through repeated earthly lives. I want to know what lives within me from earlier stages of existence. You know nothing of all this. You tell me nothing about it.”

[ 12 ] Today, there is an urge in the human mind to see through things, to understand karma. That is why now is also the time to encourage a historical perspective, such as the one I have presented to you in individual examples, which—if pursued with complete seriousness and intensity—leads one to view one’s own life in the light of repeated earthly lives and karma. That is why, in these lectures, I combine such historical reflections with a gradual guidance toward observing each individual’s own karma. That, after all, is the theme of these lectures. By the time of the final lecture, we hope to have progressed so far in our reflections that we have a clear idea of how one can sense one’s own karma within oneself. But this is only possible if one first views things within the broader framework of world history. Therefore, let me conclude this reflection—which initially sought to shed light on the inner life of the human being and on the inner dynamics of a hopeful era—by once again presenting a picture drawn from world history. Historical reflections must, in the future, relate to the whole human being; they must make it evident how, from one epoch of Earth’s history into the next, human beings themselves carry forward the impulses that live in history and in the unfolding of history. Let us consider the era in which Charlemagne lived in Europe—he reigned from 768 to 814—and for a moment, let all that you know about Charlemagne’s historical influence come to mind. Since we learned so much about Charlemagne in school, a whole wealth of images must now be welling up in the souls of my esteemed listeners! Now, at the same time as this Charlemagne—and alongside all the things that are now welling up in the minds of my esteemed listeners—there lived, over in the East, a very significant figure: Harun al-Rashid. Having fully emerged from the cultural tradition of his time, which had been shaped by Islam, he was inspired by the desire to cultivate this Eastern culture in a focal point, in a cultural center, in a very special way. And an extraordinary amount of activity took place at this court, for it was, so to speak, a confluence of all that could be achieved at the highest level in the fields of physics, astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, and geography during that era. Artistic, literary, historical, and educational endeavors—everything converged at the court of Harun al-Rashid. When one is able to witness such things, what one finds at this Eastern court is far more admirable than anything that took place at the court of Charlemagne—particularly in the spiritual realm. And indeed, many aspects of Charlemagne’s military campaigns are not exactly the sort of thing that can so immensely delight a modern heart. At the same time as Harun al-Rashid, another figure lived at this man’s court who, at that time, was merely a man of great wisdom, but who, in an earlier incarnation, long before, had been an initiate. I have told you that what was an initiation in a previous incarnation may recede into the background in a subsequent life. It was truly a magnificent academy that had been founded over there in the Orient. But this other individual was a kind of organizer: knowledge, art, poetry, architecture, sculpture in the form of that time—the sciences were organized by this man at the court of Harun al-Rashid.

[ 13 ] Both souls—Harun al-Rashid and his sage—now passed through the gate of death and continued to evolve. We know that this was the time when Arabism spread to Europe. This spread of Arabism came to an end. But both Harun al-Rashid himself and his sage remained with their works. While Harun al-Rashid, coming from the East, followed, so to speak, the course of Arabism through North Africa, on to Spain and further west into Europe, developing in the life between death and a new birth in such a way that his gaze was directed toward this outward expansion of Arabism, his wise counselor developed in such a way that he observed events from the East, across the northern shores of the Black Sea, all the way into Central Europe. It is indeed a very peculiar thing that one can also trace a person’s life between death and a new birth by observing what they look at in particular when they gaze downward. Admittedly, as I have explained to you, they see there the effects of seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, but this is connected to what is still taking place on Earth. Just as one looks up toward heaven here, one looks down upon the earth there when one is in the life between death and a new birth. And even though outwardly physical life had long since passed, the two continued their work. Outwardly, they took on entirely different forms. Harun al-Rashid became the founder of the modern worldview, Lord Bacon of Verulam. To those who can view things impartially, everything that Bacon imposed on the world truly appears to be a reincarnation of what was once pursued in the Orient. In the East, people were alien to Christianity. Outwardly, Bacon was a Christian, but inwardly—in what he sought—he was unchristian. The other man, who was his wise advisor, followed the path north from the Black Sea into Central Europe. This was the man who brought Arabism over in a completely different, much more inward way than Bacon, but who also brought Arabism into the modern era in a completely transformed form: Amos Comenius.

[ 14 ] You see, this is how such things interact in the dawn of modern intellectual life. Only then can one truly grasp this unfolding of history, in which, on the one hand, Christianity is forgotten and scientific education is externalized, while on the other hand, it is internalized all the more. Amos Comenius, in his incarnation—his embodiment that comes from the East and takes on precisely the profound life of Central Europe—works in harmony with what comes from the West. Thus, in Central Europe, what comes from both sides converges; but there is much that is Eastern in it. Not if one views the unfolding of history merely by opening a book and—yes, in a certain dialect this is called “ochsen”—I don’t know another word for it right now—and simply “ochst” what Lord Bacon is, then what Amos Comenius is; that is not how one comes to understand the inner development of the human race, but rather by observing how the various epochs are developed by human beings themselves, how the impulses from the past are carried into the future. Just try for a moment to understand what is happening there. Christianity has spread; in a certain sense, Christianity has taken hold in the regions of Central and Northern Europe. But something is making its way in through people like Bacon of Verulam—the reincarnated Harun al-Rashid—and Amos Comenius—the reincarnated wise counselor—something that is not directly Christianity, but which blends with all of this, something that works like the spiritual currents in the unfolding of the world. Only through this can one truly understand what is actually happening and the broader context of the world in which humanity is embedded.

[ 15 ] If we go back beyond Harun al-Rashid to a direct successor of Muhammad, we must realize what it was that Islam brought into Eastern spiritual life. If we trace the origins of Christianity, we see that it attaches a profound meaning to the Trinity. When we consider the spiritual aspect in all of nature’s life—that spiritual aspect which, as physical human beings, first places us in the world; that spiritual aspect which is the spirit of the laws of nature, the Fatherly Principle—we may ask ourselves: What would we be if only the Fatherly Principle were at work within us? — We would go through life from birth to death with the same necessity that operates in the world around us. But at a certain age we become free human beings; in doing so, we do not lose our humanity, but rather awaken to a higher form of human existence. That which works within us as we become free human beings, as we detach ourselves entirely from nature: it is the Solar Being, the Christ, the second aspect of the Trinity. But that which gives us the impulse to recognize that we do not merely live in the body, but—once we have passed through the body’s development—awaken again, are raised up as spirit, lives within us as the impulse of what is called the Holy Spirit. We can only recognize the entire human being through the interplay of this Trinity; there we view it concretely. Islam sets abstraction against this concreteness: There is no divine being other than the Father God alone, the one God. Everything is the Father. No triune form of the deity is to be acknowledged. — This direct protest against the Father God is Muhammad himself, as were his successors.

[ 16 ] In an age when the highest human capacity could develop only as something abstract and purely intellectual—something dry and sober—in such an age, people gradually came to identify more and more with thought, because they knew only this one abstract God; thus, humanity deified its own life of thought; deified—having forgotten that thinking has an altruistic streak—this human thinking, this human intellect. This capacity to think through the world in an abstract way was magnificently endowed in the successors of Muhammad in a unique way. One of these successors was Muawiya. I wish you could read up on the history. You would find a peculiar mental configuration in him—in a sense, the very beginning of a type of person who can be described as true abstract thinkers, people who want to shape everything in the world based on certain simple propositions. Muawiya, one of Muhammad’s successors, returned in our own age as Woodrow Wilson. The abstract nature of Islam came to life in him; the belief arose that one could shape a world out of fourteen cold, abstract, meaningless propositions. In truth, no illusion in world history was greater than this one, and in truth, almost all of humanity has fallen for no other illusion in world history quite as completely as for this one. And people refused to understand when, even before the war, in my lectures in Helsinki, I pointed out the inadequacy of Woodrow Wilson—for at that time he was at the height of his fame— people refused to understand when, time and again, wherever I could speak, I pointed out how the impending disaster was linked to the idolatry with which the world worshipped Woodrow Wilson.

[ 17 ] Well, now that we have reflected on Christmas, the time has come to speak openly about these matters; a time when historical reflections should also be conducted with regard to such things, which are directly effective impulses. For esotericism is meant to permeate our entire anthroposophical movement, so that what is hidden beneath the veil of outer physical becoming may be revealed. Humanity will only become truly attuned to world events and to what needs to be done when it begins to contemplate karma and when each individual views both themselves and world history in the light of karma.