The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture is included in Volume 207 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 11 from the lecture series: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy Vol. I. Also known as: At the Center of Man's Being: I, or Fundamental Impulses in the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Times.

If an an oriental sage of early times, who had been initiated into the Mysteries of the ancient East, were to turn his glance towards modern Western civilisation, he might perhaps say to its representatives: “You are living entirely in fear; your whole mood of soul is governed by fear. All that you do, as well as all that you feel, is saturated with fear and its reverberations in the most important moments of life. And since fear is closely related to hatred, so hatred plays a great part in your whole civilisation.”

Let us make this quite clear. I mean a sage of the ancient Eastern civilisation would speak thus if he stood again to-day among Western people with the same standard of education, the same mood of soul, as those of his own ancient time. And he would make it plain that in his time and his country civilisation was founded on a quite different basis. He would probably say: “In my days, fear played no part in civilised life. Whenever we were concerned to promulgate a world-conception and let action and social life spring from it, the main thing was joy—joy which could be enhanced to the point of a complete giving of oneself in love to the world.” That is how he would put it, and in so doing he would indicate (if he were rightly understood) what were from his point of view supremely important constituent factors and impulses of modern civilisation. And if we knew how to listen to him in the right way, we should gain much that we need to know in order to find a starting point for trying to get a grip on modern life.

In fact, an echo of the ancient civilisation still persists in Asia, even though strong European influences have been absorbed into its religious, æsthetic, scientific and social life. This ancient civilisation is in decline, and when the ancient oriental sage says, “Love was the fundamental force of the ancient oriental culture,” then it must certainly be admitted that but little of this love can be traced directly in the present. But one who is able to discern it can perceive even now, in the phenomena of decline of the Asiatic culture, the penetration of this primeval element of joy—delight in the world and love for the world.

In those ancient times there was in the Orient little of what was afterwards required of man when that word resounded which found its most radical expression in the Greek saying, “Know thyself!” This “Know thyself” entered the historical life of man only when the early Greek civilisation set in. The old eastern world-picture, wide-ranging and light-filled, was not yet permeated by this kind of human knowledge; it was in no way orientated towards directing man's glance into his own inner being.

In this respect man is dependent on the circumstances prevailing in his environment. The ancient oriental civilisation was founded under a different influence from the sun's light, and its earthly circumstances were also different from those of Western civilisation. In the ancient East, man's inner glance was captured by all that he experienced in the surrounding world, and he had a special motive for giving over his entire being to it. It was cosmic knowledge that wove in the ancient oriental wisdom, and in the world-conception that owed its origin to this wisdom. Even in the Mysteries themselves—you can infer this from all you have been hearing for many years—in all that lived in the Mysteries of the East there was no fulfilment of the challenge, “Know thyself!” On the contrary—“Turn your gaze outwards towards the world and endeavour to let that approach you which is hidden in the depths of cosmic phenomena!”—that is how the precept of the ancient Oriental civilisation would have been expressed.

The teachers and pupils of the Mysteries were compelled, however, to turn their glance to the inner being of man when the Asiatic civilisation began to spread westwards; as soon, indeed, as Mystery colonies were founded in Egypt and in North Africa. But particularly when the Mysteries began to develop their colonies still further to the west—a special centre was ancient Ireland—then the teachers and pupils of the Mysteries coming over from Asia were faced, by virtue of the geographical features of the West and its entirely different elemental configuration, with the necessity of cultivating self-knowledge and a true inner vision. And simply because these Mystery pupils, when still living in Asia, had acquired knowledge of the outer world and of the spiritual facts and beings lying behind the outer world—simply by the strength of this fact, they were now able to penetrate deeply into all that exists in man's innermost being.

Over there in Asia all this could not have been observed and studied at all. The inward-turning glance would have been paralysed, so to speak. But by means of all that the men of the East brought to the Western Mystery centres, their gaze having long been directed outwards so as to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, they were now enabled to pierce through into man's inner being. And it was only the strongest souls who could endure what they perceived.

We can indeed realise when an impression was produced by this self-knowledge on the teachers and pupils of the Oriental Mysteries if we repeat a precept which was addressed to the pupils over and over again by the teachers who had already cultivated that vision of man's inner being, a precept which was to make clear to them in what mood of soul this self-knowledge was to be approached. The precept I mean is frequently quoted. But in its full weight it was uttered only in the older Mystery colonies of Egypt, North Africa and Ireland as a preparation for the pupil and as a reminder for every Initiate in regard to the experiences of man's inner being. The precept runs thus: “No-one who is not initiated in the sacred Mysteries should learn to know the secrets of man's innermost being; to utter these secrets in the presence of a non-Initiate is inadmissible; for the mouth uttering these secrets then lays the burden of sin upon itself; likewise does the ear burden itself with sin when it hearkens to those secrets.”

Time and again this precept was uttered from out of the inner experience to which a man, prepared by Oriental wisdom, was able to attain when he penetrated, by virtue of the terrestrial configuration of the West, to the knowledge of man. Tradition has preserved this precept, and to-day it is still repeated—without any understanding of its intrinsic nature—in the secret orders and secret societies of the West which, externally, still have a great influence. But it is repeated only from tradition. It is not uttered with the necessary weight, for those who use it do not really know what it signifies. Yet even in our own time this word is used as a kind of motto in the secret societies of the West: “There are secrets concerning man's inner being that can be transmitted to men only within the secret societies; for otherwise the mouth uttering them is sinful, and the ear hearing them is likewise sinful.”

We should be aware that in the course of time many men in Western countries (I am not speaking of Central Europe) learn to know in secret societies what has been handed down as tradition from the researches of the ancient wisdom. It is received without understanding, although as an impulse it often flows into action. In later centuries after about the middle of the 15th century—the human constitution became such as to make it impossible to see these things in their original form; they could be understood only intellectually. Ideas about them could be picked up, but a true experience of them could not be attained, though individuals had some inkling of it.

Such men have sometimes adopted strange forms of outer life, as for instance Bulwer Lytton, the author of “Zanoni.” What he became in his later life can be understood only if one is aware of how he received, to begin with, the tradition of self-knowledge, but how, too, by virtue of his individual constitution, he was also able to penetrate into certain mysteries. Thereby he became estranged from the ordinary ways of life. Precisely in him one can observe what a man's attitude towards life becomes when he admits into his inner experience this different spiritual world; not only into his thoughts, but into his whole soul. Many facts must then be judged by other than conventional standards.

Of course, it was something quite outlandish when Bulwer travelled about, speaking of his inner experiences with a certain emphasis, while a young person who accompanied him played a harp-like instrument, for he needed to have this harp-music in between the passages of his talk. Here and there he appeared in gatherings where everything else went on in a quiet formal, conventional way. He would come on in his rather eccentric garb and sit down, with his harp-maiden seated in front of his knees. He would speak a few sentences; then the harp-maiden would play; then he would continue his talk, and the maiden would play again. Thus something coquettish in a higher sense of the word—one cannot help characterising it in this way at first—was introduced into the conventional world where Philistinism has made such increasing inroads, above all since the middle of the 15th century.

Men have little idea of the degree of Philistinism into which they have grown; they have less and less idea of it just because it comes to seem natural. They see something as reasonable only in so far as it is in line with what is “done.” But things in life are all interconnected, and the dryness and sleepiness of modern times, the relation human beings now have to one another, belongs to the intellectual development of the last few centuries. The two things belong together. A man like Bulwer, of course, did not fit into such a development; one can quite well picture to oneself people of older times travelling about in the world accompanied by a younger person with some pleasant music. One needs only to perceive the distance between one attitude of soul and another; then such a thing will be seen in the right light. But with Bulwer it was because something lit up in him that could no longer exist directly in the immediate present, but appeared only as a tradition in the modern intellectual age.

We must, however, recover the knowledge of man that lived in the Mystery colonies of which I have spoken. The average man to-day is aware of the world around him by means of his sense-perceptions. What he sees, he orders and arranges in his mind. Then he looks also into his own inner being. The sense-perceptions received from outside, the ideas developed therefrom, these ideas as they penetrate within becoming transformed by impulses of feeling and of will, together with all that is reflected into consciousness as memories—here we have what forms the content of the soul, the content of life in which modern man lives and out of which he acts. At most he is led by a false kind of mysticism to ask: “What is there really in my inner being? What does self-knowledge yield?” In raising such questions he wants to find the answers in his ordinary consciousness. But this ordinary consciousness gives him only what originated in external sense-perceptions and has been transformed by feeling and will. One finds only the reflections, the mirror-pictures, of external life, when looking into one's inner being with ordinary consciousness; and although the outer impressions are transformed by feeling and will, man is still unable to tell how feeling and will are actually working. For this reason he often fails to recognise what he perceives in his inner being as a transformed reflection of the outer world, and takes it, perhaps, as a special message from the divine eternal world. But this is not so. What presents itself to the ordinary consciousness of modern man as self-knowledge is only the transformed outer world, which is reflected out of man's inner being into his consciousness.

If man really and truly desired to look into his innermost being, then he would be obliged—I have often used this image—to break the inner mirror. Our inner being is indeed like a mirror. We gaze on the outer world. Here are the outer sense-perceptions. We link conceptions to them. These conceptions are then reflected by our inner being. By looking into our inner being we get only to this mirror within. We perceive what is reflected by the memory-mirror. We are just as unable to penetrate into man's inner being with ordinary consciousness as we are to look behind a mirror without breaking it. This, however, is precisely what was brought about in the preparatory stage of the ancient way of Eastern wisdom so that the teachers and pupils of the Mystery colonies that came to the West could penetrate directly through the memories into the innermost being of man. Out of what they saw they afterwards uttered those words which were meant to convey that one must be well prepared—above all in those ancient times—if one desired to direct one's glance to the inner being of man. For what does one then behold within?

There, one perceives how something of the power which belongs to perception and thought, and is developed in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates below this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below the memory-mirror and work into the human etheric body—into that part of the etheric body which forms the basis of growth, but which is equally the source of the forces of will. As we look out into the sunlit space and survey all that we receive through our sense-perceptions, there radiates into our inner being something which on the one hand becomes memory-ideas, but also trickles through the memory-mirror, permeating it just as the processes of growth, nutrition and so on permeate us.

The thought-forces penetrate first through the etheric body, and the etheric body, permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in a very special manner on the physical body. Thereupon a complete transformation sets in of that material existence which is within the physical body of man. In the outer world, matter is nowhere completely destroyed. This is why modern philosophy and science speak of the conservation of matter. But this law of the conservation of matter is valid only for the outer world. Within the human being, matter is completely dissolved into nothingness. The very being of matter is destroyed. It is precisely upon this fact that our human nature is based: upon being able to throw back matter into chaos, to destroy matter utterly, within that sphere which lies deeper than memory.

This is what was pointed out to the Mystery pupils who were led from the East into the Mystery colonies of the West, and especially of Ireland. “In your inner nature, below the powers of memory, you bear within you something that works destructively, and without it you would not have developed the power of thought, for you have to develop thought by permeating the etheric body with thought-forces. But an etheric body thus permeated with thought-forces works on the physical body in such a way as to throw its matter into chaos and to destroy it.”

If, therefore, a person ventures into this inner being of man with the same frame of mind with which he penetrates as far as memory, then he enters a realm where the being of man has an impulse to destroy, to blot out, that which exists there in material form. For the purpose of developing our human, thought-filled Ego we all bear within us, below the memory-mirror, a fury of destruction, a fury of dissolution, in respect of matter. There is no human self-knowledge which does not point with every possible emphasis towards this inner human fact.

For this reason, whoever has had to learn of the presence of this centre of destruction in the inner being of man must take an interest in the development of the spirit. With all intensity he must be able to say to himself: Spirit must exist, and for the sake of the maintenance of the spirit matter may be extinguished.

It is only after one has spoken to mankind for many years of the interests connected with spiritual scientific investigation that one can draw attention to what actually exists within man. But to-day we must do so, for otherwise man would consider himself to be something different from what he really is within Western civilisation. Enclosed within him he has a fiery centre of destruction, and in truth the forces of decline can be transformed into forces of ascent only if he becomes conscious of this fact.

What would happen if men should not be led by Spiritual Science to this awareness? In the developments of our time we can see already what would happen. This centre which is isolated in man, and should work only within him, at the one single spot within, where matter is thrown back into chaos, now breaks out and penetrates into human instincts. That is what will happen to Western civilisation; yes, and to the civilisation of the whole Earth. This is evidenced by all the destructive forces appearing to-day—in the East of Europe, for instance. It is a fury of destruction thrust out of the inner being of man into the outer world; and in the future man will be able to find his bearings in regard to what thus penetrates into his instincts only when a true knowledge of the human being once again prevails, when we become aware once more of this human centre of destruction within—a centre, however, which must be there for the sake of the development of human thought. For this strength of thought that man needs in order that he may have a world-conception in keeping with our time—this strength of thought, which must be there in front of the memory-mirror, brings about the continuation of thought into the etheric body. And the etheric body thus permeated by thought works destructively upon the physical body. This centre of destruction within modern Western man is a fact, and knowledge merely draws attention to it. If the centre of destruction is there without any awareness of it, this is much worse than if man takes full cognisance of it, and from this conscious standpoint enters into the development of modern civilisation.

It was fear that seized upon the pupils of these Mystery colonies when they first heard of these secrets. This fear they learnt to know thoroughly. They became thoroughly acquainted with the feeling that a penetration into man's innermost being—not frivolously in the sense of a nebulous mysticism but undertaken in all sincerity—must arouse fear. And this fear felt by the ancient Mystery pupils of the West was overcome only by disclosing to them the whole weight of the facts. Then they were able to conquer by consciousness what arose in them as fear.

When the age of intellectualism set in, this same fear became unconscious, and as unconscious fear it still exists. Under all manner of masks it works into outer life. It belongs, however, to our time to penetrate into man's inner being. “Know thyself” has become a rightful demand. It was by a deliberate calling forth of fear, followed by an overcoming of it, that the Mystery pupils were directed to self-knowledge in the true way.

The age of intellectualism dulled the sight of what lay in man's inner being, but it was unable to do away with the fear. Thus it came about that man was and still is influenced by this unconscious fear to the degree of saying, “There is nothing at all in the human being that transcends birth and death.” He is afraid of penetrating deeper than this life of memory, this ordinary life of thought which maintains its course, after all, only between birth and death. He is afraid to look down into that which is eternal in the human soul, and from out of this fear he postulates the doctrine that there is nothing at all outside this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has arisen out of fear, without men having the slightest idea of this. The modern materialistic world-conception is a product of fear and anxiety (Angst).

So this fear lives on in the outer actions of men, in the social structure, in the course of history since the middle of the 15th century, and especially in the 19th century materialistic world-conception. Why did these men become materialists—why would they admit only the external, that which is given in material existence? Because they feared to descend into the depths of man.

This is what the ancient Oriental sage would have wished to express from out of his knowledge by saying: “You modern Westerners live entirely steeped in fear. You found your social order upon fear; you create your arts out of fear; your materialistic world-conception has been born from fear. You and the successors of those who in my time founded the ancient Oriental world-conception, although they have come into decadence now—you and these men of Asia will never understand one another, because after all with the Asiatic people everything sprang ultimately from love; with you everything originates in fear mixed with hate.”

These are strong words indeed, but I prefer to try to place the facts before you as an utterance from the lips of an Oriental sage. It will perhaps be believed that he could speak in such a manner if he came back, whereas a modern man might be considered mad if he put it all so radically! But from such a radical characterisation of things we can learn what we really must learn to-day for the healthy progress of civilisation. Mankind will have to know again that intelligent thinking, which is the highest attainment of modern times, could not have come into existence if the life of ideas did not arise from a centre of destruction. And this centre must be reckoned with, so that it may be kept safely within and not pass over into our outer instincts and thence turn into a social impulse.

One can really penetrate deeply into the connections of modern life by looking at things in this way. Thus the realm that manifests as a centre of destruction lies within, beyond the memory-mirror. But the life of modern man takes its course between the memory-mirror and the outer sense-perceptions. Just as little as man, when he looks into his inner being, is able to see beyond the memory-mirror, so far is he from being able to pierce through all that is spread out before him as sense-perceptions; he cannot see beyond it. He adds to it a material, atomistic world, which is indeed a fantastic world, because he cannot penetrate through the sense-images.

But man is no stranger to this world beyond the outer sense-images. Every night between falling asleep and awakening he enters this world. When you sleep, you dwell within this world. What you experience there beyond the sense-images is not the atomistic world conjectured by the visionaries of natural science. What lies beyond the sphere of the senses was in fact experienced by the ancient Oriental sage in his Mysteries. It can be experienced only when one has devotion for the world, when one has the desire and the urge to surrender oneself entirely to the world. Love must permeate the act of cognition if one desires to penetrate beyond the sense-perceptions. And it was this love that prevailed especially in the ancient oriental civilisation.

Why must one have this devotion? Because if one sought to pierce beyond the sense-perceptions with one's ordinary human Ego, one might be harmed. The Ego, as experienced in ordinary life, must be given up, if one wants to penetrate beyond the sense-perceptions. How does this Ego originate? It is brought into existence by man's capacity to plunge into the chaos of destruction. This Ego must be tempered and hardened in that realm which lies within man as a centre of destruction. And with this Ego one cannot live on the far side of the outer sense-world.

Let us picture to ourselves the centre of destruction in man's inner being. It extends over the whole human organism. If it were to spread out over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil. Evil is nothing else but the chaos thrust outside, the chaos which is necessary in man's inner being. And in this necessary chaos, this necessary centre of evil in man, the human Ego must be forged. This human Egohood cannot live beyond the sphere of the human senses in the outer world. That is why the Ego-consciousness disappears in sleep, and when it figures in dreams it is often as though estranged or weakened.

The Ego which is forged in the centre of evil cannot pass beyond the realm of the sense-perceptions. Hence to the ancient oriental sage it was clear that one can go further only by means of devotion and love, by a surrender of the Ego; and that on penetrating fully into this further region one is no longer in a world of Vana, of weaving in the habitual, but rather in the world of Nirvana, where this habitual existence is dissolved.

This interpretation of Nirvana, of the sublimest surrender of the Ego, as it occurs in sleep and as it existed in fully conscious knowledge for the pupils of the ancient oriental civilisation—it is this Nirvana that would be pointed out to you by such an ancient sage as I placed hypothetically before you. And he would say: “With you, since you had to develop Egohood, everything is founded on fear. With us, who had to suppress Egohood, everything was founded on love. With you, there speaks the Ego that desires to assert itself. With us, Nirvana spoke, while the Ego flowed out into the world in love.”

One can formulate these matters in concepts and they are then preserved in a certain sense, but for humanity at large they live in feelings and moods, permeating human existence. And through such feelings they bring about a living difference to-day between the East and the West. In the West, men have a blood, a lymph, that is saturated by an Egohood tempered in the inner centre of evil. In the East men have a blood, a lymph, in which lives an echo of the longing for Nirvana.

Both in the East and in the West these things escape the crude intellectual concepts of our time. Intellectual understanding draws the blood from the living organism, turns it into a preparation, places it under a microscope, looks at it and then forms ideas about it. The ideas thus arrived at are infinitely crude even from the point of view of ordinary experience. That is all one can say about it. Do you think that this method touches the subtly graded differences of the people who sit here next to one another? The microscope, of course, gives only crude ideas about the blood, the lymph. Subtle shades of difference are to be found even among people who have come from the same milieu. But these shades of difference naturally exist much more emphatically between the men of the East and those of the West, although only a crude idea of them can be had by modern thinking.

All this comes to expression in the bodies of the men from Asia, Europe and America, and in their relation to one another in outer social life. With the crude understanding that has been applied in the last few centuries to the investigation of external nature we shall not be able to tackle the demands of modern social life; above all we shall not be able to reach an adjustment between East and West. But this adjustment must be found.

In the late autumn of this year (1921) people will be going to the Washington Conference, and discussions will take place there about matters which were summed up by General Smuts, the Minister of Africa, with his instinctive genius. The evolution of modern humanity, he said, is characterised by the fact that the seed-ground for cultural activities, which has hitherto been in the regions bordering the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, is now moving to the Pacific. The culture of the countries situated round the North Sea has gradually spread throughout the West and will become a world culture. The centre of gravity of this world culture will be transferred from the North Sea to the Pacific.

Mankind stands face to face with this change. But men still talk in such a way that their speech savours of the old crude ideas and nothing essential is reached—although it must be reached if we are really to go ahead. The signs of the times stand with menacing significance before us and their message is: Until now only a limited trust has been needed between men, who in fact were all secretly afraid of one another. Their fear was masked under all sorts of other feelings. But now we need an attitude of soul that will be able to embrace a world civilisation. We need a confidence which will be able to bring into balance the relationship between East and West. Here a significant and necessary perspective opens out. The assumption to-day is that economic problems can be handled quite on their own account—the future position of Japan in the Pacific, or how all the trading peoples on earth may have free access to the Chinese market, and so on. But these problems will not be settled at any conference until men become aware that all economic activities and relations presuppose the trust of one man in another. In future this trust will be attained only in a spiritual way. Outer civilisation will be in need of spiritual deepening.

This lecture is the first of eleven lectures in the lecture series entitled, Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy Volume I. It is also known as, The Center of Man's Being, part 1, and Evil and the Power of Thought.

Were an Oriental sage of ancient times, initiated in the Mysteries of the East (we must go back to very ancient times of Oriental civilisation, in order to contemplate what I wish to say), to turn his gaze on present-day Western civilisation, he would perhaps say to those belonging to this Western civilisation: To say the truth, you live entirely immersed in fear, fear rules your whole soul-constitution. In the most important moments of life fear permeates all you do—all you feel, too, and its results; as fear is closely related with hatred, hatred plays an important part in your whole civilisation.

Do not misunderstand me. I mean: were a wise man of the ancient civilisation of the East to stand amongst Western people with the same degree of culture and the same soul-constitution he used to possess in his time, then he would speak in this way and would perhaps give people to understand that indeed in his time and in his country, civilisation was built up on completely different foundations. Probably he would say: In my days, fear really played no part in the life of civilisation. In my days, when a world-conception had to be brought into the world, so that deeds and social life may spring out of it, the chief part was played by a joyful kind of pleasure, able to transform itself into devoted surrender to the world, into love.

This is what he would feel, and from his point of view he would show us the most important component parts, the most important impulses of present-day civilisation. And were we able to listen to him in the right way, then we would acquire thereby a great deal of what we really need in order to find the point from which we must start.

After all, a reminiscence of the ancient civilisation is still to be found in Asia, although strong European influences have entered its religious, aesthetic, scientific and social life. This old civilisation is decadent and when the wise man of the ancient East declares that love was the fundamental force of the ancient civilisation of the East, we must indeed say: In the present time, little of it can be seen directly. But he who is able to see, can positively discern this influence of an original element of pleasure, joy, love of the world and towards the world, even in the manifestations of decadence to be found in Asiatic culture.

In ancient times, the East contained little of what was demanded of man later on, when the word resounded, appearing in its most radical form in the Greek saying: Know thyself. This “Know thyself” entered man's historical life only with the appearance of the earlier stage of Greek culture. This kind of human knowledge did not as yet pervade the encompassing, enlightened world-conception of the ancient East, for it really did not turn its eye towards man's inner being. In this connection man is dependent on the circumstances ruling in the world around him. The ancient Oriental culture was founded under another influence of the Sun's light on the earth, under another influence of the earth's condition, than those appearing in the later civilisation of by what surrounded him as world, and he felt particularly induced to devote himself to the world with all his inner being. What weaved in this old Oriental wisdom and in the conception of the world arising out of this old Oriental wisdom, was knowledge of the world. Even the Mysteries—you can gather it from all that has been said to you in this connection for quite a number of years—and that which lived in the Mysteries of the ancient East, did not contain a real following of the demand: “Know thyself!” “Turn your gaze into the world, try to approach what lies hidden in the depths of the world's manifestations,” this could be taken as a demand of the ancient Eastern civilisation. But when Asiatic culture began to spread more toward the West, and Mystery colonies were founded in Egypt and Northern Africa, the teachers and disciples of the Mysteries were compelled to turn their gaze toward man s inner being. Particularly when the colonies of the Mysteries extended still farther West—there was a special site in ancient Ireland—the teachers and disciples of the Mysteries who came over from the East had to face the necessity of man's knowledge of self, of a real inner contemplation of man, because of the geographical conditions of the West, and consequently, the completely different elementary formation of the Western world. What these disciples of the Mysteries had already acquired in Asia in the shape of outer knowledge of the world, and knowledge concerning spiritual facts and beings lying at the foundation of the outer world, this enabled them now to penetrate deeply into what is really contained within man.

It would have been impossible to observe it over there, in Asia. The gaze turned toward man s interior would have become, so to say, lifeless. But what was brought into the Mystery colonies of the West as an acquisition gained by contemplating the world outside, now made it possible to look into man's interior. Indeed, one might say that at first only the strongest souls could bear what could be seen in man's inner being. Man's inner being rose into the consciousness of mankind in these Mystery colonies of Eastern origin founded in Western countries. A word addressed to the disciples by teachers of the Mysteries who already possessed this look into man's interior can really show what an impression this self-knowledge of manmade on these Mystery teachers; the word I mean is often quoted. But only in the earlier Mystery-colonies of Egypt, North-Africa and Ireland it was uttered for the disciple's preparation, and the initiate's attention in general, in respect of the experiences of man s inner being. The word which was then uttered was this one: No one who is not initiated in the holy Mysteries should gam knowledge of the secrets of man's inner being; it is not allowed to speak of such secrets before a non-initiate; for sinful are the lips that utter these secrets and sinful the ear that hears these secrets.

This word has often been uttered from out [of] an inner experience, from out that which a human being, prepared by the wisdom of the East, could experience when he advanced to a knowledge of man through the earthly conditions prevailing in the West. This word has been preserved traditionally; to-day, however, it is in constant use, but misunderstood, in its innermost essence, in secret orders and in secret societies of the West, that have really quite an influence in the world outside. But it is no longer spoken with the required earnestness, because people no longer know what they are saying when they utter these words. But even at present it does indeed happen that this word is taken as a motto in the secret orders of the West: Secrets exist concerning man's inner being; they must only be revealed in secret societies, for sinful are the lips that utter them and sinful the ear that hears them.

It must be said that in the course of time, many people (not those of Central Europe, but those of Western countries) learnt a great deal within their secret societies of what had been preserved traditionally from the investigations of an ancient wisdom. This knowledge is taken up without being understood at all, and to a great extent, enters into human actions as an impulse. It is indeed so, that during the last centuries, already since the middle of the 15th century, man's constitution rendered it impossible for him to see these things in their original form; he could only conceive them intellectually. It was possible to have an idea of them, but not to experience them. Single individuals only had premonitions. But these premonitions led many a human being into the sphere of the experiences that count most of all. Such people have at times taken up the strangest attitude towards life, for instance, Lord Bulwer, the author of Zanoni. We can understand him in his later years only if we know that he first acquired a traditional self-knowledge of man, but owing to his particular individual constitution, he was already able to penetrate into certain mysteries. This made him go further away from what is natural in life. In his case it is possible to see what an attitude toward life is assumed by a man who assimilates this differently-organised spiritual world, not only in thoughts, but in the whole attitude of his soul, in his inner experience. Then, many a thing must be judged differently, but not in the usual narrow-minded way. Of course, it is awful that Bulwer went about speaking with a certain emphasis of his inner experiences, accompanied by a younger female being, with a harp-like instrument on which she played in the intervals between his sentences. He appeared here and there at parties where he had often appeared quite formally and properly, sat down in his somewhat strange attire and before him sat the “harp-girl.” He said a few sentences, then the girl played, he continued talking and then the girl played again. Thus, in a higher sense, he brought something frivolous into this narrow-minded world, this narrowmindedness into which people sank more and more, especially since the middle of the 15th century.

People do not realize the degree of narrow-mindedness they have reached, and will know less and less about it, because it is becoming natural. Only ones “behaviour is looked upon as sensible. But there is a connection in the things in life, and modern dryness and sleepiness, the attitude of people toward each other, these belong to the intellectual evolution that arose in the last centuries. There is a connection in such things. A man like Bulwer does not fit into this evolution; it is quite possible of course to imagine elderly people going about the world, accompanied by younger people playing pleasant music. But the difference between the two soul-constitutions must only be seen in the right light, then also this will appear in its right light. In Bulwer something shone forth that he could not have acquired directly in our modern intellectual age, but only traditionally. We must, however, learn again what man's knowledge of self used to be in the Mystery-colonies I have mentioned.

The every-day man of the present age sees the world around him through the outer physical sense-impressions. He combines what he perceives, with his understanding. He also sees into his own self. This is really the world looked over by man, out of which his actions proceed. The sense-impressions he receives from outside, what he evolves out of these sense-impressions in the shape of representations, and that part of the representations transformed by impulses of feeling and impulses of will and directed towards man's inner being, then ray back again into consciousness as memories. This is what constitutes the soul s contents, the contents of the life in which man lives in the present time and out of which his actions proceed. Present-day man will at the most ask with a false kind of mysticism what is really contained in his inner being and what self-knowledge reveals. In bringing forward such a question he wants to find an answer through his usual consciousness. But out of this usual consciousness nothing else except outer sense-impressions, transformed by feeling and will, can arise. Only reflections, mirrored images of outer life, can be found by looking into man's inner being with the usual consciousness, and even when the impressions from outside have been transformed by feeling and will, man nevertheless does not know how feeling and will really work. Because the outer impressions have been transformed, man often takes what he sees within him as a special message from a divine world, an eternal world and not as the mirrored image of the outer world. But it is not so. What appears to a normal consciousness as self-knowledge, is only the transformed world outside reflecting itself into his consciousness from his inner being. If man really wants to look within himself, then—I have often used this image before—he would have to break this inner mirror. We look at the world outside. We have the outer sense impressions and connect them with thoughts. These thoughts then get reflected from within. By looking inside us, we only come as far as this inner mirror. We see what this mirror reflects in the form of memory. Just as we cannot look behind a mirror without breaking it, so we cannot look into man s inner being. The preparation given be the old wisdom of the East to the teachers and disciples of the Mystery-colonies that came over to the West, enabled them to see clearly behind memory into man's inner being. What they saw there, caused them to speak the words that were really meant to explain how well prepared one had to be, especially in those ancient times, before looking into man's inner being. What can be seen within man?

There we can see how something pertaining to the force of thought and perception which develops in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates under this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below this memory-mirror and exercise an action on man's etheric body, in that part of man's etheric body which lies at the foundation of growth, and also at the foundation of the origin of will-forces'. When we look out into the sunlit space and survey all that comes to us through sense-impressions, something shines in our inner being, changing, it is true, into memory-thoughts on the one hand, but nevertheless oozes through the memory-mirror which pervades us just as the processes of nutrition, growth, etc. pervade us. The thought-forces first permeate the etheric body, this now exercises quite a particular action on the physical body. A complete change of the material being existing in man's physical body takes place in the physical body. Matter nowhere undergoes a complete destruction in the world outside. For this reason, the newer philosophy and natural sciences speak of the conservation of matter. But this law of the conservation of matter only applies to the outer world. Within man, matter is completely changed back into nothingness. Matter is completely destroyed in its essence. Our human, nature is based on this very fact: that we are able to throw back matter into chaos, destroying it completely deeper down than where I memory is mirrored.

This is what the disciple of the Mysteries who was led from the East into the Mystery-colonies of Ireland, and of the West in general, had to learn: within you, beneath your capacity of memory, you have something in you as man, that aims at destruction; if it would not be there, then you would not have been able to evolve your thinking. For your thoughts must develop through the forces of thought which permeate the etheric body. But an etheric body permeated with the forces of thought, has such an action on the physical body that matter is thrown back into chaos and destroyed.

When man therefore sets out in this frame of mind to investigate man's inner being, he will first come as far as memory, then he will enter a region where the human being wants to destroy, to annihilate what is there. Beneath our memory-mirror each one of use possesses the mama of destruction, of dissolution as far as matter is concerned, in order that man may develop his thoughtful Ego. There is no human self-knowledge that does not point out most earnestly this human fact.

Therefore, he that is to see this centre of destruction in man must take an interest in spiritual development. He must be able to say with the greatest earnestness: the spirit must subsist and for the sake of the spirit's existence, it is permissible that matter should be annihilated. Only when mankind will have heard for years about the things pertaining to spiritual-scientific investigations, it will be possible to show what is to be found in man. But it must be pointed out already to-day, for without this knowledge man will have illusions concerning himself, and concerning what he really is within the civilisation of the West. Within the world's evolution, man is the enveloping frame of a centre of destruction, and the downward forces can only be changed into ascending forces if man will realize that he envelops a destructive centre.

What would happen if man were not led to this state of consciousness through spiritual science? Well, already in the evolution of the present times we can see what would happen. What is to be found, as it were, isolated and separated from man, and should only exercise its action in man, play only this one part in man of throwing matter back into chaos, this instead comes out of the isolation and enters man's outer instincts. This will take place in genera! in the civilisation of the West and of the earth. It can be seen in everything appearing to-day as destructive forces, for instance in Eastern Europe. This is destructiveness thrown out from within and man will only be able to face the future in the right way, in connection with what goes on in him instinctively, if a real knowledge of man will again be there, if man will again be shown this centre of destruction inside him, which must however be there for the sake of the development of human thought. This very force of thinking man must possess in order to acquire the world-conception needed in the present age, this force of thinking which must exist in front of the memory-mirror, effects the continuation of thinking into the etheric body. The etheric body permeated with thought works destructively on the physical body. This centre of destruction exists in the modern man of the West; knowledge points it out. It is far worse, however, when this centre exists and man is unable to reach it with his consciousness, than when man acquires a fully conscious knowledge of this destructive centre and proceeds from this point of view into the modern evolution of civilisation.

Fear was the first thing that befell the disciples when they heard of these secrets in the Mystery-colonies. They learnt to know it thoroughly. They thoroughly learnt to know the feeling that fear arises when they looked into man's inner being, not dishonestly, in a hazy kind of mysticism, but honestly. The disciples of the Mysteries of the West were only able to overcome this fear because they were shown the full weight of the facts. Then they were able to conquer consciously what had to arise in the shape of fear.

Then, when the intellectual age appeared, this fear became an unconscious feeling and continues working as an unconscious fear. It exercises an action on life outside, hidden under all kinds of aspects. But it is in conformity with the present age to look into man's inner being. “Know thyself”, becomes a justified demand. Through the fear that was conjured up, and then through the overcoming of this fear, the disciples of the Mysteries were led to self-knowledge in the right way. The intellectual age dimmed the look for what was contained in man's inner being, but it was unable to drive away fear. Thus it came about that man stood and stands under the influence of this unconscious fear and reached the point of saying: There is nothing in man beyond birth and death. Man is afraid to look below the life of memories, the usual life of thoughts, which legitimately exists only between birth and death. He is afraid to look into what is really eternal in the human soul and on this fear, he establishes the teaching that there is nothing beyond this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has sprung out of fear and has not the slightest idea that it is so. This modern material world-conception is a product of fear.

Thus fear lives in the outer actions of human beings, in the social configuration and in the historical process ever since the middle of the 15th century; it lives especially in the materialistic world-conception of the 19th century. Why did human beings become materialistic, i.e. why did they only take into consideration the outer aspect in material existence? Because they were afraid to descend into the depths of man.

This is what the ancient sage of the East wished to express in the words: You modern people of the West live entirely in fear. You found your social organisations on fear, follow your artistic pursuits out of fear, and your materialistic world-conception is born out of fear. You and the successors of those who founded the old Oriental world-conception during my time, though they have fallen into decadence—you and these people of Asia will never understand each other, for in the people of Asia everything is born out of love, whereas in your case everything springs out of fear which is related with hatred.

Of course, this may sound drastic, but I am trying to bring it before you by making an old Oriental sage say it. Perhaps it will not appear too incredible if he were to speak like that supposing he were to arise again, whereas a present-day man would be looked upon as a fool were he to bring forward such things so drastically. But the drastic character of these things can show us what we have to learn to day for the sake of civilisation's healthy progress. Mankind must get to know again that, what constitutes the highest achievement of more recent times, namely intellectual thought, could not be there at all, unless the life of thought rises from within, out of a destructive centre which must be recognised in order to keep it in its place, inside, and prevent it extending to the outer instinct, and entering social impulses.

By looking over such things, it is possible to look deeply into the connections of life during more recent times. The world appearing as such a destructive centre, is to be found within us, beneath the mirror of memory. But the life of present-day man takes its course between that which the memory-mirror offers and the outer sense-perception. He adds to it a material atomistic world, which is a phantastic world because he cannot break through the representations gained through the senses.

But man is no stranger to the world lying beyond the outer representations gained through the senses. Every night, between falling asleep and waking up, he penetrates into this world. When you sleep, you are within this world. What you experience then, lies beyond the representations gained through the senses and is not the atomistic world set up by the dreamers of natural sciences. What the old Oriental sage experienced in his Mysteries, was the world lying beyond the sphere of the senses. It is only possible to experience it through devoted surrender to the world, when we are seized by the impulse of giving ourselves up completely to the world. Love must be active in knowledge if we wish to penetrate behind the sense-impressions. Especially the old civilisation of the East possessed this love in their knowledge.

Why must this resignation be acquired? Because, if we wish to get beyond the sense-world with our usual human Ego, we would suffer damage. We must give up our usual Ego if we want to enter this world beyond the senses. How does the Ego arise? Through the human being diving down into a chaos of destruction,—this is how the Ego is formed. This Ego must be steeled and hardened in that world existing within man as the world of a destructive centre. With this Ego it is not possible to live beyond the sphere of the outer sense-world.

Let us imagine the centre of destruction in man. It spreads over the whole human organism. What I am describing, is to be understood intensively, not extensively; but I will draw it schematically.¹ Here is the centre of destruction and here is the human frame. If that which is inside, were to spread over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil! Evil is nothing but the necessary chaos existing inside man, which has been thrown out. The human Self, the human Ego, must be hardened in this chaos, in what must exist in man and must remain in him as a centre of evil. This human Ego cannot live beyond the human sense-sphere in the outer world. Hence Ego-consciousness disappears in sleep and when it appears in dreams, its appearance is often a strange and a weak one towards its own self. The Ego which really undergoes a hardening process in the centre of Evil existing within man, cannot go beyond the sphere of the sense manifestations. Hence, the old sages of the East were of the opinion that only through resignation, only through love, it was possible to enter the supersensible sphere, only by giving up the Ego—and that on entering this world completely, one does not live in a world of Vana, one does not live in the woof of what is habitual, but in a world where this usual existence has been blown away, where there is Nirvana. This conception of Nirvana, the utmost resignation of the Ego, as in sleep, which existed as a fully-conscious knowledge in the disciples of the ancient civilisation of the East, this is what an old Oriental sage would point out, such a sage as I have placed hypothetically before your souls. He would say: With you, everything is grounded in fear, because you had to evolve the Ego. With us, everything was grounded in love, because we had to suppress the Ego. With you, an Ego desirous of asserting itself, speaks. With us, Nirvana spoke in the Ego's loving outpouring into the whole world.

These things can be grasped in thought and remain to a certain extent preserved there, but in the world of mankind they live as sensations, as fluctuating feelings and permeate human life. In such feelings and sentiments, they constitute what lives to-day on the one hand in the East, and on the other hand in the West. In the West, people have a kind of blood, a kind of lymph-fluid which is saturated with the Ego, hardened in the inner centre of Evil. In the East the human beings have a kind of blood, a lymph, containing the echo of the Nirvana-longing. In the present-day such things do not enter into the consciousness of the people of the East and of the West, owing to the uncouth way in which people think, for intellectual thought has something very uncouth. Intellectual thought somehow tries to bleed the human organism, to convert it into a microscopic slide and observe it under the microscope in order to form thoughts about it. The thoughts thus obtained, are terribly uncouth, even from an everyday aspect of experiencing things. This is what can at all be said in this connection: Do you think that it is able to grasp the finely-shaded differences to be found in the human beings that are for instance seated here next to each other? The microscope of course only gives unpolished, uncouth concepts of the blood and lymph. But finely-shaded differences even exist in people who come out of the same surroundings and conditions. But these shadings exist most intensively in human beings of the East and of the West; the intellect of course, can only grasp them quite bluntly and coarsely.

This is what takes place in the bodies of the Asiatic, European and American people and rules their reciprocal attitude in social life outside. The coarse, uncouth understanding employed in the last century for acquiring knowledge on nature outside, will not suffice to tackle the demands of a more recent social life and especially the adjustment between East and West will not be found. But this adjustment must be found.

Towards the end of the autumn people will be streaming to the Washington Conference where the statement made from out an instinctive genius by General Smuts, England's Minister for Africa will be discussed. He said that mankind's modern evolution is characterised by the fact that the starting point of civilisation's interests, which used to be in the Northern Sea up to now, will be transferred to the Pacific Ocean. A world culture is arising out of the civilisation of the countries lying around the Northern Sea, but the centre of gravity of this world-culture will be transferred from the North-Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

Mankind is facing this change. But people still talk to-day in such a way that what they say proceeds from the old coarse kind of thinking, so that nothing real and essential is reached; yet it must be reached, if we want to proceed. The signs of the times stand menacingly and significantly before us and tell us: So far, a limited trust and confidence sufficed in the intercourse of human beings that were really all of them afraid of each other in secret. Except, that this fear hid under the cloak of all kinds of other feelings. But now we require a soul-attitude able to encompass a world-culture. We need faith and trust of such a kind, that through them East and West will be balanced. Important points of view open out, which are just those we need. People to-day think that it is only meet and right to deal with economic questions—which position Japan will have in the Pacific Ocean, ways and means of organizing China in order that all the other nations on earth engaged in trade may find an open doorway, etc.

But these questions will not be settled in any world conference until man will have acquired consciousness of the fact that faith from one man to the other is a part and being of economics. This faith and trust will in future be gained only in a spiritual way. The civilisation in the world outside will need a spiritual deepening. To-day I only wished to show you from another side what I have often tried to assert here in this direction.

• 1. The schematic drawing can unfortunately not be reproduced.

This lecture was given at Dornach in September of 1921, and is included in Volume 207 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 11 from the lecture series: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy Vol. I It is also known as: At the Center of Man's Being: II, or Natural Law and Moral Law.

Yesterday I spoke of how we find within man a kind of centre of destruction. I showed how as long as we remain within the limits of ordinary consciousness, we retain memories of the impressions made upon us by the world, but that this is as far as we can go. We receive our impressions from the world; we turn them into experience through our senses and through our understanding, through all the manifold effects they have upon our soul; and later we are able to call up again pictures of what we have experienced. We bear these pictures within us; they are for us our inner life.

It is indeed as though we had within us a mirror; but one that works differently from the ordinary spatial mirror. For the ordinary mirror reflects what is in front of it in space, whereas the living mirror we carry within us reflects in quite another way. It reflects the sense-impressions we receive, and reflects them in the course of time. Something or other—at some later moment—causes this or that impression to be reflected back again into consciousness, and so we have a memory of a past experience.

If we break a mirror that is in space, then we can see behind it; we can look into a realm we cannot see when the mirror is intact. Correspondingly, if we carry out inner exercises of the soul, we come, as I have often suggested, to something like a breaking of the inner mirror. The memories can as it were cease for a time—for how long a time depends upon ourselves—and we can look more deeply into our inner being. As we do this, as we look within behind the memory-mirror, then what I described as a kind of centre and heart of destruction meets our gaze.

There must needs be such a centre within us, for only in such a centre can the Ego of man establish itself. It is a centre for the strengthening and hardening of the Ego. But, as I said, if this hardening of the Ego, if this egoism is carried out into social life, then evil ensues, evil in the life and actions of men.

You may see from this how complicated is the life into which man is placed. Here you have something which has its good use and purpose within man, for otherwise he would not be able to develop his ego, but something which must never be allowed outside. The bad man carries in into the outer world; the good man keeps it inside him. If it is carried outside, it becomes evil and wrong. If it is kept within, it is the very thing we need to give the Ego its right and proper strength.

After all, there is really nothing in the world that would not bring blessing to man, were it only in its right place! We should be thoughtless and unreflecting, if we lacked this centre within us. For this centre enables us to experience in it something we would never be able to experience in the external world. In the external world we see objects in a material sense, and following the custom of present day science we speak of the conservation of matter, the indestructibility of matter. But in this centre of destruction it really happens that matter is destroyed. Matter is thrown back into nothingness, and we have the power within this nothingness to cause the good to arise. We do so, if instead of instincts and impulses, which are bound to work in the direction of egoism, we pour moral and ethical ideals into the centre of destruction. Then, in this very centre of destruction, the seeds of future worlds arise. Then we, as men, take part there in the coming into being of worlds.

When we speak, as you may read in my Outline of Occult Science, of how our Earth will one day suffer dissolution, and of how out of all manner of intermediate states of transformation the Jupiter existence will eventually be evolved, then we have to see it in this way. The Jupiter existence will contain nothing but the new creation that is being formed to-day in man within this centre of destruction. It is being formed out of man's moral ideals, but also out of his anti-moral impulses, out of what works as evil from his egoism. Hence the Jupiter existence will be a battle between the good which man, already here and now, is bringing to birth by carrying his moral ideals into his inner chaos, and the unmoral and anti-moral which is due to the presence of egoism.

Thus, when we look into our deepest selves, we are gazing upon a region where matter is thrown back into nothingness.

I went on to indicate how it is with the other side of human existence, where we are surrounded with sense-phenomena. We behold these phenomena spread around us like a carpet or tapestry, and we apply our intellect to combine and relate them and discover within them laws, which we then call the laws of nature. But with ordinary consciousness we never get beyond this tapestry of the senses. We penetrate it just as little as we penetrate the memory-mirror within. With a developed consciousness, however, we do come through it. Then men of ancient Oriental wisdom penetrated it with a consciousness informed by instinctive vision. And then they looked upon a world where egohood cannot hold its own in consciousness.

We enter this world every time we go to sleep. When we fall asleep, the Ego is dulled, and the reason is that beyond the tapestry of the senses lies that world where, to begin with, the ego-power, as it develops for human existence, has no place at all. Hence it is that the ancient Oriental, who had a peculiar longing to live behind the phenomena of the senses, used to speak of Nirvana, of the end and disappearance of egohood.

This brings us to the great contradiction between East and West. In times past the Oriental developed a longing to see behind the sense-phenomena, and in so doing acquired a power of vision into a spiritual world which is not composed of atoms and molecules but of spiritual Beings. This world was there in visible actuality for the perception of the ancient Oriental. In our days the Oriental, particularly in Asia but also in other parts of the world, is living in the decadent stages of this yearning to reach the world behind the sense phenomena; while the man of the West has developed his Ego, has allowed that hardening and strengthening to take place within the centre of destruction which we have described.

In saying this we are already on the way to seeing what it is that must enter into man's consciousness, now and in the early future. For if the pure intellectualism that has been developing ever since the middle of the 15th century were to continue, mankind would fall into decline; for intellectualism will never help us to pass either behind the memory-mirror or behind the tapestry of the world of the senses. And it is essential that man should acquire once more a consciousness of these worlds. He must do so, if Christianity is again to become a truth for him; it is not a truth for him to-day. We can see this clearly when we look at the modern conception of Christ—if indeed modern times may be said to have any idea of Christ at all. The truth is that we are living in a stage of evolution when man cannot possibly come to an idea of Christ as long as he makes use only of the concepts which he has been developing since the 15th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries he has become incapable of forming a true idea of Christ.

Man looks round about him on the world, and uses the combining faculty of his intellect to build up natural laws. Following a line of thought that is perfectly possible for the consciousness of the present day, he comes to the point when he could say: “The world is permeated with thought, for the laws of nature can be apprehended in thoughts; they are in reality the thoughts of the world. If I follow up the laws of nature I am bound eventually to apply them to the coming into existence of man himself as a physical being, and then I have to admit that within the world I survey with my ordinary consciousness, beginning with sense-perception and going on as far as the memory-mirror, a spiritual element lives.” One must needs be ill, pathologically ill, if like the atheistic materialist one is not willing to recognise this spiritual element. We live in this world that is given for ordinary consciousness; we come forth into it as physical man through physical conception and physical birth. But what is observable within the physical world must be inadequately contemplated if one fails to see behind the physical world a universal spiritual element.

When we are born as little babies, we are really for external perception not unlike some creature of nature. Then out of this being of nature, that is virtually in a kind of sleep condition, spiritual inner faculties gradually develop. If we learn to trace back these emerging spiritual faculties in the same way that we trace the gradual growth of the limbs, we find that we must look for their source beyond birth and conception. Thus we come to the point of thinking in a living and spiritual way about the world, where before, in our consideration of external nature, we only built up abstract laws. We come, in other words, to an affirmation of what we may call the Father God.

Scholasticism held—you will remember—that knowledge obtainable by ordinary rational observation of the world includes knowledge of the Father God. It is indeed true that if anyone sets out to analyse the world as it is given for ordinary consciousness, and does not end by gathering up all the natural laws in what is called the Father God, he must be in some way ill. To be an atheist is to be ill; that is how I put it here once before.

With the ordinary consciousness, this is as far as we can go. With the ordinary consciousness we can come to the Father God, but no further. It is symptomatic of our times when a theologian of such standing as Adolf Harnack says that Christ the Son does not really belong in the Gospels; that the Gospels are the message of the Father, and that Christ Jesus has place in the Gospels only in so far as He brought the message of the Father God. Here you may see quite clearly how with a certain inevitability this modern thinking leads men to recognise even in theology only the Father God, and to understand the Gospels themselves as containing no more than the message and tidings of the Father God. Thus in the sense of this theology Christ is of account only as having appeared in the world and brought to men the true teaching concerning the Father God.

Two things are implied in this. First, the belief that the message of the Father God cannot be read by a study of the world in the ordinary way. The Scholastics still held that it could. They did not imagine that the Gospels were there to speak of the Father God; they assumed that the Gospels were there to speak of God the Son. That men can come forward with the opinion that the Gospels speak only of the Father God is proof that theology, too, has fallen into that way of thinking which has developed as the peculiarly Western method.

For in early Christian times, up to about the third or fourth century, when there was still a good deal of the Oriental wisdom in Christianity, men were occupying themselves intently with the question of the difference between the Father God and God the Son. These fine differences that engaged attention in the early Christian centuries have long ceased to have meaning for modern man, who has been occupied in developing egohood as a result of the influences I have described.

A kind of untruth has thus found its way into modern religious consciousness. Through inner experience, through his analysis and synthesis of the world, man comes to the Father God. From tradition, he has God the Son. The Gospels speak of Him, tradition speaks of Him. Man has the Christ, he wants to acknowledge Him—but through inner experience he has Him no longer. Therefore he takes what he should apply only to the Father God and transfers it to the Christ God. Modern theology has not the Christ at all; it has only the Father—but it calls the Father “Christ,” because it has received the tradition of the Christ Being in history and, quite naturally, wants to be Christian. If we were honest, we should simply be unable to call ourselves Christians in modern times.

All this is quite changed when we go further East. Even in the East of Europe it is different. Take the Russian philosopher of whom I have frequently spoken—Soloviev. You find in him an attitude of soul that becomes a philosophy and speaks with full justification of a difference between Father and Son. Soloviev is inwardly justified in so speaking because for him both the Father and the Christ are experiences. The man of the West makes no distinction between God the Father and Christ. If you are inwardly honest with yourselves, you will feel that the moment you want to make a distinction between the Father God and the Christ, the two ideas become confused and involved. For Soloviev that would have been impossible. He experiences each separately, and so he has still an understanding for the spiritual conflict that was fought out during the earliest Christian centuries, in the endeavour to realise in consciousness the distinction between the Father God and God the Son.

This, however, is the very thing that modern man needs to learn. There must again be truth in calling ourselves Christians. It must not be that we make a pretence of worshipping the Christ and attribute to Him only the qualities of the Father. But to avoid this we must bring forward truths such as I have been indicating to-day. That is the only way we can come to the twofold experience, the experience of the Father and the experience of the Son.

It will be necessary to change the whole form of our consciousness. The abstract form of consciousness in which modern man is born and bred, and which does not permit of more than the recognition of the Father God, will have to be replaced by a much more concrete life of consciousness. Needless to say, one cannot set things before the world at large to-day in the way I have described them to you here, for people have not yet been sufficiently prepared by Spiritual Science and Anthroposophy. Yet there are ways in which one can point out even to modern men how they carry in them a centre of destruction, and how in the world outside there is something wherein the Ego of man is as it were submerged, where it cannot hold itself fast—as in earlier times men were told about the Fall and other doctrines of that kind. We in our time have only to find the right form for these truths—a form which would enable them to find their way into ordinary consciousness; they must become part of ordinary consciousness, even as the doctrine of the Fall of man used to give instruction concerning a spiritual foundation of the world, in ways that were different in their effect from our teaching of the Father God.

Our modern science will have to become permeated with conceptions such as those we have expounded here. At present it is ready to recognise in man only the laws of nature. But in this centre of destruction of which I have been speaking the laws of nature are united with the moral laws; there, natural law and moral law are one. Within man matter is annihilated, and so are all the laws of nature. Material life, together with all the laws of nature, is thrown back into chaos; and out of the chaos a new nature is able to arise, filled through and through with the moral impulses we ourselves lay into it. As we have said, this centre of destruction is below our memory-mirror. So that when we let our gaze penetrate deep down below this memory-mirror, there at last we observe it, though it is always within us. A man is not changed by knowledge: he merely comes to know what he is like, what his normal condition is. And he must learn to meditate upon these facts.

When we are able to penetrate into this inner core of evil in man, and are able also to become conscious of how into this evil, where matter is destroyed and thrown back into chaos, moral impulses can find their way, then we have really found in ourselves the beginning of spiritual existence. Then we perceive the spirit within us in the act of creating. For when we behold moral laws working upon matter which has been thrown back into chaos, we are beholding a real activity of the spirit taking place within us in a natural way. We become aware of the spirit concretely active within us, the spirit that is the seed of future worlds.

With what can we compare this finding? We cannot compare it with what our senses tell us of external nature. We can compare it only with a communication made to us by another human being through speech. It is indeed more than a comparison when we say of that which takes place in us, when moral and anti-moral impulses unite with the chaos inside us, that it speaks to us. There we have something that is no mere allegory or symbol, but actual fact. What we can hear externally with our ear is a speech toned down for the earth-world, but within us a speech is spoken that goes out beyond the earth, for it speaks out of that which contains the seeds of future worlds. There we penetrate into what we must call the “inner word.” In the words that we speak or hear in intercourse with other people, hearing and speaking are separate and distinct, but in our inner selves, when we dive down below the memory-mirror into the inner chaos, we are in a region of being where speaking and hearing go on at the same time. Hearing and speaking are once more united. The “inner word” speaks to us, and is heard in us.

We have, in fact, entered a realm where it is meaningless to speak of subjective and objective. When you listen to your fellow man, when he speaks words to you that you perceive with your sense of hearing, then you know that his being is outside you, but that you have to give yourself up, to surrender yourself, in order that you may perceive his being in what you hear him saying. On the other hand, you know that the actual word, the audible word, is not merely subjective, but is something placed into the world. Hence we find that even with the toned-down words that we hear and speak in our intercourse with other men, the distinction between subjective and objective loses meaning. We stand with our subjectivity in objectivity; and objectivity works in us when we perceive. It is the same when we dive down to the inner word. It is not only an inner word; it is at the same time something objective. It is not our inner being that speaks: our being is merely the stage whereon speaks the world.

It is similar for one who has insight to see behind the tapestry of the senses a spiritual world, a world wherein spiritual Beings of higher Hierarchies work and weave. To begin with, he perceives these Beings by means of Imagination; but for his vision they become permeated with inward life when he hears the “word”, apparently sounding to him through himself, but in reality from out of the world.

By means of love and devotion and surrender, accordingly, man presses his way through the tapestry of the senses and sees beyond; and the Beings who reveal themselves to him when he thus offers up his own being in full surrender—these Beings he comes to perceive with the help of what he recognises as “inner word.” The world without begins powerfully to resound when the inner word is awakened.

What I have been describing exists to-day in every human being. Only, he has no knowledge of it and so he gives no thought to it. He must grow into this knowledge; must learn to have it in thought and remembrance. When we learn to know the world with the ordinary consciousness that provides us with our intellectual concepts, we really come to know only the passing and the past. What our intellect gives us, if we are able to look at it in the right light, is really a survey of a world in process of passing away. But we know that with the intellect—as I have said—we can find the Father God. What sort of consciousness, then, relates us to the Father God? The consciousness that the Father God is at the foundation of a world which reveals itself to our intellectuality is in course of wearing away.

Yes, it is indeed so—since the middle of the 15th century man has developed through his intellect a special faculty for studying and observing all that is dying in the world. We analyse and test the world-corpse with our intellectual scientific knowledge. And theologians such as Adolph Harnack, who hold by the Father God alone, are really expounders of that part of the world which is going down and will pass away with the earth and disappear. They are backward-pointing men.

How is it then, in the last resort, with a man who has completely absorbed the modern natural science way of thinking? How is it for him, when this way of thinking has been grafted on to him from early childhood? He learns that out there in the world are phenomena which arise and pass away, but that matter persists, matter is the indestructible thing. The earth may come to an end, but matter will never be destroyed. Certainly (he is told) a time will come when the earth will be one vast cemetery, but the cemetery will be composed of the very same atoms as are already there to-day. A man thus trained in thought centres all his attention on what is passing away, and even when he studies that which is coming into life, he really only studies how the dying plays into it.

An Oriental could never do this; we can see this even in the East of Europe, in the subdued philosophical feeling of Solovieff. He does not bring it to expression as clearly as it will have to be expressed in the future, but he shows unmistakably that he has still enough of the Oriental in him to see everywhere, within what is passing away and crumbling into chaos, the springing up of the new, the birth of what shall be in the future.

If we would understand how this really is, we must envisage it in the following way. All that we see of our fellow men with our senses will one day no longer exist; whatever makes itself known to eye, ear, and so on, will at some time in the future cease to be. Heaven and earth will pass away. For what we see of the stars by means of our senses—that too belongs to the things that are transient. But the “inner word” that is formed in the inner chaos of man, in the centre of destruction—that will live on after heaven and earth are no longer there; it will live on even as the seed of this year's plant will live on the plant of next year. Within man are the seeds of world-futures. And if into these seeds men receive the Christ, then heaven and earth may pass away, but the Logos, the Christ, cannot pass away. Man bears within him that which will one day be, when all he sees around him will have ceased to be.

We must put it to ourselves in this way. I look up to the Father God. The Father God is at the foundation of the world I can see with my senses. The world of the senses is a revelation of Him; but it is none the less a dying, sinking world, and it will drag man down with it if he is completely absorbed in it, if he is able to develop only a consciousness of the Father God. Man would then go back to the Father God; he would not be able to evolve any further. But there is also a new world arising, and it takes its beginning from man himself. When man ennobles his moral ideals through coming to a Christ-consciousness and receiving the Christ Impulse, when he forms and fashions them as they should be formed and fashioned through the fact that the Christ has come to earth, then something comes to life in the chaos within him, seed is sown for the future, a new world dawns within him.

We need to develop a keen and sensitive perception for these two worlds—the setting and the rising world. We must feel how there is in nature a perpetual dying. Nature wears, so to speak, a deathlike hue. But over against this there is also in nature a continual glow of new life, a continual coming to birth. This does not reveal itself in any hue visible to the senses; yet if we open our hearts to nature, it can be perceived.

We look out into nature and see the colours, all the colours of the spectrum, from the red at one end to the violet at the other, with all the shades between. But if we were now to mix these colours in a certain way—make them “colour” one another—they would receive life. They would together become the so-called flesh colour, Inkarnat, the colour that speaks out of man. When we look at nature, we are looking in a certain sense at the spread-out colours of the rainbow, the sign and symbol of the Father God. But if we look at man, it is the Inkarnat that speaks out of the inner being of man, for in man all the colours interpenetrate, and in such a way as to become alive. But when we turn to a corpse, this power to take on life is entirely absent. There, that which is man is thrown back again into the rainbow, into the creation of the Father God. But for the source of that which makes the rainbow into the Inkarnat, makes it into a living unity, we must look within ourselves.

I have tried to lead you, by what may have been at times a rather difficult path, to an understanding of this inner centre of man in its true significance. I have shown you how external matter is thrown back into nothingness, into chaos, so that the spirit may be able to create anew. Let us look at the whole process. The Father God works in matter, bringing it to completion. Matter confronts us in the external world in a great variety of ways, manifesting itself visibly to our senses. But within ourselves this matter is thrown back into nothingness and then permeated with pure spiritual being, filled through and through with our moral or anti-moral ideals. There is the upspringing of new life.

We have to see the world in this double aspect. We see first the Father God, creating what is outwardly visible; we see how this outwardly visible comes to an end inside man, and is thrown back into chaos. We need to feel quite intensely how this world, the world of the Father God comes to its end; only then we shall be able to reach an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. It will become clear to us how the very thing that comes to an end, in the sense of the creation of the Father God, is endowed with life once more by God the Son; a new beginning is made.

Everywhere in the Western world we can see how since the 15th century there has been a tendency to study and investigate only the corpse-like part of nature, only what is “setting” and passing away. In truth, this is all that is accessible to the pure intellect on its own account. All our so-called education and culture has been developed under the influence of a science that concerns itself only with what is dead. This kind of culture is directly opposed to real Christianity. Real Christianity must have a perceptive feeling for what is living, and for the distinction between everything that is springing into life and everything that is on the way down. Hence the idea most important for us to connect with the Mystery of Golgotha is the idea of the Risen Christ, the Christ who has vanquished death. Much depends on this. Christianity is not merely a religion of salvation; the Oriental religions were also that. Christianity is a religion of resurrection, a religion that awakens again to life that which would otherwise be nothing but matter crumbling away into nothingness.

Out in the cosmos we have the crumbling away of matter in the moon, and in the sun we have a perpetual coming into being, forever new and fresh. When we get beyond ordinary sense-perception and reach the point where Imagination is active, then we can see in the moon something that is for ever splitting up and scattering itself abroad. There, where the moon is situated, its matter splits up and disperses like dust into the world. The matter of the moon is perpetually being collected from its environment and then split up and scattered. If you look at the moon in the consciousness of Imagination, you have a perpetual convergence of matter to the place where the moon is; it collects there, and then it splits up and is scattered like dust into the cosmos. You see the moon like this: first a circle, then a smaller, closer circle, until the circle becomes the moon itself. Then it falls to pieces; it is strewn out over the cosmos. In the moon, matter cannot endure a centre. It concentrates towards the centre of the moon, but cannot endure it; it stops short there and disperses like cosmic dust. It is only to ordinary sense-perception that the moon appears quiet. It is not quiet. It is for ever compressing matter together and scattering it.

When we come to the sun, there we find it is all quite different. Through Imagination we are able to see how matter does not collect in this way at all; true, it does approach the centre, but then it begins to receive life in the rays of the sun that stream out from the centre. It does not split up and disperse; it becomes living, and spreads out life from the centre in every direction. And together with this life it develops astrality. In the moon there is no astrality; there is nothing; the astrality is destroyed. But in the sun astrality unites itself with all that streams out. The sun is in reality permeated through and through with inner life. The centre-point is not tolerated, any more than in the moon, but it has a fructifying influence. In the centre of the sun lives the fructifying activity of our cosmos. Thus in the contrast between sun and moon we can see a cosmic manifestation of the two opposite processes: in the moon matter is thrown back into chaos, while in the sun it is perpetually springing and welling up with life renewed.

When we dive down into our selves, then we look first into our own inner chaos, into our “moon.” That is the inner moon. Matter is destroyed there, as in the external world it is destroyed at one spot alone—where the moon is. But then comes the influence of the sun, entering through our senses; the sun penetrates into our inner “moon.” The matter which is dissolving there into dust is renewed by the sun. Here, within us, matter is constantly falling under the moon influence, and as constantly absorbing the activity of the sun. Such is the relationship in which we stand to the cosmos. We must become aware of these two opposite activities in the cosmos: the moon-nature directed towards pulverising and scattering, and the quickening, life-giving nature of the sun.

In this way we come to behold in that which is dispersing and crumbling to dust the world of the Father God, which had to be there until such times as the world changed into the world of God the Son. The world of God the Son has its physical source in the Sun-nature of the cosmos. Moon-nature and Sun-nature are related to one another as Father Godhead is to Son Godhead.

During the early Christian centuries these things were instinctively perceived. Now they must be known again with full consciousness and clarity of thought, if man wants to say of himself in all truth and honesty: I am a Christian.

Our last lectures showed the fundamental difference between man's whole conception here, from birth to death, and in the spiritual world, from death to a new birth. We have already explained that in the present epoch; i.e., ever since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, man may gain freedom during his existence between birth and death; everything on earth which he fulfils out of the impulse of freedom, gives his being, as it were, weight, reality and life. When we emancipate ourselves from the necessities of earthly existence, when we rise up to free motives guiding our will; that is to say, if we do not take anything out of earthly life for our will, then we create the possibility of independence also between death and a new birth. But in the present epoch this capacity of preserving our own independent existence after death calls for something which we may designate as the connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, for the Mystery of Golgotha may be viewed from many different aspects. In the course of the past years, we have already studied quite a number of these aspects; today we shall view the Mystery of Golgotha from a standpoint arising from the study of freedom and its significance for the human being.

Here on earth, between birth and death, the human being really does not have in his ordinary consciousness any conception of his own self. He cannot look into his own self. It is, of course, an illusion to believe, as external science does, that it is possible to obtain a knowledge of the inner constitution of the human organism by observing man's lifeless parts, indeed sometimes by studying only the corpse. This is an illusion, a deception. Here, between birth and death, man only has a conception of the external world. But of what kind is this conception? It is one which we have frequently characterized as the conception of illusion (Schein), of semblance, and I have again emphasized this yesterday.

When our senses are turned to the things which surround us in the world in which we live from birth to death, then the world appears to us as a semblance, as an illusion. This semblance may be taken into our Ego being. We may, for example, preserve it in our memory, and in a certain sense make it our own. But insofar as it stands before us when looking out into the world, it is an illusion which manifests itself particularly—as I have already explained to you yesterday—by disappearing with death and by re-appearing in another form; that is to say, we then no longer experience it within us, but before or around us.

If, however, in the present epoch we were not able to experience the world as an illusion during our existence from birth to death, if we were unable to experience this illusion, we could not be free. The development of freedom is only possible in the world of illusion. I have mentioned this in my book, The Riddle of Man, and have pointed out that in reality the world which we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures cannot force us, for they are only pictures, only a semblance. Similarly the world which we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures cannot force us, for they are only pictures, only a semblance. Similarly the world which we perceive is a semblance, an illusion. But the human being is not completely woven into this illusion of the world. He is woven into it only in regard to his perception, which fills his waking consciousness. But when he considers his impulses, instincts, passions and temperament, and everything that surges up from the human depths without his being able to grasp it in the form of clear concepts, at least in the form of waking concepts, then all this is not only a semblance or illusion; it is a reality, but one which does not rise up in man's present consciousness.

From birth to death, man lives in a real world unknown to him, one which cannot ever give him freedom. It may implant in him instincts which deprive him of freedom; it may call forth inner necessities, but never can it enable him to experience freedom. Freedom can only be experienced within a world of pictures, of semblance. When we wake up in the morning, we must enter a perceptive life of semblance, so that freedom may unfold. But this life of semblance, which constitutes our waking perceptive life, did not always exist in this form in mankind's historical evolution.

If we go back into ancient times, which have so often been envisaged in our lectures, to times when people still had a certain instinctive clairvoyance, or remnants of this clairvoyance (which lasted until the middle of the Fifteenth Century), we cannot in the same way say that man was surrounded only by a world of semblance. Of course, everything which man saw in his own way as the world's spiritual background, spoke through this semblance. He perceived the illusion, but differently; to him it was an expression, a manifestation of a spiritual world. This spiritual world then vanished behind the semblance, and only the semblance remained. The essential thing in the development of mankind is that in older times the semblance was viewed as the manifestation of a divine spiritual world, but the divine spiritual vanished from the semblance, so that man was confronted only by illusion, in order that he might discover freedom in this world of semblance. Man must therefore find freedom in a world of illusion; he does not find it in the world of reality which completely withdrew to the darkened experiences of his inner being; there, he can only find necessity. We may therefore say that the world which man perceives from birth to death—but everything I say applies to our age—is a world of semblance, of illusion. Man perceives the world, but in the form of semblance.

How do matters stand in regard to the life between death and a new birth? In our last lectures we explained that after death the human being does not perceive the external world which he sees here, between birth and death, but between death and a new birth he essentially perceives the human being himself, man's inner being. Man's world is then the human being. What is concealed here on earth, becomes manifest in the spiritual world. Between death and a new birth, man obtains insight into the whole connection between man's soul life and his organic life, or the activity of the single organs; in short, into everything which, symbolically speaking, lies enclosed within the human skin.

But we find that in the present age man cannot live in a world of illusion after death. He can only live in a world of illusion from birth to death. But between death and a new birth he cannot live in an illusion. When he passes through death, necessity imprisons him, as it were. Here on earth, he feels that he is free in regard to his perceptions, for he may turn his eyes to the things he wants to see; he may collect his perceptions in the form of thoughts, so as to feel the freedom of action in the sphere of thought; but between death and a new birth he feels a complete lack of freedom in regard to the world of his perceptions. This world takes hold of him violently, as it were. It is just as if he perceived as he would perceive here on earth if every sense perception were to hypnotize him, as if every sense perception were to take hold of him so as to render him unable to free himself from them of his own accord.

This is the course of man's development since the middle of the Fifteenth Century. The divine spiritual worlds vanished from the semblance which confronted him, but between death and a new birth, the divine spiritual worlds imprison him so that he cannot maintain his independence. I said that if we really develop freedom on earth; i.e., if we submit completely to the semblance in life, we may carry our own being through the portal of death. By envisaging still another difference between the present time and older human conceptions, we shall realize, however, what is needed in addition to this.

Whether we consider mankind in general, or the initiates and the Mysteries of ancient times, we find that the whole conception of the world had another direction from that of today. If we remain standing by what the human being has acquired ever since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, through the form of knowledge which has arisen since that time, we come across certain definite ideas on the development of the earth and of the human race. But man lost track of the conceptions which might have given him satisfactory indications about the beginning and end of the earth. We might say that he was able to survey a certain line of development; he looked back into history; he looked back into the geological development of the earth. But when he went back still further, he began to construct hypotheses. He imagined that the beginning of the world was a nebula, a kind of physical structure. Out of it developed; i.e., not really, but people imagined that this was so—the higher beings of the kingdoms of Nature: plants, animals, etc. Again, in accordance with conceptions of physics, people thought that life on earth and the earth itself would end by heat—again, a hypothesis. A fragment was thus surveyed, which lies between the beginning and end of the earth. Beginning and end became a hazy, unsatisfactory picture.

But this was different in a more remote past. In past times people had very clear notions of the beginning and end of the world, because they still saw the divine spiritual in the semblance. Bear in mind, for example, the Old Testament, or other religious teachings of the past. In the Old Testament we find ideas which are above all connected with the beginning of the world, and they are described in a form accessible to man, which enabled him to grasp his own existence upon the earth. The Kant-Laplace nebula instead, does not enable him to understand human life on earth. If you take the wonderful cosmogonies of the various pagan nations, you will again find that they enabled man to grasp his earthly existence. The human being thus directed his gaze towards the beginning of the earth and obtained thoughts which encompassed man. Conceptions of the end of the earth remained for a longer time in human consciousness. In Michelangelo's “Last Judgment,” for example, we come across ideas connected with the end of the world, which were handed down as far as our own epoch and which encompass man; for although the conceptions of sin and atonement are difficult, they do not do away with man.

But take the modern hypothetical conception of the end of the world: viz. that everything will end in uniform heat. Man's whole being dissolves, there is no room for him in the world. In addition to the disappearance of divine spiritual life from the illusion of perception, man therefore lost, in the course of time, his conceptions of the world's beginning and end. Within these ideas he could still assert himself and view himself within the cosmos as a being connected with the beginning and end of the earth.

How did the people of past epochs view history? No matter in what form they saw it, history was something which moved from the beginning to the end of the earth, and it obtained its meaning through the conceptions of the beginning and end of the earth. Take any of the pagan cosmologies: they will enable you to picture mankind's historical development. They reach back to ages when earthly life was still united with a divine spiritual weaving. History has a meaning. If we turn to the beginning and also to the end of the earth, history acquires a meaning. Whereas the conception of the end of the earth, as an imaginative conception contained in religious feeling, continued to exist even in more recent epochs; the conception of the end of the earth lived on in historical ideas, as a kind of straggler, even in more recent times. In historical works, such as Rotteck's “World History,” you may still find the influence of this idea of the world's beginning, which gives a meaning to history. The significant, peculiar fact is that at the same time in which man entered the stage of perceiving the world as an illusion, so that he perceived external Nature as an illusion, history began to lose its meaning and became inaccessible to man's direct knowledge, because he no longer had any notion of the earth's beginning and end.

Consider this fact quite seriously. Take the nebula at the beginning of the earth's development, from which undefined forms first condensed themselves, and then all the beings, rising as far as man. And consider the death by heat at the end of the earth's development, in which everything will perish. In between lies what we know, for example, concerning Moses, the great men of ancient China, the great men of ancient India, Persia, Egypt—and further on, of Greece and Rome, as far as our present time. In thought we may add all that has still to come. But all this takes place on earth like an episode, with no beginning and end. History thus appears to have no meaning. Let us realize this.

Nature may be surveyed, even if we cannot survey its inner essence. It rises up before us as a semblance together with the experience of our own self, between birth and death. Modern people simply lack the courage to admit that history has no meaning; it is meaningless, because man has lost track of the beginning and end of the world. He should really feel that mankind's historical development is the greatest of riddles. He should say to himself that the historical course of development has no sense.

Some people had an idea of this truth. Read what Schopenhauer wrote on the absence of meaning in history, when one sets out from occidental beliefs. This will show you that Schopenhauer really felt this absence of meaning in history. We should be filled with the longing to rediscover the meaning of history in some other way. The world of semblance enables us to develop a satisfactory knowledge of Nature, particularly in Goethe's meaning, if we give up hypotheses and remain by the phenomena; i.e., by the truths based on semblance, on illusion. Natural science may satisfy us, if we eliminate all the disturbing hypotheses connected with the beginning and end of the world. But we are then imprisoned, as it were, in our earthly cave and we do not look out of it. The Kant-Laplace theory and the end of the world by heat block our outlook into Time's cosmic distances.

This is after all the situation of present-day mankind from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness: consequently mankind is threatened by a certain danger. It cannot quite penetrate into the mere world of phenomena; above all it is unable to penetrate into this world of semblance with the forces of inner life. Man would like to submit to the inner necessity, to his instincts, impulses, and passions. Today we do not see much of all that may be realized on the basis of free impulses born out of pure thinking. But in the same degree in which man lacks freedom during his life from birth to death, he is overcome by lack of freedom, by the necessity of perception arising out of the hypnotizing coercion which exists between death and a new birth. Man is therefore threatened by the danger of passing through the portal of death without taking with him his own being and without penetrating into a free realm in regard to his perceptive world, but into something which submerges him into a state of coercion, which makes him, as it were, grow rigid in the external world.

The impulse which must in future enter the life of mankind is that the divine spiritual should appear to man in a new way, not in the same way in which it appeared in ancient times. In past epochs man could imagine a spiritual essence in the physical at the beginning and end of the earth, to which he was united and which did not exclude him. But this must take place in an ever-growing measure from the centre, instead of from the beginning and end. Even as in the Old Testament the beginning of the world was looked upon as a genesis of the human being, in which his existence was ensured, even as the pagan cosmogonies spoke of mankind's development out of a divine-spiritual existence, even as the contemplation of the end of the earth, which—as stated—was still contained in the conceptions of the end of the world and the final judgment, which do not deprive man of his own self, so modern times must find in a right conception of the Mystery of Golgotha, at the centre of the earth's development, that which again enables man to see divine life united with earthly life.

We should grasp in the right way that God passed through Man in the Mystery of Golgotha. This will replace what we lost in regard to the beginning and end of the earth. But there is an essential difference between the way in which we should now look upon the Mystery of Golgotha and the old way of looking at the beginning and end of the earth.

Try to penetrate into the way in which the pagan cosmogonies arose. In the present time we often come across conceptions stating that these pagan cosmogonies were thought out in the same way in which modern men freely join thought to thought and disconnect them again. But this is an erroneous University conception which has no reasonable foundation. We find instead that in the past, man gave himself up entirely to the contemplation of the world; he could see the beginning of the world only in the way in which it appeared to him in the cosmogony and in the myths. There was no freedom in this; it was altogether the result of necessity. Man had to envisage the beginning of the earth, he could not refrain from doing so. In the present time, we no longer conceive in the right way how in the past man's soul confronted the beginning of the world and, in a certain respect, also the end of the world with the aid of an instinctive knowledge. Today it is impossible for the human soul to envisage the Mystery of Golgotha in this way. This constitutes the great difference between Christianity and the ancient teachings of the Gods. If we wish to find Christ, we must find him in freedom and turn to the Mystery of Golgotha freely. But the content of the ancient cosmogonies was forced upon man, whereas the Mystery of Golgotha does not force itself upon him. He must approach the Mystery of Golgotha in freedom and his being must pass through a kind of resurrection.

Man is led to such freedom by an activity which I have recently designated in anthroposophical spiritual science as the cognitive activity. A clergyman who believes that he may gain knowledge of the “Akasha Chronicle” through an “illustrated luxury edition”, that is to say without any inner activity on his part, for the grasping of truths which should appear before his soul in the form of concepts and become images—such a clergyman would simply show that he is predisposed to grasp the world only in a pagan way, not in a Christian way; for Christ must be reached in inner freedom. Particularly the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha should be faced, constitutes the most intimate means of an education towards freedom.

If the Mystery of Golgotha is experienced rightly, it already tears us away from the world. What arises in that case? In the first place, we live in a world of apparent perception and in it surges up something which leads us to a spiritual life guaranteed by the Mystery of Golgotha. This is one thing. But the other thing is that history ceased to have a meaning, because beginning and end were lost; it obtains a new meaning when it receives it anew from the centre. We learn to recognize that everything before the Mystery of Golgotha tends towards the Mystery of Golgotha as its goal, and everything after the Mystery of Golgotha sets out from it.

History thus once more acquires a meaning, whereas otherwise it is an illusory episode without beginning and end; the world which we perceive outside faces us as an illusion for the sake of our own freedom and also changes history into something which it should not be—an illusory episode without any centre of gravity. It dissolves into fog and mist and theoretically we already find this in Schopenhauer's writings.

By tending towards the Mystery of Golgotha, all that was once mere illusion in history obtains inner life, an historical soul, connected with everything which modern man requires through the fact that he must develop freedom in life. He will then pass through the portal of death with the great teaching of freedom. Avowal of the Mystery of Golgotha throws into life a light which must fall on everything in man that is capable of freedom. And having the disposition to freedom in the illusory aspect of the world which is given to him, he has the possibility to escape the danger of failing to develop freedom, because after death he submits to instincts and passions, thus falling a prey to necessity. By accepting a religious faith which is quite different from those of the past, by allowing his whole soul to be filled by a religious faith which only lives in freedom, he becomes able to experience freedom.

In the present civilization, only a small number of people have really grasped that only a knowledge gained in freedom, a knowledge gained by inner activity, is able to lead us to Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha. The Bible gave man the historical record so that he might have a message of the Mystery of Golgotha for the time when he could not yet take in spiritual science.

To be sure, the Gospel will never lose its value. It will have an every greater value, but the Gospel must be added to the direct knowledge of the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ should be felt and recognized also with the aid of human forces, not only with the aid of the forces working through the Gospel. This is what spiritual science strives for in regard to Christianity. Spiritual science seeks to explain the Gospels, but it is not based upon the Gospels. It is able to appreciate the Gospels so fully, just because it discovered, as it were, subsequently, all that lies concealed in them, all that has already been lost in the course of mankind's outer development.

You see, the whole modern development of mankind is thus connected on the one hand with freedom and the illusion of perception, and on the other, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the meaning of the historical development. The sequence of many episodes which constitutes history as it is generally described and accepted today, obtains its true weight if the Mystery of Golgotha can be set into the historical course of development.

Many people felt this in the right way and also used appropriate images for this. They said to themselves: Once upon a time, man looked out into the heavenly spaces; he saw the Sun, but not as we see it now. Today there are physicists who think that out there in the universe there swims a large sphere of gaseous matter. I have frequently said that they would be astonished if they could build a world airship and reach the Sun, for where they suppose the existence of a gaseous sphere, they would find negative space, which would transport them in a moment not only into Nothing, but beyond Nothing, far beyond the sphere of Nothing. The cosmologies developed today, the modern materialistic cosmologies, are pure fantasy. In past epochs, people did not imagine the Sun as a gaseous sphere swimming in the heavenly spaces, but they saw a Spiritual Being in the Sun. Even today the Sun is a Spiritual Being to those who contemplate the world in a real way; it is a Spiritual Being manifesting itself only outwardly in the way in which the eye is able to perceive the Sun. In Christ an older human race felt the presence of this central Spiritual Being. When speaking of Christ, it pointed to the Sun.

By recognizing the Sun as a Spiritual Being, it was possible to connect a conception worthy of man with the beginning and end of the earth. The conception of Jesus, who was Christ's abode, renders possible a conception worthy of man in regard to the middle of the earth's development, and from there will ray out towards beginning and end that which will once more make the whole cosmos appear in a light that gives man his place in the universe. We should therefore envisage a future in which hypotheses concerning the world's beginning and end will not be constructed on the basis of materialistic, natural-scientific conceptions, but in which the point of issue will be the knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. This will also enable us to survey the whole cosmic development. In ancient times, the Christ was felt to be outside in the cosmos, where the Sun was shining. A true knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha enables us to see in the historical development of the earth the Sun of the earth's development shining through Christ. The Sun shines outside in the world and also in history—it shines physically outside, and spiritually in history; Sun here, and Sun there.

This indicates the path to the Mystery of Golgotha from the aspect of freedom. Modern mankind must find it, if it wants to come out of the forces of descent and enter the ascending forces. This should be realized fully and profoundly. This knowledge will not be abstract, not merely theoretical, but one that fills the whole human being. It will be a knowledge which must be felt and experienced in feeling. The Christianity which Anthroposophy will have to teach, will not only imply looking at Christ, but being filled by Christ.

People always want to know the difference between the teachings of the older Theosophy and the truths that live in Anthroposophy. Is this difference not evident? The older Theosophy warmed up the pagan cosmology. In the theosophical literature you will discover everywhere warmed-up pagan cosmologies, which are no longer suited to modern men, and although Theosophy speaks of the world's beginning and end, this no longer means what it meant in the past. What is missing in the writings of an older Theosophy? The centre is missing, the Mystery of Golgotha is missing throughout. It is missing to an even greater extent than in external natural science.

Anthroposophy has a continued cosmology which does not blot out the Mystery of Golgotha, but admits it, so that it is contained in it. The whole evolution, reaching back as far as Saturn and forward as far as Vulcan, will take its course in such a way that the light enabling us to see it, will ray out from our knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we but recognize this fundamental contrast, we shall no longer have any doubt as to the difference between the older Theosophy and Anthroposophy.

Particularly when so-called Christian theologians again and again put together Anthroposophy and Theosophy, this is due to the fact that they do not really understand much about Christianity. For it is deeply significant that Nietzsche's friend, Overbeck, the truly conspicuous theologian of Basle, wrote a book on the Christianity of modern theology, in which he tried to prove that modern theology; i.e., the Christian theology, is no longer Christian. One may therefore say: Even in regard to this point, external science has already drawn attention to the fact that modern Christian theology does not understand anything about Christianity and knows nothing about it.

One should thoroughly understand all that is unchristian. Modern theology, in any case, is not Christian; it is unchristian through love of ease, through indolence. Yet people prefer to ignore these things, which should not be ignored, for to the extent in which they are ignored, people will lose the possibility to experience Christianity in a real way, from within. This must be experienced, for it is the other pole of the experience of freedom, which must appear. Freedom must be experienced, but the experience of freedom alone would lead us into the abyss. Only the Mystery of Golgotha can lead us across this abyss.

Today we’ll give some consideration to the way human beings relate to the world in body, soul and spirit. We have seen that experiences gained through the whole cosmos between death and rebirth become part of our inner life when we are on earth. We have seen that experiences that were like “outside” experiences before birth, or conception, come into their own by being active in our internal organs. Today, the intention is to consider the other side of the human being’s relationship to the world, that is, how the experiences gained between birth and death are taken through the gate of death and become experiences we live through in a further life between death and rebirth.

We must distinguish between the inner life we have during life on earth and the kind of outside life which we put out into the world. In the first place, we can consider the inner life to include all the feelings and inner responses we go through between birth and death. The feelings we have about impressions gained of the outside world, about our own inner experiences, and also about the approval or objections that meet our actions, actions which arise out of the will—all this is something we more or less settle for ourselves, letting others get a glimpse, perhaps, but essentially dealing with it on our own.

Our experiences based on sensory perception do not reflect reality—this has been the subject of recent lectures; an unreal world extends all around us. It is a world which in essence is neither inner nor outer; we are involved in it and really only make it our inner world by having thoughts about it, developing feelings about it, and we are stimulated by it to take particular actions. Basically our attitude to it arises from faculties we bring with us when we are born into this world. Our approach to the outside world, and also the place where we are, the nation into which we are born, and so on, is always determined by earlier lives lived on earth and in the spirit. These things hark back and do not take us forward.

We also need to consider another way in which we relate to the outside world. Our actions, which have their origin in the will, become part of the outside world. Every action we take changes that world. The least thing we do adds something to the outside world and therefore changes it.

Thus we are able to say that the outside world created by our own actions has its origin in our will intent. The quality of its relationship to us is therefore the same as that of events which occur during sleep. Our everyday conscious mind is no more able to gain insight into the deep-down world of the will than into the conditions that exist during sleep. The real events in the world of the will are not accessible to the conscious mind. As I have said many times before, when we move an arm, or a hand, the conscious mind has no awareness of the whole will-driven process, of the power that develops and is active in the moving arm or hand. We merely see the changes we have wrought. When we move an object from one place to another, our senses make us aware of the change we have made. We are therefore able to say that sensory perception makes us aware of the effect we have through the will. Our will impulses and their effects flow into the world we perceive with the senses, as it were.

Let us recall something we have been considering in recent lectures. We said: First of all we have the human physical body (white in Fig. 1); and the human ether body (red).

Between them is the actively moving world of thoughts—in so far as it is part of the organism. Between the ether body and the astral body (green) lies the world of our feelings, and between the astral body and the enveloping I (blue) the world of the will.

In ordinary consciousness, the world of the will cannot be distinguished from the human I, being completely bound up with it. But not everything that goes on in the I when it is acting out of the will comes to conscious awareness in a direct way. It is at a level that is below ordinary conscious awareness, as I said, like the events that occur during sleep. The sense organs in our physical body perceive anything our will brings to expression. Something arising out of the I and the world of the will is thus perceived with our eyes and ears. In this way, sensory perception, which is the most outside part of us, connects with the things we do out of will and I (arrow Fig. 1).

When the I makes us take just a few steps, we have no conscious awareness of the life of the will, nor of anything that goes on deep down in the human organism and makes our legs move. Yet when we have taken those steps we see the world from a different point of view. In ordinary consciousness, sensory perception provides us with an idea, an image of something that really lies in the depths of waking sleep. Gathering up the powers of the I in an act of will, letting will impulses become actions, we know about our actions through the changes perceived with the senses, irrespective of whether these actions involve walking, taking hold of something, or some kind of work. It is important to realize that through the will we really belong to the world which the senses perceive around us. This is something to remember: In our will we belong to the outside world. Developing ideas about anything we observe concerning the way the will comes to expression will not help us to enter into our true inner nature. Despite the fact that the will flows from the deepest part of the inner life, doing so continues to be an external process for the conscious mind, or rather a sum of such processes in the body.

In the inner life we have first of all the mobile world of thoughts. In outer terms, and of no real interest in the present context, its life consists in bringing some degree of logic and order into the things perceived through the senses. We classify objects, putting plants or animals that are similar to each other into the same class, and we look for other laws of nature. It is part of the body of knowledge which is common to all humanity, but it is not really part of our inner life. On the other hand we cannot really say that everything we have by way of thought is outside our inner life. Just remember a magnificent landscape you may have seen, for instance, and thought about. You can recall it from memory at any time, though it may have faded a little. Thoughts developed in connection with the outside world therefore become part of your inner world. Anything that comes to us from the outside world and is transformed into thoughts thus becomes part of the inner world.

Initially these thoughts enter into the ether body but they then also connect with our feelings and the astral body. All this is inner process. This inner part of the life of thought and with it, the world of feelings, are the true inner life. We really cannot look to the outside world for any of the things we experience in the inner aspect of the life of thought and in our feelings, but only inside ourselves. As I said, we can talk to people and choose to let them see something of what lives in us, but essentially it is indeed an inner life. We are now able to distinguish clearly between the outside life that develops because human beings are constantly taking their inner life into the outside world, and our true inner world.

If we get on a train and travel through the night from the eastern to the western part of Switzerland, we are in a completely different will environment in the morning and we are able to perceive this with the senses. We have taken our inner life with us; it is the same wherever we may be, though it may have been modified by thoughts which have touched us inwardly and become part of the inner life. If we want to we can therefore make clear distinction between the inner life—which in soul is woven out of thoughts and feelings and in body is woven out of the interacting rhythms of ether body and astral body—and the world which in a sense is “outside world”. The soul aspect of this “outside” world is woven out of will content and sensory perception content, the bodily aspect out of I and physical body. For we take our physical body with us and observe it, and it enters into a different situation in the environment. We can distinguish between inner and outer in the way I have just shown.

This is most important when we come to consider the life which human beings take with them through the gate of death. Putting it briefly, the relationship of inner to outer after death is like this:

The outer becomes inner.
The inner becomes outer.

That is the tremendous change which comes with death. The outer becomes inner. We can bring to mind the way the inner life of the soul is made up of interweaving thoughts and feelings and that this is what we mean when we say “I”. After death everything our senses have perceived with regard to our actions becomes our inner life, which is then gathered in a point or, better, a sphere: a view of everything we have done on earth. We take with us through death our whole life on earth, like an inner memory, and this becomes our inner life. There has been a complete reversal: everything the senses previously perceived to be our actions outside us will then be our inner life. Now we live in our inner responses and feelings; then we’ll live in our actions, which will have become our inner life. So if you have done a kindness to someone or you have done something bad, after death you yourself will actually be the good and bad things you have done. You mustn’t be abstract about this and imagine some vague I slipping through death and then being something else, or a bit different. No, we ourselves will be our past actions, in every detail. We shall be every one of our actions and experiences and call all of this “I”.

The inner on the other hand will become the outer. The whole world of our thoughts and feelings becomes something outside us. Here and now we have the sun and the clouds around us, or the starry heavens and their movements during the night. After death our present thoughts and inner responses will be our external environment. Things that are in our innermost heart will become part of the outside world after death and appear in mighty images. The heavens, where now the sun is shining, will then be shining with the inner life that we have here and now.

This may be described in more detail as follows. I said that we shall feel our actions to be like a sphere that is our inner life. We’ll be going through everything we achieved on earth, over and over again, following every path that we took before. After death, then, we are something which experiences its own actions as a sphere that is growing bigger and bigger (blue in Fig. 2).

And we’ll always look back to the earth (green). Now we look out into space to see the stars and the sun; then we’ll be looking back to the earth. And the earth will be surrounded by the images of what used to be our inner life (arrows Fig. 2). Not that we’d experience our inner world as mere maya; we’ll experience everything that used to be our inner world shining out from the place we have left behind and this will be like cloud formations, starry constellations, and so on, streaming out from that place. We shall feel ourselves to be in the world which previously was at the periphery, and the earth on which we used to stand will have become our central outside world. We’ll be looking towards it. We ourselves move in orbit then, and the earth will be at the centre and we’ll look towards it and see mighty images of the whole of our inner life unfold before us.

The outer becomes inner.
The inner becomes outer.

This will be true in every detail.

Looking back to the earth from the sphere which is growing ever wider, we shall see all the feelings and inner responses we had for other people streaming back towards us from the earth. Inner experiences that did not relate to human beings will appear more as cloud formations, but the inner responses we had to people will be like stars. The actual people whom we saw as figures during life on earth then become experiences based on our actions, and in this way anyone with whom we have had anything to do will become part of our inner world.

This is, of course, entirely mutual. Now every human being has feelings inside, and also a heart and a stomach. Between death and rebirth we shall have the form of the other human beings in us and with them everything that took place between them and us in physical space and in other ways. If two people had a connection, one of them, A, will have the image of B in him, and B the image of A. The outer becomes inner; the inner—feelings we have experienced—becomes outer, cosmic content. Anything we felt for others and anything they have been to us shines out after us from the earth.

That is how we actually become the creators, in a way, of the world that is around us after death. In life it is like this: I think you’ll agree that we always are at a particular point in the world—I don’t just mean the ordinary fact that we are in Basle or in Dornach—but altogether we have a particular standpoint, both in the physical and the moral sense. We see the world from that standpoint, which gives us our perspective. This is something subjective, for others have their own standpoints.

It is different after death. Human beings then have the sphere in common. Yet they have all had different inner lives. The earth therefore shines in a different way for each—different clouds and different stars. It is as if all human beings had one and the same standpoint on earth, but one would be seeing one image at one time, and a different one at another. That is more or less how I can give you a picture of the situation after death.

We put aside our physical body when we die. It is dissolved by the realm of earth itself, as I have shown in the lectures of these last few weeks [Vol. 1]. There remains the tissue that results when our sensory perceptions follow the actions we have performed out of the will. Think of all the distances you have covered on earth, crawling when you were an infant, then walking, later going on long trips—all kinds of things—all this becomes inner life, though only the outermost skeleton of it.

Everything you have done combines to form a tissue; this expands into a sphere and becomes the inner life. By becoming inner life it ensures that the human being will have an I during life on earth, for we have our I from the earth, or through the earth. Everything we have done on earth is woven into a vast image of remembered sensory perceptions, and we are thus able to take our “I” through death. Our inner experiences are relived for a short period after death, for the ether body only dissolves away a little later. It dissolves out into the universe and in consequence everything woven out of thoughts and feelings, from the ether body, but also with an astral element to it, becomes the cloud formation, or constellation of stars that surrounds the earth. Our inner and outer aspects drop away in two directions, towards the earth and out into space, as it were, as we go through life between death and rebirth.

Try and really see in your mind’s eye the kind of world in which you will be between death and rebirth. The actions that arose from your will are then your inner life. Your present life of feelings and thoughts will be the cosmos outside you. The difference is that you’ll not be looking out into the cosmos but inward from the cosmos to the earth which reflects your inner thought aspects back to you. When we live on earth between birth and death we have, on the one hand, the life of the sun. The sun is out there; we are on earth and look at the sun. After death the sun immediately disappears, for we ourselves are then the sun, and we do not see something which we ourselves are. We simply move on into the life of the sun, and it is this transition which I have been describing to you. The fact that our actions become ourselves is connected with this. And as we move away from the earth, the things we have experienced through the earth become something we look at.

Here we are on earth and look to the sun. We see the earth beneath us, which is due to the physical, material nature of the earth. The sun does not exist in material form. As I have said before, the things physicists are saying about it are mere fantasy. When we ourselves are in the sun and look back, we have the whole world of the spirit with all the hierarchies behind us. Here on earth we look down and see solid matter. Between death and rebirth we have the world of the hierarchies behind us. Thus we will be sun and see the true sun, which is of the spirit. The earth may be called sky then; it will be the sky we create out of our inner experiences. This will also be the future life on Jupiter. I have given you a clear picture of it all. Everything human beings weave around the earth with their feelings and thoughts will remain. The physical earth of today will perish. When we are between death and rebirth today we can see what is woven in the inner life. Later, when the earth is coming to an end, this will be the reality of a new earth; the old earth will melt away, and everything human beings have inwardly lived through will be the future of the earth.

This is how the metamorphosis will come about in real terms. It is superficial and abstruse to say: “Earth will become Jupiter”. We only gain insight into the process if we know that the physical substance of the earth will melt away into cosmic space; it will turn to dust. The tissue woven around it out of our feelings will be the future earth; it will grow denser and denser and become the true Jupiter planet.

Today, geologists dig down into the deeper layers of the earth and uncover strata that evolved a long, long time ago. In future, on Jupiter, it will be possible to investigate the layers that have evolved there. All kinds of strata formed of human feelings and thoughts will be found. A Jupiter geologist will clear away one layer after the other, for instance, and just like a geologist on earth will say: “This is the Lower Permian; these are Tertiary strata”, so our Jupiter geologist will say: “Ah, here is a layer going back to the early 20th century, as they called it on earth. It is the layer produced by the thoughts and feelings of all the racketeers who lived almost everywhere on earth then.” Just as we speak of the Silurian system today, for instance, they will be able to speak of the “racketeer system” in time to come. There will be other layers as well, of course, and these things are absolutely real.

We are not permitted to let our inner experiences pass away. They are world in the becoming. All that human beings are able to see even now in conscious awareness between death and rebirth is this substance of a future world. When we are here on earth we look at many things around us and also at the moon. This is part of our world in a quite specific way, for it reflects the light of the sun. We only see the moon’s surface in so far as the sun weaves a garment for it. Thus it is really the sun which is shining for us when the moon shines; except that the sun’s rays take a roundabout route. Being an earth satellite, the moon has quite a special relationship to us.

In life between death and rebirth we have first of all our inner world, the effects of all our actions that have arisen out of the will; this is the sphere of our inner world, a central core surrounded by our feelings and thoughts radiating out into cosmic space. But there is also something which is like the moon. I’d say we see the moon from the other side. This life in the sphere has different laws of perspective than life here on earth has, and some things connected with those laws are difficult to express because the laws on earth are so different. Between death and rebirth we are, in a sense, not outside the moon but inside it. We always have a certain connection with the moon and are inside it, as it were. Here on earth we always see the reflected sunlight. Between death and rebirth we always see the inside of the moon.

The different perspective can perhaps be more clearly understood if I put it like this.

Let us assume this is the earth (drawing; white); the moon orbits around it (red). For the situation we have after death, of course, we have to consider not just this spherical body but the whole sphere in which the moon orbits. We perceive this from inside. At first we move away from the earth within this sphere, remaining within it for a long time—here, and here, and so on. Later we come to be outside the moon sphere, however, and then, of course, we cannot see it from inside. But we do not see it from the outside either. It ceases to be visible or perceptible for us, but remains as a memory.

Moving out of the moon sphere we see a vision on its inner wall; the memories we retain of this we retain as the effects an earlier life on earth has had on our later life on earth. This moon actually preserves the events of one life on earth as something that comes into effect in a later life on earth. The way the contents of one life on earth live on from one earth life into those that follow is connected with the moon and the whole of its mystery within the cosmos.

When we are on the earth and look out into cosmic space we have one particular view; it is the view we have between birth and death. Between death and rebirth we have a different view, for we are inside the sphere and look back to the central core. We then have a world that in a sense is the opposite of our present world. Yet the things which the moon preserves, concentrates and so on, are carried through both worlds. In its own way, the moon is a heavenly body that is immensely important to us, for it mediates between different lives on earth. It is not, of course, the cinder we see as a shining light when we are here on earth but the moon in the full mystery of its cosmic reality.

You see the way in which the life of an individual human being unites with the life of the whole cosmos. When we are here between birth and death we see, in a sense, what is left over from earlier worlds, from the Saturn, Sun and Moon phases of earth existence. We see it surrounded with the glory of the phenomena that are all around us. All this points more or less to the past. But everything we bear inside us and everything we ourselves do here on earth, points to the future. In a sense, we already see this future casting its reflection on the present as we go through the experiences between death and rebirth, where the inner becomes outer, and the outer becomes inner.

If you take the full meaning of what I have been saying here in recent weeks about the way human beings carry their life between death and rebirth into this life on earth, you’ll find that it is really very similar. I told you that anything we experience outwardly with regard to the outer cosmos, all the way to the constellations of the planets, reappears in our internal organization, whilst everything that was then our inner life has become outer life. After death we have a similar situation: The outside world created out of ourselves becomes our inner part; our inner experiences—gained from the environment or, as I said, as satisfaction or self-reproach in response to our actions—are an inner world which then becomes outside world, like a firmament that looks out towards us from the centre, out into cosmic space.

Another way of putting it, providing people do not misunderstand, is to say that our outer life becomes our inner life, our sun life, for we then dwell in the sun; our inner life, in so far as it was experienced on earth, will be the heavens, except that we now see heaven beneath us. Earth is heaven, sun is earth in the life between death and rebirth.

It really is true to say: This other aspect of the world must be something we truly see and it must be added to the view of the world which the intellectual human beings of today consider to be the only one. Then and only then will we have a complete image of the world. And we’ll feel ourselves to be in the world in quite a different way. This other image of the world is exactly what I am always talking about in anthroposophy. Unlike the passive image we gain from external observation this is an active image, something in which we must be actively involved. To read books on anthroposophy you have to let your thoughts become mobile. People who are only used to things the way they generally are today are not willing to do this; they want to have everything presented smoothly, so that their thoughts may be quiet, passive images of what has been given and they can, in a way, be a little bit asleep in relation to the world around them.

In life between birth and death, human beings have a physical body, ether body, astral body and I. The I may be called the highest principle here on earth. When we go to live on the sun after death, the I is really the lowest principle; there follow, from below upwards, the spirit self, and then the life spirit and spirit human being which will only come into physical existence in later periods of evolution, though human beings develop them in spirit when they are between death and rebirth. It is in fact the spirit self which radiates into cosmic space as an image of earth. The I lives in the sun, and the light of the spirit self is reflected by the earth. The other elements are higher ones that come to human beings from the cosmos and to begin with have nothing to do with their inner life. The light that shines out towards human beings will appear in a new life and become life spirit. Into the actions of the human being enters a high spiritual substantiality, shivering through them—the spirit human being. This is something given and received from the cosmos when we are out there. When we come down to earth at birth we receive our physical and ether bodies.

When we have gone through the gate of death we receive our life spirit and spirit human being; they are given to us as garments. But the I we shall have will be truly our own—I have given you an outline of this. And the spirit self which shines out from the earth truly is a finely woven planetary existence between death and rebirth, something that is like a transformed earth for us on which we look back and on which we continue to weave from life to life. When the earth will have come to the end of its present development, human beings will go on with it to Jupiter. Thanks to the substance we have woven we shall be able to develop a physical spirit self on Jupiter, having laid the foundations for this through our own inner activity during life on earth.

That is truly the way evolution proceeds. You see, we need not put words together in an outer sense—earth existence, Jupiter existence—and describe these things in an external, abstract way, for if we grasp the human being as a whole, it is perfectly possible to describe the transition from one to the other. We have to be able to develop the ideas that enable us to grasp visions like this: Our feelings and thoughts, spreading out inside us, shine out from the earth like planets and stars into the cosmos where we then live; or this: The people with whom we have been connected will then be carried inside us. Human life is complex. People who want to stake out a few ideas and develop a whole philosophy of life on that basis have little perception of the real situation. This can only be developed if we consider the whole of life. Yet even the life of the smallest beetle is highly complex, and it would be quite wrong to imagine that the life of the macrocosm, to which the human being relates as microcosm, is such that we can grasp it with a few simple ideas.

We’ll continue with this tomorrow.

The information given in the 1914 course of lectures on life between death and rebirth¹ rounds out what I have been saying in preparation in the last few days and weeks. Today I particularly want to draw your attention to alternating states of life between death and rebirth, which are rather like the alternation between waking and sleeping we know during life between birth and death. Between birth and death we have the normal conscious awareness that makes us human beings only when awake. In sleep, conscious awareness is toned down; it is below the threshold of the waking state. It is at its dimmest level when we are fully asleep; we may perceive dream images which arise out of sleep and represent things remembered from life, or processes that take place in the organism. A similar change occurs during life between death and rebirth, except that everything is the other way round. Yesterday I spoke of the radically different way in which we experience life between death and rebirth. And this also applies to our states of conscious awareness.

Between death and rebirth we have experiences which show us the activities and will impulses of the I. This awareness of the I is essentially the norm when we are in the other world, just as the waking state is the norm here. We have seen that here on earth we have a physical body, ether body, astral body and I, whilst in the other world we have an I, a spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being, or at least the first beginnings of these. Between death and rebirth, therefore, the I is the lowest principle. Here, we are inwardly aware of our I when we are awake; there, the comparable level of consciousness gives awareness of the I in the activities and will impulses on which we look back, so they are like outside experiences; it is as if our actions shone back towards us from the earth.

This state changes into another. Here on earth we are able to speak of waking consciousness and sleep consciousness, with a subconscious state added on to our waking consciousness, as it were. Between death and rebirth we have the kind of consciousness I have just described and a kind of super consciousness, in which higher entities are conscious in us, or, we may say, higher entities fill our conscious mind.

When we are asleep on earth we go down to a kind of plant level of existence. Between death and rebirth we rise to a kind of Archangel consciousness, which is above our own level of consciousness. As I said, in the normal state we have the hierarchies behind us, as it were. In the state of super consciousness we literally move back towards them and live in them. We learn things from them that we would not otherwise know. If we were limited to the experiences of the I which shine out after us and at the same time are part of us, we would not gain experience of all the processes we shall need to build a new organism in our next life on earth. As it is, our normal state of consciousness alternates with a state where the knowledge of the Archangels and even the Archai enters into us; this then also comes to normal consciousness as a kind of memories, just as here on earth dreams come from the subconscious to the conscious mind. Between death and rebirth we thus have the form of consciousness I described yesterday and in between come super conscious states in which we gain knowledge from higher entities. This knowledge enables us to build exactly the kind of existence we shall need in our next life on earth.

You can see analogies between the life we have here between birth and death and the other life we live between death and rebirth. But we must also take note of the radical differences that exist between the two kinds of life. We shall gain a clearer picture if we also consider the element that mediates between the two, a higher principle that extends both to life on earth and to life between death and rebirth. As we go through life on earth we have, in the first place, the impressions we gain through the senses, and we have seen how impulses of will and activity become interwoven with them. For the moment, however, we need to consider the impressions of the outside world that are gained through the senses.

Try to visualize for a moment the sum total of sensory impressions you gain all the time you are awake in life on earth, with all the human senses involved in weaving a whole tapestry. We usually consider sensory impressions to be attached to objects. Thus objects and creatures present themselves in colours that impress the eye. Others produce sounds that impress the ear. Let us call to mind the whole world of sensory impressions and ask ourselves what they truly represent.

I have made it clear to you on more than one occasion that the fantastic world of moving atoms that physicists dream of is definitely not to be found behind our sensory impressions. No, behind the world we perceive with the senses lies something which is of the spirit. It is present in the world of the senses, though we are not directly aware of it when we have the tapestry before us in ordinary consciousness. In reality the tapestry presented to the senses contains the totality of all the spirits which in my Occult Science are collectively called the Spirits of Form. Anything which presents itself in space has form, and the coloured surface also gives objects form. In everything which we experience in space through the senses live the Spirits of Form, which in the Old Testament are called the Elohim.

We do, quite rightly, call the world that presents itself to the senses the world of phenomena.² This is only correct, however, in so far as at our ordinary level of consciousness we human beings perceive no more than these outer phenomena of the world. It is the “maya” of the Orient. But the moment our conscious mind wakes up and is able to perceive in images, this whole world of the senses is filled with, or, even better, transformed into, a world of flowing, moving images which also reveals the world of the Angels that is woven into it. This is also the world which inspires us when we are capable of Inspiration. It is then transformed into the world of Inspiration in which the Archangels are active. Later we also experience the world of Intuitions, when we advance from the world of the senses to the world of the Archai.

When we come to have the world of the Archai all around us, it will be possible to look back, with the help of this world, to the things we have gathered from higher hierarchies in earlier lives between death and rebirth. We then become aware of the spirits who are behind the Archai in this world. In the Bible they are called the Elohim, and in my Occult Science you’ll find them called “Spirits of Form”. Thus we are able to say that when we look out into the world through the senses, we are really looking into the world of the Spirits of Form (see table—world of the senses).

Having entered with heart and mind into the world of the senses, where we’d have to say that we move in the world of the Spirits of Form, let us now enter yet more deeply into the inner life, into a part of the inner world that is still closely bound up with the outside world, however, its function being to create an inner image of the outside world that we can bear in us as memory. In other words, we move on to the world of thought (see table).

In the first place this world of thoughts has image character. You’ll not feel the least temptation to consider the thoughts that are ordinarily alive in your conscious mind to be real. But there are hidden realities in that world, just as the realities of the Spirits of Form lie hidden in the world of the senses. In ordinary consciousness we have in the first place the fleeting inner thought forms we know so well. Again it is possible to find spiritual entities at work if we advance to higher knowledge through Imagination and Inspiration. These spiritual entities live in the phenomena that accompany the thoughts as they evolve in us.

You’ll remember what goes on in us when we are thinking; it has been described in earlier lectures. Processes are continually occurring that may be compared to the way salt dissolving in a glass of water disappears completely so that we can look right through the glass. If we let the water cool down a little it becomes cloudy and the salt slowly precipitates out. This kind of condensation process occurs when we think; it is a kind of mineralization. And the spiritual entities which are active in the element of thought are involved in this process of mineralization. We have always called them the Archai, powers of origin. We are therefore able to know that when we live in our thoughts, the Archai are with us, just as the Elohim, the Spirits of Form, are active in the processes of sensory perception.

The Spirits of Form can only be found in the outside world if we use imaginative perception. If we study that world in the normal state of consciousness we have today, we discover the “laws of nature”, which are abstractions. When we advance to imaginative perception we find not the abstract laws of nature which can be formulated as statements, but images, a life in images. These are not the kind of images of which I have spoken before, but images that cloud the images we gain when we behold the Elohim, condensing into them, as it were. There you have the Archai at work in the outside world. It is something we can observe in the outside world and also in the inner world.

At this point it may help to turn our attention not so much to the inner life but to one way in which life comes to outward expression. In our thoughts we relate to the outside world, with the secrets of that world revealed in our thoughts. Our thoughts are, however, part of the inner life. Yet they can be uttered and conveyed to others. Speech is one element in human life by which our thoughts are given outward expression.

Let us consider the world of speech. As I have said on a number of occasions, we do, of course, experience more of our world of speech than we do of the world of thought which flows into our speech. Will also enters into the element of thought, but this is something of which we have little awareness in ordinary consciousness. The human will does, however, flow strongly into our speaking, and this is something which can be realized in ordinary conscious awareness. Nevertheless, we know extraordinarily little about what really lives in our speech. In our present intellectual age, people perceive little more of what lives in speech sounds than some kind of signals referring to something else. The inner life of speech sounds has gone very much into the background in modern minds. All we can do is show the people of today that they can reflect on something which lives in the speech sounds and may be perceived to be a distinct, separate element in life.

Take a phrase like “wending our way”. The vowel sound in “wend” conveys a calmness as we proceed, with nothing to excite us. Compare this to “run” and you can feel the increased demand on your breathing in the vowel sound of this word, for your breathing goes faster when you run.³ There is a spiritual aspect to language, which has a genius of its own. Modern people are not much aware of the life in their language, but in earlier times, when people still had a real inner experience of sounds, the spirit was very much active and alive in language for them, and they were more conscious of this inner experience than of anything perceived with the senses or any part of the world of thought.

The Archangels live in the element of speech and language, just as the Archai live in our thoughts. This makes them the spirits who guide nations and who come into their own in the element of speech.

People are much more the product of their language than we think, just as they are also the product of their thoughts. Our human form comes entirely from the world around us, and we in turn pour form into the world around us through the will. Our life comes from the same region as our thoughts, which is the region of the Archai. The language we speak as members of a nation gives expression to physical qualities that limit us as human beings to a much greater degree than is the case with our thoughts. Thoughts are common to all humanity; languages differ. People are different when it comes to language; but as they belong to a large or small nation they nevertheless have their language in common with quite a number of other people.

When we go down to the level of the Angels—and this is something I have told you before—people relate to their Angels on an individual, one-to-one basis. This shows itself in two ways. Inwardly it does so when we give ourselves up to the inner life in such a way that we transcend it. In ordinary life a luciferic element may immediately come in, but still, we can transcend ourselves and have an objective inner experience by using our imagination. In many respects our imagination is as creative as language is, but it is individual; language is essentially based on an active imagination. People normally experience language only in an abstract way and are not aware of the genius of language spreading its wings. They also fail to notice that in their imagination—which becomes sheer fantasy if the luciferic element comes into it—an Angel passes through the life they have as individuals.

True poets or artists who have not grown cynical or superficial will know, of course, that a higher spiritual principle enters into them when they do creative work. This higher spiritual principle also takes us from one life to the next as our personal guardian spirit; it is our Angel. And it is certainly the thinking of our Angel which enters into our imagination when it is active in the regular way. Goethe made certain statements to indicate, without making much of it, that he was aware of an unconscious element coming in which was very real when he used his imagination.

If we do not go out of ourselves inwardly when awake but do so in sleep, entering the region where the imagination we use when awake has its roots, the principle which shows itself in our imagination when we are fully awake comes to expression at a more subconscious level in our dreams. Imagination can become sheer fantasy if a luciferic element enters into it, and in the same way our dreams may degenerate into all kinds of strange things, which we may even take for real, if influenced by ahrimanic elements. Dreams are essentially luciferic, but an ahrimanic element may enter into them. Yet when our dreams are “innocent”, as we may put it, and purely human, the Angel lives in them, the same Angel which is in us when we use our imagination and inwardly go beyond ourselves, as it were.

The world of language which is governed by the Archangel now dims down inwardly into a world that is halfway between feeling and thought: the world of ideas, or ideas with feeling quality (see table below). Imagination and dreaming dim down to become the world of feelings, and of the will element that lives in our feelings, so that we may also speak of feelings with will quality. Going further down from the Angel we come to the human I. Here we need to go out of ourselves much more intensely than we do when the Angel lives in us. This happens when we let our will impulses become actions in the outside world, as I said yesterday.

We are definitely out of ourselves when we dream, but only in mind and spirit. Nor do we go out of ourselves physically in our acts of will, but we set the physical body in motion, and the I actually has its basis in such will impulses. We are thus able to say: The will that lives in our actions leaves its mark on the outside world.

We have now gone all the way down to the physical world, where independent development comes only in acts of will. The I lives in the sum of all our actions, a sum that remains after death and on which we look back, as I have shown yesterday. Higher spiritual entities live in everything else in us—in our imagination and our dreams, in the world of speech and language, the world of thought and the contents of the senses. These higher entities are always in us. Thus we are able to look at everyday life and see how the human being relates to the cosmos.

Another way of coming close to the truths spiritual scientists are able to discover by using more highly developed faculties is the following. Take your own life in the physical world. You gain all kinds of impressions in this world and may even be able to remember them the next day. I am not saying that everybody remembers; for instance I am not sure if everybody who is sitting here tonight will be able to let the things heard in this lecture come alive in their minds tomorrow. Generally speaking, however, it is fair to say that the things we perceive around us with the senses live on in us as memories. To take us a step further, let me show this in a drawing.

The light-coloured lines are the world around us and the red line represents the human being. The world around us and anything we experience in it lives on in us as an inner world. In a sense this is quite an abstract experience to begin with, at least in so far as the outside world, which we experience merely in the way it presents itself on the outside, lives on in abstract inner experiences, thoughts and feelings which then give rise to will impulses. But we can certainly say—let us bring this to mind very exactly—that our inner life represents experiences gained between birth and death, or rather birth and the present moment.

Let us now turn our attention from those inner abstractions and images to our internal organs, which are physical and tangible—lung, heart, liver, and so on. We have these inside us as well. Out-and-out mystics will say that they are only interested in things of the soul and spirit, in the inner impressions they have of the world that surrounds them. Physical objects like those organs are far too lowly and unimportant to them. In saying so, they merely show how much they are caught up in materialism and fail to realize that seemingly material objects are in reality deeply spiritual. Our lungs and livers are just as spiritual as the inner experiences we have as a reflection of experiences gained in the outside world between birth and death. They may appear to be present as physical, material objects to our ordinary consciousness, but they are very much the fruits of the spirit.

As you sit quietly at home, the thought may come to mind: The human being has a physical body, ether body, astral body and I. This thought is something you have inside you. At one time it was something outside you.

You first came across it in a book, maybe, or in a lecture, that is, in the outside world—as in the drawing. You also have your lung, heart, liver, brain, and so on inside you, and they are in physical form. They, too, are the fruit of experiences. If we make a simple sketch of the human being and the various organs, the things inside are the outcome of everything we have lived through between death and rebirth—not their physical substance, of course, for that only comes with conception, birth, and so on, but their form and internal organization. You hear me talk, and this becomes an inner experience; in the same way your heart, lungs and liver are the outcome of experiences you had between death and rebirth. We are able to say: I have physical matter inside me that is organized in a particular way; this is the outcome of experiences I had between death and rebirth.

The soul qualities in me
are the fruit of experiences gained between birth and death.
The physical organization in me
is the fruit of my life between death and rebirth.

A materialist will of course say that all the organs in our bodies have been physically inherited from our ancestors, but he’d be utterly wrong. Physical substance is inherited, that is true, but the germ cell is not seen in its true light if it is considered in purely material terms. Fertilization is not a matter of the human individual being physically derived from the generations that went before, but of an empty space arising, with matter broken down in the human being and the whole universe built into the human being. Matter then pushes its way into the spiritual form; for lung, heart and liver are essentially spiritual forms. The organizing powers are, however, entirely shaped out of the whole universe, out of experience gained between death and rebirth. This is what we experience when our consciousness rises above the waking state and we come to the region of Archangels and Angels in the way I have described. Between death and rebirth human beings experience consciously, or rather in a state of super consciousness, the things which they then build into their organs.

Our organs are built in accord with our karma, which comes from our earlier lives on earth. It may seem that purely physical processes occur as generation succeeds generation, but in fact these are processes brought about by the whole universe.

The following is an analogy I tend to use when small-minded materialists come and say: “Do not speak to us of the whole universe being involved as a human being develops in the womb, and whatever you do, don’t take us out into the universe; kindly speak of the germ plasma continuing on through the generations.” We can deal with this by saying: Someone has a magnetic needle which points north and south. Someone else will come and say: “There are crazy physicists who say the whole earth is a magnet and the magnetic south pole of the earth is attracting this pole of the needle. But in fact the reasons for the magnetic needle pointing north and south lie in the needle itself. The earth has nothing to do with it!” This is more or less the kind of thing modern biologists are saying about the germ cell. They look only at the germ cell. But just as the whole earth is active in a magnetic needle, so the whole universe is active in the creation of the embryo. The part which the human being plays in this is, of course, at an unconscious level.

Seen in this light, the human individual is with the whole of his being connected with a material and a spiritual universe. We say: We make the outside world our inner world when we perceive it in ordinary conscious experience. Yesterday I said, from a certain point of view: When a human being goes through the gate of death, inner becomes outer, and outer becomes inner. Today I presented a different point of view to show that the way we have to approach anything that comes before birth, or conception, is to look for our inner physical life and the processes that prepare it in the outside world during life between death and rebirth: The outer becomes inner. Something we experience as spread out through the whole universe becomes deeply unconscious experience in our organs.

The nature of our internal organs is truly such that a whole cosmos is alive in them. If we merely consider those organs the way they are presented in ordinary anatomy and physiology, this is maya to a much higher degree than the maya we face in the world around us.

Looking into the world of the senses, I said, we can see as far as the Elohim. Looking down into the inner physical body, we have to go higher to find the reality that lives in us and creates our organs. You’ll remember that in my Occult Science higher entities are mentioned who are above the Spirits of Form. These do not only exist outside human beings but are also active inside them. We learn about them from the Archai when between death and rebirth we raise our level of consciousness to theirs and learn things from them which we then pour into our organization. We truly carry the world of the hierarchies through life in the way we are made inside. Today these things can be investigated. In older times people knew about them out of an instinctive clairvoyant consciousness. Those were the times when it was said that the human organism is a temple of the gods, and people sought to gain insight into the whole world by interpreting the inner human microcosm.

Isn’t it true that we know about the world which has been our own for as long as we have had conscious awareness here on earth from memory? We are able to reflect on everything we are able to recall from memory. We look inwards and find that the world we have known outside is inside ourselves, and we realize that the outside life has entered into the images we have inside us. Looking back in memory we understand again what we experienced before. Now if we look at our physical organization and understand it, we also understand the cosmic process. Our memories let us understand life’s experiences. Our whole human organization lets us understand the cosmic process, if we know how to look at it. And this is what anthroposophy is all about—to understand the human being in every way.

It means that anthroposophy is also cosmosophy, for just as we bring our life back to mind when we remember, so we bring the whole cosmic process, cosmosophy, to mind when we gain insight through anthroposophy. The two cannot be seen apart. Cosmosophy and anthroposophy belong together. The human being is to be found in the world, and the world in the human being.

This is also why it is not anthropomorphism to speak of human evolution in the same breath as evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on in my Occult Science. Cosmic evolution is something that is given, and human evolution is something that is given, for the further we penetrate the secrets of existence, the more do cosmos and human being come together; the more does it become apparent that the separation between cosmos and human being that exists for us on earth is mere maya. The human being belongs to the cosmos, and the cosmos to the human being, and each is to be found in the other.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and the Life between Death and a New Birth. Eight lectures given in Vienna in April 1914. English by A. Meuss. Bristol, Rudolf Steiner Press 1994.
• 2. “Phenomenon”, defined as “an immediate object of perception; something of which the senses or the mind take note directly”, derives from the Greek verb for “to shine, to appear”, which is also reflected in the German word for it—Erscheinung. Translator.
• 3. The two German words Rudolf Steiner was comparing were gehen and laufen. He went into considerable detail and this has been shortened. Translator.

To broaden the subject matter I have been presenting, let us start by looking back to a period of human evolution when the gaining of insight, as we know it today, was entirely different in character. We have spoken of this before, but a new light may be thrown on things that are already familiar because of the things that have been said in recent lectures.

Human perceptiveness has a completely different character today from the way it was in ancient Greek and Roman times. And the knowledge held in the Orient and in Africa before those times was of a completely different kind again than the insights that were so magnificently presented by the Greeks, made more abstract by the Romans and have in our day become more and more materialistic. At about the beginning of the 8th century BC the nature of human understanding became what essentially it still is today, though with modifications. Until now, we have more or less characterized the earlier way that went before it by saying: It was a kind of instinctive perception. Insight lived not in concepts but in images; these were not entirely like the dream images we see, yet they did not have the clear definition when they lived in human souls which they have in the modern world of concepts, but took more the form of images that passed through the conscious mind.

The contents were also different, relating more to the worlds in which human beings had their origin and in which they still lived, having separated only a little from them. During Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, the human being was still wholly part of the rest of the world. And during earlier stages of Earth evolution, too, the human individual was not yet separate from the general content of the world but felt part of it. When people let go of the intellectual approach, where we use our brain to learn things, and do more or less as is done in certain oriental schools, where breathing processes are used to gain a kind of insight, a situation is created where the clean separation between self and world has disappeared. When people do yoga exercises, which belong to the past but can still be found today, they feel their individual nature to be reduced and subdued, so that they are like a breath in the world.

The nature of perceptiveness was like that in those earlier times, though people were also able to interpret their own inner physical body, in the way I spoke of yesterday, by using their image-based perception. Yesterday we considered how human beings take in the world around them today and retain it in ideas. This becomes an inner life out of which individuals are able to create an image of their world as it has been from birth to the present moment. The organs we have inside us—brain, lungs, liver—are content of the whole world. We can recall something we have experienced from memory and interpret its meaning, so that it lives in us as an idea. And in our internal organs we have the whole world inside us. Ancient wisdom consisted in interpreting the individual organs by relating them to the content of the whole world.

Essentially, the older kind of human understanding which existed until the 9th century BC was such that people gained insight into the content of the world by interpreting the internal physical and etheric nature of the human being. Of course, their view of those internal organs was different from that held by modern anatomists and physiologists. Every individual internal organ related to something in the outside world, yet the organ itself was experienced from inside. Thus the structure of the brain was seen in tremendous images and these in turn were related to the whole sphere of heaven, and people with this ancient way of understanding were able to gain an idea of the whole sphere of heaven, based on indications as to the structure of the brain gained through atavistic perception in images.

Essentially all the ancient wisdom about the world has come from such interpretations of the inner human being. It is not really possible, however, to say that the knowledge and understanding of those times was truly human by nature. True human understanding, which of course is not at all the dry, purely intellectual knowledge people often think it to be, is, after all, unthinkable without intelligence. The wisdom of old, however, was entirely without intelligence produced by human beings, and we cannot really call it “human” understanding. Human beings merely had part in the understanding which other entities had inside them. These were spirits belonging to the hierarchy of the Angels. An Angel would ensoul a human being and the old form of wisdom was really that of the Angel. The human individual merely had part in it by looking into the inner life of the Angel, as it were. This is also why people who had that ancient wisdom were rather vague as to how they got it. They simply said to themselves that it was something which was given to them, for it was the Angel who created insight in them; as they were unable to do this themselves.

Those were not the normal angelic spirits who accompany human beings through several lives on earth. They had luciferic character, for their disposition had remained at the earlier, moon level of development. Thus we are able to say that the ancient wisdom arose when spirits who should have gone through their normal human stage of development on the ancient moon let their soul powers enter into and ensoul human beings, and people would have part in the Angel’s experiences inside them, gaining an extraordinarily sublime insight in this way. The wisdom given to the angelic beings during the moon evolution was at a high level of perfection, but it was not really something which people could put to any real use on earth. People acted more or less out of instinct on earth, we might say they acted like a higher kind of animal. And into this creature shone the sublime wisdom which began to fade away towards the 8th century BC.

This wisdom—definitely luciferic the way it is presented above—really related only to anything that showed the human being to be a citizen of other worlds. With regard to their perceptions, therefore, human beings had not yet really come to earth. They felt themselves to be in higher spheres in their wisdom, and their actions on earth were instinctive.

There followed the development that goes hand in hand with the intellectual or mind soul. Human beings began to let the mind be active in them and evolve concepts. Greek civilization still had the angelic wisdom of earlier times but worked it through with human concepts. Plato’s⁴ wisdom makes such an impression on us because he was subjectively evolving concepts and ideas, but the old instinctive wisdom still shone into the process. His writings therefore are a marvellous combination of the highest wisdom and a way of thinking that was human and individual. Considering Plato’s mind and spirit it would be impossible to imagine him writing his philosophical works in a form other than that of dialogues, for the simple reason that he was definitely aware of a wisdom that had only been an indefinite feeling to earlier people. They would say: The wisdom simply exists; it comes to me and radiates into me. Plato found himself in a form of dialogue with the entity that brought wisdom into him. Experiencing this wisdom in dialogue he also preferred to express it through dialogue.

Soon, however, conceptual thinking became more prevalent. Aristotle⁵ already presented his knowledge in a complex of theories.

As the fourth post-Atlantean age progressed, a civilizatory element gained influence that may be described as follows: People felt that an ancient wisdom had filled human souls in times past. They felt that superhuman entities had come down and brought this wisdom to humanity. But they were also aware that this wisdom was becoming more abstract. They could not longer grasp it; it eluded them.

Roman civilization is characterized by a mind that made everything abstract. The Romans evolved a dry, abstract way of thinking that did not perceive in images and wanted to live only in the forms of the mind. With the Greeks we still feel that the figures of their gods, that is, the elemental principles in the world of nature, had an inner life. The Roman gods were stiff, abstract concepts. Logic gained the upper hand over the imaginative thinking that had still been widespread in ancient Greece. Anything the Romans still had by way of imagination actually came from Greece. The Romans introduced the prosaic, logical thinking that was later to give the Latin language the logical quality that was to govern civilization for ages to come.

One thing continued on, however—in a more living way through Greek culture and a slightly more dead way through Roman culture, into the Christian era and right into the Middle Ages—and that was the tradition of the ancient wisdom. This has persisted more than people are inclined to think today. The world that presented itself to the senses could not be immediately grasped with the mind, but people sought to grasp the traditional element in this way. The result was that an element which before had been luciferic, inwardly enlivening, gained an ahrimanic character that was also outwardly apparent, as a mask. In reality this is a luciferic element which continues by tradition. Romanism continued through the centuries; a strong Germanic element came into it, but the tradition survived and it was essentially luciferic. Its original character was lost because it streamed down into the realm of thought and became formulated in thoughts. We may say that in the Latin language, a luciferic element lives on in an ahrimanic way.

This luciferic element was still very much alive in Greek art. It then became more or less rigid and it is interesting to see how it extended into theology, which had to do with other worlds, yet had no real access to those worlds; all it had was the tradition. A spiritual stream that was essentially luciferic thus brought the ancient perception of other worlds into theology.

The Christian faith also got caught up in the meshes of this theology; it became theology. The language of Rome was made logical, the Christian faith theological. The true life of Christianity was submerged in a luciferic element that bore an ahrimanic mask. The personal and individual element was always there, but it was more instinctive. It was not able to unite fully with the element which came from above. It is particularly interesting to observe this when it was at its most striking, during the Renaissance. There we see a highly developed theology with concepts and ideas of other worlds but no perception. Everything took the form of tradition during the Renaissance. Romanism had preserved the original, ancient wisdom in a theology that had brought it down into the realm of ideas, where it lived on as a luciferic element. Those theologizing elements are still marvellously apparent in Raphael’s wall paintings in Rome, the Disputa, for instance.⁶ Profound wisdom, more or less living on in words, no longer offering perception, but holding true wisdom for those who are able to connect it with perception. We also admire the theology in Dante’s Divine Comedy,⁷ though we know that whilst Dante gained some of the old true perception—thanks to his teacher Brunetto Latini,⁸ as I have shown on another occasion⁹—most of the work represents the traditional, theologizing approach with a strong luciferic element in it. We can also see that the entities which brought the ancient wisdom into the theologizing element also brought the essence of Greek art into the art of the Renaissance, a Greek art that originally had soul quality before and had become more rigid, but still came down through tradition. Goethe¹⁰ was therefore able to perceive the resurrection of Greek art in the art of the Renaissance.

It has to be said that there is a powerful luciferic element in the theology and in the art that have come to us from the past. To be artistic, this art must look for elements that belong to other worlds, and it is not able to descend fully to the human level. Where it does so, it seems to us to have made a sudden leap down to the level of instinct. Looking at Renaissance life, we see that people had ideas of heaven—no vision any more—and were able to bring those ideas to life in their art in a truly marvellous way. Beneath this, however, we see Renaissance life deteriorate to the level of instincts. World history presents magnificent but sometimes also horrific scenes where Pope Alexander VI, for instance, or Leo X, are on the one hand great scholars, having ideas of the most sublime aspects of other worlds, yet on the other hand are unable, as Renaissance people, to let their personal life rise to that level, letting it degenerate to the life of instincts. It is a terrible thing to see those individuals develop a kind of higher animal life on the one hand, and spreading above this a heaven that is luciferic by nature, a heaven presented to human minds in a theology that is truly wonderful and at the same time also entirely luciferic.

With this, we are coming to an age when powers other than those older angelic spirits became involved in human evolution.

Humanity is halfway between the world of the angels and that of the animals. In past ages the human form was quite animal-like, but ensouled with the element I have just described. Without a clue as to the reality of this situation, modern geologists and palaeontologists are turning up ancient human remains that show receding foreheads and animal-like human forms and believe this shows that humans are related to animals. This is quite right if one considers only the outer physical form, but the more animal-like those forms become as we go back in time, the more are they ensouled with original wisdom. If all that modern geologists and palaeontologists are able to say about the remains dug up in some parts of Europe a few years ago is that these were human beings with low skulls, receding foreheads, prominent brows and eye-sockets, anyone who knows the true situation has to say: This human being, who may look animal-like today and to palaeontologists who see only the outer appearance may appear to have evolved from apes, was fully ensouled with an ancient, original wisdom. Another spiritual entity had that wisdom in the human being who merely had a share in it. In the past, therefore, human beings held within them a superhuman principle. They grew increasingly towards this as they evolved out of animal-like forms, finally to become a kind of super-animal which included all the different animal forms. This super-animal offered conditions where an ahrimanic entity that was very different from the usual angelic spirits was able to enter. The human being who combines intellectual thinking with an animal-like organization came to the fore at the time when the wisdom of old was fading and becoming tradition. From the 8th century BC, human evolution took a course, slowly at first, but progressively, where a kind of ahrimanic super-animal nature developed from inside which then also entered the human soul from the other side.

The spirit which meets with the luciferic spirit in the human being, as it were, may be said to be another one who sought to deflect human beings from the true path. The luciferic spirits may be said to be spirits of ire in the human soul who do not intend human beings to be glad to be on earth but draw them away from the earth, over and over again, always wanting to draw them up towards the superhuman. They want him to be an angel who does not have anything to do with the lower functions of the physical organism. It angers the luciferic spirits to see people walk the earth on their two feet who are connected to the earth through their lower functions. They want to strip all animal nature away from people. Today, at the present stage of human evolution, for example, they do not want to let individuals come to physical incarnation; they want to keep them up above in the life that passes between death and a new birth.

The ahrimanic spirits, on the other hand, may be called spirits of pain and suffering. They seek to achieve the human form for themselves but are unable to do so. Essentially these ahrimanic spirits suffer terrible pain. It is as if an animal were to feel dimly: You ought to come upright and be a human being—as if it wanted to tear itself apart inwardly. That is the terrible pain experienced by the ahrimanic spirits. It can only be relieved by approaching human beings and taking hold of their minds. This will cool the pain. These spirits therefore get their teeth into the human mind, digging their claws into it, boring themselves into it.¹¹ Ahrimanic nature involves something that is like painfully letting the human mind enter into you. Ahrimanic spirits want to unite with human beings so that they may come to their senses, as it were.

Thus the human being is the battle ground for luciferic and ahrimanic elements. It would be fair to say that the luciferic element is involved in anything to do with the arts and with abstract theology. The ahrimanic element is like something coming up from the world of matter that has gone through the animal world and painfully seeks to achieve human status, taking hold of the human mind; it is repulsed by the part of the human being that is higher than human nature; again and again it is thrown back, though it wishes to take the human mind for itself. Again and again this element wants to enter into human beings and make them go by the intellect alone, preventing them from developing the higher faculties of Imagination and Inspiration, seeking to keep humanity at their level, so as to ease their own pain.

Everything which has developed during the more recent ahrimanic age by way of materialistic science, a science that comes from the burning pain of material existence that is cooled in the human being, is ahrimanic by nature. We see this materialistic science arise as human beings evolve it. When people give their inner life to this science, Ahriman unites with them through it. Lucifer has a hand above all in the sphere of the arts; Ahriman has a hand in the development of mechanics, technology, anything that seeks to take the human intellect away from people and put it into machine tools and also the machinery of government. This alone has made the developments possible which have arisen mainly from the time of the Renaissance onwards. We might say that luciferic activity came to a kind of dead end during the Renaissance and that ahrimanic activity then took over. We can see how everything since then has gone in the direction of mechanization, and a science divorced from the realm of the spirit.

If the industrial technology and materialistic science which has evolved from Renaissance times and is entirely ahrimanic by nature is allowed to spread without there being any understanding of Christ, it will bind human beings to the earth and prevent them from reaching the Jupiter stage. Yet if we bring understanding of Christ, a new life of the spirit, and Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to what at present is mere discovery of the physical world, we will redeem ahrimanic nature. This redemption can be presented in images, as I have done in many different ways in my Mystery Plays. Humanity will however be overcome by Ahriman unless understanding of Christ, an understanding that is truly of the spirit and free from all theology, is able to develop. Materialistic science and industrial technology would condemn humanity to earthly death, that is, they would craft a completely different world in which human beings live on as a kind of petrified fossils for the edification of ahrimanic spirits, and this will happen unless spiritual understanding of Christ spreads through the mechanization of our age.

We are thus able to say that Lucifer has a hand in all traditional theology, all art that is stiff and mannered, anything by way of renaissance; Ahriman has a hand in all materialistic science divorced from the realm of the spirit and unable to find the spirit in the world of nature, and in all aspects of human activity that are mechanical and without inwardness. The luciferic angelic spirits who have survived till today on the basis of tradition are only interested in keeping people from actually doing anything at all. They want to keep them confined to the inner life. Human beings have become individuals, but these angelic spirits do not want human actions to flow out into life and activity, into a manifestation of human will impulses. They want to keep people in an introspective frame of mind, to look rather than take action, to be mystics and follow the wrong kind of theosophy. They like people to sit musing all day, pursuing a thread through all kinds of riddles of the world and unwilling to apply the things they have in mind to the real world outside. They want detached observation to lead to a science of the outside world. They are good at creating a science like the one of Father Secchi,¹² who was an excellent astrophysicist, being able to make observations using the microscope and telescope and record them, and who also had something that did not relate to this at all, a sublime wisdom greater than the wisdom of this earth and of the human mind that had been given to him by luciferic spirits. The luciferic spirits nurture this wisdom and in doing so tear the human soul and spirit away from earth existence. And however great our materialistic science may be, it comes to nothing, for it has no inner reality of the spirit. This is of no interest to the luciferic spirits.

These spirits also want art to be as lifeless and devoid of spirit as possible, so that no spirit may enter into the forms created. They want nothing but the revival of things that existed in the past. They make people hate any kind of new style that may truly arise out of the present day. They want to reproduce the old styles because they come from a time when things could still be taken from unearthly realms.

On the other hand it is ahrimanic nature not to let a style or anything of a spiritual nature develop but rather to create utterly prosaic, purpose-designed buildings, mechanize everything and let it serve industry, letting people attach no value to hand-made arts and crafts and merely produce models which machines can reproduce in endless numbers. In the same way Ahriman can manifest in an infinite number of examples in many human beings through the mystery of numbers.

The human beings of today are caught in the midst of this battle. They need to realize that anthroposophy enables them to find and perceive the spirit and is therefore the true gift of Christ. Holding on to this they can keep the balance between luciferic and ahrimanic elements and thus find their way. They have to fight the ahrimanic spirit, for otherwise they must fall to the luciferic spirit. It is important, however, to be watchful when they give themselves up to the streams of Ahriman, lest they fall into a world that is entirely mechanized. The luciferic spirits want to prevent human beings from taking action; they want to make them mystics, given up to thought, who will gradually cease to take an interest in life on earth and can in this way be made remote from this life. The ahrimanic spirits want to keep human beings very much to life on earth. They want to mechanize everything, that is, take it down to the level of the mineral world. If they succeeded they would reshape the world to suit themselves and prevent it from reaching the Jupiter stage. On the other hand they do not want to deprive people of the opportunity to act; on the contrary, they want them to be as active as possible, except that it should all be routine and according to programme. Ahriman is a real programme enthusiast. It is he who inspires people to have endless statutes. He is really in his element if he finds a committee busily engaged in setting up statutes: Paragraph one, two and three—in the first place this is to be done, in the second place something else, in the third place one member has those particular rights, and in the fourth place another member is to do one thing or another. Of course, the members will never think of respecting those rights and may well refuse to do what it says in the statutes. That is not the point, however. Once the statutes exist, it is a matter of acting in the spirit of Ahriman, always pointing to paragraph number such and such.

Ahriman wants people to be active, but within the system, with everything firmly laid down in paragraphs. People should really find a list of things to be done on their pillow when they wake up in the morning and carry it all out mechanically, thinking only with their legs, as it were and not their heads. Lucifer wants them to use their heads and pour their hearts into their heads; Ahriman seeks to make people think only with their legs, pour everything into the legs.

People are caught up in the battle. I am trying to give you a picture of something which essentially is already part of our culture. We see people whose idea of perfection is to sit on folded legs like a Buddha figure and introspectively rise to sublime levels, not using their legs at all, but their heads swelling as they enter into mysterious depths. In the Western world we see others who hardly know how to get more quickly from one office to another, from business to business on their legs, so that we get the impression that it is really quite unnecessary for them to carry a head on their shoulders, for essentially their heads are not involved in their doings. Those are the two extremes in our time—solitary figures sitting thinking with eyes closed so that they may not even see what they themselves are doing, and others who actually don’t need eyes, for they have strings that pull their legs, and at the other end of those strings are the different paragraphs, with people pulled along as if they were part of a mechanism.

Occasionally we see modern people rebel against the ahrimanic trend and complain of the bureaucracy, which is of course entirely ahrimanic, against standardization in education, and so on. But as a rule all that happens is that they slide even deeper into the situation from which they want to escape.

The only thing to take us out of it all it to direct the whole of our minds and hearts to the search for the spirit, to an understanding that brings true spirituality to our thinking, with the true spirit taking hold of the whole human being and not merely the head. This will overcome the ahrimanic element and in so doing redeem it. We are not saying anything against ahrimanic nature, nor against all the situations where keeping of records and making of statutes and paragraphs have their rightful place. But the spirit must enter into it all.

We cannot really avoid using the ahrimanic skills in the present age—taking shorthand, for instance, and using a typewriter. These are highly ahrimanic elements in our civilization. But we can also bring the spirit into it, and in this way raise such ahrimanic influences as stenography and typewriting into the sphere of the spirit, redeeming Ahriman in the process. It is only possible to do this if we bring the life of the spirit fully to mind. People who live as materialists today, using stenography and typewriters, get deeply caught up in the ahrimanic element. You see, it is not my purpose to preach reaction against these things; the demonic world that has come on us is not to be given a bad name; but the demons themselves need to be redeemed.

This may certainly also show itself in individual instances. Basically we may say that the ahrimanic elements which have entered into our civilization in more recent times really only pursue their ahrimanic skills because they are inclined that way. The things they write in shorthand or on typewriters might just as well stay unwritten. We usually know all about it and there is no need to put it down on paper. The content does not matter, for only the ahrimanic skill has some significance. Yet it will be good to have the things that are coming up in the science of the spirit laid down exactly, for it is necessary to express ourselves in a careful, accurate way. And in this respect the ahrimanic element will be able to serve the realm of the spirit well.

It will be of special importance that the modern science of the spirit enters fully into the different human sciences and advances them from natural sciences devoid of spirit to a truly consistent science of the spirit, with the individual sciences as chapters in a unified science of the spirit. This will deahrimanize them, and if details are handled in the right way we gradually come into the stream that I had to present to you today, developing it out of the polarity between the luciferic and ahrimanic elements.

Please do not think it is irrelevant to go into detail the way I have done today. It is good to enter into this to some extent, using the kind of images I have used today, with today’s luciferic individual sitting on crossed legs, and ahrimanic people who rush from office to office, a finger in every pie, and who really don’t need to use their heads to keep their busy lives going.

You may feel more comfortable if abstract ideas are presented to you rather than concrete images, but the modern, anthroposophical science of the spirit must relate directly to life and indeed call a spade a spade. This, after all, is the only way to develop sound, proper ideas and the right inner attitude.

This is what I wanted to add today. The next time we’ll try and use a different approach to the nature of the human being.

• 4. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC), Athenian philosopher.
• 5. Aristotle (384–322 BC), Greek philosopher, scientist and physician.
• 6. Raphael, or Raffaello Santi or Sanzio (1483–1520), Italian painter.
• 7. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), greatest Italian poet.
• 8. Brunette Latini (c. 1210–c. 1295), Florentine statesman, scholar and poet.
• 9. published in How can Mankind Find the Christ Again? (GA 187) Tr. F.E. Dawson, G. Hahn, O. D. Wannamaker. London: Rudolf Steiner Press.
• 10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet, dramatist, scientist and statesman.
• 11. Phrase coined by Steiner
• 12. Father Angelo Secchi (1818–1878) Italian astronomer trained as a Jesuit, Professor of Physics, Washington, USA, and from 1849 director of the observatory at the Coliegio Romano.

Today, we’ll consider the human form and we shall see how much this will add to our subject matter and deepen it. The first thing to remember is that taken in its widest sense, the human form is of course connected with the whole of human life, and this is what we have to consider if we want to gain real inner understanding of it. Human beings are part of the whole universe, the cosmos. If you take it that the form of the human head primarily reflects the sphere of the cosmic universe, you may say that with regard to the head, human beings relate to the whole universe. However, to understand how human beings relate to this when at the same time they are also an entity that is complete in itself, we have to consider the way human beings relate to the world around them.

Let us begin by saying that in all their thinking, in so far as it is connected with the head, human beings turn to the whole cosmos. When at birth we bring the head into this physical world from the world of the spirit, we are encased in a living physical body and in a way able to look back to our inner reality of soul and spirit, and to a time when we were not encased in a body. It may be easiest to see what I mean if we consider how human beings gain insight and knowledge by looking back inside themselves, as it were. We are looking back inside ourselves, for instance, when we do arithmetic or geometry. We recognize the laws of geometry simply because we are human beings and are able to find the laws of physical space in ourselves. We also know that these laws fill the whole universe. This, then, is something we inevitably see when we use our eyes; everything is arranged in geometrical order; even the design of our eyes, and the way we are able to focus, is based on geometry.

Thus we are able to say that when we relate to the world through thinking, which is connected with the head, we take back into ourselves what lies spread out in the universe. One way we relate to the universe may therefore be seen as follows: The universe is reaching into us, and we are, in a way, looking back on it. This would be the way in which human beings relate to the universe, out of which they have been built, at the most superficial level.

We progress a little more if we now consider, in second place, how human beings make everything they take in from outside come alive in them. You see, when a child is born everything it went through between death and rebirth is inside it. If the child were able to develop the right kind of awareness, it would be able to look back on life before birth. Those pre-birth experiences then begin to stir. Human beings do not merely look back inside themselves to find the universe, but also look around them and see their environment. We are thus able to say: Apart from taking in the universe, we also look out into the universe around us, taking its mobility into us. We become inwardly mobile.

Now to the third aspect: In the first two, human beings are not really quite inside themselves. Having the universe inside us, say as geometry, we live in something that is really outside us. When the child begins to be inwardly mobile as it imitates the movements of the universe, it lives in something that is outside it. How does the human being become inward and become aware of self?

Just take your left hand in your right hand, thoughtfully—all you have to do is take hold of yourself and you remain entirely inside yourself. You are using your right hand for an activity, but it is you yourself you take hold of. You may take hold of other objects at other times, but in this case you take hold of yourself. All self-awareness, all inwardness, essentially is a matter of thus taking hold of oneself. We do something similar with our eyes. When we focus on a particular point, the right visual axis intersects with the left visual axis, just as the right hand takes hold of the left. Animals have less inwardness because they do much less of this taking hold of self. The third thing, therefore, would be experiencing or touching ourselves. There we are actually in the outside world and take hold of ourselves, and we are not yet inside our skin.

Let us now consider the boundary between outside and inside. We indicate the process by letting the right hand move to and fro over the left hand which it is holding. This defines a surface area we actually have all over, the covering which encloses everything inside. The fourth thing, then, is to enclose oneself. Get a real feeling for the way the skin encloses your form, and there you have the closing-off principle.

1. The universe reaching in. Looking back
2. Looking out into the universe. Taking in the mobility of the universe
3. Experiencing self, touching self
4. Enclosing ourselves.

These four things show how the human being is gradually given form from outside in. First there is the whole universe and we are outside ourselves; then imitation of the universe, where we have not yet come to ourselves. Taking hold of ourselves we find ourselves outside ourselves. With the fourth element we enclose ourselves.

For the fifth we have to look for something that is inside us, fills us, actively pulses inside us.

As to the sixth, since we not only have a skin but also something that fills it we are now inside ourselves, but this is also where the form is dissolved again; we have something that not merely fills us inside, but makes us like a fruit when it grows ripe. Take a fruit when it is just on the point of being ripe; once it goes beyond this point it starts to dry up. The sixth thing, then, is ripening.

But visualize this ripening process. As we grow ripe we begin, in a way, to decay inwardly. We cease a little bit to develop further as human beings. We are human but we decay inwardly, turning to dust, as it were. We become mineral and thus part of the outside world again. That which fills us is wholly inside. But as we fall to dust we become part of the mineral world again. We become a body that has weight, as it were. The seventh thing, then, is to become part of the inorganic world.

I have shown, on another occasion, that if we weigh a human being who walks this earth, that human being is just like a mineral. There we have the process of becoming part of the forces of outer nature. Just think—if you walk properly you involve yourself in the forces of physical nature, and if you do not walk properly you fall over. The first step in finding our place in the outside world is therefore to find our balance.

The eighth thing: We find that we do not merely become part of the outside world but also take it into ourselves as we breathe and when we eat. Before, we essentially only fathomed things that were already inside ourselves; it is a matter of being alive inside. But we take the outside world into ourselves, and at this point it has to be clearly understood that everything we take in from outside is something that does not really belong inside us.

People have the wrong idea about the way we take in things from outside. In principle, everything we eat is a little bit poisonous. Life consists in taking in food and not letting it become entirely part of ourselves, resisting it. This resistance, defending ourselves, is in fact life. The point is, however, that the foods we eat are not very poisonous so that we are able to hold our own against them. If we take in real poison it will destroy us, for we’ll not be able to defend ourselves.

Thus we may say: With the outside world, a poison sting enters into us. I have to use words that have real meaning, but today’s language and understanding does not have them. You’ll have to understand what I mean when I put these things before you.

5. Something that fills us
6. Ripening
7. Becoming part of the inorganic world. Finding our balance
8. Poison sting.

The human being is now at the point where the outside world is taken in. First we considered the way the human being is given form out of the universe. Then came the way the human being is given form from inside, and this has taken us to where the inner human being gains form by resisting the outside world.

But human beings create their form, or at least shape their lives and a little bit also their actual human form, according to the way they relate to, and are active in, the outside world. Today our activities no longer relate entirely to our human nature; we have to go back to earlier times to see human beings relating to the world around them in a way that makes them act in a truly human way. We are then able to say that in the ninth place, one human activity is to involve oneself in the outside world here on earth, and not in the universe. In their outside life in civilization people were first of all hunters.

They progressed by developing another activity—breeding of animals. That is the tenth stage, and the eleventh stage of perfection is to be a tiller of the soil. Finally the twelfth stage is to be involved in trade. - You’ll see later why I do not include other activities that followed. They were secondary. Hunting, animal breeding, tilling the soil and trading are the primary human activities.—This, then, defines the human form in relation to the earth:

9. Hunter
10. Animal breeder
11. Tiller of the soil
12. Trader

We might also show this in a drawing. Let us say this is the earth, and here we have the human being on earth. With regard to the first four form principles, form is given from outside, from the cosmos surrounding the earth (Fig. 9, left). Let us leave the middle principle aside for the moment and consider where the human being is formed by the earth to be hunter, animal breeder; here the opposite would be the case. Here the constellations influence the human being; but the influence of the constellations which are down there has to pass through the earth to reach the human being. This would mean that the human being would have to take his orientation from the earth where these stars are concerned. And the four middle principles would give human beings the potential to develop inwardly.

Thus these four principles (Table below) take us out into the universe; the last four take us to the earth, with the stars involved covered by the earth. In the four middle principles, stars and earth are in balance, and we have human beings with an inner life.

People had a feeling for this in the past. They would say: One part of the starry heavens influences human beings by forming them from outside, out of the universe. Different stars had to be seen in that role through the ages, of course, for the constellations change. But let us take, broadly speaking, the age in which we live. An ancient Greek who had given some thought to these things would say: The stars that are in the region of the Ram are acting on us from outside, and so do those in the region of the Bull, the Twins and Cancer. Through them human beings have the principle in them that looks back, the one that is inwardly mobile, the one that takes hold of itself and the one that encloses itself. To the stars down there on the opposite side, which are covered by the earth, human beings owe their existence as hunters (Archer), animal breeders (Goat), tillers of the soil—walking across the field carrying urns to water the fields (Water Carrier), and we are traders thanks to the part of the starry heavens that takes us across the seas—in far distant times boats were built to look similar to fish, and two ships side by side that have sailed the seas in pursuit of trade are the symbol for trade. If we take the liberty and call the ships “fishes” we have the twelfth sign.

The human being formed out of the universe—head

1. Taking in the universe. Looking back—Ram
2. Looking out into the universe. Taking in the mobility of the universe—Bull
3. Taking hold of ourselves (touch)—Twins
4. Enclosing ourselves—Crab, Cancer

The human being formed from within—chest

5. That which fills—Lion
6. Ripening with ear of corn—Virgin
7. Becoming part of the inorganic world. Seeking balance—Scales
8. Poison sting Scorpion

Forms of Human activity on earth—limbs or earthly human being

9. Hunter—Archer
10. Animal breeder—Goat
11. Tiller of the soil—Water Carrier
12. Trader—Fishes

In the middle we have that which fills, that is, something which acts like the blood that fills human beings. The best animal to symbolize the blood is probably the Lion, because there we have the activity of the heart at its highest. Ripening—we only need to look at a field where the wheat or rye is getting ripe; the ear of com is exactly the stage at which fruiting becomes ripening—so we have the Virgin with the ear of corn, and it is the ear of com that matters. Human beings become part of the outside world again in seeking balance—Scales. And where we feel the poison sting, and feel that everything is slightly poisonous—Scorpion.

In the past, people really had a feeling for the way the human being is connected with the universe and the earth. In our time people say: Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion ... and draw those figures, but they no longer have any real idea as to their meaning.

It is important to see these things in the right way. If you look at an old illustration of the Ram, you’ll realize that it is not a naturalistic, materialistic image of a ram. The important characteristic is, again and again, the gesture of looking back. The way the Ram looks back is the way the human being looks back on himself as he looks back to the universe that lives in him. It is the gesture that counts.

If you look at old pictures of the Bull you’ll find that the Bull always looks sideways and makes a leap. It is the gesture of looking around you and letting the general, universal principle come alive in you. Looking at the Twins you have one person on the right and another on the left, and always the right hand of the one on the right holds the left hand of the one on the left. This is the gesture of touching, feeling oneself. Two individual persons are shown in order to indicate that in a way the human being is still outside himself, and takes his pre-birth human being into himself by touching himself.

Closing off, enclosing oneself—Crab. The people who chose the Crab as the symbol for this enclosing gesture did so because the crab puts its claws around its prey. The word “cancer” actually still holds the meaning of enclose. The Crab is the symbol of the individual closing himself off, not merely touching and feeling himself but closing himself off from the outside and creating an inside.

The Lion is the animal of the heart, for the obvious reason that its heart is particularly well developed. It represents the qualities that come in fifth place.

With the quality of ripening, it is the ear of corn the Virgin holds that represents the fruiting quality when it is just on the point of drying up. The Scales show the search for balance, and the Scorpion is of course the poison sting. The Archer is really an animal form, the front part of which is a human figure with bow and arrow, like a Centaur astride an animal body. This is the hunter.

Capricorn, the he-goat, is really a goat with a fish’s tail, something which does not exist in the natural world. But human beings breed animals and thus make them as tame as tame fish. This, then, is a made-up symbol.

Agriculture is represented by the Water Carrier. There is a certain spiritual justification for thinking in terms of water, but what matters is the way he walks across the field. He holds an urn in each hand and pours water from these. This is the gardener and the tiller of the soil.

I have already suggested that the Fishes represent trade. People used to have fishes' heads up on the front part of their ships, heads of dolphins, for instance—dolphins are not fish, of course, but the ancients thought them to be. This symbol clearly points to trading activity.

Rather than consider these things in a superficial, schematic way, which is so often the case today, we have to look at the way the human being is given form and then see how this gives us the relationship to the universe and to the earth. Basing ourselves on the form, we gradually perceive the human being as part, as a member, of the whole universe. Another approach is the following. Let us take the Ram, for instance. Considering Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes from the point of view of the ancient Greeks we may say: In the shape of the head, the human being is formed out of the universe. Then mobility develops inside and the potential for symmetry. Next, however, it will be necessary to see the influence of the last constellations in the list as having the opposite effect. In this case the influences come from the earth. Activities have an effect on human beings.

If we made the figure broad at the top (see Fig. 11), we’d best make it narrow (down) here, saying: When human beings want to be hunters the qualities we may take to be those of the Archer must be particularly well developed in them. To be animal breeders they have to bend their knees a lot. The tiller of the soil has to walk; he is therefore shown stepping out, and so on. Carrying on trade: If we want to look for a symbol in the human being, it has to be the feet. All these organs are also formed from outside in. The remaining part, where the human being develops himself, is in the middle.

This figure I am drawing really arises from the twelve signs as if of its own accord. We are able to say: There (in the middle) the universe with its stars is more active in the inner human being; there (at the top) the stars act from outside, and there (below) they compress the human being. You can see that the form I have drawn is the human embryo. Basing yourself on the laws of zodiac, you really have to draw the human embryo like this, just as you get a triangle if you draw a figure that encloses 180 degrees. It is therefore immediately apparent that the human embryo is created out of the whole universe.

As I said, we have to take the point of view of the ancient Greeks to do this, for today we can no longer start with the Ram; we have to start with the Fishes. We have been in the sign of the Fishes for centuries now, and this marks the time of transition to human intellectual development. But if you go back to the time when it was right to start with the Ram and the zodiac could be seen the way the ancients saw it, you have not much more than Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes, or the occupations of the hunter, animal breeder, tiller of the soil and trader. Today we live in the age of the Fishes, during which the whole of our modern industrialized civilization has developed. Going back to the time of the Ram, we still find the four honest occupations—through modified to some extent and more complex—which place human beings in the world of nature.

Going back through the ages of the Bull, the third, second and first post-Atlantean ages, the last Atlantean age, the last but one, and so on, we would come to an earlier age of the Fishes, when human beings were still completely etheric and had not yet descended into the physical world. And because human beings were completely etheric in the earlier age of the Fishes, they are today essentially repeating everything they went through at that earlier time when they were in the process of becoming human. They have been repeating this from the middle of the 15th century, but in an abstract way. Then they were truly evolving their humanity; now they are growing into things that have been abstracted from them, for a machine is something that has been abstracted. With the new age of the Fishes, human beings are placed in something that is actually dissolving them. And when humanity enters another Water Carrier age, the process of dissolution will go a great deal further. Above all humans beings will not be able to relate to the world in any way at all unless they hold to the world of the spirit. It is exactly because of this recapitulation that humanity must move on into the world of the spirit.

Again it is possible to see that human beings are really threefold by nature: formed out of the universe in so far as they are head; developing inwardly, merely in concord with the outside world, in so far as they are chest; developing limbs and metabolism in so far as they make themselves part of the physical world, i.e. are limb people, or earth people (see Table above).

Threefoldness exists also in another respect. When we arrive in the world, the first four powers or impulses are already in us, though we only develop them afterwards. Yet in a sense we are also full human beings, for the potential for the other eight principles is also there. The head person is a whole human being, but the other parts are only rudimentary. The chest person is a whole human being, but the first and last four impulses are rudimentary. The limb person is a whole human being, but chest and head are rudimentary. So we really have three people in every human being. The first, the head person, is a metamorphosis of the previous incarnation. The chest person is the human being of the present incarnation in the true sense. And everything we do in the world around us, which comes to expression in our limbs and in our metabolism, takes us forward into our next incarnation. In this way, too, human beings are threefold by nature, and it is another way of studying the human form as a whole. We really ought to say that to draw a human being we ought to draw the head. This would be a complete human being. You can see it like this: The lower jaw really represents legs, except that in the head they point backwards; this person is sitting on his legs.

The chest person is another whole human being, with the arms more or less the outer representatives of etheric eyes. And the limb person is another whole human being, with the kidneys the eyes, for example. Even in terms of form and shape, we have three human beings fitted into one another. In the human being who has vanished into the head and become a sphere we see the previous incarnation coming alive, in the chest we have the actual human being of the present time, and in the person who is walking about we may see what will enter into the next incarnation.

In a sense we are also able to say that the way people comport themselves today shows a threefold nature. Take the human being of the limbs and metabolism: he is capable of engendering a whole human being. All you need is the human embryo in the mother’s womb and you see how the limbs and metabolism person wants to become a whole human being.

As to the chest person, look at a small baby and you can see how at that stage the head and chest still form a whole. Threefoldness therefore shows itself also in the way we grow up. And when we are no longer babies we are brought up and educated. The human head is the educator of other human beings—a child’s head, or a childish person, teaching another childish person, for essentially we are for ever children in the head. We only grow old, that is to middle age, in the middle, or chest person, and really old in our limbs. People find out about this when they get old. As the old riddle goes: We walk on all fours in our youth, then on two and later on three legs. People grow old in their limbs. In their head they always remain somehow the outcome of their previous incarnation, and throughout life the head is really a child’s head. Education theory will have to solve the problem of how the child’s-head teacher can best treat the child’s-head pupil.

These things can be amusing, but behind them lies a deep truth which must be considered if human beings are to see themselves in the right light.

Essentially the human head is a passenger carried by the rest of the human being. The legs of the head are always in a sitting position and it does not even attempt to do its own walking. The head is carried around like a passenger sitting in a coach. The chest person is the carer, and the limb person is the worker, used as a slave, and the one who really works his way through life. This is also why we have a head, in so far as we are head as a whole human being; I have said so many times. All the way to where we enclose ourselves, using the Crab principle, we are head. This is the gift of heaven and we do not have to contribute. Here (in the middle) we must breathe and eat: this is the the carer, the wet-nurse. And the true worker belongs to the sphere of Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes.

We are thus able to evolve the human form in relation to the whole universe. You need to take these things very seriously, even if they are presented with a fairly light touch and not in a pedantic way. Taking them seriously you will see that on the one hand everything I have said today holds the potential for understanding the human form out of the whole universe, and on the other hand it is something to make us feel the greatest respect for the perceptiveness of people in the past; out of instinctive clairvoyance they were able to gain the most tremendous knowledge of man from the signs of the zodiac. Today our knowledge is such that people goggle at the Ram but fail to realize that the way it turns around is the important thing; they goggle at the Bull and do not know that it is the way it leaps and looks sideways is what matters; and with the Twins the way one hand holds the other, and so on. Everything in those signs of the zodiac, every single gesture, is truly profound, and if there is no gesture, as in the case of the Lion, the symbolic element has been chosen in such a way that the sign itself has the gesture in it, with the Lion having the strongest heart beat. The Lion represents that which fills us. We can find the wisdom of those ancient days again if we look for it in ourselves.

Today I have been considering the human form, tomorrow I intend to consider human life in relation to the universe. In the following lecture we’ll consider the human soul in relation to the universe.

Yesterday we discussed the way the inner and outer human form is created out of the universe. We also found that this was something people knew instinctively in earlier times. It is important, however, to note the following. In one of my drawings I showed that the whole zodiac can be seen to lie in the human form, but this had to be the form of the human embryo. If we draw this we have literally recreated the zodiac within the human form.

During life on earth between birth and death, human beings tear themselves away from this embryonic form. They certainly have their form given by the universe during the embryonic period, but they “stretch” during their time on earth, lifting the head up and out of the circle that reflects the zodiac. They then have the form given to them as embryos, but no longer allow it to relate to the fixed stars, and this means that human beings become able to take into the form of the head what they have brought with them from their previous life on earth.

Animals keep their backbones horizontal, and essentially continue much more in the position given by the zodiac, with the head merely attached to the front part of the backbone. This means that animals are not able to use the head to take in anything from a previous life. The situation is such that if we consider the human form in one respect, we would have to say that the human form based entirely on the zodiac would be like this (embryo). And if human beings continued to have this form throughout life, the form of the human head would not be able to take in the essential nature of a person which comes from the previous incarnation. By lifting the head out of that position, it becomes possible for the form to hold and protect the element that comes from the previous life.

Human beings also lift the other side out of the embryonic form, which is the side that takes its orientation from the last four signs of the zodiac, from Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes. As we saw yesterday, this relates to life and conditions of life in the outside world—to hunting, animal breeding, agriculture and trade, or shipping. Human beings follow these pursuits out of will impulses, out of the system of limbs which they have lifted out of its orientation on the zodiac. The result is that everything people do holds the potential, or seed, for future lives on earth. Animals retain their orientation on the zodiac and are therefore unable to take in anything from a previous life on earth or to look towards any future life on earth.

Out of the profound wisdom people had as instinctive knowledge in the past they called the circle of constellations “the zodiac”.¹³ Today we use not instinct but clear thinking to discover the same truths, and we consider the original wisdom human beings once possessed with growing respect.

So much, then, about the human form. Into this form is poured life, and we find this life localized in the human ether body just as we find form localized in the human physical body. It is quite right to consider the human physical body with regard to its form, for that is the essence of it. The ether body essentially represents life, and this is what we want to consider today. Yesterday we saw that the human form is really made up of twelve different forms and we made the attempt to study those forms. The human form as a whole, in its inner and outer aspects, arises from twelve individual forms.

Human life also has a number of levels, and in the first place these may be considered as follows.

The first, and to our everyday thinking this is not yet a level of life, is the life of the senses. Although they are part of the whole human being, the senses are so much at the periphery that we tend to forget that the life of the senses is the outermost layer of our life.

Moving inwards from the periphery—now thinking only in terms of life—we come to the life of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the life of the senses just as the nerves go inwards from the sense organs.

The life of the nerves in turn is in touch with another level that develops in the living human being. I have shown some aspects of it on earlier occasions, when I drew your attention to the way we draw breath. We take in air and the air we inhale creates a kind of inner rhythm which continues through the spinal canal and on into the brain. There the life of the nerves comes in contact with the life of our breathing, which is the next level as we move inwards.

The life of breathing in turn connects with another level of life. The breath, we may say, continually renews the blood. Thus the breathing rhythm is connected with the blood rhythm and we can move on from the life of our breathing to the life that exists in the rhythm of the circulation.

The circulation, however, is also connected with the whole of metabolism; it takes in metabolism, and we thus come to the next level, the life of metabolism.

Metabolism stimulates the movements we make in the world around us. It is thanks to our metabolism that we are actually able to move around. The nature of the human—and also the animal—metabolism is such that the soul is able to use the metabolic processes to produce movements. In the life of movement we are again becoming part of the outside world, for anything we achieve at that level of life connects us with the outside world.

There is one more level of life: the life of reproduction. In movement we continually use ourselves up, and internal “reproduction” has to take place for the very reason that we are in motion. Instead of “life of movement”, we may thus also put “internal reproduction, or regeneration”, providing we remain inside the human skin. And when this reproduction occurs independently, it becomes life of reproduction in the true sense.

1. Life of the senses
2. Life of the nerves
3. Life of breathing
4. Life of circulation
5. Life of metabolism
6. Life of movement
7. Life of reproduction

Yesterday we had twelve elements of form, today we have evolved seven levels of life, and it is true to say that in terms of the ether body, human beings live differently on each of these seven levels. If we are to take these things seriously, we cannot speak of a single kind of life that is all at the same level.

In the first place, then, our ether body may be said to live at the level of the senses, and this is a form of life that barely feels like life to us. Through it, we are involved in the outside world. If we take the eye, for example, we say the ether body is alive in the eye and in a manner of speaking enlivens it. It does however come in touch with a form of matter that is close to death in the eye, which is a living organ only in so far as the ether body enters into it. Apart from the ether body, the eye is really a physical apparatus.

Individual sense organs are always both a physical apparatus and penetrated by the ether body, each in its own particular way. Generally speaking, however, our sense organs are dead organs, except that the ether body enters into them. It would therefore be reasonable to say that the life of the senses is life in the process of dying.

The life of the nerves takes the experiences gained through the senses and makes them into something that can preserve the life of the senses. All lingering effects are due to the life of the nerves, therefore—lingering sounds, for example, and in the case of the eye, after-images. The life of the nerves, then, is a kind of resting life, or a life that holds and keeps.

The life of breathing gives image quality to the fleeting life of the senses that tends to preserve itself. We are able to have images of the outside world because the breathing rhythm is in touch with the currents that pass through the nerves. Ideas and abstract thoughts are still entirely bound to the life of the nerves, but anything to do with images is connected with the life of breathing. When we breathe we have creative life in us, a life we may call the image-creating life. This lives in the human form and therefore also takes part in the human form.

We have seen that the human form arises out of the zodiac, and because the creative life that comes with our breathing lives in the human form, it also has part in the whole outer form that has been created out of the starry heavens.

This form is therefore also part of the inner aspect of the human being. And it is thanks to our breathing that we have not only the contents of our conscious mind but also images of all our internal organs, images based on the outer form. Our internal organs therefore arise at first in a roundabout way—as images created in the breathing process. They do not yet have substance at this point. The breath creates an image of the internal human being. With our breathing we are in the outside world, moving within the zodiac with the earth, and we are continually inhaling the images of our internal organization.

These images are inhaled from life outside us. This, then is our creative life. The images we inhale are spread through the whole organism by the life of circulation. This and the life of breathing take human beings to the point where they are inwardly image of the world. Thus we may say:

The life of circulation is in touch with the life of metabolism, with the result that the images are given physical substance and physical organs develop on the fifth level of life. Matter infiltrates the images; it suffuses or tinges them. Thus the upper human being creates images in the life of breathing and these images are made tangible reality by the matter that infiltrates and tinges them.

Energy then enters into the physical organs from the life of movement. We may put it like this: We have physical organs and here we have life that generates power in the organs. The life of reproduction, finally, renews itself.

You can also see how the threefold human being arises: nerves and senses, circulation and rhythm, and metabolism and limbs, or metabolism and movement. Reproduction, finally, gives rise to a new human being.

The attributes I have added on the right (Fig. 14) give you an idea of the differences between the levels of life. Living in the senses, our ether body is in a kind of life that is dying. In the life of the nerves, the currents in the nerves, it is in a life that holds and keeps. The breathing life is where our ether body truly becomes a body of creative powers that designs images. The life of circulation ensures that those images become our whole internal organization. Physical substance is then brought in through the life of metabolism. The ether body enters into metabolism and suffuses the actual body of creative powers with matter. Subjective human energy is added through the life of the limbs, and so on.

The instinctive wisdom of old gave people understanding of this, too, and they knew, therefore, that human beings take in the life that is outside and develop it further inside them. That is more or less how the sages of old would see it. They would say: Let us take the outermost layer of the universe that is around the earth, then the next, and the next. The outermost layer is closest to the fixed stars in the sky, to the universe to which we owe the human form. Human life, they would say, does not come from the fixed stars, however, but from the planets in the sky. (Fig. 15).

They would first of all speak of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the sun. If we consider the true nature of the sun—this is something I have said many times before—it differs from the other planets in so far as it presents itself as a source of light. This is also why in popular astronomy it is called a fixed star. The other planets do not appear as light sources but as images. This is why it is said in popular astronomy that their light is borrowed light, for they reflect the light of the sun. Just consider the difference between the sun, which lets its own essential nature emerge with the light, and the other heavenly bodies, the planets, which merely present an image of their outer nature, or of whatever they have on the surface, making this visible by reflecting the light of the sun. It is a major difference. And being the source of light, the sun is also the source of life.

It is also the source of something else. At all times, even when people had only instinctive knowledge, it was said that the sun was threefold, the source of light, life and love. This trinity is to be found in the sun.

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No need to go against the Copernican system today, you can keep it and still understand what the ancients meant with their system, based on instinctive perception of the cosmos. Let us assume that, in Copernican terms, we have the sun at the centre—or at a focal point, if you like, but we can ignore that for the moment. Mercury, Venus, earth and Mars—we can ignore the minor planets for present purposes—Jupiter and Saturn are in orbit around the sun. But now we’ll look at it like this:

Let us say, and this is certainly also possible, that we have Saturn, Jupiter and Mars here, and then come sun, Mercury, Venus and earth, with the moon, however, which we’ll position here.

It is not essential, of course, to take this particular position, I am merely presenting it to show you that even with the Copernican system it is possible to get the sequence that was thought to be the right one in ancient times: moon, Venus, Mercury, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. All we need is for the relative positions to be such that the earth is to one side of the sun and the outer planets are somewhere on the other side. It is not necessary to have this kind of opposition or conjunction—which may happen in alternation—but the sequence is certainly feasible. And it is the sequence that was in people’s minds out of the old instinctive wisdom. This sequence seemed important to them.

The ancients would say: Let us think of the human beings here on earth. They are exposed to the universe. They experience the rays of the sun as their source of light, life and love. These three enter into them from the sun. Yet human beings are also exposed to the image quality of Saturn. If they were only exposed to the life of the sun as they developed on earth they would not be able to develop the life of the senses. Thus the eyes would not become a distinct physical apparatus but would be just like any other part of the human body—muscular organs, or vessels, or the like. Continuously exposed to the sun, human beings would not be able to develop eyes, nor any other senses. They are able to do develop them because Saturn, the outermost planet, reduces the influence of the sun. Saturn dries the vessel out, as it were, and this, roughly speaking, produces the physical apparatus. The ancients had as instinctive knowledge what we are discovering again today: The life of the senses develops under the influence of Saturn.

Human beings also would not be able to develop the life of the nerves if they were continuously exposed to the sun. Thanks to the influence of Jupiter, the life of the nerves dries up and does not become as vital as the muscles and similar organs. The ancients would say: The life of the nerves is stimulated by Jupiter.

Saturn orbits the sun in about 30 years. During their life on earth, human beings have it happen about once that Saturn is blocked out by the sun, in a way. If someone has the good fortune to have Saturn blocked out very strongly by the sun, a powerful sun life dawns in their life of the senses. We might say that their eyes or other senses are stimulated—the eyes are in fact least affected, but they make the best example, being so obvious. So if once during life on earth a person is in the position where Saturn does not influence the senses, that person may discover that a specific cosmic influence comes in through the senses. The individual is given a stimulus and is strengthened in the sphere of the senses.

People try to explain these things in all kinds of ways. There is a considerable literature on the subject in America. William James, for instance, wrote of all kinds of “awakenings” that happened in people’s lives.¹⁴ If you read his books and those of his followers you’ll find that a particular phenomenon occurs when someone receives a special stimulus at some point in time. These people have no idea as to the cause; they do not know that this is due to the position relative to Saturn or Jupiter. When the life of Saturn is blocked out, the life of the senses receives a special stimulus; when the life of Jupiter is blocked out, which happens all the more easily because Jupiter takes only 12 years to orbit, the life of the nerves is stimulated.

All these things are said to be in the subconscious, which is an absolute sludge tank today for people like William James and all psychoanalysts. This subconscious of theirs is a negative term, a waste bin for all the things that cannot be explained. Everything has to go in there; there you’ll find the hidden “provinces” of the soul that will react occasionally, and so on. It would certainly be highly desirable to take a good look at those pragmatic and psychoanalytical ideas one of these days.

The third planet, Mars, reduces heaving life to the point where breathing becomes possible. Mars, too, may be blocked out by the sun, and the life of breathing then receives a special stimulus. Mars orbits quite rapidly, taking about two years, and everybody therefore gets certain stimuli in the breathing life, the life of images. These stimuli are not always of the first quality, but people become poets or composers, or something like that, through receiving this stimulus in their breathing life. It does not go deep enough to make people like William James want to investigate and speculate; it seems quite clear to them. People with the old, instinctive wisdom thus felt that Mars stimulated the breathing life.

The life of the sun arouses light in the outside world, love in our hearts, and life in our dealings with the outside world. The location for this is midway between the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as the ancients also knew. Between those two lives lies the heart, which does not act as a motor but reflects the interplay between circulation and breathing.

Next we come to metabolism. People who had the old wisdom looked at Mercury not to see how far the sun is able to block it out, the way it does with the other planets, but how far Mercury itself blocks out the sun for the earth. Its position between sun and earth was considered to be the most important aspect, just as in the case of Jupiter the position beyond the sun was considered most important. When Mercury blocks out the sun, the life of the sun is reduced. As the life of the sun is weakened, this weakened life stirs inside human beings. If it were not reduced, people would immediately spit out any food or drink they had taken; they would not tolerate anything that comes from the outside world. They would then get out of the habit of eating, finding it too much of a bore. That is how powerful the life of the sun is in us. If we had only the life of the heart, or the sun, we would not be able to digest anything and immediately spit, or indeed vomit, everything out again. We owe the development of our metabolism to the fact that the life of Mercury weakens the life of the sun a little in this respect. The ancients therefore thought that the Mercury principle came between the life of circulation and the life of metabolism. The Mercury principle thus pushes physical matter through the human organism and into its individual organs.

Energy comes in through the life of movement which depends on Venus life, just as the life of metabolism depends on Mercury life. The ancients therefore ascribed to Venus the power that streams through the human being, this inner self renewal, the feeling that there is another human being, an energy human being, inside one.

The life of the moon, which is close to the life of the earth, does more than reduce the life of the sun and thus enable human beings to digest physical matter and process energies. The background to reproduction is something I have spoken of before: a space is created, with matter pushed back at the organic level, as it were. The embryo is able to develop because matter is pushed aside and in energy terms the embryo is organized from the cosmos. In this respect the life of reproduction depends on the moon life.

Yesterday I spoke of the relationship of the human form in its twelve aspects relating to the fixed stars. Today I have tried to show you how the new science of anthroposophy is in agreement with the instinctive wisdom of old in saying that the different levels of human life are connected with the life of the planets in the cosmos. Depending on the position of the earth in relation to the different members of the planetary system and the sun at its centre, life is modified in many different ways. Life is made to die, it is preserved and made creative in the upper human being. It is reduced in the lower human being so that physical matter and energies can be taken up from the earth. Human beings simply take the earth’s power of repulsion, make it their own and in this way develop the power that is in their own organs, and so on.

We see, then, that human life, too, comes from the cosmos. Looking up to the fixed stars, we see the zodiac as representing the principles that give rise to the human form. Observing the movements of the planets, we find the explanation for the different levels of human life. We look to Saturn for the life of the senses, to Jupiter for the life of the nerves, to Mars for the life of breathing, which is active in images.

Let us take a special look at this life of breathing. I told you that the images are received from the cosmos: form. The movements experienced in the zodiac stream inwards as images of our internal organs. Between birth and death, human beings are on earth, however, and the lower acts into the upper, with the result that everything has its polar opposite. The images enter into us and become suffused with matter, otherwise we would have no internal organs. But there is also always a counter process. So we are able to say that when we breathe, the images are pushed inwards, the image of the kidney, for example.

Matter then fills this out (red); but the opposite also happens, this time in an upward direction, with the images thrown back, as it were, like an echo, but do not think of this as a once-only event. The organs are in existence, having been developed in the early stages of earth existence; but the counter action may go on all the time.—The role played by the soul element in this will be considered tomorrow.

Consider each on its own, therefore. You take in the images of your internal organs with the life process. Then comes the counter action, in which the echoes of those images rise up again, as does the zodiac, especially with the life of breathing in it. Well, just think of your ears, and there you have the counter process. These images are created and go out into the air—they are the vowels and consonants! The vowels come more from the planets, the consonants from the zodiac. The counter process to the images coming in is reflected in speech. Consonants and vowels are pushed into us, as it were, to be the foundation for our organs. Anything that is more by way of form inside us comes essentially from the zodiac, anything that is more by way of life comes essentially from the planets. If the counter action relates more to life, we produce vowels, if it relates more to form, we produce consonants. All this is to some extent connected with the life of breathing, and we can see that quite clearly in speech.

You see, it is not really a good idea to try and understand the human being by putting him on the dissecting table and investigating what lies inside the skin. The result of this is no better than if someone were to take a magnetic needle and ignore the fact that the earth itself is a large magnet, making one end point north and the other south. If anyone were to insist on producing a theory that the magnetic needle takes that position of its own accord, ignoring the fact that the forces of the earth give it that particular direction, it would be just like anatomists and physiologists trying to understand the human being on the basis of what is to be found inside the skin. You cannot understand the human being on the basis of what lies inside the skin. All the people who seek to explain speech and language on the basis of what lies inside the human being are also working at the level of that explanation for the function of a magnetic needle. The truth is that human beings take their form from the life of the fixed stars and reproduce this as an echo, which gives rise to the consonants. They take in the movements of planetary life which influence their own life. The life of breathing in particular creates images of all this. The counter action then produces the vowels. Human speech can only be understood if consonants are seen in relation to the constellations of fixed stars and the vowels in relation to planetary conjunctions and oppositions. Thus human speech and language is seen to derive from the whole cosmos.

The sun, here (horizontal line in Fig 14), marks the middle. Take the three upper principles and you have the upper human being. Take the three lower principles and you have the lower human being. The reproductive life then gives rise to a new human being.

Take the life of breathing and the life of circulation. The latter essentially reflects the planetary movements. Our blood circulation is basically no more than an image of planetary life. We may thus also say that the vowels come from the life of the circulation and the consonants from the life of breathing. And now we get another strange relationship. We can relate the life of metabolism to the life of the nerves and the life of movement to the life of the senses. The life of the senses, however, relates to the movements of Saturn, which may be said to be closest to the zodiac, just as human beings present themselves most clearly to the outside world in their life of movement. If we want to show how human beings reflect the secrets of the cosmos, we have on the one hand the life of the senses and on the other hand the life of movement and this gives us—eurythmy. Eurythmy is the direct image of the relationship human beings have to the cosmic periphery. I just wanted to mention this briefly.

My purpose today has been to show you how the human being relates to the cosmos in regard to life. Yesterday it was my purpose to show the relationship of the human being to the cosmos in regard to form. Tomorrow we’ll consider the third aspect of the relationship between human being and cosmos—the soul. After considering the human soul in relation to the life of the cosmos we will have the three aspects of form, life and soul.

• 13. Zodiac from the Greek and Latin zodiakus, derived from “circle of the figures”, being the Greek for the sculptured figure of an animal.
• 14. William James (1842–1910), American physiologist and pragmatic philosopher, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), chapter 3: The Reality of the Unseen.

So far we have attempted to see the human being in relation to the universe as regards form and as regards life. We found that human beings relate in different ways to the universe at the head end and at the limb end. All these things essentially hold true for the period of human evolution in which we are today, i.e. the post-Atlantean period, and it has to be understood that anything we are able to say about the phenomena of this world always applies only for specific periods, for the world is in a process of evolution and changes radically from one stage of evolution to the next.

We saw that human beings tear themselves away, as it were, from the relationship to the zodiac. Unlike the animal head, which lies within the zodiac, the human head has been lifted out of it, going through an angle of about 90 degrees. The head end of the human being is fully in a way of life that inclines towards inorganic, lifeless nature. Here life is more or less in decline; it is dying. Both form and life tear themselves away from their connection with the cosmos, and because of this enter into a kind of frozen state, the beginning of lifelessness.

Essentially we are the outcome of previous development in this area. Think of the individual aspect of the human being and the fact that the human head is the metamorphosis of the other person who lived on earth before, and you will recall that the head points to the past, whilst the limbs point to the future.

The head part of the human being also points to the cosmic expanses of the past in another way. As you know, the head is the principal bearer of the sense organs and these had their origin on ancient Saturn. The most highly developed senses—other senses developed on ancient sun and moon—go back to the earliest stages of cosmic earth evolution. Everything connected with the human head therefore points to the past and in some respects it would be right to say: The mineral world evolved in the course of earth existence, and the human head, being the oldest part, is more than any other part involved in this process of mineralization.

Tearing themselves away from the cosmos, human beings keep the form that is no longer connected with the cosmos during their life between birth and death, and they also keep the life that is dying and becoming mineralized. We may also say that if human beings had kept the animal form, that is, if their heads had maintained the orientation given by the zodiac and therefore the weightier life that is to be found in the animal head, they would be entirely the outcome of earlier times in their heads. The head would have something that would immediately make it apparent that it has arisen out of the whole past cosmic evolution. By tearing the head away from this, human beings are in a way destroying their cosmic past.

It is tremendously important that we consider the things that were presented yesterday and the day before and realize that in the development of the head human beings essentially destroy their cosmic past. In fact, they go beyond the actual mineralization process, entering into a process in which matter is finely dispersed to an extraordinary degree. Organic forms are of course also to be found in the head, and embedded in the organic element is a process in which matter is reduced to dust to a degree that actually goes beyond the mineral level. Fig. 18.

If we look at the human head in the right way we have to say it is the focus of a process in which matter as such is reduced to nothing and it is this which makes it the bearer of a distinct inner life. The generally accepted materialistic view is entirely wrong when it comes to the form of the human head. Thanks to the head being part of the organism, human beings have a life of thoughts and ideas. This becomes possible because the material life is reduced to dust in a strange process which you may be able to picture as follows.

Imagine—as I said, it is a picture, but it will give you some idea of the extremely subtle process involved—imagine, then, a painting, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, for example. For the painting to exist in this world, it is necessary for it to have physical substance. Imagine that the physical substance falls to dust, but a fine etheric tissue would remain. So now the Sistine Madonna has turned into dust, but everything that was painted by using physical paints, including the nuances of colour, continues to exist in etheric form and someone with etheric perception would be able to perceive the etheric form that remains.

That is what the thinking process is like, the process of forming ideas. When we become conscious of a thought or an idea, this is due to the fact that because the head has been taken out of the wholeness of the cosmos, as we have seen yesterday and the day before, matter loses all significance and human beings face the constant need to let their heads come alive again because they are always disintegrating, and dying in every detail. The etheric aspect of their heads lifts out of it in the process (Fig. 18, red line on the outside) and thoughts evolve. Matter turns to dust and falls away, as it were, and the etheric remains and that is how people become aware of their ideas.

You’ll remember me saying that in the senses we already have something of a physical apparatus. The eye is a physical apparatus, except that the human ether body is active in it. There it already is the way I am now also going to describe for the rest of the head, for nerve tissue. Please take careful note of what I am going to say now. In the senses, and especially in the senses connected with the head, a separate etheric principle is active in the process of perception. In the sphere of the senses, therefore, we have a kind of independent etheric process.

Take the eye. It is a physical apparatus, but the etheric is active in it. Independent etheric life is to be found in an organ that is all the time tending to disintegrate and is really a mechanical, if not sub-mechanical, object. This is the situation in the sphere of the senses.

In the sphere of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the sphere of the senses, the situation is such that the ether body is more closely bound up with the physical substance, but the whole of our life of the nerves wants all the time to become life of the senses. Imagine, therefore, that you are seeing a coloured surface. The ether body moves independently in this process of sensory perception. If you now leave this process aside and give yourself up to the life of the nerves, the whole sphere of the nerves becomes sphere of the senses and you have a idea of the coloured surface in your mind. We may say that in so far as human beings are nerve human beings, they become entirely sphere of the senses in their mental images or ideas.

Now comes the reaction. The senses are geared towards the physical and are able to take things in continually. The organism of the nerves takes in what the senses present to it. It changes into sphere of the senses and in doing so it partly dies. It seeks to become all eye, or all ear, for instance. To prevent this happening, the vital principle, the principle of life, enters from the rest of the organism and pervades it and the human individual lets the idea go, as it were.

To sum up, we may say that towards the head end, human beings destroy their past. They thus become human beings with nerves and senses that hold images and they have a living experience of images that moves in the etheric realm. You see if we base ourselves on the spiritual science of anthroposophy it is perfectly possible to describe the life of ideas that arises in the conscious mind.

As human beings develop their head end with regard to form, they do so in a way that in the present age exposes them to the influence of forces that evolve in the cosmos when the sun is in the Fishes, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, but they lift their heads out of this, as far as the form is concerned. The result is that the head does not become an animal head but assumes what we may call the “human vertical”, whilst the animal remains within the zodiac.

With regard to life we are able to say that towards the head end, life evolves under the influence of the outer planets Saturn and Jupiter, as we saw yesterday. But human beings lift their life out of this, and thus the following happens: If those planets were never blocked out by the sun, the whole life of the nerves would increasingly become life of the senses. People would perceive with their eyes, or their ears, but this would continue on into the life of nerves. The life of the twelve senses would be in total, inorganic chaos in their life of nerves. Due to the fact that those outermost planets are blocked out, the life of nerves is torn out of the life of senses, and human beings are able to be conscious and act with deliberation in the life of ideas—entering into sensory function and leaving it again by deliberately suppressing ideas, and so on.

Thus an independent etheric principle is active in the senses during sensory perception and a reduced life of senses that is bound to the physical body is active in the nerve organism.

The whole has image quality because by going into the vertical human beings destroy the principle that would give them not image quality but the quality of physical substance. Animals remain within the zodiac and have only dream images and not the conscious images that human beings have. Dream images grow out of the vital principle of the organism; conscious images are lifted up into an etheric life that has become independent of the physical body. It is important to realize that human beings develop an independent etheric life towards the head end because they raise that part out of both the zodiac and the movements of the planets. Then the astral body and the I enter into the independent etheric life and are able to take part in the thought and idea activity of the ether body.

We thus see that the nature of the soul principle can be understood if we know that human thought life has soul quality, that is, it does not take part in material life.

We have seen how human beings develop with regard to both form and life at the other extreme. The day before yesterday we saw that human beings become active in the world through their limbs; going back to ancient Greek times we saw how they became hunters, animal breeders, tillers of the soil and traders who sailed the oceans. Human beings continue in these activities by withdrawing from the influence of the relevant images in the zodiac. Animals remain fully under the influence of Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes and therefore develop forms that relate to the earth. A study of the zodiac will show why animal limbs have developed in a particular way. Human beings develop their system of limbs in such a way that they relate it to the earth when those zodiacal images are beneath the earth, when the earth is at that point in the zodiac in the northern hemisphere for a time. This is also why the geography of the earth offers different living conditions. Human beings are however able to transfer something they have developed in one place to another. I am speaking of things that apply to earlier times; today the different human forms mingle on the globe and the study of geography will no longer give a real idea of the way human beings relate to the macrocosm.

Here, then, human beings tear themselves away from the line of the zodiac in a different way, entering into the “human vertical” in the opposite direction. They remain fully exposed to the constellations of the zodiac with regard to form and to the outer planets with regard to the head, but withdraw from both influences by standing on the earth and letting the earth cover up the other side. Saturn and Jupiter influence human beings by letting their light shine on the earth. Living in images in their heads, human beings also receive the images of those starry worlds, just as they receive images of the planetary movements by developing the principle of life towards the head end. Images from the cosmos, the macrocosm, are taken up into the life of images that human beings develop.

At the other end, images are taken up and thus the forms develop that I showed you the day before yesterday—the limbs, forms that are the opposite of those seen in the head. Human beings also develop activities that are beyond the influence of the macrocosm, that do not allow those influences to enter.

At the head end, therefore, human beings destroy their past. The opposite is the case at the limb end. If we stood on a transparent earth so that both zodiac and planetary movements could influence us from the other side as well, we would not be able to act freely and independently but only under the influence of the life of the planets and fixed stars. Freedom of action is only possible because the earth blocks out the life of the planets and fixed stars. Furthermore, if we were fully exposed to them, then in view of the special nature of the human life span, with repeated earth lives, the life of our limbs would grow wooden, it would harden in itself. We would be unable to let matter fall to dust, and our organic substance would become cornified (horn-like) before it matured. Human limbs would be cornified in a way that is utterly different from the hoofs of horses or cows—almost all the way up. We are protected from this horny development because as human beings we are lifted out of the zodiac.

The process which results from this is the opposite of the process of reducing to dust in the head, where the past is destroyed and matter turns to dust. Development of the limb end is such that matter is not allowed to reach full cosmic maturity. It is held back. We have fingers and toes because we do not allow our limbs to reach their full growth potential. If they did, we would not just have nails but our arms and legs would be completely stiffened and cornified. By holding our limbs back we are able to develop the will in them, and this provides the basis for future lives on earth. If we allowed the limb person to reach full maturity, life would consist of one life on earth only. We preserve the basis for our future by not letting the limb person grow to maturity.

Thus we have a complete contrast: When it goes in the direction of thought, our inner life becomes a life in images; when it goes in the direction of our limbs, life becomes material, it is flesh and organic matter—“young”, I’d say. It does not cornify and grow old and because of this it is possible for the flesh to fall away and the image of youth to go through death and into the next life on earth.

There (Fig. 19) the will is able to develop, and we may say that the “will-end” of the human being is organic development not taken to its conclusion. At the head end we were able to speak of image quality, and here we must speak of something else. Organic development not taken to its conclusion remains germinal, an embryo capable of further development. At the head end we have something like an oyster shell, pure matter that has been secreted out. At the limb end we have something that is embryonic.

Here (above) we can say we have living inner experience of a purely etheric principle—the image. Here (below) we live not in the image but in germinal life and we know ourselves to be bound up with matter, which is also why we are able to move our limbs. We do not have much physical movement in the head, except in so far as our senses are transformed into limbs, so that in the head, too, we are human beings with limbs. One thing is also always to be found in the other, that is a basic principle. In a sense our eyes are also hands, in so far as they are able to move. Nevertheless, the head is largely immobile, and the lobes of the brain and similar structures in particular are incapable of voluntary movement. Even the outside of the head does not show much mobility; it is quite rare even for people to be able to move certain ear muscles; if they can, it provides them with an excellent opportunity for showing off.

Life experienced in organic substance does not allow conscious awareness to arise and this makes it possible for us to develop the will. (Up) here, then, we destroy physical matter, and (down) here we retain, in embryo, the powers for our next life on earth when physical substance falls away from us at death.

Between the two lie the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as we called them yesterday. We also saw that with regard to form this area relates to the constellations of the zodiac that lie between the upper and the lower ones.

If we consider the present-day fixed stars to be Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes, we need to relate these four (Fishes, Ram, Bull, Twins) to the head. Under their influence and in accord with the planetary movements that are above the earth, the head is given a dying life that offers experience of life in images, an inner life of ideas. The four opposite constellations—it would have been slightly different in ancient Greece—would be Virgin, Scales, Scorpion and Archer. The constellations that lie between the upper and lower ones would relate to the rhythmical aspect of the human being, just as in planetary life Mars and Mercury hold a middle position. Here, we may say, the human being swings to and fro between image and embryo. The life of breathing and of the blood illustrates this quite beautifully. We take in oxygen which gives life and is connected with the limb organism and with everything that is mobile in us. We combine the oxygen with carbon, a substance that initially has a stimulant effect on the life of the nerves and senses, bringing in an element of death, and is then cast out as a dying element. Here we have in physical, material terms the continuous contrast of extreme life in oxygen and extreme death in carbon: dying and enlivening, dying and enlivening. Life swings to and fro between these extremes.

At the level of soul life it is like this: we have inward experience of something that on the one hand is still purely etheric, like the life of thoughts; but the ether body takes hold of certain glandular structures and these glands secrete matter. At the physical level, therefore, the ether body acts on the glands. Glands do not make a connection with etheric life, the way muscles do—which are essentially part of the limb organism but secrete matter when etheric life takes hold of them. Etheric life and physical, material life therefore do not fuse completely, and we have a stage of transition. Matter is taken hold of but it also resists and is secreted out. If you study muscles and bones, the elements of the limb system, you find that matter is rigorously taken hold of by the human ether body, most of all in the bones. Nothing falls to dust and is dispersed, everything stays fresh and alive. In the head, none of the matter is taken hold of, but as the head develops, matter falls to dust. Unbound, etheric activity develops to become the life of thought. When the ether body takes hold of the glands, it unites with them but they resist. Muscle tolerates the ether body and take it into itself. Glands do not tolerate it; they immediately secrete matter and drive out the ether. At the soul level this is the life of feeling.

We can now get a real idea of the life of thought. Matter is not put to use, it only goes as far as the etheric, and conscious awareness lives in this etheric element. In the life of feeling, the ether body takes hold of glandular life, which does not tolerate it. Yet for the time that the ether body vanishes into glandular life, before secretion actually comes into effect, human beings are without their ether body, which has vanished into the glands. At that point they find themselves only in their I and astral body, and that is how it is when we feel.

idea—ether body, astral body, I
realm of feeling—astral body, I
life of will—I

If we take the ideas that come in the life of thought—the life of the physical body is cast off; human beings experience themselves in ether body, astral body and I. In the human head the I is active in the astral and the ether bodies and rejects the physical element; the I is thus able, with the aid of the astral body, to experience thoughts, thinking, in the ether body. In the realm of feeling human beings have the ether body taken away from them when it takes hold of glandular life; it is withdrawn from them until the gland has taken the secretory activity to its conclusion. The ether body is therefore in the physical body and human beings have only the astral body and I available for conscious inner life. Experience is at the level of feelings and dream-like in quality, because we enter into the physical body.

In their life of will, human beings enter completely into organic matter with the ether body. When we are awake, the ether body takes the astral body with it, and this enables us to move our limbs. The astral body is also taken into matter and is therefore withdrawn from us so that we have conscious awareness only of the I.

Thus we find that the inner life and the physical life are related at every level. Basing ourselves on the science of the spirit we merely need to have a clear picture of the way in which I, astral body and ether body are involved in the physical body and we perceive the difference between the inner life of thought, the inner life of feeling and the inner life of will. We find that the inner life of thought is in the dying part of the organism which has torn itself away from the upper part of the world of the fixed stars and the upper world of the planets, and become a life in images by reducing the past to dust. We find that in the middle, or rhythmical region we are able to share in life relating to the past and therefore also to the macrocosm, which has evolved out of the past; yet we also react to this because there is a continuous rhythmical element—on the one hand the rhythm of oxygen combining with carbon, and on the other that of glands being taken hold of and responding with secretion. When the macrocosmic life in us is taken hold of and takes hold, the microcosm, that is, the individual human being, reacts. We live in rhythm not only inside ourselves but with the world; we open up to the cosmos and take it back into ourselves. We are half-way individual beings and move rhythmically to and fro between macrocosm and microcosm, and this is where we are alive and active in our feelings. Here we can see exactly how the physical, material aspect of the organism interacts with the element of soul and spirit. In the life of the will, physical matter is most strongly taken hold of and this is where we are most of all mere microcosm, withdrawing entirely from macrocosmic activity in becoming active ourselves.

Living in the northern hemisphere, we withdraw from the other fixed stars and planets in our own way; people living in the southern hemisphere do the same in a similar way, and the whole does, of course, rotate. In our limbs we are therefore entirely microcosm between birth and death, in a world of our own which therefore is also able to take itself forward into a future. We are today developing the will as the youngest element in the inner life. This is still entirely dependent on the physical body for support; it allows only the I to find to itself, with the astral body and the ether body caught up in the physical body.

We shall never understand the inner life unless we are able to differentiate between I, astral body and ether body. Anyone who does not have a real, inner grasp of these will never be able to understand the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. What happens when people refuse to grasp this reality today?

What happens is that people who carry some authority stand there and tell people that it is not really possible to know anything about the inner life, though certain phenomena suggest that something exists that has soul quality, which they call “psychoid”. Giving an explanation of the way Descartes¹⁵ and Spinoza¹⁶ endeavoured to discover the nature of this interaction, they are unable to be anything but abstract—the body on one side, the soul on the other. It will never be possible to get at the truth in this way, because the relationship between soul and body is different in the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. People will not get to the truth if they insist on making one big muddle of the whole inner life and talk of a “psychoid” element rather than giving real consideration to the way the I, astral body and ether body are related in real life. It is as if someone were to refuse to look at the real human being and talk about an “anthropoid” in order to avoid speaking of the anthropos¹⁷ That kind of science is anthropoid-sophy rather than anthroposophy; it is psychoidology.

If we give real consideration to the life of soul and spirit, we can give full detail of the “interactions” and so on, as people call them. There will be no need to cut out bits of the liver, or the brain, and present them neatly as abstract tissues, the way anatomists do. Instead we must know that the relationship of the human being to the cosmos is different at the head end and the limb end. At the head end we reduce it to dust, destroying the past. At the limb end we do not allow growth to reach its full potential but remain embryonic.

The worst thing is when people leave truth aside and speculate on the nature of the physical body as well as of soul and spirit. Using worn-out old words and making them into -oids, they fail to grasp the real truth. There are people nowadays who have no notion of how to get from a word to a concept. Someone called Arthur Drews¹⁸ has been giving lectures to non-conformist religious and monist congregations in Germany today, both of which live on the dregs of the materialistic science that goes back to the 1860s and 70s. He has studied Hartmann’s philosophy¹⁹—as a young man he would always dance attendance on him—but he really only took in the words, which roll about in his head like the balls in a pin-ball machine, and he has no idea of how to get from word to concept. And he uses these words from Hartmann’s philosophy, words that whizz around in his head as if in a pinball machine, to criticize anthroposophy!

Those are the fruits of education in our modern civilization, where people refuse to give serious consideration to the methods available for gaining real insight into the relationship between human being and cosmos. These enable us to describe the human form and human life on the basis of the cosmos and to understand that because human beings are specifically torn away from the cosmos they have dying life at one end, which enables them to develop an inner life of ideas based on images, and a life that remains embryonic at the other extreme, which allows the will element to develop.

These things sound incomprehensible to the people involved in the official science of today, and as a rule—not always but as a rule—we cannot expect them to gain access to them, for essentially they have lost all real understanding with their kaleidoscope of words. For anyone who knows the real situation, those lectures about psychoids are essentially no more than word kaleidoscopes; the things said about Descartes, Spinoza and so on, right up to Fechner,²⁰ have no inner connection and are kaleidoscopes of words. The scraps of words that whirl around in confusion can only gain inner meaning through insight into I, astral body, ether body, and so on. It seems a pity that one has to talk about the present time like this; but when it comes to the “intellectual life”, as it is called, we have to speak about the present age like this. The philosophers have no longer been able to get their bearings because decades ago their words have lost all meaning.

The latest thing is to appoint modern scientists as professors of philosophy. They are asked to hand down philosophy. It started with Mach,²¹ and today Driesch²² is one of the main representatives of the species. Scientists are being appointed as professors of philosophy because the philosophers no longer have anything meaningful to say, whilst scientists at least still have the faculty of external observation. What they say about philosophy is, of course, even more empty of meaning than the things said by philosophers, who at least still had the words. This really has been a strange development. We have seen philosophy, which still had meaningful content in the first half of the 19th century, evaporate completely in the wordy works of someone like Kuno Fischer,²³ for instance. But in his day the chairs of philosophy were still held by philosophers, even if their philosophy no longer had inner meaning.

It is absolutely necessary that we realize this clearly and that there are at least a few people in the world who see through all the glitter of those “psychoids” and know that we are deeply in decadence, particularly in the field of academics. You can’t know this strongly enough, and I think it will be good for you to enter deeply into the things I have tried to put before you in these three lectures.

We have seen that on the one hand man appeared to be connected with the universe in outer form and in the way of life, but that he has renounced the universe at the head end and at the limb end, so that we are only wholly given up to the rhythm of the universe in so far as we are rhythmical human beings; renounced in order to develop the life of thoughts as life in images, that is, independent of physical matter, at one end, and at the other end to develop the life of will by keeping matter at an embryonic level, not letting it assume the rigid form that the macrocosm is able to impose. The limb end is thus kept mobile and has the potential to evolve and progress from earth to existence on Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan.

Hold on to these things and you can see that the insight gained in anthroposophy really wants to take hold first of all of our sense of truth, secondly of our sense of aesthetics—when you study the human form as it arises out of the macrocosm—and thirdly also in the direction of what is good and of religious life. These three lectures are particularly able to show the profound justification of the statement that has been made so many times here, in courses and also on other occasions, that we must look for a synthesis, bringing together in harmony religion, art and science. This cannot be achieved unless we come to a genuine cosmology which clearly shows the reality of the human form and of human life.

Something else we need is a theory of independent activity in the inner life, a theory that shows us the true nature of man, who has torn himself away from the cosmos at either end. And we also need to know the qualities which human beings develop independently, relating to future worlds which will take the place of the earth within the macrocosm. This will lead to deeply religious inner responses and feelings.

If human civilization is to show true progress we need a cosmology that includes the human being and does not leave humanity aside the way our present-day cosmology does. We also need a theory of independent activity and we need ethics that are able to show that the potential for good which they hold is the seed for worlds. We need ethics that have reality, their values not abstract but having the power in them to come to realization. Cosmology, a theory of independent activity and ethics—these are the things humanity will need to be able to rise to something higher.

• 15. René, Descartes (1596–1650), French philosopher and mathematician.
• 16. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch-Jewish philosopher and theologian.
• 17. Anthropos, Greek for “human being”.
• 18. Arthur Drews (1865–1935), a professor of philosophy who gave a number of lectures against anthroposophy in the autumn of 1921. See his Metaphysik und Anthroposophie, Berlin 1922, esp. the chapter on perception of the supersensible.
• 19. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher
• 20. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), German philosopher and psychologist.
• 21. Ernst Mach (1839–1916) Austrian physicist and philosopher.
• 22. Hans Driesch (1867–1914), German zoologist and philosopher.
• 23. Ernst Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), German philosopher who wrote a major history of modern philosophy, books on logic and metaphysics and on Kant, Descartes, Goethe, Lessing and Schiller.