The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Question: Is it possible to hear more about the personality of Jesus Christ?

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, that the question that is being asked is timely, and so we will discuss it today. I must say from the outset that what I am going to say will only be fully understandable to those who have been here for a long time, while those gentlemen who have only come today will slowly find their way into what we are discussing.

So the question that has been put to me and that we will discuss is about the personality of Christ, who was thirty-three years old when he died.

“On the third day he rose from the grave, resurrected. How did that happen, and where did this personality acquire the strength and power? And then you would be so kind as to talk about his ascension after forty days.”

Since time is just right, I will discuss this as it really happened, after we have already discussed the other thing; but, as I said, it can only be fully understood by those who have been here longer. The others will also understand it once we are together here more often.

Well, you see, at first the whole thing about Christ's personality and his destinies was actually quite unknown in the very early days after it happened. You don't have to look at it the way we look at it today, because today we have the feeling that the events in Palestine that are linked to the personality of Jesus became known throughout the world in one fell swoop. This is not the case. Rather, the situation is that in the time when the fate of Christ Jesus was unfolding, the so-called Roman Empire was widespread, a mighty world empire, and Palestine also belonged to this mighty Roman world empire.

You know that we still have a rather unfortunate legacy from this Roman Empire, the so-called Roman law. Perhaps you know that students at universities of so-called legal scholarship have to study for a very long time the so-called Roman law. Now, Roman law was conceived at a time when social conditions were quite different, so that Roman law has naturally become something highly unsuitable for today. But justice is still being done according to Roman law today.

So we have just this one inheritance from this Romanism. We have many other things as well; but this one inheritance, the so-called Roman law, is something that can be noticed by all of you.

Now, this Roman rule was extraordinarily widespread. I will just give you a small idea of how widespread Roman rule was. You just have to imagine the south of Europe: here we have Spain (it is being drawn), here we have Italy; then we have Greece, then we have the Black Sea. Then we have a lot of small islands. There Asia Minor comes over, and over there, in the area I want to mark, there was the small country of Palestine with Jerusalem, Nazareth and so on.

Roman rule now extended over all these lands. The Romans had occupied all these lands with their rule. So it was a very extensive Roman rule! Rome is located there. Of course, everything that was government-related and so on took place in Rome, so it was very far away from Palestine. And what happened in Palestine was very little known in Rome at that time. And those writers who wrote in Rome did not write about it for about a hundred years after the fact that had occurred with Christ Jesus in Palestine! It was only about a hundred years later that people in Rome understood the significance of what had happened in Palestine. And they did not treat it much differently in Rome at the time, except to say: Well, an unknown person has been crucified over there in Palestine. At that time, being crucified meant something like being hanged later. So it didn't cause any particular sensation. It was only after a hundred years had passed, and Roman rule had become more and more tyrannical and luxurious, that it became apparent that, while the people in Rome were enjoying their luxurious lives, Christianity had slowly spread here, and it was only then that they first noticed the Christians. And the Christians in Rome were initially not tolerated at all. Whoever was a Christian was something very much persecuted in Rome. And now I have to tell you why Christians were persecuted in Rome, because otherwise you would not be able to understand at all what the idea is behind the view that arose at the time: that a god died in Palestine, in Jerusalem. You have to realize what the views in the world actually were at that time.

You see, for a Roman in this first Christian century, that is, for a Roman at the time when it was written - they didn't write it back then, they calculated according to the Roman calendar, but if it had been our calendar, they would have written 1 or 10 or 50 for all I care - so if you had asked a Roman back then: Who is God? — he would have said: Emperor Augustus, or: Emperor Tiberius. — Just as today [1923] a Chinese, when you ask him: Who is God? — points to the Chinese emperor. So you must be clear about the fact that in those days for the Romans the ruler, the one in power, was at the same time their god. And that was the first thing the Romans noticed about the Christians: that they were not aware that a human being on earth could be a universal god. The Romans only knew that some human being sitting on the throne, who had powerful rule, was the god, was the highest thing, that had to be worshipped. And so the Romans did honor their emperor in a way that amounted to worship.

Yes, it was the same all over the world in those days. Over there in the Orient, where the great empires once were, the Persian Empire, the Assyrian, the Babylonian Empire and so on in the old days, it was also the case that the ruler was the god. “God” meant nothing more than the one to whom one turned when one needed something. He was the supreme one. He was seen as a helper. He was not always a helper, but he was seen as a helper.

I would like to point out that you are likely to know the word “God” in your language. When children are baptized, people have to be godparents. Now there are areas, I believe also here in Switzerland, where the man is called the Lord and the woman is called Gottel. This means that the godparents have to provide help. This is the same “God”. And the god was only the one who was the general god of the world. If you want to understand the things of the earlier times, you must always go back to the earlier times. So the god was the general god of the world. The name Goethe, the name of the German poet Goethe, also comes from the same word.

And that was the first thing one heard about the Christians: that the Christians did not believe that a human being on earth could be a universal god. For the Romans, this was something they could not grasp at all. Such terrible people, who do not accept the emperor as god, yes, they are very dangerous people. And the Christians, on the other hand, referred to the saying: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. — So, they referred to Jesus' saying, where the matter of Caesar and God is cut apart. God is the invisible. God is that which does not dwell in a visible man on earth. That is what the Christians claimed. And that was the big difference between the Romans and the Christians. And the consequence of that was that the Romans considered the Christians to be the most dangerous people of all, undermining the authority of the state because they did not offer sacrifice to the emperor in the temple. The sacrifices in the temples were offered to the emperor by the people. Now, the Christians sacrificed to a God who died in Palestine and who cannot be seen anywhere. That was something the Romans could not understand. And so the first Christians had to perform their sacrifices underground, under the earth. And these underground passages that they dug out there, in which they buried their dead and performed their sacrifices, are called catacombs. There are such extensive catacombs under the earth in Rome, in Italy in general, like small cities. The first Christians performed their sacrificial services there in the first centuries, while above, the Romans had large circuses, huge circuses. And there they had, for example, in such circuses, made a point of somehow tying a person they despised to a stake, to a pillar, and, after smearing him with pitch, setting him on fire and burning him alive. And they watched it in the circuses, just as people watch bullfights today. It was something that was quite common.

Just imagine this picture: above, the wild Romans in the circuses, who tied the pitch-coated man to the column and burned him alive. That amused them very much. And below, the Christians who performed their religious services in the catacombs. That was the difference, gentlemen, between below ground and above ground, which could not be more sharply defined. One must only consider that.

It is true that things were also quite terrible in the Middle Ages with the Inquisition. But as bad as the Romans behaved in the heyday of their imperial era, the Christians did not behave as badly as that later on. You just have to hold on to that. That is just true.

So the first thing one heard in Rome was that the Christians do not want to recognize a visible God. Now, of course, more and more has become known about what was actually meant by this Christ Jesus, and I have already told you some of it. For example, I have pointed out to you that there were actually two Jesus boys – the name Jesus was just as common a name in Palestine as Sepperl or Michel are today – one of whom died very young, and they were, one might say, playmates, extraordinarily capable, talented children.

Now, this story, which you all know from the Bible, about how the twelve-year-old Jesus taught the scribes in the temple, is something that is based on a truth. Of course, you don't have to tell yourselves: if a twelve-year-old boy goes to university today, the professorial council would not have much respect for him. Today's teachings cannot be compared with those of that time. You should not think that I am conservative or even reactionary, but I have to tell you the facts as they are. Nowadays we take it for granted that we have to send our children to school. Gifted children in particular learn an enormous amount of material that is not suited to them. We have to prepare things in such a way that they suit the children, as we do in the Waldorf school. But in general, children learn an extraordinary amount of material that does not suit them. Of course, adults are better at doing the things that do not suit them than children are. But what is driven out of children when they learn our present-day reading and writing, well, gentlemen, people today pay no attention to that. Children, if you know how to listen to them properly, will say extraordinarily clever things. They have brought this with them from the spiritual life before they descended to earth. And this one Jesus boy, he brought an extraordinary amount with him. And because the two Jesus boys were playmates, they actually always knew the same things. Now one of them has died. And so now the Gospels tell only of one Jesus boy, because people liked that better. But that doesn't help us understand the Gospels. If you read the Gospels of Matthew and Luke today, they contradict each other. The whole genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is described differently than in the Gospel of Luke. Why? Yes, because the things really refer to two Jesus boys.

I have told you that I have really been dealing with this question from a spiritual-scientific point of view for years, and I have come to the conclusion that there are two Jesus boys, and that the Gospel of Matthew is about a different Jesus boy than the Gospel of Luke.

Now one of them died in his twelfth year, while the other remained. So when it says in the Gospel: “Jesus increased in wisdom, spirit and power,” this is only true of the one.

You see, I found that long before I told you that there were two such Jesus children. It was not known that somewhere in history it is reported that there are two Jesus children until we came across a picture in northern Italy. There this story is depicted of Jesus in the temple, where he teaches the scribes. And there, strangely enough, is this second Jesus child. He is leaving. The one who is teaching and the other who is leaving – that is not the usual Jesus child, we know him! So there are two Jesus children in it, so you can say that in certain centuries people still knew: a second Jesus child existed. He walks away. Only after I had found that out could I know that this second Jesus child is depicted. So you see, gentlemen, for centuries people have known this. But the church has never actually allowed such things, which correspond to the real truth, to come up.

Now, as I have already told you, there are simply certain things in the life of man where one says, there is an enlightenment. Of course, people don't accept that. But you see, there are such revelations, and I will give you an example that was given to me only yesterday by a member of this group. I could give you hundreds of examples, but I will give you this latest example. Mr. Pfeiffer, you don't mind if I do, do you?

There is a very important chemist, Kekulé, an impeccable scholar, simply a real chemist who has written many books on chemistry. Now there are two important scientific views that come from Kekulé. I don't need to explain these views to you in more detail; that would take us hours, it's not important now. These two

important chemical views relate to the structure of substances, such as benzene, in their smallest parts. And these views, which Kekulé established, play an extraordinarily important role in chemistry. Anyone who knows chemistry knows that today everyone is talking about Kekule's theories.

But what did Kekulé himself experience? Kekulé recounts that he was once in London, where he lived quite a distance out of town – before he had formulated any of his theories – and had to take one bus after another to get to the other end of the city at night. He had an acquaintance there whom he visited in the evening. He always had to take one bus after another because he spent the night there. Once he was driving home after spending a long time talking about chemistry with an acquaintance who was also a chemist. He was driving home and sitting on the top of the bus. He dozed off and began to fall asleep. And as he began to fall asleep on top of the omnibus, he dreamt: There is an atom, there is another, there is a third atom; and there are then small atoms that are held together by the large ones (it is drawn). He dreamt of the substance, the matter, how it is made. He dreamt all this on the top of the omnibus. As soon as he comes home, he writes it down carefully. That was the one theory. You see, it was a dream to him. It was given to him, a completely materialistic theory.

The second is the so-called benzene theory. He dreamt that at another time, though not in London, but when he had dozed off at another place.

Yes, gentlemen, you see, a completely materialistic chemist had to confess that he could not have come up with his ideas and inventions through thinking, but that he was enlightened about these two things through a dream. It was all a real inspiration.

Now I would like to know why people object when it is said that the Jesus who was left behind became something completely different in his thirtieth year. Of course, Kekule did not immediately become a completely different person because the inspiration was only a small one. But the knowledge of the whole world entered into Jesus when he was thirty years old. In those ancient times, this was something that was entirely possible, and similar things are still possible today. So you just have to imagine that the Jesus of Nazareth, who had been left behind, was enlightened in his thirtieth year with all that is called the Christ. It entered into him, just as Kekulé's benzene theory entered into him. As a result, he had become a completely different person. And those who now understood something of the matter said: the Romans have a god on the throne. The god on the throne, they said, came into being through the ordinary powers of the earth. Such gods on the throne do not usually have revelations; at least not usually, do they; they do not have such revelations at the age of thirty.

Now, the Christians said: Our God is not appointed by men, He is appointed by the world powers themselves.

But now they had to say something else. You see, what was said about Jesus in those days was not as vague as what I am telling you now. I have to tell you slowly and gradually, which is why the matter is only vague at first. But it was more specific in the following way. You see, today, in order for individual people to become wise according to the view of our time, we have universities. After being made clever for a long time in the so-called grammar school or in secondary school, one comes to the university. There one is now given the finishing touches of cleverness. But you will not always find that the people who come out of the university have become different people in the university, but rather they have learned something externally.

This was certainly not the case in older times. In older times there was no distinction between churches and theaters and schools, but it was all one, and that was called mysteries. That is where people were educated back then. And the most important thing that people were taught in the mysteries was the so-called knowledge of the sun.

You see, when we were talking about natural science, I always told you what influence the sun has on everything that happens on earth. Plants do not grow merely because they are driven out of the ground below, but because the sun drives them out. The power of the sun is in all of us, as is the power of the earth. And I have drawn your attention to the fact that this solar power is not just a dead force, but a wise, living force. I have given you many examples. You have seen that what happens among animals happens wisely, intelligently, judiciously. Yes, when you look up at the sun, the learned imagine it is a ball of gas. Yes, gentlemen, that is about as clever as if we could all get on a big airplane and fly to the moon, as Jules Verne described. We could sit on the moon and look for our work and I would say to you: There, gentlemen, down there, you see, there is the earth. The Earth is a single body, there is nothing else on it. — You would not believe me, gentlemen, because you came up with me. You would believe that there are people on it after all. People who have souls are on Earth.

But that is exactly what the scholars are doing with the sun today. You sit there on the earth, look up at the sun and say: There is nothing up there but burning gas. — But that is real nonsense. The sun is inhabited, even if not by such people as can be seen with the eyes, but it is inhabited.

And this knowledge of the sun was the main thing taught to students in the ancient mysteries. And that is why these students were called sun disciples. It was said: Up there on the sun, there are the forces, the spring forces, the sun forces, there is that which draws everything out of the earth. And so someone who had learned in ancient times the secrets of the sun was called a sun disciple, and later, when he was fully trained, a sun master. And what Jesus of Nazareth suddenly knew at the age of thirty was this solar wisdom. This solar wisdom had come over him. Now you may have already seen that when plants that are beautifully green and full of energy on the earth are below ground in the cellar, they turn completely whitish and appear paralyzed. This is because the solar power does not enter them. This solar power in the mystical, spiritual sense is drawn into Jesus. And those who understood this said: Now the Christ is drawn into Jesus.

You see, now this remarkable thing happened. The Jews, who mainly lived here in Palestine (please refer to the board), had long since heard from their prophets that something must happen so that the earth can be taught from outer space itself. But you can be quite sure that if someone were to write a “Wilhelm Tell” today, as Schiller wrote it, and it were to be performed in the theater, people would say: That's nonsense, it's something very bad. They would not recognize it. And 'Wilhelm Tell' was first recognized by the few people who knew Schiller; then it spread. It is always the case in our social order, it has always been the case, that the majority of people let themselves be led by the hair. So the Jews also let themselves be led by their hair and, when that happened, and they were no longer led by the mysteries, but when someone appeared who had this solar knowledge, they said: But there is someone who claims that everything he says is true! You know, of course, what is done to people who speak a truth that is not yet known among the people. It was a great truth and wisdom that Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ now lived, had to proclaim. Well, and then they crucified him. And he actually went through death.

And now I come to the question as it was put to me directly. You see, gentlemen, today's enlightened theologians are often even worse than their unenlightened counterparts. The unenlightened theologians say: Well, they laid Christ in the grave, and after three days he rose again with flesh and blood, just as he was. Well, of course, the enlightened people said: We don't believe that because no one comes out of the grave. But, I would like to say, it is at least something to profess. It may be debatable, but it is something to profess.

But what do enlightened theologians say? You see, one of the most enlightened theologians, who is well known and named, is Harnack. What does he say about the resurrection? You see, Harnack says: What happened on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane – that is where the grave was – you can't know. So the enlightened theologian says: What happened there on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane, that cannot be known. But many people have gradually come to believe that Christ was resurrected there. So that is the Easter belief, and we assume that we should hold to this Easter belief.

You see, I once raised this question - it was a long time ago - in the Berlin Giordano Bruno Association. The chairman was an academic who thought he knew a great deal about these matters, and he said: Harnack could not have asserted that, because what would that mean if Harnack asserted that one should not believe what really happened, but only in what people believe about it! That would be just like the Holy Robe of Trier, where people also say: Well, whether the Holy Robe of Trier is really the one that Christ wore, nobody knows, but so and so many believed in it, so we believe in it too! — Thus said the Protestant about the Catholic belief in the Holy Shroud of Trier. Or another example is that of the bones of St. Anthony. When they were examined closely, they were found to be veal bones. So the people who believed in them did not make much of it either, but said that it did not matter whether it was reality or not, but whether people believed it.

But it does not depend on that at all; what matters is what happened! Now the Bible actually tells the story in a wonderful way, only people do not pay attention to how it is told. The Bible does not say that such and such happened, but everywhere it says: such and such people have seen, really seen. That is what is told.

So it is related that the women came out, and what they saw at the grave – take that as sophistry if you want! It is related that the Christ met the disciples at Emmaus, and so on; that the Christ was seen, that is related.

Now, remember that I told you that a person does not consist only of this material body that is laid in the grave, but that a person also consists of the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. I have described this to you in detail. Now the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth has indeed been laid in the grave. I have studied this question a great deal, and it is extraordinarily significant that it is stated in the Gospel itself that an earthquake occurred. There was such an earthquake. It made a split and the body was taken up by the earth, so it was really no longer there. And the disciples did not see this physical body, but the etheric body, the supersensible body. The women and the disciples saw Christ in the etheric body, no longer Jesus of Nazareth, but Christ, that which was now the transformed inner man.

Of course, you have to imagine that what happened there was something extraordinarily magnificent for the disciples. You just have to consider that if there is someone among you with whom you have grown so close as friends, who is snatched from you by crucifixion, or as we would say today, by the gallows, you are intimately connected with him – that must have created a state of mind. This state of mind made the disciples almost clairvoyant for these things. And they really saw Christ again and again in the early days, more often than is mentioned in the Gospels. But it was the supersensible Christ.

And you see, when you read the letters of Paul, you read about the famous event of Damascus that Paul experienced. Near Damascus he came into a kind of sleeping state, and there the Christ appeared to him in the clouds. And pay attention to how Paul tells it. He once said: You can't take away my faith in the Christ, because I, like the other apostles, have seen the Christ.

So Paul is not saying that the other apostles saw Christ in the physical body; otherwise he would have to claim that he too saw Christ in the physical body. He explicitly claims that he saw the Christ in the clouds, thus the supersensible Christ, and by saying that he and the other apostles saw the Christ, he is already indicating that the other apostles, like him, saw the Christ in his supersensible body. And isn't it true that people believe that the unbelieving Thomas had to place his hands in the wounds as an objection to this? That just wants to say: the presence of the Christ, that he was there, this experience was so strong that Thomas himself could have the strong faith to touch him. So everything was related to the supersensible Christ.

The wounds were something that touched the hearts of the disciples, especially the apostles. It would be much less vivid if it were not mentioned that the wounds could be touched. Why the wounds in particular? Why not lay his hands on the face or something like that? He would have sensed that something was there. He laid his finger on the wounds because the wounds made a special impression, and what the disciple really became aware of in the Christ actually depended on the higher vision.

So that one can say: For forty days in a row, the disciples were clear about one thing: the Christ is still there.

And from this the Christian teaching arose – which is the original Christian teaching, and which ties in with what I told you last Monday. The Christian teaching arose from this: When Christ is buried, there is only the body in the grave, which of course disappears; Christ showed us the immortal in Himself; He walked around in His immortality for forty days. We have seen him. And he appeared to Paul even much later. So he is always there.

And so we can say today: He is always there. Only the disciples, because this power of vision has disappeared in them, have not seen him after forty days. That's when they said, “Now he has left us: Ascension.” This is an event that naturally filled the disciples with great sadness. They said: Even though he died, even though his enemies crucified him, he was still with us for forty days. Now he is no longer with us. Now he has returned to the vastness of the world.

And then they became truly sad. Not in an ordinary sadness, but in a very deep sadness. And the ten days that are now being talked about, these ten days were for the disciples and apostles something where they went very deeply into their hearts, where they reflected with inner strength on everything the Christ had ever said to them. These ten days were enough for them to say to themselves afterward: Yes, we can know all of this ourselves; this wisdom – they said to themselves, impressed by the strong impression – this wisdom itself resides in us. And now, after ten days, they felt the strength to teach this wisdom as well. The fiery tongues – that is the image of it – came upon their heads. That is Pentecost, the Pentecostal idea, the fiery tongues. Through their great sorrow, when they had lost sight of everything except the Christ, they had reflected so deeply that they were able to teach themselves.

And it is beautifully told that they now began to “speak in all languages”. But here we must realize something about the way people spoke in those ancient times. Of course we must not suppose that it is claimed that the apostles began to speak Chinese or Japanese or even German, but rather that it is meant that, through the way they spoke in those ancient times, they had now become tolerant through all that they had thought in the ten days between Ascension Day and Pentecost. Now, for them, there was no longer any difference between religions, but they proclaimed one religion for all people. That is what is meant by being able to speak in all languages; they proclaimed one religion for all people.

And that is the most beautiful thought of Pentecost; one religion for all people. You see, the thing that has done the most harm to people is always fanaticism in religion, the exclusiveness in religion, that you have Christianity and Buddhism and Judaism and all sorts of things. Why is it that you have so many religions? That you have so many religions comes from the fact that these religions are earth religions, real earth religions.

What do I mean by that when I say: earth religions? Now, you see, there is a time when we go back, let's say – it's 1923 today – to the time when I told you that Christ Jesus lived in Palestine, so at the turn of the age. Now we go further back, let's say, to the year 3500 before Christ Jesus, so back to ancient times, there are people down there in Egypt who also spoke of their God about 3000 or 3500 years before Christ, only in old words. They called him Ra, for example. They spoke of their god, but they said: the god is in the city of Thebes, for example, and in the city of Thebes there was a kind of building with a special artistic, tomb-like structure. The god lived in there. That was the oldest form of worship, that he was in a certain place.

Yes, gentlemen, if someone lived where we live today, he probably did not say: the god is in Thebes; because that was something that not only could not be reached in ancient times, but of which nothing was known at all. They knew nothing of Thebes. So those who were down here, in Egypt, where the Nile flows, said: the god who lives in Thebes. And those who were here, in our area, they also had such local deities. For example, there was a local deity in what is now Alsace, or in Münster. So people worshiped God in a particular place. Yes, that is the reason why there are different religions: the Theban religion, the religion of Münster, the religion of Alsace. There the religions split.

And later, when people wandered more on earth, they could no longer accept any place for God, because then they would have contradicted themselves. They had migrated, and there they no longer accepted the place as God, but the man who led them. And so, gradually, the dignity of God passed to the emperor and the princes. For the people, the prince was emperor. Many princes arose.

You see, in Rome there was still something of this religion, in that the Romans still worshiped their emperor as a god.

But what was Christianity? Christianity said nothing of the sort. What is to be worshipped is not bound to a place on earth, not to a person on earth, but to the power of the sun, the sun's vitality, which the Christ has taken up in himself. And the sun is precisely universal. For no one in Europe can say that when the sun shines on his head it is a different sun from that of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Australians. Those who truly recognize that the power of Christ comes from the sun must recognize the universal religion for all people.

It was the universal religion for all people, even if people did not always understand it. And it dawned on the disciples that the religion of the sun is there. This is expressed by the fact that they were able to speak in all languages. They were able to bring a religion of reconciliation and tolerance for all people. That is the idea of Pentecost. But as you know, the idea of Pentecost has not yet been fulfilled today. And it must be fulfilled. It must still become quite clear that what the Christ brought to Earth does not depend on a doctrine at all, but on a fact.

When today European missionaries come to an Indian or a Chinese, they demand of them that they believe in what is said about the Christ in Rome. The Indians or Chinese cannot bring themselves to do that, because it has been developed from European conditions. You cannot get people to do that. But if it were said as I have told you today, it could be understood all over the world. Because what applies to all people is the idea of Pentecost.

I have now tried to explain to you the idea of Ascension Day and the idea of Pentecost, which is what the Lord, who recorded the question, wanted to know. I also find it very fitting because today is the day before Ascension Day and in ten days the Pentecost follows. I was very happy to be able to tell you this.

Now I have to go to Norway. I will let you know when the next lecture will be. Goodbye.

In order, gentlemen that the last question may be thoroughly answered. I will, as far as possible, say something about colors. One cannot really understand colors if one does not understand the human eye, for man perceives colors entirely through the eye.

Picture to yourselves, for instance, a blind person. A blind person feels differently in a room that is lighted and in a room that is dark. Though it is so weak a matter that he does not perceive it, yet it has a great significance for him. Even a blind person could not live perpetually in a cellar, he would need the light. And there is a difference if one brings a blind man into a bright room with yellow windows, or into a dark room, or into a fairly light room which has blue windows. That acts quite differently on his life. Yellow color and blue color influence life quite differently. But these are things which one learns to understand only when one has grasped how the eye is affected by color.

Now from what I have hitherto put before you, you will perhaps have realized that two things are most important in man. The first is the blood, for if man were not to have blood he would have to die at once. He would not be able to renew his life every moment and life must be every moment renewed. So if you think away the blood from the body, man is a dead object.

Now think away the nerves too: man would no doubt look just the same, but he would have no consciousness; he could form no ideas, could will nothing, would not be able to move.

We must therefore say to ourselves: For man to be a conscious human being he needs nerves. For man to be able to live at all he needs blood. Thus blood is the organ of life, the nerves are the organ of consciousness.

But every organ has nerves and has blood. The human eye is in fact really like a complete human being and has nerves and blood. Imagine that here [a drawing was made] the eye protrudes, and in the eye little blood-arteries, many blood-arteries spread out. And many nerves too spread out. You see, what you have in the hand, that is, nerves and blood, you have also in the head.

Now think: the external world which is illumined works upon the eye. By day at any rate the world in which you go about is illumined, but it is difficult to form an idea of this wholly-lighted outer world. You get a true idea when you imagine the half-lighted world in the morning and evening, when you see the red of dawn and evening. Dawn and the sunset glow are particularly instructive.

For what is actually there in the glow of dawn and evening? Picture to yourselves the sunrise. The sun comes up, but it cannot shine on you direct as yet. The sun comes when the earth is like this—I am now drawing the apparent path, but that does not matter (in reality the earth moves and the sun stands still, but how we see this makes no difference). The sun sends its rays here [drawing] and then here. So if first you stand there, you do not see the sun at dawn, you see the litÖ¾up clouds. These are the clouds and the light falls actually on them. What is that actually? This is very instructive. Because the sun has not quite risen, it is still dark around you and there in the distance are the clouds lit up by the sun. Can one understand that?

If you stand there you are seeing the illumined clouds through the darkness that is around you. You see light through darkness. So that we can say it is the same thing at dawn and sunset—one sees light through darkness. And light seen through darkness—as you can see in the morning and evening glow—looks red. Light seen through darkness looks red.

Now I will say something different. Imagine that dawn has gone by and it is daytime. You see freely up into the air, as it is today. What do you see? You see the so-called blue sky. To be sure, it is not there, but you see it all the same. That certainly does not continue into all infinity, but you see the blue sky as if it were surrounding the earth like a blue shell.

Why is that? Now you have only to think of how it is out there in distant universal space. It is in fact dark. For universal space is dark. The sun shines only on the earth and because there is air round the earth the sunbeams are caught and make it light here, especially when they shine through watery air. But out there in universal space it is absolutely black darkness. So that if one stands here by day one looks into darkness, and one should actually see darkness. But one does not see it black, but blue, because all round there is light from the sun. The air and the moisture in the air are illumined.

So you see quite clearly darkness through the light. You look through the light, through the illumined air into darkness. And therefore we can say: Darkness through light is blue.

There you have the two principles of the color-theory which you can simply get from observation of the surroundings. If you thoroughly understand the red of dawn and evening glow you say to yourself: Light seen through darkness or obscurity is red. When by day you look out into the black heavens, you say to yourself: Darkness or obscurity seen through light—since it is light around you—is blue.

You see, men have always had this quite natural view until they became “clever.” This perception of light seen through darkness being red, and darkness through light being blue, was possessed by ancient peoples over in Asia when they still had the knowledge which I have lately described to you. The ancient Greeks still had this concept, and it lasted through the whole Middle Ages until the 14th. 15th, 16th, 17th centuries when people became clever. And as they became clever, they began not to look at nature but to think out all sorts of artificial sciences.

One of those who devised a particularly artificial science about color was the Englishman Newton. Out of cleverness—you know how I am now using the word, namely quite in earnest—out of special cleverness Newton said something like this: Let us look at the rainbow—for when one is clever one does not look at something happening naturally every day: dawn, sunset, one looks at the specially unusual and rare, something to be understood only when one has gone further. However. Newton said: Let us look at the rainbow. In the rainbow one sees seven colors, namely, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. One sees them next to each other in the rainbow:

When you look at a rainbow you can distinguish these seven colors quite plainly.

Now Newton made an artificial rainbow by darkening the room, covering the window with black paper, and in the paper he made a tiny hole. That gave him a very small streak of light.

Then he put in this streak of light something that one calls a prism. It is a glass that looks like this [drawing], a sort of three-cornered glass, and behind this he set up a screen. So he then had the window with the hole, this tiny beam of light, the prism and behind it the screen. Then the rainbow appeared with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet colors. What did Newton then say?

Newton said to himself: The white light comes in; with the prism I get the seven colors of the rainbow. Therefore they are already contained in the white light and I only need to draw them out.

You see, that is a very simple explanation. One explains something by saying: It is already there and I draw it out.

In reality he ought to have said: Since I set up a prism—that is. a glass with a cornered surface, not a regular glass plate—when I look through it like this, there is light made red through darkness, and on the other side darkness made blue through light—the blue color appears. And in between lie in fact gradations. That is what he ought to have told himself.

But at that time the aim in the world was to explain everything by seeking to find everything already inside that from which one was really to explain it. That is the simplest method, is it not? If, for example, one is to describe how the human being arises, then one says: Oh well, he is already in the ovum of the mother, he only develops out of it. That is a fine explanation!

We don't find things as easy as that, as you have seen. We have to take the whole universe to our aid, which first forms the egg in the mother. But natural science is concerned with throwing everything inside, which is the simplest possible way. Newton said that the sun already contained all the colors and we had only to draw them out.

But that is not it at all. If the sun is to produce red at dawn, it must first shine on the clouds and we must see the red through darkness; and if the sky is to appear blue, that is not at all through the sun. The sun does not shine into the heavens: it is all black there, dark, and we see the blue through the illumined air of the earth. We see darkness through light, and that is blue.

The point is to make a proper physics where it could then be seen how in the prism on the one side light is seen through darkness and on the other darkness through light. But that is too tiresome for people. They find it best to say that everything is within light and one only draws it out. Then one can say too that once there was a giant egg in the world, the whole world was inside, and we draw everything out of it.

That is what Newton did with the colors. But in reality one can always see the secret of the colors if one understands in the right way the morning and evening glow and the blue of the heavens.

Now we must consider further the whole matter in relation to our eye and to the whole of human life altogether. You see, you all know that there is a being which is especially excited through red—that is, where light works through darkness—and that is the bull. The bull is well known to be frightfully enraged by red. That you know.

And so man too has a little of the bull-nature. He is not of course directly excited through red, but if man lived continually in a red light, you would at once perceive that he gets a little stimulation from it. He gets a little bull-like. I have even known poets who could not write poetry if they were in their ordinary frame of mind, so then they always went to a room where they put a red lampshade over the light. They were then stimulated and were able to write poetry. The bull becomes savage: man by exposing himself to the red becomes poetic! The stimulation to poetry is only a matter of whether it comes from inside or from outside. This is one side of the case.

On the other hand you will also be aware that when people who understand such things want to be thoroughly meek and humble, they use blue, or black—deep black. That is so beautiful to see in Catholicism: when Advent comes and people are supposed to become humble, the Church is made blue; above all the vestments are blue. People get quietened, humble; they feel themselves inwardly connected with the subdued mood—especially if a man has previously exhausted his fury, like a bull, as for instance at Shrove Tuesday's carnival. Then one has the proper time of fasting afterwards, not only dark raiment, black raiment. Then men become tamed down after their violence is over. Only, where one has two carnivals, two carnival Sundays, one should let the time of fasting be twice as long! I do not know if that is done.

But you see from this that it has quite a different effect on man whether he sees light through dark that is red, or darkness through light, that is blue.

Now consider the eye. Within it you have nerves and blood. When the eye looks at red, let us say at the dawn or at something red, what does it experience? You see, when the eye looks at red then these quite fine little blood-arteries become permeated by the red light, and this light has the peculiarity of always destroying the blood a little. It therefore destroys the nerve at the same time, for the nerve can live only when it is permeated by blood. So that when the eye confronts red, when red comes into the eye, then the blood in the eye is always somewhat destroyed and the nerve with it.

When the bull is faced with red it simply feels: Good gracious—all the blood in my head is destroyed! I must defend myself!—Then it becomes savage because it will not let its blood be destroyed.

Well, but this is very good—not only in the bull, but in man and in other animals. For if we look at red and our blood becomes somewhat destroyed, then on the other hand our whole body works to bring oxygen into the eye so that the blood can be re-established.

Just think what a wonderful process takes place there. When light is seen through darkness—that is, red—then the blood is destroyed, oxygen is absorbed from the body and the eye vitalized through the oxygen. And now we know through the renewal of life in our eye: There is red outside. But in order that we may perceive this red, the blood and the nerve in the eye must be a little destroyed. We must send life, that is, oxygen, into the eye. And by our own vitalizing of the eye, by this waking up of the eye we notice: there is red outside.

Now you see, man's health too actually depends on his perceiving rightly the reddened light, on his always being able to take in reddened light properly. For the oxygen which is drawn out of the body vitalizes then the whole body and man gets a healthy color in the face. He can really reanimate himself.

This refers not only to a person who is healthy and able to see, it applies as well to one whose eyes are not healthy and who does not see: When the light works through the bright color then he is vitalized in the head, and this vitalizing acts again on the whole body and gives him a healthy color. So when we live in the light and can take in the light properly we get a healthy color.

It is very important tor people not to be brought up in dark places where they can become lifeless and submissive. People should be brought up in light, bright places with yellowish-reddish light, where they also properly assimilate the oxygen in them through the light.

But you see from this that everything connected with the element of red is actually connected with the development of man's blood. When we look at red the nerve is actually destroyed.

Now just think: We see darkness through light, that is, blue. Darkness does not destroy our blood, it leaves our blood unharmed. The nerve too is undestroyed since our blood is in order. The result is for man to feel himself thoroughly well inwardly. Since blood and nerve are not attacked by blue, man feels thoroughly well inside.

And there is really something subtly refined in creating submissive meekness. When, let us say, the priests there above at the altar are in their blue or their black vestments, and the people sit below and gaze at them, the blood-arteries and nerves in the eye are not destroyed and naturally the people feel very well. It is actually directed to the feeling of well-being of the people.

Do not imagine that that is not known! For they still have their ancient science. The more modern science has only arisen with the men of the Enlightenment, in such men as, for instance. Newton.

Thus we can say: Blue is what sends through man a feeling of well-being, when he says to himself (it is all unconscious, but he says it inwardly): There alone I can live—in the blue. There man feels inwardly himself; in red, on the other hand, he feels as if something were to penetrate into him. One can say that with blue the nerve remains undestroyed and the body sends the feeling of well-being into the eye and hence into the whole body.

That is the difference between the color blue and the color red. And yellow is only a gradation of red, and green is a gradation of blue. So that one can say: according to whether nerve or blood is active, the more sensitive is man to red or to blue.

Now you see, one can apply that to substances. If I want to look for a red for painting, to produce a red color which contains the substances that stimulate man to develop oxygen inwardly, then I gradually arrive at the fact that to get red color for painting I must test the substances of the outer world to find how much carbon they contain. If I combine carbon in the right way with other substances, I discover the secret of making a red for my painting.

If I use plants for getting colors for paints then above all it is a matter of so organizing my processes, diminishing, consuming, and so on, that I obtain the carbon in the paint in the right way. If I have the carbon in it in the right way, then I get the bright, the reddish color.

If on the other hand I have substances which contain much oxygen—not carbon but oxygen—then I obtain the darker colors, such as blue. When I know the living element in the plant then I can really create my colors. Imagine that I take a sunflower: that is quite yellow, a bright color. Yellow is near to red, that is, light seen through darkness. If I now treat the sunflower in such a way as somehow to gel into my paint-color the right process that lies in the flower, then I have a good yellow. Even the outer light cannot have much against it, because the blossom of the sunflower has already taken from the sun the secret of creating yellow. If I therefore get the same process into my artist's color as there is in the blossom, then if I get it thick enough, I can use it normally as paint.

But let me take another plant, the chicory, for instance, the blue flower that grows on the wayside—it grows here too. If I have this blue plant and want to prepare a paint from the flower, I cannot do it, I get nothing from it. On the other hand, if I treat the root in the right way, there is a process in it which actually makes the blossom blue.

When the blossom is yellow then something goes on in the blossom itself which makes yellow; when the blossom is blue, however, the process lies in the root and it only presses upwards towards the flower. So if I want to produce a blue paint from the indigo-plant, where I get a darker blue, or from the chicory, this blue flower, I must use the root. I must treat it chemically till it yields me the blue color.

In this way, through real study, I can find out how to obtain paints from the plant. I cannot do so in Newton's way; he simply says that everything is in the sunlight and one has only to draw it out. (One can apply that at most to one's purse; what I spend for a day I must have in the purse in the morning.) That is how the quite clever people picture it, like a sack in which everything is lying. That, however, is not the case.

We must know, for instance, how the yellow is in the sunflower or in the dandelion. We must know how the blue is in chicory. The processes which make the chicory or the indigo׳ plant blue lie in the root, whereas the processes that make the sunflower or the dandelion yellow lie in the flower.

And so I must imitate chemically, in a chemistry become living, the flower-process of the plant and get the bright, light color. I must imitate the root process of the plant and there obtain the dark color.

You see, what I have related here is plain to the real human understanding; whereas as a matter of fact this business (in the rainbow) with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, is a rarity.

Now when Goethe lived the affair had got to the point where people generally believed in what Newton had taught, namely, the sun is the great sack in which lie the so-called seven colors. One need only tempt them out, then they come to light. Everyone believed that; it was taught and in fact is still taught today.

Goethe's nature was not one to believe everything immediately. He wanted to convince himself a little about things that were taught everywhere. People generally say that they do not believe anything on authority. But when it comes to the point of crediting what is taught from the professorial chair, then people are today frightfully credulous, they believe everything that is taught. Goethe did not want to believe everything straightaway, so he borrowed from the university in Jena the apparatus, the prisms and so on which provide the proof. He thought: Now I will do exactly what the professors do in order to see how it actually is.

Well, Goethe did not get down to it immediately and had the apparatus rather a long time without doing anything. He just did something else. So the time became too long for the Hofrat Büttner who needed the apparatus and wanted to have it fetched back. Goethe said: Now I must do the thing quickly—and at least, as he was already packing up, looked through a prism. He said to himself: The rainbow must look beautiful on the white wall if I look through there; instead of white, red, yellow, green and so on must appear. He therefore peered through, anticipating with delight that he would now see the white wall in these beautiful colors,—but he saw nothing: white as before, simply white. Naturally he was extremely surprised and asked himself what was behind it. And his whole theory of color arose out of this.

Goethe said: One must now control the whole affair again. The ancients have said light seen through darkness = red, darkness through light = blue. If I gradate the red somewhat it becomes yellow. If I make the blue go up to red, then it becomes green on the one side and violet on the other. These are gradations. And he then worked out his color theory and in fact better than it existed in the Middle Ages.

Now today we have a physicist's color-theory with the sack from which the seven colors come, which is taught everywhere. And we have a Goethean color-theory which understands the blue of the heavens rightly, understands rightly the morning and evening glow as I have been explaining to you.

But there is a certain difference between the Newtonian and the Goethean theory. For the most part other people do not notice it, for other people look on the one hand to the physicists: there the Newtonian theory of color is taught which stands in the books everywhere. One can very clearly picture to oneself what appears there in the rainbow as red, orange, yellow, green and so on. Well, but there is no prism there! However, one does not reflect further. The Newtonians certainly know, but they do not admit, that when one looks through the rainbow on the one side, then one sees darkness through the sun-illumined rainbow; sees on the other side the blue. But then one also sees in front the surface where one sees light through darkness, and on the other side the red. One must explain everything therefore by the simple principle: light through darkness is red; darkness through light is blue.

But as I have said, people on the one hand see everything as the logicians explain it to them: on the other hand they look at pictures where the colors are used. Well, they do not ask further about the red and the yellow and so on; they do not bring the two things together.

But the painter must bring them together: one who wants to paint must connect them. He must not merely know: There is a sack and the colors are within it—for he has not got the sack anywhere. He must obtain the right thing from the living plant, or living substances, so that he can mix his colors in the right way.

So this is the position today: painters really reflect (—there even are painters who reflect, who do not simply buy their colors): but those painters who reflect upon how they are to obtain these colors and how they should use them, they say: Yes, with the Goethean color-theory one can do something; that tells us something. With the Newtonian color-theory, the theory of the physicists, we painters can do nothing.

The public does not bring painting and the physicists' theory of color together, but the painter does! He therefore likes the Goethean color-theory. He says to himself: Goodness! We don't bother about the physicists: they say something in their own field. They may do what they like; we keep to the Goethean color-theory. The painters look on themselves as artists and not as having to encroach on the teaching of the physicists. That is in fact uncomfortable, enmities arise, and so on.

But that is how things stand today between what is in the books about color and what is true. With Goethe it was simply the defense of truth which impelled him to oppose the Newtonians and the whole modern physics. And we cannot really understand nature without coming to Goethe's color-theory.

Hence it is quite natural that in a Goetheanum Goethe's theory of color should also be vindicated. But then if one does not remain in some religious or moral sphere but also intervenes in the smallest single part of Physics, then one has the physicists' whole pack of hounds upon one.

So, you see, the defense of truth is extraordinarily difficult in modern times. But you should just know in what a complicated way the physicists explain the blue of the sky. Naturally, if I start from a false principle and want to explain the simple thing that the blackness of universal space appears blue through light, then I must make a frightfully complicated explanation of it. And then the red of dawn and sunset! These chapters mostly begin like this; the blue sky—one cannot actually explain that properly today, one could imagine this or that.—Yes, with all that the physicists have, their little hole which so much amused Goethe—the little hole through which they let the light come into the room, in order with the darkness to investigate the light—with all this they cannot explain the simplest facts. And so it comes to the point that color is no longer understood at all.

If one understands, however, that the destruction of the blood calls forth the vitalizing process—for when I have destroyed my blood then I call up all the oxygen in me and renew myself, bring about health—then one also understands the healthy rosy color in man.

If I have darkness round me or continual blueness, well, then I shall not continually reanimate myself, or else I should create too much life in me. And so on the one hand one can understand the healthy rosy countenance from the intake of' oxygen, when one is thoroughly exposed to the light, and one can understand paleness from the perpetual intake of carbonic acid. Carbonic acid, the counterpart of oxygen, wants to go into my head. That makes me quite pale.

Today, for instance in Germany, the children are almost all pale. But one must understand that that comes from too much carbonic acid. And if man develops too much carbonic acid—carbonic acid consists of a combination of carbon and oxygen—then he uses the carbon which he has in him too much for forming carbonic acid. Thus in such a pale child you have all the carbon in him continuously changed into carbonic acid. So he becomes pale. What must I do? I must administer something to him through which this eternal development of carbonic acid inside him is hindered, through which the carbon is held back. I can do that if I give him some carbonate of lime.

In this way the functions are again stimulated, as I have told you from quite a different standpoint, and man keeps the carbon that he needs, does not continually change it into carbonic acid. And since carbonic acid consists of carbon and oxygen, the oxygen comes up into the head and animates the head processes, the life processes. But when the oxygen is given up to the carbonic acid, the life processes are suppressed.

If I therefore bring a pale person into a region where he has a good deal of light, he becomes stimulated not to give up his carbon continually to carbonic acid, because the light sucks the oxygen up into the head. Then he will get a healthy color again. In the same way I can stimulate that through the carbonate of lime, inasmuch as I keep back the oxygen and the person has it at his disposal.

So everything must be interconnected. One must be able to understand health and illness from the theory of color. One can do that only from Goethe's theory, for that rests simply on nature in a natural manner. It can never be done from Newton's color-theory which is merely devised, does not rest on nature at all, and actually cannot explain the simplest phenomena, the red at dawn and sunset and the blue sky.

Now, gentlemen, may I still say something else to you. Think of the old pastoral peoples who drove out their flocks and herds and slept in the open air. During their sleep they were not exposed to the blue sky but to the dark sky. And up there upon it [drawing] are the unnumbered shining stars. Now picture the dark sky with these countless shining stars and there below the sleeping men. From the heavens there streams out a calming force, the inner feeling of well-being in sleep. The whole human being is permeated by the darkness, so that he becomes inwardly quiet. Sleep proceeds from the darkness, but nevertheless these stars shine down. And wherever a star-beam shines the human being becomes inwardly a little stirred up. An oxygen ray goes out from the body. Pure oxygen rays go to meet the rays from the stars and the man becomes entirely permeated inwardly by the oxygen rays: he becomes inwardly an oxygen reflection of the whole starry heavens.

Thus the ancient shepherd folk took into their quietened bodies the whole star heavens in pictures, pictures which the course of the oxygen engraved into them. Then they woke up and they had the dream of these pictures. From this they had their star knowledge, their wonderful knowledge of the stars.

Their dream was not merely that Aries, the Ram, had so-and-so-many stars, but they really saw the animal, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, and felt the whole starry heavens in themselves in pictures. That is what has remained to us from the ancient shepherd folk as a poetic wisdom which sometimes has extraordinarily much that can still be instructive today.

One can understand it when one knows that the human being lets an oxygen ray radiate to each beam of light from the stars, that he becomes wholly sky, an inner oxygen sky.

Man's inner life is as we know an astral body, for during sleep he experiences the whole heavens. It would go badly with us if we were not descended from these ancient pastoral peoples. All men in fact are descended from ancient shepherd folk. We still have, purely through heredity, the knowledge of an inner star-heaven. We still unfold that, although not so well as the ancients. In sleep, when we lie in bed, we have still a sort of recollection of how once the shepherd of old lay in the fields and drew the oxygen into him. We are no longer shepherds and herdsmen but something is still given to us, we still receive something, only we cannot express it so beautifully as it has already become pale and dim. But the whole of mankind today is indeed interconnected, all belong to each other,—and if one would know what man still bears in him today, one must go back to ancient times. Everywhere, all men on earth have proceeded from this shepherd-stage and have actually inherited in their bodies what could descend from these pastoral peoples.

[ 1 ] Now, Gentlemen, I have not yet fully answered the last question about colors. We will take it a little further or complete it.

[ 2 ] First of all, today we have to consider a most interesting question, namely, the human color itself. You know, of course, that over the face of the earth are people showing skins differing in color. The Europeans to whom we belong are called the “White Race.” Well, we know indeed that a man in Europe is not quite healthy when he is cheese-white. He is healthy when he shows his natural, fresh color, created by himself inwardly, through the white.

[ 3 ] But now besides this European coloring we have four other principal colors of the skin. We will consider this a little today because one actually understands the whole of history and the whole social life, even modern social life, only if one can turn to the race-characteristics of humanity [see drawings]. Only then can one rightly understand the spiritual element if one first studies how the spirit works in man precisely through the skin-color.

[ 4 ] I should now like to put the racial color before you in this way. Let us start from Europe where we ourselves are living. Here we have therefore—I can draw it for you only roughly—first Europe; bordering on Europe: Asia, England, Ireland; here Japan, China; further India, India proper, Arabia; here we have Africa. Thus: Europe, Asia, Africa.

Now we will sketch in the men as they are in the corresponding regions. We call ourselves in Europe the white race. If we go over to Asia we have the yellow race, principally in Asia. And when we go over to Africa there we have the black race. Those are the original races. All others living in these regions are the consequence of migration.

So if we ask: What races belong to these parts of the earth?—Then we must say: To Asia belongs the yellow race, the Mongolian; to Europe belongs the white race or the Caucasian race, and to Africa belongs the black or Negro race. The Negro race does not belong to Europe and it is naturally only mischievous that it now plays so great a role in Europe. These races are, as it were, at home in these three parts of the earth.

[ 5 ] Now we will consider the color of these three races. I have already told you that color has to do with light. When one sees the black of universal space through the illumined universe, then it appears blue. When one sees light, illumination through the dark air, it appears reddish, as in the glow of morning and evening.

[ 6 ] Let us just simply consider colors on ordinary objects. You first distinguish—let us say—black and white. These are the most striking colors, black and white. What is the position then with a black body? A black body assimilates in itself all the light that falls upon it and mirrors back none at all.

So if you have a black body, it takes the light that falls on it, absorbs everything into itself, and gives none back. It therefore appears black because it reflects no light.

When you have a white body it says: I do not need the light, I will only use what is in myself, I send all the light back. It is therefore white.

Thus a white body sends back all light and we see its surface light, white. A dark body absorbs all the light and also all the warmth and throws back no light, no warmth at all, and therefore appears black.

[ 7 ] You can study that more closely if you consider the following. Suppose there is some object on the earth which takes up all light. In the first place it gives back a little light and so appears bright. But it allows itself time and takes up the most light possible. When it can take up no more and one brings it into the light, then it appears black.

[ 8 ] Now, suppose there is a tree. It stands at first on the earth's surface and takes up a certain amount of light. But it absorbs a good deal of both light and warmth. That goes on until the time when it falls below the earth. When, for a length of time,—but that means thousands or millions of years—it has remained beneath the earth, what does it become? Black coal. It becomes black because it took up light and warmth into itself when it was a tree. It does not give that out unless we destroy it. If we burn it then it yields it, but if we only bring it into the air for a time it keeps it. It has taken up so much light and warmth that it gives nothing out—we must destroy it. That is the condition of coal.

[ 9 ] Let us suppose that the object does not take up further light, it sends all back again, then something of such a nature will be white. That is the snow in winter. It reflects all light, it takes up no light and no warmth and thus becomes white. You see by this difference between coal and snow the relation that exists between objects on earth and universal space.

[ 10 ] Let us apply that to man in universal space. Let us look just at the blacks in Africa. These blacks in Africa have the characteristic of absorbing from the universe all light and all warmth. They take it up. Now this light and this warmth in the universe cannot go through the whole body because a human being is always a human being even if he is a black one. It does not go through the whole body but stops short on the surface of the skin, and therefore the skin itself becomes black.

Thus a black man in Africa is one who absorbs the most possible warmth and light from the universe and assimilates it in himself. Through the fact that he does this the forces of the cosmos work over the whole man like this [see drawing]. He takes up light and warmth everywhere and uses it in himself. Now there must be something which helps him in this assimilation.

Well, you see, what helps him in particular is his posterior brain. In the Negro the posterior brain is specially developed. That goes through the spinal cord and can work over all the light and warmth that is in him.

Hence all that is connected with the body and metabolism is strongly developed in the Negro. He has, as one says, a strong desire-life, instinctive life [see drawing]. And since he actually has the sun-like, light and warmth, on the surface of his skin, his whole metabolism proceeds as if there were a cooking by the sun itself in his interior. Hence comes his desire-life. There is really a continuous cooking going on within him, and what stokes the fire is the posterior brain.

[ 11 ] Sometimes man's organization throws off further byproducts. That is to be seen just in the Negro. The Negro not only has this cooking in his organism, it not only boils there, but he also has a frightfully crafty and observant eye. He peers craftily and very observantly. You can easily take this as a contradiction. But it is like this: If there in front is the nerve of the eye [see drawing], the nerves go just into the posterior brain; they cross there [see drawing]. The nerve goes into the posterior brain, and since that is specially developed in the Negro therefore he peeps out so craftily, is such a sly observer of the world. [ 12 ] If one begins to understand the matter, it all becomes clear. But modern science does not make such studies as we do and so it knows nothing about these things.

[ 13 ] Let us now pass over from the black to the yellow man. Yellow is already related to the red, and so light is reflected to some extent but much is absorbed. However, the yellow man throws back more light than a black. The black man is an egoist, he takes up all light and all warmth. The yellow Mongolian gives indeed some light back, but he absorbs a great deal. That makes him what he is [see drawing]. Thus he takes up much light but gives some back. He contents himself with less. This less amount of light cannot work in the whole metabolism, and so the metabolism must be referred to its own force. That works chiefly in the breathing and blood-circulation.

Thus in the yellow race—Japanese, Chinese—the light and warmth work principally in breathing and blood-circulation. If you have ever met a Japanese, you will have noticed how he pays attention to his breathing. When he talks to you he keeps himself under restraint so that his breathing may be in good order. He has a certain feeling of well-being in breathing.

This means that less is worked over in his interior, it is principally worked upon in the breast [see drawing]. This causes the yellow man to develop strongly, not the posterior brain, but the middle brain. It is there that his breath and blood-circulation are maintained. The yellow Asiatic lives rather less in the metabolism.

You can notice that too by his walking. He has a less energetic walk. He does not work so strongly with the limbs and the metabolism. The Negro is more to the fore in racing and outer movement that is governed by desires. The Asiatic, yellow man, develops more an inner dream life and therefore the whole Asiatic civilization has this dreamer-element.

Thus he is not only living more in himself; he absorbs something from the universe. And so it comes about that the Asians have such wonderful poems about the whole universe. The Negro has not got this quality. He takes everything into his metabolism and really he only digests the universe.

The Asiatic breathes it into himself, has it in his blood-circulation. And so he can also give it out from himself when awake. For speech is in fact only a metamorphosed breathing. Yes. Gentlemen, they are beautiful, wonderful poems. The Asians are altogether an inward people. They scorn the European today because they say: They are external people. We shall see why immediately. That then is the yellow race [see drawing] and it is connected with color in the way I have told you.

[ 14 ] Now let us look at ourselves in Europe. We are a white race in regard to the universe, for we must give back all external light. We give back all light and, in fact, all warmth too. The warmth has to be very powerful if we want to take it into us. And when it is not there we are stunted, as we see by the Eskimos. There is the human being [see drawing] of such a nature that he throws back all light and warmth. He absorbs them only when they become powerful. He throws them back and develops only the light and warmth that arise in his inner being through his own inner activity.

Yes, neither breathing nor blood-circulation comes to help him, nor the creation of warmth; but he must himself work out light and warmth through his brain, that is, through his head. We actually throw back all external light and warmth. We ourselves must give the color to our blood. That then presses through the white and so we obtain the human color of the Europeans. It is from within.

And so indeed we are such a white body as assimilates everything within and throws back all light and warmth.

And whereas the Mongolian mainly needs the middle brain, we Europeans use the frontal brain, the anterior brain. Through this fact the following is shown. The man with the posterior brain has mainly the desire-life, life of instinct: the one here with the middle brain has the feeling life, situated in the breast; and we Europeans, we poor Europeans, have the thought-life that sits in the head. Thereby, as it were, we do not feel our inner man at all. For we feel the head only when it is ill. Otherwise we do not feel it.

But this makes us aware of the whole outer world and we easily become materialists. The Negro becomes no materialist, he remains man inwardly, only he develops the inner desire-life. Nor does the Asiatic become materialist, he remains at the feeling-life, he does not bother about external life as the European does. Of the latter he says: He is only an engineer, concerning himself only with outer life.—He is, in fact, since he must develop his frontal brain, assigned to the outer world, and everything is connected with that.

[ 15 ] Thus we are the white race, inwardly the white is colored through our blood. Then there is the Mongolian, the yellow race; and then there is the black race. And we can understand that quite well when we start from the colors—then the whole thing is explained.

[ 16 ] Now you only need to consider how that is. The Negroes live on a part of the earth where the sun oppresses them very much indeed, penetrates into them. So they give themselves up to it, absorb it fully into their bodies, become friendly with it, reject nothing.

With the Asians—more comes to them from the heat of the earth. They do not give so much back. They are no longer so friendly with the sun.

And with the Europeans—here the fact is that they would actually obtain nothing from the sun if they did not evolve their own human element. Europe has therefore always been the starting point for all that develops the human element in connection with the outside world.

Inventions have very seldom been made in Asia. They can be assimilated, but inventions themselves, by which the Asians can apply what is produced through practical experience with the outer world—these the Asians cannot make.

[ 17 ] For instance, this is what once happened with a screw-steamer. Some Japanese had learnt about it through stealthily watching Europeans, and they also wanted to manage it alone. Previously the Europeans had always been in charge and directed things. Now the Japanese wanted to manage the steamer alone. The English remained behind on the shore. Suddenly the Japanese who were on board fell into evident despair, for the steamer continually revolved round itself. They could not make out how to bring the proper forward motion to the revolving movement. The Europeans who knew how to do it naturally grinned tremendously on the shore. This independent thought which the European develops in familiarity with the environment is not possessed by the Asiatic peoples. The Japanese will therefore develop all European inventions, but they will not think out something by themselves.

As regards the human race, men all over the earth are actually dependent on one another. They must help each other. That is a consequence of their natural ability. [ 18 ] That is connected, you see, with the whole of man's development. Think for a moment of a black man; his desire-life is especially evolved, all that boils in the interior. This gives much ash, and the ash is deposited in the bones. He is therefore more developed in his bones than a man of the white race. The latter rather directs to the blood what he has inwardly and his bones are more finely developed. Thus the Negro has coarsely developed bones, the European has more finely developed bones. And the Asiatics, the yellow race, stand in between.

[ 19 ] You can observe by the manner in which a Japanese stands and walks that in his bone-structure he stands between the European and the African. The Africans have these strong bones continuously in movement. The European has more the blood system. The Japanese has all that acts on the breathing and from the breath on the blood-circulation.

[ 20 ] But now, Gentlemen, men on earth do not simply remain where they are. If one were to go back into ancient times, one would already find that the yellow race belonged to Asia, the white race to Europe and the black race to Africa. But it has also always happened that people have wandered out. And it can happen that either the yellow wander to the East or the blacks wander to the West. And that was once done. The yellow have always wandered eastwards. There they have come to those islands which lie between Asia and Australia [see scheme]. When the yellow wander over to the East they become brown. There arose the Malayans who became brown. Why?

Yes, why do they become brown? What does it mean to become brown? Well, when they are yellow they throw back a definite degree of light; the rest they absorb. When they become brown through the different way in which they now live in the sun—for they come from another part of the earth—then they throw back, reflect, less light. They take more light into themselves. So these brown Malayans are migrated Mongolians, but who now, since the sun works on them differently, accustom themselves to absorb more light and more warmth.

But consider how they have not the nature tor this. They have already accustomed themselves to have a bony structure which limits them to a definite degree of warmth. They have not the right nature for taking up so much warmth as they now take up as Malayans.

The result of this is that they begin to become unusable people, people who break to pieces in the body, whose body dies away. This is in fact the case with the Malayan population. They die of the sun. They die of the Fast. One can say that whereas the yellow, the Mongolians, are still men in full strength, the Malayans are already a dying race. They are dying out.

[ 21 ] In ancient times the Negroes wandered over to the West—today circumstances are different, they can do it less—but they wandered westwards in ancient times; there had always been a ship passage, and there were still islands over the whole Atlantic Ocean, for earlier this was in fact a continent. Now when the blacks wandered west they could no longer absorb so much light and warmth as in their native Africa. Less light and warmth reaches them. What is the result? Their nature is organized to take up as much as possible of light and warmth and actually in that way to become black. Now they do not get as much light and warmth as they need in order to become black. So they become copper-red, become Indians. That comes from the fact that they are obliged to reflect something of light and warmth. That gleams a copper-red. Copper is itself a body which must reflect a little light and warmth.

They cannot hold out against this and so die in the West as Indians. They are again a race that is going under, they die from their own nature which gets too little light and warmth. They die from the earthly, and the earthly element of their nature is their desire-life. They can no longer develop that properly, whereas they still get strong bones. Since much ash goes into their bones these Indians can no longer hold out against it. Their bones become frightfully strong, but so strong that the whole man goes to pieces by reason of his bones.

[ 22 ] You see, this is how things have developed, so that these five races have come about. One might say: Black, yellow, white in the center: as a side-branch of the black the copper-red, and as a side-branch of the yellow the brown: those are always the dying-out parts.

[ 23 ] The whites are actually those who evolve the human element and so they are assigned to themselves. When they migrate they somewhat take on the characteristics of the other regions, yet they do not go to pieces as a race, but rather as individuals. But instead they do something else altogether.

You see, all that I have been describing to you are things that go on in man's body, and the soul and spirit are more independent of it. And so soul and spirit can be most active in the European, since they make most claim on him. He can more easily bear going into different parts of the earth.

Hence it also once came about that starting from up above there [see scheme] a great migration of people went over as far as India. A stream of white people struck into a region where the population was yellow. Thus arose the Hindus, a mixture of Mongolian and Caucasian. Hence came the very beautiful Indian poetry, the most beautiful in existence. But again at the same time something of which one notes that it has already become inert, because the white element is not in its own territory.

[ 24 ] And so one can say that the white man can go everywhere, today even to America—and all the white inhabitants of America have come from Europe. The white element therefore comes into American regions, but something happens to man when he comes to America from the Europe for which he is naturally constituted. It means that some demand must be made on the posterior brain. As European in Europe he has made demands chiefly on his frontal brain. Now in America there flourish those people who were once actually decadent Negroes—that is to say, they do not flourish, they are going to pieces—the Red Indians. When one comes there a conflict always arises in the head between the anterior and the posterior brain.

It is found that if a family moves to America and settles there, then the descendants have the peculiarity of acquiring somewhat longer arms. The arms and legs grow rather more when the European settles in America—not in himself, of course, but in his descendants. That comes from the fact that things move over through the middle brain to the posterior brain when as European one comes to America.

[ 25 ] But at the same time something very peculiar comes about in the American. Now the European lives entirely in his inner being, does he not—especially if he is a thinker. If he is no thinker, he barely reflects at all, but that produces a life which is not quite filled up. But as soon as the European settles in America he no longer is such a brooder. So the following arises: When you read a European book, things are always proved. One cannot get away from the proving. One reads through a whole book, reads through 400 pages, only proofs. Even if it is a novel there is always proving. For the most part, nothing is proved at the end on the 400th page.

The American does not do that. When you read an American book everything is put forward as a statement. There again it is a going-back, nourished by the instinct. The animal proves nothing; the lion does not prove that he will devour another animal, he will devour it. If the European wants to do anything, it must first be proved. Today that is the great difference between the European and the American. Europeans prove, Americans affirm.

[ 26 ] But that is not to say that what they affirm cannot be just as true, it is even realized more through the whole man. The Americans have that in advance of the European. On the one hand they approach decadence—the American Indian is decadent—but when one begins to go to pieces one becomes clever. So the Europeans become clever when they go over: they disaccustom themselves from the proving. [ 27 ] This wanting to prove is not exactly a quality to bring one forward. If one is to do something in the morning, one can begin with proving, and at night on going to sleep one can still not do it, because one still must prove. The American will not do that, because he has not been trained at all to prove. And so it comes that America will quite certainly go ahead of Germany in some things. One can make quite interesting observations. If one takes up a European book it proves somewhat as follows—let us say it is a book about the digestive system of the cockchafer—such books are indeed written. It begins by proving: “The animal species of the cockchafer contains also digestive organs, they only withdraw from ordinary observation, one must penetrate deeper into the whole organization of the cockchafer.”—Well, so it goes on. One has to prove everything.

The American begins with: “When one dismembers a cockchafer then one finds in it that and that”—he affirms as he observes.

And so you see in the case of the Europeans: they no longer develop their racial character on behalf of their whole organization. They develop rather the qualities of soul and spirit. For this reason they can penetrate into all other parts of the world. The process of becoming decadent is naturally a slow one.

[ 28 ] The sun always sends more or less of warmth and light down to the earth. Now we have the Vernal Point in the Fishes, as I have told you. Previously it was in the Ram, Aries. After some time it will be in Aquarius: only then will the true American civilization come.

Before then civilization will go more and more over to America. One who will, can already see today how powerful the Americans are becoming and how Europe is getting increasingly impotent. And the reason why no kind of peace can now come to Europe is because Europe no longer actually understands its own land.

Now all civilization moves over to America; it will take a long time, but when the sun's vernal point has entered the Sign of Aquarius then it will send down its rays to earth just in such a favorable way that the American culture and civilization will be especially powerful. That is already to be seen today.

[ 29 ] It is very remarkable: In Europe over here what we call Anthroposophy can be developed. It must be developed out of the Spirit—that does not come at all out of racial characteristics. It must be developed out of the Spirit. And the men who are unwilling to approach the Spirit will plunge Europe into disaster.

[ 30 ] The Americans do not yet need it, especially those who travel over there. For they can still maintain themselves on racial characteristics. And so over in America, curiously enough, arises something remarkable. Anyone who reads American books really attentively, who reads parliamentary speeches, one who takes a general interest in what goes on in America today, will say to himself: Good gracious! That is very remarkable. We in Europe develop Anthroposophy out of the Spirit. Over there they develop something that is a kind of wooden doll of Anthroposophy. Everything becomes materialistic.

But for one who is not a fanatic, there is something similar in American culture to what is anthroposophical science in Europe. Only everything there is wooden, it is not yet alive. We can make it alive in Europe out of the Spirit: those over there take it out of instinct.

[ 31 ] You see, one cart notice that in all detail. The time will one day come when this American “wooden man”—which actually everyone is still—when he will begin to speak. Then he will have something to say very similar to European Anthroposophy.

One can say that we in Europe develop Anthroposophy in a spiritual way; the American develops it in a natural way. Therefore when I explain anthroposophical matters I can so often point out: Well, that is how it is anthroposophically, and that is the American caricature of it [sketch]. That is the caricature of it.

[ 32 ] But if someone is a fanatic and has come to Anthroposophy not through the inner life but through fanaticism, then he finds the very sharpest invectives for Americanism because—well, man abuses the apes chiefly—since the ape is like himself—as a caricature. And so it is really such a remarkable affair as between North and South Pole, between what we achieve spiritually in Europe and what is gained over there in America in a natural way.

[ 33 ] Books on natural science in America do not look at all as they do in Europe. They really talk continually of Spirit, but they represent it to themselves in the crudest, most material way. Hence Spiritism has also arisen in America in recent times. For what does Spiritism do? It wants to talk of the Spirit and imagines it as cloud-phenomena, would prefer everything to be like cloud-phenomena. And so Spiritism is an American product, it aims at the Spirit but in a materialistic way.

It is in fact so interesting that in America materialism simply flourishes, but actually on the way to the Spirit; while in Europe if someone becomes a materialist he dies as human being. The American is a young materialist. In fact, all children are at first materialistic, and then grow to what is not materialism. So too will the American blatant materialism sprout to a spiritual element. That will be when the sun rises in the Sign of Aquarius.

[ 34 ] Now, you see, in this way we can realize what we as Europeans have as a task. Our task as Europeans is not at all always to abuse the Americans, but naturally we must found over the whole earth a civilization which is put together from the best.

[ 35 ] If one thinks about things as the Prince of Baden does who has been taken in by the American European Wilson, then it does not do. For Wilson was not a true American. He had actually taken all his theories from Europe and therefore made things so dreadfully theoretic. But genuine Americanism will one day unite with Europeanism which will have taken a more spiritual path. When one studies something in this way one sees the attitude one should take in the world.

[ 36 ] And so it is really quite interesting: On the one hand we have the black race, which is most of all earthly. When they go westwards, they die out. We have the yellow race, which is between earth and cosmos. When they go to the East they become brown, connect too much with the cosmos, die out. The while race is the future one, is the race creating in the Spirit. When they moved over to India they developed the inward, poetical and spiritual Indian culture. When they now go to the West they will develop a spirituality which does not so much grasp man's inner being, but turns to the spirituality of the outer world.

[ 37 ] And so in the future, purely out of the racial characterization those things will emerge which one must know in life so that one takes the right stand. Men are getting less and less adjustment in life. They want indeed to have everything fall from the skies and not actually to learn.

[ 38 ] This has come about through the fact that in the last third of the 19th century nothing more of a human element was provided in education, particularly in scientific education. Knowledge of man is so difficult to present nowadays. Materialistic scholars themselves realize this, they get no farther.

It was very interesting at the last Natural Science Conference. One of these scientists had especially realized it—one does not advance, one learns nothing of the human being through science today.—But he did not go on to say: “We must develop towards Anthroposophy:” he said: “Give us corpses so that we may dismember them.”

[ 39 ] You see, that was all he could say: Give us corpses! People want to have more corpses, they want to study the dead man. That was a right catchword: Give us corpses!—Whereas we here can do without corpses, for we want to observe and study the living man. For that it is only necessary to open one's eyes and through one's eyes somewhat the soul, for one finds the living man everywhere. One meets nothing but living men. Only one must be able to live with them, so that they may make known to one what a human being is.

But the learned scholars of today have really quite weak eyes; they do not see man. And then they fervently beg “Give us corpses!” Then they can study them. Give us corpses! This was the position in educational centers in recent years, recent decades. People have taken in nothing there pertaining to man. And so knowledge of man has disappeared from all science.

[ 40 ] That is why I dealt with this question in the first chapter of my “Threefold Commonwealth.” I had to show how those who had not been occupied with science but with work had advanced and now naturally wanted science. But the others, the bourgeois, could not give them this, which they appeared to have. And thus arose the great calamity in civilization. The workers demanded science and it was not there, because only a science was there that is devoid of man.

I have shown that in the first chapter of the “Threefold Commonwealth” because that must first be understood if one talks of the social question. So that it was in fact necessary for the “Threefold Commonwealth” to begin with it in the first chapter.

[ 41 ] Now, we have dealt with colors somewhat further today.

[ 1 ] A few questions were put to me last time. I will now answer them, but in a somewhat different order than they were asked. The questions are:

[ 2 ] What is the relationship between coming to see the secrets of the universe and one's conception of the world and of life?

[ 3 ] How far must one go before one finds higher worlds on the path of natural science?

[ 4 ] Do the forces from the cosmos influence the whole of humanity?

[ 5 ] What connection do plants have with the human being and the human body?

[ 6 ] These are, of course, very complicated questions and so I would like to organize my remarks in such a way that the answers emerge gradually. One cannot do otherwise with such complicated questions because if you ask, How can I come to see the secrets of the universe?—this means, How can I arrive at a true spiritual science? Now, you must not imagine that this is something easy to do nowadays. Most people, when they hear that something like Anthroposophy or spiritual science exists, think to themselves: Very well, if that is so, I too will acquire for myself the capacity to see the spirit. I will manage it within a week then I will be able to know everything for myself.

[ 7 ] Needless to say, it is not as simple as that. One has to realize that a great deal is required to master even ordinary science. In order to undertake the simplest observations, one must first learn how to use the instruments. Of course it is comparatively easy to use a microscope, but if one wants to investigate something with the help of a microscope one cannot simply say: I will now put a piece of muscle or the like under the microscope and look into it; then I will know what goes on in the muscle. If you were to proceed like that, you would see nothing. To see something under a microscope, one must first prepare the slides. A piece of muscle is no use by itself: one must make very thin slices with a fine razor, and sometimes a little must be removed and another cut made so that finally one has a very thin film. And very often even then the microscope does not help. For if you have such a sliver of muscle or cell under the microscope, you will probably still see nothing. What one must do is ask oneself: How can I make visible what is under the microscope? Then, often, what one must next do is color what one wants to see with certain dyes to make it visible. But then one must realize one has changed something. One has to know how it would be if one had not changed it. But these things are still really quite simple.

If one wants to observe the stars with a telescope one must first learn how to handle a telescope, although this is much simpler than a microscope. You know there are people who set up telescopes in the streets for people to look through. By itself, this does not help much. For this again requires lenses and a clock, which in turn one must then also learn to handle, etc. These are only examples to show you how complicated it is to investigate the simplest things in the physical world.

[ 8 ] Now, to investigate the spiritual world is really much more difficult, for more preparation is necessary. People imagine they can learn to do it in a week. But this is not so. Above all, one must realize that one has to activate something one has within oneself. What ordinarily is not active must be made active.

[ 9 ] To make things clear for you I must explain that in all investigation of the spiritual world, as in normal science, one must frequently start with some knowledge of what is not normal. You can only learn how things really are if you know how they are when they are not normal. I once gave you a particular example of this. We have to consider this because people in the outside world call people mad who investigate the spiritual world, however normal they may be. We must therefore set about our investigations in such a way that in the end we arrive at the truth. Of course one must not think one can achieve anything by concerning oneself overmuch with what is diseased and abnormal, but one can learn much from it.

[ 10 ] For instance, there are people who are not normal because they are, as is said, mentally deranged. What does this mean? There is no worse word in the world than "mentally deranged" (geistesgestört) for the spirit can never be deranged. Consider the following case for instance: If somebody is deranged for twenty years—this happens—and afterward recovers, what has occurred? Perhaps for twenty years this person says that he is being persecuted by others—that he suffers, as one says, from paranoia—or he says that he sees all kinds of specters and apparitions which are not there, etc. This can continue for twenty years. Now somebody who has been deranged for twenty years can become normal again. But in these cases you will always notice one thing. If someone was deranged for three, five or twenty years and recovers, he will not be quite the same as he was before. Above all you will notice that he will tell you, after he has recovered, that throughout the time he was ill he was able to look into the spiritual world. He will tell you all sorts of things that he saw in the spiritual world. If one then pursues the matter with the knowledge one has gained of the spiritual world as a completely healthy person, one finds that some of what he says is rubbish but. that also much of it is correct. This is what is so strange, someone can be deranged for twenty years, recover, and then tell you that he has been in the spiritual world and has experienced these things. And if one knows the spiritual world as a healthy, normal person, one must admit that he is right in many instances. [ 11 ] If you speak to him during his mental ill-ness, he will never be able to tell you anything sensible. He will tell you the nonsense he experiences. People who are mentally disturbed over a long period do not actually experience the spiritual world during their illness. They have not experienced anything of the spiritual world. But after they have recovered they can, in a certain way, look back to the time they were ill, and what they have not experienced appears to them like glimpses into the spiritual world. This conviction that they have seen much of the spiritual world only appears when they have recovered.

[ 12 ] One can learn much from this. One can learn that the human being contains something that is not used at all during the time he or she is insane. But it was there, it was alive. And where was it? It was not in the outer world for the person told you that the sky was red and the clouds green—all kinds of things. The sick one saw nothing properly in the outer world, But the inner being, which the person cannot use in the deranged state, is in the spiritual world. When he or she can use the brain again and can look back on what the spiritual being lived through, then spiritual experiences come.

[ 13 ] From this we see that a human being who is mentally ill lives spiritually in the spiritual world. The spirit in the person is perfectly healthy. What, then, is ill in a mentally ill patient? It is, in fact, the body: the body cannot use the soul and spirit. When a person is called mentally ill, there is always something ill in the body, and obviously when the brain is ill one cannot think properly. In the same way, when the liver is ill, one cannot feel properly.

[ 14 ] This is why "mentally ill" (geisteskrank) is the most incorrect expression that one can use, for "mentally ill" does not mean that the spirit (geist) is ill. It means the body is so ill that it cannot use the spirit which is always healthy. Above all you must be quite clear that the spirit is always healthy. Only the body can become ill, with the result that it cannot use the spirit in the right way. When someone has a diseased brain it is like having a hammer that breaks with every blow. If I say to someone who does not have a hammer, You are a lazy fellow, you are not even able to strike a blow—then this is, of course, nonsense. He could well strike a blow but he does not have a hammer. It is therefore nonsense to say someone is mentally ill. The spirit is perfectly healthy, only it lacks the body through which to act.

[ 15 ] A good example of what one can learn in this way comes from considering how our thinking works. From what I have told you, you will see that, though one has the spirit, one needs a tool for thinking, and this is the brain. In the physical world one needs the brain. It is not particularly clever of materialism to say one needs a brain. Obviously one needs a brain. But this postulate explains nothing about the spirit. We can also learn that the spirit can completely withdraw itself. In the case of mental illness the spirit does withdraw completely. And it is important to know this, because this shows that people today—and now I am going to tell you something that will really surprise you—cannot think at all. They delude themselves that they can think, but they cannot. I will show you why people cannot think.

[ 16 ] You will object: But people go to school; nowadays one already learns to think quite well even in grade school. So it seems, at least. Nevertheless, people today cannot think at all. It only appears as if they could. In grade school we have grade school teachers. These have also learned something; ostensibly they have also learned to think. Those from whom they have learned have, as one says in Stuttgart, "swollen heads." These are very clever people according to present ideas. They have been to a university. Before they went to university they went to high school. There they learned Latin. If you think back a bit you might say: But my teacher did not know Latin. Perhaps not, but he learned from teachers who did. And what they learned was entirely under the influence of the Latin language. Everything one learns today is under the influence of the Latin language. You can see this from the fact that when someone gives you a prescription, he writes it in Latin, It stems from the time when everything was written in Latin. It is not so long ago, only thirty to forty years, that if one went to university one was obliged to write one's thesis in Latin. [ 17 ] Everything one learns today is under the influence of Latin. This is because in the Middle Ages, up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—this is not so long ago—all teaching was in Latin. For instance the first person to lecture in German was a certain Thomasius¹ in Leipzig. This was not long ago, it was in the seventeenth century. Everywhere lectures were given in Latin. Everybody who learned anything had to go through the Latin language and in the Middle Ages everything one could learn was in Latin. If one wanted to learn anything new one had to learn Latin first. You may protest: But surely not in the grade schools. But there were no grade schools before the sixteenth century. Only gradually, as the vernacular was adopted by science, did grade schools come into existence. So, you see, Latin influences our whole thinking. All of you think like people who have learned to think under the influence of Latin. And if you were to say that the Americans, for instance, could not have learned Latin so long ago—well, today's Americans emigrated from Europe! They too depended on the Latin language.

[ 18 ] Latin has a certain peculiarity. It was developed in ancient Rome in such a way that it thinks by itself. It is interesting how Latin is taught in high schools. One learns Latin; and then one learns thinking, correct thinking according to Latin syntax. So one's whole way of thinking does not depend on anything one does, but on what the Latin language does. You understand, don't you, that this is something quite significant. Anybody today who has learned something does not think for himself: the Latin language thinks in him, even if he has not learned Latin. Strange as it is, one meets independent thinking today only in the few people who have not been to school very much.

[ 19 ] I am not suggesting that we return to illiteracy. We cannot do this. In no realm do I advocate going backward, but one must understand how things have become as they are. Therefore it is important to be able to go back to what the simple person knows, though he has not had much schooling. He is not very forthcoming because he is used to being laughed at. In spite of everything, it is important to know that contemporary human beings do not think for themselves, but that the Latin language thinks in them.

[ 20 ] You see, as long as one cannot think for oneself, one can in no way enter the spiritual world. This is the reason why modern science is opposed to all spiritual knowledge; because through Latin education people can no longer think for themselves. This is the first thing to learn—independent thinking. People are quite right when they say: the brain thinks. Why does the brain think? Because Latin syntax goes into the brain and the brain thinks quite automatically in modern humanity. What we see running round the world are automatons of the Latin language who do not think for themselves.

[ 21 ] In recent years something remarkable has happened. I hinted at it last time, but you may not have noticed it, because it is not easy to see. Something remarkable has happened in recent years. Now, as you know, besides the physical body, we have the etheric body. (I will not speak for the moment of the rest.) The brain belongs to the physical body. The etheric body is also in the brain and one can only think independently with the etheric body. One cannot think independently with the physical body. One can think with the physical hotly only when—as with Latin—the brain is used like an automaton. But as long as one only thinks with the brain, one cannot think anything spiritual. To think something spiritual one must start to think with the etheric body—with the etheric body which, in the case of the mentally ill, is often not used for years. It has to be awakened to an inner activity.

[ 22 ] This is the first thing one has to learn: to think independently. Without independent thinking, one cannot enter the spiritual world. But it is, of course, necessary first of all to find out that one has not learned to think for oneself in one's youth! One has only learned to think what has been thought for centuries through the use of the Latin language. And if one really grasps this then one knows that the first condition for entry into the spiritual world is this: Learn to think independently!

[ 23 ] Now we come to what I wanted to point out when I said that in recent times something remarkable has happened. The people who, more than anyone else, thought along Latin lines were the people of learning—those who, for instance, created physics. They worked it out with thoughts derived from Latin and with the physical brain. When we were small, when I was about as old as young E. here, we learned physics which was worked out with a Latin brain. We only learned what was thought out with a Latin brain. Since then a lot has happened. When I was small the telephone was just being invented. Until then it did not exist. After this followed all the other great inventions that everyone now takes for granted as if they had always been there. They only appeared in the last decades. This caused more and more people to become involved in science who were not Latin trained. This is rather a strange thing. When one looks into the scientific life of the last decades one finds more and more technicians of this kind involved in science. These people had not had much to do with Latin and so their thinking did not become so automatic. And this non-automatic thinking was then picked up by others. This is why today physics is full of concepts and ideas that fall apart. They are most interesting. There is, for instance, Professor Gruner² in Bern who two years ago spoke about the new direction in physics. He said that all the concepts have changed in the last years.

[ 24 ] The reason that one does not notice this is because if you listen to lectures on popular science people tell you what was thought twenty years ago. They cannot tell you what is thought today because they themselves cannot think yet. If you take the thoughts of thirty years ago as valid, it is just like taking a piece of ice and melting it; the ideas melt away. They are no longer there if one wants to follow them exactly. We must see this. If someone learned physics thirty years ago, and sees what has become of it today, he wants to tear his hair out, because he has to confess: I cannot handle all this with the concepts I have learned. This is how it is. And why? Because in recent years, through the development of humanity, the human being has reached the point when the etheric body is supposed to begin to think, and human beings do not want this to happen. They want to go on thinking with the physical body. The concepts fall apart in the physical body, and yet human beings do not want to learn to think with the etheric body. They do not want to think independently.

[ 25 ] Now you see why, in the year 1893, it became necessary for me to write the book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,³ It is not the contents of this book that are so important, though obviously at that time one wished to tell the world what is said in it, but the most important thing is that independent thinking appeared in this book for the first time. No one can possibly understand this book who does not think independently. From the beginning, page by page, a reader must become accustomed to using his etheric body if he would think the thoughts in this book at all. Hence this book is a means of education—a very important means—and must be taken up as such.

[ 26 ] When this book appeared in the nineties people did not know at all what to make of it. It was as if someone in Europe wrote Chinese and no one could understand it. It was of course written in German, but people were completely unaccustomed to the thoughts expressed in it, because all connection with Latin was purposely cast off. For the very first time, quite consciously, it was intended that there should be no thoughts in it that are influenced by Latin, but only independent thoughts. Only the physical brain is a Latin scholar. The etheric body is no Latin scholar. And therefore one has to try to express such thoughts in a language one can only have in the etheric body.

[ 27 ] I will tell you something else. People have noticed, of course, that concepts have changed in the last decades. When I was young the professor filled the whole blackboard with writing. You had to learn it all and then you did well in your exams. But recently, people have begun to notice what Gruner said in his inaugural lecture: none of our concepts would remain valid if there were no solid bodies, only fluids. If the whole world were liquid, as Gruner imagined in his lecture, then our concepts would be invalid and we would have to think quite differently.

[ 28 ] Yes, of course one would have to think differently if there were no solid bodies. In that case you, as you sit here, could do nothing with the concepts you learned in school. If you, say, as a fish, suddenly became clever and had the idea that, as a fish, you wanted to attend a human university, then you would learn something that does not exist for a fish, because it lives in water. A fish only has a boundary sensation of a solid body; the moment it touches the body, it is immediately repulsed. So, if a fish began to think, it would have to have thoughts quite different from those a human being has. But a human being likewise needs such different thoughts, because other thoughts escape him, so that he has to say to himself: If everything were liquid I would have to have quite different thoughts. [ 29 ] Well, have I not told you about the condition of the earth when there were no solid bodies and when everything was fluid, even the animals? I have told you of this condition. Can you not then understand that present day thinking cannot reach back to these conditions? It cannot think them. So present day thinking cannot make anything of the beginning of the world. Naturally, then, a human being today begins to say to himself: Good heavens! If the world were fluid we would have to have quite different concepts. But in the spiritual world there are no solid bodies. So, with all the concepts with which Latin has gradually schooled us, we are unable to enter the spiritual world. We must wean ourselves of these concepts.

[ 30 ] Here is another hidden truth. In Greek times, which preceded the Latin era (the Latin era only began in the fifth or sixth century B.C. but the Greek period is much older), in Grecian times there was still a knowledge of the spirit, One could still see into the spiritual world. When Rome emerged with the Latin language, this was gradually extinguished. Now I must again say something you will find curious, but you will understand it. Who has used Latin, only Latin, throughout the centuries? More than anyone, the Church. It is precisely the Church that claims to teach humanity about the spirit that has contributed the most to drive out the spirit. In the Middle Ages all universities were ecclesiastical. Of course one must be grateful to the Church for founding the universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but it founded them in Latin, and Latin thought has no possibility of attaining the spirit. And so it gradually came about that human beings only have concepts relating to solid bodies. Just look at the Romans, they only introduced dry, prosaic and unspiritual concepts into the world. And this was the reason that all ideas became so material. How would the Greeks have described the sacrament of the Eucharist? They would certainly not have described it as if the elements were actually blood and flesh. This stems from materialism. So even the concept of the Eucharist has become materialistic and this is connected with the Latin language.

[ 31 ] Latin is entirely logical. I have worked with many people who were Latin in their whole attitude to life, although they spoke German. If one wanted to make something clear one quickly translated it into Latin, because since the time of Christ only in Latin does one think logically. But this logical thinking only applies to solid bodies. If one wants to enter the spiritual world one needs fluid concepts.

[ 32 ] There is for instance the Theosophical Society. It also wanted to reach the spiritual world. The Theosophical Society says that man has a physical body, an etheric body, etc. But these people are materialistic because they think the physical body is dense, the etheric body is a little thinner and the astral body thinner still. But all these are still bodies, they never become spirit. If one wants to reach the spirit one has to find concepts which are constantly changing.

Even when I draw something on the blackboard you will notice that I take this into consideration. When I draw the physical body I try to portray physical man as he is. But if I try to draw the etheric body, I would never dream of representing it in the same way. I would do it like this. The human being has an etheric body which expands.

But you must know that this is not so much the etheric body, but the picture of one instant. In the next moment it is different. So if I wish to draw the etheric body, I would have to draw, quickly wipe it off, draw differently, again wipe it off, draw again and wipe it off. It is in constant movement. With the concepts we have today, we cannot catch up with these movements. This is what you have to keep in mind, concepts must become mobile. People must get into the habit of it, This is why it is necessary that thinking become completely independent.

[ 33 ] But this is not enough. I will tell you something more. As you know a human being develops, but one does not usually notice it. However, when a person is quite young, one does notice it. One knows that a child who is only four years old can neither write nor read nor do sums. An eight year old child can perhaps do these things. Here one can see development. But in later life when we have made our way, we are so terribly superior that we don't admit that we can still develop. But we do, throughout our lives, and it is remarkable how we develop. Our development goes like this: Imagine this is man:

I will draw him diagrammatically. When the child is quite young its development proceeds from the head. After the change of teeth, the development proceeds from the chest. Therefore one must watch how a child between seven and fourteen breathes—that it breathes adequately, etc. So this is a picture of the older child. (Nowadays one would have to say it differently. Children do not like to be called children any more. From fourteen onward one must call them "young ladies" and "young gentlemen.") Only at puberty does the development proceed from the limbs and from the whole human being. So one can say that only when one has reached puberty is one developing from the whole being. And this goes on throughout our twenties and thirties. But when one becomes older—some of you can already see it in yourselves—there is a certain retrogression. This need not be the case if one has adopted a spiritual mode of life, but in normal life there is a certain retrogression as one gets older. It is just the task of Anthroposophy to see to it that in the future one does not regress as one gets older. Slowly and gradually this must happen.

[ 34 ] Now there are people whose mental capacities diminish alarmingly. But the mind, the spirit, cannot diminish. It is again only the body. It is interesting that often it is the most brilliant people who regress very much in old age. You may have heard that Kant was reckoned to be one of the wisest men, but in old age he became feeble-minded. His body regressed so much that he could not express his wise mind any more. And so it often is. Especially the very intelligent become feeble-minded in old age. It is an exaggerated form of what happens to everybody. Eventually in old age there comes a point when one can no longer use the physical body. The reason for this is mainly be-cause the arteries harden with excessive deposits of calcium, And the more this happens, the less one can make use of the physical body. As, up to the fortieth year, development proceeds from the head into the whole body, so, in the same degree, the process reverses. As one proceeds from the forties to the fifties one comes back to using the chest more, and in old age one goes back to using the head. So if one becomes really old, one again has to use one's head much more. But now one would have to use the finer head—the etheric head. But this is not learned in Latin education. And it is just those who, in the last decades, had a materialistic Latin education who were most strongly affected by senility.

[ 35 ] In old age one must go back to childhood. There are people in whom this is very noticeable. They become mentally weaker and weaker. The mind, the spirit, however, remains completely intact. Only the body becomes weaker and weaker. In the end such people can no longer do the things they first learned to do in life. Such things happen. Let us say somebody gets old. He can no longer do the work he used to do. He can only do what he did as an older child. Finally he cannot even do this. He can only play and can only understand ideas he learned when playing. There are even very old people who can only understand what their parents or their nurse told them in the very first years of their lives. The saying about returning to second childhood is well founded. One really does return to childhood.

[ 36 ] Actually it is not a misfortune, that is, if one has developed a spiritual life. In fact it is rather fortunate, for as long as one is a child, one can use one's etheric body. If a child tears around and shouts and does all kinds of things, this is not done by the physical body—except if it has a stomachache, but even then the stomachache has to be transferred to the etheric and astral bodies so that the child throws itself about as a result. What tears around is not the physical body. Now one grows old and returns to childhood. Gradually one has learned not to tear around any more, but one no longer uses the etheric body like a child, but for something more sensible. So it can be fortunate that one returns to childhood.

[ 37 ] This is the second point. The first was that in order to enter the spiritual world one has to learn to think in the right way. We shall have to speak further about how one achieves this. The matter is very complicated. Today we have to concentrate on the question why there has to be independent thinking. One must break away from much in modern education, for what one learns in modern education is not independent thinking, it is Latin thinking. Do not imagine that the thinking emerging from socialist theories being developed today is free thinking! It has all been learned from what originally came from Latin, but people do not know it. The worker may have this or that intention in his will, but when he begins to think he thinks in bourgeois concepts and these originate in Latin thinking. So the first thing one has to learn is independent thinking. [ 38 ] The second thing is that one must learn not only to live in the present moment, but to be able to turn back into the life one led in childhood. If you want to penetrate into the spiritual world you must continually remember to ask yourself how it was when you were twelve years old. What did you do? One must not do this superficially, but imagine it in great detail. Nothing is better than to begin to try to picture: Oh yes, there I was twelve years old—I can see it quite clearly—there was a pile of stones by the roadside and I climbed up on it. Once I fell off it. There was a hazel bush and I took out my pocket knife and cut off some branches and cut my finger. It is important really to visualize what one did so many years ago; in this way one gets away from just living in the present. If you think the way one learns to think today, you think with your present physical body. But if you turn back to when you were twelve, you cannot think with your physical body as it then was, for it is no longer there (I told you the physical body is renewed every seven years) so you have to think with your etheric body. If you think back to something that happened twelve or fourteen years ago, you call on your etheric body. This is the way to call up inner activity.

[ 39 ] Above all, one should get accustomed to think in a new way, different from one's usual thinking. How do you think? You know we met here at nine o'clock. I began by reading to you the questions on the slips of paper. Then I proceeded with various observations and we have now arrived at saying: We have to think back into the life we lived when we were twelve or fourteen years old. Now when you get home, you can, if you find it really interesting, think through these thoughts again. One can do this. Most people do it. They go through it once again. But you can do something different. You can ask yourself: What did he say last? The last thing he said was that one should think back to one's early life, to the age of twelve or fourteen years. Before that he said one has to have independent thinking. Earlier still he described how Latin gradually took over. Before that, how a person who was mentally ill for a time and then looks back on it, says he has experienced extraordinary things. It was further explained to us how the inner being cannot be mentally ill—only the body can be ill. Now you have run backward through the whole lecture.

[ 40 ] But in the world things do not run backward. I could possibly have given you the lecture backward in the first place, but then you would not have understood it. One has to begin at the beginning and then look at the whole as it gradually unfolds, but once one has understood it, one can think it backward. But things do not run backward. So I tear myself free from things. I say: Just to be contrary, I will think things exactly not the way they go in the outer world, but I will think them backward. This requires a certain strength. When I think backward I have to make myself inwardly active. A person who wants to look through a telescope has to learn how to handle it. In the same way a person who wants to see into the spiritual world must learn how to handle it. He must think backward many times. One day the moment will come when he knows: Ah, now I am entering the spiritual world.

[ 41 ] You see, throughout your whole life you have accustomed your physical body to thinking forward, not backward. When you begin to think backward your physical body does not take part in it. Something strange happens. This is the first advice to those who ask: How can I reach the spiritual world? You can also read this in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.⁴ What is said there repeatedly is: At least learn to go backward through the course of the day; then other things, People have, of course, only learned to think with their physical body. They notice this and have to make a great effort to think backward, but they have only learned to think with the physical body, not with the etheric body. Now there is an all-out strike by the etheric body; yes, a real "general strike." And if people would not fall asleep so easily, they would know that, if they began to think backward, they would arrive at the spiritual world. But the moment the vision begins, they fall asleep. People fall asleep, because the effort is too great. So one must exert one's entire will and all one's strength not to fall asleep. In addition, one must have patience. Sometimes it takes years, but one must have patience.

[ 42 ] If somebody could tell you what you experienced unconsciously when you went to sleep after thinking backward, you would see that it was something very wise. The most stupid people begin to have extraordinarily wise thoughts in their sleep, but they do not know anything about it.

[ 43 ] So today I have drawn your attention to the fact that one must first learn to think independently. Well, one can do this. I do not want to say—for I am not a conceited fool—that only my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity serves this purpose, but it was quite consciously written in a way that would lead to independent thinking. Independent thinking; thinking backward accurately over things that happened when you were ten or twelve years old, or over other things one has experienced—with these we have at least begun to describe how one tears oneself free from the physical body and how one finds one's way into the spiritual world.

We will pursue this further and eventually deal with all four questions.

• 1. Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), philosopher and jurist, delivered the first lectures in the German language at Leipzig University in 1687.
• 2. Dr. P. Gruner, Professor of Theoretical Physics, gave the Presidential Address, entitled New Guidelines for Physics (1922)," at the eighty-seventh Founder's Day celebration of the University of Bern on the 26 November, 1921.
• 3. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (also called The Philosophy of Freedom). First published in German in 1894 and in English in 1916, this basic work of Rudolf Steiner exists at present in two English editions: Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York, 1986 (translated by William Lindemann) and Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1988 (translated by Rita Stebbing).
• 4. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. First published in book form in German in 1909. English editions appeared in 1909 and 1910. Two versions are currently available in English: Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York, 1983 (translated by Henry B. and Lisa D. Monges); and Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1985 (translations by Max Gysi (1909) and Clifford Bax (1910) revised by D.S. Osmond and C. Davy).

[ 1 ] We will now continue to answer the questions we took up last time. You must be quite clear that the answers to these questions are among the most difficult. I will try to make them as easy as possible. I have already mentioned that, to find a way to spiritual vision, first one must become accustomed to completely independent thinking. Second, one must have the ability to think backward. You must therefore attempt to think backward those things that normally occur in daily life in a 1, 2, 3, sequence. For instance, as I told you last time, when I give a lecture, you should try to think it through backward, from the end to the beginning. These two aspects constitute the absolute first steps.

[ 2 ] In connection with the second question I want to explain something else. As you know, a human being can live only within a specific temperature range. When it becomes very hot in the summer, one sweats but can still tolerate it. However, were it to become progressively hotter, a point would be reached when one would no longer be able to live. Similarly, a human being can tolerate a given degree of cold, and if it gets colder than that, one freezes.

The fact is that one cannot see spiritual beings between the two extremes within which the human body lives: i.e., between the cold at which one freezes and the heat that is still barely tolerable. Within these extremes, where human life is possible, we cannot see spiritual beings. It is not surprising therefore that one cannot perceive spiritual beings when one is in the body.

As I told you last time, when we begin to think backward and approach the point of consciously seeing spiritual beings, we often fall asleep. Unless they have trained themselves to stay awake, most people go to sleep.

One can also perceive spiritual beings at temperatures higher than those normally tolerable. One could see spiritual beings at such higher temperatures, but of course one cannot tolerate them. At lower temperatures likewise one could perceive spiritual beings if one could transform oneself into a snow-being, but of course one would freeze in the process. Thus, what seems so unlikely to people is actually a fact: spiritual beings withdraw themselves from the temperatures that are tolerable to humanity in its physical body.

[ 3 ] A human being cannot tolerate those temperatures in his body, but he can tolerate them in his soul; but of course the soul goes to sleep. The soul does not freeze, the soul does not burn, the soul goes to sleep.

[ 4 ] There are two ways to gain an idea of what it would be like to experience the extreme temperatures outside those one ordinarily lives in. I will give you an example. When one has a fever, one reaches inwardly a temperature that one cannot bear. One does not immediately reach so high a temperature that one dies because the warmth is created from within, one is able to bear it. However, when one's fever enters these higher temperatures one may speak in a way that is not normal on the earth. What people babble in their fever has no relation to what we are used to on earth. Now, the materialist may say: Yes, but there are nevertheless untrue thoughts produced that are cooked up in the heat of fever.

[ 5 ] A person, when he enters into a state of high temperature, first of all feels feverish, then speaks nonsense. The soul cannot speak nonsense. Even when the soul is living in a high fever, it cannot speak nonsense. It seems or appears to speak nonsense at higher bodily temperatures because the body is not in order.

You can verify the truth of this by the following example. Let us think about our experience with those glass spheres one sometimes finds in flower gardens—a sphere that is actually a kind of mirror in which the environment is reflected. If you look at yourself in one of these, you will find yourself with a face that you would rather not have n reality. (He sketched this.) You would hate to have that kind of face. You will not say, however, "Oh no! What kind of a thing did I turn into?" You would not believe that this is really your own face, just because it looks changed in the sphere. Similarly, if your soul talks nonsense when you have a fever, you will not say that your soul is talking nonsense; but rather you will assume that whatever is said by your soul seems nonsensical because it is spoken out of a sick brain—just as your face looks distorted and flattened out because it is reflected by a false mirror. So you must say to yourself: When I have a fever and speak nonsense, it is my soul that is speaking through a sick brain. When I see myself reflected in a glass sphere, it is not that I have another face, but that my face appears distorted. In the same way the speech of one sick with a fever appears distorted because it is spoken out of a sick body and a brain that is not working properly.

Now, we might ask why the brain does not work properly? It is because the whole blood circulation is too fast. You can verify this by feeling your pulse when you have a fever. The blood circulation produces warmth which rises to the head—you feel a fever—and your soul now appears reflected as by a distorted mirror.

[ 6 ] The opposite can also happen, but this will not happen as a result of lying in the snow and letting oneself freeze, because then one would actually die of freezing. This opposite experience can happen, but only as the result of something spiritual.

We come now to a strange subject. Carefully consider the following: Let's assume one begins to concentrate, to think powerfully about the smallest things (it is better to think about the small things that most people wouldn't even want to give time to)—for example, a triangle. Let us say we have a triangle, and we divide it into four equal parts so that we have four equal triangles. (He draws on the blackboard).

You can see that the whole triangle is greater than the four smaller triangles. From this I can make a general statement and say: The whole is greater than the parts. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.) But now let's assume that a well-fed stockbroker comes by and I tell him: Hey, just think, the whole is greater than its parts. He will say, No, that is too boring for me. He would say it again if I continued to speak to him and said: the blackboard is a physical body with a given size and extension, the table is also a body with a given size and extension, and I then constructed the general statement: All bodies have extension—are extended in space. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.)

If a whole conference were given to you, if a lecture was given consisting in the single statement "all bodies have extension," you would walk away, saying, Gosh, that was boring! Let's say I were to come to you and make other obvious remarks like the meadow is green, the rose is red, these things have colors, and yesterday there was a trial in court and the judge passed judgment, the judgment had no color. Then I went to another place and there also was a trial and a judgment, and it had no color either. And therefore I said: judgments have no color. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.)

[ 7 ] Let's assume someone stood in front of you for an hour and told you: judgments have no color. You would think to yourself: I have spent a whole hour listening to someone bore me. This is the ultimate boredom. But why are these statements so boring? I should not be telling them to you humorously; I should be standing before you stiff and severe like a professor, announcing: Gentlemen, today we will consider the statement, "Judgments have no color," and then of course I would have to lecture for a whole hour to prove that judgments have no color; all bodies have extension etc.

I could also give you another instance: draw a line from one point to another; this is a straight line. All others are curved, and when you look at it you would immediately say the straight line is the shortest way; all others are longer. Here again I could write down a general statement: The straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Again, if I were to speak for a whole hour on the subject, you would find it exceedingly boring.

The Whole is Greater Than Its Parts
All Bodies Have Extension
Judgments Have No Color
The Straight Line is The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

[ 8 ] There is a German professor who said that it is quite possible to perceive things of the spiritual world, but that the only things that we can perceive of the spiritual world are what reside in such statements as: the whole is greater than its parts, judgments have no color, bodies are extended, and the straight line is the shortest distance between two points. This, he says, is all one can know of the spiritual world. Of course, most students are extremely bored by his lectures. It is also the case that people today have come to believe that science has to be boring, and therefore many of the students are actually excited by this professor! This, of course, is just an aside.

[ 9 ] The real story is the following. Taken by themselves, sentences such as "the whole is greater than its parts" and "the straight line is the shortest distance between two points" cause the back of our head to become cold. This is what usually happens: the temperature drops and the area at the back of one's head becomes cold. When the temperature drops you begin to freeze and you want to get away from such statements—they are so boring. It is a fact—boredom causes a drop in temperature at the back of the head—not the whole body, but just at the back of the head. What cools it down is not snow or ice but something of a spiritual nature, insofar as there are subjects that hold no interest for the human being.

[ 10 ] It is of course possible to make fun of these sentences, but the fact remains, that patiently to think such thoughts over and over again means to put oneself, again and again, deliberately into a state of dreadful boredom, and this is a good way to reach in the direction of a true spiritual perception. It is remarkable that the very things men do not want in general are the things they must practice if they wish to have a real look into the spiritual world. Mathematics for many is boring; it causes a drop in temperature at the back of the head; and precisely because it is a cold subject for most, and precisely because they have to work at it, those people who do, have the least trouble reaching into the spiritual world. Those who overcome this resistance and experience again and again the truth of these statements are those who can create artificially a state of boredom in themselves. They have the easiest way into the spiritual world.

[ 11 ] I have told you already, when one has a fever one's pulse speeds up. One warms up, and this warmth reaches into one's head and into one's brain, and in this way the warmth causes one to talk nonsense. If, on the other hand, one struggles with such statements as we have mentioned, this causes one's blood to slow down, and there is an accumulation of salts deposited in the back of the brain. Most people react in one of two ways to this. Some get a stomachache and they notice this right away, as soon as they start to think of these statements, and so they stop. One can go on thinking, as for example Nietzsche did. He always tortured himself with such statements when he was a young man, and the salts accumulated in his head, and in his case he suffered dreadful migraines. The objective is to be able to think such thoughts without causing a migraine or a stomachache.

One must find a way to be completely healthy while at the same time artificially producing in oneself a state of boredom. Thus, if someone were to tell you quite honestly how to reach into the spiritual world, he would have to tell you first of all to learn how to create boredom artificially in yourself. Short of this you have no hope of reaching the spiritual world. But look now at our contemporary world. What is it that people want at this time? People today are constantly trying to drive away boredom. Just look at all the things and all the places people run to in order not to be bored. They always want to be amused; but what does that mean, to want to be amused all the time? It means that they really want to run away from the spirit! It has no other meaning; and people today always want to be amused, which makes it clear that wherever anything spiritual might be present people of our time always run away from it immediately. People are not conscious of this, they do it unconsciously, but the fact remains that they want amusement and to run away from the spirit.

Well, gentlemen, only those can reach into the spirit who are not afraid of renouncing amusements and of living in such sentences. When one can manage to live artificially in those sentences without getting a stomachache or a migraine, but can actually tolerate living in such sentences for many hours at a time, then it becomes possible to contemplate the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] An additional change must take place in this act of holding oneself consciously in these sentences. One notices, if one has been living with these sentences for a while, that they start to turn around. If I think about the sentence "the large triangle is greater than its parts" for a long time, if I think about it for a very long time, there comes a point when the sentence somehow turns around. It even starts to become interesting, for I start to have the following perception: If I have a triangle here, and I consider one quarter of that triangle and take it out, it somehow begins to grow with me and it no longer remains true that the whole is greater than the parts. Suddenly that quarter part is larger for me, I see that it has grown, so that I now must say: The whole is smaller than the parts! (The sentence is written on the blackboard.) [ 13 ] By doing this, I have worked myself into a position where I can see how things work in the spiritual world. Things there are the opposite of the way they are in the physical world.

In the physical world, the whole is always greater than its parts. In the spiritual world, the part is greater than the whole. It is impossible to know a human being without knowing that the part is greater than the whole.

Contemporary science always wants to look at the smallest parts, the components of things. If, for example, we study the liver of a person, we find that it is smaller than the person in the physical realm. But if we start looking at it from a spiritual point of view, we find that it grows and grows to gigantic proportions; it actually becomes a whole world in itself. If one cannot see this, then it is impossible to perceive the liver at all in a spiritual way. Therefore you must first honestly arrive at the statement: the whole is smaller than the part, or the part is greater than the whole.

[ 14 ] In the same way, if you think for a long time—long enough—about the statement: All bodies have surfaces, or are extended, then there is a danger that the back of your brain will freeze. If you think upon this sentence in this way, all the bodies shrivel into one; they stop having surfaces—external surfaces—and in the end you arrive at the statement: Bodies do not have surfaces, they are not extended. (The sentence is written on the blackboard.)

[ 15 ] Now I will take a funny example, funny for the physical world, but of the highest seriousness in the spiritual world. It could seem that there is nothing more foolish than to say: in Buxtehude there was a trial, and judgment was passed—it has no color. In Trippstrill, judgment was passed in the course of a trial—and this also had no color. But if you think about judgments for a long time, they in fact acquire color. Just as you can say the rose is red, so you can say the judgment in Buxtehude was a kind of dirty yellow, and the judgment in Trippstrill was red. There can even be some judgments that are a beautiful red, although this is rarely the case.

As you begin to understand this, you begin to grow into the sentence: All judgments made by human beings have color. (The sentence is written on the blackboard) Only now does one reach the point of being at all capable of thinking about the spiritual world, because it has the opposite characteristics of the physical world.

[ 16 ] The straight line is the shortest path between two points. This is true to such an extent that all geometry is built upon it. It is one of the first statements in geometry. It is as true in the physical world as anything ever can be true in the physical world. But if one thinks about it long enough—if some being goes from village A to village B, and that being is not a physical but a spiritual being, the way will seem very short if he walks in a half circle. The sentence then changes to: The straight line is the longest way between two points.(The sentence is written on the blackboard.)

The whole is smaller than its parts
No bodies have extension
Judgments have color
The straight line is the longest distance between two points

[ 17 ] You must admit there is something here that astonishes you, but the world as a whole does not like these kinds of things, and people will say: If someone says that judgments have color, he must have a fever or he is mad! Of course, the whole point is that one reaches these things in full consciousness without the use of one's body. The spiritual world has characteristics that are the opposite of the physical world and one may come to this realization through the simplest statements, for the simplest statements are the hardest to believe.

As you know, if someone starts telling you interesting things about the spiritual world, everybody starts listening; for instance, if someone starts talking about ghosts. But if someone tells you first that you must get used to creating boredom in yourself artificially—it has to be artificially—this doesn't seem so interesting. If you are just naturally bored by external science, nothing comes of it; it has to be done artificially, through an inner effort that enables you to reach the state of boredom without getting a migraine or a stomachache. The body must not participate in that state of boredom. The moment your body is involved, it is clear that you will get a migraine or a stomachache. Don't listen when people tell you, Do not let professor so and so bore you. Such advice will be of no help, it will not make you see into the spiritual world. What you must do is gradually overcome both migraines and stomachaches.

You see, the student is sitting here—the professor bores him to death—he should be getting a migraine or a stomachache, but he doesn't. What happens in this case is that other organs come into play which do not hurt. People, in fact, do get sick when the physical body is involved in the boredom. If you induce the boredom in the way contemporary science does, it only makes people sick.

If one teaches people in the right way, one gives them the ability to produce, through their own powers, in total freedom, the boredom which, when penetrated, will gradually allow entrance to the spiritual world. One must take hold of absolutely basic judgments in the physical world and see how they are turned upside-down in the spiritual world.

There is one extremely good way in which it is possible to work on oneself. For example: let us say you have experienced something very boring, so boring that you walked away from it because it was so boring, so boring that you could not stand it anymore, (you were so happy when it was over!) In such a case it is important that you start very, very slowly thinking it through again. [ 18 ] Let me tell you that I have learned a great deal from this kind of exercise in my life. When I was young, I listened to many dreadfully boring lectures; but before it even started, I would look forward to a boring lecture, because it brought about the kind of result sleep normally does in life. I was very happy. I would tell myself: You are going to listen to a few hours of boring lectures. When the lecture started and the professor started to speak, I often had the feeling: He is talking too much, he is disturbing me in my boredom. But afterward I would think very deeply about every single thing he had said, not that it interested me—it didn't interest me at all—but I relived every single hour. I relived it from the very beginning exactly the way it had been presented. Sometimes I went over it so thoroughly that it would actually take two hours. I would have two hours of artificial boredom. In this process, one can make an extraordinary discovery. This kind of discovery is one that could be made at the end of the nineteenth century. Imagine that you have come out of a lecture by a giant rhinoceros—this can happen!—and that you have been bored to death.

Now you can meditate, as the saying goes, on this boring lecture, bringing everything that was boring back into yourself, into your soul. Then suddenly, behind that giant rhinoceros of a man who was presenting you with all this boring stuff, a higher man, something like a completely spiritual human being, will emerge. The whole lecture hall is thereby transformed for you. I am putting this in a way you can understand rationally. The lecture hall becomes transformed in such a way that behind the professor the spiritual—a truly and deeply intelligent man—appears. I knew many professors of the nineteenth century with whom this was the case; but of course I don't want you to talk about this, because people would think it a terrible thing. [ 19 ] For the truth is that humans are not inwardly as unconscious or as stupid as they pretend to be. Often they are quite smart. The dumbest are often quite smart, and the opposite is also true. But they don't know their own intelligence. It is a very deep secret: behind a person there often stands the true nature of his soul and spirit, which he cannot perceive in himself. [ 20 ] This is already a way of reaching into the spiritual world.

As you know, at the end of the nineteenth century there existed a materialistic natural science, and people today still adore this materialist science. I must admit however, that this science was tremendously useful to me. What it did, from start to finish, was bring up the most boring statements. It is as if the modern scientist licks his fingers with enjoyment when he thinks he has discovered that all humans descended from apes. But if one thinks about this statement again and again, with complete energy, it changes! It changes into another statement that is spiritually correct. That is to say, humans do not descend from apes but from a spiritual being.

[ 21 ] There are different points of view here. A child was once sent to school. There he heard for the first time from his teacher that humanity is descended from apes—too early as it turned out. When he returned home, he said to his father, "Hey, I heard today that humanity is descended from apes. Just think of that!" "Well," said his father indignantly, "You're certainly a stupid fellow. That may be the case for you, if you like, but not for me!" You see, for the father—he took it with reference to the soul—the story was quite unbelievable.

[ 22 ] From all that I have told you you will see that one can find one's way into natural scientific thinking in two ways. If you have not studied natural science, as many did in the nineteenth century and indeed still do, instead of simply parroting the conclusions, you can think about them—but think about them in a meditative way. Think them over for hours and hours, and you will find that what is true in the spiritual world comes forward. If you think for a long time about plants and minerals, and you have thought all the things about them that people tell you these days in such a dreadfully materialistic way, then you finally come to the meaning of things like the meaning of the zodiac, the meaning of the stars, all the secrets of the stars.

The surest way to this goal is to start with those simple statements that are taken for granted, and proceed forward from there. The part is greater than the whole, bodies have no extension, judgments have color, the straight line is the longest path between two points. In saying these kinds of sentences you tear yourself away from your physical body. When you have experienced all this, you come to the point where you can use your etheric body instead of your physical body. You can then start thinking with your etheric body—your etheric body thinks everything upside-down, or in the reverse of the way it appears in the physical world. It is the etheric body that gradually brings one into the spiritual world. At precisely this point, however, very often one gets stuck: one must still accustom oneself to one thing more.

You may know that one can read very strange things these days. I was in a small southern Austrian town (which is no longer in Austria) and I found an evening paper. It had a so-called editorial; it was a very interesting story, in all detail—every particular—a political story. There were three columns—it was all very interesting. Then at the end—still on the same page, there was a small disclaimer that said: We are sorry to notify our readers that everything in today's editorial article is based on false information and therefore not a word of it is true! This is the kind of thing that can happen to you today. This of course is rather an extreme case, but whenever you read newspapers it can happen that on every single page there is something that is not true at all. At some later point what one is now reading will be exposed as untrue. My feeling is that most people have become dreadfully insensitive in such matters, and they take in, quite evenhandedly, both truth and lies. The mind has become blunted in this way, so that truth and lies are both taken in the same way. This makes it impossible to reach into the spiritual world.

[ 23 ] I told you last time that when someone becomes crazy, only his body is sick; the soul is not sick, it remains healthy. I told you that when someone hallucinates in a fever, it is only his thoughts that become caricatures—for the soul itself is intact. One must get used to these things, if one wants to penetrate the spiritual world. One must get used to feeling pain in one's soul when something is not right, and to finding that something that is correct gives one a spiritual joy. One must rejoice about the truth the way one would if one were to receive a million dollars. One must be happy when one is told some truth. The opposite case is that when something is discovered to be a lie, a suffering is felt in the soul—not in the body—suffering as if one had a dreadful illness. The suffering need not be so severe that the soul has to become sick, but it must be possible for the soul to experience pain and joy just as, when the body is disturbed in a physical way, one feels pain and joy. This means that one must come to the point where one feels the truth in the same way that one experiences happiness, cheerfulness, and general pleasure in the physical world. One must eventually come to the point where one suffers such pain in the face of untruth that one's soul becomes sick—as one can be in a bodily way. If someone heaps lies upon you, you must be able to say inwardly: Damn it, this person has just sold me deadly nightshade. This must be true in an inner way. Now of course, if you look at the current world—for instance, at the newspapers—one eats that deadly nightshade all the time. You must constantly nourish yourself spiritually, for the soul has to remain healthy. You must continually be spitting out what is bad, spiritually, if your spirit is to remain healthy. One has to get used to this fact, because one cannot be without newspapers. Once you come to the spiritual world, you will have to be used to the bad taste of newspapers; and to feeling joy when you read something exceptionally good—the same kind of joy, in my opinion, that you would have when you eat something that tastes very good.

Truth, and the striving for truth, must taste good to you; and lies, once you are conscious of them, must taste bitter and poisonous. You must not only know that judgments have color, but also that printer's ink nowadays is mostly wild cherry juice. You must be able to experience this in all honesty and rectitude, and once you can do so you will be in a state of spiritual transformation. [ 24 ] People read these days about alchemy, and believe it in an external way. They believe that they can change copper to gold, and there are charlatans who will tell you all kinds of superstitious variations of this. Of course, in the spiritual world these things are possible; but one must believe in the truth of the spirit. One must be able to tell oneself that the printer's ink used is the same everywhere, materially, whether it has printed a true book or a lying newspaper. In the second case, the printer's ink is really the wild cherry juice, and in the other it is like liquid gold. Things that in the physical world are exactly the same are quite different in the spirit. [ 25 ] Of course, if intelligent people today hear the statement "printer's ink can be liquid gold or wild cherry juice" they will tell you that you are only speaking 'metaphorically'. It is only a metaphor! But the metaphorical must become spiritual reality and one needs to understand how metaphors become spiritual.

[ 26 ] I will give you an example—it actually comes out of the history of the Social Democratic party. You probably did not experience this as much in this country. At one point the party split; on one side were those led by Bernstein—happily making all kinds of compromises with the middle class—and on the other side, led by Bebel, were the radicals.⁵ I am sure you have heard about Bebel in books. At one point in Dresden there was a party convention, and Bebel got angry about the others and said he was going to put some order into social democracy. He gave a big angry speech. In the course of it he said: Well, if this or that happens on the other side, it feels like a louse running across my liver. Now everybody would say this is only meant metaphorically. Of course there is no such thing as a louse on his liver! But then one can ask: Why use such an expression? Why is it possible to speak in terms that suggest a louse walked on your liver? For the most part it is extremely unpleasant when people have lice, it is extremely unpleasant; it is actually a distressing feeling.

[ 27 ] Not everyone is as lucky as a certain sorry fellow who was always picking lice from his head. Someone asked him once, "How is it that you are so skillful and always manage to find a louse?" He answered, "Its easy. If I miss the one I'm aiming for, I get the one beside it." It does not happen to all of us to aim for a louse and miss and still get one!

Generally, when people have lice, it's terribly unpleasant—a horrible feeling. I remember a case when I was a tutor and one of the boys entrusted to me came home after being out. He had been sitting on all kinds of benches in a big city and he started to have dreadful pains in his eyes. Everyone was wondering which specialist to take him to for his terrible pains but I said, "Why don't we first try a lice-killing cream on his eyebrows?" Indeed, it was then noticed that he was full of lice, and once the cream went to work, his eyes stopped tearing. Now, you should have seen how upset people—the mother and the aunt—looked when they suddenly discovered that he had lice. Their feelings were so intense that they had repercussions in their livers; they had pains in their bellies. They said, "My God, our child has lice, what a terrible thing!" When this happened, the sensation was really as though they had lice running across their livers.

In the case of the Social Democratic party, it was not a matter of people getting lice, but rather of some people doing things that seemed so awful, so repugnant to the others, that the sensation was the same—the same as would have been experienced in earlier times, or would still be experienced in some classes of society, at the thought of having lice on one's liver. So you can see, in the way the expression was formed, it did correspond to a reality. Latterly, however, these expressions have been used in a way that only refers to spiritual matters or matters of the soul. But again, one has consciously, deliberately, to make those connections. One must really be able to experience, not just the sound of the phrase, but the actual sensation that it came from.

[ 28 ] Let us say I have a newspaper in front of me: most of the things that are printed in it must be felt by me as if the printer's ink was a somewhat toxic deadly nightshade juice. I wonder what people would do if they truly experienced that these days? Think for a moment how much deadly nightshade juice is used when, for instance, people talk about war guilt—Germany's war guilt in the first World War, or Germany's innocence in the war—and the fact that people, just by reason of belonging to this or that nation, feel comfortable when they claim innocence, using all manner of untruthful statements. They feel good doing this, but not because what they say is actually true.

So, how in today's world can one reach the spirit? One must, first of all, make a firm decision, a very intense commitment, to be very different from these contemporaries—and yet get along with them. For of course it is not going to be very helpful to just stand on a stage and insult people. One way or another, one has to find an avenue for truth. This is extremely difficult, as I have shown you today. [ 29 ] Today I had to present difficult things so that you would see that it is not easy to enter the spiritual world. You will see that it is good to work with difficult things. Later on we will come to things that are easier, less strenuous. Next time, I will show you the whole way into the spiritual world.

• 5. Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), socialist theoretician, writer, and politician, who rejected revolution and established revisionism as a moderate, evolutionary path for socialism in the 1890's.
  
  August Bebel (1840–1913), co-founder of the Social Democratic Labor Party with William Liebknecht in 1869, writer, politician.

[ 1 ] In the last lecture I told you that contemporary humanity cannot know anything because our thinking nowadays does not lead to real knowledge. In earlier times, say a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, whoever wanted to learn anything had to undergo special training in thinking. People did not believe that they could understand anything of the spiritual world with their ordinary, everyday thinking, and therefore there existed a kind of schooling of thinking. Today, on the other hand, none of the education we receive enables us to educate our thinking in any real way.

[ 1 ] This means that we are quite unable to think. I will give you an example that you probably saw in the newspaper a few days ago.⁶ There was an article on a very common dream, a recurrent dream of flying. We can all remember dreams of flying, floating, or falling. Such dreams often occur soon after we go to bed. But you know all this. In this article a writer, versed only in today's natural scientific thinking, attempts to explain this kind of dream. You will see that this kind of thinking leads nowhere in such matters. He says: "This dream of flying, according to Dr. Richard Traugott, is actually induced or triggered by a contraction of the body." What is the writer saying here, what does he believe? He thinks that at the time of going to sleep the body contracts or twitches. But, I ask you, has it not happened to you that you have had this same experience when you are awake? And when does it happen to you? As far as my own experience goes, this kind of sudden jolt or start happens when you are afraid. It is when you experience something startling or frightening that you experience that kind of bodily jerking or contracting. The same thing can happen if, let's say, you go out onto the street and you see a man whom you believed to be in America. At the moment you notice him, your body is jolted—because you are surprised. Now you could not imagine that starting with what has just been described you would feel yourself flying! The problem is that people can invent all kinds of ideas, but those ideas do not particularly fit the observation. The thoughts seem to fit as long as one makes experiments in the laboratory with lifeless matter; but the minute one tries to explain something real, they don't fit anymore.

[ 1 ] Let us continue with this writer. He says: "The cause of this contraction resides in the difference of muscle tension in sleeping and in waking. In the waking state there is a constant flow of energy from the central nervous system to the muscles." He assumes that in the waking state there are constant electric currents moving between the muscles and the nerves. "These energy currents create the muscle tension necessary for the maintenance of the bodily balance that the harmonious interplay of the musculature requires. In sleep this muscle tension largely disappears. During the period of going to sleep the reflexivity of the spinal cord actually increases, and thus the relaxation of the muscle tension, or rather the stimulus that this process exerts on the spinal cord, easily leads to this twitching reflex." So presumably, in the nervous system of the spinal cord there is a stimulus that is continuous and that increases the muscle tension. The writer goes on: "Other sensations that exist in our organs, particularly the rising and falling movements of the chest musculature and the rib cage, may even more directly influence the development of this feeling of flying, floating in the air, or swimming." In other words, muscle tension increases, contracting the body to such an extent that finally, when we are asleep, we experience a condition like that of flying or swimming.

[ 1 ] Now, after all this, just think back in your own experience to when you were breathless (panting) and your chest was tight. Did it ever occur to you that you were having a swimming sensation—not to mention the sensation of flying? On the contrary, in such moments you feel particularly heavy. The article goes on to say other things. For instance, attention is called to the amount of pressure and resistance we feel, when awake, on our bodies where they rest on something. Then, supposedly, when we fall asleep, we become aware of the lack of pressure and resistance. But really, gentlemen, this doesn't make sense. After all, when we are awake and walk, we actually are supported only on a very small surface! We feel that we are walking on the soles of our feet. Of course, when we sit down, we are resting on a larger surface than the soles of our feet. But even if you were to add the surface area of both these places where the body contacts the outside world, this still does not compare to the surface we need when we are asleep. So, as you can see, this kind of thinking really leads one to talk nonsense. This kind of thinking is what passes for science today. Our same scientist tells us that the electric currents in the nerves are stronger when we are asleep; they stimulate the muscles, and they cause the sensation of flying—so that one believes one is flying. Or he tells us that the support disappears when we sleep! One can hardly believe what he goes on to say, for he speaks of: "the disappearance of the perception of pressure and resistance, that in the waking state is present in all the parts of the body that need a support . ." It is not to be believed that he could fail to take into account that there is a much larger surface being used in sleep. But he doesn't care about this, because contemporary thinking never really reaches any real explanations or clarifies what really happens when we go to sleep.

[ 1 ] Let me now clarify what really happens when we go to sleep. From this you will see how one can really achieve insight into the higher, spiritual world. First I will show you this in an image. Remember that this is only an image! Let's assume you have here someone's physical body. (He draws it on the blackboard, left) Within it, there is an etheric, supersensible body—I will draw it in yellow. This fills out the physical body and is invisible. When we are asleep, these two bodies remain behind in the bed. When we are awake, the astral body is also within those two bodies—I will draw the astral body in red here. Within the astral body there is the ego, the fourth member—I will show it in violet. This, then, is the human being when awake: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego—inserted one within the other.

[ 1 ] Let us now look at our sleeper: when he is in bed, he has only a physical body and an etheric body (drawing, center). Outside these are his astral body and ego (drawing, right). What lies in the bed therefore may be compared to a plant, for the plant also has a physical body and an etheric body. If a plant had no etheric body it would be a stone, and it would not be alive and could not grow. So what is lying in bed is like a plant—the plant does not think, and what lies in bed does not think in the sense of conscious thought. But it is also true that thoughts are in there somewhere, as I have already explained to you; and sometimes these thoughts are even more clever than those we use when we are conscious. However, there are no daytime thoughts such as we are used to, and in this respect what lies in bed is like a plant.

[ 1 ] But when we describe what lives outside that which lies in bed, this feels no boundaries. You can start to have an explanation of this, if you notice that when you leave the boundaries of your body, your consciousness disappears. When you are in your physical body, your astral body has to be as big as it is; but when you leave it, then your astral body suddenly grows—it grows to gigantic dimensions, because the physical body no longer contains it and makes it small. At the moment you go to sleep, at the moment you move out of your physical body, you feel as if you were growing larger and larger.

[ 1 ] Now, let's say you drink a glass of something. I guess I'd better not talk about a glass of alcohol, or else the word would be spread that I speak in favor of alcohol. As you know this is a rather unpleasant issue in Switzerland these days. So let us say you drink a glass of water with a little raspberry juice. If you put some raspberry juice in a glass of water, you can taste the raspberry juice easily. If, however, instead of a glass, you take a small bucket containing the equivalent of five bottles of water, and if you put only the same amount of raspberry juice in it as you put earlier in your glass, the raspberry juice is diluted—spread out over a much larger amount of water. You have much less of the raspberry taste. When I was a little boy, I grew up in the vicinity of a winery. There were big cellars with barrels of 400 buckets of wine. If we had filled one of these with water instead of wine and had added a little raspberry juice and stirred it, you could have drunk the water without at all realizing there was raspberry juice present. This is clear, I am sure. Now, gentlemen, as long as the astral body is as small as the physical body it is like the raspberry juice in the glass of water; your astral body expands only to the limit of your physical body. But when you leave the physical body in sleep, it no longer contains the astral. The astral body spreads out, just as the raspberry juice spreads out in the 400 buckets of water. Therefore in your astral body you have no consciousness. Consciousness is created through the fact that the astral body is concentrated or contracted.

[ 1 ] Here you have a true explanation for what actually happens when you go to sleep. As long as we are awake, our astral body is in our fingers and our toes, in all our muscles. When we feel the astral body in our muscles, we have the feeling of being dependent on our physical body. The physical body is heavy. We feel the heaviness of the physical body. In the moment we leave the physical body, we leave behind its heaviness. In this brief moment before consciousness has completely disappeared in sleep, we no longer feel the heaviness. We do not feel that we are falling, for in fact we are rising; we feel, rather, that we are floating into the air. This sense of not being bound to a physical body, this sense of enlargement, is what we experience as flying or swimming. We can feel ourselves moving freely until consciousness disappears and we go to sleep completely. In contrast to what has just been described, all the natural scientist can say is: our muscles twitch. And, as you well know, when our muscles twitch we feel them more than we usually do, and when that happens, it does not make us feel that we are flying—on the contrary, that is when we feel most narrowly tied to the physical. Another example is that when someone is surprised—Wow!—his mouth gapes open. This is because he is then so much connected with his muscles that he can no longer control them. The experiences of one's muscles twitching in surprise, or loosing control when "wowed," are the opposite of those prevailing when we go to sleep. When we go to sleep, we leave behind our muscles; therefore there cannot be a contraction of the muscles. When we lie down and rest on a larger surface of our bodies, there is rather a relaxation of the muscles. We do not need to hold our muscles together by means of our astral body. They relax, they do not become tenser. Because we no longer need to exert an influence on them, we believe that we are free of our muscles, and because of this we fly away with our lighter astral body.

[ 1 ] Now consider for a moment what I told you last time about learning to think in a way opposite to our everyday thinking. Here you can see how today's ordinary thinking, when trying to explain the human being, results in the opposite of the truth. Therefore the first thing you must do is to think correctly—which really means being able to think the opposite of what holds true in the physical world.

[ 1 ] People have lost the habit of thinking correctly. They can no longer think in such a way that they can reach the spiritual world through thinking.

[ 1 ] There are many people today who speak our language, and this language contains the word "spirit," so they use it. The problem is that they no longer have any real picture of what the word "spirit" means. They can make mental pictures only of physical things. But if we want to think of the spiritual, we come to something without physical characteristics, and therefore to something that you cannot perceive in the physical world. But thinking nowadays is so tainted that people actually wish to see the spiritual world in a physical way. As a result of this, they become what we call spiritists. They say to themselves: If a physical body can move a table, the fact that I can do this means I exist. Then they continue: If a spirit exists, it must also be able to move a table. And this is how the practice of "table-tapping" originated. People rely on table-tapping for signals from the spiritual world. This is because their thinking has become twisted or warped. Their thinking is materialistic in nature. It says: I must have the spiritual, but I must have it in a physical guise. Spiritism is the most materialistic concept of all, and it is very important to understand that.

[ 1 ] Now perhaps someone will say: But I have been present where people sat around a table and linked hands in a chain, and the table started to move and hop around, and all kinds of things of that sort. The external facts are true. It is quite possible to sit around a table, to make a chain of hands, and at some point the table will be set in motion. But this is the case when any small motion in some way starts a larger motion. If we have a railroad train with a locomotive and an engineer, the driver does not get out of his engine and go to the back of the train and start pushing it when he wants to start moving. In fact, he would not be able to do that. He would never be able to set a train into fast motion in this way. As you well know, the engineer makes a very small motion, and the train soon starts to move very fast and pull many cars. Why? Because the connections are established in the right way so as to result in the train moving. In this way, physically, a very small motion starts a larger motion.

[ 1 ] This is the case in the purely physical process of people creating a chain of hands around a table. They then start to twitch very slightly and, lo, and behold! from these small motions a larger motion results. This motion is transferred through the material plane. But this is really a very ordinary physical event.

[ 1 ] Now, if there is one person among those present at the table-tapping who has any thoughts in his subconscious, then these thoughts are translated into the twitching of the finger tips, causing a response, which forms letters which we can then read. However, what we read as an answer in such cases was always present somewhere in the subconscious of one of the people there. This is true, no matter how clever the answers seem to be. I have explained to you that when a person enters into the subconscious, he is entering something much more profound than his ordinary consciousness. This is can be seen in the practice of table-tapping. Nevertheless, the fact of people turning to spiritism is proof of the strength of materialism in our time.

[ 1 ] Ordinary thinking does not bring us to any true explanation of what a human being is. That was obvious from the newspaper article I mentioned here today wherein there was an attempt simply to explain a flying dream. The author of the article explains it in exactly the opposite way to which it should be explained. People no longer seem able to study things of real interest. I have often talked to you about dreams. Let me now repeat a few important facts.

[ 1 ] Let's say someone dreams he is in Basel in some town square. Suddenly—in dreams everything is possible—he finds himself standing in front of a fence.

[ 1 ] The fence has pickets: here one, there another; and here one is missing and there is a gap; and then another picket, and another gap. Now he dreams that he wants to jump over the fence, and he impales himself on one of the pickets, and this hurts—hurts so much that he wakes up and notices that he has not been impaled, but rather that he has a terrible toothache. He has a toothache and it wakes him up. He has a missing tooth in his upper jaw and he also has another missing tooth and this is what he saw in his dream picture as missing pickets in a fence. There was an exact correspondence to his upper jaw and its missing teeth. He then touches one of his teeth and he finds out which one hurts him. There is a cavity, and it hurts. One can certainly have such a dream.

[ 1 ] What is really happening here? This whole episode was actually played out in the dreamer's waking life. You can really say: So long as I was asleep, I was happy; I did not feel my awful toothache. Why not? It is because the astral body was outside the physical body, and the etheric body does not feel the toothache. You can hit a stone as much as you want, and even break little pieces off it, but the stone as such does not feel it. You can tear a plant and the plant will not feel it, because it does not have an astral body—it has only an etheric body. You would soon stop picking roses and other flowers in the meadows, if the plants were to hiss like snakes because it hurt them. However, it does not hurt the plant, and a human being, when asleep, is like a plant. As long as we are asleep, the tooth does not hurt. But when the astral body slips back into the physical body, as soon as this happens, we 'inhabit' our teeth. Then, you see, the astral body is in the teeth. Only when we are completely in our body do we feel what hurts our body. When we are not quite within our body, what hurts appears to us as an external object.

[ 1 ] Say, for instance, I burn a match: when looked at from without I will see it burning white. But if I had somehow lived within that match with my conscious astral body, I would not have only seen it externally. I would have felt it as a pain! In the case of the teeth, until I am fully in my body, when I first slip in, I feel them as if they were external objects, and I therefore make an external picture of them for myself that in some way resembles some aspect of them. Since I cannot make quite the right picture, which I could do only through spiritual science, I make a picture of a row of pickets instead of a row of teeth. Where there are gaps in my row of teeth, I have gaps in the row of pickets. As you can see, as a result of the confused picture that arises as a consequence of not quite being fully in the body, there is an error. Because when we are asleep we are outside our bodies, the inner is interpreted as the outer. I have been able to study what happens in such cases when observing little children as I taught them. They have no feeling as yet for the correct use of speech and I have often experienced that a child who has just started to write "Zahn," the word for tooth, will instead write "Zaun," the German word for fence. Such a child has to be told that this is false, wrong. Somehow the child was scared entering his body—not leaving it, but entering it. This does not cause a flying dream but a fearful dream, a nightmare. The child has a nightmare and somehow expresses this in the form of the fence dream. There is a connection between the child's misuse of words and the images of the dream. The images of the dream come into existence through words. There are always verbal connections. These help us to see more clearly what is really happening.

[ 1 ] The man I referred to before—Richard Traugott—has written a great deal about dreams, most of it is as absurd as what he wrote about the flying dream.⁷ When he speaks, equipped with ordinary science, he says exactly the opposite of what is actually the case. He does not understand that because the astral body grows larger when leaving the physical body it perceives itself as flying, and that when it is forced to shrink on reentering it pictures itself as someone (or something) who is squeezed somehow. The muscles tighten, causing an anxiety dream. The anxiety dream occurs precisely when the man who wrote the article would claim that there should be a flying dream. It is also possible to have anxiety dreams when the process of going to sleep does not proceed properly. Let's say, for example, that you are lying down and you have the sensation that you are being strangled by someone. This can happen if you are in the process of going to sleep and somewhere there is a disturbance, so that you cannot go to sleep, but you keep trying to do so anyway. You pass in and out of sleep, and returning into your body correctly is not quite possible because you are still tired. This can be felt as a strangling sensation, because the astral body is being forced in some way, and cannot quite enter correctly. Knowing this kind of thing, you can explain all these matters much better.

[ 1 ] This brings us to the fact that one more thing is necessary if we really want to know the spiritual world. One must be absolutely clear about the fact that the physical body is not involved here. One must be able to live in the astral body alone, in a way that does not involve the physical body at all. If one wants to know the spiritual world, one must induce a sleeplike condition in oneself. In ordinary life this occurs only when one slips out of one's physical body, which is viewed externally as the condition of sleep. But as I mentioned in my example of the raspberry juice in the large casks of water, in sleep the astral body (or juice) normally becomes gigantic and this must not be allowed to happen. The astral body must be held together through an inner effort of another body. Do not think now about the astral body and the human ego, just think again about the image of the drops of raspberry juice. Create a vivid image of a glass of water with only one drop of raspberry juice in it. The raspberry juice expands in the water to the limit of the glass, but it is still perceptible. But if you assume a container a hundred thousand times larger, then you would not be able to perceive anything of the juice, and this is comparable to our normal inner experience in sleep. Now, imagine for a moment that this drop of raspberry juice takes on an impish character. I put this impish drop in a cask with four hundred buckets of water; it has a real temper and says to itself: I am not going to let myself get mixed up in all this water, I am going to remain myself. Were this to happen, you would then have a huge casket with one drop of raspberry juice in it; and if you reached this drop with the tip of your tongue, if you went through all that water to the exact spot where the raspberry juice held itself together, then you would actually taste the sweetness of that single drop.

[ 1 ] I must stress here that I am speaking only metaphorically about the raspberry juice with its impish character. The opponents of Anthroposophy can be quite funny at times. There was once an article in a Hamburg newspaper in which Anthroposophy was insulted from all possible sides; and there, it is true, I was actually seen as an imp or devil, and in that case indeed it was meant very seriously, as if I myself were not just an imp but the devil's own helper—as if I were the very devil come into the world. To return therefore to the image I gave you: the drop of raspberry juice is only a devil's imp insofar as it can keep itself quite small when it is put into the water.

[ 1 ] In the case of the astral body, it is possible for it to stay as small when it leaves the physical body as it is when it is within the physical body; but it can develop the forces necessary to do this only by learning to think sharp, well-honed thoughts. I told you we must develop independent thinking. This independent thinking is much stronger than the weak thinking possessed by most people.

[ 1 ] The first requirement for knowledge of the spiritual world is very sharp and well-honed thinking. The second requirement is the ability to think backward. The outer physical world proceeds forward, therefore one needs to learn to think in reverse. This strengthens one's thinking. One must learn that truth which I told you about last time: the part is greater than the whole. This once again is something that contradicts what the physical world seems to indicate; but if one can do this one can put oneself into the spiritual world. All these things I have mentioned cause the astral body to remain small in spite of the fact it is not contained in the physical body—so that it does not simply flow out into the common astral ocean.

[ 1 ] All these requirements fit together, but you must be careful that all these things are taken with the same sobriety and the same scientific attitude with which the physical world is ordinarily examined. The moment we slip into fantasy, we are finished with the scientific. Our clear and definite approach must never be allowed to turn into fantasy.

[ 1 ] Let's take the case when one has a pain in one's big toe. You feel this pain through your astral body. If we had only a physical body, we would not feel the pain; and likewise if we had only an etheric body, we would not feel the pain. If this were not true, the plant would squeal when it was plucked! But we squeal when we have a pain in our big toe—of course, we don't actually squeal, but you know what I mean. We all feel like making a noise when we experience a pain of this kind. Why is this?

[ 1 ] Our astral body is spread throughout our whole physical body, and when our astral body reaches the spot where something in our big toe is out of order, this is brought up to the brain by the astral body, and we have a mental picture of our pain. But let's assume someone has a sick brain that does not allow him to register the pain in his big toe in that certain spot in the brain where it is normally felt. One needs a healthy place in one's brain to be able to register the pain in one's big toe. Assuming this spot in the brain is sick, and remembering what I have told you—that neither the soul nor the astral body can become sick—the pain in your big toe cannot be registered. What happens under these conditions? The specific place in the individual's physical brain is sick, but this still leaves the etheric aspect of the brain. The etheric aspect of the brain that remains is not properly supported by the physical part, and we may therefore ask: What will the etheric body do in such a case? The etheric body makes a great deal of this toe; not only does it notice it, it makes a mountain of it. The pain to the etheric body will appear to us as little beings, little mountain-climbing beings sitting in this mountain. So here we have the big toe transferred into a spatial picture, into a large space—just because the brain is sick. If this were to happen to you, you would swear that there was a mountain in front of you. In actuality this mountain is only your big toe, and it is clear that this is a delusion. It is very important to protect oneself from such sick delusions when one penetrates into the spiritual world, or else one can slip into total fantasy. How can we avoid these delusions? This has to be done through real schooling. We must learn what can result when the physical body becomes sick in any way, so that we will not be confused when merely physical manifestations appear to be real spiritual occurrences! For this reason we must learn truly active thinking, thinking backwards, thinking such as I described last time—a thinking very different from our ordinary thinking in the physical world. In this way one will be protected against delusion, and one will recognize the physical origin of what we have just described. In earlier times people were prepared so to penetrate safely into the spiritual world. There was a real method or art of preparation, which was called dialectic. This meant that people really had to learn to think. Nowadays, if one were to suggest to people that they must first learn to think, they would pull our hair out—for everyone is convinced that they already know how to think. But if one looks back to earlier times, it is actually true that there was a real schooling of thinking, or a dialectic. One had to be able to think both forward and backward, and one had to be able to form concepts in the right way.

[ 1 ] How, we might ask, did this training take place? It took place through the activity of speaking, and at the same time as one spoke, one learned to think. I have just given you an example of this, when I talked of children first learning to speak and then learning to think. But of course such thinking is at first entirely childlike. Nowadays this childlike thinking is preserved by people throughout life, although it is worthless in later life. If one were to continue to learn thinking through speaking this way, then one would have to ensure that with each in-breath and each out-breath the air moved correctly in and out for correct speaking is connected with correct breathing. For speaking to be rightly connected to the breathing process the air must come in and go out in the proper manner.

[ 1 ] Much depends on one's being prepared for correct speaking, because correct speaking prepares one for correct breathing. Whoever knows how to breathe correctly can also speak for a long time without becoming tired. Through the art of dialectic, one once learned how to speak and breathe correctly, and therefore how to think properly. These days, however, people are no longer able to think properly, for their breath keeps bumping into the organ of their breathing at every moment. Just listen to some academics when they speak. First of all, they do not speak very much in general; they usually read, and they use their eyes very much for support. But if you listen to an academic speaking, for the most part it is as if the person were short of breath. It is as if he were constantly bumping into his own body.

[ 1 ] For this reason everything that is said becomes a picture of the physical body. Whether one has a sick spot in one's brain, and consequently makes a mountain, with mountain spirits, out of a painful big toe; or whether one keeps bumping into oneself with one's breath whenever one thinks, with the result that true thinking cannot emerge—it is all the same. Because your breath is constantly bumping into your physical body, you will perceive the whole world as a physical phenomenon. Now, what really is the source of this materialism? Materialism comes from two facts: people do not know how to think correctly, and they do not breathe out correctly. It seems to them as if the whole world were made up of pressure and thrust—which they have in themselves—because they have not been prepared through right thinking. Therefore we can say: A person is a materialist because he cannot get out of himself; inwardly, he keeps bumping into himself.

[ 1 ] Let us return for a moment to Mr. Traugott. What he should really say is that the flying dream is caused by the fact that we go out of ourselves, and the astral body starts to grow larger. However, he does not conclude this. He thinks, indeed he thinks a great deal. And what happens if someone wants to think, and think some more, when in fact he is unable to think? What really happens? First of all, you will see him frown, and if this doesn't help he will hit his forehead and thus tighten his muscles, and then he tightens them some more, and he may even hit himself again so that his muscles are really tight. What is Mr. Traugott really doing when he is thinking about dreams. Instead of looking at things as they really are, he tightens his own muscles, and what he finds is what he himself is doing—muscle tension. I've got it he says: the dream is caused by muscle tension! He confuses his own attempt at thinking about dreams with reality. We can all learn something from Mr. Traugott. We can learn what is happening to him when he thinks about things, and when you yourself read the story. What happens today when we read what people print is that we learn what they themselves imagine is true. Whenever we read the newspapers today, we have to say we really learn very little about what is really happening in the world, but we do learn what the people who sit in the editorial rooms would like to be happening in the world.

[ 1 ] The same is true of today's materialistic science. Through it you will not learn what the world is; rather, you will learn what materialist professors think about the world. If you penetrate this a little, you will see that Anthroposophy has no intention of deceiving the world, but in fact it wants to put honesty in the place of deception and illusion, and in place of what is often untrue, very often consciously so.

[ 1 ] You may see from this discussion that honesty, inner honesty, is the fourth quality that must be present if we are to be able to reach into the spiritual world. If you contemplate the world in this way, you will see there is very little honesty operating in the world, and it is no surprise that not much of it can be seen in science.

[ 1 ] We have therefore seen four required qualities: independent thinking, thinking not linked to the outer world, thinking whose quality is completely different from the physical world, and thinking honestly. We will look at other characteristics next time.

• 6. The report appeared in the Basler Nachrichten, July 5, 1923.
• 7. For example: The Dream, Psychologically and Cultural-Historically Viewed, Würzburg, 1913.

There are many questions still pending from those asked recently, but I will tie in some of these with the recent subject of dreams. We shall start with a question that seems to have broken many scholars' heads, and that is the question of the lizard's tail.

As you know, if we see one of these large lizards and grab it by the tail, the tail breaks. In fact, it is very difficult to catch such lizards because, when the tail breaks, the lizard runs away quite happily without its tail. The tail seems brittle and scientists attempt to establish whether the tail is really torn away or if it is somehow left behind by the animal. Contemporary science proceeds in a materialistic way and therefore tends to assume that the animal simply has weak muscles in that part of its tail and that these muscles just cannot hold together under the strain of being caught.

But there is a little-noticed fact that is undervalued, which is that when the lizard is caught and kept in captivity for a long time it loses the ability to let go of its tail. It is as if the tail becomes stronger and therefore increasingly difficult to pull off. The peculiar thing is that when the lizard is in the wild he loosens his tail easily, and when he is in captivity he holds onto it. What is really going on here?

You see, people direct their thoughts toward the musculature around the tail, instead of looking at all the facts, facts that would very easily give the answer to why the lizard in captivity does not lose its tail. The missing evidence is that the animal in the wild is scared when one tries to catch it, because it is very unusual for it to be caught and may actually be the first time this has happened to it. The first time a man comes into its vicinity the lizard is scared and becomes so brittle that it lets go of its tail. Once the lizard becomes used to the proximity of people—when people are constantly near it—the lizard loses its fear and likewise stops losing its tail.

Even a superficial observation of all the facts in this situation leads us to conclude that fear plays a very important role in the case of the lizard. But we must examine this fear more carefully and say: The fear that this lizard has when people come near it to catch it—this somehow comes out of the animal when it is caught, though normally it remains inside. It is this fear that holds the matter in the tail together and makes it strong!

Let me introduce here a remarkable phenomenon of human life. As you know, when people who are very dependent on their soul life become scared they get diarrhea. The fear causes diarrhea. How can we understand the meaning of this? This means that whatever is normally held in their intestines is no longer held together as it was. What was it that held things together in the intestines? When fear rises up in the soul it stops holding things together in the intestines, but when fear remains in the intestines it holds things together.

The same thing is true of the lizard. If one looks at a lizard, it is like one's own lower body: it is completely filled throughout with the soul quality of fear.

It is especially true of the tail that it is completely filled with fear; and when this fear is pressed out or expressed, the tail breaks. The fear, however, normally remains within the animal. The animal does not feel the fear while in captivity because it is used to people, and because of this the fear can remain in the tail and hold it together. Here we see a very important quality of soul that has a certain significance for the bodily constitution.

Human beings also contain fear. We have fear in our big toe, in our legs, in our belly—there is fear everywhere. This is not everywhere the case however. Fear does not normally rise above the diaphragm—it does so only when we have nightmares. Nevertheless, fear does have a role to play: it holds our organism together. It is in our bones that fear lives most strongly. The bones are strong and hard because a terrible fear lives in them. It is fear that holds the bones together. When we feel our bones too much, our bones get soft. Those children who were fearful at the time when their bones were not yet completely hardened, develop weak bones—a condition called rickets. It is possible to cure children with rickets by reducing their fear through some soul work. But it would be quite false to say that this fear in us is something of the soul: that we need only approach the fear in a somewhat higher manner in order to have an experience of a higher kind of knowledge. To enter this subject in the wrong way would not be good, for we would make ourselves sick in body and soul at the same time. We must do something entirely different.

In order to gain knowledge of the spiritual world—I have already given you various other means—we must learn to live correctly in the outer world. How do people really live in the outer world these days? As we said recently, we freeze terribly, and often we sweat a lot, and this is how most people normally experience living in the world. First they sweat, then they freeze. This is not the only way one can live into the outer world, however. Rather one should try to cultivate a certain capacity, so that when it is cold one isn't just cold but rather one becomes aware of a kind of qualitative experience that goes with it, namely that of fear. When one is aware of fear, one easily notices that with the return of warmth fear disappears. When a person cultivates a certain awareness of fear connected with the coming of snow; when the warm rays of the sun bring a certain pleasant comforting feeling—that person is in fact living into the outer world in a way that leads to higher knowledge. This belongs with the other requirements I have tried to describe to you. It is really true that whoever wants to gain higher knowledge must feel something when he comes close to a glowing piece of iron, and he must feel something different when he approaches a piece of flint. When he approaches the glowing iron, the feeling should arise: here is something that is related to my own warmth and is good. But when he picks up a piece of flint he should feel a sense of strangeness and a somewhat fearful mood. (You can see immediately that whoever wants to gain higher knowledge cannot be nervous, as we say these days, or else he would drop the piece of flint the minute he takes it into his hand, because he is afraid of it!) One must be brave and conquer the fear. At the same time we cannot be like a moth that takes so much pleasure in the light that it flies right into it, to its death

The example of the insect flying into the flame gives you a good idea of the relationship of a flame to the spiritual world. We really must acquire a sensitivity to the inner feeling for whatever is at hand out there in nature. What will this produce? Let us examine things as they are now. Materialists assert above all that the earth has a crust of hard stone—they believe in this hard rock of the earth because they can walk on it and when they touch it, it is hard. Materialists believe in this hard rock, but whoever wants to gain higher knowledge should experience a certain fearfulness of this same hard rock. This fear is totally absent when a man finds himself in the warm air. I will draw the warmed air above the hard rock. (He draws on the blackboard.)

When one considers the warm air, fear is totally absent. (To show the warmth of the air I will color it red.) Yet it is possible to enter a condition such that even the warm air would make one afraid. This is the case when one attempts to get closer and closer to the feeling that one gets from the warm air. In a person who feels more and more comfortable living in the quality of the warm air, the warmth too will eventually cause fear. It seems strange, but the better one feels, the more fearful one becomes! When one gets used to feeling completely at ease in warmed air, when one becomes more and more used to the warmth and is fully at ease inside all of nature, then one can find spiritual knowledge. At this point something quite remarkable happens—I will try to make it clearer for you. Most people try to keep cool, to cool off when they get warm—all they know is that it is very pleasant to get cooled off. But if, instead of this, one were to remain warm, if one were to soak up the good feeling of the warmth—then whatever it is that I have drawn here schematically (yellow) would start to fill itself with all kinds of images (upper light) and the spiritual world would literally arise: the spiritual world which is contained in the air, which one does not normally feel and is not conscious of, because in most cases one cannot tolerate the warmth in the air. When one becomes accustomed to seeing those beings in the air, one gradually reaches the point where one can tell oneself: when I take a stone in my hand, it is very hard; but when I become more and more aware of the spiritual, when I am able to penetrate into the spiritual, when there is more and more activity around me—not just the sensory world but also the spiritual world—I can do something more. I cannot slip into the hard ground with my physical body of flesh and blood, but with my astral body I can actually slip into the earth (lower red). This is very interesting—at the moment that one starts to perceive the spiritual world in the realm of the air, at that moment one slips so far out of one's body that stones are no longer perceived as obstacles—and one can actually dive into the hard earth the way a swimmer dives into water. What is interesting is that we cannot penetrate into the air as spirits, for there are already other spirits there, but in the earth, which is empty of spirit, it is very easy to gain entrance—one can dive under as a swimmer does.

In between the solid and the gaseous elements we have the watery element (blue). This rises and falls as rain. Up above, as I am sure you have seen, there are sometimes formations of lightning (upper red). The water is between the hard earth and the air; it is thinner than earth and denser than air. What is the meaning here? This is something that is easiest to understand if we consider lightning.

According to the scientists, lightning is an electric spark. Let us examine why, according to them, it is an electric spark. You probably know all this but I will repeat it. If we take a sealing-wax rod and we rub it with a leather strap, it becomes electric; and if we have little pieces of paper, they are attracted by the rod; and so it is possible to electrify all kinds of objects by rubbing them. This is often shown to children in school. But there is also the specific need for something else. If you do this experiment in a very humid room, you will not be able to electrify a rod or anything else. First you have to dry everything thoroughly with a dry cloth; then, and only then, can you produce some electricity, for water does not produce electricity.

Now, according to the scientists there are clouds up above that rub against each other and somehow produce electric sparks. Even the child can tell you that in order to produce electricity you must remove all water, for if there is anything wet in the apparatus you will not be able to produce any electricity—even a child can tell you this. This is the kind of nonsense we are being told: it is clearly impossible to produce lightning by clouds rubbing against one another.

Think for a moment whither the water evaporates—it rises and reaches higher and higher into the region of the spiritual; it moves away from matter empty of spirits here-below and rises into the spiritual world above. It is actually spirit that produces what looks like our electric spark. For, as we rise, we move higher and higher into the regions of the spiritual. Matter is present only in proximity to the earth. Higher up, it is surrounded by the spirit. Therefore, at the moment when the water vapor rises and reaches the region of the spiritual, the flash is produced. The water First becomes more spiritualized and then it falls down again, "densified".

If one observes nature correctly, one is forced to come to spiritual subjects; but if one absolutely refuses to take the spiritual into consideration, one is then left with no alternative but to make all kinds of absurd statements like the ones you heard about the flying dreams or the lizard's tail or the cause of lightning. Everywhere we can look, it is clear that it is impossible to explain nature if one does not bring in the spiritual.

We will now try to proceed further. When one stands on the earth, starting from the feet and moving up, one is always related to the lower spiritual beings, and one can dive in like a swimmer. When we move out of our physical body with our astral body, we can actually penetrate into our solid surroundings and find ourselves within solid matter. (We cannot however do this with the surrounding air.) We can actually wander around, but this wandering around in the solid element has very important aspects. When we conduct ourselves correctly in relation to warmth then we come to the point of seeing spiritual beings in the air. But when we go out of our body at night and unite ourselves with the earthly in a spiritual form, then it can happen, when we awake, that we can still sense something around us of what we experienced when we were in the hard matter of the earth. Something remains in the soul.

Some of you may have noticed on awakening that it is easy to hear very soft sounds; and if, as you wake, you are really attentive you may have an experience similar to hearing someone knocking at the door. It is quite remarkable that when we live into the air with our soul there arise images, and when we live into the solid earth—into matter—with our soul, as a swimmer does who dives into water, then we experience tones.

It is very important to know that all hard matter continuously produces sounds that of course we cannot hear if we are not inside of it. All solid matter continuously contains tones and we can hear them on waking up only because we are still half in our surroundings. These sounds can have a very special meaning in certain cases. It is completely true, for example, that it sometimes happens, when a person dies at some distance, that someone else may hear on waking what sounds like a knocking at the door. This knocking sound is related to the dead.

Now of course it is very difficult for one to understand these things properly. But just think: You would all be unable to read, that is, to make sense of signs or letters on paper, if you had not first learned to read. In the same way one cannot immediately understand the wonders at work when one hears tones on waking up. You do not of course have to believe that there is actually a dead person standing at the door knocking with his fingers. But the dead do reside on earth in the first days after death, and they do live in the solid material of the earth. The fact that tones arise in connection with solid bodies does not necessarily have to seem very remarkable. It was quite widely known in the past when people paid attention to such things. People can have a premonition when someone at a distance dies. This means that someone has died and is still bound in his soul to the solid earth. Tones arise out of the dead when they abandon the earthly realm. It is just as easy to hear the sounds that are made at a distance as it is to read a telegraph message from someone who has transmitted from America. These kinds of long distance effects transmitted through matter are present on earth and are always there, and in days when people paid attention to these things the connection of the spiritual with the earthly was well known. This is not some fairy tale it is actually something that was perceived in earlier times.

As you can see, we are now entering an area that is described nowadays as superstition. But it is actually possible to explain these things scientifically, just as other scientific things are explained only you must know how to do this accurately.

One could come to the point of perceiving the spiritual world in the air: that is, if men were not so "poor me" as they so often are today. (The more civilized men become, the more depressed and plaintive they become in a certain way.) Those whose daily work forces them to live in great heat have no time during work hours to perceive the spiritual world and so they lose the opportunity to perceive the spiritual world contained in the air. The fact that one can see spiritual beings in the air is not in itself a dangerous thing; everybody could perceive those beings without further delay and without it in any way being dangerous.

However, in the case of hearing, if that seizes a person too strongly, and one enters a condition where one hears all kinds of things—that is a danger. The reason is that there are people who can come gradually to the point where they hear all kinds of things—they hear all kinds of things told to them. Such people are on the road to madness. There is a simple reason why there is never a danger in seeing the spiritual beings that are in the air. I will make it clear by using a comparison. If you were in a boat and you fell into the water you could drown but then, if someone pulled you up, you could have all kinds of experiences, except that of drowning: you would not actually drown. In the same way, if the human soul goes out and up it can see all kinds of things; however if it sinks into solid matter, it does in a way drown spiritually. This spiritual drowning happens when people lose their own consciousness in that they give it up to all kinds of things that are told to them inwardly. It is not a very serious danger when a man sees the spiritual outwardly. This is the same as walking around in the world, and just as a man is not afraid of a chair that is in front of him, so gradually he stops being afraid of spiritual beings and actually enjoys what he sees. But when things are heard inwardly, then we sink into the solid earth with our whole spiritual life, with our whole soul life, and it is possible to drown in that—one stops being truly human. Therefore one must always look with some caution and wakefulness at those people who say that all kinds of things have been told to them inwardly. That is always dangerous. Only the human being who is firmly rooted in the spiritual world and knows his way about can understand what is really being said, which amounts to this: it can never be higher beings speaking in a case like this it can only be spiritual beings of a lower nature.

I have told you these things in great detail so that you can see that as human beings we must come to a completely different conception of the outer world if we want to penetrate into the spiritual world. Of course there are people who can say: Why have the spirits made it so difficult for us to get to know them? But gentlemen, just think what kind of being a human would be if one didn't really have to make an effort to penetrate to the spiritual world—if one was always within it. One would be a purely spiritual automaton. A human being only comes to a proper relationship to the spiritual world, to the degree that he or she has really worked at it. It does indeed take the hardest inner effort in order to research and explore the spiritual world. It is not difficult to take one's ease at a laboratory bench and to make all kinds of experiments. It is quite easy to cut up corpses and thereby learn all manner of things but it takes inner work to really penetrate into the spiritual world, and for this kind of work the contemporary, educated world is too lazy. Because of this laziness people say: I have made these exercises on how to reach knowledge of the higher worlds—but I didn't see anything. The problem is that such people believe that these things have to be given to them outwardly, not that they have to work and conquer them inwardly. This indeed is in keeping with what people nowadays want—they want everything to be ready-made for them. As I have mentioned to you already, human beings these days want to put everything on film. They want to make a film of everything so that they can look at everything from the outside.

If we want to make progress—real progress, spiritually—we must make sure that no matter what we take up from the world, we will work it through. Therefore, in the future, those people will penetrate most deeply into the spiritual world who will as much as possible avoid having everything on film for their comfort. Rather they should choose to think everything through for themselves, to think along, so that when people tell them things about the world they will be participants in the thinking. As you can see, I have not shown you a film! Even if we had time for it, I would not attempt to present things to you with a film. I have done a few drawings, but these were done at the time and you could see them being made, so you could see what I was trying to do with every stroke and were able to think along with me.

This is also what needs to be introduced in the education of children. As few finished drawings or pictures as possible should be given, and as many as possible that are done in an impromptu manner, because in this way the child works inwardly with the teacher. In this way people become awakened to an inwardness that leads to a deeper living into the spiritual and thus enhances their understanding of the spiritual. Also one should not give children finished theories this makes them dogmatic. What really matters in all cases is that they are brought into autonomous activity this in turn will make the whole body freer.

I want to mention one other subject which arises from the questions I received from you. Many of you have read that potatoes were introduced into Europe at a particular time in history, for the people of Europe were not always potato-eaters. In fact a rather interesting story is related to this. There is an encyclopedia, in which I myself collaborated—but not in the article in question, for in this there is something comical, namely: According to the article, it is universally said that Drake introduced the potato into Europe. There is in Offenburg, which is now occupied by the French, a Drake monument. I looked it up in a conversational dictionary,⁸ and there it stood: The monument was erected to Drake in Offenburg, for it is rumored (wrongly) that he brought potatoes to Europe. One can say if anything is even attributed to a person, people in Europe will build a monument to him. But this is not what I wanted to talk about rather, that at a particular time potatoes were introduced.

Let us now take a closer look at potatoes. When we eat potatoes we are not really eating a root the roots are the little things dangling off the potatoes, and these are removed along with the peel when one cleans them. The potato itself is actually a thickened stem. An ordinary plant grows and it has a root and then a stem—and if the stem becomes thicker, as is the case with the potato, there arises a kind of knot or tuber, which is really a thickened stem. You should remember this when you are eating a potato—you are eating a thickened stem. We should ask, what does it mean for us that with the introduction of the potato into Europe we learned to like the taste of thickened stems?

If you look at a whole plant, it is made up of root, stem, leaves, and flower. (This is drawn.) A plant is something quite remarkable. The roots down there become very similar to the soil insofar as they contain many salts; and the flower up here is very similar to the warm air, so that it is as if through the heat of the sun the flower were continuously cooked. As a result the flower contains many oils and fats. In other words, when we look at the plant we find roots at the bottom, and the root is rich in salts, whereas the flower is rich in oils. Therefore when we eat roots we introduce many salts into our intestines these salts in turn make their way to the brain and stimulate it. If for instance someone suffers not from migraine headaches but from ordinary headaches—the type that seem to fill your head—it is very good for that person to eat roots. One can see how a certain salty sharpness is present in those roots, and this can already be established by the taste. If you eat a flower, the plant is in fact already half-cooked; the oils are already on the outside and this is what primarily fattens the stomach and the intestines and, in turn, affects the lower body. These are the kinds of things doctors have to take into account when they prescribe teas. There will never be a very strong influence on the head if someone cooks flowers in the tea on the other hand, if you cook the roots, they will have a strong effect on the sick person's head.

So you can see that when considering the human being we pass from the stomach to the head or from the bottom to the top. With plants, we must do the opposite. To find the correspondence, we must proceed from the flower to the root. Remember—this may enlighten you as to the meaning of potatoes—that the root is connected with the head. The potato has a tuber, which is something that is not entirely turned into a root. Thus when you eat potatoes you are eating, by preference, plants that have not quite become roots. If one limits one's self to the eating of potatoes—too many potatoes—it is not possible to pay a proper amount of attention to the brain, so that all these potatoes stay down below in the digestive tract.

This is why we say that potato-eaters neglect their heads or brains. You will only perceive this connection if you are an adept of spiritual science. But one can say that ever since the habit of eating potatoes has become firmly established, the head has become less capable, and it is the tongue and throat that have been particularly stimulated. This is why the potato is particularly appreciated as a side dish for people, because it stimulates the body below the head, leaving the head itself unburdened.

If, on the other hand, we eat red beets, we develop a great craving for the activity of thinking. This happens unconsciously. Potatoes only make one crave the next meal. Potatoes make one hungry because they don't quite reach the head. In contrast to this, the red beet satisfies so quickly because it actually reaches all the way to the head, and that is the most important thing. Of course it is very unpleasant for people to disturb their ease with thinking. Therefore they will very often eat potatoes more readily than red beets just for this reason: that to do so does not stimulate their thinking. They become lazy and their thinking becomes lazy. The red beet on the other hand stimulates thinking—it is a true root—insofar as it actually makes one want to think, and anyone who does not want to think does not like red beets. If you need to have your thinking stimulated, the salty stimulation of radishes, for instance, might be necessary. Anyone who is not quick in the head will get good results eating radishes—because the addition of radishes to his meals will set his thoughts into movement.

So we can now see a remarkable thing: the radishes stimulate thinking, and it is not necessary to be really active oneself thoughts come naturally as a result of eating radishes thoughts so strong that they also stimulate very powerful dreams. On the other hand, one who eats a lot of potatoes will not have strong thoughts, and his dreams will make him heavier. If you habitually eat potatoes, you will find yourself constantly tired and always wanting to sleep and dream. You can see that there is enormous cultural and historical meaning in what foods people actually have access to.

One could say from what I have shown you: The way things really are we live completely in matter, from matter, and yet this is not true. I have often told you that human beings have a totally new body every seven years it is constantly being renewed. Whatever matter was in our body eight to ten years ago is nowhere to be found now: it has been expelled. We have cut it away in the form of our nails and with our hair it has run out of us with our sweat—it all goes out. Some of it goes out more quickly and some more slowly, but eventually it all passes out. So what is the true story? Well, this is more or less the way it goes. I will start by giving you a schematic drawing. Let us say this is the human being, who is constantly producing tissue, and expelling it, and always absorbing new matter and of course it is easy to think: Well, it comes in through the mouth and it goes out in feces and urine. In this way the human body is seen as a kind of tube. The matter enters while we are eating, and then is expelled after we have held onto it for awhile: this is more or less the way digestion is presently thought of. But in the real human being nothing at all of earthly matter naturally goes in—this is an illusion. What really happens is the following: Let's say we eat potatoes. This does not mean that we actually absorb anything from the potatoes. Something in the potatoes stimulates us, it stimulates our throat, it stimulates our larynx etc.—everywhere the potatoes go to work, and the result of this is that we receive the strength to expel the potatoes again. In this process of expulsion, something from the earth comes into us, but it comes from the ether, not from solid matter, and it is this that builds us up in the course of the seven years. We are really not built up from earthly matter. When we eat, we do so in order that we may be stimulated. In reality we are built from what is above us, so that all the ideas and conceptions people have of food coming in and food going out again, with the side effect of leaving some material inside, do not at all fit the situation. To repeat: what is really happening is that a stimulation occurs and in response to this stimulation a counter-force enters from the ether, and our whole body is built up from the ether. Nothing that we have in us is built from earthly matter. It is like this: when we push at something and there is a counter-push and a kind of reflexive push coming back to us, we must not confuse the pushing with the reflex action. We must not be confused by the fact we need food. The actual purpose of food is that we do not become lazy in the reconstitution of our bodies. We must not confuse this stimulating activity with the fact we happen to be taking in material food.

Now of course there can be all kinds of irregularities that enter the normal situation—such as, if we eat too much, the food stays in us too long, and we accumulate matter that should not be there—fat. And if we take in too little, then we are not stimulated enough and we absorb too little of what we need from the spiritual world, from the etheric world, which is so necessary for we do not build ourselves from the earth and its matter but rather we actually build ourselves up from what is outside the earth.

If it is the case that within around seven years the body is renewed, the heart is also renewed. The heart that I carried in me eight years ago is not there anymore. It has been completely renewed by what surrounds the earth—by light. Your heart is actually compressed sunlight, and what we have taken in as nourishment has only given us the necessary strength to concentrate the sunlight. All our organs are built from our light-surroundings. All that we eat, that we take in by way of nutrition, affords only stimulation.

The only thing that food does give us is that it builds a kind of inner chair, in which we feel ourselves, as we would feel the pressure against us of a chair. In ordinary life, as a result of this resistance we have the feeling of our self, our ego, and this is related to the physical material we have in us. You feel your body as you are constantly pressing upon what you have made out of the cosmos. When you sleep, you do not feel it, because you are constantly outside yourself. You feel your body, for it is like a kind of resting bed that is made for you. In some cases it can be hard and bony and in others it can be softer, but it is really like a bed in which one goes to sleep. Of course you know the difference between a soft feather bed and a wooden bench—we feel a difference as a result of which one we have. However, we also feel in the one condition as in the other that this does not concern the real, essential human being. The real human being is what sits inside of it all. I will explain to you next time how all this is related to higher knowledge.

When people nowadays want to reach knowledge, they do not deal directly with human activity rather, they concern themselves with whatever it is that their 'chair' offers them.

• 8. Pierers Konversation-Lexicon, Seventh Edition, in twelve volumes, Berlin and Stuttgart, 1888-1893.

Good morning, gentlemen! Since not all of you are here today, I will perhaps speak in such a way that those who are not here will not miss much. Perhaps you have something to ask?

One questioner (Mr. Burle) wants information about reincarnation. There are many more people on earth today than there used to be!

Another question: He had often noticed that people like to turn, whether it's in dance or something else. Even when a dog is running, it always returns to the same place. Even if you get lost in the forest or in the fog, you will come back to the same place.

Dr. Steiner: That is actually a very interesting question!

First of all, the question that was asked regarding incarnations. If we take into account anthroposophical spiritual science, we come to the conclusion that every person who lives now has a whole number of earthly lives behind them and still has many ahead of them, so that the human soul always returns. We must not imagine that what is meant by this has anything to do with what was often believed in ancient times: that human beings have passed through animal bodies and the like. Our opponents ascribe this to us. There can be no question of that. But two objections can be made against the idea of human beings recurring again and again. Mr. Burle has the first.

The usual view is that the population of the earth is constantly increasing, that we therefore have considerably more people in Europe today than, let us say, for example, about a hundred and fifty years ago. Isn't that what you mean? So if all those who are here today, with a large population, were to be traced back to their previous lives on earth, far too many would come out? So one would have to say: There were far fewer people living in the past, and there are far more people living today. So how can it be that people from the past are appearing in present-day bodies? That is the question. This question is asked very often. There would be too many people today for us to be able to say that they had all been here before.

Well, there are a number of things to be considered. First of all, the statistics that are compiled are only ever based on certain areas where the population is increasing extremely rapidly, and this gives the impression that if the population of the Earth had been constantly increasing, as if, say, three or four thousand years ago there had been only a few people on the Earth and today there were an enormous number of people on the Earth. You calculate back that far. For example, they say that in Europe the population has approximately doubled in the last one hundred and fifty years. Now you calculate further back and say that two to three thousand years ago there must have been terribly few people on the earth.

But, gentlemen, this is also in complete contradiction to the facts that we otherwise know. I am merely drawing your attention to the following. You see, if we go back before the time of Christ's birth, say perhaps two thousand years, the largest pyramids were built in the Nile region of Africa, in Egypt; the entire Nile has been regulated. And when you think about the crowds of people that were needed to build these huge structures, for example, just the sphinxes, which are huge in size, to produce them in such large numbers as they were produced, you get the view: it is quite wrong to think that there was a small population in Egypt at that time, but there must have been a dense population in Egypt, much denser than the population is today in Saxony or in Belgium, for example. So the idea that you go back in the development of the earth and encounter fewer and fewer people is quite decidedly contradicted by the facts of history.

Furthermore, if we go much further into Asia, we find huge canal systems laid out. If we have Europe here (it is drawn) – I have already drawn it for you – we have Africa there. The Nile and Egypt would have been there, and over here we have Asia. It is an enormous continent that continues on. And here we have this teeming population that built the pyramids and so on. Over there we have the old Chaldean country in Asia. You know that in the Bible it says of Abraham that he came from Ur in Chaldea. This Chaldean country existed at that time. And in this country, in ancient times, huge canal systems were built, the remains of which can still be seen today. These, in turn, required huge masses of people. So you have to imagine that, simply proven by the facts, several thousand and even a thousand years before the birth of Christ, huge masses of people were present in Africa and Asia.

Furthermore, you must bear in mind that when the Europeans came to America, they settled there. But America was not empty of population in those days. That old Indian population, of which I have told you, which was so copper-colored, has died out completely. If you look at the remains, some of which are buried, you can see that there was a huge population with which the Europeans did not come into contact.

So this is simply not true, that there were far fewer people on Earth in the past. Just think, we don't even have accurate data on the current population, only for a certain area. What do European statisticians know today about the Chinese population today and a thousand years ago! All that travelers tell us about this indicates that the population does not always decrease as one goes back, as is usually assumed, but that there have been times when the earth was extremely heavily populated. There have certainly been times when certain areas in particular have been less populated, but we will soon see that this does not matter. So that in general, even in the face of what can be known through the external science, the objection that there are too many people today as reincarnations from earlier times can be completely dismissed.

But there is something else to be considered. You see, if you look at people today, you come to the conclusion that one of them, let us say, has gone through a thousand years between death and the present birth, the other perhaps only five hundred years, the other perhaps fifteen hundred years in the spiritual world before coming down again. So that the people who live today were by no means all there at the same time, but at different times. When there was once a smaller population on earth, then the souls just waited upstairs until there was more population again.

So what can be said about incarnation and reincarnation, about re-incarnation, is absolutely in line with the facts. I have often said – and this is an objection that has been raised time and again over the many years in which I have been lecturing – that this is just a mathematical calculation. Let us assume that in the year 800 A.D. there was a person somewhere; now in the year 1000 A.D. there would have been another person (it is drawn). Now we have 1923. Now it may well be that the one from then meets the one who is there, because the one from then undergoes a shorter journey. Now in 1923 there are already two, and in 800 and 1000 A.D. there is always one at these different times. So they do not all have to be there at the same time and come back at the same time. So that also applies to those times when the earth is less populated, that there are fewer souls coming down to earth.

If you think about it, you realize that it wasn't just that there were two people here once, then four, then six and so on, but the further back you go in the population of the earth, the more you realize that it happens in a very rhythmic way. There are times when there are many people on earth and times when there are fewer people on earth. And we never come back to a single couple, as the Bible says. It is not meant that way. It cannot be said that there was once a couple, as it is written there. So you would have to say that if you only assume that there were once two people, there would always have to be only two, and in the meantime none at all. But that is not the case. Real science contradicts what fantastic science believes today.

But now something else. You see, one must be clear about the fact that a certain time must pass before man comes back down to earth. And then you can ask: Yes, when does he come down? - Then, if you really research this matter to the end, you will find out: One who has occupied himself a great deal with the spiritual world here on earth grows more easily into the spiritual world after death. Because he has occupied himself a lot with the spiritual world, he then needs a relatively long time between death and a new birth. You may be surprised that I say long. He can spend a long time in the spiritual world because he has already learned a lot from the spiritual world. People who have occupied themselves a great deal with the spiritual world can develop better there, remain there longer and come back later. On the other hand, someone who is only concerned with the material world comes back relatively soon. And so things also shift.

This is one objection. Then there is another objection, quite different. I have already pointed it out to you. It is this: why are the former incarnations not remembered? - Yes, you see, gentlemen, it is like this: if someone says that man can calculate, then there is no doubt about it – man can calculate. Now someone says: but I will prove to you that man cannot calculate. Well, how do you do that? Then he brings a small child who cannot do arithmetic. But he says, 'That is also a human being.'

It is the same with earlier lives on earth. Man can gradually learn this, and he will learn to remember his earlier lives on earth as he continues to develop further and further on earth. This is precisely something that spiritual science says that man is not yet ready to remember in the present, what he experienced in a previous life. But what we can say in spiritual science is completely in line with that. You see, gentlemen, you are awake from morning till evening. You experience everything around you. And when you remember, you only remember what you have experienced while awake. Just think how quickly you forget even your dreams, which, as I have already told you, do not mean anything special! So the human being remembers what he has experienced here while awake. But there is something else that he does not remember here on earth. That is what he experiences in a state of sleep. And in fact we experience a great deal more in a state of sleep than we do when we are awake, only with our present consciousness man cannot yet grasp the experiences of sleep. Once the ability to do so has been acquired – which can indeed be acquired by man – then we know that an enormous amount is experienced in sleep. But in general man does not yet know this. Now the human being dies, and what he experienced while awake disappears after two or three days. It seems as if all the thoughts that one experiences while awake simply go away after two, three, four days. And then all the things that one has experienced in sleep emerge. As I have already mentioned, these take up a third of one's entire life on earth. That is, what a person experiences inwardly, he does not know even here on earth. He will know it when he becomes more and more engrossed in spiritual science.

Therefore, we need not be surprised that in the present life on earth we are still unconscious of things that happened in earlier lives on earth. I also told you the other day what a difference it makes if I put a shirt button down without being aware of it – then I can walk around looking for it in the morning, always looking – and if I explicitly remember: You put this button here –; then I won't walk around looking for it, but will go straight for it. It just depends on whether you think of something.

In ancient times, people knew that they repeatedly live on earth, but through the millennia they did not think of it at all as something spiritual. Therefore, they cannot remember it in the present life on earth. But there comes a time when they will remember, just as there comes a time when a four-year-old child will be able to count.

Now comes the other question: Man has such an urge to go around in circles. That is quite a correct observation. I must draw your attention to the following. We learn, as we have emphasized before, that as a child we actually only stand and walk, we learn as a child to move upright and so on. Now just imagine you are lying in bed asleep, and you wake up with a dream. Not only can you dream of turning over, of course that is the first thing, but you can even dream of flying! And dreams in which a person flies, initially in a spiritual sense of course, are not that uncommon. The fact that a person flies in their dreams usually comes from the fact that they wake up. When they are awake, they are accustomed to either feeling the ground under the soles of their feet or feeling the seat of a chair under them, to have something under them on which they are sitting upright, in short, to always feel something under them when they are awake. When a person is lying down, it is very rare for him to bump into the bed with the soles of his feet, because the soles of his feet are free. So he wakes up in a situation he is not used to. He thinks he is in the air and flying. That is his first belief.

But now you have to consider the following. When we first learn to walk and stand in life as children, that is, to be upright, then the ability to straighten up is not innate in us; we are just learning it. On the other hand, we now ask ourselves: where does this ability to straighten up come from? What are we doing when we walk upright? — You just have to think very carefully about what you are doing. Imagine there is the surface of the earth (drawing $. 24). If you let go a stone here, it will fly to the earth. Why? We say because the earth attracts it. Whether that is exactly true, that the earth attracts it as if on a thread or not, would have to be properly understood first. We could also talk about that some time. But in any case, there is a force there that pulls it down, otherwise it would not fall. And wherever the stone is, it falls vertically to the ground.

We too must learn to place ourselves in this line. We must learn to place ourselves in the vertical line when we are human beings on earth. So we fit ourselves into this vertical line. Our whole physical body would make no sense at all if we did not fit ourselves into the vertical position. Because look at the animals that do not walk in a vertical position, but walk on all fours: Yes, their toes are designed quite differently from our fingers! So, if our physical body is to make sense, we have to fit into the vertical position; that is absolutely necessary.

But what the physical body needs, does the etheric body also need? You know, I told you: we not only have this physical body, which we see with our eyes when we look at a person, which we can touch with our hands, but we also have a fine etheric body. Yes, this etheric body does not need to adapt in this way. It retains different habits. What habits? Well, gentlemen, you know that the earth is round and that day and night alternate. How do day and night change? The sun is here (it is drawn) and when the sun's rays fall on the earth, it is day on this side. It would always be day if the earth did not turn. When this half, which is red here, comes over here, it is night on this half and day on the other half - it then comes over here.

So day and night arise because the earth is turning. Now just imagine: the etheric body of a person, this fine body that a person also has, does not get used to the vertical position as a child, but always wants to participate in the rotation of the earth. This etheric body always wants to move around the earth; it always wants to be like this, it always wants to make this movement. If the ether body did not want to make this movement, then you, if you were walking straight in the direction of the earth because the earth was making this movement, would constantly want to turn around because you would always be in pain from the impact you would receive. There must be something in you that always participates in the movement of the earth, otherwise you would always be in pain.

From this you can also see how thoughtless present-day science is. It knows very well that the earth rotates, not only that movement that the physical body makes when it has adapted to this vertical position. But now you have no body that participates in this movement! That is the story.

Now imagine that you are fainting. When you faint, something leaves your physical body and etheric body, the I and the astral body, that is, the actual spiritual-soul. And you feel that the etheric body wants to turn. At first you turn spiritually, just as in the morning when you dream, when you feel that the ground is not under you. So when you faint, you turn spiritually at first. When a person feels dizzy, for example, only the soul wants to turn. But imagine that you now walk along without thinking. Yes, when you walk along without thinking, you mechanically move your physical body. You do not think about walking at all, and especially when it is foggy in the forest, you cannot think about walking; you do not know where to go, where to turn, where to go. When you walk with your physical body, you are heading towards a certain point. Sometimes you don't even know it, but the path itself guides you to a certain point. But when it's foggy, you can't see anything; your physical body doesn't know its way around. Then your etheric body comes; it just wants to make its movement, and that is a circular movement. So it follows the circular movement, and pulls the physical body with it! When you are merely dreaming or dizzy, the astral body makes the movement. But when you are on the move, the ether body draws the physical movement into the physical body, and you take part in it. From this, however, you can see that the ether body is not at all earthbound. The ether body in man does not take part in what is on earth.

Now just imagine: as such, a human being is an earthly creature between birth and death. There he has to work. But you know, it does not always go with the work. The physical body would wear out and so on. Now the human being wants to move his physical body, but he does not want to move it in the way that the physical body has adapted to the earth; he wants to move it according to the ether body. But the ether body wants to make circular movements, and so the human being dances. And ordinary dancing consists precisely in man following not his physical body but his ether body. The desire to dance exists precisely so that man can forget his physical body and feel that he belongs to the world.

However, according to his inner feeling, a person would want to belong to the world far too much and follow his etheric body. Actually, most of the time a person does not want to move the way the earth wants him to, but rather wants to follow his ether body. And he would quite like to move in circles, as the ether body wants to move. Therefore, a person must get used to movements that belong to the earth. And we have included these usual movements in education: gymnastics. Why do we do gymnastics? Gymnastics consists of adapting to the earth even more than one is otherwise able to adapt to the earth. By detaching oneself from one's etheric body, one does gymnastics. But one must also, in order not to become completely estranged from the great world, the outer world, do such movements that do not bind one to the earth.

Now, you see, we live in an age of materialism. Those people who long for materialism the most live in the West. The Orientals, those who have had an old culture, the Asians, they have no great longing to belong to the earth. They consider the earth to be a veritable vale of tears, much more so than the Christian, and those who live in the Orient, in Asia, want to get out of there as quickly as possible.

But Westerners are very fond of the earth, very fond of it. They don't say that out loud, but they would actually like to stay on earth forever. That's why they would like the following. And now I have to tell you something: the etheric body wants to move in accordance with heaven. The planets move in circles, so the earth moves in circles. The etheric body wants to move in a circle, the physical body wants to get out of this circle. If it has a lot of work to do, it will get out of this circle; but suppose the higher classes in the West, who have nothing to do, how do they feel about it? They feel a bit strange, they feel uncomfortable because the etheric body is constantly pestering them. When such a beefsteak-eating person goes through the world, the etheric body is constantly pestering him, constantly tormenting him, and he wants to make circular movements. And this beefsteak-eating person then wants to follow these circular movements of the etheric body. Gosh, that's so uncomfortable! The etheric body wants to dance all the time, make round, beautifully round movements, and the beefsteak eater can't keep up. Now he wants to get his physical body used to not letting itself be dragged into the round by the etheric body all the time. Now he does sports; not just gymnastics, but sports. And the result of this sport is that the person comes out of his ether body completely, following only the physical movements on earth. In this way, the person becomes more and more friendly with the earth and turns away from the spiritual world.

You must not think that one loses touch with the spiritual world merely by not thinking about it, but also through such things as doing too much sport, when one thus completely diverts the physical body from the etheric body. This is terrible for man, and it is even something that is, I would say, a very worrying thing. The more sport is done, the more people forget the spiritual and come back again from the spiritual world immediately after their death, in a very short time. So that therefore, when everything in the West would not receive something spiritual, the Earth would gradually be inhabited only by people who no longer want to go back to the spiritual world. But then there would gradually be only people on earth who would gradually destroy the earth completely. We are already beginning to see a little of this. This little is already quite strong for people of the present time. But when people no longer pay attention to their etheric body, but only to their physical body, that is something that will cause terrible conditions on earth. And here again spiritual science must intervene. This can only be done by opposing those movements which are entirely directed towards driving people into their physical body, making them entirely earthly, and opposing them with other movements.

Now people are already so minded that the most important thing for them is to become earthlings. You will understand, even now, after I have given you so many lectures, that without being a Philistine, the heart aches in such matters.

You see, I was also in England last summer. Just as we were leaving, the whole of England was in a state of agitation, waiting for the evening papers to report on the most important event. Everyone was eagerly awaiting the evening papers. What were they waiting for? The result of the football match!

We have just come down from Norway. When we got on, there were many people there to accompany us. The platform was full of people. And when the train started to move, we heard: Hurray! Hurray! - And at the next station they shouted: Long live him! - Yes, of course it wasn't for our sake, but rather, the question is what was there. I just managed to find out: They were soccer players who had come up from Central Europe and were now going back.

Yes, what are people interested in today? Much more than in some event that has something to do with the weal and woe of millions of people, people today are interested in these things, which gradually draw the physical body away from the etheric body, so that the human being becomes no more than an animal on earth.

That is the reason why the movements that are being made all over the world today and that are spreading further and further, must be countered by others: these are the eurythmic movements. These are aligned with the etheric body. When you see eurythmy, you see all the movements that the etheric body performs. When you watch sports, you see all the movements that the physical body performs.

Yes, gentlemen, that is extraordinarily important, for at the same time there is a longing for sport. I do not want to speak against sport in general. Of course, sport is quite good when it is practised by people who also work, because at work one has to get used to more unnatural movements; if one then introduces natural movements into sport that are more suited to the physical human being, then recovery through sport is good. But this modern-day sport, in which many people also take part who have no need to recover, what is that? Yes, there are sportsmen today who, under certain circumstances, go to church quickly in the morning and pray: “I believe in one God in heaven, and so on.” Then they go to the sports field. Yes, they do not say it with words there, but what they do there, if you put it into words, it means: “I do not believe in a God in heaven. He gave me the etheric body, but I don't want to know anything about that. I believe in flesh and bones, that is my only bliss. — You see, that is of course the necessary, unconscious consequence of what is being done today. It is not only by saying that one does not want to know anything about the spiritual that one is a materialist, but by such things, by which one tears the whole human being away from the spiritual.

So that in relation to your question earlier, one can say: If someone goes into the forest and it is foggy, and he gets lost, it may happen that he runs after his etheric body. That's not so bad, he just comes back to the same place. If you turn around – that's not so bad, there is a lot of back and forth, once back and forth to the etheric body, once back and forth to the physical body. That is because man has both and should also develop both. That is contained in it. But the fact that today in the West in general there is a tendency to break away completely from the etheric body and to take care of the physical body alone, that is what accounts for the terrible materialism that is the actually harmful materialism. Because thought materialism is not even the most harmful. The most harmful is the materialism where the whole person comes down to the animal. That is indeed what one must consider.

It is very easy for people to say: Yes, he is a Philistine, railing against sport! Sport is something extraordinarily useful. But I am not railing against sport at all. People should only do sport, they are free beings. But they will then destroy themselves entirely as human beings if they only pay homage to sporting things.

In this respect, it must be made clear that what I said in the first chapter of the “Key Points” applies in the broadest sense. Of course, when I wrote these “Key Points”, I thought that I would write in such a way that people would think about them. Well, they didn't give a damn about it! They didn't think at all, and the “Key Points” were not understood at all. I said: Of course, we have a great democratic, proletarian movement, but if you look, most proletarians today imitate what the bourgeois imitated them in the past, they imitate science and believe in what is presented to them at the universities. Sometimes the proletarian parties are the first to vote for laws – I recall the freedom of the press; the socialists are usually the first to say: Yes, there must be a board of experts and the like. And with regard to sport: sport is, of course, a bourgeois invention, which will also be copied if possible! Of course it won't work completely; but all the same, in spirit, it is simply copied and regarded as something that is the only thing that is beneficial, whereas in fact the proletarian movement can only become something if it gets its own impetus, if it doesn't copy what the earlier classes did. That is why I have written this first chapter. Everywhere you could see how the proletarian movement unfortunately comes under the influence of belief in authority. That is why I have written this first chapter in the “Key Points” and thought that people would think about it.

But of course, thinking is something that people who do sports do not like at all; because when someone is really doing sports, they get out of thinking. You can only think with the etheric body. No matter how hard you try, you cannot think with your physical body. Therefore, when asked: Should one eat meat or just plants to be able to think better? - one can only say: You cannot cultivate thinking through eating; you have to do that through the etheric body. You have to enter into the etheric body.

So you see, the etheric body almost shows its presence in the human being through these circular movements that the human being wants to make, through the desire to dance or through this getting lost and going in circles.

Yes, gentlemen, if you have ever lived in Vienna, for example, then you know that the Viennese are easy-going people. They are; they are cozy, but they are easy-going people. In Vienna there is the Prater. This is a large pleasure garden, a huge pleasure garden. The Prater is something where you actually go on Sundays if you have not been a good-for-nothing who went to the Prater every day. There are sausages in the Prater, Bajazzi and so on, all sorts of things. But the paths in the Prater are designed in a peculiar way as paths. Because the paths are designed that way, you will always end up at the same place. You walk down a long street, go into the forest somewhere; yes, after a while you will be back where you were! If you were at a hot dog stand, you are back there now. The paths are designed that way. You see, of course they didn't say to themselves: We'll lure the Viennese out to amuse themselves – but they felt it, sensed it, and that's why they laid out the paths so that people don't even need the fog to get back to the same place, but they made circular paths that the etheric body wants, where the person already feels completely removed from the physical body. You can also feel so absorbed that you enter into a real sense of well-being. If you have no sense of direction, you will go in circles. But if you already have paths that make you go in circles by yourself, you also have the feeling of well-being. And that is what the people who created the Prater wanted to evoke in the Viennese: that their etheric body would have a real sense of well-being when they kept coming back to a place like this. It is very ingeniously designed. It still exists today. You can see for yourself how the paths go. If you get lost in them, you will find your way back, but you will get turned around. And this turning around, especially if you do it all Sunday afternoon, is something that leads people into a real sense of well-being.

Now this is a much more innocent sense of well-being than many other feelings of well-being. You know that orientation also ceases in other ways, I have told you the story before: when you come home late at night and you don't really know whether you are drunk or not, you put your top hat on the bed. If you see it once, you are not drunk, if you see it twice, you are drunk. This is because it turns. You see, something is turning there too: the astral body. If the person lying in bed is drunk, his astral body turns. But if someone brings in the etheric body in a more spiritual way, by walking on round paths, the etheric body turns. That is the more innocent kind of turning.

Drinking goes into the astral body, while turning goes more into the etheric body. Then one also understands what a difference there is. Because if I look at someone who is drunk, yes, he does not turn like someone who walks on round paths, but with him everything turns as if his astral body itself had now become the earth. He turns as the earth turns. That is the astral body that turns.

But when people dance or spin around in the Viennese amusement park Wurstl-Prater, it is the etheric body that turns. It takes the physical body with it; that is the more innocent one. You can say: in the case of someone who dances, it is the etheric body that turns, and in the case of someone who is drunk, it is the astral body that turns. So you can tell by looking at a person's life what they do whether it is the etheric body that is doing it or the astral body.

You see, today's science does not yet deal with such things. Therefore, it cannot answer the big questions of civilization, because people do not know how to set things up so that man does not become completely inhuman. Humanity is becoming more and more animal-like if today's obsession with sports remains as it is.

Something spiritual must enter into humanity. And I am convinced that those people who, on the one hand, get to know the earth through work will also long to enter into the spiritual realm and gradually learn to understand that the spiritual must also be cultivated, that it is necessary.

Well, that is what I wanted to tell you for the time being. We will talk about these things in more detail so that everything becomes clear to everyone.

Good morning! Actually, today I would like to add something to what I presented last time. I believe that we will increasingly know better what the human being actually is in the context of the world when we look at precisely such things. So today I would like to add to what we discussed last time how things actually behave in reality when something like a cataract or a black cataract comes over the eye. The eye then becomes useless. At first, the person gets the impression that there is something flickering before their eyes. Then it becomes more and more unclear and unclear before the eyes, and then they can no longer see what they had just seen.

Now, what is this eye disease caused by? It is due to something in the eye, which should be transparent, like glass, becoming opaque. If you put opaque paper or a cardboard cover instead of transparent glass on a window, you can no longer see through it. The same is true of a severely strabismic eye. There is something there that should be transparent but has become opaque.

Let's make this very clear. I have drawn the eye for you several times. It grows out of the brain (see drawing), out of the skull; this is a side view. There is something at the front with a protrusion, and inside the eye, blood vessels and the optic nerve expand. So blood vessels and the optic nerve come together.

But then there is something else in the eye, which is a kind of muscle attachment. This muscle attachment carries what is called the lens. So inside the eye, a very small transparent, lens-shaped body is carried by the muscle. If you imagine a small lens that is transparent, it is suspended inside the eye. And you have to see through this lens. When viewed from the front, this lens looks like this (see drawing), and you have to be able to see through it. From this alone you can see that it is a matter of our having to have a transparent eye if we are to see. The eye must be transparent. If you think about it properly, you will say to yourself: It cannot be the eye that sees, because the eye must turn away, make itself transparent, so that it can see. If you smear these window panes, for example, so that you cannot see through them, you no longer see out. Yes, it is you who see through the glasses. The glasses cannot see, but you yourself see. Likewise, it is not the eye that sees, but there is something in man that sees through the transparent eye.

Now, what happens when a person becomes seriously ill? When a person becomes seriously ill, this lens in the eye becomes opaque. It is very small, this lens, but when you have it out of your eye and see through it, it is transparent. But a lens from a seriously ill person is white, milky, not transparent. So I would have to draw the beautiful transparent lens of the healthy eye like this, and the opaque lens like that. So the lens has become cloudy and opaque.

You see, it always helps in these matters that the individual parts of the human body are elastic, elastic in many respects. So if you have a very sick eye and you cut into it in a certain direction, then this muscle asserts its elasticity here, and the lens, which is otherwise held by the muscle, pops out when you make a hole here. So you imagine that you have a very sick eye. You cut into it in a certain way. The operations are relatively very simple because the body comes to their aid everywhere. The lens pops out. You have it in your hand, put it in the dissecting glass, the lens that has become opaque. Now, of course, the person cannot see at all when the lens is out, because he needs the lens to see. I will show you in a moment why he needs the lens to see.

So if you have operated on a person in this way, by removing their lens, it will become light around them again, whereas before they saw nothing at all. He can already see out, but if he is operated on now, when the lens is removed, he will only see objects that are very far away. But the vision is still not good enough. So we have been given an unusable eye. The vision is not good enough for us to see what we could see here with the lens removed, for example. The eye has become unusable.

Now, after such an operation, a person is given glasses. You see, this is an artificial lens. He used to have a lens inside his eye and now he has an artificial lens. Now, the artificial lens is used to redirect the visual rays, which used to go so that he could only see things very far away before the lens was removed, so that he can see things close up again. That is what this glass in front of his eye does. So the lens that was inside his eye can be replaced by a transparent glass. Of course, it is less perfect because it is not alive. The lens in the eye is alive, it can be moved, and that naturally has its advantages. But in any case, in an emergency, you can see if you simply take out the lens that has become opaque and replace it with glasses for cataracts. Then the person can see again.

In this way, one is able to see exactly how the matter of seeing actually lies: that one has an apparatus in the eye, a tool for seeing, because one can even replace a small part of the eye, precisely by means of an external tool, namely the cataract glasses. That the living glasses, that is, the lenses, have an advantage over these cataract glasses, these replacements, may be clear to you from the fact that the lens, which is like this (a drawing is shown), when you want to see something very far away, has to be made a little thinner. Then you see something further away. So when the hunter aims and wants to shoot something further away, he has to make his lens thin. The muscle that sits here (pointing to the drawing, $. 35) does that; it makes it thinner. If you want to see something very close up, to read something small, then you have to make the lens thicker. Again, the muscle does that. Of course, this cannot be done with cataract glasses, because otherwise you would always have to put on a different pair. That is what you do sometimes. There are already people today who need two different pairs of glasses, for near and for far. But because the lens in the eye is alive, you can adjust it internally and see near and far.

Now you can also see why, if I have removed the lens completely, only distant objects can be seen, because it is as if I had made the lens completely flat when I removed it. Then I can see things that are very far away again. But then again, my eyesight is not good enough.

Behind the lens is a slimy substance called the vitreous humor. This can also become opaque. If it has become opaque, it cannot be operated on because it cannot be replaced in any way.

When you look into the eye from the outside, it is black. There is the lens, behind this black pupil. And it is black because you are looking at the background of the eye. You look through the entire lens and through everything [the vitreous body].

But now we have to ask ourselves: what actually happens when the lens becomes opaque? Imagine the glass. When the glass is transparent, the light passes through. If you have something opaque, it means that the light does not pass through, that the light is stopped. Now, in the eye, light has to go in and out through the lens. You see, light belongs to the ether. It does not belong to matter, to the substance of heaviness, which is outside, but light belongs to the ether.

Now I have told you that, in addition to his physical body, a person also has an etheric body. And what does it mean that the lens is transparent? That the lens is transparent means that the etheric body of the person, which passes through everything – I am now drawing it in red – can simply pass through the lens. If the lens is perfectly transparent, the etheric body can pass through the lens. This means that at the point where the lens is, the person has a small piece of etheric body. If the lens becomes opaque, it is because the substance in the lens clumps together. If salt or something similar settles in the lens, then it becomes opaque. It is just like when you have dissolved salt in a glass of water. As long as the salt is dissolved, you have an almost transparent salt solution. When the salt settles down there (it is drawn),

then it becomes opaque down there. That means the substance does not let the light through. So when salty particles settle, the lens becomes opaque. With age, such salty particles settle. The transparent parts of the human being become opaque.

So in serious illness, the transparent lens can become opaque. What is the consequence of this? The consequence is that the etheric body of the human being can no longer enter the opaque lens. Now there is a small hole. The human being has his etheric body everywhere, and when he is healthy, this etheric body fills everything. When the lens becomes diseased and opaque, the etheric body cannot enter the place where the lens is. Now you have no etheric body at the place where the lens is. So we have to say: what is the disease of weakness? The disease of weakness is that the person has no etheric body at the place where the lens has become opaque in the eye.

But you can't actually see with the etheric body alone. If you could see with the etheric body, you would always see at night, because you also have the etheric body in bed at night, only the astral body is outside. So you don't see with the etheric body. You see with the soul. But you need the etheric body to see. The astral body is also still there – it is the third that a person has – and it in turn fills everything. If this astral body now wants to see at the point where there is no etheric body, it cannot, because the etheric body is missing at that point. And so we can say: How does something like this happen, that we see? It is because our astral body is inside our etheric body. — But if the etheric body is eliminated at a point, pushed aside because the lens and the eye are opaque, we cannot see. The astral body cannot see there. Is that understandable?

It is confirmed: Yes!

This is how our astral body becomes able to see that the etheric body can enter at the point where the lens is, where it is most needed. If you understand something like the disease of weakness correctly, you can really see from it how the human being has an etheric body and an astral body.

If a person is at the beginning of such a severe illness, it can be said that this severe illness comes from the fact that the salts deposited in the eye, in the lens, do not allow the etheric body to enter the eye. Now something would have to be done to make this lens transparent. If the matter is very advanced, if the lens is already completely permeated with salts, and has therefore become opaque, then there is nothing left to do but to operate it out and replace it with cataract glasses. But the thing is that if the cataract is at the very beginning, there is still something else that can be done. And this is precisely where I want to show you how the human being is connected to his environment.

Take the earth, for instance. Plants grow out of the earth. You see, a plant like this naturally has a physical body. We can touch it, look at it. But this plant also has an etheric body, because it is alive, and everything that is alive has an etheric body. If the plant had no etheric body, it would be a stone. It has an etheric body, it is alive. But the plant cannot feel or sense. It has no astral body. But the astral substance is everywhere in the environment of the earth. The astral is everywhere. We have an astral body within us, but the astral is also everywhere in the environment of the earth. I will tell you how one can come to the conclusion that the astral is everywhere. We will have to draw on a rather remote fact that seemingly does not belong to this at all.

You all know that fire-breathing mountains occasionally, well, just come into spitting, as one says, that glowing masses fly out. I will describe such a fire-breathing mountain to you a little. First, there is the ground at the bottom, filled with ordinary rock. If we look at Vesuvius, for example, which is in Italy near Naples, the ground there, the basic ground, consists of Apennine rock, as it is called. So we have the usual rock down there, which is also found in the surrounding area. But then somewhat different layers are piled up there. It is layered like this (see drawing). At the point where, for example, Vesuvius erupts, there is a crevice in the earth. And when Vesuvius erupts, ash and water first come out of this crevice; then rock-like bombs come out. All of this is hurled up to the surface. Sometimes it is liquid, sometimes bomb-like. Then it runs down, runs further down. And everywhere there are these rocks that are thrown out like bombs. They flow down again. In between, there is rain mixed with mud. All this then piles up to form such a mountain. So first, hot water mixed with ash is ejected from the interior of the earth. When it runs down, it turns into a very viscous mud. Then, a little later, come these bomb-like chunks that rush up and are hurled around everywhere. In this way, such fire-breathing mountains are raised.

Now, gentlemen, I would like to tell you how science usually behaves in the face of such a phenomenon as fire-breathing mountains. Science says: Yes, all sorts of things that are under the earth come rushing out. The fire-breathing mountains are usually near water. - Certainly, that is also true. There are few fire-breathing mountains in the middle of the country; they are usually near the shore, near the water. —- So there, because there is a crevice in the ground anyway, the water could get in, and the water that is there then boils because of the heat inside the earth. And this boiling water then pushes out all the substances that are down there. – So now first of all one of the scholars says, writes a book about it and in this way explains the formation of the fire-breathing mountains, as they say.

Now someone else comes along and says: Yes, but we have reasons to assume that these fissures are not wide enough for water to get in. We cannot assume that the water, even if the fire-breathing mountains are also near the water, can enter through these cracks in the earth. So what the first scholar said is not entirely correct. You have to explain the matter in a different way.

Now, there comes the and says: Yes, inside the earth, the thing is not the same as outside, but inside the earth the metals are liquid. Like the iron in the furnace, when it is processed, is liquid, so are the metals liquid inside the earth. There are liquid metals inside. - Well - names are easy to find - these liquid metals are then called magma. So there is magma inside it – well, liquid metals. And now, when this liquid metal, this magma, comes to a place where it can more easily escape – here it is too hard for it to escape everywhere, otherwise it spews out everywhere – when it comes to a place where it can more easily escape, then it just escapes there, and that's where it comes out. – So says the other. So it happens, says the other, because of the unevenness in the density of the earth; the magma radiates in one direction or another.

Then a third or a fourth comes along and says: Yes, but the magma can't have the strong power to throw the bombs out so powerfully! That can't be the explanation either. Then a few others come along who say something else. And then it is written in the ordinary books that are for the people. They write: Actually, we still don't know the reason why the fire-breathing mountains arise. — That's about the state of affairs today. Usually you will find: one person claimed this, the other that — but we don't really know what the cause is. For the most important things, we don't know what the cause is!

But now I will tell you something. The thing is this: when you come to the area where Vesuvius is very close, in the neighborhood of fire-breathing mountains, there is a very beautiful phenomenon. If you take a piece of paper and light it, then suddenly the earth begins to smoke. So you have the earth here (it is drawn), light a piece of paper here, now that is burning (red), and now the earth starts to smoke everywhere under the paper flame, all by itself, and you can gradually be surrounded by the rising smoke as you burn a large piece of paper. This is, of course, a very beautiful phenomenon. Tourists guides show people traveling in Italy how the smoke comes out of the ground when you just light a piece of paper.

Now, what does that mean anyway? Yes, you see, gentlemen: at that point in there, there is a certain accumulation of water vapor. There in the earth - at the point where this vapor comes out - it has accumulated inside. It cannot get out if the air above it has a certain density. The air keeps this vapor in. Now, you all know that when air is warmed, it becomes thinner. When you heat a room, the air also becomes thinner. Warm air is always thinner than cold air. So when you light a fire here, the air becomes thinner. The thinner air can no longer hold the vapor down, and so it escapes. Of course, it must first be down there. There must be something down there for it to flow out. Yes, but, gentlemen, think about what you have done! You have not been down there and blown the steam up. You did not do that, but you lured the steam out from the outside by lighting a piece of paper. So if you light something up here above the ground, you can lure the steam out. Because you make the air thinner, you lure the steam out.

You see, the learned gentlemen are now constantly searching for the causes of water vapor coming out of the volcano, of bombs even flying out; they are looking for these causes, yes, they are looking for them underground. But they are not there at all, just as the causes of the water vapor coming out when you light a paper are not under the ground, but the causes are outside, outside the earth.

You just have to be able to understand the things that are facts in the right way, then you will understand the things. So just as little as you are in here and blow the steam out of the earth, but lure it out through the thin, heated air, so something lures out everything that is down there. And you see, you can't get solid rock out of there by just lighting a piece of paper, otherwise those curious Englishmen who were traveling around here would not only be enveloped in smoke if they lit a piece of paper near Naples, but they would also get a good whack in the nose from all kinds of stones! You don't get that there, but only the rarefaction of the air and the steam rising. But here, above Vesuvius, when it begins to spew, to erupt, everything that lies above it in the astral is rarefied. And this astral is rarefied by the far-out forces of the stars, the planets. So when a certain constellation of stars is above Vesuvius, as it often is – it doesn't usually occur that way, it occurs precisely at this point – then, just as here through the paper, here through the constellation of stars, because the astral is thinned above, that which is below is torn out.

So you show a small eruption of Vesuvius when you see the sulfur fumes – not only water vapor but also sulfur vapor – coming out. It's called the Solfatara. So wherever these mighty volcanic eruptions take place, it is not what is down there that is active, but what is outside, what comes straight from the star constellations.

Of course, sometimes there is a bit of, how should I say, meddling, self-importance in such things. So someone once came up with the idea that certain such things come from the star constellations, from the position of the sun and moon, for example. That was Falb. Perhaps the older ones among you have already heard of the famous Falb theory. Falb did not just say that earthquakes, but also volcanic eruptions, for example, come from the star constellations. That was true. But he was also a terribly vain man and liked to act important about the matter.

Now he has come up with something else that is also important. You know, in mines, a terrible plague is the so-called firedamp. Something happens in the mines because the gases ignite as they flow powerfully through the mine. Now Falb has said: This particularity of the gases also does not come from the earth's underground, but from the position of the sun and moon, for example. And Falb, after what he had thought up, even compiled prophecies of earthquakes and of striking weather in mines. Well, that was often not true, sometimes it was true. The way it is, of course, is that sometimes unforeseen things happen during natural events; then the story is not true. But Falb then published a calendar throughout the year. He indicated the so-called critical days. When special star constellations occurred, when there were special positions of the sun and moon, he said: “There must be firedamp on that day” or “There must be an earthquake.

Once upon a time – it was a long time ago, more than thirty years – I was at a lecture by Falb. Falb, who was a tall, slender man, presented his theories convincingly, that is, he presented how – he knew nothing of the astral, but believed that it only came from this heat thinning -, how the heat is thinned and how it is then lured up from below, just like with such solfataras, the gases from mines either become firedamp or something like that. Now that was a large hall. Falb was standing up there. He explained it, explained it well. There was a lot of truth in his explanation. Suddenly, in the middle of his explanation, he says: So a certain position of the sun and moon causes a change in the air, firedamp must form, it is lured out – bang, it knocks on the door. A newspaper boy from the “Neue Freie Presse” enters, brings a telegram, and lays it on the lecture table. Falb is just not refined, says: It must be something important! - opens the telegram during the lecture, reads: In the and the mine, major explosions have just occurred. - Now Falb had just prophesied these explosions in his lecture and had contacted the “Neue Freie Presse”: If something comes in, send it to me in the lecture hall! Falb often worked with such things; he was just a bit vain. But it did happen, gentlemen. Just as Falb had explained that something like a kind of firedamp had to come again, the newspaper boy brought him the telegram. And he said, “You see, ladies and gentlemen, that's how the evidence is delivered to the table!”

Well, of course that was a bit of a boast. But there was a great deal of truth behind such things, especially with Falb. The fact is that you have to say: these thick, heavy masses are not thrown out from below by pushes, as the scholars always say, but lured out from above, by the position of the stars. Only, I would like to say, when the steam rises from this burning paper and you are completely immersed in this steam, the air is a little thinner. It cannot be so severely thinned that the solid masses can be hurled upwards by the mere air; the ether must be thinned and then the astral. This leads us to the conclusion, when we have correct explanations for our fire-breathing mountains, that our Earth is everywhere enveloped not only by the substance of the Earth, but also by the astral. Today's science simply has no courage to explain such things in a truly appropriate way. It has no courage!

So when we imagine the earth, we have to think of it as being surrounded everywhere, first by the ether, but then also by the astral. Now, however, the astral also penetrates everywhere. But plants generally do not take in the astral. They only have an etheric body. They only take in the ether, they do not take in the astral. But there are certain plants that do take in the astral. These are the poisonous plants. And that is the difference between the non-poisonous plants and the poisonous plants: the non-poisonous plants have no astral in them, and the poisonous plants have an astral in them.

Now, what does that mean? You see, one of the most poisonous plants is the deadly nightshade. If you have a deadly nightshade here, it is so black because the astral is absorbed into it. So the deadly nightshade absorbs the astral. But because belladonna takes in the astral — it does not actually destroy itself completely — it has the power within itself to continually destroy physical matter. Belladonna is very sharp on the inside; it wants to destroy physical matter. Therefore, when we eat a deadly nightshade berry, the deadly nightshade juice, as soon as it is inside us, immediately begins to destroy our inner matter. We must perish under the deadly nightshade. The deadly nightshade has the inner power to destroy physical matter.

Do you think that we can now introduce the diluted, properly diluted deadly nightshade juice into a person's blood in the right way by inoculation? Then, when the lens starts to get salts, to become cloudy, we can fight this cataract with the deadly juice of the deadly nightshade, if it is properly diluted, has become so weak that it no longer has a toxic effect, and disperse what has arisen as a deposit. I have drawn the sentence for you here (on the board). So if we have brought the destructive juice of the deadly nightshade, which everywhere drives everything else apart, by means of a correct vaccination here on the lens, then it also drives apart the salts that have deposited there, and the lens can possibly be cured.

Of course, if the cataract is already too far advanced, you can't rely on this story too much. But if you notice the condition in a person at the right time, when the cataract is not yet so advanced, you can still fight the cataract without having to operate to remove the lens later.

Therefore, it is usually not how homeopathic doctors do it. They administer the diluted deadly nightshade. It works, but not very strongly; the problem always comes back. So, you can't usually achieve anything in this way. But you can achieve a great deal by administering it into the blood. The blood then goes everywhere, and also enters the eye.

This also shows you something else. Namely, you see this: if we have a poison like that of the deadly nightshade, if we eat a lot of the deadly nightshade – of course a little is enough, but that is a lot in this case – if we eat a relatively large amount of the deadly nightshade, it destroys us from the stomach, already from the pharynx, our physical matter. We can no longer live. If we dilute this deadly nightshade juice more and more, the physical parts are no longer attacked, but the deadly nightshade juice is digested and still attacks the head very strongly. One can then use the deadly nightshade juice to correct people when they have become very nervous, when they have become dizzy, by giving them highly diluted deadly nightshade juice to eat, which expels what has settled there.

expels. But if you take it so thinly that it no longer affects the head, then it still works on the eye. The eye is the organ that is sensitive to the thinnest amounts of belladonna. Belladonna, “the beautiful woman”, is called the belladonna because it has such beautiful black eyes. So the eye is still receptive to the smallest amounts of belladonna juice. It is remarkable that our human being is receptive to the various substances in the environment in the most diverse ways. As already mentioned, too much belladonna juice destroys the entire eye, but in dilution the eye is receptive to the belladonna juice. Other organs are receptive to other juices. So that for each substance something in our body is particularly receptive and causes different things.

Take the human liver, for example. Yes, it is the case that the human liver actually has an awful lot to do. I have already told you how it is an inner observer. It has an awful lot to do in the process of digestion. In particular, the liver in the human body has to do a great service in processing fatty substances. If the liver cannot work properly, then all the fat that a person has accumulates and migrates around the body in the most diverse ways. Fat migrates instead of being processed in the liver. The fat that a person consumes also has a special relationship to the liver. Just as good substances have a relationship to the limbs of the human body, so too do toxins have a certain relationship to all parts of the human being.

And so we can say: We can, so to speak, make the lens in the eye bright again when it has darkened, thereby sending the astral body back into this piece of the human being when we instill something into the person from the environment that particularly attacks the eye. This is, for example, the appropriate dilution of deadly nightshade juice. From this you can see that in deadly nightshade juice we have something that attracts the astral element in the eye, so that the person can see through the astral; it draws in the astral, and the astral then in turn draws in the etheric.

Therefore, I would also like to say: even if the deadly nightshade grows outside, it attracts the astral. The etheric is already inside, it does not need to be attracted. If one can properly study this fine process that occurs in the deadly nightshade healing in the case of strongly wandering eyes, then one also understands what is going on outside in the deadly nightshade. The excluded astral is drawn in by the belladonna juice. So the belladonna juice also draws in the astral from the world. The belladonna juice is an attraction for the astral. And when we are poisoned with belladonna, too much astral is drawn into us, this astral begins to boil and this boiling destroys our physical.

But when too much physical matter is destroyed – in the badly stricken eye it is destroyed because too much has been deposited – then we have to remove it again. Away with it! Then one could indeed hope, gentlemen, that one could also heal with belladonna, with deadly nightshade, when salts or similar substances are deposited elsewhere in the body. If, for example, a person develops gallstones or urinary stones, then something solid is deposited, which should not actually be there. Then one would have to hope that if one can cure this in the lens of the severely stricken eye with belladonna, one could also cure the gallstones and the bladder stones with belladonna. This can be done if one only uses the substance correctly. It can be done!

So you can see that things all fit together, and if you understand nature correctly, you can also understand people correctly. Now we have come back to the etheric and astral body from this side, just as we came to the etheric and astral body last time when turning around. If you simply look at things in the right way, you will come across these supersensible parts of the human being everywhere. These things are really not made up, but are based on a science that goes further than ordinary science in every respect.

Next Wednesday, if you don't have any questions prepared, we will continue talking about these things.

Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have any further questions?

A question is asked regarding cataracts. The questioner says that he was in hospital in Basel in 1916 because of an inflammation of the iris, and that he received injections into the head. Now he would like to ask whether these injections could have had a harmful effect.

Dr. Steiner: Have you noticed anything in yourself? Of course, it is out of the question that these injections could have caused a disease. These so-called flies, these phenomena you speak of, do not have to indicate any kind of serious illness, but come from something else. The injections have the peculiarity that they sometimes weaken the nearby muscles a little, and then you can no longer move the muscle as freely; the eye becomes a little stiff. When you focus on something, it doesn't come into focus properly, and that's where these 'gnats and flies' come from. So this often comes from a slight weakness in the adjustment, I would say. Why did you have the iris injections?

Questioner: It was thought to be the vitreous humor.

Dr. Steiner: It is always better to fight such things with other means, as long as possible, through inner means. Some things cannot be fought through inner means; then one tries to inject. But you don't need to worry about that. It's not necessary.

Is there perhaps another question we can answer?

Questioner: I would like to come back to the turning. I and also my colleagues noticed that when we talk about the heart, there is some ambiguity. I thought about how Doctor once drew for us how the Earth is connected to the moon and the fluid - I don't know if I'm expressing myself correctly =, the sun is around it. The heart is on the left side of the body. I would now like to ask whether the heart is actually connected to the whole world mechanism?

Dr. Steiner: Here we have to recall various things that we have already discussed. I once said: In science today, people have completely wrong ideas about the heart. They think the heart is a kind of pump, and that the heart pumps blood all over the body. So they think: the heart contracts. When the heart contracts, it becomes smaller, holding less blood in itself. This pushes the blood through the veins, it is pushed into the body, and because the heart is elastic, it is thought to expand again. This brings the blood back again. — So today we attribute to the heart that it behaves like a pump, that it pumps blood throughout the body.

You see, that is a completely wrong view. It is a view that stems from the materialistic age, which attributes everything to the mechanical, when one thinks that the heart should be a real mechanical pumping device that pumps blood throughout the body. In doing so, no consideration is given to how all of life takes place in a living being. I would like to draw your attention to one thing in this regard.

There is a very small, lowly animal that actually consists only of a kind of tube. If I wanted to draw this animal, I would have to draw it something like this (see drawing): There would be a skin. Such a tube is the animal. Inside it is hollow, and there it is simply like a small harbor, a small cup. It still has little cilia, tiny hairs, with which it can move. This little animal lives in the water. It is called Hydra because it lives in the water. This little animal, Hydra, has the peculiarity that, when compared to higher animals or to humans, it is nothing more than a mere stomach. And this tube actually does nothing other than absorb all kinds of granules, that is, all kinds of food, that come near it and then digests them inside. So the little animal lives in the water; all kinds of nutrients swim in the water. The animal swims around, swims up to the nutrients, absorbs these nutrients, just like our stomach does; it also absorbs. Of course, this little animal does not have a pharynx or a mouth that prepares the nutrients. The Hydra simply absorbs these nutrients and digests them. The strange thing, however, is that it has the excretory organ, the anus, in the mouth at the same time. It also secretes through the mouth again immediately. So, everything is together in this little animal.

Now it is natural: if something wants to be a living being, especially an animal, it must not only eat – it must eat – but it must also breathe. And this little animal breathes with the outside of its skin. There are tiny holes all over it. These holes are found wherever there is organic matter, living matter. And it draws in the air it needs from the water through these holes. So you can say that this little animal, the Hydra, has an inside, a cavity with which it eats. On the outside, it has its respiratory organs. So the animal draws in the air, and the air also enters in the middle into this hollow space. The animal can eat and breathe. It is always busy with this. The animal swims around everywhere in the water, eats and breathes in the air from the water, which is also contained in the water.

What will the materialistic person say? He will say: Well, this little animal simply consists of this skin. This skin, which has grown inside in such a way that it is a nutritional apparatus on the inside, and on the outside it is a respiratory apparatus. — That is what the materialist says. But we cannot say so, because we must consider that to be a highly superficial view and must say: No, this little animal also has an etheric body, in which it is enclosed, and also an astral body, in which it is also enclosed. It still has that, these are the invisible limbs,

Now, gentlemen, can you prove by any means that the animal is also something invisible besides the visible? The materialist says: I take care of the visible, I do not take care of the invisible. The visible, that shows me a kind of stomach inside, on the outside it is a kind of lung, and I am satisfied with that.

Now you can do something special with this animal. Not true, gentlemen, we don't wear gloves, but we still remember what it looks like. If you have a glove, you can turn it inside out. So imagine that the glove is brown on the outside for my sake and has a gray lining on the inside. If you now turn it around so that the gray is on the outside and the brown is on the inside, you have turned it over correctly; now the inside is on the outside and the outside is on the inside. You can cut off a finger and do the same with the individual finger. Then, when you cut off the finger and turn it around, you have something like this hydra. The hydra looks like a single finger. And the strange thing is: just as you can turn this fingerling around so that the inside is outside and the outside is inside, you can also turn this Hydra around. You can do that, you can really turn it around. And then what I have drawn here (in the drawing, $. 53) in red is on the outside and what I have drawn in blue-violet is now on the inside. But the hollow space is now also outside, and what used to be outside is now inside. And the strange thing about it is that now the Hydra suddenly starts swimming around again. It doesn't mind at all. It swims around in the water again, eating and breathing. She now eats the granules in this newly formed cavity and breathes through what used to be the stomach wall. So it doesn't bother Hydra at all. It doesn't harm her at all. She starts to eat with what she used to breathe with, and to breathe with what she used to eat with.

Yes, gentlemen, if it were the case that it had only grown like this, and there was only a stomach inside and respiratory organs on the outside, the Hydra could do nothing but breathe in from the inside and start eating from the outside. But it doesn't do that. Instead, when it is turned around, it turns its stomach into lungs and its lungs into a stomach. Yes, now I would like to know how that would happen if there were nothing but a stomach and lungs! If you have a tool, a glove or whatever it is, you can turn it around if it is something external. If it is something internal, you cannot just turn it around, of course. So what is left of the etheric and astral body, the invisible, remains. And because that is there, the body of the hydra can simply be turned around. So you see: if you just look with a clear eye at what is actually going on in nature, you will immediately find out that the materialistic view must be absolutely wrong. So that one can say: That which actually eats and breathes is something invisible. And because the body of the Hydra is not constructed like ours, it does not have bones and muscles, but everything is one and the same substance, that is why the Hydra can use this one substance for everything.

It is not true that we cannot turn our stomachs inside out because it is so specially formed, because we do not consist of the same material as the Hydra, but our materials are different. But inside our stomach must also breathe, and the air that we have in it, it draws in from the outside as well. So our stomach is already a kind of Hydra.

From all these things, to which much more could be added, it is clear that even in the smallest animal we can prove that there is something invisible that underlies this animal.

Now, gentlemen, from this you can see that when we speak of what actually moves our whole being, we come to the conclusion that it is something invisible. If you take the external movement when we walk, you will not come to the conclusion that it is your big toe that takes the step, but you will say: I walk, it is my will that causes me to walk. When the organs move within – and it is not only the heart that moves, for example, the intestines are constantly moving; the intestines move in waves, otherwise the chyme could not be digested; so within the human being everything is in motion, there are constant movements within. So when the organs move within, these movements are not caused by the material part within us, but they are caused by that which is invisible within us. So we have to say: the heart is not a pump, but the heart is moved by our astral body. - So we have an astral body, and it moves the heart, or rather because our real self is also in the astral body, we also move our heart with our self, and we move it in a very special way.

If you look at the heart, as Mr. Burle quite rightly said, it is located on the left side of a normal person, not as strongly as one usually thinks, but it is located on the left side. And then the large veins come out of the heart here. The large artery and the other veins actually come out of the heart.

Now it is like this: when I breathe in, for example, I nourish myself with oxygen, so to speak. When I breathe out, I breathe out carbon dioxide. When I have breathed out the carbon dioxide, I immediately feel an oxygen hunger. I want to breathe in again. Yes, that has nothing to do with my heart at first, but with my whole body. My whole body gets the oxygen hunger. When it gets oxygen hunger, it drives all its blood to move, because the blood must have oxygen. Through its astral body, the body sends the blood to where it can get the oxygen.

Or suppose I am walking or working. Then the food burns up in me. I have already explained this to you. As a result, the blood becomes poor in nourishment. When one is working, the blood always becomes poor in nourishment. Now, what does the blood want? The blood wants to get nourishment again. The blood, as it were, seizes the nourishment that the stomach and intestines have absorbed. All of this, this hunger for air and food, sets the blood in motion. It is the blood that moves first, and the blood carries the heart with it. So it is not the heart that pumps the blood through the body, but the blood moves through the hunger for air and food, and this moves the heart. So we have to say that it is our invisible self that moves the heart.

Now, gentlemen, when you hear this, you may raise a question. You see, with our anthroposophy, it is always the case that our opponents think they are making the objections. But you know the objections long before. You make them yourself beforehand. That is why I always draw your attention to the objections. You may object: Yes, what use is our heart if it does not pump blood through the body? If the blood moves, we might not need the heart, which is supposed to be carried along.

Yes, you see, that is what people say who have no real understanding of the human body as a whole. There is a big difference between the human head and the rest of the human being. I have told you something about this difference before. Suppose you are walking or working. Yes, the head is not involved in that. The head sits with the rest of the body, like you sit in a carriage. You sit very still. The carriage has to move its wheels, the horses have to pull. But our hands and feet have to work, and the head sits inside as the one that does not work, right? Otherwise, we would somehow have to have ropes on our ears and use them to set the wheels on the machines in motion. We don't do that. The head doesn't work. Imagine if you could attach ropes to your hair – most people today could no longer do this because they are bald. That would be very bad for you. The head does not actually work, it sits quietly on the rest of our organism. But why is that? Yes, you see, the head is something completely different from the rest of the human being. The rest of the human being is a movement apparatus. The head is only to that extent a movement apparatus, as it participates in the movements and so forth; the movements work up into our head. But the head is not that which itself makes the movements.

The head has sensory organs on the outside. That is where it perceives what is outside. But the head also perceives what is going on inside, only unconsciously in most people. If I want to look outside so that I know what is going on outside, I need my eyes. If I want to look inside, at the blood circulation, I need my heart. The heart is not just there to pump blood through the body, but is a sensory organ that perceives everything, like the whole head. We would know nothing about our blood circulation – of course, with our upper floors we know nothing about it either, but there must be knowledge in the head – if the head did not perceive our whole blood circulation through the heart.

I have already told you how the liver is a perception organ. The lower movements, for example, are perceived by the liver. But the heart perceives all the movements of the whole person. This sets the heart in motion. Through the movements caused by the hunger for breathing and the hunger for food, the heart is set in motion. And from the movements of the heart, one can tell whether something in the body is in order or in disorder.

Now, imagine that someone has drunk an awful lot of alcohol on a particular evening and is, as they say, thoroughly drunk. This disrupts the entire blood circulation. The next day, the head notices through the heart: the entire blood circulation is out of order. The result is a hangover, a familiar headache. Yes, why is there a buzzing in the head? You see, when it's a nice day and I look around with my eyes, I have a nice impression. If it's awful weather out there, I have a bad impression. Yes, gentlemen, when everything is moving properly in the blood, the head has a good impression, everything is in order in the head. But when there is a storm in the blood – that is what happens when someone has been drunk in the evening – then the head has a stormy impression through the heart, everything is mixed up.

So we only understand what the heart is when we know that the heart is actually the inner sense organ through which the head perceives everything that is going on in the body.

If we look around us in the world, it turns out that the human being stands in relation to the whole world through his invisible part, through that which I have called his astral body. The most important stars in relation to which the human being stands are the sun and the moon. Now, the human head is mainly in relation to the sun, but the rest of the human being is actually in relation to the moon. And one can say that it is, of course, an awful superstition to think that something can be done with the current phases of the moon. But there is a rhythm in the human being that is also expressed in the blood and is similar to the lunar rhythm. Man orients himself to the whole world. And so it is also the case that the movement of the blood does not depend on food alone. When a person is completely healthy – after all, in a sense he is a free being – then in a sense he makes himself independent of the external forces of nature, and in a sense he also makes himself independent of the whole world. But the moment a person begins to feel a little ill, he becomes dependent on the whole world.

Let us suppose that someone is ill and you can tell from their pulse. There is a huge difference for the person who can perceive it between the pulse in the morning and the pulse in the evening. You can tell a lot from the difference between the morning pulse and the evening pulse. But for certain sick people, there is also a big difference between the pulse at the full moon and the pulse at the new moon. Human beings are dependent. Even if they can make themselves independent when they are healthy, a certain dependency remains, and this is particularly evident when they are ill. So we have to say: in terms of what makes an impression on our hearts, we are already related to the movement of the heavenly bodies, namely the moon. We are related to the movement of the moon. — In this respect, a great deal of observation still needs to be done.

I told you earlier that in a normal person, the heart is slightly shifted to the left. But just as there are left-handed people and most people are right-handed, doing everything with their right hand, there are also, curiously enough, right-handed people. There are people who do not have their heart on the left, but on the right side. Most of the time this is not noticed at all, because the difference is, of course, an internal one. If someone is left-handed, you notice it very quickly, but if their heart is shifted a little to the right instead of to the left, you don't notice it so quickly. But it would be interesting to examine precisely such people, who have their heart on the right side, to see how they are somewhat different in life than those who have their heart on the left side. A person whose heart is on the right side, that is, shifted to the right, is someone who actually always has to do certain things at a certain time of year or at a certain time of day. The right-heart person is much more dependent on the external environment than the left-heart person. And if the heart has only moved a little bit to the right – after all, it is not in the same place for everyone, but a little bit different for each person – if it is still on the left, but has moved a little bit to the right, then he immediately has the desire to align himself more with his surroundings. He immediately wants to do something special in spring, let's say, and something special in autumn. Of course, you can't always do that and then ruin yourself. People have no idea how they can ruin themselves.

For example, in the case of children who have their hearts a little to the right, you have to proceed differently at school – it doesn't need to be noticed – than with those children who have their hearts in the right place. When a person's heart is to the right, they are then led to make much more use of their astral body.

You see, gentlemen, that is the story: if someone works at a machine for a long time, you can say that in general the work becomes mechanical. It becomes more unpleasant because you yourself become a piece of the machine, but if you work at a machine for a long time, you do the movements and so on mechanically. Imagine that you are quite normally a real left-handed person. The father was also a left-handed person, the grandfather too, the great-grandfather too. It has slowly crept in. And when you are born as a son, you naturally make the same movement internally that your father and grandfather and great-grandfather have already made. It's as easy as if you've been working on a machine for a long time.

If you are a right-hearted person, the position of your heart is not inherited from your father. As a rule, the father is not also a right-hearted person. That is not inherited. In that case, you have to start things over and over again from your astral body, so to speak. You don't have the whole inheritance in you. And the consequence of this is that such a person, who is a right-hearted person, has to apply much more inner strength to keep the whole blood circulation in order. And that is why such a right-hearted person is much more concerned with the external.

The following is even possible. Suppose you are not a right-heart person at all, but a perfectly normal left-heart person. But if you become a ballet dancer – it happens to men too, but even more so to women – then ballet dancing also affects the heart. Now, ballet dancing is also very materialistic. But in ancient times, when people were encouraged to dance, for example in ancient Greece, the fact that they then incorporated movements that imitated the stars even pushed the heart a little to the right during their lifetime. Even today, dance still has a strong effect on the heart of a dancer, even though it has become materialistic, because it moves the heart a little to the right. And if one paid more attention to these things, one would see, when one dissects the human being after death, how the heart has stretched certain vessels apart. The fact that the person in question was a dancer is why the heart has been pushed a little to the right - you can still see that after death.

This answers the question that Mr. Burle asked. It is answered by seeing that when man is more devoted to his astral body, he actually does not want to follow his usual blood circulation, but he wants to control it even more, and in doing so he indulges in movements that are more like the movements outside the earth, towards the moon. Can you understand that? (Answer: Yes!)

So what you asked today, that it is very easy to see that a person has a certain longing to do this, is precisely because man's whole heart movement is controlled by the invisible part, that he then, I might say, slips a little over to the invisible and that he then actually directs himself according to the external and not merely according to the inner blood movement, which is directed towards breathing and nourishment. All these things can be explained if one really understands the human being.

And now I would like to tell you something that is still a little bit related to what we discussed last time. Last time we saw: there inside the eye, there is this small lens (it is drawn). If a person has normal vision, then this small lens is transparent. If a person gets cataracts, then the lens becomes opaque. Salts are deposited. So we can say: In a healthy person, here in the eye – if that is the front of the eye – is the lens; it is transparent. In a person who is seriously ill, we have the lens in which salts have been deposited, making it opaque. Because the lens is transparent, the human being's astral body can see the world through the transparent lens. He sees everything in the world.

When you get used to very, very intense thinking through things like the ones I have described in the booklet: “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”, there comes a moment when you can do something very special. But getting used to very intense thinking is not something people today want to do easily. Because people today do not withdraw completely into their own thinking, because they say: everything must be given to us from the outside; we must explore the secrets of the world from the outside. Of course, it is also uncomfortable, because you have to be very careful with this thinking. If you think very vividly, you have to be terribly careful, of course. But there comes a moment in life when you can do something very special.

Not that I can lift a chair with my hand, everyone understands that because it happens all the time. But I can also leave my hand alone, not use it for what it usually does. What the lens of the eye does is not so much in the power of people. If you have an impression from the outside, well, then you look through your lens of the eye towards this impression. If you have no impression, then the lens of the eye remains still.

But, gentlemen, just imagine someone who has really made an effort to think very hard. He is completely absorbed in his inner thoughts. He is not looking outwards, he is leaving his eye lens alone, just as you leave your hand alone when you are not using it. Yes, then the whole starry sky is reflected at the point where you would otherwise have the transparent lens with which you would otherwise see. That is, I would like to say, the downright wonderful thing about this method, which you develop in the way I have described in 'How to Know Higher Worlds', is that you learn to use the individual organs not only for the earth, but also for the other world. When salts have naturally deposited, the lens becomes thick and automatically opaque. When one reflects deeply, it remains transparent, but the person does not see through the lens, he does not look outwards. And from there it begins to illuminate the whole world from the lens. But then one sees the spiritual. And you see the whole starry sky in its true, inner meaning. This small place in man, where the lens is located, can teach you about everything you dare to say about stars and so on. You see, it is actually so wonderful with man that at the smallest point is the seat of knowledge that is tremendous.

Those who are very healthy – of course, one does not need to wish this for any human being – even have this whole story easier, they do not have to exert themselves so much with their thinking. They only need to concentrate very little to be able to see inwardly when they have forgotten how to see outwardly. But this is what must always be emphasized when speaking of such higher knowledge: when speaking of such higher knowledge, it is always so obvious that one can, of course, exert oneself too much, and then, instead of higher knowledge, something can occur, such as, let us say, the disturbance of the lens. The lens can then become somewhat opaque due to this strong inner concentration, even if one does not become strong-minded, but something opaque. Therefore, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” everything is described in such a way that a person can achieve what is discussed there, but without becoming ill as a result. No exercise should be described in such a way that it can make one ill. But this lens is the place in the human being that can actually reveal the entire spiritual world to us at the very back of the eye. And so we can say: you can see outwardly when everything is transparent in the eye. You can see inwardly when something is deliberately made opaque.

Yes, gentlemen, this is something that can make it clear to you how knowledge of spiritual worlds actually arises. Knowledge of spiritual worlds arises precisely from the fact that one first finds in one's head the individual points that are not needed for ordinary activity, because they are at rest. Through the lens, one first gets to know the outer world. But one can train the whole body so that all possible uses of the senses are suspended for a moment. If, for example, one does not use the heart – blood circulation can continue, but one switches off the heart as a sense organ – then one begins to perceive the whole blood circulation. But then one does not just perceive the blood circulation. When you make your heart so that you can see through your body to the blood circulation, when you do not feel your heart inwardly and do not feel the pulse beat, but see through it, as you learn through the lens to see out into the world with your head, when you learn to see through yourself, then, gentlemen, you see not only the blood circulation, but you see the whole movement of the moon, everything that the moon does, and you see how the moon relates to the sun. And then you see the relationship of the heart to the sun and moon.

You see, in the old days, all this was easier for people. They were not yet schooled to learn only from the outside world. They did not want to see everything in front of them. If you had taken a Greek, a person who had lived twenty-seven or twenty-eight hundred years ago, to the movies, he would not have watched the movie for long because he would have fainted. at the moment when the old Greek would have looked at it, inside him, but not just in one limb, but in the whole person, what you get when a limb falls asleep, when something presses on it. Not a real sleep would have come to the person, but this falling asleep of the whole person would have arisen if you had sat the old Greek in a cinema. He would have fainted from it, of course. The ancient Greek would not have been able to watch it at all, because at that moment his head would have received such a disturbance in the whole blood system through the heart that his whole body, not just individual limbs, would have fallen asleep, and the head would no longer have been able to control anything. He would have fainted. Man has become quite different from what he was in ancient times. Today, modern culture has caused such a disorderly blood circulation that people no longer faint in cinemas.

If you have really studied spiritual science a little bit and then go to the movies, you have to pull yourself together very hard, otherwise you can still faint today. But it's not true, we are all human, and one takes on the characteristics of the other. And it is the case that people no longer have the blood circulation system of ancient times, like the ancient man. That is why the ancients could see more clearly into the circulatory system and could speak more easily of the sun and the moon than we can. We are cut off from it and must first reconnect to it through exercises. We must first properly restore the organs so that we can see.

You see, the ancient Greeks could still understand when older people told them something about how things actually are on earth. We must not believe that everything handed down from ancient times is always superstition; it is just that in many cases later generations have transformed it to such an extent that it has become superstition. It is indeed strange how things that are quite reasonable at first simply become superstitions later on. When people no longer know how things should actually be done, then these things become superstitions. For example, the ancient Jews did not eat pork. Yes, they knew that, because of their race and the area in which they lived, pork made them weak. Then it later became superstition. The things that later become superstition always go back to earlier reasonable things. So we don't have to believe that what was previously available as old knowledge is always nonsense, but you can't always rely on the old because the old things have been falsified many times. That is why you have to research everything anew.

That is why it is so nonsensical when people say of anthroposophy that it merely collects together what already existed. Nothing is collected together, but everything is newly investigated! And to those of you, gentlemen, who say: In Anthroposophy they only collect all kinds of old Gnostic stuff — just ask them where they can prove that the story of the eye lens is found as I told you last time and today, where you can find it in any book. You cannot find it because the story has been completely forgotten. Therefore, you can answer anyone who says that the things have been collected together: You are lying because you do not even know what is said there – that the whole view of the heart and so on is renewed.

It is the case that everything is originally explored here and then comes to the whole person. And from such simple things as the fact that a person moves while dancing and turning, which I touched on last time and today, prompted by Herm Burle's question, one can see a lot. It can be understood.

But, gentlemen, then something else will come out, which is what humanity fears most. Because, you see, once anthroposophy gets through – today you can't do anything; if you want to do something practically, all hell breaks loose; even if you just say things, the opposition arises immediately, as you are well aware – but once anthroposophy gets so far that it penetrates into our schools, that it asserts things everywhere, something else will come. Then people will know which movements are right for their health and their entire metabolic development and which are wrong. Then the time will come when work will be organized around the human being. Today, work is organized around machines. Today, people have to move in a way that those who discovered the machine find appropriate. Later, people will realize that what comes from the machines is not the main thing; the human being is the main thing. Therefore, there must only be such machines that are designed for man. This will only be possible once anthroposophy has been fully accepted. Then it will be possible to say: everything mechanical must be geared to man.

But something is needed for this. First, one must understand that the heart is not a machine, but is directed towards the human being. Then one will also be able to find the basis for the outer machine that shapes it in such a way that it is directed towards the human being. But a science that has made itself so comfortable that it describes the heart as if the human being had only a pump in his blood circulation makes no conscience of making the machine so that the human being must adapt to it. Our whole false social situation is connected with this false view in science. And therefore one must understand that only a correct thinking about man must come first; only then can a correct social life begin. As long as one believes that the heart is a pump, one will not be able to adjust correctly in the outer life either. Only then, when one knows that the invisible man is higher than his heart, it is he who moves his heart, then one will also adjust the machines according to man. We must begin to realize this.

Today people make it much too comfortable for themselves. They make it much too comfortable for themselves. What is most international today? The football game! I explained it to you the other day. But what is spiritual is always pushed together into small circles and so on. It fragments. Right, in Norway you can hear: Long live him! or you hear a German song sung when footballers (from Germany) are up. But otherwise people separate.

What must be grasped is the spirit, but in such a way that it is grasped in the particular. Not that one speaks in general terms of spirit, spirit, but it must be grasped in the particular.

We will continue the discussion next Saturday.