The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have already shown that the Apocalypse is built up on the number principle—one of the occult principles—from a certain view point. From my explanations about the fundamental rhythmic numbers in the universe and in man earlier today you may have seen how deeply numbers are grounded in the universe, to the extent that they can disclose rhythmical things.

The buildup in accordance with numbers is quite natural with occult revelations which are written in the way that the Apocalypse of John is. According to the modern principle of initiation the visions that the Apocalypticer speaks about arise if one has Imaginations before one and Inspiration speaks into them. Then one sees the Imaginations spread out before one in a pictorial way and Inspirations speak through them. However, when this occurs one has a number principle whereby the number 7 is always the most perfect one for all occultists. This is practically a tenet of occultism: 7 is the most perfect number. The number principle enables one to follow things up. You shouldn't think that this number 7 has much content or that its content is very important for one. But it is of very great importance when one is listening to Inspirations. If one lives in the number seven one can understand Inspirations in many different ways. I will give you an example. Let's suppose someone feels that there are important spiritual backgrounds behind his own age. Of course most people around the world feel the spiritual backgrounds in their own time; this is only natural from a human point of view, but it is rather arbitrary nevertheless. For if I am an observer in 1924, the observation year is 1924, whereas if someone else is an observer in the year 1905, that is the observation year, and so on. However, if I am the observer at any time and I know what I'm observing, and I'm able to go 7 impressions back from any given impression, then according to the laws of the spiritual world whatever makes the seventh impression explains the first one, and the fourteenth one explains both of these. So this is really a methodic principle to find one's way into what something can tell one. Just as one has to know the language which someone is speaking in order to understand him, so the main thing is to be able to live in this number seven.

This is the way one has to look at these things. For this revelation of the number seven is very complicated. All kinds of things in the universe are arranged in accordance with the number seven, and to a lesser extent according to twelve and other numbers. One can follow up the events which explain things from every point through multiples of 7.

We can do this precisely in connection with the fact that we indicate such an important point yesterday, which really seems to be extremely important in our age where Michael is regulating things in the world. We pointed out that John's significant vision of the woman clothed with the sun, the dragon under her feet, giving birth to a little boy will appear to men in a particular form in the near future. Therewith we have gained an extremely important point of departure; and from this point of view an apocalypse, every apocalypse and especially John's Apocalypse is the most impressive if one grasps what one is standing in in this way.

When I tried to interpret the Apocalypse in Nuremberg in 1908 it was an entirely different time in the entire Anthroposophical movement. The main thing then was to interpret Anthroposophy by means of the Apocalypse, as it were. One can interpret a great deal through the Apocalypse, and the events in the world which it was important to mention at that time could already be seen in the Apocalypse. However, as I already mentioned a number of times, you should identify yourselves with the Apocalypse and realize that the Apocalypse describes a large number of events which proceed in accordance with multiples of seven. Since I pointed to the events which are connected with the woman clothed with the sun and the dragon under her feet, you will be able to tell in which Apocalyptic point of time we're living from the point of view of the experiences of the consciousness soul.

My lectures in 1908 dealt more with the evolution of mankind in general, and with the evolution of the astral body, but with respect to the consciousness soul which doesn't run parallel with the other evolutionary processes, but pushes into them we're really living in the age of the trumpet sounds today.

We're standing at the beginning of the development of the consciousness soul, and we only hear the trumpet sounds if this consciousness soul elevates itself to the point where it can have supersensible visions, because people do not interpret what goes on down below in a supersensible way today. The significant thing today is that people accept things indifferently and that they do not interpret them in a supersensible way. In Anthroposophical lectures I have often referred to a particular point in the 19th century in this connection, namely to the beginning of the 1840s. I said that the beginning of the forties is a significant incision into the development of the civilized world, from a spiritual viewpoint. It is the culmination of materialism, as it were. Everything that is connected with materialism was already decided in 1843/44. What happened after this until now is basically only an after effect of this, and everything that happens in the future will also be an after effect. This point in time at the beginning of the forties is really extremely important for what has happened to the civilized population of Europe and its American appendage, for the breaking in of Ahrimanic powers into human affairs was a tremendously intensive one. You can say: yes, but there were even worse events after the years 1843/44. However, this only seems to be the case. You have to remember that Ahriman is smarter than human beings. Ahriman did his most important work in 1843/44, and he arranged things in the way that he does this in accordance with his intelligence. This is the low point in the materialistic path, or the summit, if you prefer. Then men continued to go about their business, and the things they did later on are sometimes seemingly nastier, but they are not as terrible for the totality of human evolution. If one looks at them from a spiritual viewpoint, they are the after effects of what was projected at the beginning of the forties. The sixth angel began to blow his trumpet at the beginning of the forties and he will continue to sound until the events of which I spoke yesterday will begin at the end of the 20th century, when the seventh trumpet will begin to sound.

We are definitely in the midst of the three woes. This is the second woe that civilized humanity is going through in the age of the consciousness soul, which was preceded by the fifth trumpet back to 150 years earlier. And if we follow the trumpets back with respect to the seven-foldness of the consciousness soul, we arrive at a somewhat earlier point in time. The consciousness age begins in 1413 down below here on earth; but things have shifted, and earlier times work into them. The trumpet sounds go back to about the age of the Crusades. In real occult centers one always looked upon this time of the Crusades up to our time as the age of the trumpet sounds, in a certain sense. You will be able to connect the stages which are described in the Apocalypse' with outer events. For instance, when Copernicanism takes hold and when materialism sets in one third of the human beings are killed, that is, they stop developing their full spirituality. And the plague of locusts which is described in the Apocalypse is really very shocking.

Here one comes to something which one doesn't like to talk about, although of course it belongs to the things that priests must deal with. This plague of locusts is with us in a very prominent way from a purely consciousness standpoint. Of course such things should not be discussed when we speak in a theoretical way or when we speak to humanity in general, where cures for sick conditions can always occur. But if it's a question of priestly activities, then of course one must know with whom one is dealing, just as one has to know this for normal humanity.

As a rule, the people who call themselves liberals or democrats are very glad if they can point to evidence that the number of people in a particular region on earth is increasing tremendously. An increase in the population is something which is very much desired, especially by politically minded democratic and liberal people, and also by people who think that they are free thinkers and intellectuals.

Now first of all this is not quite correct, because the statistics are based on errors; people usually look at one part of the earth and they don't realize that the other parts of the earth were more densely populated in previous times than they are today. It is not quite correct; however, on the whole it is correct in the sense that there is a kind of a surplus of human beings who are already appearing in our time who have no egos, who are not really human. This is a terrible truth. They walk around and are not incarnations of an ego; they enter into the physical line of heredity and receive an etheric body and an astral body. In a certain way they are equipped with an Ahrimanic consciousness, and they look human if one doesn't look too closely, but they are not human beings in the full sense of the word.

This is a terrible truth, which is present, it's a truth, and when the Apocalypticer speaks about the plague of locusts during the trumpets epoch he is referring directly to human beings. Here again one can see how good the Apocalypticer's vision is, for such men in their astral body look exactly the way the Apocalypticer describes them—like etheric locusts with human faces. One definitely has to think about such supersensible things in this way, and priests must know about such things. For a priest is a minister. Hence he must also be able to find words for everything that happens in such a soul. They're not always bad souls; they can just be souls who get to the soul stage but are lacking an ego.

One will certainly realize this when one runs into these human beings. A priest has to know this, for after all there is fellowship among men with regard to such matters. People with normal souls suffer through their association with such persons who really go through the world like human locusts. The question can and must arise: How should one behave towards such human beings? It is often very difficult to relate to such people because they feel things deeply, they can feel things very deeply, but one notices that there is no real individuality in them. However, one must of course take care to keep the fact that they have no individualities from them, otherwise insanity will necessarily result. But even though one has to conceal this from them, it's a question of arranging things for such souls—after all they are souls, even though they're not spirits—in such a way that these people can develop in the company of others, that they can make connections with others and go along with them, as it were. These human beings display the nature and essence of human beings fairly closely until their 20th year. The intellectual or mind soul only emerges around age 20, and this makes it possible for the ego to live out its life on earth.

Anyone who says that one shouldn't act in a sympathetic way to such ego-less, individuality-less people, since they won't incarnate again and because they have no individuality—is very much mistaken. He would also have to say that one shouldn't behave in a sympathetic way towards children. One must decide what is really inside such men in each individual case. Sometimes such men contain posthumous souls, that is, posthumous with respect to the actual or normal human souls that arose at a particular time in evolution and which incarnate repeatedly as men. These are souls which remained behind, or they are souls which returned belatedly from other planets, to which almost all human beings went during a certain age. Such souls may be present in such human bodies. Thus we must consciously educate such men like permanent children.

All of this is really secreted in the Apocalypse. And if one takes these ideas in the Apocalypse that are given as Imaginations, they sometimes cut into one's heart in a terrible way. It's really horrible the way he talks about all kinds of suffering that will befall mankind on earth with regard to our age; we can only say that a great deal of this is already here as far as the spiritual aspects go.

Then of course there are mildly grand ideas like the angels who come down with incense and a censer. There's a reference to the smoke of incense. Then our gaze immediately falls upon a great deal which happened at the time of the Crusades. The trumpets go back to the Crusades. What we see in the sphere of the consciousness soul enters the consciousness soul of humanity during the Crusades epoch.

Here one finds that consciousnesses of individual personalities arise during the time of the Crusades and what is connected with this, who really had tremendously strong impressions from their experiences of the spiritual world. Here we really meet what I would like to call geniuses of piety. It's very important for us to realize that we meet geniuses of, religiousness there.

If we go further back, we find that for the consciousness sphere the period between the Mystery of Golgotha and the time of the Crusades and everything that is connected with this is a smaller epoch that corresponds to the opening of the seven seals. One can only understand this completely if one realizes the following. Just think of how many personalities arise during the time of the Crusades who direct almost all of their religiousness into their depths, into their intensity of feeling, into an inner mystical experience. This begins at that time, whereas previously one looked up into the whole universe when one wanted to perceive the divine world; the previous state of affairs also existed in tone-setting places, although there was a continual battle with the stream that proceeded from Rome. They had an understanding for the God who lives, weaves and works in the sensory phenomena to which they looked up. However, at some point everything was more or less directed within. The great geniuses of mysticism appear. Previously one received divine revelations through the perception of the universe; afterwards we have a feeling of the, inner kindling of light which the human heart can feel, so that divine things can be illuminated from within men.

The stages which the Apocalypse describes are also present here. We have the first, quiet, victorious advance, where the spreading out of Christianity depends on the victorious spirit and word, where Christianity spreads out in the sub-depths of the social life at that time. Then we have a second epoch, where the spread of, Christianity takes away a lot of what one could call peace from the world. Christianity participates quite a bit in the wars which take place in a second epoch. Then we see an epoch where a gradual dying out of the inner impulse of Christianity occurs, where Christianity becomes the state religion, which of course is a dying of the real Christian impulse. Then we have the period which corresponds to the fourth seal, when Islam breaks in in the way I described. And so it goes; seal after seal is opened, and then what occurs under the influence of significant religious geniuses and under the influence of the Crusades is something that one can observe if one follows up what really happened more exactly. In this respect all the history books are really a falsification of history.

Up till the Crusades the spread of Christianity in a good sense through the repeated efforts of countless members of monastic orders and also in a more external and bad sense, occurred through the direct inspiration of the Palestinian stories. Of course, the gospels were only referred to by priests and not by laymen, but the things that happened were definitely influenced by what the priests learned from the gospels. The priests had the gospels and the cultic rites; the cult gradually became something that reflected the supersensible world in a sensory way. The priests looked upon the sacrifice in the mass as a direct portal to the supersensible world, and therefore they looked up to the starry heavens less and less for their divine, spiritual inspiration. All of the wonderful prophecies and wisdom which I mentioned this morning in connection with ancient astrology and astrosophy disappeared almost entirely by the time of the Crusades.

During the time of the Crusades we suddenly see people appearing who travelled from east to west. Some of them are coming back from the Crusades, and others who came a little later had taken a deep interest in the secrets of the Orient. A large number of writings were brought from the east that were later lost or destroyed. They were definitely brought, but not many of them survived because people didn't watch their literary possessions as vigilantly then as one does today. However, the cosmic Christianity which they contained was handed down by word of mouth from about the time of the Crusades. People began to develop a deep interest in this at the time of the Crusades.

A kind of 7th seal is opened here. And one could say that things have really changed with regard to people's respect for written things. For instance, it's still uncertain at the moment, but if this Italian professor really did find handwritten things by Livius, you can imagine what a storm the Italian state will kick up in order to acquire them. And yet you wouldn't have to go back too far to get to a time when the state would have been quite indifferent to whether or not this or that had been found. This is something which has only developed rather recently.

I once witnessed a find like this. When I was at the Goethe and Schiller archives we received a letter by Goethe which looked rather odd; it was dirty and terribly torn. To us this was a real crime; that was no way to treat Goethe's letters. We tried to find out what was behind this. And we discovered that the letter had once been in the possession of Kuno Fischer, and he had simply sent Goethe's original letters to the printers with his notes and comments in the margins, without bothering to copy them. It was a bit miraculous that this letter had survived, since one generally doesn't keep manuscripts.

Thus it's not too surprising that the Christianity that was still alive in the Orient, or the orientalism that helped to explain Christianity were spread by the Crusades. What we would call cabalistic truths spread and a few people who might have known much more than Jakob Boehme lived at a time when no one thought that this was strange, whereas during Jakob Boehme's time the fact that someone like him existed created a sensation.

It is the time of the Crusades, where we want to point to what was going on in men's consciousnesses, and not so much to the outer events that are described in history books,—it's the time when the seal age gave way to the trumpet age. People with a little depth to them have always had a feeling about the time of the Crusades which made them say: Ah yes, the trumpet sounds; if I look at the thing from supersensible viewpoints it's really terrible what is going on there with respect to human souls. However, men on earth don't hear the trumpets, even though they're there.

A great many people should be aware of this trumpet period, since we're living at the time of the 6th trumpet, and you know what the most important effects and characteristics of this trumpet are. We're told that a third part of the men are killed, as I mentioned. Of course this doesn't happen all at once. But this killing refers to the absence of an ego in those men who had already been prepared previously through their locust forms.

These are things which force priests to look more deeply into the structure of what actually occurs. After all, priests are supposed to be dealing with supersensible things. We are surrounded by supersensible things in all directions, and what one can observe in human beings through the fact that they have a physical body is only one segment of human life. As soon as we press into the supersensible world we see that people do things of which they are often not aware. It could be that it's in someone's karma to behave in a particular way towards another human being in this earth life; and one can sometimes not know what it does to the other person's life if he goes by him without paying any attention to him. Of course later on karma will exert much more force and the thing will be adjusted; but maybe it could have been adjusted in this lifetime already. Someone who should have had something to do with another human being in this life cannot be moved to do it and he passes him by. One doesn't necessarily have to notice this in outer life on the physical plane. No real objections to this can be made, since the person concerned has done all of his duties, from a conventional outer viewpoint, but perhaps he did something that can strike terribly deep wounds into something which is connected with world evolution. Then one cannot say that one is dealing with super-terrestrial things, but with supersensible things, for supersensible things are constantly happening on earth.

It will be necessary to understand the Apocalypse in a serious way, to the extent that the one whom I called the etheric Christ will make himself visible within humanity. Therefore, it was due to a very healthy feeling which came up out of your deepest sub-consciousness that you wanted to make the Apocalypse into the object of these studies. Perhaps you initially had a different idea about what I can give about the Apocalypse at this time, but that you wanted to hear something about the Apocalypse from me was definitely the voice of the times in your hearts. And one can say that the fact that the need arose in you to understand the Apocalypse shows that you have a certain relationship with John the Apocalypticer, since you priests belong together and have become united in such tendencies. Since this permeation with the spirit of the Apocalypse is very necessary for you, you will not find any contradiction in the fact that one can find various sevenfold epochs, that one can really begin them anywhere and that one then discovers how things proceed; but if one cannot look upon the number principle as the methodic thing one won't find any connections in world evolution at all. Therewith we have really touched upon the productive side of the Apocalypse for our time.

Now we usually find other events sprinkled into the Apocalypse at the places where one set of seven goes over into the next one. that we run into here is very much in need of an explanation. If one only reads the Apocalypse in an external way one might think that there are so and so many numbers of human beings who have the seal of God on their foreheads in a particular epoch, so that they are among the fortunate ones who are rescued, or saved, or, however one wants to put it, whereas the others cannot be saved. This, is something which can be depressing if one reads the Apocalypse in a thoughtful way.

However, one should realize that there is always a difference between racial development and individual development in ancient writings. One should realize that no one felt at all depressed in earlier times when one said that so and so many will be saved in a particular race, whereas the others will be destroyed. No one included himself among these because one thought in a realistic way. It's just like today, where everyone is anxious to have his life insured.

Here one calculates how long one will probably live. Insurance companies don't accept people who will probably die soon because if they insured a lot of people who will soon die, their cash boxes would soon be empty. They want to have people who live a long time and make a lot of payments. Hence one must calculate the insured's probable life expectancy on the basis of past experience through probability calculus, which is a very interesting method of calculation. I have never found that anyone felt that he had to die at the moment he was supposed to according to the no doubt correct methods of the insurance companies. There's no such thing. One doesn't feel obliged to die. And this is based on a reality. As soon as one gets into numbers one is not grasping the stage of spirituality at which a particular human individuality is.

When one says such things, one is touching upon a certain mystery and an occult secret. This is based on the fact that one thinks that if one has 1,2,3,4,5 individualities and one counts them and then uses the number—already in counting them—that this must also be of importance for the spiritual world. But it is not important in the same way. Numbers enter in at the moment when the spiritual world breaks through and becomes manifest. As for instance when it becomes manifest in the world year or in breathing, or wherever the spiritual world breaks through. So that if one ascends to a spiritual consciousness, one needs the number at the boundary or threshold into the spiritual world. One doesn't get further there if one doesn't have a number or something similar to a number. But once on has crossed the threshold and one wants to do something with numbers, nothing fits. Therefore, when an occult writer like the Apocalypticer speaks of racial development which takes place on earth, he can very well say that there are so and so many people in this category—and we will see next time what these numbers mean—but a single human individuality cannot feel that he is affected by this, because these numbers refer to the development of races and not to human individualities. We will go into how all of this is possible the next time.

I will try to answer your prepared questions during the course of this lecture. Except that I would like to answer some of them in a special session with the arch-rulers even if they were asked by others. This could be done in the next few days, and the answers could then be passed on.

I would especially like to draw your attention to a seal in the Apocalypse which is an Imagination of the Apocalypticer and which has often been depicted by artists in connection with the Apocalypse. One cannot always say that these pictorial renderings of what is in the Apocalypse are very felicitous. However, one can hardly fail to recognize the individual parts of the seal that is involved here and which will be realized in our time, as we saw yesterday, for they come to meet one in the Apocalypse in a quite characteristic way. However, in order to understand this seal, we will have to discuss something which goes parallel with it, which is very important for our time, and has already been touched upon in an Anthroposophical connection and which we find illuminated in a particular way at this point in the Apocalyptic discussion.

If one looks at the development of man and notices how he becomes a being who is split into three parts, as his consciousness makes the transition from the physical, sensory world to a perception of the spiritual world, as I described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?,—if one looks at this one will say to oneself, a triad and a monad are united in men through the integration of these into the form of a physical being. This union is really quite obvious. One can see it if one studies the opinion about the division of the human being that is expressed in Anthroposophy.

Let's look at man and his spirit, soul and body. The way this division is related to the others that are given in Anthroposophy should be clear without further ado. Now, thoughts live in the spirit which man has today. These thoughts are like I the ones which I refer to in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for instance, where one has pure thoughts that are freely created in man's consciousness, and not the kind that are permeated by sense perceptions. Here, thoughts are almost completely illusory from a qualitative viewpoint; they are a full reality to such a small extent that we don't have quite enough inner force because we don't have a mirror image, and so we can't quite, compare them with mirror images, and yet in a certain sense we can. The image that appears in a mirror doesn't unfold any forces along the directions of its lines, it is completely passive. Human thoughts have some force when they are developed, so that we can catch this force and we can permeate it with will—as I said yesterday in the esoteric class. But the ordinary thoughts that man has during his lifetime are really like mirror images in comparison with the universe's existence and its full content. So that although we hear spirit in our human being, it's a mirror image of the spirit.

What we bear within us there comes from a world which I called spiritland in my Theosophy. So when we think on earth we're really bringing the ingredients of the spiritland down to the earth as an illusory reflection. When we think we carry what Theosophy calls devachan down into the earth sphere, even though this is only a faint reflection of it. We bear these contents in us on earth; we bear a faint reflection of heavenly splendors in us.

If we pass on to the soul element we mainly find feeling there. It exists as feeling during the waking state, and as pictorial dreams while we're asleep. The only difference between dreams and feelings is that one is the content of the soul during the waking state and the other is its content during sleep. What we experience in our feelings as men on earth between birth and death comes from another world that I described from a certain viewpoint in my Theosophy. It comes from the soul world which we experience in its real form after death. Our feeling life is not a mirror image of this real form but an image of it which is maintained in our soul by creative elemental powers. We only dream of this soul world in our feelings and there is no reality in our image of it.

What constitutes men's bodies on earth today does not develop any consciousness of archetypes, but it contains the strongest realities of existence. We are real in our body, but we are only active in the physical, terrestrial world in it. Thus the three members of man's being belong to different worlds.

You must develop a correct view about these things, since you want to work upon the being of man, and therefore you must have something in your feelings that points to what exists in man's being. Quite good philosophers have failed to understand my division of man's being altogether. They have expressed one misunderstanding after another about it, which shows how difficult it is even for good thinkers of the present time to really get into Anthroposophy.

One philosopher spoke about this division of man as if it were an arbitrary one that had been made with the intellect and which amounted to a formal schematism. Of course one can also divide a table into legs, top, etc., even though the whole thing is made of wood. One could also divide it from left to right, but the division of the human being has nothing to do with such an arbitrary classification. One could put it like this: if one has real hydrogen and real oxygen and one combines them one gets water. They are realities and not just artificial schemata. Likewise, man's members are not separated in an arbitrary way; they are integrated into the reality of human nature, so that one can say that the spirit comes from spirit land, the soul from the soul world and the physical body from the physical world. These members of the human being come from three different worlds and they are integrated in man. And when man leaves the physical world with his consciousness, his inner elements split up, and the one becomes three. However, what happens in individual men in this way takes place in the whole of humanity throughout its various racial and national evolutions, although not everyone has to participate in it. One can say that the evolving humanity which is present in the sub-consciousness of every single human being and which doesn't become noticeable to ordinary consciousness, goes through stages of development that are similar to the ones individual men go through.

Something like a splitting into three and a crossing of the threshold by mankind is taking place in our time. In our consciousness age individual men have to acquire something which constitutes a going past' the Guardian of the Threshold, if they want to do it. However, mankind is going past the Guardian of the Threshold in our time, although, individual men are unaware of this. The whole of humanity is crossing the threshold. Whereas the physical body still gave something to men on earth up to the end of the 18th century because of the elemental beings which are living in it, men must now get their virtues and everything productive that they will find inwardly from the spiritual world; this is mankind as a whole, not individual human beings. So that a crossing of the threshold is occurring in the evolution of mankind as a whole, which appears to the Apocalypticer before he has his vision of the sun-illuminated woman with the dragon under her feet, because it actually precedes it in time. Here the Apocalypticer has another vision that clearly reflects what he wants to say: The time is coming when the whole of humanity, or at least its civilized parts will have to cross the threshold. And a triad appears which is the cosmic Imagination of what mankind is going through. There will be ever more men who will have the feeling: My thoughts want to run away from me, and my feet are being pulled down by the earth's gravity; this is in addition to other feelings that men can develop when these things become more pathological. Many people today have the strong feeling that their thoughts are running away from them and that their feet are being pulled down to the earth too much. Except that our present-day civilization talks people out of something like this, just as children are talked out of visions they have which are nevertheless based on a real foundation.

However, what lives strongly in our time appears before the clairvoyant eye of the Apocalypticer as a figure that forms out of the clouds, has a face like a sun, goes over into a rainbow, and has fiery feet, of which one is planted on the ocean and the other on the earth. One could say that this is really the most significant vision that the present-day human soul should look at. For the thoughts that belong to spirit land are in the face which is born out of the clouds above. The rainbow is the feeling world in man's soul which belongs to the soul world. What is contained in the bodies of men who belong to the physical world is in the fiery feet that get their strength from the power of the earth Which is covered by the ocean.

One could say that this points to a real cultural secret of the present, which is that there are three kinds of men, and not that each man is split into three parts. One can see this very clearly today. We have cloud men who can only think, whereas the two other parts—rainbow and fiery feet—remain stunted. We have rainbow men where the main development is in the feelings. They can only grasp Anthroposophy with their feelings and not with their minds. However, this type is also present in the outside world and not just in the Anthroposophical Society. They can only grasp the world with their feelings. These people's feelings are well developed but their thinking and will are stunted. Then there are people today who act as if they only had a hypertrophically developed will; their thinking and feeling are stunted; they charge like bulls and act in accordance with direct, outer impulses,—they're the fiery footed men.

The vision of John the Apocalypticer depicts these three kinds of men which we meet in life. We should become aware of this secret of our present-day civilization so that we can look at human beings in the right way. One can also discover them if one looks at larger world events.

Just look at what is, happening in Russia. We have the influence of the cloud man, of the man who mainly thinks, in whom feeling and will are neglected. They would like to surrender their will to a social mechanism, and their feelings are used by Ahrimanic powers because they don't have any control over them. They are thinkers, but since man on earth is organized in an Ahrimanic and Luciferic way, their thinking is like - - I will use an analogy that will seem like a perfectly natural one to anyone who knows spiritual science; it will only scare such people away who haven't worked their way into this kind of thing yet. If one takes the thoughts of Lenin and the others and one looks at these thoughts, that is, if one tries to imagine what the combined thoughts of Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharski, etc., looks like, if one imagines what is growling and raging in the heads of leading Russians today, one gets what one calls a system of forces in physics. If one was a gigantic elemental spirit one could form clouds and arouse thunder and lightning up in the sky over a large territory with these forces. But they don't belong on earth. This image might surprise you, but anyone who can look into the occult depths of existence must say that the same forces that weave and live in the heads of leading Russians are also in the lightning that is formed in the clouds over our heads and that they flash the lightning down to the earth and roll the thunders. This is where these forces belong. Their action in leading Bolsheviks is out of place.

So you see that the Apocalypticer clearly foresaw many things that are present in our time. And he knew that such an epochal period of time can be indicated with a number. I myself have indicated the approximate number of years which the development of the consciousness soul, intellectual or mind soul, etc., covers. I said that such a period lasts one twelfth of 25.920 years.

Now the place in the Apocalypse to which I'm referring gave me quite a bit of trouble for a while. For the Apocalypticer supposedly prophesies about things that will take one thousand two hundred and threescore days. They used to speak of days when they meant years. Anyway, the Apocalypticer mentions the number 1260. It took a lot of intensive research to discover that the 1260 days is really a printing error, as it were, in the Apocalypse that was handed down. It should say 2160 days. Then it agrees with what one can see today. It's quite possible that an un-clarity arose in some school where the things were handed down, because many numbers look like their mirror images to seers. However, this is something that is not too important when one feels one's way into the Apocalypse.

Now the people who stand within their race in such a way that they're really cloud men are confronted by others who are rainbow men. Their thinking is relatively inactive, they mainly like to use traditional thoughts and they are rather timid about approaching the spiritual world with their thoughts. One meets a large number of such rainbow men in central European regions.

Thinking and feeling get increasingly stunted the further we go west, where we find a pathological development of fiery footed men. One finds large numbers of such fiery footed human beings in the western part of Europe and presumably in America. So that we can divide the earth along these lines: In the east there are many cloud men, in the center many rainbow men, and in the west many fiery footed men.

If we take racial developments into account, one could say that something like a picture of the figure which we encounter here in the Apocalypticer is spread out over the earth, if one looks at it, spiritually from outside. One can't do this in a balloon or airplane, but if one would raise oneself up spiritually into the heights from a point in Westphalen and would look down at the earth, Asia would have a kind of a cloud form face with solar shapes, and one would see rainbow colors spread out over Europe, and further over would be the fiery feet, with one planted on the Andes in South America and the other in the Pacific Ocean. And then one has the earth underneath this image.

This is one of the most incisive prophecies that the Apocalypticer has for our time. This is something that is very important for priestly activities, for the great riddle of our time that developed with Napoleon consists of this. This striving of men into races and nations that has come to expression so incomprehensibly throúgh Wilsonianism today really only arose in a distinct way under the influence of Napoleonism, of the first Napoleon. The way that men are striving towards races and nations and the way that they basically want to bury all cosmopolitanism today is really quite terrible. But the reason for this is that this passage through the threshold, place is occurring.

Just as a human being splits up in the spiritual world when he develops further, so men on earth split up into regions that individual human beings remain unaware of, namely, into cloud men, rainbow men and fiery footed men. This splitting of men into three parts—which I described for individuals in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, has occurred for humanity on earth; it's here. The powerful sign which the Apocalypticer sketches is there in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. People cannot find the harmony between the three parts at first, and so they look for things in the split rather than in the union; which sometimes leads to rather strange results.

For instance, through this whole external way of thinking that takes hold of people, one can see that people don't find their way together with inner understanding, that is, they often unite for superficial reasons. For instance, we can see that the Czechs whose land is between the Krusnehory and Fichtel mountains, the Bohemian Forest and down to the Morave River and over to Bratislava (formerly Pressburg), and up to the Ceskyles and Sumava Mountains as the southern boundary,—that these Czechs are cloud people in the most eminent sense of the word, who have only developed their thinking. They were welded together with the Slovaks in a way that shows a lack of inner understanding, for the Slovaks are definitely a rainbow people who are not the thinking type at all. On the other hand, we see that another quite external relationship which had been formed shortly before is dissolved. All of these human, earthly activities are not very sensible, because they want to exclude the spirit.

We see that the whole of Slovakia was recently separated from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, which is the territory which I just indicated. We see that all of this Slovakia was previously united with Magyar country and with real Magyars. You must distinguish the real Magyars from the immigrated ones, and you can do this just by looking at their names. A real Magyar has a name one can't even pronounce in the west, especially if he's an older type. But he's called Hirschfeld, if he's one of those agitative and screaming Magyars of today. One has to go back to the genuine Magyars who are all fiery-footed men, and they were briefly welded together with the rainbow Slovaks. The non-spirit in the world today throws the dice in such a way that the Slovaks are first thrown together with the Magyars and then with the Czechs.

That is the way the dice are being thrown in general today. This comes to expression in deeper symptoms, such as the fact that a really significant person like Masaryk who is standing at the helm in the Czechoslovakian Republic, is a Slovak, and not a Czech. Anyone who knows Masaryk knows that he is a rainbow man who can't think at all. If you read his books you will see that our age is speaking in them. He is a rainbow man, a real Slovak.

One has to be able to look at contemporary human beings in accordance with these categories in order to see the kind of crap game that is being played, although of course this is based on world karma. Here we must look at the age—which is really ours—which can say of itself that it is entering ever more into men's consciousness and into the consciousness soul. People previously saw the starry script written outside; they saw the contents of old traditions and old wisdom written outside. There is a kind of a memory of this man who is split into three in ancient books. Everything which the wise men proclaimed about the world in the mystery centers in Macedonia, Greece, Ephesus, Samothrace, Delphi and in other places in Asia Minor and elsewhere is the book which is preserved from ancient times, which is in the hand of the angel whose face is fashioned out of clouds, his chest out of a rainbow, and his feet out of fire, and he stands firmly in America with the rest of his body spread out over Europe and Asia. However, as consciousness men we can only keep this active and alive for ourselves if we have to look within ourselves for the source which enables us to learn how to see spiritual things. We must devour the book, which could previously only be brought from outside, and bring it into ourselves. This book which contains the world's secrets is sweet in the mouths of some people at first. People like to come to things which can give them spiritual views; so that they taste like honey to them. But as soon as one has to fulfill the exacting conditions in life which are connected with a spiritual comprehension of the world then what the Apocalypticer says is sweet as honey becomes a stomach ache, especially to the people who have become so materialistic today. These people find that the digestion of the spiritual nourishment that is so necessary for them is painful.

If we look at this, we have to admit that all of this dice throwing and confusion indicates that a force which can measure everything in a new way must come from the spiritual power that can be seen in threefold man. A reed, or really a measuring rod, is sent down from heaven, with which everything is to be measured in a new way. Just look at our time. Doesn't everything have to be measured anew? Shouldn't we add something like a cloud shape to that abstract Asian shape that we find on our maps, rainbow colors to Europe and fiery feet to the Americas? Don't we have to measure everything anew from the viewpoint of the spiritual life? After all, we're right m the midst of what the Apocalypse is showing us here.

If we grasp what we must stand in in a fully conscious way, we will get away from the layman's attitude that is often present in the depths of our sub-consciousness today and we will acquire a non-rationalistic grasp of the tasks of our time through what is to be a new priesthood. This is something that should be said in connection with this particular chapter of the Apocalypse. The things agree in every detail. Vie will have more to say about racial and individual evolution tomorrow.

We will now try to imagine how what is said about the woes, etc., in the Apocalypse often plays into our time, and how the consciousness soul can be taken hold of by this and how it of course points back to previous experiences on earth at a certain level,—germinally indicating tremendous upheavals in advance. We should realize that what I interpreted for you yesterday has an important influence on the overall shaping of human evolution.

We should consider that although the things that take place in the spiritual sphere are not taken into account very much by our contemporaries and by our age in general, they nevertheless have a very strong and much more extensive effect upon things than people think; people generally think that the effects of spiritual events are restricted to the spiritual sphere. For instance, when I said yesterday that certain leading personalities in eastern Europe are developing thoughts which really represent a force that should only be active in cloud formations, it indicates that what is going on in the heads of Russian leaders will someday be something that will appear as events in the clouds after it develops out of its present germinal condition. So that one can say that the current upheavals in Russia will later be tremendous stormy revolutions that will occur above the heads of men.

We're now coming to another secret of Apocalyptic vision that should explain a certain passage. Thereby we're getting ever closer to a real interpretation of the mighty visions in the Apocalypse. We're coming to what we with our present way of experiencing things should make clear to ourselves. If we look at life over the short span of time that people usually consider today without going back to the starting condition of the earth or to its final one through daring and usually foolish hypotheses,—if one surveys this without the aid of spiritual observations, one can say: Nature's processes take their course in the outer world; we see lesser natural events that occur over the years and we see greater events in nature such as earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions.

However, what we call historical events such as the 30 years' war, Louis XIV, etc., run alongside these, although we don't feel the need to connect the two series because we only have a limited overview of these events. They follow each other, and they occur simultaneously, and no one feels an urge to make a connection between the two series, because one thinks that they run parallel. However, one only has to look at a longer span of time and one will see that this parallel idea leads one astray. For if one looks back from the present life on earth to a previous one—which must of course be understood in a theoretical way as long as it is not grasped by the Imaginations which the spiritual investigator gives—if one brings repeated earth lives into one's real experience one gets the impression. One looks over a meadow and into the woods and one notices how different these things are from what they were during one's past incarnation on earth. One notices this even if one is far away from the place where one was last time. For everything on earth is changing continuously, and no matter where one was before, the plants and animals have taken on a very different character.

One feels this as soon as one becomes aware of, something from the previous incarnation and one then looks out into nature again in a free way. One feels that this is very astonishing and bewildering. One gets the inner feeling that what one sees in one's environment didn't come from what was there at the time of the previous incarnation, but that the main part of it originated elsewhere. It's like this: someone, with the customary scientific world view looks upon what happens in nature as a straight line (See drawing). For instance, one has the years 343, 895, 1260, 1924. Then one thinks that what is growing on the meadow today came from the seeds of what grew before and so on back to 1260, 895, etc. One follows the generations of seeds from one to the next and one thinks of this as a straight line. But this is not so. At the moment I mentioned one discovers that this is not so. I have often pointed out that the body which one carries around today is not the same as the one, one had 7 to 8 years ago, with the exception of a few inclusions. Some things harden during the course of one's life as I mentioned in the other course but in any case none of the substances that are in your body now were in it when you were a three-year-old child; all of the physical matter has been exchanged.

Likewise, nothing of what was present in former ages is present, in the meadow with all its flowers. Instead one gets the idea that the present meadow came down from spiritual worlds, and that what was a meadow in previous times also came down from spiritual worlds, etc., and that what was a meadow centuries ago has perished completely. Spiritual seeds that come down from the upper regions are continuously replacing what existed previously, and it's not just a matter of physical seeds that are handed down by heredity.

Once one has grasped that what is a meadow today was not a meadow in, say, the 13th century, but that there was another meadow there which has perished in the meantime, one gets an idea of the mission of snow: It is I the bearer of a continual dying process. One gets more snow every year, and ice is continually renewed from above, as nature dies into this whole, elementary shaping process that is present in the dynamics of snow and ice formation. This is the way things are in our time. However, this state of affairs will eventually change. We will say more about this shortly. However, I would first like to mention the following.

As soon as one notices that the meadow out there came down from super-terrestrial spheres via snow and ice—and it makes no difference which region one was previously incarnated in—one knows: you helped to create this meadow in the time between your last incarnation and now. You helped to build up everything in nature that is around you in your present incarnation. That is something one notices. And then one also becomes aware that this is only a temporary state of affairs.

Scientists are always saying that the processes you find out in nature are something permanent. But this is really nonsense. In reality nothing out there remains. The fact is that everything changes including the laws of nature. That is why today's scientists have gotten to the point where they only look upon the most abstract laws of nature as permanent ones. Generalities like: Every effect has a cause. Matter is constant—that really say nothing are considered to be eternal laws of nature.

This alternation on earth between the greening summer which dissipates moisture into warmth and the withering winter that solidifies moisture into ice and snow, did not always exist, and a time is coming when it will no longer exist. Instead a condition will arise in which there will be something that doesn't exist today.

You see, we have the alternating states today—I would like to emphasize this and I would like it if you grasp this quite clearly—we have the present state of affairs: Firstly, summer, which evaporates watery things through warmth, and secondly winter, which uses cold to harden the same watery things into ice and snow. Fall and spring is a condition that oscillates between these two. All of this will gradually become evened out. Summer will no longer evaporate aqueous things as much, and winter won't harden them into ice and snow as much. Instead there'll be an intermediate condition where watery things will have a different consistency, namely a considerably thicker one than in the summer time, where it remains and doesn't just pass over into another one. Snow and ice will not look like they do today; they will look like a reflective, transparent mass that will remain in both summer and winter. This is the emergence of the “glassy sea” which the Apocalypticer refers to.

We have pointed to a natural phenomenon which we grasped through an observation of events in nature and we have placed it in time. Now since we know that everything that is done around us really comes from us, and that we help to make the meadows on which our karma places us when we incarnate, we should also be able to extend this to the great transformation of the earth. And it is quite correct to say that men will contribute ever more towards the creation of the glassy sea through their inner dynamic qualities and through the intellectuality that they experience and develop in the consciousness soul age, so that men will work together on the great events of the future. Here you have a unified working of what occurs in men and of what takes place outside in nature and not just a parallelism.

Now you will also be able to understand something else, and that is the following. We should realize that when we come into the divine element that is connected with human evolution and into the state of equilibrium between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces that is continually being maintained,—if we grasp the real essence of this, then whenever we rim into this, when we rightly perceive what is not an influence from Lucifer and what is not an influence from Ahriman, that is, when we perceive what comes from this progressive, divine spirituality that is really connected with human evolution,—if we approach the divine element that keeps a balance between the realms where Luciferic elements are continuously flowing in and Ahrimanic things are continuously flowing in, we find that the basic force in everything that is streaming through here and which forms men outwardly, and which inwardly ensouls them and permeates them with spirit—is pure love. This fundamental force is pure love.

The universe consists of pure love, as far as its inner substance and being is concerned and in so far as it relates to human beings. It is nothing else; we don't find anything besides pure love in the divine things that are assigned to men. However, this love is an inner element and it can be experienced by souls in an inner way. It would never become outwardly manifest if it didn't create its body from the etheric elements that we know as light. If we really look at the world in an occult way, we get to the point where we tell ourselves: the fundamental essence of the world is inner love substantiality that becomes manifest outwardly as light.

That is not an opinion or a belief for someone who has an insight into these things; it is knowledge that was gained in a quite objective way. To the extent that man Is rooted in the universe, the latter is essentially love that becomes manifest outwardly as light. Essentially, because we have to do with all the essences or beings of the higher hierarchies who are carried by this love and who experience this love inwardly, which however becomes manifest as love, if we want to use an abstract idea. The outer sheen of beings is love and the outer sheen of love is light. That is something that one repeatedly emphasized in all the mysteries, and which is real knowledge that has been acquired by every true occultist, and it is not just an opinion or a belief.

Now the fact is that this is one stream in the universe, and it is important to us as human beings, but it is only one stream. If we look at the age of materialism since the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, at the climax of materialism during the 40's of the 19th century and at the development of materialism afterwards with everything that people think and do and with all the terribly destructive forces that have been raging in humanity since the middle of the 19th century, although many people haven't even really noticed them yet,—we can well imagine that divine love which unfolds in light weaves above all of this.

However, if you take some very clean water, some absolutely crystal clear water and dip a dirty sponge in it and squeeze it, and let the water run out again, you will see that it is cloudy and dirty. You have let the dirty sponge suck up the crystal clear water and you have squeezed it out again and it has become dirty water. The crystal clear, pure water can't help it that it flows out as dirty water when one squeezes the sponge. And the divine love that is springing up in pure light can't help it that it is being absorbed by the age of materialism, by a sponge that is permeated by impurities and that it thereby becomes something quite different when it reemerges. So when crystal clear water is absorbed by a dirty sponge it becomes cloudy, undrinkable water, and by analogy we can imagine that when divine love that appears in light is sucked up by all the evil ingredients that are latently or openly raging in humanity, it becomes divine wrath.

The secret of the next age is that divine love will appear in the form of divine wrath through what happens in humanity. It will appear in the form of the divine wrath that will stop the harmful effects of the materialistic arrangements that are arising in our materialistic, consciousness age by destroying them. Proceeding from what appears to the Apocalypticer in pictures, he speaks of the pouring out of the vials of wrath in the next age. That is something that was expressed in the mysteries in a sentence that had a terribly shocking effect upon the neophytes: Divine love appears in the form of divine wrath in the sphere of human illusions.

That is a statement that was handed down in the mysteries many millennia ago and it lives in a prophetic way in John's visions in the Apocalypse. He describes how divine love becomes sullied through the preceding events and what will have to happen as the necessary fulfillment of the preceding, namely, the pouring out of divine wrath in an age when men's actions will have a much greater effect upon events in nature than they do today. For the parallelism that gives men the illusory idea that nature and man's soul and spirit run side by side, only applies in the middle parts of evolutionary periods. Even in the smaller evolutions such as the present period between the Atlantean catastrophe and the war of all against all, men had a greater influence upon events in nature at the beginning and end of these periods through what went on in them. Hence it is not just a fable that a large part of humanity was using black magic on a large scale near the end of the Atlantean period of evolution. The consequence of the crimes that men committed through their dealings with black magic was the events in nature that brought about the Atlantean catastrophe.

Therefore, many things that are happening now will give rise to later events in nature. One of these is the Russian revolution, which also had many occult causes; its storms of thunder and lightning will pour out over the heads of men all summer long for years to come. Other world elements that are gathering in our time are clouding the gods' love, and will appear as events in nature that we can only look upon as a transformation of divine love into divine wrath through the illusions of men.

Looked at from a real and true point of view, the divine wrath that is poured out over men is still a manifestation of divine love, and that is why the sentence was formulated in the way that I gave it. If divine love would become weak and if it would seemingly take pity on men in this age, it would be no real compassion, for it would ignore the necessary consequences of human thoughts and actions. That would be very loveless, for then humanity would become corrupt. The deleterious things that men did and that would have an unspeakably harmful effect on further human evolution can only be eliminated by the outpouring of divine wrath, which is a metamorphosis of divine love. This sentence in the manuscripts is so old that it is often stated in its oriental form in Europe, so that one says: In the region of mayadivine love becomes manifest as divine wrath. Here again one can see how completely the Apocalypse is taken from the really active ingredients in the world. The deeper one goes into it the more one realizes that one can really rely on this Apocalypse; although that is a rather trivial way of putting it. It is basically something that tells priests what is happening in the course of human and world evolution. It was originally given to priests as the really esoteric part of Christianity in addition to the other part that was exoteric.

I would now like to go back to something so that we can proceed from there in our deliberations. I pointed out that one sees something strange today, namely, there is a strong longing for spirituality in the subconscious wishes of the human soul. What is experienced on the physical plane today in a superficial and external way is basically quite different from what is really present in the souls of present-day men.

Something rather surprising happened today that confirms this. A few days ago I told you about the strange form my lectures to the workmen is taking in terms of their content due to the questions that are being asked. As I mentioned, one can see from the desires which are developing there that one can speak to people out of the spirit of the Apocalypse today if one finds a suitable tone. Sven though one doesn't talk to them about the Apocalypse right away, one can speak out of its spirit just as we're doing here.

Now the rather surprising thing that happened is that I arrived at something that I had to tell you today, because it arises out of the whole context of our studies here. This morning when I gave my lecture to the workmen, when everything which we will now have to discuss stood before me quite clearly, a question was asked that made it necessary to present scientific things that I had intended to present to you today. Here one can see the presence of subterranean influences and one can see that what is happening here in a real, spiritual way through the fact that these lectures are being given, arouses longings over there that would otherwise not exist. That lecture over there would never have been given today if we had not been talking about the Apocalypse here. And yet the lecture over there was given in response to a question that I didn't know outwardly, but which was asked.

This shows that our time is being taken hold of by a spiritual life that is still present in most people's sub-consciousness, and this especially concerns priests who must investigate the extent to which an inclination to enter into spiritual things is emerging from souls. Now we will have to contemplate our topics here in the spirit of the Apocalypse. That is what we intended to do today, but I had to indicate a number of things this morning about the same matter from quite different viewpoints in response to a question. One has to take such things seriously, for they are important.

We should point out how much more intimate the terminology of the Apocalypticer is, for if you take everything that has been said so far you will realize that when the Apocalypticer how man stands in the whole world he basically looks upon the stars and the earth as a unity. He connects man's real nature with both the stars and the earth. We will now have to point to the real thing that the Apocalypticer is referring to when he speaks about the seven-headed beast, the two-horned beast and about beasts in general. Up till now we have looked for these real things by pointing to what man can experience inwardly. However, you will find that whenever the Apocalypticer speaks about fixed stars he is talking about the divine spirit, as people continued to do during the whole Middle Ages. Whenever he speaks about planets he's speaking of angelic intelligences or intelligences which, have a hierarchical, angelic character. But when he speaks about beasts he's also referring to something concrete like this. He lets human beings participate in the crystal heavens, fixed stars and planets but also in the whole development that underlies the beasts that are continuously being mentioned in the Apocalypse. Now what outer physical reality do these beasts correspond to?

Whenever the Apocalypticer refers to beasts, he's really speaking about the forces and activities of comets. Once you know about this terminology you will begin to understand a number of things that the Apocalypticer knew about the nature of comets, although mankind in general then forgot about these things. So let's take a look at the nature of comets in connection with the Apocalypse. I would like to present this as follows.

If one takes the Copernican solar system that one learns in school with its sun, Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars, asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn and also Uranus and Neptune, one finds that it has a calculable regularity. If one doesn't make serious errors in one's calculations and if one makes the appropriate corrections, one finds that all one has to do is to turn the telescope to the calculated spot, and one will find the body in one's instrument. These are calculable things. Then one also has the orbits of various comets in there. One can calculate the orbits of many comets and the calculation gives rather strange results that can almost drive one crazy if one simply takes them as they stand.

I will just give one example. It was 1773 and a famous astronomer by the name of Lalande said that he would give a lecture about comets at the Paris Academy. The rumor spread that he was going to prove that there would be a collision between a comet and the earth that very same year. According to his calculations the orbits of the comet and the earth would intersect and a collision was inevitable. Just imagine the atmosphere at the time; this rumor was going around in Paris in 1773 and there was a big surge in the number of miscarriages, premature births, and deaths among severely ill people, who were shocked by this rumor. Catholic priests were getting rich because everyone was running to confession, and they all wanted to have last rites because the world was coming to an end. This report caused a terrible panic in Paris in 1773, so that the police, who after all do have a mission, forbade this lecture, because it was too dangerous. Since the lecture could not be given and since it turned out that all the miscarriages and premature births were unnecessary, it's not clear how Lalande would have explained the absence of destructive effects, for the calculation was correct as far as the collision of the comet and the earth was concerned, but in effect it also predicted that the collision would displace large quantities of ocean water at the equator and produce tremendous floods on the masses of land between the north and south poles. This catastrophe did not occur, even though the calculation was correct.

We can understand what happened here if we connect this incident with what happened to another comet, namely, the famous Biela comet. If one connects these two one arrives at the following. People were quite right to be very interested in the orbit of Biela's comet in 1832 and in all that can be predicted from calculations of the same. The appearance of this comet confirmed the calculations. The comet came so close to the earth that people said: this could get dangerous; for each time it comes back it's getting closer to the earth. And since Biela's comet came back every 6 or 7 years, people were particularly interested in its appearance in the mid 40's, for according to the calculations the comet was going to pass at a distance of thirteen times the radius of the moon's orbit around the earth, which is too close for comfort. The comet continued to get closer each time, although observers noted that it was getting fainter and fainter the closer it came. The 1860s were unfavorable for observations for the closer it got the fainter it got. However, when it was getting dangerously near the earth one discovered that it had split in two. And people were very curious about the decisive thing that was supposed to happen in 1872, because if the calculations were as accurate as for that other comet in 1773 something terrible would happen to the earth.

I was only a little boy in 1872, but I still remember quite well that pamphlets were distributed everywhere which said that the end of the world was at hand. A great deal was said and written about the earth's destruction at that time. I can't quote any statistics about the number of miscarriages and deaths and absolutions, but people certainly awaited this event with considerable anxiety. The big day came and I still remember how excited and expectant everyone was but 10 and behold the only thing that appeared was a very beautiful and magnificent meteor shower the comet didn't come back at all. It was a wonderful shower of meteors; as if a nocturnal fire in the sky was falling down to earth in many scintillating sparks. The comet had split up even more into a lot of small fragments which could be absorbed by the earth's atmosphere and which became connected with the earth; it had taken a course whereby it could be absorbed by the earth.

Now an astronomer by the name of Littrow wrote a very interesting paper back then; you should really read it, it is very interesting. He made very nice calculations, and taking everything into consideration he said that nothing too serious could happen through the near miss in 1872, but that if the comet stayed together his calculations showed that a real catastrophe would occur in 1933. That's right: 1933. That's right.

That is, if the comet had remained the way it was, there would have been a real catastrophe in 1933, for all the oceans would have flooded the earth in such a way that all creatures on earth would have perished. But it broke up into particles before then and was absorbed by the earth; the earth feeds on this world substance. So there will be no collision in 1933—it's not too far away; but what the earth has absorbed will come up from the earth then as a spiritual reflection. What the earth has absorbed becomes spiritualized by other substances, and the spiritual elements rise up. The earth digests the comets and the spiritual elements rise up. That is why spiritualized, cometary things in the earth rise up from time to time.

Now this has a deep significance in the world context. I have often mentioned the odd things that transpired when railroad trains were first introduced. When people suggested that the post master in Berlin should have a railroad built, he said that he was already dispatching two coaches a week, and they were practically empty, so why bother building a railroad. And when people asked the medical board in Nuremberg whether it would be all right to build a railroad from Nuremberg to Fuerth, they said that this would not be advisable, because people's nerves would suffer terribly from it; people shouldn't be exposed to this for their body and soul would be deleteriously affected. However, if people did feel compelled to give in to this foolishness, the medical advisory board said, they should at least put up high wooden partitions on either side of the tracks so that the farmers would not get brain concussions.

That was the verdiet of the learned board in Nuremberg at that time. One laughs about that today because one thinks: people were really narrow-minded back then. However, as I've often mentioned, I can't get too mirthful about this because the learned board was right, if one goes by the state of scientific knowledge at the time. Although people don't go by what science knows too much. However, given the state of the art at that time, the experts had to say: people will ruin their nerves if they ride in railroad trains. That is even true to a' certain extent. If you compare present-day human nerves with earlier ones, you will see that the Nuremberg doctors were not entirely wrong. For I have always heard that people from Nuremberg never hang anyone until they get their hands on him. And Dr. Rittelmeyer will agree that they won't use a science that they don't already have.

So those scientists were only saying what they knew, and they would have been right—if comets didn't exist. People wouldn't be able to endure the demands that are made upon their physical bodies by their astral bodies, if these astral bodies which constitute the bestial element in man weren't being continuously corrected and healed by the absorbed cometary substances that are radiated back to the surface of the earth, and that have an equilibrating effect upon human capacities. So you see that man is placed into the universe in a strange way in this respect.

Let's look at Biela's comet of 1872. Fire falls from heaven; the earth absorbs it, so that someone who can percelve these things spiritually sees that something comes up again and influences man's astral body in a favorable or unfavorable way. Some comets have a therapeutic effect upon men's nerves, and others which the earth absorbs unleash wild astral forces in man when, they press upwards again.

Thus the Apocalypticer looks at cometary phenomena and he lets them run parallel with the descriptions of his beasts. He compares them with seven-headed beasts because at that time the latter were much more closely connected with physical conditions, and a comet that was split into seven parts was a heavenly expression of what occurred on the earth. Likewise, the two-horned beast referred to a comet with two tails.

Wild superstitions were connected with comets, and they prevented people from knowing much about them, except that one calculated their orbits and one was bothered by their erratic manifestations, etc. Once in a while someone with a good head like Hegel pointed to other connections between cometary things and earthly things. Hegel occasionally treated himself to a bubbly glass of wine, and he quite rightly observed that good and bad wine years are connected with comets. Now just consider the matter in its large, cosmic connections. Just consider that the earth consumes cometary substances and ejects them again in a spiritualized form. This becomes united with human astral bodies in a good way or a bad one. The cometary essence that we see in the sky at a certain time is up there. Where is it after this particular time?

In a lecture in Paris in 1906, I pointed out that cometary substances contain compounds of carbon and nitrogen or cyanogen. This was before anyone else had mentioned anything about it, although scientists later confirmed it through spectral analysis. That is rather significant, because the cyanides that are distributed in the earth in trace amounts are used to purify astral bodies. An indispensable cosmic doctor is at work in the cosmos and he carries out such therapies more or less continuously.

Just consider that a comet that one sees at a particular time becomes atomized in the way that I described and comes down from the heavens as a rain of fire; later it is in the ground, still later it goes from the soil into the roots, stems, leaves and flowers of plants. We eat the cometary bolts and the ferments that are given to the earth by the cosmos in our daily bread.

The Apocalypticer looks at the phenomena and he sees that favorable spiritual effects arise from one comet and unfavorable ones from another. A beast, or a comet in a cosmic sense, frees itself from its imprisonment in the earth. The beast gets out: this means something for human evolution. And so one will point to very intense realities if one wants to indicate large, important points in the evolution of the earth and mankind.

The earth and everything that exists on it might I have perished in 1933 if another wise arrangement weren't there that can't be calculated, so that the calculations may not always be correct if the comets have taken on the other form. From the Apocalypticer s viewpoint one would say: Before men can grasp the etheric Christ in the right way, mankind must first meet and deal with the beast who will rise up in1933.

That is spoken from an Apocalyptic viewpoint. Here a spiritual view is united with an observation of nature. The basic spiritual character of what is present in the universe becomes clear here. If you consider the farmers in 1872 who stood outdoors and observed this rain of light and you add the spiritual knowledge that is available about this, which I have outlined here, and if you compare this with some of the descriptions in the Apocalypse you will see that it agrees word for word and that the Apocalypse refers to real events in nature.

This justifies one in saying that the Apocalypse is a book with seven seals. One has to unseal it in this way so that one finds out what is meant. It doesn't seem much wiser to me to ask why the Apocalypticer wrote something that has seals than to ask why we seal our letters when we mail them. We seal them so that people for whom they weren't intended will not read them. The same goes for the Apocalypticer. He wanted the Apocalypse to be read by people who are qualified to do so and who know how to open the seals. No one knows how to open them if he isn't competent in a certain sense, that is, if he doesn't, as it were, get a knife from the spiritual powers to cut the scroll open.

So this shower of light was there in the 1870s. The comet's activity was much more spiritual in 1872 when it was supposed to came back, than in its previous appearance's; it was almost entirely a Spiritual activity. The comet has poured down upon the earth as a shower of luminous meteors ever since, and the earth absorbs them. And Michael approached the earth and began to rule it in a shower of golden light at the end of the seventies. Here you have events in nature that are really spiritual events, or spiritual events that are strong enough to be nature events. You will only arrive at a real insight into the way that the world is designed if you see that all natural events become spiritual events, and that all spiritual occurrences have the intensity of natural occurrences. Then you will connect moral things with natural things in evolution and you will no longer say that faith should be the only content of religious life and you will be more inclined to make knowledge the content of religious life. That is something you can gain through a more intensive study of the Apocalypse.

We will probably be able to conclude these studies tomorrow or the day after.

Aside from the more obvious content of the Apocalypse which we have discussed, it is also an initiation book. We can definitely look upon the Apocalypse as an initiation book through the way that the successive stages of evolution are presented—through the inner nature of the thing—, the stages that can be experienced by those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, whereas they will of course pass people by who have no eyes or ears.

We should realize that when we enter the world with our cognition that increasingly becomes a perception, that content of our soul life which is basically a kind of a reflection of outer nature disappears. In other words, the physical sense world disappears and the spiritual world gradually appears from the other side as if out of the background. The Apocalyptist clearly shows that he has a very intense, correct idea of this way of entering into a relation with the spiritual world. This enabled him to find the things in his imaginative visions as objectively as he found them.

It is simply a fact that one can arrive at a view of the world in two ways. The one way is to lovingly devote oneself to the physical sense world and to become familiar with all its aspects; thereby one increasingly becomes familiar with the work of the gods. If one looks at nature in an inner, spiritual way and not just in an external mechanical one, one then has what one could call nature in the widest sense of the word. However, one could also imagine—and the idea is a correct one—that one can get the same world content in a purely spiritual way from within through one's own soul. So that someone with sufficient inner force will be able to see that some natural phenomenon is involved at a particular point in world events, even if he has no access to any historical reports about it. One can definitely say that it's possible to arrive inwardly at the knowledge that earthquakes or something else occurred in some year when something was going on in mankind. Many people have the more or less clear feeling that they can know concrete details about the world from within, and it is a perfectly correct one. Now one can ask what is actually involved when a man gets into the spiritual world in this Imaginative way.

We can definitely discuss what is involved here in connection with the Apocalypse, for we encounter a number of series of stages where the Apocalyptist sees something that leads into the spiritual world in each case, first he presents the letters, then the seals, then he passes on to what can only be expressed in auditory terms in our human language, namely, to the trumpets, and then he goes on to what I described yesterday as divine love, whose counterpart is divine wrath.

If we understand the Apocalyptist rightly, he's saying that wherever he gives the content of the Apocalypse through the letters he was inspired to write, it refers to the physical world. The moment he goes over to the seals and treats them seriously, what he has to say with these seals refers to the astral, Imaginative world or to what one can call the soul world. When he passes over to the trumpet sounds we get into spirit land, and when we experience divine love and divine wrath in accordance with their content we really get into the interior regions of spirit land.

Now one should consider that while man treads this Imaginative path, he's basically standing in the world with his experiences, so that his experience of things is the world's experience. However, he doesn't notice this at first. During the course of his esoteric training he gradually becomes aware that everything that happens to him, through him and in him is a world event at the same time. He increasingly feels that he is poured out into the objective world content, and the Apocalyptist makes this very clear. So that we can say: physical world = the content of the letters.

Now let's take a look at the way the physical world appears to us. This physical world is more than it seems to be. This physical world would not present us with its manifold nuances of color and warmth and all the rest of what inundates us from all parts of our environment if it weren't permeated by spirit. We should realize that what we think of as a physical content in our present age is really spiritual.

One could say that one has to learn the soul language of someone like the Apocalyptist if one wants to try to imagine what his soul is like. And when we adopt this soul language for our own personal, spiritual use we must become so united with it that it passes over into our flesh and blood, to use a rather trivial expression.

I would like to give you a few examples of the inner soul language of an initiate, which he doesn't always use outwardly or exoterically, but inwardly in order to form his ideas about his particular experience of the spiritual world. For instance, he might say: Dampen lightning and you will understand color. That is initiates' language. What does it mean? An initiate sees flashes of lightning; he sees something flaming up as it comes out of the universe; he looks upon it as a flickering up of the spirit in world space, and he imagines that when this lightning becomes ever dimmer or milder he gets a dampened or mild development of colors. Lightning spreads out, as it were, and becomes a colored surface. This is the way initiates think of it.

Or an initiate says: Let thunder become quieter and ever more quiet; then listen to its modulation—and musical things will arise. Thus initiates look upon the sensory tapestry that is spread out before us as one side of revelation, and it is a real idea for them to think the following: One has the colored manifold world content;—what I'm drawing here could be sounds just as well as colors. It could be like the world content that approaches our senses, that is, like the sensory, physical veil that is spread out before us as our world of perceptions, into which we weave our abstract, unreal thoughts.

If you imagine that this blackboard is a tapestry that is spread out everywhere and that it consists of sounds, colors and warmth, an initiate sees lightning flashes behind it. The real flashes of lightning that are sometimes visible simply break through this sensory tapestry from behind and from the spiritual world. Wherever lightning appears there is a radiating in of the spiritual world. And if we look at the way this lightning is dampened and toned down to an even display of colors in nature we have our colorful earth before us.

If we look up to the heavens and its stars, we have points that also appear to us out of the spirit, except that they are an enduring, living revelation of flashing lightning. However, an initiate looks upon all of this as the outer I manifestation of what is behind it. He tells himself: You should really see—and he does see it, as his soul becomes increasingly active—you should really see the red in a rose begin to spray out above and below as tiny flashes of lightning, and whereas the front part becomes dulled, the red in the rear interacts with the sphere of the Seraphim, and all sounds are linked with the sphere of the Cherubim, and everything that we touch I is connected with the sphere of the Thrones. When one sees nature around one in the physical world it is really all an illusion, for in reality it is the toned down work of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

If we look out into the colorful world and at the way it appears,—it is only the evenly toned down lightning flashes and action of the Seraphim. People in ancient times used to speak about the Maya character of the sensory, physical world, but that was only because they didn't know that there are Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones everywhere in it. Now let's go a little further on the path of initiation. Let's go to where the Apocalyptist emphasizes the opening of the seals. What is going on there? Here color and warmth separate off from the world and increasingly spiritual effects appear which become similar to the true shapes of the lightning-like things which form. Instead of the spiritual world breaking through the sensory tapestry in a zig zag way, we see more gentle lightning flashes, etc., behind it (drawing). We know that the beings who live in them are the servants of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Something similar applies to sounds, warmth and barely perceptible touches.

Now just as the earthly, sensory tapestry fades away and such lightning-like and enclosed figures behind it form out of the astral fire and expand ever more, so the stars begin to shine down and their threads of light enable us to see what they are. Starry threads, starry radiations or lights mingle with things that work in an elemental way. Earthly and heavenly things become connected, and we realize that we are in a second world—that was the first one—, and we arrive at the first condition of the second world, where everything is still shining in a natural way, and where we have an inkling that there are beings behind it. At most we perceive elemental beings here, but we know that these beings are the agents of powerful, important and sublime beings; we get to the first precinct, as it were, of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai. They are still behind this, as it were, but they mingle with these beings. The real nature of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai is gradually revealed, the further we go on the path of initiation. This is connected with the emergence of the harmony of the spheres that resounds through the world. The Apocalyptist presents the individual sounds of this world harmony as trumpet sounds, although they really only combine into harmonies and melodies during the course of long periods of time, when time becomes a unity. So we have the pure life of the second hierarchy in the clear sounds of the trumpets, whereas the very powerful beings in the first hierarchy underlie actual sense experiences. This is a world in which one could say that all the sensory effects have become flowing, grand and majestic, so that they're not just located around the things and processes of the physical world, but they have become the expression of beings who work in and with the second hierarchy and through elemental beings. Then we eventually arrive at a third region where we no longer perceive anything natural, or any natural things that have been broken up into elemental things, for if we want to perceive something there we have to perceive it in a spiritual way.

We arrive at a region of the spiritual world which we have to describe as follows. When you went through what is like a dissolving and a reshaping of earthly sense perceptions, that are taken hold of by the expanding sense perception of the stars, you were able to see everything that is working in the universe in Kyriotetes, Exusiai and Dynamis as if it were in the last residues of sense perception—in such a way that these beings are as if inwardly bound to the real substantiality of the stars.

The starry world has become transformed into the beings of the hierarchies for us; instead of looking up to the stars' sensory semblance we live in the world of the hierarchies. Here the hierarchies are still saturated with what I would like to call sprayed and dissolved sensory knowledge. We now get to the third region where we no longer perceive earthly things in a sensory way and where we must perceive souls and supersensible things without sensory inclusions. We arrive in the actual spiritual world, and we become acquainted with its angels, archangels and Archai.

We get to know the spiritual aspects of these beings, and when we depict them in paintings and the like we should realize that they only have the sensory forms we give them because they are woven into the soul, spiritual elements and essences of the higher hierarchies. For instance, the wings we paint on them get their substantiality from the beings of the second hierarchy, and the shape and contents of their heads are derived from the first hierarchy. We should realize that we can only see what is within the third hierarchy of angels, archangels and Archai in a spiritual; way.

What. I'm telling you here is of very great historical importance, because you won't be able to read books that are basedon ancient ideas, and which deal with these spiritual worlds in an intimate way unless you are aware of the fact that when we investigate the spiritual world we perceive the lowest hierarchy in a spiritual way, as it were, whereas the higher hierarchies that we perceive still contain the ingredients of the sense world. This is why quite a few misunderstandings gradually arose when spiritual life became decadent, concerning the descriptions that are found in the ancient initiation wisdom.

We find that the more worldly initiates in the Middle Ages always describe the matter in such a way that the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones stand close to the earth, as the lowest hierarchy, and that one ascends through Dynamis, Kyriotetes and Exusiai to the angels, archangels and Principalities. If you look at illustrated books from the Middle Ages you will be confused about what you're seeing and you will ask yourself why the angels are sitting above the Seraphim. This came about because one no longer knew the exact details that are connected with these processes and one didn't imagine these things in a very organic way anymore. The error first arose during the Jews' Babylonian captivity in B.C. times when the whole doctrine became contaminated with Babylonian symbols through the contact of the Jews with the Babylonians, and this error in the order of precedence of the spiritual hierarchies was perpetuated by the Jewish cabala in the Middle Ages.

However, one must be familiar with such matters if one wants to understand the development of ideas about spiritual things in the course of human evolution, and this is the right place in our clarification of the Apocalypse to discuss these things. So we get out to the spiritual world, and the first beings we meet there are those in the third hierarchy. The Apocalyptist shows how well acquainted he is with all of these things whenever he describes something now, because he increasingly tries to let angels appear, and they carry the events. The phenomenal thing is that earth regions can reflect something that angels bring in as the messengers of higher hierarchies; and namely these angel appearances bring us into a region where we see that divine love is the real ingredient of the world to which we human beings belong. For we become aware that the as it were normal angels, archangels and Archai are r something like the embodiments of higher hierarchies, just as we look at|_ the hands, arms, feet, legs and the rest of a person's body and we have the feeling that this is a body for the soul and spirit.

Thus as one ascends into the world of the third hierarchy one gets the impression: these are angels, but they are like the limbs of higher, divine spirits. They are really the soul, spiritual corporeality of higher divine spirits. So that one feels that one is in a pure spirituality and in God's corporeality at the same time. That is something to which one ascends; one has to occupy oneself with such an idea, and that is something which anyone who really wants to get to know the occultism that underlies spiritual life must do.

If you look at a human being on earth in his physical body, one cannot really think of this body's structure in terms of mere growth or in terms of the shooting and sprouting that goes on in it. You must add some degradative processes to the organism, that lead to excretions. They represent degradation and they show that the physical body is in a continual process of destruction which, however, is destined to absorb spiritual things, since it is degradation at the physical level; so that the spirit can then live in the physical, degradative processes. We know that spiritual things don't live in a human organism's anabolic processes. Spiritual things are suppressed and not promoted when man grows and when physical processes are becoming more active. Materialists are very silly when they say that man only has to purify the shooting and sprouting life in his brain, and that a continuation of biological processes becomes refined and transformed there—and that this amounts to thinking. If the brain would only be a continuation of digestive processes it would have dull, vegetative inner experiences. Spiritual things only enter the brain because it is continuously punctured by physical processes, as it were, so that it decomposes and falls apart. Spiritual things intervene in physical things in a creative way via degradation. The physical body absorbs degradative processes. We see that an inhibition and a holding back is built into the growth.

It is extremely interesting to take a look at the details of this phenomenon with one's spiritual perception. For instance, when Fichte's individuality descends into its physical body in that tiny village one sees how the boy grows. One sees that hindrances which are slightly greater than normal are mixed into his growth a little at a time; it's really very little, but it's there. So this little boy Fichte gets bigger and bigger, but he could have grown faster if something wasn't continuously holding back his growth very slightly. Fichte's particular philosophical talent was connected with this inhibition of his growth; he remained small throughout his lifetime. Here the spiritual becomes active within the physical so that one has to look upon degradation in a sympathetic way and not just in an antipathetic one. One can comfort oneself about degradation in a loving way, for hindrances to growing, sprouting life must exist.

When one realizes that the world of angels, archangels and Archai is really the corporeality of the divine spirit, and when one sees the weaving and moving and working of the angels, archangels and Archai and when one sees how individual soul lives are taken care of by their angel, groups of men by an archangel, and how streams of world events are pushed on from age to age by Archai, if one takes this whole weaving of this wonderful garment that is woven there, which is so nicely described in the Proserpina saga—, if one takes this whole garment of the world, one sees that divine love flows in it like the red blood in our bodies, and that this is necessarily accompanied by a stream of divine wrath. The latter is always formed from hindrances to world events by beings who feel things in a really moral way and who must first harmonize their moral characteristics with the course of world events.

We see the sprouting and shooting of the divine corporeality in divine love, as it were, and through its connection with the weak creatures which nevertheless characterize the ways that the gods want to direct the world we see that this spiritual body is permeated by something which is like the secretory products in man's physical body. Something like human glandular secretions become exuded here; the secretory centers appear as the divine vials of wrath which are woven into the course of world events.

We see the connection between divine love and divine wrath within these three worlds, and this gives rise to the idea, which must be accompanied by inner reverence; What happens when the vials of wrath are poured out? Here divine spiritual beings are stimulated by the misdeeds of weak creatures, and they think of how they can keep world events going and of how they can transform the hindrances into a vehicle for spirit-filled events that are pressing forwards, just as a man can make soul and spiritual progress in his body through the degradative processes that occur in it, so that he doesn't just vegetate. The Apocalyptist imagines all of this in accordance with the paths of initiation. As we saw yesterday and also earlier, the Apocalypse acquaints us with concrete physical things that are happening in the world, and it also makes us familiar with the path of initiation in a marvelous way.

If one looks at the Apocalypse in this way it firstly enables us to get an insight into the course of world events, so that we're looking into things in the future that we need and which we can add to our ideas, and it also becomes a meditation book, and it can be used as a meditation book in a wonderful way; it is really marvelous in this respect. If you come to a place in the Apocalypse that seems to be paradoxical or difficult to understand, stop thinking about it and start to meditate on it; for it is always accompanied by a passage where you can become spiritual, as you inwardly absorb and elaborate what you can't grasp intellectually anymore.

For instance, if one runs into a passage that refers to a bad gland, then of course intellectual types will say that glands can only be in men and animals, so what is that supposed to mean, it must be a poetic image—and they race on; but they're wrong about this. The Apocalyptist uses the word gland because he knows that it's just as justified to think of this real thing in the microcosm, as it is to think about the corresponding thing in the macrocosm. You begin to realize that the introduction of such a glandular thing that has to do with secretions leads over to the functions of divine wrath. Thus seemingly paradoxical things in the Apocalypse enable one to pass over from a merely intellectual course of the soul life, which is so common today, to a spiritual one.

Here we come to a point where it is very necessary to see things clearly and accurately, especially for priestly activity. People feel that our age intellectualizes souls completely, and that's why they react, and they long for hearty feelings in all fields. Just look at how religious confessions are resisting the widespread intellectualism; they don't want salvational truths to be preached in intellectual forms anymore; they want them to be shaped out of feelings and irrational things. No doubt this longing is partly justified, but one is in danger of losing the religious element altogether if one only wants to feel religious contents.

Priests should note the strange course which pedagogy has taken. Pedagogy proceeded from the life of instincts, and it was most effective when one did things instinctively, so that one didn't think in a pedagogical way at all. People were not really pedagogically active in ancient times, they just followed their instincts. Teachers only began to talk a lot about pedagogy after they had forgotten how to teach in an instinctive way. All our talk about it proves that we are the worst teachers in the whole of evolution. People begin to talk a lot about something when they don't know much about it anymore. Like one began to talk about transubstantiation when one no longer knew its secret. Whenever one notices predominantly intellectual contents of discussion in a particular age one has to ask: what are these people lacking? At the time when there was a lot of discussion about the labor question, all that this really meant was that they knew very little about it. Of course this applies to an even greater extent to the time when the printing press replaced writing. That was a time when people gradually lost their understanding for the divine script that speaks out of the sun, wind and stars.

It was not at all necessary to write things down at the time when the knights around King Arthur's table could still read the script which arose from the spouting ocean, the waves that sprayed up against the rocks along the shore, and the mingling of spraying billows with air currents that were saturated with light. Thus one basically has to deduce the dying out of spiritual and invisible things from the luster of visible things, and on the other hand one has to perceive how sensory, physical outer symbolism died down during the time when spiritual things became particularly prominent.

This is what makes us realize that we shouldn't react to intellectualism by denying it or by developing a dark, nebulous feeling life, but we should sublimate this feeling life by letting intellectual things run into a metamorphosis of the spiritual life more and more. Then we will find that we can ennoble our feeling life with the spiritual content of revelations that are really objective and no longer subjective.

We have looked at the Apocalypse with respect to its inner spirit and we have looked at it in connection with your work as priests. One could of course say a great deal more in connection with the Apocalypse; for instance, one could unroll the whole composition of the Apocalypse, but it seems to me that this conference in Dornach will get its best content if what was said in connection with the Apocalypse will show up in priestly activity in a really practical way.

We'll only have to add one more thing today. We should consider that we're living in the consciousness soul age or at that stage of man's overall evolution where he has to gain control over his intellectuality, as it were, so that it's integrated into his individuality. Of course to begin with this age is still restricted to man's spirit or intellect, as it were, where the things which are connected with the acquisition of intellectuality occur within human thinking and reflection, although a time will come when the deeper forces of the human soul will also be taken hold of by that which now occurs more within thinking, wishing and reflecting.

At present man can only form ideas about how he should use the intellectuality that is breaking into his individuality. However, before this age of consciousness soul development is over souls will be taken hold of by intellectuality right down into their deepest emotions, feelings and passions. And then what was still sought in the stars during the Middle Ages, when one spoke of angelic intelligences in the stars and planets will live even more deeply and pervasively in men.

All of this will be deposited in men, and later on when the Jupiter period comes even man's corporeality will be taken hold of by intellectuality. However, at present, where the soul has still not been taken hold of by intellectuality in its innermost structure and men can grasp the important things in their thoughts and words, it is possible to orient priestly activities in such a way that the world goals can really be attained.

So you see things are like this; when men grab intellectuality from the cosmos—and after all, it is a wise arrangement of the world powers that he is taking possession of it—there are always unguarded moments when it becomes possible for the Ahrimanic power who is called Satan in Christian tradition to take hold of this intellectuality that men have. Satan must not be confused with the ordinary devil, who is a lower power with different characteristics. Satan has the rank of a Principality (Archai), and he took hold of this intellectuality in the course of world evolution long before it approached men in the described manner, and one could say that he possesses more intellectuality than any other being. He is trying to bind human intellectuality to his own to such an extent that men can fall out of their evolution in this way. In other words, this Ahrimanic power is trying to nullify the Mystery of Golgotha and Christ's activity.

Now this Ahrimanic power who is called Satan in Christian tradition lacks the strength to work up further than the human level of cosmic beings. So one shouldn't think that the intelligence of an angel, for instance, could be taken hold of directly by this Satanic power; this can only happen in certain exceptional cases. These exceptional cases that could occur in the future, where it might not only be possible for the Satanic power to chain men to himself through their intellects, but also to bind beings from the spheres of the angels and namely of the archangels to himself—these things still belong to the higher secrets of occultism that cannot be spoken about at present, and that can only be disclosed under certain conditions. So we can only indicate that a temptation and a seduction of beings in the hierarchy of angels and namely of archangels might be possible in the future, but we must reckon with the fact that the power who is called Satan in Christian tradition has the ability to cling to something in man's inner life that is as independent as his intellectuality. And then when the intellectuality which men contain is taken hold of by the Ahrimanic power, a man can be torn out of evolution and can be put on an entirely different course, simply because his being is pulled along with the intelligence with which Satan is able to connect himself.

This is only possible with man's intellectuality, and not with any other psychical, spiritual or bodily force in him. For a man's intelligence sits in him in such a way that it is the most independent thing in him. Everything else is connected with certain divine powers, and so if Satan were to do anything with men's feelings, sensations, desires and wishes he would still have to deal with the superhuman forces that are in these soul-capacities. Intellectuality is the first thing through which each human being can separate himself entirely from the beings who bring about his personal evolution, and it is the first thing in which he must freely connect himself through his own efforts with those powers who have accompanied his evolution right from the beginning. So that he has to identify himself freely with the last goals of the Apocalypse, where the Apocalypticer clearly indicates that the power who is the Alpha and Omega of the creator beings who go through evolution will appear, and each human being has to decide for himself to attach himself to the being who led him during the time when he was becoming cosmically mature.

To be sure, Satan can use this great moment in the evolution of humanity and he can pull men's intelligences and the men with it into his own realm. We can already see how the Satanic power is trying to bring men into its evolution in this way. The way to do this is to bring people together in the kind of associations that we see arising everywhere in a germinal form today, where the old group souls end and a new group-soulness can begin.

That is why what is occurring in eastern Europe today, for instance, is so terribly Satanic because it all tends very forcibly in the direction of putting people together in such a way that group souls become necessary. If the most intelligent people are then taken over into the lower Ahrimanic regions in this way, the groups that are formed here can only be assigned to Ahrimanic powers as groups. That would be a way for the Satanic powers to tear mankind out of earth evolution and to bring it into another planetary evolution. That kind of activity with a group soul character can only succeed if the intellectual element becomes completely emancipated in a certain way.

Very clever beginnings in this direction are being made in the east today, and priests should understand these beginnings for their work, because they are becoming manifest in a very forcible way in the east, but they're also present in central and western Europe.

For example, something that seems to be more or less harmless in exoteric life but which must be discussed very seriously is the way that psychology is being allowed to pass over into an experimental observation of human souls. This is one of the methods that will eventually prevent the soul elements from working from man to man in the way that the old divine powers intended, and psychical things will be determined in a numerical way or some other way instead by the emancipated intellectuality.

These things in central Europe and in the West are still relatively harmless. However just consider, for example, that a statistical, intellectualistic way of looking at things that is emancipated from men's soul life has arisen in the west through William James and others. They apply statistical methods to the inner conversion of human beings or to what one could call a finding of one's inner religious bearings—which occurs in many people just before they're 20 years old. Many people also experience an inner transformation after they're 20, which is like a whirling up of the Godhead out of their own soul.

In the U.S. they determine the percentage of the population that undergoes such inner conversions, and they treat things in a statistical manner. The Satanic thing about this is the statistical treatment, the compilation of data, the emancipated intellect. All these conversions are really the results of karma, but then one has to look at each particular case. You will find that statistical methods are praised to the skies in all scientific fields today, if you follow such things at all. People can't penetrate inner things anymore, and they try to arrive at laws through statistics everywhere.

This is the hardest to combat in the medical field, where it has caught on in the most terrible way, and where all clinical methods tend in this direction. One simply records whether medicaments have a positive or negative effect, etc., in a statistical manner. This statistical element is becoming established, but it is completely worthless in this field. For it really tells one nothing to know how many cases went one way and how many went the other way. The important thing is to have a really thorough understanding of the individual case, no matter how it turns out. Only when all the cognitional methods have been pressed into the service of a study of the individual cases and their individual forms,—only after one has everything else through individual observations can one use statistics at the end and say that the thing was favorable in so and so many cases and unfavorable in the rest. As you know, statistics are very popular in social studies and social democracy.

The statistical approach has also produced some very nonsensical things in connection with suicides and crazy people. One determines what percent of the people in particular professions committed suicide or went crazy. But it has no real value to know this. Because the important thing is to know why this individual committed suicide and why that individual became insane. And so with regard to this statistical approach which scientists think is so important today when they write about theories of knowledge,—it's really as if Satan were loose: it's really quite terrible.

This approach has been successful for the Satanic power in central Europe and in the east. It became a philosophy in Avenarius and Mach, who were studied by leading Bolshevik philosophers, who then brought the thing to Russia and made it practical. Even good natured people who want evolution to proceed in an orderly way don't pay much attention to the fact that the seeds for Bolshevism were laid in central Europe decades ago and were carried over to Russia; it's as if one takes a seedling and transports it to another place where it is supposed to grow up.

Thus this Satanic power is working hard today and he turns to people everywhere and appeals to their emancipated intellect that is disconnected with things in some way. This applies to the soul, to the spirit, to inner conversions, etc. If Satan were to succeed in bringing about what he wants to do within a certain time, what has to approach then would occur in a harmful way for the evolution of humanity.

For the events of which the Apocalypticer speaks will come. It's just a question of how they will occur. There's only two possibilities: either human evolution will proceed in accordance with the intentions of the gods, or it will not. Intellectuality is breaking in now and men are becoming more and more intelligent through their own efforts, and not through inspiration. That is breaking in. But on the other hand mankind has been kept weak by influences that come from the Luciferic side. Even though the individual element is the only salutary thing for mankind in this age of the individuality, which is really a Christian age, groups will form, but these group formations must be taken away from the danger that they're in.

Through the efforts that the Satanic power is making to acquire the intellectual forces of humanity, a time will come when this Satanic power will be so strong that it will approach all groups that will have formed. So that it will really come about that Satan's power will work towards the four corners of the world, and these smaller and larger groups—Gog and Magog—will be exposed to the temptation and the seduction of the Satanic power. What will be decided then is whether or not those who have begun to work with spirituality have developed such an intensity that human intellectuality can be led to where it belongs with the aid of the Michael power, namely, to the starting powers who were connected with the origins of human evolution, and who want to lead what men have become further, although men are left free. A great deal will depend upon whether; men will get to the point where they will fully understand real spirituality that has an inner order. In priestly work one must already look at these affairs of humanity now, for only if one succeeds in directing everything into channels that run along these lines will the great seduction scene that Satan intends with Gog and Magog turn out in a way that is beneficial for human evolution.

Otherwise what men have experienced under the influence of their developing individualities; since the year 666 after the beginning of Christian evolution will someday have to be torn out of humanity. Darkness would be spread over all previous human incarnations and a new world evolution would replace the earthly one. We can already see the beginnings of this quite clearly, and we can also see the great danger that mankind is in today. Ahrimanic powers possess an almost unbelievably large amount of intellectuality, and they use men's vanity, untruthfulness and all of their other weaknesses in order to win them over. For instance, it is really quite terrible how the Satanic powers used the vanities of men at the beginning of the world war in order to create a tremendous turmoil in a few days—after there had been a very deep state of sleep—which put people in a great uproar, so that they're still not sure what really happened.

But it's only a phase. There are much worse phases in the purely intellectual so-called spiritual battles of the present. For where can one find truth anymore? One sees that things are being introduced everywhere in such a way that truth of action or a true way of working is becoming less and less important for men today. Just think of how they're increasingly trying to put the spiritual life under the control of the state. Just look at how much of our spiritual life is under state control.

All of these things expose humanity to a great danger, but men are not inclined to develop a real understanding along these lines. You could see this when the first attempt was made to do something with the threefolding movement so that the seduction by Gog and Magog that is to happen in the future can be brought into channels that are favorable for humanity. The threefolding idea should have led mankind over the threshold of evolution, and also would have had to lead it across, but the way it was received shows the tremendous dangers that mankind is exposed to with respect to these things, and priests should take these things very seriously.

There was an individual in the early Christian centuries who lived in the place where the actual church battle occurred which then made preparations in Europe for the Christianity that had been present in Rome throughout the centuries, who experienced the year 666 and perceived what really went on there with a certain clairvoyant power. This particular individual saw quite clearly and spiritually that the Satanic power was preparing itself for such a mission. Like many other people, this individual later confused the Satanic power that Michael knows is higher than he is, with the devil of the Middle Ages; he speaks of the devil, but in such a way that one sees that he really means the Satanic power. He reincarnated in Berlin in the first half of the 19th century; he was a high school teacher by the name of Drandorf. He spoke about the devil, that is, about Satan, and he wrote an article Is the Devil a Figment of the Imagination? You should also study his book on aesthetics some time. Drandorf remained relatively unknown; the consistorial and supreme consistorial counselors in Berlin were his enemies.

What all of this amounts to is: will you priests be able to represent the spiritual world in its full reality and not just in the sentimental way in which this has occurred everywhere in the last few centuries, so that one doesn't want to bring in the evil powers whenever one is speaking about the spirit. In other words, the main question is whether there is enough energy among you to really represent spirituality. The main thing is that such things like a knowledge of karma or an honest look, at earlier earth lives presuppose the same attitude of soul as the perception of the celebration of transubstantiation during an act of consecration of man.

These ideas must become real for men again. Only if they become real will it become possible to bring everything that is connected with the perspectives for humanity which the Apocalypticer wanted so much to present, into the right channels. It should be emphasized that the things that were discussed here in connection with the Apocalypse are truths which one should not receive without uniting them with one's whole being, which one should not receive without looking upon them as a kind of communion.

So one would like to say that a church is outwardly real, and it embraces the faithful members of the congregation. And the priesthood must look upon itself as that group of people in the church through whose activity a spiritual element flows into humanity. For this they need the right understanding and a little chapel for the sacraments and the consecrated bread and wine, which contains the secret of transubstantiation.

And one would like to say: If we imagine that we have a chalice, in which transubstantiation takes place, then men look for a way to the Father through transubstantiation. They look for a way to that creative power in the primal world which is present in there in a fully real way, and which therefore cannot be found if one only goes towards the material or only towards the spiritual. It can only be found if one discovers that the spiritual and the material are a unity. An understanding of the world is only present today when a transubstantiation is carried out at an altar. A sacred search for the Father really still occurs there, and here the Son always shows men the way to the Father; the Son who now mediates the way to the spirit.

And so when a man looks at what appears everywhere in the physical things during transubstantiation he can find the completely hidden spirit and the working of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in the physical things. Their concealed activity becomes manifest as physical substances. If one wants to have the latter as something spiritual, one has to take the path to the Father. The path to the Father is indicated by the Son, and he then brings it about that the spiritual appears out of the physical.

Bread is bread, but one can look for the Father in it; this can also be shown for the wine. Christ shows the way; the transubstantiation puts an aura around the bread; man experiences the spirit in the aura. The wine reinforces what is present in the bread (drawing: sun). And so one can say that the longing for the Father is present in the sensory aspect that conceals the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Christ leads each human being on the path, so that Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai become active before him in the way ye indicated yesterday, and he ascends into that region where he can only perceive the spirituality of the spiritual world today in angels, archangels and Archai, who however have the Holy Spirit in their midst.

To understand this and to draw the right conclusion from it today is written in the Apocalypse. What does that mean? It means that the one who understands it finds his own understanding already traced out in the Apocalypse. Hence one can say that whether or not the Apocalypse is speaking about you depends upon you and upon whether you will it.

For if you take the impulses in the Apocalypse into your work as priests in a truly spiritual way, you will be the ones who are spoken of in the Apocalypse, who will come and will ward off the power of the beast, the false prophet and Satan. And then at least in your mind you will always think that the book of the Apocalypse is placed underneath the chalice when it is standing there for the transubstantiation. And as you imagine that the chalice is standing on the apocalyptic book, you will be able to say to yourselves: My vocation is in the latter. And what we do over it is the carrying out of my vocation.

And so I didn't want to give you a theoretical exposition during this conference. After the justified wish arose in you to hear something about the Apocalypse I wanted to give you what I did and therewith I wanted to place the Apocalypse underneath the chalice for you, at least in your minds. That is the goal I had in mind for these lectures. You will definitely succeed in attaining the things that are possible if you intensify the ideals of your work as greatly as you can if you make these serious studies of the Apocalypse into the innermost impulse of your own activity. That is what I wanted to place before you at the end of these reflections. You can imagine that the most intensive thoughts about an intensive, forceful activity that is worthy of your great task will accompany everything that you will do in connection with these reflections.

Good morning, gentlemen! Today we want to use the time to add something to what we have heard. Then we will be able to understand a great deal about the dignity of man.

You see, I have roughly described how nutrition and breathing take place in the human being. We have also shown that nutrition is more closely related to human life, that nutrition consists of our absorbing nutrients that are actually in a lifeless state in our intestines, that these nutrients are then brought to life by the lymph vessels, and that they are then transferred to the blood in a living state. Then, as we know, this living food comes into contact with the oxygen in the air inside the blood. The air is absorbed by the human being. The blood is changed. This is the process that takes place in the chest. And at the same time, we have what our feeling gives us.

So, life is actually brought about between the intestinal processes and between the blood processes. Within the blood processes, in turn, between the blood processes and the air, that which is our mind is brought about. Now we also have to take care of the mind and try to understand how the mind came about in humans.

You see, it has only been possible to recognize this externally for about sixty years, one might say. We could have celebrated the sixtieth anniversary last year, in 1921. It was not celebrated because people today have little interest in organizing purely scientific anniversary celebrations. The discovery made in 1861, which could have been celebrated as a 60th anniversary – so only for the last fifty or sixty years has it been possible to talk about the matter I want to talk about today – is an important scientific discovery. I remember this discovery for the simple reason that it is exactly the same age as I am. This discovery consists of the following.

I recently told you how one can observe in a human being: one does not need to experiment, but one only needs to pay attention to what nature itself experiments on the human being when the human being falls ill in some way. If we know how to observe what has happened in the physical human being when the human being has fallen ill in any way, then such an experiment, such an attempt has been made by nature itself for us, and we can gain knowledge from this experiment.

Now, in 1861, it was found, namely, by Broca, it has been found that in people who have speech disorders, when they are dissected after death, something is violated in the third left frontal convolution.

It is not true, when we look at the brain, when we, so to speak, lift off the bony skullcap, the bony covering, we get to see the brain. This brain has convolutions: There is one convolution, there is a second, and there is a third convolution (it is drawn). This convolution is called the temporal convolution because it is located here at the temple. Now, every time a person has either individual speech disorders or is no longer able to speak at all, something is broken in this left frontal convolution.

This can happen when a person suffers a so-called stroke. A stroke consists of blood that should only be flowing in the veins pressing through the veins and flowing into the rest of the mass around the veins, where the blood should not be. This kind of hematoma then causes the stroke, the paralysis. So when the blood pours into the human being unlawfully, into this temporal winding, this ultimately causes, when this temporal winding is completely undermined, that the person can no longer speak.

You see, this is a very interesting connection. We can say: A person speaks because he has a healthy left temporal winding in his physical body. And now we have to understand what that actually means: a person has a healthy left temporal lobe. But to understand that, we have to look at something else.

When small children die, and we examine this same area of the brain, this left temporal lobe, then this strip of brain is a fairly uniform mass; especially before the child has learned to speak, it is a fairly uniform mass. To the same extent that the child begins to learn to speak, this left frontal convolution gets more and more small convolutions. It is formed more and more artificially. So that one can say: If, for example, this left frontal convolution would look like this in a very young child (it is drawn), it will look like this in a child who has learned to speak and in an adult: very artificially formed.

Something has happened to the brain; something happened just as the child was learning to speak. And no one should think differently about such a thing than one otherwise thinks in ordinary life. You see, if I move the table from here, no one will say: the table has moved here. Nor should I say: “The brain has formed convolutions.” Instead, I have to think about what actually happened and what the cause is. So I have to think about where this formation of the left temporal convolution comes from.

Now, you see, when the child learns to speak, it moves its body. It moves its body in the speech organs. Before that, when the child cannot yet speak, when it is still just a fidgety being, it screams at most and so on. As long as it just screams, this left frontal convolution is still a pulp like the one I drew at the beginning. The more it learns to do more than just scream, but to let screaming turn into sounds, the more this frontal convolution is developed. So that one can say: When the child just cries, then there is a brain mush at that point. Now it begins not just to cry, but to say sounds. Then gradually this general mush is transformed into a beautifully formed left brain part.

Now, gentlemen, the thing is this: You know that when the child cries, the cries it makes are mostly what are called vowels: A, E. So when the child just cries out, it does not need a structured left frontal convolution; rather, it always produces what it cries out from within itself, without having anything artificial in the brain. If you pay a little attention, you will see that what the child cries out first is very similar to the A sounds. Later, the child begins to add U and I sounds to his crying. And gradually, as you know, the child also learns consonants. The child first cries out A; then he learns the M to go with it: MA or WA. So the child gradually forms words out of his crying by adding the consonants to the vowels.

And how do you form these consonants? You only have to pay attention to how you produce an M. You have to move your lips. As a child, you have to learn this through imitation. When you produce an L, you have to move your tongue. And so you have to move something. You have to move from the fidgeting that the child does to regular movements, to movements that the speech organs perform by imitation. And the more the child adds such consonants, L, M, N, R, and so on, to the vowels, which are only present when screaming, the more this left frontal convolution is structured, the more this left forehead is artificially developed; so that the left frontal convolution develops with the same strength with which the child learns the consonants.

Now, we can say: How does the child initially learn to speak? The child really only learns to speak by imitation. It learns to move its lips by intuitively imitating how other people move their lips. Everything is imitation. This means that the child notices, sees and perceives what is going on around it. And through this perception, through this mental work of perceiving, the brain is formed. Just as the sculptor forms his wood or marble or bronze, so this brain is formed by the child moving. The organs that it moves plant their movement all the way into the brain. So when I say L with my tongue, the tongue is connected to the brain by a nerve, connected to other organs. This L goes into my left frontal convolution and produces such figures in there. The L produces such a figure where one thing follows another, where this left frontal convolution almost forms like a bowel. The M produces such spherical convolutions. So you see, it is work on this left temporal convolution. It is the one that moves the child by noticing, by experiencing. It is very interesting that since we know that a stroke ruins the left frontal lobe and thus undermines speech, we can know that the child's left frontal lobe is actually being worked on all the time as it learns consonants and vowels. And that comes from the fact that the eye and all kinds of other organs notice that something is happening in the outside world. What is happening there in the outside world?

Well, you see, when we speak, we always breathe while speaking. We breathe all the time. And when we breathe, what is formed from breathing, this breath, as I have called it, first goes into the human body, then goes up through this spinal cord canal (it is drawn) and goes into the brain. So while the child cries, cannot yet say the consonants, but cries and breathes, during that time this breathing always goes up, this breathing impulse; it goes up and goes everywhere into the brain.

Let us ask ourselves: what actually goes into the brain? Well, blood goes into the brain. It goes everywhere, as I have explained to you in the last few days. So through breathing, the blood is actually pushed into the brain all the time. But that through breathing the blood is pushed in everywhere, yes, you see, that already takes place after the child is just born – even earlier, but there it is just working in a different way. So when the child is born, it begins to breathe. This rush of air, which pushes the blood into the brain, is actually always present.

And in this way we can say: as long as only the blood is pushed into the brain through breathing, the child can only scream. It begins to talk when not only the blood is pushed into it, but when, let us say, the child notices something from the eye or from some other organ, from the ear in particular, when it perceives something. When the child notices a movement in another person, it imitates the movement internally; then not only does the blood flow up there, but then, let's say, for example, another flow goes from the ear continuously into there (it is drawn). You see, that is the other current. And this other current is the nerve current.

So in the left temporal convolution, in the so-called speech convolution, as everywhere else in the human body, blood vessels and nerve cords meet. What one notices, what one perceives, acts on the nerve cords. The movements that the child makes during the consonants are thus transmitted through the nerves into his left speech coil. And there this is very well developed, in that the respiratory impulse always interacts with the blood with what comes from the ear or also from the eye, and what there gradually, beautifully structures the entire pulpy brain mass between blood and nerves. So you can see that our brain is actually only formed – at least in this part, and then in other parts it is exactly the same – formed by the fact that one activity, namely perception, interacts with another activity, namely this push that drives the blood into the brain.

But now you also have to be clear about the following. The child learns to speak in this way, that is, it trains its left frontal convolution. But, gentlemen, if you now sit with a corpse and dissect it, and observe the right frontal convolution, which lies symmetrically there, it is relatively untrained. So there we have the left frontal convolution; it has become as beautiful as I told you. The right one usually remains throughout life as it was in the child – so it remains undivided. I would like to say: if we only had the right frontal convolution, we could only scream, and only by artificially preparing the left frontal convolution can we talk.

But, you see, once a person is a lefty , that is, if he is in the habit of doing things not with his right hand but with his left, then it turns out that, when he is struck on the left side, he does not lose his speech, for example. And when he is dissected, it is found that in the left-handed person, the right frontal convolution has been structured in the same way as in the usual, normal citizens and people, the left frontal convolution is structured.

So the arm and hand movements play an extremely important role in the formation of the brain. Where does that come from? Yes, you see, it comes from this: when someone gets used to doing a lot with their right hand, they not only do what they do with their right hand, but they also get used to breathing a little harder on the right, and thus using more breathing power. They get used to hearing more clearly on the right, and so on. This only shows us that when a person gets used to using his right hand, he generally tends to be more active on the right side than on the left. But the left frontal convolution is developed when he is a right-handed person, and the right frontal convolution when he is a left-handed person. Why is that so?

Yes, gentlemen, you see: here (he draws) you have the right arm, the right hand, here you have the head and here you have the left temporal convolution. Now let's examine how the nerves run. The nerves run like this; you have nerves everywhere in here. If you didn't have these nerves, you wouldn't be able to feel warm or cold here, for example. It's all connected with the nerves. You have nerves everywhere here, which go up through the spinal cord and into the brain. But the strange thing is that the nerves in the right hand go here into the left brain, and the nerves in the other hand go into the right brain. Because the nerves cross inside there. In the brain, the nerves cross so that when I do, say, some gymnastic or eurythmy exercise with my right hand or my right arm, I feel it through the nerve that conveys this sensation; but I feel it with the left side of the brain because the nerves cross.

Now imagine that a child prefers to do everything with his or her right hand. Then he also breathes a little more on the right side, listens a little more, and even sees a little more sharply on the right side. The person then makes more effort on the right side and develops what he does in terms of movements into the left brain.

Now you just have to imagine that we also always have a little peculiarity that we make gestures when speaking: Ah! (corresponding gesture); and when we reject something: E! We make gestures when we speak. These gestures are felt by our nerves; and the gestures of the right hand that we make when speaking are felt by the left side of the brain. And in the same way, if we are right-handed, we tend to use the right side of the larynx more to pronounce the vowels and consonants, to pronounce the sounds more strongly; then what we do there is also felt more strongly with the left side of the brain. And that is where the fact that the brain, which is originally a pulp, is more developed comes from. We leave the left half more unused; therefore, the right hemisphere is less developed and remains pulpy. But if someone is left-handed, it happens the other way around.

This leads to a number of important pedagogical issues. Consider left-handed children – and there are a few of them even at school – you have to realize that while the left temporal lobe in the brain is very artificially developed in all others, it is fully developed in these left-handed children, and the right temporal lobe is developing. And when I teach the children how to write, I use the right hand. Those children who are right-handed will only strengthen what they have already begun to develop in their left frontal gyrus when learning to speak. But those children who are left-handed will ruin what they have formed in their right temporal gyrus through language if I force them to write with their right hand. They ruin it again, and so I have the task, since it should not be that way with writing, of letting left-handed people write with their left hand. I have the initial task of slowly and gradually gradually transfer what they do with their left hand to their right hand, so that they first learn to work with the other hand and only then, much more slowly than the other children, begin to write. It doesn't matter if they learn to write a little later.

If I just let left-handed children learn to write as quickly as right-handed children, I make these children dumber because I ruin what they have developed in the right hemisphere of their brains. So I have to make sure that I teach left-handed children to write differently from right-handed children. They will not become duller for later life, but cleverer, if I lead left-handedness slowly into right-handedness, and do not simply confuse the whole brain by writing with the right hand.

Now, you see, if you want to treat the whole person with writing at all, then pedagogically you achieve the opposite of what you want to achieve. There is now a great tendency to teach people everything with both hands, to let them do everything with both hands. That's how I mess up their brains. And it just shows how little people know when they have such a tendency to let people do the same thing left and right. You could strive for that; but you have to do something else first. And what should you do? Yes, gentlemen, you would have to change the whole person first! You would have to slowly let one activity pass from the left side to the right side and slowly weaken the activity on the right side. What would happen then? Yes, you see, what would happen then is that under this surface of the left temporal convolution (it is drawn) the left temporal convolution would be formed more artificially, and on the outside, on the outer side, it would remain mush. And that would then also occur on the right temporal convolution. Instead of dividing the two activities between the left and right sides, I make each temporal winding into two halves, an outer and an inner half. The inner half is then more suitable for speaking, the outer half is more suitable for shouting the vowels and consonants into it. But all speaking is a combination of shouting and articulating. This remains so throughout life.

So you see, you can't just mess around with people, but you have to know the whole person if you want to do pedagogy, even just elementary school pedagogy. Because with everything you do, you change the person. And that is the really sinful thing, that today people only tamper with appearances and do not look at how things are when you really get inside the person.

Now, in very few people are both frontal lobes usable, but the right frontal lobe is more permeated with blood flow, the left has less blood flow and is more permeated with nerves. And that is the case with our entire brain: the right brain is more for blood flow, i.e. for blood to run apart, while the left half is more for noticing, for perceiving.

As soon as we come to know that the brain develops under external influences, only then will we begin to understand how strong these external influences are. These external influences are, of course, extremely strong when we know that everything that goes on in the brain is caused by external influences. So, by having learned what actually happens in the brain when a person speaks, we can now form an idea of what the human brain is like in general. You see, if we examine this brain further, it turns out that there are always more blood vessels on the outer wall, where the brain has its outer wall, than on the inside. So we can say: the brain is richer in blood on the outside, and richer in nerves on the inside. So on the inside we have nerves; there are nerve cords inside.

So how is the brain actually formed in a child who learns to speak in the usual way, that is, who is right-handed? Well, you see, if you take a very young brain from a child, it is surrounded by a blood-rich, I would say, mantle (it is drawn). That is viewed from the front. That should be to the right of the person – seen from you, it is on the left – that should be to the left of the person. All these nerve cords are now forming there. Because of this, gentlemen, because there are nerve cords in there, you see, when you take them out, the inner brain mass looks whitish, while the more blood-rich brain mass around it looks reddish-gray when you take it out. It looks reddish-gray.

If the child continues to develop in such a way that it learns to speak, that its left temporal convolution is structured, what happens then? Yes, that is what happens: these nerve cords become more involved; as a result, the blood system develops less here and more there (it is drawn). So, in a sense, the inner part of the brain moves more to the left in a normally developing child; the other moves after it. The brain thus shifts over to the left side, and it becomes whiter and whiter towards the left side. It shifts over like that. The whole of human development is based on such artificial things.

Now, let's move on from language. You see, there are languages that have, let's say, a lot of consonants, and there are languages that have a lot of vowels: A, E, I and so on. There are other languages in which everything is squeezed out: S, W, so that one almost does not notice the vowels. Now, what is actually the case here?

If someone lives in a region – because it depends on the regions, the languages differ according to the regions of the earth – in which more of the consonants develop, what does that mean? It means that he lives more in the outer world, because the mitlaute have to be formed on the outside. So when someone lives more in the outer world, his white brain matter shifts more to the left. When someone lives more within himself, in such a region, where man lives more within his own inner being, this white brain matter shifts over less. Man is more inclined to produce harmonious sounds from his inner being. But this varies according to the regions of the earth.

So let us take the following, gentlemen. Imagine there is the earth (it is drawn) and at different points on the earth there are people. I will draw it very schematically, there is a person and there is a person. So there are different people standing on the earth. We always stand on the earth like that, even if it is drawn much too disproportionately, of course, but that is how we stand on the earth. And the person here, let's say, gets a language with consonant-final vowels, the other gets a language with consonant-medial vowels.

What must have happened in the area in question? Well, a great deal could have happened, many different things, but I will highlight one possibility. Imagine there are high mountains here (it is drawn) and a plain there. So here are high mountains, there is the plain. Now, in fact, when there are flat plains, you notice that the language there has more vowels. If there are towering mountains somewhere, then the language tends to become richer in consonants.

But you see, it's not that simple. We have to ask ourselves: what causes the mountains and the plains? This is how it is (it is drawn): here is the soil everywhere; here the sun shines. Our whole Earth was once a pulp. The mountains must have been pulled out of the pulpy mass. So the Earth is basically a pulp, and the mountains are pulled out of it here.

Gentlemen, what is pulling the mountains out? The mountains are pulled out by the forces from the universe that are working from outside! So that we can say: certain forces are at work from the universe, drawing out the mountains. These forces are strong, and that is why a mountain range is created. Here, weaker forces from the universe are entering, and that is why no mountain range is created. There the earth's surface was pulled out less in ancient times. And those people who are now born on such earth, where these forces are less effective, speak in self-sounds, and those people who are born on such earth, where these forces are more effective, speak in middle-sounds. So that depends on the whole forces of the universe.

And how can we state something like that? Well, gentlemen, what we indicate must be set up in such a way that we can look at the clock. We have to go to work or have to leave. But we will not say for a moment: Now it's too much! This damn big hand, he's a horrible guy, he's whipping me to work now! - That doesn't occur to us at all. The hand indicates when we should go to work, but we do not ascribe the slightest blame or cause to it. Don't we, we don't do that. So it is most innocent in the matter.

Likewise, gentlemen, we can look towards the sun here and can say: When we stand here, at a certain moment the sun is, let us say, for example, in front of the constellation of Aries. There we have the direction where the strong forces are at work. It is not the ram, but it indicates the direction where the strong forces are at work. At the same time, a person is standing here. For him, the following only comes into consideration: When the sun has moved over here (it is drawn), it stands here, for me in Virgo, in the constellation of Virgo. The forces are weak in that direction. Instead of telling the whole process now, I can say: If someone is born in an area where, at a certain time, let's say at the time of his birth, the sun is in the constellation of Aries, then he learns to speak more consonantly; if he is born at a time when the sun is in the constellation of Virgo, then he learns to speak more vowels.

So you see, I can use the whole zodiac like a clock to tell me what is happening on Earth. I must always be clear about the fact that it is not the constellations that do this, but that the constellations are there to read. From this you can see that the zodiac can tell us a great deal. It can tell us something to the extent that we can understand from it how languages on earth differ.

So we can definitely say: let's look at the earth. Let us imagine that there is the Earth and that we have placed a chair there – it may not be so, but hypothetically we can assume it – a chair in outer space, looking at a kind of language map, the different languages on Earth. Then we get a picture. And now we turn the chair around, now we look out into space. We get a picture of the stars, and they correspond to each other. If someone were to look at the southern half of the earth and observe the languages there, and then turn the chair around and look at the southern starry sky, it would be quite different from if someone were to do the same for the northern half. So that one could draw the starry sky, and anyone who has studied this connection can indicate from a particular constellation what language is common under that constellation.

So you see that just when we start observing the spiritual life of man, that is, where his mind is formed through language, we have to look up at the starry sky if we want to understand something. On earth, we don't get any context. No matter how much you think about why languages are different, you won't get an explanation.

You see, if you want to know what is going on in your stomach, you have to ask the ground – what is down there. If cabbage is mainly grown in a particular area, you can tell yourself: in this area, the killed cabbage fruits must be continually revived. So if you want to know how a particular area is nourished, you have to ask the soil. If you want to know how a particular area is breathing, you have to ask about what is happening in the air around it. And if you want to know what is going on inside this box, in the brain box, you have to ask how the stars are arranged out there. And so you have to be able to integrate the human being into the whole universe. And then you will see that it is indeed a superstition when, from remnants of what people once knew, it is merely said: When the sun is in Aries, this and that is effected. That is nothing at all. But when one knows the whole context, then it ceases to be an ordinary superstition, then it becomes science.

And that is what gradually brings us from an understanding of the mere reworking of materials to what happens and what is connected with the whole universe outside.

Good morning, gentlemen! Today, too, I will have to continue with what we have discussed, because the reason is that the matter can only be fully understood if one penetrates further and further into it.

You see, it depends on the human being, as you have seen, that he takes his nourishment from the earth, thereby feeding himself – that he takes care of his breathing from what surrounds the earth, from the air, only through this does he actually come to life, only through this is he able to become a sentient and feeling being -, and as we have seen, he takes forces from the whole world, only through this does he become a thinking being and only through this does he actually become a complete human.

So man must be able to nourish himself, man must be able to breathe, thereby becoming a sentient being - and he must be able to take the forces from the universe to thereby become a thinking being. He does not become a thinking being by himself, just as he cannot speak by himself. Man cannot think himself, just as he cannot eat himself.

Now let us take a closer look at how these things actually happen. Let us begin by clarifying how this process actually occurs when we absorb nutrients, have them in a dead state, so to speak, within our intestinal organism, and then they are revived again by the lymph glands and transferred by the lymph into the blood, the blood is renewed through breathing. The blood, or rather the force of the blood, the breath, then rises through the spinal cord into the brain and connects there with that which is brain activity.

You only have to consider how a child's nutrition differs from that of an adult to gain a great deal of insight into the human being as a whole. As you know, a child must drink a lot of milk in the very earliest period of life. At first, it feeds exclusively on milk. What does it actually mean for a child to feed exclusively on milk? We can visualize this if we consider what milk actually consists of.

Milk consists of 87 percent water. So when we drink milk as children, we actually drink 87 percent water, and only the last 13 percent is something else. Of these last 13 percent, only 4 percent is protein; 4 percent is fat in milk, and then there are some residual other substances, salts and so on. But essentially, that is what the child absorbs with the milk. So it is actually mainly water that it absorbs.

Now I have already told you that a human being consists mainly of fluid. The child must always increase this fluid. It must grow and therefore needs a great deal of water, which it takes in with the milk.

You may say: It would be the same if we gave the child only this 13 percent nutrition and the rest as water. Yes, you see, the human body is not designed for that. What we get with milk is not 13 ordinary percent of protein and fat and so on, but all of that, protein and fat, is dissolved in milk, dissolved in water, if it is milk. So it is the case that when the child drinks the milk, it gets the substances it needs in a dissolved state. And that is different from when the body first has to do the work that occurs during dissolution.

If you recall what I have already said about nutrition, you will say: we also have to dissolve the nutrients that we take in through our mouths first. We actually only have permission from nature to get solid nutrients into our mouths; then we dissolve them with our own fluids. The rest of the body, stomach, intestines and so on, can only use what has been dissolved. The child must first acquire this ability to dissolve; it must first develop it. So it cannot do it itself from the beginning. So it is dissolved beforehand. You can see this best from the fact that if a child is fed too much with any artificial food that is composed, it will still stunted.

Now you might say: What if I could create artificial milk after all, what if I could combine the 13 percent of protein, fat and so on contained in water with the water in such a way that it would be similar to milk on the outside, would that be a milk that would be just as good for the child as the milk it usually gets? Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is simply not the case. The child would waste away if it were given such artificial milk. And since people can only produce according to need, we will also have to refrain from producing such milk. It would be a means of corrupting humanity.

For who can supply, as a solvent, what the child needs? You see, only life itself can do that. Animals could do it in a makeshift way, but not all animals. But for the very early days, when the child depends on it – because it cannot yet dissolve properly itself – these nutrients, protein and fat, can only be properly digested if they are already properly dissolved, and the child can only be properly nourished with human milk itself.

And of other milks, donkey milk is the one most similar to human milk, and so, if there is no way to feed the child through self-breastfeeding or breastfeeding at all, the child can still be fed to the greatest extent with donkey milk. This is admittedly very strange, but donkey's milk is actually most similar to human milk, so that if the right human breast cannot be provided, then in a pinch, breastfeeding could also be provided by keeping a donkey and a she-donkey and in this way providing the child with milk. But of course this is only something I say as a hypothesis, so that you can see how things are connected in nature.

If you now compare milk, for example, with the chicken egg as food, you will find that the chicken egg contains about 14 percent protein, which is actually four times more than what milk contains. If we begin to give the child food containing more albumen, then the child must already have the power of dissolving. It must already be able to dissolve.

You can see from this how necessary it is for the child to receive liquid nourishment. But what kind of liquid nourishment? A liquid nourishment that has already passed through life and, since the child is nursed directly at the mother's breast, is still alive.

In the case of a child, it can be clearly seen that when it drinks milk and the milk passes through the mouth and oesophagus into the stomach – only then is it killed in the human body – that it can then be revitalized in the intestines. So we see directly from the child that the life must first be killed. And because the life is still little changed, the child needs less strength to revive when it drinks milk than when it enjoys something else. So you see how close man is to life.

But it shows something else as well. If you really think about it, what do you actually come to? Start thinking correctly about this point right now. You see, if we say to ourselves: The child must therefore take in living food that it can kill and revive itself, and we then say: the human being consists for the most part of fluid – may we then say that the human being consists of water, of the water that we find outside in nature, in inanimate nature? Then this water, which we find in inanimate nature, should be able to work in the child in the same way as it works in the adult, who has already accumulated more vital forces!

From this, however, you can see that the water we carry in us as our almost 90 percent water is not ordinary, lifeless water, but that it is revitalized water. So there is something else that a person carries within them: they carry revitalized water. And this revitalized water is the same water that we have out there in inanimate nature, permeated with what permeates the whole world as life, only asserting itself just as little in inanimate water as human thinking asserts itself in a dead corpse. So when you say: water – here I have water in the stream and water in the human body, you can understand this in the same way as when you say: here I have a corpse and here I have a living person; the water in the stream is the corpse of the water that is in the human body.

That is why we say: Man not only has this dead part in him, this physical part, but he also has a life body, a life body within him. This is what real thinking really gives: man has this life body within him. And how this continues to work in man, we can realize if we really observe man in connection with nature. But then we must actually visualize that we first look out into nature and then look into the human being. When we look out into nature, we find the components, the parts of which the human being consists, only that the human being processes these parts from nature in his own way.

So, to understand this, let us go to the very smallest animals. You will notice, as I talk, how I have already spoken similarly about what is in man in the same way that I now have to speak about the smallest and lowest living creatures out in nature. You see, there are very small animal creatures in the water, in the seawater. These little creatures are actually just little lumps of mucus, usually so small that they can only be seen through a strong magnifying glass. I am now drawing them enlarged (see drawing, left). These little lumps of mucus swim in the surrounding water, in the liquid.

If there were nothing else but a lump of mucus and water all around, the lump of mucus would remain at rest. But if, let's say, some small grain of some substance floats by, for example such a small one (see drawing, right) floats by, then this animal, without anything else being there, spreads its mucus so far that now this grain is inside its mucus. And of course it has to spread this mucus by pulling itself away. This makes the little lump move. So it is because this little creature, this little mucus of life, surrounds a grain with its own mucus that we see it moving at the same time. But the other grain there is now dissolved inside it. It dissolves and the little animal has eaten this grain.

Now, however, such an animal can also eat several such grains. Imagine there is this little animal, there a grain, there also a grain, there and there also a grain (see drawing), then the little animal extends its feelers here, there, and there, and where it has extended them the most, where the grain was largest, it then pulls itself along and pulls the others with it. So this little animal moves in such a way that it feeds at the same time.

Now, gentlemen, when I describe to you how these little lumps of mucus swim around in the sea and feed at the same time, you will remember how I described the so-called white blood cells in humans. They are initially exactly the same in humans. Such small animals also swim around in human blood and feed and move in this way. We come to an understanding of what is actually swimming around in human blood by looking at what is swimming around out there in the sea in the form of such small animals. We therefore carry this within us.

And now that we have remembered how we actually have, in a sense, such creatures swimming around in our blood, creatures that are spread out in nature, living in our blood on all sides, let us try to understand how our nervous system, namely our brain, is constructed. Our brain also consists of the smallest parts. If I draw these smallest parts for you, you will see that they also represent a kind of lumpy, thick mucus. Rays emanate from this mucus (see drawing), which consist of the same substance as the mucus. You see, there is a cell, as it is called, from the brain. It has a neighboring cell. It stretches out its little feet or arms here, and touches the others there. There is a third such cell; it stretches out its little feet here, touches there. They can become very long. Some go almost through half the body. It borders on another cell. When we look at our brain through the microscope, it appears to consist of such dots, where the mucus is more concentrated. And then thick tree branches extend from here; they repeatedly enter into one another. If you would imagine a dense forest with thick treetops that have widely spreading branches that would touch one another, you would have an idea of what the brain looks like under the microscope, under the magnifying glass.

But, gentlemen, you can say now: So he has described these white blood cells that live in the blood. And what is described as the brain is quite similar; lots of little bodies settle there that are in the blood. If I could take all the white blood corpuscles out of a person without killing him, and then put them into the skullcap, after I had first taken out his brain, then I would have made a brain out of his white blood corpuscles.

But the strange thing is that before we could make a brain out of his white blood cells, these white blood cells would have to die halfway. That is the difference between the white blood cells and the brain cells. The white blood cells are full of life. They are always moving around each other in the human blood. I told you that they surge like blood through the veins. That's where they come out. As I explained, they become gourmets and go up to the body's surface. They crawl all over the body.

But if you look at the brain, these cells, these corpuscles, remain in place. They are at rest. They only stretch out their branches and always touch the next one. So the ones that are in the body and are in full motion, they come to rest in the brain and are indeed half dead.

Imagine this little animal crawling around in the sea, eating one time too many. If it eats too much, then the story goes like this: Then it stretches out its arm, its branch, takes this and that, and has eaten too much. It cannot tolerate this; now it splits in two, diverges, and we have two instead of one. It has multiplied. Our white blood cells also have this ability to multiply. Some always die and others are created by multiplication.

In this way, the brain cells that I have drawn for you cannot multiply – our white blood cells within us are fully independent and alive. The brain cells that interlock in this way cannot multiply; two brain cells will never develop from one brain cell. When a person gets a bigger brain, when the brain grows, cells from the rest of the body must always migrate into the brain. The cells must grow into it. It is not that this ever happens in the brain, that the brain cells multiply; they just accumulate. And as we grow, new cells must always migrate in from the rest of the body so that when we are adults, we have a brain that is large enough.

And from the fact that these brain cells cannot reproduce, you can see that they are half dead. They are always dying, these brain cells, always, always dying. If we really look at this properly, we see that human beings have a wonderful contrast: in their blood they carry cells full of vitality in the white blood cells, which want to live forever, and in their brain they carry cells that actually want to die forever, that are always on the path to dying. This is also true: through his brain, man is always on the path to dying; the brain is actually always in danger of dying.

Now, gentlemen, you will have heard, or perhaps experienced yourself – it is always unpleasant when you experience it yourself – that people can also faint. When people faint, they enter into a state as if they were about to fall. They lose consciousness.

What actually happens in a person when they lose consciousness in this way? You will also know that, for example, people who are quite pale, such as girls who are anemic, are most likely to faint. Why? Well, they faint because they have too many white blood cells in relation to the red blood cells. A person must have a very precise ratio, as I have indicated, between white blood cells and red blood cells in order to be consciously aware in the right way. So what does it mean when we become unconscious? For example, when we faint, but also when we sleep, we become unconscious. This means that the activity of the white blood cells is much too active, much too strong. When the white blood corpuscles are too active, when a person has too much life in him, then he loses consciousness. So it is very good that a person has cells in his head that constantly want to die; because if these white blood corpuscles in the brain were still alive, then we would not be able to have any consciousness at all, then we would always be sleeping beings. We would always be sleeping.

And so you may ask: why do plants sleep all the time? — Plants sleep all the time simply because they do not have such living beings, because they actually have no blood at all, because they do not have this life that exists in our inner being as an independent life.

If we want to compare our brain with something in nature outside, we again have to compare our brain only with plants. The brain, which basically continually undermines our own life, and in doing so creates consciousness. So we get a completely contradictory concept for the brain. It is contradictory: the plant does not get consciousness, the human being gets consciousness. This is something that we still have to explain through long deliberation, and we now want to set out to be able to explain it.

We become unconscious every night when we sleep. So something must be going on in our body that we now have to learn to understand. What is going on in our body then? Yes, you see, gentlemen, if everything in our body were the same when we are sleeping as when we are awake, we would not sleep. When we sleep, our brain cells begin to live a little more than they do when we are awake. So they become more similar to the cells that have their own life in us. So you can imagine: When we are awake, these brain cells are very quiet; but when we sleep, these brain cells cannot move very far from their location because they are already localized, because they are held in place from the outside; they cannot move around very well, they cannot swim around very well because they would immediately bump into something else, but they acquire a kind of will to move. The brain becomes restless internally. This is how we enter into an unconscious state, because the brain is inwardly restless.

Now we have to ask: where does this thinking actually come from in us humans? That is, how is it that we can absorb forces from the whole wide universe into ourselves? With our organs of nutrition, we can only absorb earthly forces with the substances. With our respiratory organs, we can only absorb air, namely with oxygen. In order to absorb all the forces from the wide world with our head, it is necessary that it is very quiet inside, that the brain is completely calm. But when we sleep, the brain begins to become active; then we absorb fewer of these forces that are out there in the wide universe, and we become unconscious.

But now the story is like this: Imagine that work is being done in two places; here, let's say, work is being done by five workers, and there by two workers. These are then combined, these works, and each batch continues to do a part of the work. But suppose it becomes necessary to stop work for a bit because too many parts of one kind have been made and not enough of the other. What do we do then? We ask one of the five laborers to go over to the two laborers. Now we have three workers there and four of the five here. We transfer the work from one side to the other if we do not want to increase anything. Man has only a very limited amount of strength. He has to distribute it. So when the brain becomes more active during sleep at night, when it works more, that strength has to be drawn from the rest of the body. This work has to be taken from there. Now, where is it taken from? Yes, you see, it is taken from some of the white blood cells. Some of the white blood cells begin to live less during the night than during the day. The brain lives more. Some of the white blood cells live less. That is the compensation.

But now I have told you: the fact that the brain slows down a bit and becomes calm is how a person begins to think. So when these white blood cells become calm at night, then the person should begin to think wherever the white blood cells become calm. He should begin to think with his body.

Now let us ask ourselves: Does a person perhaps think with his body at night? — That is a ticklish question, isn't it, whether a person perhaps thinks with his body at night! Well, he knows nothing about it. For the time being he can only say that he knows nothing about it. But the fact that I know nothing about something is no proof that it is not there. Otherwise, everything that people have not yet seen would have to be denied. Just because I don't know something, that is no proof that it is not there. The human body could indeed think at night, and one simply knows nothing about it and therefore believes that it does not think.

Now we have to examine whether man perhaps has signs that while he thinks with his head during the day, at night he begins to think with his liver and his stomach and his other organs, and perhaps even with his intestines.

We have certain indications of this. Every person has indications that this is the case. Because just imagine where it comes from, that something is there and yet we know nothing about it. Imagine I am standing there, talking to you, and I am turning my attention to you, that is, I am not seeing what is behind me.

Strange things can happen. For example, I may be accustomed to sitting down here on the chair from time to time while I am talking. Now I turn my attention to you, and during that time someone takes the chair away from me. I didn't see the whole thing, but it happened anyway, and I notice the consequences when I want to sit down now.

You see, the thing is that one must not judge merely according to what one usually knows, but one must judge according to what one might be able to know in a completely indirect way. If I had looked around quickly, I probably wouldn't have settled on the ground. If I had looked around, I would have prevented it.

Now let us take a look at human thinking in the body. You see, natural scientists like to talk about the limits of human knowledge. What do they actually mean by that? When natural scientists talk about the limits of knowledge, they mean that what they have not yet seen – whether through a microscope or a telescope or at all – is not there. But with knowledge, people just keep settling on the ground, because not seeing something is no proof that it is not there. That is the case.

Now, that which I am to become aware of must not only be conceived by me, but I must also observe the conceived. Thinking could be a process that always happens, sometimes in the head, sometimes in the whole body. But when I am awake, I have my eyes open. The eyes not only see outwards, but the eyes also perceive inwards. Likewise, when I taste something, I not only taste what is on the outside, but I also perceive inside, for example, if, let's say, I am sick all over, and what tastes pleasant to someone else becomes disgusting to me. So the inside always determines. The inner perception must also be there.

Now imagine we wake up quite normally. Our brain cells slowly calm down. They come to rest very slowly, and the thing is that I gradually learn to use my senses, that is, I use my senses again. The waking up process follows the cycle of life quite appropriately. That can be the one case.

But the other case can also be that I calm my brain cells too quickly due to some circumstance. I calm them down much too quickly. Now something else happens when I calm them down too quickly. Let's say that if one of the five workers directs the movement, as I said, he takes the fifth one away and puts him over there. If one of them directs it, it may go very smoothly. But suppose one of them has to take it away from one person and put it back with another, then all sorts of trouble can arise, especially if the two of them start arguing about whether it is right or not. If the brain cells in my brain now start to calm down too quickly, then the white blood cells that have now come to rest during sleep will not be able to get moving again so quickly. And it will happen that while I am already calm in my brain, while I have already calmed all my movement in my brain that was there during sleep, the white blood cells down there in the blood will not want to get up yet. They will still want to persist in their calm. They don't want to get up.

It would be truly wonderful if we could perceive these still-lazy blood cells – I am speaking only figuratively, of course – that still want to remain in bed. If we could, they would look at each other just as the quiet brain cells look at each other, and we would perceive the most wonderful thoughts. Just at the moment when we wake up too quickly, we would perceive the most wonderful thoughts. You can easily understand that, gentlemen, if you understand the whole story of the connection between man and nature. If you were to wake up quickly, if nothing else were to prevent it, you would be able to perceive the most wonderful thoughts in your body. But you can't. Why is that not possible? Well, you see, between these lazy, still-sleeping white blood corpuscles, and between that with which we perceive them, which we can only do with our heads, that is where all the breathing is going on. The red blood corpuscles are in there. Breathing is going on, and we have to look at this thought process that is going on in us through the whole breathing process.

Imagine I wake up; this calms my brain. Down there (it is drawn), the white blood cells are somewhere in the blood. I would also perceive them as calm, and I would see the most beautiful thoughts in there. Yes, but now in between there is the whole breathing process. It is just as if I want to look at something and I look at it through cloudy glass; then I see it indistinctly, everything becomes blurred. This breathing process is like cloudy glass. All the thinking that is down there in the body becomes blurred to me. And what arises from it? Dreams. Dreams arise from it: indistinct thoughts that I perceive when the brain activity in my body calms down too quickly.

And again when falling asleep, if I have an irregularity, so if the brain comes into activity too slowly when falling asleep, then the story happens in such a way that I, due to the fact that the brain comes into activity too slowly, still has the ability to perceive something – that I can observe the thinking that already begins down there during sleep, when falling asleep. And so it happens that a person perceives in dreams what actually remains unobserved by him throughout the night, when he is waking up and falling asleep.

We actually only perceive dreams at the moment of waking up. You can very easily visualize the fact that we only perceive dreams at the moment of waking up by taking a good look at a dream. Suppose I am sleeping and there is a chair next to my bed. Now I can dream the following: I am a student and meet another student somewhere, to whom I say some rude word. The other student has to react to it – it's called a 'comment' – and then he has to react to this rude word, and it comes to the point that he challenges me. Sometimes it can be something very trivial, that's how students have to challenge each other.

Now, everything is dreamt: the seconds are chosen, you go out into the forest in a dream, and you have arrived outside; you start shooting. The first one shoots. I still hear the shot in my dream, but I wake up and have just knocked over the chair with my arm next to the bed. That was the shot!

Yes, gentlemen, if I had not pushed the chair over, I would not have had the dream at all, the dream would not have existed! The fact that the dream became precisely such an image only happened at the moment of waking up, because the pushed-over chair was what woke me up in the first place. So in this single moment of waking up, the image arose, what is going on in me became unclear. From this you can see that what is pictorial in the dream is only formed in the single moment in which I wake up, just as what is pictorial in the dream must be formed in the single moment of falling asleep.

But if such images form, and if I can perceive something with such images, then thoughts must be there for it. What do we come to then? We come to understand sleeping and waking a little. So let's ask ourselves: What is it like to sleep? When we sleep, our brain is more active than when we are awake; when we are awake, our brain calms down. Yes, gentlemen, if we could say that our brain becomes more active when we are awake, then, you see, we could be materialists, because then the physical activity of the brain would mean thinking. But if we are reasonable people, we cannot say that the brain is more active when we are awake than when we are sleeping. It must just calm down when we are awake.

So physical activity cannot give us thought. If physical activity gave us thought, that thought would have to consist in stronger physical activity than non-thought. But non-thought consists in stronger physical activity. So you can say: I have lungs; the lungs would be lazy if the external oxygen did not come over them and set them in motion. But my brain becomes lazy during the day; so something external must come for the brain that sets it in motion. And so we have to recognize that in the world — just as oxygen sets the lungs in motion or sets them in action — during the day the brain is brought to thinking by something that is not in the body itself, that does not belong to the body itself.

We must therefore say to ourselves: If we do real science, we are led to assume something incorporeal, something soul-like. We see that it is there. We see it, so to speak, flying in when we wake up, because what is thinking cannot come out of the body. If it came out of the body, one would think better at night. We would have to lie down and fall asleep, and then thinking would arise in our brain. But we don't. So we see, as it were, what our soul and spiritual being flies in.

So that one can say: Science has indeed made great strides in recent times, but it has only come to know that which is not actually suited to life and to thinking, while it has not grasped life itself, and has grasped thinking even less. And so, if you really do natural science, you are led, not by superstition, but precisely by this real natural science, to say: just as there must be oxygen for breathing, so there must be something spiritual for thinking.

More about this next time, because it cannot be decided so easily. There will still be all kinds of counterforces in many of you against what I have said. But it must be said that anyone who does not talk like this simply does not understand the whole story in man. So it is not a matter of spreading superstition, but of creating complete clarity. That is what it is about.

Question: A listener has brought stones back from his vacation. The question is whether stones also have life or have once had life and how they came into being.

Dr. Steiner: I may be able to take up these stones again at a later date; but perhaps it is also possible that I can still incorporate it into our present consideration.

Look, gentlemen, I will say the following: We have seen that there is actually a kind of killing of life within us, in the human being. We have seen that we have these little creatures crawling around in our blood, the white blood corpuscles, which creep through the blood vessels to our skin. I told you that it is a special delicacy for these little creatures when they come to the surface, whereas they are otherwise only inside the human body. This is, so to speak, the spice of life for them. So these are the living cells that crawl around. In contrast to this, I told you: the cells in the nervous system, namely those in the brain, are actually cells that are continually being killed, continually entering into the dead. The cells in the brain are such that they actually only begin to be somewhat more alive when you are sleeping. They start to be a little more alive. They cannot move away from their place because they are very cramped among the others; they cannot move like the white blood cells, but they start to live a little during the night while you sleep. And that is why, when these cells get a little more life and willpower from the body, the white blood cells have to stay a little calmer. And that is why, as I have told you, thoughts actually arise in the whole body.

Now let us pose the question: Where do thoughts actually come from? — Not true, the people who just want to think materialistically, that is, comfortably, they say: Well, thoughts just arise in the brain or in the nervous system of the human being. Thoughts grow there like cabbages in the field. — But if only people would think it through — “like cabbages in the field”! Cabbages don't grow in the field unless they are planted. So, things have to be planted first, so to speak. For my part, everyone can see a kind of field in the human brain for thoughts. But just imagine: if you have a beautiful field of cabbages, and the person who has always cultivated it were to move away and no one were to be found to continue the work, then no cabbage would ever grow in that field.

So it must be said: Just when one thinks that thoughts come out of the brain, one must first ask: Where do they come from? Well, just as the cabbage comes out of the field! - So the question must first be properly understood. And then we have to ask ourselves the following: What you see here has actually come into being out there in nature. I would like to explain to you how what comes into being out there in nature. I have said: We find everything in man when we understand everything in man's surroundings. When we looked at the plants and so on, we understood many things in man. Now we have this stone. Let's take a good look at this rock. You see, it is a very soft rock underneath and behind and above. You can scrape it off with a knife. The outer part, what is around it, is just a bit denser earth. So it is like this – I just want to draw the bottom here –: there is this soft rock at the bottom, and just as if they were growing out of it, there are all kinds of crystals on this soft rock, crystals that look like they are growing out of it. I would have to draw many, wouldn't I, but this is enough. There are such small crystals; they are down there, as if they had grown out, but they are terribly hard. You can't scrape them off with a knife; the knife doesn't affect them; at most, if you can get at one, you can cut it off as a whole, but you can't scratch into it. So these are hard crystals that are embedded there.

Now let us ask ourselves: How do such crystals get into the softer soil, which is only a little compacted? Such crystals are bodies that are very beautifully designed; they have such a longitudinal shape, and at the top they have a small roof on them. There would also be a roof at the bottom if it did not extend into the earth. If the earth were soft enough, this would be the case with every crystal; but it perishes when it enters the earth.

Where do these crystals come from? When plants grow, carbonic acid must be outside the plants. Otherwise the plants cannot grow. The same substance that we exhale must reach the plants. And then, when the carbonic acid reaches the plants, the plants absorb this carbonic acid, retain the carbon that is in the carbonic acid, and they exhale the oxygen. That is the difference between humans and plants. Humans inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; we retain the oxygen while we release the carbon dioxide. The plant is connected to the earth. When the plant dies, this carbon returns to the soil and becomes the black coal that we dig out of the earth after centuries.

But there are also other substances. There is a substance that is quite similar to coal in a certain respect, but is different in other ways. This is silica. Suppose you have a soil that is rich in silica, with a lot of silica in it. Then, because oxygen is always present, oxygen takes effect. There is oxygen above it now. This oxygen does not initially affect the silica. But after some time, in the course of the development of the earth, you suddenly find that the oxygen has combined with the pebble. And just as we produce carbon dioxide when we breathe out, when the pebble from the earth properly combines with the oxygen, quartz, silicic acid is formed; crystals like these are formed. It only needs the pebble to combine with oxygen from the earth, and crystals such as those that are there are formed.

But oxygen does not have the power to combine with silica on its own. You can have as much silica as you like, and oxygen on top of it, it would not all form. Why do these beautiful shapes form? Yes, they form precisely because forces are at work in the universe from all sides and the earth is constantly in connection with the whole universe. Forces are constantly coming in from all sides, and these forces bring oxygen into the pebble, and that is how such crystals are formed. So all these crystals are formed because the earth is influenced by all the other stars. We can therefore say that these crystals are actually formed from the world.

Now, however, you can say the following: What are you telling us? The rock that the pea-flour has given us proves the opposite! — The rock is actually like this: there is loose earth below (see drawing), above it is more loose earth, and behind it is more loose earth. It is completely surrounded by loose earth, and these crystal forms here, they are not just growing upwards from below, as I have described them now, but you could say that they are already growing upwards if only they were there from below. But these are now those that grow towards us from above. Now you might say: But that cannot be explained from the universe, because then one would have to assume that the same forces come from the interior of the earth, which would then have to come from the universe if one were to explain them only from bottom to top.

Yes, you see, that is an apparent contradiction. There must be something behind it. Now I will tell you what is behind it.

Such rocks do not form on the open ground; they form in the mountains. And if it is on the open ground, it is also the case that there are layers of earth above and below, just as there are in the mountains. But let's assume we get it out of the mountains. Imagine we have such a mountain range, and I want to draw the slope of the mountain range. If you now go up there (see drawing), you go up like this, and of course you have to go past there, the path has to go there, the earth or the rock can overhang a little; you will find overhanging earth everywhere if you go into the mountains. Now imagine that a very, very long time ago, what I have drawn here in brown would have been there, would have been deposited there, and that would have been deposited there (see drawing). According to my explanation, crystals would have formed here through the forces of the universe, as I have explained, and therefore also such crystals. Crystals would have grown down there, as it were, through the forces of the universe, and up there too.

Then it later happened that what was up there fell down and covered it. So you see: When the upper falls down, it falls in such a way that it is then at the top (see drawing), and at the bottom are the crystals that originally went up, and because of the fall they fell over them so that they were held by those that were at the bottom and were thus superimposed on each other. Those who fell down lay on top of those below, so that what was at the top came to be at the bottom.

This is how it was in the mountains all the time. Those who study will find that landslides like this have occurred continuously in the mountains, where the upper layer has been laid on top of the lower layer. That is precisely what is interesting about studying mountains. When you walk in the plains, you get the feeling that one layer has been laid on top of the other throughout history, because it has only happened in the last few millennia. We could never say that about the Alps. The Alps were also formed in this way a long time ago; but then the higher parts plunged over the lower parts, and the Alps are completely jumbled layers of earth.

That is why it is so difficult to study the Alps, because you have to consider everywhere whether what is above has also originated in this way. Often it did not come about that way, but rather that there was a layer down there, a layer up there, and then something was pushed up, knocking over what was below; and it covered what was below. And so these folds, as they are called, have formed in the mountains over the course of millennia and millennia, bringing about such things. So that one must first explain these things by the fact that the mountains have thrown themselves over each other again. So one would have to say: the lower part was formed on such a slope (see drawing), the upper part on such a slope, and behind it there was of course the mountain range, so that it fell over it; it was laid over it. So that one can only explain such a thing, where crystals face each other from below and from above, if one knows that on Earth, over the course of millennia, everything has gradually been mixed up.

So in the whole inanimate realm we always have forces that come from the universe and that also work in us in such a way that we actually have to do something in us to prevent these forces from disturbing us.

You see, gentlemen, the pebble that is common in the earth is also found in us. It is not too much, but we have such substances in us, from which such terribly hard stones can arise. But if such hard rocks were to arise in us, as Mr. Erbsmehl has brought here, then we would be in a bad way! If, for example, a child who already has pebbles inside could not help it and such crystals, even if they were very small, would form everywhere (they would be tiny after all), that would be a very bad thing! They sometimes form during an illness.

Sugar can also form crystals, as you know. If you look at rock sugar, it also consists of crystals that are layered on top of each other. Now, we have a lot of sugar in us. Not everyone on earth eats the same amount of sugar. That varies. For example, people in Russia eat very little sugar, while in England they eat a lot of sugar – on average, of course. But then people also differ again. The Russian character is different from the English character. The Russians are very different people from the English. This is largely due to the fact that the Russians get little sugar in their food. The English eat things that contain a lot of sugar, foods that contain a lot of sugar.

This is connected with what I have already said. The forces of the universe are at work in everything. So man has a lot of sugar in him. Sugar always wants to become crystal. What can we do to prevent it from becoming crystal?

You see, I told you that there is a lot of water in us, living water: that dissolves the sugar. That would be a nice story if the water didn't keep dissolving the sugar! Such small crystals would form, like rock candy crystals, and we would have such small stuffy crystals inside us if the sugar were not constantly being dissolved. We humans need sugar in our food, but we can only use it if we dissolve it continuously. We have to have it. Why do we have to have it? Because we have to do this, to dissolve it! We don't live on it alone, but it is part of our life that we dissolve the sugar. So we have to get it into us.

But if we now have too little strength to dissolve this sugar, then these very small crystals form, and then they leave with the urine. And that's when diabetes comes. And that is the explanation for why people become diabetic: they have too little strength to dissolve the sugar they eat. They have to get sugar, but if they have too little strength to dissolve the sugar, diabetes occurs. The sugar must not get so far that it comes off in small crystals, but it must be dissolved. Man must have the strength to dissolve the sugar. That is his life.

If you think about something like that, you can also see from it that we not only have to have the strength to dissolve the sugar, but we also have to have the strength to continually dissolve these small crystals that always want to form in us as quartz crystals – there are few of them, but they want to form, these quartz crystals. They must not be allowed to form in us. If they were to form in a child, the child would come and say: It's terrible, it stings me everywhere! It stings everywhere!

What has happened if it stings the child everywhere? Yes, you see, there are the small pebble crystals that have arisen in the nerves, have not been resolved. They have remained lying. You must not imagine that these are huge masses. There are very few, tiny ones that you can not even find easily with a microscope; much smaller than one ten thousandth of a millimeter. When many tiny crystals have accumulated in the nervous system, then the person gets tiny pricks everywhere that they cannot explain. It stings them everywhere. And in addition, small inflammations are caused by this happening; very small inflammations are caused. And then the person has rheumatism or gout. Gout is nothing more than such tiny crystals settling. These pains that a person has come from this. And that a person with gout gets the gouty lumps comes from the inflammation. When you push a nail into yourself, an inflammation occurs. These little skewers come from within, pushing to the surface. There are small internal inflammations, and then these inflammations form these gouty lumps.

These are all processes that can take place inside a person. But from this you can see that we must always have forces within us that, let's say, have to work against gout, otherwise we as human beings would constantly get gout. But we must not get it all the time. So there must always be something behind it that we can work against.

What does that mean? Yes, you see, it means that forces are at work from the universe. They actually do not want to form too large, but microscopically tiny crystals in us. When these forces come in and form these crystals here, they also work in us, so that we are constantly permeated by these forces, and we have to develop those forces in our inner being that constantly bring this matter into nothingness. We must continually work against these forces. We must therefore have forces within us that work against these forces. These forces of the universe also enter into us; but we work against them – and particularly strongly in the nerves. If we did not work against them, mineral substances would continually arise in the nerves.

These mineral substances must arise because, you see, there are children who remain stupid and die young. If you then dissect such children who have remained stupid, you often find that they have too little of what is called cerebral sand. Everyone must have a little cerebral sand in them. This cerebral sand must arise and must be dissolved again and again.

But if we have too little strength to dissolve it, too much can remain. But, gentlemen, if you get the food into your blood, the sand will continually settle in your brain, because that is what you are constantly doing in your brain. It is continually being deposited. And the cerebral sand that is in there (it is drawn) is exposed to the forces of the universe just as much as what is outside in nature, so that tiny crystals are constantly trying to form in there. But they must not form. If we don't have cerebral sand, we become stupid. If the crystals were to form, we would constantly faint because we would effectively suffer from cerebral rheumatism or cerebral gout. Because otherwise the body just hurts; but if the brain contains these crystals, there is nothing you can do but faint. So you need brain sand, but you have to keep dissolving it. It is a continuous process of brain sand being deposited, dissolved, deposited, dissolved.

If too much is deposited, it can sometimes also damage the walls of the blood vessels in the brain. Then the blood comes out. Then there is the stroke, not just the fainting, but the stroke, the cerebral hemorrhage.

So when you study the disease process, you can see what a person actually has inside them. Because in illness, everything in us that is in a healthy person is just too strong. Being sick means nothing more than that we develop something too strongly.

This also happens in life, gentlemen. You have already seen that when a small child is there and you touch its cheek gently with your hand, it is a caress, you stroke it. And you can also make the same touch with your hand too strong; then it is no longer a caress, then it is a slap.

Well, you see, that's the way it is in the world. Things that can be a caress on one side can be a slap in the face on the other. And so in life, what has to be done in the brain, this gentle work in the brain sand, becomes a slap in the face when it becomes too strong, when the power in us is too weak, so that we cannot dissolve this mineral that we have within us. Then we would constantly faint or if it becomes too strong, when these crystals keep piercing our blood vessels, we would have a stroke. So these crystals must be continually dissolved by us. This thing that I have now told you is constantly going on in you.

I will now tell you something else. Let us make things very clear. Suppose you have the human being here – I will draw it very schematically – here is his brain, here is his eye, and here I will draw something that you are somehow looking at, so let us say there is a plant in front of your eye for the sake of argument.

Now turn your attention to this plant. See, when you turn your attention to this plant – you can only do this, of course, when it is daylight all around – and the plant is illuminated by the sun's rays, then it is bright, and you receive the light effect in your eye. But through the optic nerve, which goes backwards from the eye, what is the light effect goes into your brain. So when you look at a plant, you are directed towards the plant through your eye, and from the plant the light effect goes through your eye into your brain.

This secretion, you have to imagine it as a completely human process. You will have noticed that you not only sweat when you exert yourself, but also when, for example, you are terribly afraid of something. You do not exactly secrete brain sand, but other salts, and with that water through your skin. That is secretion. But looking means constantly secreting brain sand. When someone looks very intently at something, brain sand is constantly being secreted. And that is where we have to dissolve this brain sand. Because if we did not dissolve this brain sand again, then a tiny little flower would arise in us from the brain sand in the brain! To look at the flower, that actually means that a very small, tiny flower forms in us from the brain sand, which is then only directed from top to bottom, just as the little picture in the eye is also directed from top to bottom. That is the difference, gentlemen.

It is like this: when we look at a chair – it doesn't even have to be a flower – a little bit of brain sand forms in there through the act of looking, and if we were now to just abandon ourselves to this looking, we would get a very small – much smaller than it can be in the microscope – a tiny little image made of silica sand of this chair. And if I were to stand in such a room, and I had developed a certain power of observation as a human being, the whole room would be reversed in me, only with the floor at the top, as an image composed of tiny pebbles. It is quite colossal how we are constantly building in ourselves. Only we are not the kind of people to let it happen. Without our consciously doing so, we dissolve the whole thing again. In this respect, we are very peculiarly constituted as human beings. We look at the world. The world constantly wants to form such shapes in us that are like the world, only reversed. And if we were not there, if we did not observe, then — especially at night when we sleep, when we do not develop the strength to dissolve from within — such formations would continually form through that which is in the universe. These formations also mainly form when the earth is not illuminated by the sun, by light, but rather they are formed by forces that come from much further away. But we are always exposed to these forces. So that we can say: When we sleep, all kinds of mineral, inanimate forms want to form in us continuously through the universe, and when we look at them, forms want to form in us that are just like our surroundings. When we sleep, we recreate the universe. In the universe, everything is arranged in a crystalline way. What we see there (in the crystals) is so because the forces in the universe are arranged just like the crystals. Some go this way, the others go that way, so that the crystals are formed from the whole universe. But this is what we want to happen in us. And when we perceive, when we look at our immediate surroundings, what is in our immediate surroundings wants to form itself. We must constantly prevent this from becoming solid, must constantly dissolve it.

Now, gentlemen, a peculiar process is taking place here. Imagine that the flower in there wants to form an inanimate image of itself out of stone. This must not be allowed to happen, otherwise we would not know the flower, but would get a headache. So that must first be dissolved.

I will make this process, which is constantly going on, even more clear to you by saying the following. Suppose you had a pot of lukewarm water here and someone blindfolded you, and after you were blindfolded, they brought some object that could be dissolved in this lukewarm water. You were to reach into this lukewarm water with your hand. You cannot see the object because you are blindfolded. But the other person can now ask you: “Reach into the water with your hand; can you feel something in there?” — “Yes, the lukewarm water.” — “Can you feel anything else in there?” — “Yes, it is cold around the fingers.

Where can that come from? The other person has put an object into the water that is dissolving! And this dissolution causes the lukewarm water around the fingers to become colder. He feels this dissolution around his fingers and can say: Something is dissolving in there.

But this is the case all the time when we have formed the object in here and have to dissolve it again. We feel the dissolution and then, because we feel the dissolution, we say: Yes, the object is out there, because it formed an image for us, and we dissolved the image. Because we have dissolved it, we know what the object looks like. Thus the thought of the object comes to us, because we must first dissolve the image of the object. Thus the thought comes. We would faint if we only had the image. But if we are strong enough to dissolve the image, then we know about it. So that is the difference between fainting when we see something or having knowledge of it.

So, consider someone who is, say, a little sickly, and there is a terrible thunder – that can happen. From this thunder, even if not through the eye, but through the ear, brain sand is deposited in him, an image is formed. He cannot dissolve this quickly enough. He may faint, lose consciousness. If he is healthy, he does not lose consciousness, which means that he has dissolved his brain sand quickly enough. So fainting means not dissolving the brain sand quickly enough. Not fainting means dissolving the brain sand quickly enough. We must always, by looking at the things around us, dissolve the brain sand quickly enough.

This brings us to the question of man's relationship to the forces in the whole universe. Last time I told you: if man's relationship to the forces in the universe is such that the brain cells in his brain are constantly dying, then they are indeed totally inanimate, and he has to handle them. That is his soul-spiritual with which he handles them. Now we even find the force that is constantly dissolving the brain cells. The cerebral sand is constantly killing the cells. The fact that cerebral sand is mixed in is what keeps killing the cells. And we have to work against that. And that, you see, is the reason why we are human: so that we can work against the cerebral sand in a certain way.

This is not the case with animals in the same way. An animal cannot work against the brain sand as much as we humans can. That is why animals do not have a head like ours, except for the higher animals. We have a head that can dissolve everything that constantly enters us. This dissolving of what comes into us is what enables a person to feel that he is saying 'I'. This is the strongest dissolution of the cerebral sand when we say 'I'. — Then we imbue our speech with consciousness. So the cerebral sand dissolves, all the nerve sand dissolves. This is not the case with animals. That is why it makes an animal scream or something similar, but not real speech. That is why no animal has the ability to feel itself, to say 'I' to itself like a human being, because a human being dissolves the brain sand to a much greater extent.

So that we can say: We are not only working against what is on earth, but we are also working against the forces of the universe. The forces of the universe would crystallize us inwardly. We would become a mountain range inside with all those layers of crystals. We are working against that inwardly. We are constantly dissolving that. We are constantly working against the forces of the universe with the dissolving forces.

And so we not only dissolve silicic acid – because that is silicic acid, which these crystals form here – we dissolve everything possible; we dissolve the components that sugar has and so on.

You can literally follow these stories. Suppose a person knows nothing at all about it properly, because such things happen like an instinct in man, but he still feels something vague in himself. Imagine, the person feels: Oh, I can't really think properly, I can't really hold my thoughts together.

A journalist who writes an article every day can very easily get into this mood. Yes, gentlemen, writing an article every day means dissolving an awful lot of brain sand! It's a really disgusting business, writing an article every day, because it means dissolving an awful lot of brain sand. And so you start, when you're supposed to be writing the article – at least that's how it used to be – nibbling on the back of the pen shaft. This is something that journalists in particular have been said to do, that they bite the back of their pen stems to draw out the last of their strength. It's true, when you bite something, you draw the last of your strength from your whole body, to have it in your head, to conquer this brain sand. You have to dissolve a lot of brain sand.

All this happens so instinctively. Of course, the journalist does not say to himself: I will bite my pen handle to get thoughts. — That can go on. In this instinct, he then goes to the coffee house and drinks black coffee. They do not think anything of it, the journalists, because they know nothing about these processes. But if they have now drunk black coffee – by Jove, there goes the story, they can write again when they have drunk black coffee.

Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that in this case the so-called caffeine is absorbed with the black coffee. This is a toxic substance that contains a lot of nitrogen. Nitrogen is in the air. But we can get it back in again. With breathing, we always get a certain amount of oxygen and nitrogen. Now, the person who has to dissolve the brain sand needs a force that lies particularly in the nitrogen to dissolve the brain sand. We draw this force from the nitrogen to dissolve the brain sand.

That is why we are more exposed to nitrogen at night when we sleep than when we are awake, and we said that by breathing in more oxygen we live much faster; if we breathe in more nitrogen, we would live much more slowly and would therefore be around for longer. We could dissolve more.

The journalist who drinks coffee unconsciously relies on this nitrogen, which he gets from coffee, and through this nitrogen, which he gets from the caffeine, he is able to create more brain sand and then also be able to dissolve more. Then he no longer needs to nibble on the quill but can write with the feather because his thoughts are connecting more and more again.

So you see how the human ego works. The human ego conveys, because you get nitrogen-rich food into the stomach, caffeine conveys this nitrogen into the brain, and this facilitates the dissolution of the cerebral sand, and we are thus able to connect one thought to another.

Some people, on the other hand, have the peculiarity that their thoughts stick together too strongly, that they cannot get away from their thoughts. They are so predisposed that they are actually always working on their brain sand. Yes, they do well when they do the opposite process. While one person's thoughts are held together by the fact that he can develop some coherent train of thought, the other person has to help himself with caffeine, with coffee. But if you don't want to hold your thoughts together too tightly, but rather let them shine and sparkle, if, as they say, you want to throw thoughts at people, which looks very witty, then you drink tea. This has the opposite effect. It scatters the thoughts. And it supports another dissolution of the cerebral cortex.

So that this story that goes on in the human being is actually an extremely interesting and complicated one. Each food works in a different way, and we must always add the opposite to what actually wants to arise. We have to dissolve it again. This is actually now our highest spiritual, through which we are constantly actually dissolving our human being internally.

And you see, when a person eats in a certain way, in that for a while they get too little of food that contains enough nitrogen, then what happens is precisely what makes them so sleepy, and one of the gentlemen also asked me about that.

So this is due to the fact that we do not get enough nitrogen with our food. And that is why, in such a case, when we become too sleepy, we must try to take in more nitrogen-rich food. This can, of course, be done in a variety of ways. But it happens especially when we try to take in, say, cheese or egg white, that is, eggs. Then the nitrogen in us is repeatedly replenished. So we have to work in the human being so that he is able to work with that which is his I in this matter.

I said to you at the beginning today: the field can be there, cabbages can grow on it; but they will not grow if the person who cultivates the cabbages is not there. But the field must also be properly prepared. So our brain must contain the necessary substances so that our I can work inside it. But this I is connected with the whole wide range of forces in the universe that want something different. These cosmic forces constantly strive to turn us into hard stones, and we must dissolve again and again. If we could not dissolve, we would not be able to think, we would not come to self-awareness. It is in this dissolution that what we call our self-awareness exists.

You see, gentlemen, these questions must first be answered sensibly if we are to go further in a scientific way to a world view, if we want to know something about man in his relationship to the world. It is most important for the human being to grasp something that is connected with his dissolution. We see a person die, which means that he now completely dissolves as a physical human being. If we do not know that dissolution is taking place in us in every waking moment, we can never grasp what dissolution means, which takes place when a person dissolves in death.

So, first of all, you have to know, gentlemen, that we can actually dissolve ourselves continuously within ourselves through our ability to work against the forces of the world within us. The dissolution is only continually suspended because nutrition provides us with the substances through which we dissolve. But when man has become so that he can no longer dissolve the substances he has within him, then he dissolves himself. Then man becomes a corpse; then he dissolves himself.

When we meet again, we must ask: What is the case when a person dissolves himself? Today we have at least come so far as to know that there is a constant process of dissolution, and if we do not have the strength — because we have too little nitrogen in us — to dissolve the things that want to form in us from the cosmos, then our ego will first become unconscious or it will become drowsy. Being drowsy means that we cannot dissolve enough; we are overwhelmed by the power of deposition. And so, these forces increase,

But just as you are when you fall asleep, because you can wake up again, so you must not conclude the spiritual from what happens externally in the body. Just as nothing can happen to the machine without the human being being present, nothing can happen to the human being without the spirit being present. That is scientific, gentlemen; the other is unscientific. This is not something that I want to tell you; it is something that a person acquires who can really take the matter scientifically very seriously.

We will continue these reflections at the beginning of September. You will see that the matter goes far into the understanding of the human being, leading to it in all possible detours, so that you can understand the human being in everyday life. You will understand the human being quite differently when we talk further, on the basis of what we have already discussed for some time. The human being is repeatedly restored, he dissolves and so on. We will continue to look at this in the near future. Then you will already see what a human being actually looks like to a real scientist.

Now, gentlemen, since there has been a fairly long interval between our lectures, I would like to pick up where we left off last time. At the time, I mainly tried to explain how sleep and waking are connected in life. I told you that we have certain small structures in the brain, they are called cells, and I also drew you the shape. These cells have the protein body here (see drawing) and then extensions, so they are star-shaped. But these extensions are unequal. One is long, the other is short. Then there is another such cell nearby that has its processes, then a third that also has its processes, and these processes, these threads that emanate from the round cells, become entangled with each other, so that they form a network. So that the brain is actually – you can't see it with the naked eye, but only if you use strong magnifications – a network, forms a network, and the little globules are embedded in this network.

You see, these brain cells are basically half dead. That is what is most striking. Because little creatures like brain cells – when they are alive, they also move. And I have already explained the other cells to you: the white blood cells swim around like little animals. They are little animals too; they look just like them. But they swim around and eat. If there is anything in the blood that they can absorb, they absorb it, stretch out their feelers and suck it into their own body. And so they swim through and flow through our body like streams. So we have half dead and half living cells swimming around in our blood.

Now it is the case that when we are awake, these brain cells are then really almost completely dead. And only because the brain cells are dead, can we think. If the brain cells were more alive, we could not think. And one can see that. Because when we are asleep, these brain cells start to come to life a little; especially when we are not thinking, when we are sleeping, the brain cells start to come to life. And the only reason they don't move is because they are so close together, because they can't get out of each other's way. Otherwise, if they started moving, we wouldn't wake up at all.

When someone becomes imbecile, i.e. can no longer think, and then dies and one examines his brain cells, then one also finds: these brain cells in a person who has become imbecile have begun to live, to proliferate. They are softer than they are in a normal person. That is why we also speak of brain softening in people who have become feeble-minded, and the term “brain softening” is not entirely bad.

If you really get to know the living human being without prejudice, you say to yourself: the life that is in him, this physical life, cannot be caused by his thinking, because that must indeed die in the brain if the person is to think. That is precisely the point. If science were to proceed correctly today, if it were to work properly, then science would not be able to be materialistic, because then one would see from the very nature of the human body that a spiritual element in him is most vividly active precisely when the physical element dies, as in the brain. So one can prove soul and spirit in a strictly scientific way.

At night, when we sleep, the brain cells are a bit more alive. That is why we cannot think. And the white blood cells, they start to become active when we are awake. That is the difference between sleeping and waking. So we are awake when our brain cells are paralyzed, almost dead; then we can think. We are asleep and cannot think when our white blood cells are somewhat deadened and our brain cells begin to have a little life. Man must therefore actually have something of death in him in relation to his body if he is to think, that is, if he is to live spiritually.

You see, gentlemen, it is not at all surprising that today's science does not come up with such things, because today's science has developed in a very special way. If you have the opportunity to see something like I have seen in Oxford, for example – I was able to give a series of lectures in Oxford, and Oxford is one of the most important universities in England – you may notice that this Oxford university is organized quite differently from our universities here in Switzerland or in Germany or in Austria. This Oxford college, university, still has something very medieval, absolutely medieval. It has such a strong medieval character that those people who do their doctorate there, that is, who do their doctorate, get a gown and a beret. Each such university has its own cut for gowns and berets. You can distinguish an Oxford Baccalaureus or Doctor from a Cambridge one because he has a different cut in his gown and beret. But people have to wear this gown and cap on certain solemn occasions so that it is known that he has been to such and such a university and belongs to it. This is just the way it is because in England many such things from the Middle Ages have been preserved, as for example with the judges there; when they are on duty, they still have to wear the wig; it is part of the uniform. Now you see, there the medieval way of doing things has been preserved in its entirety. That is no longer the case on the continent, in Switzerland, Austria or Germany. There you don't get a gown, and even judges no longer wear a wig. I believe that is no longer the case in Switzerland either, as far as I know.

For a continental European, it is very amusing to watch from the outside. He simply says to himself: Well, there they still have the Dark Ages. The bachelors, the doctors, they walk around on the street with robes and berets and so on. But it means something quite different. You see, science is still being practiced there as it was in the Middle Ages. That is to say, what is being done there is extraordinarily congenial. Compared to a modern university, which has done away with all that – I don't want the gown to be reintroduced, don't misunderstand me – but compared to some of what is at other universities today, it is actually something extraordinarily congenial, because it has a whole. It has really preserved the Middle Ages in all its forms. It has something complete. Because in the Middle Ages one could research all sorts of things, but one was not allowed to research anything about the world that religion had taken as a monopoly. This is also something that you can still feel in Oxford. As soon as someone would open up and want to say something about the supernatural world, they would be extremely reserved.

Now, medieval science had complete freedom as long as people did not express themselves about religious life. That has been lost in our country. Nowadays, at our universities, you have to be a materialist. If you are not a materialist, you are treated like a heretic. If, let us say, it were decent to burn people at the stake, they would still be burned today, even by the universities. You can see at close hand how you are treated when it comes to introducing anything new into the fields of knowledge. The external wigs have disappeared, but the internal wigs have not disappeared at all on the continent!

It is now the case that science has developed on the continent, but this science still has the old habits, and it becomes materialistic because it has never got into the habit of dealing with the spiritual. In the Middle Ages one was not allowed to occupy oneself with the spiritual, because that was left to religion. In this way people still continue to do it today. They just occupy themselves with the body, and for that reason they learn nothing about that which is actually spiritual in man. So it is actually just a neglect on the part of science that they do not really study the things that are there.

I would like to show you this today with an example, so that you can see: anyone who really does real science today can speak scientifically of the fact that a soul or a spirit enters the body when the human being develops his body in the mother's womb, and that in death the spirit leaves the body again. This can be scientifically proven today, but you really have to know science then. You have to be able to deal with science in the appropriate way. What does science do in a particular case today? Let us say, for example, that a fifty-year-old person develops liver disease and dies of it. Well, they put him on the dissecting table, cut open his stomach and examine the liver. They find that the liver is perhaps somewhat hardened inside, and they think about where this could come from. At most, they think about what the person might have eaten that could have hardened the liver through the wrong food. But our nature is not so easy to understand that we can simply have a person, examine his liver and know what the liver is like; it is not that easy. In fact, if you just think about a person's last few years, you can't even tell from the liver why it is the way it is.

If you cut out the liver of a fifty-year-old person and find that the liver is hardened, then in most cases - not in all cases, but in most cases - the reason for this is that the person was fed the wrong kind of milk as a very young child, as an infant. What often only manifests as an illness in a person's fiftieth year has its cause in very early childhood. But why? You see, the person who can really examine the liver and who knows what the liver means in the human being can tell the following. He knows that in a very young child the liver is still fresh; it is even still developing. Now the liver is a human limb that is quite different from all other human limbs. The liver is something very special. You can see that even on the outside. If you take any organ of the human body, heart or lungs or whatever you like, you can say that this organ belongs to the whole human body. Take any organ, let's say the right lung, for example, and you can say that red blood vessels go into this right lung, and you know what that means. The red blood vessels that go in carry oxygen – you can see this passing into the body – and the blue blood vessels carry the waste products, the carbon dioxide, which has to be exhaled (see illustration).

Now, you see, every organ – stomach, heart – is set up so that red blood enters these organs and blue blood comes out. The liver is different. At first it also looks the same with the liver. If you have the liver – the liver lies under the diaphragm on the right side of the human body – you also have the matter at first that red blood veins go in and blue blood veins go out. If that were the case, the liver would be an organ like the other human organs. But in addition, a large vein containing blue blood, carbonic acid, goes into the liver, which is not the case with any other organ. So a blue vein, the so-called portal vein, goes into the liver, a mighty blue vein. It branches out everywhere inside the liver and supplies it with blue blood, blood that has become unusable for all other organ processes and that would otherwise be cleaned by breathing out the carbonic acid. We are constantly sending carbonic acid into the liver. The liver needs precisely what the other organs have to throw away.

Where does it come from? This is because the liver is a kind of inner eye. The liver really is a kind of inner eye. The liver senses – especially when it is fresh, in a child – the taste, but also the goodness of the milk that the child sucks at the mother's breast. And much later, the liver perceives everything that comes from food in the human body. The liver is an organ of perception, an eye, one might say; I could also say, a tactile organ, an organ of feeling. The liver perceives all of this.

Another human organ that perceives is the eye. But the eye perceives the external world so strongly precisely because it sits almost separately in the head. It is completely inside this bone cavity, but it is almost a separate organ. You can take it out, and it lies completely separate from the body in this bone cavity. The other senses do not lead us into the outside world as much as the eye does. When you hear, you still experience something inwardly. Music is therefore more inward than seeing. The eye is designed in such a way that it does not belong so much to the human body, but rather to the outside world.

But because blue blood goes into the liver, which otherwise throws carbon dioxide out into the outside world and is turned red again, the liver is almost as isolated from the other human body as the eye. So the liver is a sense organ. The eye perceives colors. The liver perceives whether the sauerkraut I eat is beneficial or harmful to the body, whether the milk I drink is beneficial or harmful to the body. The liver perceives this very finely, and the liver releases bile, and the bile is released – this is really the case – just as the eye releases tears. When a person becomes sad, he begins to weep. Tears do not come from the eye for no reason. The process of becoming sad is connected with the perception, with the noticing of things. And in the same way, the secreting of bile is connected with the liver perceiving whether something is harmful or beneficial to the body. It secretes more or less bile, depending on how harmful it is for the person to receive it. So we have a perception organ in the liver.

Now imagine: if the child is given unhealthy milk, the liver is constantly annoyed. And if the person is so healthy that they do not immediately develop jaundice from excessive bile secretion, there is a constant urge for bile secretion in the child. And then the liver becomes ill in the child. A person can endure a lot. He can carry around this diseased liver, acquired in infancy, for forty or forty-five years; but finally, in the fiftieth year, it breaks out: the liver has hardened.

So it really isn't the case that you just put a fifty-year-old person on the dissecting table, cut open his stomach, take out the organs, look at them and say something about them. You can't say anything. Man is not just a creature of the moment, but man is a creature that develops over a certain number of decades. And what sometimes happened fifty years ago comes to expression after fifty years. But you have to know the person completely if you want to understand that.

Now I assume that you are materialists. But if you are materialists, then consider the following. I have told you that the liver is an organ whose disease can be caused in the infant and can break out in the fiftieth year of life. Yes, gentlemen, but what about the human being? Let us assume, quite schematically, that man is a being of flesh, blood, muscles and so on. He has blood vessels in him, veins in him, nerves – all these are substances, of course, real substances. But do you believe that the substances that are in the liver, for example, of a small child who is being breastfed are still present in the fiftieth year? No, that is not the case. Take the simplest example: you cut your fingernails. If you do not cut your nails, they grow like hawk claws. You are constantly cutting a piece of material from yourself! And when you cut your hair, you are also cutting a piece of material from yourself. But you will have noticed sometimes that this does not only happen when you cut your hair and fingernails, that material goes away, but when you scratch yourself sometimes and have not washed your head for a long time, then you scratch off dandruff with it. These are pieces of skin. And if you didn't wash completely, if it weren't for sweat washing away small scales from the body, you could end up with a completely scaled body. That is, on the outside of the body, the substance is constantly falling away.

Now imagine cutting a piece of your fingernail. It grows back again. It comes from the inside out. Yes, that is how it is with the whole human body. What is on the very inside is on the outer surface after about seven years, and we can get rid of it as scales. Otherwise, only nature does that, and we don't notice how we always get rid of the fine scales. The substance, the matter of the human being, always goes from the inside out and sheds itself externally. What you have completely inside today will be on the outside after seven years and will have shed itself completely, and what you then have inside is newly formed, completely newly formed. Every seven years, the soft parts of the human substance are newly formed. When you are a small child, this even applies to certain external bony organs. That is why we only have milk teeth until about the age of seven; then they are shed and new teeth form from within. They only stay because you no longer have the strength to shed your teeth; just as you shed your fingernails, you just can't shed them. But in fact, they don't tend to last very long in modern people! Well, people can endure a lot. The teeth endure, but for how long? They become terribly damaged after some time, especially in Switzerland. It has to do with the water, the teeth becoming damaged, especially in this area.

But from this you can see that after seven years you will no longer have the substance that you have inside you today. You have expelled it and formed a new one. If it were the substance that counted, then, for example, Mr. Dollinger would not be the person sitting there today, because the substances he had back then have gone, they have evaporated. Since then he has become a completely new person in terms of substance. But he was already addressed by the same name back then. He is still the same today, but it is not the substance. That which continually holds the substance together as a force, that which, when the substance goes out of any one part of the body, carries a new one there in return – you can see the substance when you lay a person on the dissecting table, but you cannot see that which is extended as a force in the person – that is the so-called supersensible.

Yes, gentlemen, so if the liver is ruined in the infant and a liver disease emerges in the fiftieth year, then the piece of liver that lies there is completely replaced. The substance is long gone. It is not because of the substance that we have acquired a liver disease, but because of the invisible forces. They have got into the habit of not allowing the liver to work properly during infancy. The activity, not the substance, the activity has been disrupted. So if we are clear about the fact that the liver is like this, we have to say: It is quite obvious that since man is always changing the substance, he carries something within him that is not substance.

If one only grasps this thought properly, it leads to the conclusion that, for scientific reasons, it is impossible to be a materialist. Only those people who believe that a man at fifty is the same substance as he was as a child are materialists. So that is what makes it necessary, for purely scientific reasons, to think of man as having a spiritual basis, that is, to think of man as having a spiritual substance within him.

But, gentlemen, you cannot believe that these liver particles, which have long since left at the age of fifty, build up the liver, that they can contribute to the liver being built up. They just go away, they just leave the liver. For these particles of matter, there is actually nothing left there but space. What the liver continually regenerates is strength, it is something supersensible. It continually regenerates the liver.

The whole human being must become newly formed if it is to come into the world at all. The forces that are in the liver must already be there when the human being is being formed in the mother's body.

Now, you may say: in the mother's body, the female ovum and the male sperm come together, and from that, the human being arises. Yes, gentlemen, from this mixture of substances, the human being can arise just as little as the liver disease in the fiftieth year can arise from the substance that has been spoiled in the first year of life. This substance must already be there. Anyone who claims that a human being is formed from matter in the mother's womb should also claim that he can put together wood and sit down for a few years and then, after a few years, a very beautiful statue will emerge. Of course, the material must be made available to the spirit. This happens in the mother's womb. But the human being is not formed in the mother's womb; rather, this substance, like the substance of a sculptor, is worked by the spirit, and in this way, what is formed in the human being is always newly formed when a physical substance is ejected. We would really need to eat much less than we have to eat if the substance had a greater significance. Of course, when we are small children we would have to eat in order to grow larger. But if we were fully grown at twenty years of age and the substance remained the same, we would not need to eat anything afterwards. It would be a wonderful story for the employer, because children are forbidden to be used today, and the workers would no longer need to eat. So it would be a wonderful story! But the fact that we still have to eat all the time when we are fully grown proves that what remains in the human being during life is not the material, but the spiritual-soul. And that must be there before human conception takes place at all, is also there, and works on the material from the very beginning, as it continues to work on it.

When a person is born, we can see how he sleeps almost constantly in his very earliest childhood. He sleeps constantly. It is actually only healthy for a person to be awake for one to two hours at most during the very earliest infancy; otherwise, the infant should sleep continuously and also has the need to sleep almost all the time.

But what does it mean when we say that an infant needs to sleep continuously and that it should sleep? This means that its brain should still be somewhat alive. The white blood cells should not yet be shooting too vigorously through the body; they should still be calming down, these white blood cells, and the brain should not yet be dead. That is why the infant must sleep. But it also cannot yet think. As soon as he begins to think, the brain cells also begin to become more and more dead. As long as we are growing, the force that makes us bigger continues to drive processes to the brain that can keep the brain quite soft. But when we are no longer growing, when growth has ceased, then it becomes increasingly difficult for that which should go to the brain to actually reach it during sleep. And the consequence of this is that, although we learn to think better and better the older we get, our brain has a much greater tendency to be dead, and we actually die in the brain once we are fully grown, continually dying.

Now, a person can endure a lot. For a very long time, he still holds his brain in such a way that it becomes soft enough during the night. But there comes a time when the forces that drive up to the head can no longer properly supply the brain, and then it approaches old age.

What is it that a person actually dies of in reality? Of course, when any organ perishes, then the spirit can no longer work, as one can no longer work on a machine that is out of order. But apart from that, his brain becomes more and more rigid, and he can no longer organize his brain properly. During the day, the brain is continually being ruined because the body is not what the brain restores, but it is the spiritual-soul. But that is, if one may put it that way, like a poison; the spiritual soul ruins the brain during waking. That is why we must sleep, so that the brain can be restored again. When the brain could not think, then the brain would not be killed, but would become stronger and stronger. Because the arm, which does not think, but works, becomes stronger and stronger. But the brain becomes weaker and weaker with thinking. The brain is not an organ that thinks through its life, but rather it thinks by dying, and in this way the body becomes useless to the person. The spirit is there, but the body will one day become useless.

This also becomes apparent when you remember what I said: the liver is like a sensory organ, like a kind of eye in there. Yes, gentlemen, that is a liver disease when a fifty-year-old person's liver is as stiff and as hardened as I assumed earlier. But the liver is always somewhat hardened at a later age. In young children, it is fresh and soft. There are these reddish-brown tissue islets – the liver is made up of such tissue islets – connected by such a network. That is the liver tissue.

Now, this liver is quite soft and elastic in childhood. But it becomes more and more stiff and hard the older you get. Do you think the same thing happens with the eye? As you get older, the inside of the eye becomes more and more rigid. If it stiffens abnormally, then comes the cataract. If the liver stiffens abnormally, then comes internal liver hardening with liver abscesses and so on.

'But even in a healthy state, the liver is used up just as much as a sensory organ as the eye is used up. And the liver perceives less and less, as the food inside is beneficial or harmful, because it has been used up. So when one has grown old, the liver no longer serves him so well to judge these things that come into the stomach, whether they are beneficial or harmful. It is no longer so good at keeping them out. When it is healthy, the liver ensures that useful substances are distributed throughout the body and harmful substances are kept out. But if the liver has become defective, then the harmful substances also enter the intestinal glands, the lymph, and then go around in the body and cause all kinds of diseases. And that is what it does, that the one who has grown old as a human being can no longer perceive his body internally as he used to be able to perceive it through the liver. He has, I might say, become blind to his own body internally. When one is blind externally, another can guide one, can help one. But when you become blind inwardly, then the processes no longer proceed properly, then very soon comes intestinal cancer, or stomach cancer or cancer of the pylorus, or anything where the liver is not in order. Then the body is no longer usable. But then the new substances, which have to be constantly shed, can no longer be properly integrated into the body. The soul can no longer function with the human body, and the time has come when the body must be thrown away completely.

Yes, gentlemen, you can see how the body is discarded from year to year, because when you shed skin on your head or cut your nails, you throw away what has become useless. But what is inside as forces remains. But when the whole thing becomes unusable, then what works inside can no longer replace anything. Then, just as nails and dandruff and other body parts are shed, the whole body is shed, and what remains of the person is the soul. So you can say: When I understand a person, I understand both body and soul, and it is not true that a person is only something physical.

Yes, you see, one could say that this is only a religious matter. But it is not just a religious matter. Here in this Goetheanum science, it is clear that it is not just a religious matter. Through religion, man should be reassured that he does not die when his body dies. These are basically selfish feelings, and the preachers also take this into account. They tell people things so that they don't die. This is not a religious matter, but a really practical one.

Someone who merely lays a person on the dissecting table, cuts open the abdomen and looks at the liver, will not think about how to ensure that an infant is properly nourished. But anyone who knows how this happens will realize how the child should be raised so that it can become a healthy person. Establishing health in childhood is much more important than curing illness later on. But you don't know anything about it if you only see the human being as a block of matter.

Now, from this example it is easy to see what I have said. But take another example. Suppose I have a child in school and I keep feeding it all kinds of stuff, and I keep it learning until its memory is overloaded and the child can't really come to itself. Yes, gentlemen, that's when you really strain the mind. But it is not true that you only strain the mind, because the mind is constantly working on the body. And if I teach and educate the child wrongly, even if it is only, let's say, in terms of memory, then I harden certain organs in him because what is used in the brain is lost to the other organs. And if you put too much strain on the child's brain, his kidneys will become diseased. That means that you can make a child sick not only through physical influences, but also by teaching and educating the child in such a way that you make it healthy or sick.

You see, this is where history comes in handy. If you really know the human being, then you will have proper teaching in schools. If you know the human being as today's science knows it, then you can present to people at the universities what we have seen: the liver looks like this, we have reddish-brown liver islets and so on. And what I have described to you can, of course, be described at the university. But afterwards you fall silent.

Such a science is not practical because it cannot be taught in schools. Teachers cannot use such a science. Teachers can only use it when they know that if the liver looks like this at the age of thirty, then in order for it to develop properly, they have to do this in the eighth or ninth year of life, not demand that the child do visual instruction, but rather teach the child something in the eighth or ninth year that guides his organs in the right way. So, for example, I have to tell him something and let him retell it to me, and I must not overload the memory, but leave it to itself. You bring that out by knowing the person in body, soul and spirit. But then you can also educate properly.

Now I ask you, is that not the most important thing, that you do not just calm people with a story from the supernatural through sermons, that they do not die when their body dies? Of course that is not done – I have proved it to you – but the result is that one only works with people's egotism, who just wish to live on, and one accommodates these wishes. Science does not deal with wishes but with facts, and these facts, when one knows them, make the whole story practical. There is something to be brought into the school if one really knows the human being.

And this is what distinguishes this Goetheanum science from other sciences. Here we would like to gradually bring about a situation in which science is not only applicable to a few people who happen to belong to the scientific community, but where science is generally human, benefits humanity and works for the development of humanity.

Today's science is only practically applied in technology, sometimes in this or that other field, for example in medicine, but not very much there either. Yes, gentlemen, theology is taught or history is taught – yes, ask whether this is applied anywhere in life. Not even in the pulpit can the theologian apply his science; he has to speak as the people want to hear it. Or ask the lawyer, the attorney, the judge! He learns his stuff so that he has it committed to memory and knows it in the exam. But afterwards he forgets it as quickly as possible, because outside he is guided by completely different laws. Nothing is applied to the living human being. In short, we have a science that is no longer practical for life. And that is the worst part.

From this you can also see that classes of people are really forming. In life, what is in life must also be applied. So if there is a science that cannot be applied, an useless science, then the people who pursue this science are also useless in a certain sense, and then an useless class of people arises. There you have the class differences.

I have tried to show in my “Key Points” that class differences are actually connected with intellectual life. But when you point out the truth, everyone declares you to be a fantasist. But here you can see for yourself that it is not a matter of fantasy, but of real, actual knowledge and of making science practical, which can really intervene in life. Then people will also be reassured about death.

Of course, some things are difficult for you, precisely because school education is not what it should be. But you will gradually understand things. And you can be sure that the others do not really understand it either. When you come to today's science under all these medieval conditions, you can see what kind of science it is. When I present the science of the Goetheanum at Oxford, it differs quite considerably from what is otherwise presented at Oxford. It is a completely different approach and will only gradually be understood.

And so I would like you to understand how difficult it is to make an impact with this. It is difficult, but it will happen and it must happen, because otherwise humanity will simply perish.