The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dearly beloved! Whoever gazes at a cloud, or at a cloudy sky, would never guess that in the next moment lightning will flash out of the cloud and thunder will rumble. Lightning and thunder are phenomena hidden in the cloud. This is an image for the things around us; there is also much hidden that can be awakened from its slumber.

I will now try to characterize this hidden world. In theosophy, it is called the three worlds. These three worlds are not separate from each other, but they rest within each other; they are present within this world of ours, but they only emerge under special circumstances. The physical world is visible, audible, tangible, and so on, for the ordinary person. The other two worlds rest hidden in the physical world; but they can be brought out.

An often-used image can help us to understand what is meant by this. Let us think of a person born blind, whose eyes are opened and who can now see. Until now, he has felt his way around; now he has had an operation and can see. The same objects, whose properties he could previously only explore by touching, take on shine and color now that his eye has been opened to the light. In this sense, one speaks of higher worlds. They are there, but the higher sense, the spiritual eyes, must first be opened in order for them to be revealed to the person.

Another comparison that has been made here before: two naturalists were observing three Moluccan crabs in an aquarium. One of them had fallen on its back and was so unhappily placed under an iron bar that it was unable to right itself. The other two crabs tried in vain to help their comrade back on his feet. After they had tried for a long time without success, they left. The naturalists waited to see what would happen. After some time, the crabs returned and brought two more brothers with them. These four then managed to get the crab back on its feet by working together.

I am not telling this story to give an example of mutual aid in the animal kingdom, although it is a fine testimony to it. It is intended to lead us to a different consideration. Suppose the naturalists had lost their patience and reached into the water and turned the cancer back over; and then imagine the crabs endowed with human intelligence, the following would arise: The cancer society would consider this strange case. First, there would be the orthodox, the conservatives; they would say: A miracle has occurred. Then there would be the monists, the materialists; they would say: There are only cancer forces, no other forces exist; a higher intervention is impossible. They would have to leave the case unexplained. Thirdly, the cancer theosophists would come; they would say: No, there are no miracles, everything is based on law; but there is also a higher law that goes beyond the ordinary comprehension of cancer. We theosophists extend the law into higher realms beyond the ordinary comprehension.

Let us now realize what it depends on to perceive these supersensible things. All our senses are active and serve us to perceive the things around us. But we also become aware that the senses decrease, die, and then the ability to perceive ceases; but life does not stop with that. So you can live in the world without perceiving. Whether or not we perceive things depends on whether we have the senses necessary to perceive them. Admittedly, it is not unacceptable that we live in countless worlds for which the senses have not yet been awakened.

The real purpose of the theosophical movement is to awaken man to these higher senses. Some people go wild when you talk to them about supernatural things. They cannot grasp that one can really gain an insight into these things, that not everything that is said about them is based on hypothesis. But they do not consider that there are many things around us that pass us by without a trace because we do not recognize them.

An example of this: a famous singer was invited to an elegant society event; she was late – as famous personalities sometimes are. She was seated between two gentlemen; one was Mendelsohn, whom she knew and with whom she had a lively conversation. The gentleman on her other side tried repeatedly, in his polite, modest way, to draw her into the conversation, but she didn't like him and asked Mendelsohn quietly, “Who is that stupid fellow?” The famous philosopher Hegel, was the reply. Had she known beforehand that she would meet Hegel there, she would have made every effort to engage him in conversation. Now she had sat with him – and had not recognized him.

Could it not be that many a person who is endowed with higher faculties is merely a “stupid fellow” in the eyes of many people? Let us think of Christ Jesus; now, after all that the Church and time have made of him, it is indeed easy to recognize him. But just imagine he were to enter this hall today. Who would recognize him then?

Therefore, we may admit the possibility that there may be people who are endowed with higher senses than the ordinary ones, without the ordinary man in the street perceiving anything. Such a person is called “one with a higher state of consciousness”.

Actually, every human being lives in these different states of consciousness. We must realize that the human being really lives in different states of consciousness. First, in the physical world during the day, in the normal state, he has the waking consciousness. Second, the dream-filled state of sleep. It is not uninteresting to study the experiences of dreams. If you pay just a little attention to them, you will find a certain regularity in the dream images. Dreams are symbolic. The dream experiences show that we are dealing with rudiments of our daytime consciousness.

I would like to make this clear with a few examples, which, like all the examples I give, are based on real experiences. Someone dreams that they have caught a tree frog, vividly reliving the entire chase until they hold it in their hand. With the feeling of the soft, slippery thing in their hand, they wake up and realize that they had a corner of their bedspread in their hand. There the dream consciousness had symbolized the soft mass of the bedspread and transformed it into a tree frog.

A dream is also a playwright. Example: A woman dreams that she is in church, the preacher is giving an uplifting sermon, gradually his raised hands turn into wings – she finds this quite natural in the dream – then his lofty speech turns into cawing and outside the cockerel crows. - How the dream is a symbolist and a playwright, Schubert described in “The Night Side of Nature” from the hidden side of man. Heinrich von Kleist received many suggestions from him about this matter.

Thirdly: the state of consciousness of dreamless, unconscious sleep. Everyone will admit that a person is present, even when he is unconscious in his sleep, that he does not cease to exist in the evening and come into being again in the morning. And yet his consciousness perceives nothing of what is going on around him. These three states of consciousness change significantly when a person undergoes a spiritual, mental development. Then the divine man is awakened in him. He learns to perceive the mental processes. With the help of higher, more perfect people, mental organs develop in him that change the first two states of consciousness, so that the person not only perceives fleeting images, but a new world opens up to him that speaks to him in symbols. It is not enough for a person to be conscious only in dreams; he now also learns to bring dream consciousness into daytime consciousness, and in this way all irregularities will be regulated. Gradually, the confused dreams become clear symbols. If one receives guidance, one also learns to understand these symbols. Something real may then well occur. For example, it may occur that the student dreams of something ugly that is connected with a particular friend, who moves him; he learns that the friend has fallen seriously ill. A real condition has been expressed in the ugly dream.

In this way, a new world gradually opens up for the dreamer, and he learns to take this spiritual world into the ordinary world. He also perceives the soul in his fellow human beings. He also perceives soul-spiritual beings that he has not usually seen before.

The world that opens up to the human being is the “astral” world. Just as lightning and thunder issue forth from the cloud, so things emerge when the astral senses are awakened. Why is this world called the astral world? Those who understand only one sixteenth of it have quibbled a lot about the name. The people who have always been theosophists, the ancient mystics, used this name for good reason. What is the astral world? It is an expression of the soul world.

What is physical about me, my bones, muscles, and skin, forms the physical body. What is mental about me, my instincts, passions, and desires, is just as real as my hand and my head. These [mental qualities] form the astral body.

A person stands before me. I see his form, his hair, his face, his skin; but just as real as this visible person are his desires and cravings, instincts and passions before me, they are just as real for the astral world as the visible body is for the physical world. It has been suggested that it should be called the “drives-body”, but that is no better; it could lead to the erroneous opinion of the materialists, who believe that the drives emanate from the physical body. Before man was born, the soul of man was there, which has embodied itself in the body. The drives, instincts, passions and so on were there, and they are what shaped the physical body. So we can give a very definite answer to the question of where the physical body comes from.

Imagine a glass of water with a piece of ice floating in it. Ice is water. It is formed from water through cooling. This is roughly how we can imagine the process. The astral is to the physical as water is to ice. Ice is condensed water. The physical is the condensed astral substance. This is the relationship between the desire body and the physical body. Just as water crystallizes into snowflakes, all worlds have been created through crystallization processes. Our visible world has also emerged from the astral one. Goethe knew this process and tells us about it in the words of the world spirit:

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge and surge again,
Weaving to and fro,
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life.
Thus I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of the Godhead!

Just as our earth was created from the astral matter that surrounds it and consists of it, so the astral matter and the other matter consist of the same matter as the whole world of stars. The physical matter of the earth is related to the physical matter of the stellar world, the astral matter to the astral matter of the same and so on. The astral matter permeates everything. The mineral contains forces and substances. The plant also has substances and forces and life. The animal feels and senses, but more unconsciously. Man, finally, who still has the animal in him, consciously gains control over it and thereby rises above the animal. He is, as it were, a summary of all physical realms and has the essence of all of them within him.

The materialists claim that instincts arise from the physical. Theosophy claims the opposite. Our desire body is related to the world of desire around us.

Thirdly, dreamless consciousness: human consciousness develops ever higher and higher. Then not only dream consciousness emerges from the dark night, but something new emerges that cannot be compared to light images. It speaks to the human being in sounds, as it were. This sound of the higher spiritual world was well known to the Pythagoreans; they called it “the harmony of the spheres” or “music of the spheres”. Goethe also tells us about it in his “Faust”. The “Prologue in Heaven” introduces us to this third world. What Goethe presents to us here is not just a poetic image, but reality. — The archangel Raphael sings:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brotherly spheres of song,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

What resounds is not the physical sun. This physical sun is only the body for the sun spirit. This “resonance” is perceived by the more highly developed people. From the dark deep sleep, it “resonates” up to him. This is what Goethe means when he says “the sun resounds”. He sticks with this image. In the second part of “Faust” it says:

Tönend wird für Geistesohren
Schön der neue Tag gebören:;

This third world is the mental world, the spiritual world. It can be perceived in its true state with proper concentration. Once man has reached this level, he knows that the mere thought is something real. Heaven – Devachan – can be conjured up.

This state is called the continuity of consciousness. When the ear is opened to this sound, the actual spiritual world, the world of the spirit, opens up to man. Just as man is plant, animal and mineral, he is also astral and mental; it is possible for him to live entirely within himself, in the spirit.

Man lives in the three worlds. During the day he lives in physical consciousness. At night, during sleep, he initially perceives nothing that is perceptible to his senses. How is it that man is unconscious during sleep? There is a very specific reason for this. Man divides his being. During the day, the human being uses the powers of the physical and etheric bodies. The powers for the waking consciousness are taken from these two bodies. These powers must be renewed; this is done during sleep; the actual human being uses his astral and mental bodies and their powers to work on the physical body.

The person who wants to develop himself higher must acquire special moral qualities, whereby he can make the work of the astral and mental bodies superfluous.

How can a person make this possible? When he enters the “Chela path”, which has been discussed in detail here. The qualities that are necessary as preparation for this path have been mentioned here many times. The first main condition is the control of thoughts; one must not let them stray; then comes the control of passions and desires, great composure, and so on. When all this has been achieved, after years of practice, what happens then?

A calmness comes over the physical and astral life, a feeling of well-being, an inner health, and thus the astral and mental forces are released from their work during sleep; they no longer have as much work to do on it. These unused forces are now used to draw out hidden abilities in man and to develop clairvoyant organs, to form the “eyes of the soul”. These organs are called “lotus flowers” or “chakras”; they are described in detail in “Lucifer - Gnosis”. With these organs, the astral world can be perceived.

In this way, a person develops through virtues, especially through calmness and composure. Once he has achieved these, he may use the freed-up energies to develop the higher organs. Those who want to develop these higher organs without these virtues are drawing on physical forces that the physical nature still needs. The result is that the person becomes nervous, even mentally and spiritually ill. In this way, the human being can open up the two higher worlds. The astral matter is thin, thinner than air. It appears in the astral light as a human aura. It is a radiation that extends one and a half times the length of the head. This aura expresses the character of the human being's innermost being in different color tones. The newcomer to the astral plane is struck by the fact that everything is read there as in a mirror image, in a most strange and shocking way. Above all, he sees the mirror image of himself there, which seems to be coming towards him, while in reality it emanates from him. If, for example, one sees the number 164, one must read 461.

What takes place in relation to time also runs in the opposite direction. You first have to learn how to orient yourself in the other world. It is very important to know that the passions show themselves there in an ugly, demonic form; one's own passions pounce on the clairvoyant as demonic figures – in the mirror image.

That is how you get to know yourself. Those who have had experience in this and have previously learned the context know how to judge and deal with this phenomenon correctly. Many a person who has attained abnormal vision without having received proper training, but has broken into the astral unprepared, describes it that way. That comes from materialism. Theosophy is quite serious. It can only confuse those who approach it without understanding. But for those who look deeper into it, theosophy brings spiritual health. Materialism, on the other hand, makes people ill. If the religious element slumbering in every human being is not satisfied, it will eventually break through the brain; the brain does not understand it and becomes ill. The higher worlds break in on man, and he does not understand them. That is the essence of mental illness.

The “sounding” is then the third world.

The human being lives in these three worlds one after the other. After he has ended his life here in the physical, he discards his physical body, then also his etheric body; then the astral body remains, in which he now lives. He really lives in the astral. When we say we live in this or that, we mean that we have something in common with the world around us. Now, one thing in particular is no longer the case. Even during sleep, the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies, but they are still connected by a magnetic bond. This now falls away. The human being now becomes aware of this. It is a very peculiar awareness that confronts him. He is accustomed to perceiving and doing everything through the senses; for example, he is accustomed to enjoying food and delighting in the taste through the palate; the longing for enjoyment has remained with him; he must first get used to doing without these pleasures.

This happens for all the senses. This happens through this deprivation of the senses. Through this deprivation of the senses, two conditions arise violently. First, a burning thirst that arises from the inability to satisfy desire. This acts as a kind of fire — the purgatory of Catholics. He must first get rid of his desires. The other concerns action. He is accustomed to acting; but he lacks the hand to act, the foot to walk, and so on. This feeling of inability causes a state of coldness. This state is called Kamaloka, the place of desires. This state is caused by the desires in man, which are still active and find no satisfaction. It is the state of disaccustoming.

If a person has already become accustomed to living in the spirit during his lifetime, this disaccustomment will not be difficult for him. Christ Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is within you” (Luke 17:21), so that a person can already live here in the spirit, in the third, the mental world, in Devachan. If he has then passed through Kamaloka after death, he comes to Devachan. That is the state in which the divine man truly lives in his element. When he is no longer attached to the lower, his own divine self comes to life in his inner being.

I have now shown how man, by opening up the higher senses, becomes familiar with the two hidden worlds, which are hidden only to the extent that colors and light are hidden things for those born blind.

The time has not yet come for everyone to follow this hidden path of knowledge. But people must hear about the higher worlds, become familiar with them, try to grasp them intellectually, and let them tell them about themselves. That is the first step towards finally entering them. Man should create concepts for himself, he is a self-creating being.

We live in an important time, when great movements of a spiritual and intellectual nature are taking place. Much is being told publicly about supersensible facts that used to be kept secret. Then some people come and say: Yes, you are telling us all kinds of things; and we are to believe in you. — Once a personality in Berlin was literally enraged. To this personality I said: You don't need to believe me at all. I don't care what you think about me. If I draw you a map of Asia Minor, indicating the outlines, the rivers with lines and the cities with dots, you can say: 'What are you making up, Asia Minor doesn't look like that. No, it does not look like that, but if you go there, you will see that the drawing was correct. That is how it is with the drawing I have sketched for you of the transcendental worlds. For the time being, you are welcome to think of me as a fraud who is telling you something, but – listen! – after death everyone is in a position to apply what they are now learning.

But culture will soon produce blossoms that will only be understandable to those who understand the occult. Therefore, it is advisable to listen quietly and to process what you hear. If you can do this without inner contradiction, life will open up for you in a completely new way; you will learn to understand it in an unimagined way.

In this way, one struggles upwards to knowledge, to that which never fades, to the realm of heaven. We develop ever higher and higher, through the three worlds first. The first stage is the physical, the second the astral, the third the mental, the spiritual. The first step consists of man's turning from the transitory to the eternal. The astral life of mind and desire turns either downwards to the transitory or upwards to the eternal; it has two sides. The third world, the spiritual world, encompasses what man recognizes as his own spiritual being.

Report in the “Neue Hamburger Zeitung” of February 14, 1902

Dr. Rudolf Steiner spoke on this subject yesterday evening at the local Theosophical Society. We learn the following from the speaker's remarks, which are also of interest to those who do not share these views:

The genuine spiritual leaders of humanity differ from other people in that we keep returning to them and keep drawing valuable instruction from their writings. But only a few are called to this leadership. Among them is Goethe, the artist and proponent of a worldview that opens up infinite perspectives. He is a man of a deep, mystical nature who set down in Faust that which he could only reveal to mankind in symbols. Admittedly, this work has been little understood. The first part is admired as the great, ingenious work of an excellent poet, while the second has found only a few appreciative viewers. Even an esthete like Fr. Th. Vischer called the second part a cobbled-together concoction of old age. Only he who has grasped and understood the revelations of the inner life as they appear in the mystical works of all times can draw from the second part of Faust, this deep source. Goethe himself says that this part of the work is to be judged quite differently than the first, just as he also points out that one becomes a mystic in old age under all circumstances.

As early as the sixteenth century, the figure of Luther, who wanted to seek the truth with the Bible in his hand, was contrasted in folk legend with that of Faust. Faust sought the truth in the book of the world and wanted to build further, relying on the knowledge of nature. Such a personality does not throw the inkwell at the devil's head, but is taken by him. As a result of the education of his time and his own character, Goethe was ripe for understanding this Faustian urge for knowledge. The time had come for him to draw truth from nature; even as a seven-year-old boy, he sought to establish his own cult of nature! And knowledge of nature at its highest level is at the same time knowledge of man.

The first part of Faust shows how Goethe faces nature, a man facing the universe. But Faust cannot break away from the material and falls into a grave sin in the first stage of development. Which paths should Faust take in the future? His Italian journey opened up a new world for Goethe. On classical ground, the secrets of an old, noble art were revealed to him. He also eagerly pursued the laws of nature. Now Goethe was ready to have Faust embark on a profound path of development: the second part of Faust bears witness to this. At the emperor's court, Faust appears in the mask of Pluto, who was revered in ancient mysticism as the god of life and death. Goethe knew how an understanding of life can arise from death. Faust shows the emperor Helen and Paris, the eternal living, eternal archetypes of those who have overcome life and recognized death. Faust finds these archetypes in mothers. Just as in Greek symbolism the appearance of a female personality signifies the attainment of a deeper level of consciousness, so in Goethe's work the mothers are a symbolic representation of the deeper layers of consciousness to which man descends, a representation of the depths of his own soul, from which he draws self-knowledge. But when Faust wants to grasp the archetypes, they fade away, for he has not yet progressed to the full inner experience. In Homunculus, we see a product of pure knowledge. Homunculus cannot yet live, but it can be a guide on the path to life to where Goethe himself was led: to ancient Greece, to find the real Helen, who can now stand before his soul as a figure of experience. Euphorion, who is created by Faust, represents the highest, initially achievable level of consciousness.

At the beginning of Act 4, Faust appears as a complete mystic. He has reinterpreted the best of his inner being for immortality. He who has awakened the highest humanity in himself, confronts the world as a completely new person, and so Faust strives for comprehensive activity in all fields. Once again he becomes a sinner, but then he appears at a higher level, that of material blindness. But the soul shines all the more brightly in its eternal radiance. Now Faust has become completely spirit in the body. Faust's ascent through the stages signifies a series of inner processes and opens up the perspective of immortality. The hymn of Pater ecstaticus is a paraphrase of Fichte's “I am eternal in all finiteness”. This shows the illumination of truth within the human being. During Faust's ascent to heaven, Goethe seeks to symbolize the higher powers of knowledge again in a female figure, this time the Mater dolorosa. The Chorus mysticus also shows that Goethe wanted the development in the second part of Faust to be understood as a symbolic-mystical one. The eternal feminine that draws us up is the deeper forces of our consciousness. Only he attains eternity who acquires it during the time. Thus Goethe concludes the second part of his Faust as a true theosophical mystic. The words are spoken from a higher vantage point:

Who always strives, we can redeem.

and

Only he deserves freedom and life, Who must conquer them daily.

Dear attendees! That the theosophical worldview is not just a series of doctrines and dogmas and that professing them is not the main thing will be best shown when we practically consider the great cultural issues of our time. Today we want to look at educational issues from a theosophical point of view. What more beautiful fruit could arise from this world view than if it led us into the depths and into all corners of human nature, if it taught us to understand the human being and thus the art of influencing it. That would, of course, be different from if we came only out of curiosity or a desire for knowledge, to hear and learn unknown things about the mind, soul and body of man.

This path alone – the path of learning – cannot be called theosophical, because the theosophical path is only the one that passes through practical life. For those who do not delve deeper into the teachings in their daily lives, they remain incomprehensible. You only get to know the human being in terms of soul and spirit if you work with the undeveloped life of the same. This also gives you insight into the higher worlds. And we cannot deny that an intimate understanding of the soul is needed if we want to be leaders.

The human being consists of different parts, of which the physical body is only one. It is of great importance to know this, because the person who knows that the soul of this child has already led a rich life, that it has already taken many steps through many lives on earth, will relate to the growing child quite differently. What appears at birth in the way of aptitudes and abilities has been acquired in previous lives.

Anyone who knows that the soul gradually evolves out of its shells sees the child with completely different eyes. Not only with regard to the more intimate knowledge of human nature, but also to the whole process of human development in time, Theosophy sheds new rays of light.

We must distinguish between two aspects of the human being: firstly, an eternal core that gains new experiences in the most diverse embodiments, in that it takes something of an extract from each life on earth, so to speak, and secondly, the lower human nature, which only forms the shell of the actual self. Let us briefly repeat what this lower nature consists of.

We have, firstly, the tangible, visible physical body; secondly, the etheric body, which creates the shape of the human being; thirdly, the desires, instincts and passions – the astral body. The higher self is enclosed in these sheaths. We have the physical body in common with the mineral kingdom, the etheric body with the plant kingdom, and the astral body with the animal kingdom. Only the fourth, the I, is possessed by the human being alone. The sheaths that surround the I serve the human being as instruments, as tools, in which the actual I, that which already existed, lives out.

With each new birth, these three sheaths are formed anew. However, we do not have to imagine these sheaths as onion skins that seal off the core of our being from the outside world. Rather, the bodies penetrate each other, and the I penetrates the bodies.

Only those who know the growing human child not only in terms of their physical body, but also take into account their developing and growing etheric and astral bodies, can fully influence their education.

But there are other fundamental questions to be grasped. Great progress has been made in the art of education for over a hundred years. Pestalozzi on the one hand, Rousseau on the other, as well as Herder, have paved the way for the attempt to find the way to make a whole human being out of the child. Deep attempts have been made. Through theosophy, these attempts are becoming even more profound.

Since the subject is so vast, this evening we will limit ourselves to a few educational questions with regard to the finer limbs of the human being.

As long as one regards people as a real mess, one can only achieve results from observations. It is quite different for someone whose gaze is able to perceive the four limbs of the human being, or who at least has knowledge of the connections between these things. The child develops differently in the first years of life and differently in later years. We will now ignore the ego for the time being and deal with the physical, etheric and astral bodies.

Let us consider the child as it stands before us after its birth. There we have the physical body, which is most important. Then, from the seventh or eighth year onwards, it is particularly important to take the greatest care of the etheric body. At the time of the onset of sexual maturity, the astral body requires a very unique educational treatment.

What should happen in the first years of life? The etheric body is devoted entirely to the growth of the physical body during this year, so that the etheric body is not yet free for the astral body according to its natural disposition. Only later, when the physical body is formed, is the etheric body freed for independent growth; for the occult eye, this is connected with the will, which sits deepest.

The one thing in man that he most easily changes is his concepts and ideas. The concepts we form of things in earliest childhood differ significantly from what we think about them in later life. Our emotional world is also changeable, although it changes more difficult than the conceptual world. If, for example, a child has a grumpy disposition, it will be difficult for him to get rid of it. Temperament and character change more slowly.

The most difficult thing of all is the basic character of the will, because the will has its seat where the human being can do the least. He can create new understanding, acquire new feelings, but there is one thing he cannot do: he cannot work on the physical body; and it is the physical body that gives the basic shade to the character of the will. It is only possible to work on the physical body in the first years of life. The educator must always bear this in mind. It is now up to him to develop courage of will in the early years; he must devote himself entirely to its pure development; he must beware of interfering by wanting to teach the child concepts too early. So the will must be developed above all else. The human being has an instinct for imitation. The educator's attention must be focused mainly on this instinct for imitation. He must ensure that good role models are available for the child to imitate. The educator must have an effect on the child through his mere presence. The foundation for some good qualities, such as fearlessness and presence of mind, must be laid in the first year. Until the age of seven, the main focus must be on educating the physical body to become a useful organism.

Is it not possible to influence the etheric body at all during this period? The educator should not intervene much. He must work through his presence. He will then realize that feelings and thoughts are facts. He must not believe that only a slap in the face, a push or an upset stomach are real, but he must be aware that whether he has a good or an evil disposition is just as real, and that it matters who cares for the child. It is not what one does with the etheric and astral bodies of the child that matters, but rather with what thoughts, with what attitude, with what atmosphere one surrounds the child. Depending on the environment, the child's attitude will also be noble or ignoble. Thus it is possible to influence the child systematically, with full consciousness, by setting an example in ordinary, daily life. Everything the child absorbs, it absorbs through the senses, and what it absorbs, it imitates. In this way one is able to influence it harmoniously.

It would be very important if this idea were thoroughly worked on from a theosophical point of view, so that one would learn to recognize better and better the tremendous importance of the environment for a young child. Let us try to make this clear to ourselves in a few details. Some people believe that they are doing a child a great service by giving it a beautiful doll. This is the worst thing possible in the eyes of the occultist. With the beautiful doll, the child's instinct for imitation, which is to be stimulated, is forced into certain channels. The creative power is killed. If you observe a child closely, you will often see that it throws away the most beautiful toys and creates a new one for itself from the simplest material. You should not give the child a reflection of reality. Imitation must not be allowed to restrict the imagination. The child must live in an illusory world; the imagination must occupy the child. It must develop its own powers and create its own world of ideas. And this inner strength remains idle in the face of a beautiful doll. The child's games are reproductions of what they hear and see; they demand mental effort. This awakens two kinds of energy: skill and the ability to maintain balance in a wide range of circumstances. These are some of the aspects from which the education of a young child must be considered.

Around the seventh year, the etheric body becomes freer. The physical body has now acquired the vitality to develop further. Now it is important to influence the etheric body and develop its powers, which are memory and attention. Good habits should be instilled during this time. The educator must now develop these soul powers.

This has also been considered by today's educators. The astral body must not be influenced yet; that comes later; in these years, formal education is the main thing. It is not about acquiring a lot of specific knowledge at first, but about the human being itself. What the person does not learn in the way of geography and so on during these years can be made up later, but what cannot be made up is the acquisition of memory and attention. And these powers should be strengthened so that the person is later protected from flightiness, so that he learns to stand firm and not become fickle. So it is important to teach formal education at this age.

In this regard, big mistakes are made. As early as possible, one wants to develop the child's judgment, to answer the why and wherefore. This is not the right time for that. Rather, one should offer the child a sum of contemplation and thus strengthen his memory. Inner silence must be encouraged, one must try to limit the incessant questioning in order to promote a rich inner life. It is not a matter of saying no and yes, but of developing the possibility of one's own judgment; this would be restricted by saying: This you should do, that you should leave, but one should work more through examples and stories. The spiritual must be reflected in the symbols, fairy tales and mythologies that are communicated to the child; this awakens deeper soul forces. By saying yes and no, we restrict these forces; they should develop out of themselves. No ready-made morals should be given to the child; one should try to create great thoughts and feelings for great people. If possible, little doctrine. Stories of great personalities work better than moral rules. Describe the world, but don't teach rules and laws. It is not one's own judgment and views that should be cultivated at this time; the child is not yet mature enough for that. But what is missed in the development of memory between the ages of seven and fourteen cannot be made up for later. For example, in arithmetic: If the foundations have been laid through visual instruction, then memory must be used to learn the multiplication table. The same applies to languages and other things.

The educator has to gradually withdraw his personality and become a servant to the child. He must not only fill the child's soul with wisdom; he must approach the child's nature and slip out of his soul. He must be a puzzle solver. It is a great gain for the soul when the etheric sheath is given a fixed form in the seventh to fourteenth year. When the memory is practised, when the ability to dwell on one object in quiet concentration is developed, these are firm and solid habits that become constant in people, remaining with them for life.

Whatever we can do must be practised. During these years, everything must be repeated over and over again to become a habit. Formative, creative powers are developed in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth year. The task of the educator is now to lead from example to the ability to judge; the child should learn to use his finer powers. The soul must not be influenced alone, nor must it be guided only by precept and prohibition. Pythagoras struck a balance here and gave wise teachings clothed in a form that held the middle way between example and principle. Thou shalt not beat fire with thy sword, that is, a person in anger wastes strength. He now expresses this in a way that not only appeals to the abstract mind, but he also frames the teaching in a picture that stimulates the child's imagination, develops his fantasy, his imagination. The Pythagorean tenets are something between a picture and a principle. The aim should be to work towards the child learning to form his or her own opinion. The child's opinion should not be narrowed down by strict doctrines, but broadened. And this is done through images, through symbolic representations of the great truths. During the first years of school, the aim is to bring calm and work into the right relationship with the etheric body. As the time of maturity approaches, it is necessary to bring the right balance to maturity, so that the person can live out in the three worlds. The first task was to free the etheric body from the demands of the physical exertions of the body; this required careful observation in order to steel the body through gymnastic exercises and make it mobile, and then to give it the necessary rest, to get it used to rest while the etheric body works.

The tasks of the educator become increasingly difficult as the third period, the time of sexual maturation, approaches. Here, the astral body must be treated with care. Only now has the time come when the child must be taught to form their own judgment. Before that, it was necessary to encourage taciturnity. In the first period, the senses impel the child to imitate; the task is to create the right model for him. In the second period, the child should be influenced by authority; this is natural and has a beneficial effect, inspiring faith and trust. Happy the child who looks up with reverence to an authority that is everything to him. During the third period, the educator has to let his own wisdom take a back seat to the wisdom of the person he has before him in the growing child. Sexual maturity is connected with the independence of the human being. Preparation is necessary for this. What the astral body is to absorb must be prepared in the etheric body. This relates to the harmonious development of the emotional world. If we succeed in awakening graceful, aesthetic feelings in the child, this has an effect on the astral body and produces a normal, harmonious, aesthetic power of judgment.

It is not good when children of 16 or 17 approach us with ready-made judgments; this takes its toll bitterly. We should bring them noble figures from history, beautiful poems, the works of our great masters, but not a confession. Confessions evoke a yes or no, but not a rich inner life. And those who have not had the good fortune to see authorities before them will not come to their own judgment either.

Now is the time when we must strive to develop the relationship between people. In the past, it was important to awaken the spirit of worship; now he must learn to recognize the value of different people himself. Now he learns to distinguish his earlier relationship to people as man to man, recognizes what is worthy and what is unworthy. For what must now be awakened? The affects, the sensations, the feelings of pleasure and suffering. The astral body develops through our dealings with the world around us. Therefore, we must first cultivate the astral body in such a way that it works inwards. Now it is coming to the fore. If it is to make the right use of its freedom, the etheric body must be prepared for it. The astral body was otherwise called the body of instincts and desires. If it is not properly prepared, it will express itself in wild desires and the vices of academic life. If it is not prepared for freedom, the driving force that wants to live it up becomes wild and unrestrained; it must be strengthened in earlier years by educating the etheric body.

Through theosophical knowledge, the educator will be able to deepen and spiritualize his pedagogical skills. Thus, Theosophy becomes useful when it is used to influence young people. The usefulness of having these concepts will be recognized by those who try to apply them in practice in their lives. He will then gain knowledge from life itself, even if he renounces the theosophical worldview. And this practical knowledge is worth more than curiosity and a thirst for knowledge.

External material knowledge often does not depend on us. The state, the class, the circumstances are often decisive; but that is not the most important thing either. What is required by profession and station can take a good or a bad direction. Even with the most flawed curriculum and the most overcrowded classrooms, you can still be effective if you know the person. If it is true that the human being can develop all his powers harmoniously, then this can only happen if you recognize the person from the first year of life, even before birth.

Spiritual things are real. It matters not which thoughts surround a child, not unimportant who receives the human being. It depends very much on whether the person who receives a human being has good or evil thoughts and feelings; doctors and midwives should be priestly educated, ennobled personalities. If this is the case, then the human being enters a pure atmosphere at birth, and that is not insignificant. The spirit is a real thing. This is an area where an insightful education can do a lot of good, and conversely, ignorance can do a lot of harm. Imperfectly, the human being comes into existence. He comes into existence to acquire higher abilities; he must pay for the possibility of rising higher with his helplessness. He must be helped. In this we recognize the solidarity of all humanity, the necessity of mutual aid. Thus, all humanity is one great body, of which individuals are only members. This gives us an understanding of brotherhood, the first principle of the Theosophical Society.

When a human being comes into existence, it is not a matter of a finished life in the most eminent sense; the task of the educators lies in educating him for culture, and this can only happen if it is done out of a sense of brotherhood, out of a sense of community.

Answering questions

One teacher, who was obviously deeply moved by this clear and convincing speech, asked a question about inheritance.

Answer: Above all, the educator must be an observer. He must observe human nature in the child. In doing so, it does not matter at first whether he has a materialistic view that the child's abilities and drives come from heredity, or a theosophical view that the child has acquired his abilities in previous lives on earth and is therefore born into certain circumstances with certain parents. The facts, the result of observation, will always be the same. The educator must be careful not to intervene forcibly in the child's development. Here is an example: an educator had to deal with an eleven-year-old boy in a family. He was retarded and his body was not normal either; he had a large head. He had never progressed beyond the lowest class. His arithmetic books, among other things, were in a sorry state. When he had calculated a task, it was never right, and he kept erasing until everything was full of holes.

The educator did not despair and said to himself: the soul would form the body. He carefully set about educating the child's soul, working according to the principle of the smallest measure of force. He started from very specific points of view and learned that one learns to solve puzzles. He succeeded in educating the boy into a normal child in a year and a half because he was able to recognize the causes of the characteristics. The large head gradually took on the right shape; the boy then developed normally and was later able to study.

It would be very desirable if the question of education were to be thoroughly elaborated in the light of Theosophy.

Dear attendees,

As we look around at our fellow human beings and consider the spiritual striving with which they seek to satisfy their inner yearning for something higher, we find that a major change has taken place over the past century. For a long time, the prevailing tendency was to seek only in the material, the obvious, that which has value for them. For them, the spirit was the emanation of the material, just as the hand of the clock is the expression of what is happening inside the clock, namely the wheelwork. They sought to explain all forces in terms of the material. Anyone who still talked about the divine spirit, about the soul, was, in the opinion of those setting the tone, stuck in outdated views. All life should arise from the material.

In recent years, a major change has taken place in this respect. There is a deep yearning in the world for a spiritual deepening, for solving the mystery of what lives within form. Even today's natural scientists no longer shy away from speaking of soul and spirit.

From three sides, today's humanity is trying to penetrate into the depths of existence. The most comprehensive research is the theosophical worldview. It emerged thirty years ago as an association of philosophy, science, religion and morality. Theosophists are spiritual researchers who strive to explore the spiritual life with the highest powers of man. But Theosophical research is just as certain as science. It aims to recognize the truth and only accepts what has been found through the strictest research into the truth. This is a difficult path, and our aim is to make this path popular.

The second area in which man tries to approach the spiritual and soul is the area of hypnotism and suggestion. For some time now, abnormal phenomena have been observed that cannot be explained by the mechanism of the brain. However, it is becoming apparent that there are many things in the world that our conventional wisdom did not dream of until thirty years ago. Scholars have been forced to take note of some inexplicable phenomena.

When Wilhelm Preyer, who wrote The Life of Darwin, pointed out that there were phenomena that could not be explained by conventional theories, his colleagues shrugged off his claim. Yet the phenomena increased. The appearance of the Danish mesmerist Hansen caused a great sensation among laymen, as many will still remember. He sat a person on a chair and could then do whatever he wanted with him. He gave him a drink of vinegar-sour liquid, telling him it was delicious wine, whereupon the person drank with pleasure; and only when he awoke from the state into which Hansen had put him did he shake himself and spit out what he had drunk. Or he would give him a potato and tell him it was a beautiful pear, which he would then bite into with relish. Yes, he would make him crawl on all fours and bark like a dog.

Some naturalists shrugged their shoulders and smiled, saying that these were just abnormal phenomena; but they did not engage in any attempt at explanation. However, there were individual researchers who wanted to try to see if something could be explored in this way about the hidden aspects of a person's mental life.

The third field in which his followers are so keen is spiritualism. Those who are not spiritualists or spiritualists cannot understand how otherwise reasonable people can come to believe that they can summon any deceased person to learn all kinds of secrets about the afterlife. The fact that some people make an effort to gain knowledge in other ways does not impress the spiritualists at all. What such a person says is considered fantastic by them. They think that to get to the source, you just have to die. They often turn to those who had no special higher wisdom in them while they were alive, and believe that now that they are dead, they can explain the most difficult areas of existence.

These are the three areas in which people seek enlightenment about the supernatural life.

The first, the theosophical area, is nothing more than the popular proclamation of a mystery wisdom that has always existed. The mysteries always showed the development of man, including that of the spiritual world.

There stands before me the perfect animal; was it really made out of a clod of earth? No! It has developed from imperfection to perfection. Honest theorists have also recognized this and traced this development from undeveloped sea animals to apes. The same development that the physical form has undergone has also been experienced by the soul. The human soul has also developed upwards. We become aware of this when we compare a “savage” who blindly follows his instincts and desires and devours his fellow human beings, with a European man of culture who submits to the commandment when it says: “You must not do that.” The latter has gradually learned to let duties take the place of desires. From an average person, we look up to Schiller. How much higher he stands above the average person! He has already cast off his desires. From there we come to the higher human being who has raised himself through piety, like Francis of Assisi; from there we look up to the initiates like Plato and Pythagoras. Between these and the ordinary person, the difference is just as great as between a cartilaginous fish and a lion.

The theosophically minded person says to himself that this soul of Schiller — or even the soul of Buddha — may well have developed itself to this height, that it has gone through the same primitive foundation from ancient times as today's savage. Thus, he sees ever higher stages of development before him. He sees the possibility for every soul to swing itself up to ever higher knowledge, to an eternal goal in life. What has lived in the soul before birth and what will live on after death also lives in us today. Why can't we see this soul? Because we lack the organs to perceive it. Living and perceiving are two different things; there is a great difference between them. The blind person also lives, but he does not perceive. If a person does not perceive the soul within him and the souls around him, it is because he lacks the organs to perceive it. But in man these organs can be awakened. Just as the blind man sees when the cataract is removed, so can the higher organs of perception be awakened in man, and then he can perceive from his own vision, and then he can enter into the higher worlds.

At first, this happens during sleep, when the body is resting from the work done. Gradually, the brain then transmits to the mind what the spirit has perceived during sleep, and the mind also learns to find its way in the higher worlds. The world of the senses envelops us in darkness. No man can say, if he is reasonable, that the inner nature of man is dead; but he does not perceive it. But there is the possibility to make it perceptible. Just as a whole new world of light and colors opens up for the blind-born after the operation, so it is for the person to whom the spiritual eye and ear is opened through practice; the deep night that surrounds him gradually brightens and begins to perceive the spiritual things that surround him. When man's inner life is thus awakened, the whole of nature comes to life for him. He finds the soul of the forest, the soul of the plant, the whole world is ensouled for him.

Some will say: I know nothing of this. That may be so; but he is a poor critic who wants to judge something he knows nothing about. Only he who has seen for himself can judge it.

What world is this that man enters in this way? It is the same world that the ordinary person enters at death. The clairvoyant consciously enters the world that one otherwise only enters after death. For him, death is only a change in life. For those who cannot see, survival after death is a matter of faith; some deny the fact. For the one who can see, all doubt disappears; for him, death is only the laying aside of the physical garment; for the one who has the organ of perception, the soul is there just as before.

What is important, therefore, is that we create organs for ourselves and develop our own soul upwards to the spiritual world, to the disembodied souls. All will struggle through, all will become companions, citizens of the spiritual world; but it is a slow process. Therefore, the call goes out to everyone: Develop your soul! Today, admittedly, there are only a few who have grown beyond the average human being and who, from their own experience, bear witness to the higher worlds. But today, through the theosophical world view, this knowledge is to be brought to all people.

Listening to the stories of the soul's development is the first step towards developing one's own spiritual life. Becoming familiar with the theosophical teachings is quite different from scientific learning. There is a big difference between reading an ordinary book – once I have taken note of its content, it has given me what it is supposed to give – but when I read a theosophical book, it gives me spiritual nourishment in a special way; by awakening thought powers in me, it ignites a fire in my soul. And these powers of thought are life-giving, awakening the slumbering powers in the soul. And so reading a theosophical book or listening to a theosophical lecture is the first step towards one's own independent realization. And just as the first step on this first path to the realization of higher worlds takes place in full day-consciousness, so every step forward is taken in bright day-consciousness.

Even if a person initially has his experiences at night while sleeping, he still takes the perceptions into clear day-consciousness and is awake from morning till night. As he develops further into the higher worlds, he will also be able to see the spiritual light that always surrounds us during the day. In true, correct clairvoyance, the person must be firmly and securely conscious at the center. Only a very reasonable person can enter this path, because only such a person can rationally grasp and logically think through each step forward. This is the clairvoyance to which Theosophy wants to lead people.

You can also achieve a certain clairvoyance by tuning down your consciousness. Souls are constantly around us; for the clairvoyant in the above sense, the spiritual light is not extinguished by the lamplight or daylight. For a different degree of clairvoyance, it is necessary to dim the lamplight so that the weaker light can be recognized. Let us be clear about this. If we want to recognize a small light that is outshone by bright lamplight, we can achieve our purpose in two ways. Either we can dim the lamplight so that the weaker light can shine in the darkness, or we can fan the small light or fire so that it outshines the flame of the lamplight. The theosophically trained clairvoyant does the latter. In full day-consciousness, he can make the light shine, whether daylight or lamplight or darkness surrounds him. The situation is different with mediums, in whom clairvoyance of a different kind occurs, not in full day-consciousness, but in a trance. Thus in a state where day-consciousness is extinguished; there the soul is given the opportunity to see the intermediate light because the waking mind consciousness is immersed in darkness. With the clairvoyant, the world, which is otherwise darkness, becomes light. With the medium, this world begins to shine when the visible has become invisible to the medium. The other two areas do not deal with the waking consciousness; they appeal to the trance consciousness.

We now come to hypnosis. Through some influence or other, a person's consciousness is so subdued that he can no longer control his actions; to varying degrees, the bright consciousness of day is subdued. Suggestion has such an influence on people. The man to whom you say, “Here is a pear,” while a potato is put into his hand, has not lost the ability to see; he can hear and see, but he has lost the ability to control the perceptions through the ear and the eye. Consciousness is dulled to the extent that he is only receptive to what you tell him. As long as he is awake, he can say and do whatever he wants; then he can control his actions. Now that the waking daytime consciousness has faded away, the mental consciousness is still there. Through various means, one can put a person into such a state, for example, by looking at a shiny object. When consciousness is tuned down to a certain degree, the person is a suitable subject for suggestion. He then does things that he would not do if he were awake, for example, he will crawl on all fours like a dog and bark. He hears what is being said but cannot make sense of it. But suggestion can also be carried out without such means. This is called verbal suggestion or suggestive hypnosis, and many contemporary researchers believe that everything comes from such verbal suggestions. What seemed miraculous to us — the barking of the hypnotized person — no longer seems miraculous to us now that we have seen that when the physical-sensory consciousness is extinguished or dulled, the soul-spiritual rapport from soul to soul has been established.

If you go through life with an open mind, you can observe this soul-to-soul rapport in many aspects of daily life. Not only what we hear and see has an effect on us; souls have a direct effect on each other; this also explains the otherwise inexplicable sympathy and antipathy. However, much of it is based on suggestion. Anyone who observes the workings of the soul will also be able to explain the powerful influence that some speakers exert on the masses, even though they give no logical reasons for their convictions. These are subtle effects of suggestion. Interesting observations can be made in this area. The well-known theater director Laube had a subtle suggestive effect on the audience. He brought the great actor Sonnenthal and the actress Wolter to the top. At first the audience did not want to know anything about them; but Laube was sure of his cause. He said: “Not today, but they will eat them!” The Viennese laughed at first, then mocked, but finally they also recognized the greatness of the excellent actors. Through continued listening, the audience's opposition was lulled and they became receptive to the impression that the great actors made on them.

How does science view these phenomena of suggestion? Wilhelm Wundt, who is almost worshipped like a god by some scientists, could not deny the facts, but he did not seek or find a satisfactory explanation for them either. He realized that a part of the brain was switched off during hypnosis, but he could not give a scientific explanation for it and shrugged his shoulders because he did not believe in the existence of the soul. His students tried to track down the existence of the soul and its effects.

The ancients were well aware of the suggestive effects. [Kircher] proved them to his contemporaries as early as 1646 by means of a simple experiment. He took a chicken, put it on the table, hit it a few times on the head with his fist, then drew a straight chalk line on the table, and the chicken obediently walked along this line without thinking of flying away. — It is also known that farmers would draw a thick circle of chalk around geese that were not supposed to fly away; no goose dared to leave the circle.

The knowledge of suggestive effects was buried under the rubble for a long time until the half-quack Hansen uncovered it again. The scholars mostly behaved dismissively towards the phenomena that were new to them. However, there were also unprejudiced men, especially doctors, who took a closer look at the matter and soon realized that a whole new avenue was opening up for them in particular. While it was previously believed that the soul has nothing to do with the body, it was gradually realized that the errors of the soul can even have a harmful effect on the body. The sick bodies are built by errors of the soul, the healthy bodies are built by healthy souls.

All of you gathered here will not be able or willing to dispute spiritualism, the third area we want to turn to. So we don't need to dwell on the evidence for its real existence. If we look at the spiritists, we will notice something. Most of them are quite gullible when it comes to the spirits they want to see, and incredulous when it comes to the spirit that lives in man.

You spiritists want to see the spirit! Why not enrich yourselves by recognizing your own spirit! You really often do much wiser things in your ordinary life than sit down at the table to converse with departed spirits!

When nine people sit around a table, there are nine spirits present, and it seems to me much more useful for these nine spirits to converse with each other than to summon foreign spirits to converse with them. Because spiritualism is known, it is known that a lot of fraud is done in the process; but it is also known that many interesting phenomena occur.

For the theosophist, the question arises as to whether it is appropriate to approach the spiritual world in this way. For the clairvoyant, the disembodied souls are of course companions, and he advises people to develop their own soul so that they too can see. The spiritist says: Why should I become different from what I am? I can save myself that; I don't like developing my mind. – The spiritualist seeks to make the spirit manifest itself to him. The theosophist wants to develop himself up to the spirit, to experience the spirit through his own soul.

The spiritualists are materialists. They say: What do I care about the spiritual worlds? I want to see! - Spiritism originated as a reaction against materialism. People believed in the material, they longed for the spiritual. And so they also wanted to make the spirit materially visible. This did not prove useful for human culture. What was needed was this: to descend even deeper in order to learn to understand the world from within itself. By trying to draw the spirit down to themselves, spiritists lose all control over the spiritual world. One thing is clear: only those who retain their rational minds can judge correctly.

Spiritualist séances whet our curiosity, and curiosity is selfishness. It should not be ignored that many are driven by noble motives and that they mean well. But on the whole, the matter cannot have a moralizing effect, since it leads to the most blatant materialism, in that one even wants to materialize spirits. Fortunately, a large number of spiritualists have saved themselves by joining the theosophical movement.

In this science, every step forward is controlled by the logical mind. So what might happen in a seance? When a person dies, he discards his physical body; the corpse decays; the soul leaves him, and this dissolves soon after death. The human being then still has the astral body; much, much later he also discards this when he enters devachan. Then he leaves an astral corpse in Kamaloka. This has no intelligence, but it can still respond to questions in an automated way. It is these shadows that manifest themselves very often. It is nonsense to turn to the astral corpses. The phenomenon may be correct, but man is not able to judge it. In other cases, one is not dealing with human beings at all. Confusion also occurs frequently. It can be compared to using the telephone; you hear a voice but do not see the person speaking. Confusion of voices can also occur. You speak to a different person than you think. It is like that and much worse in the spiritual world. Everything is uncertain; nothing gives us sufficient guarantee. Everything is withdrawn from clear day-consciousness.

This is how Theosophy stands in relation to the other two fields. The first materialists claimed that no stone could fall from the sky. And now we find meteorites in every natural history museum.

When we look at hypnosis, we see that the scientific world was quite dismissive, even mocking and hostile towards it. But gradually the scientists have been tamed by hypnosis to register the phenomena, and hypnotism has gained respect.

The spiritualists, who long so much for certainty, often become fanatics; but a little bit of materialistic spiritualism has served to reveal the mystery of the invisible world.

Mysterious in broad daylight
Nature cannot be robbed of the veil,

says Goethe, and Goethe was a theosophist.

The scholars only engage in what they can register; only series of numbers and percentages count for them. They achieve a little, and many of the researchers deviate from it nevertheless. They examine the phenomena for their authenticity with the greatest accuracy. Whether they come across the spirit in this way: In the meantime, their scientific endeavors may be quite good until they learn to take the only right path to knowledge.

The theosophical worldview truly leads people to higher things. It wants to guide people with bright, clear clarity and bring them proof that all their yearning for clarity can be satisfied, as Goethe said from his own spiritual insight:

The spiritual world is not closed, your mind is closed; your heart is dead. Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted

The earthly breast at dawn!

Science speaks of heredity, but the word is far too crude to indicate the subtle, subtle differences. Theosophy or spiritual science only focuses on the laws that apply to humans, not to other living creatures, animals and plants. Why is there so much similarity between daughters and fathers, and between sons and mothers? Science does not have a proper answer to this. You have to go deep to find it. When you see a child develop gradually, you see the soul unfold. How much of that comes from the parents, and how much from other circumstances, and so on? Where do the details come from?

William [James], America, writes: Man does not weep because he is sad; he is sad because he weeps. Something in the human environment causes the tears to be pushed out of the lacrimal glands into the eyes and then fall down, and then the person is sad. — This is, of course, the opposite of the truth. The human body is built from the soul and spirit. What people develop as intellect, ability and feeling, and so on, results from what the human being has taken with them into the core of their being from all their previous lives. What comes from the parents is in the physical and etheric bodies; the core of our being points us back to what it has worked for in previous embodiments.

When a child is given to a couple as a gift, we must remember that a new individuality is not created there. This couple can give him the most suitable physical and etheric body, and that is why the essence of the child is drawn to them. This is how the past and the future come together.

Much of what you observe in a child can be seen in the father and mother. But there is still much that cannot be derived from heredity. The same hereditary conditions exist in several children of the same parents, and yet each has its own individuality.

We have to separate what a person has inherited physically and what he has acquired through his own efforts. Schiller, for example, inherited his nose, his walk, even his temperament; but his genius, that which makes Schiller into Schiller, he acquired through his own efforts in many lives.

Why is a particular core of being drawn to a particular pair of parents? Arthur Schopenhauer made an interesting observation. There is something individual in the sympathy of the love passion between man and woman, if we pay attention to the glances that go back and forth; there is something individual in the love process itself, which is as individual as what arises from this act of love.

The love life between man and woman provides the attraction for the new being. In the individual acts of love, very different feelings go back and forth. In the third, fourth, fifth year of marriage and so on, the fabric is woven for those who fit into the family.

In the Holbein family of painters, the talent for painting is inherited. You see how the talent is inherited, it is said. It is the same in the Bach and Bernoulli families. The musical ear is based on a subtle inner structure. The mathematical sense is not tied to a particular brain, but there are three semicircular canals in the ear, which is the organ for spatial perception. If these channels are particularly finely developed and trained, then there is a mathematical sense. A great talent is at the end of a developmental series. This does not prove the inheritance of talent; on the contrary: if it were at the beginning of such a series and were now inherited, this would prove the inheritance. But it does not, it is not inherited.

Carnegie: “The Gospel of Wealth”. It is useful for theosophists to read such books. If Theosophy is to become the powerful impulse it is meant to be, then we must show that we do not identify with the people at the “tea table”, but with people who are in the world and dealing with issues like Carnegie. We don't have to agree with him. Some doting fathers are too anxious to transfer supposed commercial qualities to the son in order to hand over the business to him. But many stoppages of payments are due to this, have occurred because the same abilities were not inherited. In business, you should not take people who, through biological inheritance, do not have the commercial skills; rather, you should hire people who may be without any talent, but who are endowed with the appropriate abilities.

Life demands the whole personality of the human being right now. In educating the child, we must respect the child's own individuality, let it develop freely, not in a stereotyped way according to supposed inheritance.

Dear attendees! The word “knowledge” undoubtedly evokes in people the feeling that it is something that is purposefully and coherently connected with the whole human destiny in life. And intimately connected with this feeling is the realization that by acquiring knowledge, man provides himself with a position within his existence and within the whole of human development that corresponds to his true destiny, to his goals.

Now, in the fields of knowledge that are connected with the study of nature, and perhaps also with the study of certain branches of human life, we can very soon see that they provide us with laws, that they show us certain forces of natural or other effectivenesses, through which we are able to intervene in life. We need only consider how, in certain respects, our knowledge of nature makes us masters of the forces of nature, how the laws of nature that we recognize enable us to equip ourselves with tools and devices that enhance life and advance man in existence. And when we allow the most remote fields of knowledge to come to mind, we will feel the connection somewhere between the laws that we acquire through knowledge and the actions through which we enhance our lives in a useful, purposeful way. Thus, when it comes to knowledge that can be directly implemented in our actions and behavior, we readily understand that they do not merely satisfy our curiosity, do not merely correspond to a certain urge to act, but that they arise from the much higher urge to shape life and existence ever more perfectly and completely. Thus, we gain the feeling that these insights have a certain mission, a task in our lives.

Now everyone knows that there are other fields of knowledge in which, when we think of this mission, it comes to mind to an even greater degree, which we can call human dignity and human destiny, humanity and human fulfillment. But these are insights that – in the way just described – are not directly applicable to the purposes and goals of practical life. These are insights that one says one acquires for their own sake. Man feels that he has an urge to explore and recognize the secrets of existence; he feels that knowledge is simply enlightening. It is something that satisfies the soul even if it cannot apply this knowledge directly, so to speak, cannot forge it into external instruments and tools or into actions of daily life that are related to external human goals.

A realization for its own sake, a realization that grows out of a deep need of the human soul and that should satisfy the human being through itself - such a realization is sought by the human being, and he seeks it all the more the deeper the inner needs of his soul develop. He seeks it perhaps less when he feels immersed in a life that drifts from event to event, from sensation to sensation, from work to work in everyday life. He may seek them less when life distracts him and keeps him fully occupied by his external demands. But especially in those moments when a person - perhaps not even of his own volition, but through those events and experiences that tear us out of everyday life - can be still within himself, that is when the urge for such different insights awakens. There are perhaps hours in which man suffers great losses in life, moments when perhaps what is most precious to him is snatched away, when he believes he must see his hopes for life fail. These are moments when a longing awakens in the soul that can never be satisfied by the outer life. And it is people who have this need for knowledge who gradually come to deepen their soul life more and more. Such people then begin to realize, initially through mere feeling, through sensation, that insights that are far removed from the everyday can act as a source of courage and strength where a person becomes weak, indeed that such insights can act as a balm where the soul is desolate and full of pain. Yes, then the soul can develop to a point where it feels that it would not want to live without such knowledge, that existence seems worthless and bleak without such knowledge.

When pondering such an experience of the human soul, the thought may arise: If one already feels that everyday knowledge, for example knowledge of nature or knowledge of the laws of human coexistence or the like, only fulfills its purpose when it not only satisfies the curiosity of our brain, but when it also inspires the strength of our hands and cause us to stir our hands in earthly existence, then one might ask, with what tasks of man, with what goals, are the other insights connected, which one so easily thinks are there for their own sake and find no direct practical confirmation? Do such insights have no task at all, to intervene in human life and to stimulate something that leads to deeds, to actions? That is the big question that one can ask oneself about knowledge and its task in life.

If one is aware of how the soul, in its state of dissatisfaction with the external existence, feels the necessity of knowledge, if one thus gains a certain insight that this intimate knowledge can become necessary for the innermost being of our soul, then one will think that such knowledge, which extends beyond the immediate external life, must be connected with the highest qualities, with the highest aspirations of our humanity, in other words with the essence of the human being itself. And one will soon notice that one must seek the connection between what man calls knowledge in the higher sense and the actual essence of man. But then one will have to organize one's search for knowledge after such an insight has been gained. One will say to oneself: You have to organize the search in such a way that consideration is given to the deepest, innermost nature of the human being. Anyone who believes that all existence is exhausted in the external sense world alone, that all science is exhausted in the knowledge we gain through rational processing of external sense phenomena, in short, anyone who believes that external observation of life and science directed at external being can be the only science, will be ill-equipped to provide answers to the question just raised.

Another science, the so-called spiritual science or “theosophy” - if one wants to use this much-abused and much-misunderstood term - gives us the possibility to answer this question little by little. This science refers to the spiritual, to that which goes beyond the sensual world; it is dedicated to research that alone can lead us to the essence of man. With the help of this science, one can feel that the innermost being of man comes from the spirit and that what is best in us - our true governing being - is spiritual. Only spiritual science can explore this innermost part of our being, and so we can also hope that through this spiritual science we can gain knowledge of the real nature of man and that in this way we can find the mysterious foundation that otherwise only manifests itself in life through a dark feeling that says: I want knowledge that gives me something that everything else cannot give me.

Spiritual science certainly follows different methods and seeks different paths than ordinary external science, but in our time there is still little inclination to see it as anything other than the eccentric or sad aberrations of individuals. It is not yet recognized in wide circles that this spiritual science works with the same strict means of knowledge as the natural sciences, that it applies the same strict means of knowledge, but only to a different area, thus not to the outer natural life, but to the spiritual life. In the course of this lecture we shall be able to point out some of the things that lead man into the spiritual world and the methods by which man can gain insight into the other, the supersensible world. But we want to take the starting point from the everyday. Through rational ascent from everyday life, and thus also from mere reason, one can indeed get some kind of inkling of a possibility to gain knowledge of the spiritual world.

How does this manifest itself in the outer life of the human being? Let us take the human being at four significant points, two of which we are usually unaware of because we experience them as a matter of course. But there are two other things that intervene in each life, one questioningly and the other shockingly. These four things are referred to as waking and sleeping, as living and dying. In these four words lies basically all the mystery of human life. Those who are able to obtain satisfactory explanations will see that the darkness of life becomes light and clear. Waking and sleeping alternate in our everyday life. From waking up to falling asleep, impressions arise in our soul that we owe to our mind. We know that during the state of sleep we shut ourselves off from pleasure and suffering, from instinct and desire. Thus we see our life unrolling from waking up to falling asleep. Then, as we fall asleep, we see all the experiences and activities of the soul descend into an indeterminate darkness. All perceptions and representations sink down. We are as if overcome by a faint; we cease to be connected to our environment. We feel transported from the conscious into the unconscious.

What actually happens when a person experiences this moment of falling asleep? Only an opinion that does not follow the laws of logic can believe that the whole world that sinks into darkness in the evening is reborn in the morning, that everything that a person has left behind in the physical world is reborn. Everyone must ask themselves the question: Where is that which is thought, intended, and felt during the day, what is felt as the power to take action? It is not difficult to see that what we can describe as the actual inner being of a person, what we feel as an inner drive, cannot simply have disappeared [when we fall asleep] and has to arise anew [after waking up]. It is therefore not difficult to understand what the spiritual researcher must say based on his research. He says: That which remains in bed, this human being, is not the whole human being. This human being, who sleeps at night, has released from himself that which, during the day, constitutes the innermost being. How is it that one does not see and cannot observe that which goes out? Everyone can give themselves the answer: You can observe it just as little as a blind man can observe colors. He who maintains that there is nothing that leaves the body and is outside of it at night is like the blind man who says, “Ah, what are you saying about your foolish fantasies, about red and blue colors; that does not exist!” What you do not perceive does not exist.

Of course, only spiritual science can explore what eludes the senses. But a certain beginning is sometimes made by everyday consciousness, albeit only in certain abnormal states of human life. There are experiences that actually every human being could have, that he has more often than he realizes, but they only last for a short time and are therefore not noticed by most people because the external impressions have too numbing an effect on the soul. A certain practice and inner calmness of soul, a special training for spiritual research, is needed if a person is to have such moments. There are people who have such moments and describe how, at the moment of falling asleep, they can experience something that is not usually experienced. Just as chemists describe some chemical process, so observers in this field describe what they experience at the moment of falling asleep.

They experience, as it were, a kind of alienation from everything they do in their sensory life. They experience the powerlessness to move their hands, they feel the powerlessness to move their tongue; they feel how the senses gradually lose the ability to interact with the outside world. And then, in a particularly embarrassing way, the person feels, with severe self-reproach, all the mistakes and wrongdoings they have committed. And then comes the moment when a kind of experience occurs that is aware of being free from the necessity of external sensory perception, but which is not unconscious, but feels that the soul is in the spiritual world: this is a subjective feeling. There is a stronger light, greater clarity, than can ever be present in the external sensory life. A blissful moment of feeling free occurs. Then, for those who are ordinary observers, there follows what appears to be a quick twitch, of which one is aware: Now that which during the day had passed through the hands and feet to work, which had lived in the eyes, which had lived in the brain, has now detached itself. But then what one might call a transition into unconsciousness occurs. A brief, intense feeling arises, combined with the wish: Oh, if only this moment could last forever!

These experiences are just as much facts as any others. They should not be dismissed by saying that only a few people have such experiences, that they have a special subjective ecstasy in their soul because they have an abnormal mental life. These doubts cannot be refuted unless one says: Yes, but spiritual science, on the other hand, knows from its own means and methods that it is right when it says: I cannot prove it, only certain people experience it; you too can experience it yourself if you methodically try to spread inner balance in your soul through completely normal means of education. One would not get very far, however, if one could only cite such rarities of human observational ability. What alone can lead to research and science in this field is the methodical schooling through which man can really achieve what makes him capable of consciously experiencing falling asleep almost as if by chance. If such a science is to come into being, it must be possible not only to rely on such abnormal rarities, but also to really experience, systematically and with full consciousness of the soul, what occurs almost by chance. That is, it must be possible to see, perceive and explore this emergence of the real inner being of the human being, preventing the human being from being unable to observe it precisely when he wants to perceive what is free of his body, because he is unconscious.

So how is it possible to get to know what a person otherwise only experiences unconsciously – the spiritual world in which he finds himself [during sleep]? If what is presented comparatively like [the experience of] a blind person born who gains his sight through an operation could be achieved at a higher level, if it were true that there are forces in the soul that cannot emerge in the outer body but that man and that can be brought out through certain methods - self-discipline and schooling of the soul - then the moment of a higher, spiritual power of vision could occur, and then it could be that the human being could experience that of which he must say: I know that there is a spiritual world.

This possibility exists if a person continues to do what we have emphasized as a natural prerequisite: instilling calm and inner balance in the soul. And if we do more and more in our soul to enable it to have experiences that it does not receive through external impressions, then we enable the soul to perceive for itself. I can only describe everything here briefly, but in my essays “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my book “Occult Science: An Outline of Its Principles” you will find a more detailed discussion. It is certainly no fairy tale, but can be confirmed by those who have achieved it, that the human soul is able to consciously experience the moment of falling asleep in the midst of everyday life. This can be characterized by the words: We can induce that moment when we consciously and deliberately suppress external impressions, when we withdraw with our perception from what makes an impression on us as light, color and sound, as warmth and cold, even as pressure and impact, as pain and joy. If we are able, through a strong willpower, to command all external impressions to stand still, then we are also able to make our soul consciously as empty as we make it empty when we sink into the unconsciousness of sleep. It is true that the one who arouses the strong will to consciously switch off external impressions comes to consciously live through a state in which, although it is empty of the expression of his soul, it is nevertheless permeated and interwoven on the inside by what we can call inner activity, inner awareness that we are something and that we can do something. However, what has been emphasized so far by such efforts leads to an empty soul, which is not unconscious, but whose consciousness is contracted into the basic feeling: You are there, but have nothing in you; you have yourself, but there is nothing in you.

A second step is necessary if man is to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. It is necessary that he should no longer remain empty in his soul. If nothing could penetrate into his soul, then there would be no means at all by which man could ever be brought to the conviction of a spiritual world in the scientific sense. If in such an experiment, which excludes external impressions, the soul remained completely empty, then that would be actual proof that the external sense world is the be-all and end-all of all existence. But anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher continues this work of self-discipline and education of his soul, and now tries, through strong will, to evoke such ideas that can be called symbolic ideas, which do not depict external things but have other properties. When a person devotes himself to meditation and contemplation, he will feel and experience that these ideas evoke feelings and sensations from the depths of his soul just as external impressions evoke pleasure and displeasure.

When a person is alone with himself, when he allows strong, powerful images to live in his soul that do not mean anything external, then, with sufficient patience - sometimes it takes years - he can experience through experience that something is pushing into his soul that he knows for sure is reality. Then he begins to experience a different, higher world, then he enters the supersensible world. And he will keep going further and further with his observation. When he falls asleep, he can observe what now withdraws from the physical body and enters the spiritual world and reality and what, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, is surrounded by the place from which man's original home originates – he is surrounded by the spiritual world. Then, through his methodical research, so regulated by his soul, the realization springs forth that man, with his actual inner being, withdraws from his outer man when he falls asleep, that he lives on in the spiritual world and that he, when he wakes up, again descends into the outer physical body.

When spiritual researchers present us with these facts, just as a chemical or physical truth is presented to us, we may ask: Is there nothing in life that can make the matter clearer and more distinct? Let us examine life to see if it confirms what the spiritual researcher says. Certainly, the majority of people today have the right to say: Well, we are not spiritual researchers; there may be some who can claim such a thing, but one would still have to find confirmation of what has been said in life. Therefore, let us examine life, assuming that something could help to confirm the researcher's statements.

We see that life proceeds in such a way that a person comes into existence through birth and leaves existence through death. We see that life alternates between sleeping and waking. We ask: Is there an inner meaning, a lawful significance, to the fact that a person always alternates between waking and sleeping? Well, ordinary phenomena of everyday life could make a person aware that it must have a significance. I do not take into consideration the hypotheses of natural science, but neither am I opposed to natural science. That which is to be derived from spiritual science is in perfect harmony with the facts of the most modern natural science. This the spiritual researcher can always show. One must only not confuse opinions of natural science with facts of natural science. Opinions are often in sharp contradiction to facts. Unfortunately, there is not enough time today to go into this in more detail. One phenomenon that can point to the meaningfulness of sleep is clearly evident to us every day: the phenomenon of fatigue. People tire and feel in their fatigue that their strength is waning. When they wake up, they feel how, as it were, the forces that enable them to live their lives from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep draw in and flow into them. Man could never make up for what he has lost through fatigue if he always remained in his physical body. Only by entering into another world in the evening, into the original home of his soul, can he draw from this original home the forces that he pours into his physical body in the morning, through which he balances out the forces he used the day before. The scientific hypothesis regarding fatigue will not be touched upon here. It is spiritual forces alone that we must pour into ourselves if we want to balance what we lose in the physical world, the sense world. We can never find these forces in the sense world itself. Man can fatally make acquaintance with the fact that he can never get the forces out of the sense world when he realizes what it means when sleep does not have a balancing effect. So we need sleep to dive into the spiritual reservoirs from which we draw the strength to live.

We have seen what a person brings with them when they wake up from sleep. But what do they take with them into sleep? These are the facts that take place between birth and death and which we include in the word: we develop into ever new states, into ever different abilities. What enables us to develop new abilities in later epochs of life? Take the fact that we can write, that we can express our thoughts in writing. Do we remember how we acquired the ability to hold a pen, for example? It would be bad if we were to consciously remember all the practice that was necessary to achieve this. We have a whole sum of experiences behind us that are no longer present to us, only in the form that they have enabled us to write as a result. The experiences have poured into the ability to write. What we have experienced in the physical world has - contracted - formed the ability that now wells up from within. What has happened there?

This can be gauged from a simple phenomenon that manifests itself in someone who, for their job, has to learn a lot by heart. Everyone will notice that they can only learn very poorly if they try to memorize and cram as much as possible in a row. But it will go better if a healthy sleep interrupts it; this will have a strengthening effect and will expand what we have learned and what we have acquired at an earlier point in time. When it comes to something as close to our soul as memorization, we notice how significantly the state of sleep is involved. Anyone who observes this will no longer be able to doubt what the spiritual researcher says. During sleep, what has been experienced during the day is transformed into ability and strength. The spiritual researcher shows us how this is the case in all areas of life. We would not learn to write if we were not able to draw the experiences of learning to write into ourselves again and again and to transform them into abilities during the state between falling asleep and waking up. In his primal home, the human being finds the strength to transform life experiences into abilities, to weave them around.

We see that the human being does indeed take something from everyday life into his sleep. He takes in what he appropriates in the sensual world so that he can activate his strengths, so that he can work fruitfully, because that is where experiences are woven into abilities. Today we know little of such things. But there were times in the development of humanity when the guides of humanity knew such secrets and expressed them in those poems that are not everyday poems but prove their worth by their effect over thousands of years. In art that is truly worthy of the name, the deepest, most truthful knowledge is at work.

Let us assume that a poet, knowing that the experiences of physical life are transformed into abilities during sleep, had wanted to express how someone prevents the soul from acquiring a certain ability, a certain power. He would have wanted to show, for example, how one could prevent the ability to love from developing. He would describe a person who ensures that what the external experiences of the day send into [the sleep] and what is woven into the night is again undone, dissolved. Homer wanted to give such a description when he showed how Penelope, Odysseus' wife, was surrounded by suitors who did everything to make her develop the ability to love them. But she prevented it by undoing what she had woven during the day at night.

I know full well that a light-footed contemporary aesthetic, which believes that it can grasp all the secrets of art from a certain obvious understanding, will perceive this as the pinnacle of interpretation. But that is not the point. Rather, it is about something else: anyone who penetrates the human spirit will recognize that the great artists have placed great secrets in their works of art and that these works of art have had an effect on the souls and hearts of people from era to era. So much for the illustration of what has been said about the meaning of waking and sleeping.

We must therefore say that a person progresses in life when he is able to develop abilities through sleep that he did not have before and that he can now utilize in the sensory world in order to live a meaningful and spirited life; thus, the human being is endowed with new abilities for his activity. The experiences are transformed by the fact that he can move into the spiritual original home of the soul, which one enters through the gate of sleep. All perfection depends on the human being transforming the experiences of the sense world into abilities through his connection with the spiritual world, in order to then pour the experiences into his outer being in the morning.

Everything that has been described now naturally has limitations. We can bring these limitations to mind when we think of certain tendencies and qualities that a person brings with them into existence at birth for their outer physicality and corporeality. In relation to certain forces that are connected to our innermost being, we can perfect ourselves through what we experience. However, the nature of our body sets a limit to this. And no matter how high our abilities become through our experiences, we cannot transform these experiences if we find limits to our outer body, because it is part of this process that abilities developed by the soul as powers connect with the whole configuration of the body. After all, the body is always the same when we wake up in the morning. We can only express the abilities that relate to the external body. We can influence these to a certain degree.

You can realize this if you consider what becomes apparent when you observe a person for ten years and follow how they work through ten years of insights [into the physical body]. Everything that can be called inner battles and victories and sometimes also inner decline or downfall lives in this. In someone who, for example, has completed the realization in himself over ten years, you can see how such realization, how such transformation of the soul pushes into the outer body, how it comes to expression in the physiognomy, in the gaze, and how, in fact, the person is able to process this into his body where the soul permeates the body so strongly. But if one sees that someone has had the opportunity to have experiences in the field of music, and [believes] that he could simply use these experiences to advance not only in terms of musical feeling but also of musical understanding and musical activity, then one must say that it is impossible for him to infuse this ability into his body from the experiences if he has an unmusical ear organization. Here we see the limits set to us in the fine structure of the organs of our outer body; they exist because we depend on descending into the same body every morning.

The question must be raised: Are such experiences, which find their limit in the transformation into abilities in the outer body, without significance for the life and development of the human being? We cannot answer this question if we stop within the life between birth and death. We can only answer it if we go out with the deep insights of spiritual science to what lies beyond the mysterious gate that we pass through at death. And just as we have tried to make plausible to ourselves from spiritual science that man does not go into a nothingness of unconsciousness [during sleep], but into a spiritual world, so we can ask: What happens to man when he passes through the gate of death and does not return to his corporeality? External science will not be able to pursue him; but spiritual science can. It arrives at a lawful connection which even today affects so many people that they regard it as fantasy, as folly, perhaps as madness: the law of re-embodiment, of repeated lives on earth - which is nothing other than the development of the realization that the soul and spirit can only come from the soul and spirit.

A few centuries ago, learned researchers still claimed that earthworms and fish could arise from river mud. With the same certainty, it was taught even earlier, in the 6th and 7th centuries, that new life would grow out of matter in a putrefying state. If you beat a horse carcass until it was mushy, then the matter would be able to grow bees out of itself, and if you did that with an ox carcass, then it would be able to sprout hornets and wasps out of itself. It was only in the 17th century that Francesco Redi taught that living things can only arise from living things. And that means nothing other than: If someone claims that living things arise from river mud, this can only be claimed as a result of inaccurate observation. But it must also be said that it is only due to inaccurate observation when we see a person come into existence through birth and believe that he acquires all the characteristics and traits from his ancestors. A close observation shows that the soul and spirit only comes from another soul and spirit, which struggles into existence and attracts the substances and fluids of its surroundings, thereby developing. Thus, the soul-spiritual comes from another soul-spiritual and has nothing to do with the inherited characteristics of the body. So when a child comes into existence, its soul-spiritual must be traced back to another soul-spiritual. It has nothing to do with the line of ancestors. The child receives its facial features and so on from its father and mother. But in the same way, we are led from the spiritual soul of the child to an earlier spiritual soul, because we will not be led from the spiritual soul of the child to the characteristics of the ancestors. Thus, spiritual science points us back to our own previous life on earth.

So we are talking about repeated lives on earth. This present life is the repetition of countless previous lives and is a prerequisite for the future. This law of repeated lives on earth plays the same role today as Redi's law did in the 17th century. At that time, Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today, anyone who speaks of the law of re-embodiment is considered to be just as much a heretic as Redi was for those who wanted to hold on to the old ways. At that time, burning heretics was fashionable. Today it is fashionable to condemn as fools and fantasists those who teach new laws. But it will be the same with the law of repeated earth lives as with the law of Redi. There will come a time when people will not be able to understand how anyone could ever have believed that a person inherited his abilities only from his ancestors. Goethe says about himself:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature,
and the desire to tell stories.
[...]
What then in the whole creature
can be called original?

Try to see if you can separate out what is original and what he has acquired from the line of inheritance, in order to preserve those qualities by which he means something to humanity.

Thus we see that we have the prospect of a law that seeks to incorporate human culture and human education – a law that may still be called fantastic today, but which will later be said to be: It cannot be grasped how people could ever have believed that something other than the development of humanity existed in the sense of this law. If we understand life in this way, we can ask: What do we do with the experiences that we cannot transform into abilities within the limits of our physicality? What do we do if we have wanted to acquire musical abilities through musical experiences in life and have found limits to an unmusical ear? When we pass away, we discard our physical body and live in a purely spiritual world, where we now spend the entire time between death and a new birth preparing to be able to bring completely different, higher abilities into life through the new birth. Now we have the opportunity to build a new body for ourselves, to work with it and to shape it plastically into our new physicality. Then, with regard to the new birth, we must now make provisions for the shaping of our new body in such a way that we convert into abilities in the new life what was neglected in the previous life, and that we convert into ever higher forms through changing conditions that which we cannot use for our perfection. Thus we truly progress from life to life. Although we may suffer setbacks due to other influences, life as a whole is still ascending, and what we utilize in later lives is productive, creative and constructive for our being.

We may ask: What are the most important, meaningful abilities that a person can acquire? We look at the lives of those individuals who stand more clearly visible to humanity than others. Consider the creations of a great artist, a Raphael or a Michelangelo. Such creations have arisen through interaction with the external world. It is the victory over matter that speaks to us from the walls, elevating our souls and bringing us satisfaction. But then we turn our gaze to other facts, for example to Leonardo's painting “The Last Supper”. Goethe saw it in all its beauty in his youth, but now it has been destroyed. When we consider this, the thought that is undoubtedly true will surely suggest itself. Everything that great men have conjured into such works is doomed to destruction, condemned to the fate of descending. And a time will come when all these works will be crushed to dust. But if everything is doomed to destruction and will have disappeared, will nothing of what held sway on earth be saved into eternity?

We need only realize that Raphael and Michelangelo became different after they had conjured up these works. Not only does something arise that is communicated to the outer world, but something also enters the human soul. While working in the outer world, something connects with the soul and transforms it. What is reworked is connected with this soul, and if we really penetrate the principles of re-embodiment, we say to ourselves: May the works that Raphael has conjured up into the physical world disappear – the ability remains and will ignite new abilities in a new existence, and these will lead people ever further from step to step. Thus we see that the fruit of our labor extends through various embodiments. Even if our outer work disappears, what connects it to the soul will live on with that soul. Souls will preserve the fruits of their creations. The creations will perish, but the soul fruits of these creations live on in the souls. But what are the deepest, most intimate abilities? They are those that enable people to conjure up what gives millions of souls pleasure and can be transformed into works of art and of life. Such abilities are connected with the outer aspects of our lives.

But there is something in human life that is interwoven with the inner essence of our soul; there is something that we know has a different effect on us than what could be called an urge or an impulse, for my part the impulse from which Raphael painted his pictures. Instincts work in us, but we feel that instincts also have something in them that can be called talent. Instincts are changeable, something indefinite for man, where man is not completely there. No one can become a painter unless he has accumulated special abilities. But there is one thing that cannot be acquired: it is something that comes from our deepest, innermost being. This drive cannot be limited to external realization, but must be drawn from the spiritual itself, and that is the urge for knowledge - an urge that lives in us [deepest]. If the soul wants to work [in the world], we need external materials; for what we call the urge for knowledge, we need only life itself. And only this urge can spur us on to develop that power of thinking that allows us to penetrate into the world of imagination and thought and to unite its secrets with our being. Here we feel the transition between thinking and imagining on the one hand and recognizing on the other.

The person who believes that mere thinking can lead to knowledge is greatly mistaken. Only those who fill their ideas with a content that is not given in the external world will come to know what is behind the external world. What one has acquired in life connects with the innermost self, which is the same as the innermost being of our self. The spirit [in the world] is the same as the spirit within ourselves; the spirit outside in the world connects with the spiritual that we carry within us. There we draw the highest fruit from what we can acquire in our waking life. Knowledge is the human activity through which we draw the highest fruits from our experiences; it is the human activity that transforms into abilities in life, for which we find limit after limit to express them outwardly in life. But knowledge causes us to carry these abilities over through death [into the spiritual world]. And in death, because it is a central spiritual faculty, knowledge not only gives the certainty that we carry over the fruits of our present life to perfections that must be awakened again and again, but it also gives the certainty that we acquire abilities that last as long as the spirit itself - that must last as long as the spirit itself, because they have the same characteristics as the spirit. In knowledge we connect with the spirit, and from this connection arises not only the certainty of knowing immortality, but also the power to establish immortality - to establish it in ourselves - so that with knowledge we acquire the power to carry our essential core through the incarnations. Thus, the acquisition of the powers we regard as immortal is intimately connected with what we call knowledge. It is the activity between birth and death that gives us the immortality of our most individual being, our ego, precisely beyond death, for it is this most individual being that must acquire knowledge through its innermost, self-chosen urge.

For human beings, knowledge and immortality are inwardly related. It is true what spiritual researchers have always handed down from time to time: Man has a life that flows into eternity, but only through all the [forces] that have been laid in him [through life in] the material world. It is true what the spiritual researchers say: Nowhere out there in space can you find anything that can guarantee you this immortality. Only when you penetrate through knowledge to that which lives in you as the center, as spirit, do you gain in you the intimate connection between what you strive for in the noblest sense and what, in knowledge, creates in you for the ever-lasting elevation of your being. Thus we see from knowledge that it not only satisfies curiosity, but that it works on our soul, that it transforms the soul, just as external knowledge transforms the forces of nature. Knowledge is precisely that which makes true what spiritual research passes down to us in the following words:

Being follows being in the expanse of space,
Being follows being in the course of time.
If you want to penetrate from the realm of transience
into the realm of the eternal,
then make a covenant with knowledge,
For only so you will find the eternal
in you, the eternal outside of you
Beyond all space,
Beyond all time.

Dear attendees! Not so long ago, only 300 years, not only laymen but also learned naturalists believed that lower animals, worms, even fish could arise from inanimate river mud. And it was a great advance in human thinking when the Italian naturalist Redi first stated that, under our present-day conditions, living things could only arise from a living germ. Today, anyone who still wanted to claim that earthworms or fish can simply form from ordinary sand or mud would be considered a fool or an ignorant person. Indeed, the vast majority of today's thinking people are hardly aware that these three hundred years ago, people still believed that such a thing was possible! What is taken for granted today by laypeople and by science, that under our present conditions, living things can only arise from living things, is something that humanity had to gain for its thinking only over the course of centuries, and so it is, honored attendees, for many achievements of human knowledge. Today, spiritual science or theosophy has a very similar truth to implement and introduce into human consciousness. That this truth will become part of human consciousness in the future depends solely on whether people will just as naturally accept what many people today consider to be folly, a reverie or a fantasy: that the spiritual and soul can only arise from the spiritual and soul. Basically, all that is needed to understand all the things that will form today's topic is a thorough living through of this simple sentence. Nevertheless, much, much water will flow into the Elbe before the advocates of this sentence will no longer be regarded as fools, dreamers or fantasists.

The sentence that living things can only arise from living germs was not easily accepted either, and Redi only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today, those who bring something similar together are no longer condemned to death by fire, that has gone out of fashion. But they are condemned to the other death, which burns less, but which is therefore still equivalent to the way in which uncomfortable truth seekers were eliminated from the world in the past. Today they are condemned as dreamers, fantasists, fools or the like. But the time will come, and it is not so far away, when it will seem self-evident that the spiritual and the soul can only arise from the spiritual and the soul. And the whole question at issue today, the question of such immeasurable importance for people, the question of the supersensible worlds and the destiny of the human soul in the supersensible worlds, the question of the riddles of human death and life, the question that is not just a theoretical, but a practical question in the most eminent sense, because the one who is able to solve it for his own soul draws certainty and strength for life from the answer, hope and confidence for his work, in short, everything that allows people to stand upright in the most difficult struggles of fate, in all that life brings.

Today we will approach the question of the destiny of man in life and in death from two sides. One approach will bring this question before the court of facts, the other before the court of common sense. If we want to speak of facts, then we must first form an idea of what we actually have to understand as facts. We speak so easily of proving. We shall see that these things are taken very superficially in the wide circle of humanity. The fate of the human soul in the supersensible world will be the subject.

Now, dear audience, when I was still a little boy, I often listened to conversations of very simple people about that mysterious land where man comes after death. There were religious people who, out of their faith, gave certain answers about fate, but there were also free-spirited people among the simple folk, unbelievers. One sentence always worked to beat the others. That was the sentence: No one can know anything about that country from which no wanderer has yet returned. It was said more simply: Have you seen one who has told of the events after death?

That was something that was taken by many as something striking. Now, honored attendees, people would not attach so much importance to such words if they wanted to reflect more thoroughly on the ordinary events of the day that happen to every human being in 24 hours. In the ordinary course of daily life, a person clearly experiences different states. In 24 hours, you go through two states of consciousness: waking and sleeping. Of course, the most ordinary and everyday things are the least thought about; but the riddles of the world are present in the everyday. It should seem mysterious to man that what he experiences within himself from morning to evening, the whole world of surging and swaying sensations, perceptions and thoughts, lust and suffering, joy and pain, drives and desires and passions, that he sees this whole world of the evening sinking into an indeterminate darkness. Everything that a person perceives through his eyes from morning till evening, which awakens desires, lust and suffering in him, etc., descends into the darkness of consciousness like the setting sun. In the morning, the person wakes up again; what he left behind for his consciousness yesterday dawns again out of the darkness. All the familiar images, thoughts, impressions come to consciousness just as the sun rises over the horizon. All the pains and sufferings that had been forgotten come back up like the sun rising over the horizon.

Would it not be foolish to claim that every evening the sum of perceptions, sensations and perceptions, pleasure and pain, pain and joy, that they disappear and merge into an indeterminate nothing and are recreated tomorrow? Anyone who thinks thoroughly says: It would be the greatest folly to claim such a disappearance of mental life and a new creation. The soul is there, it is present, it is real, anything else is contrary to common sense. What distinguishes the sleeping soul from the waking soul? Only that the sleeping soul cannot perceive, it has no consciousness of what fills its field of vision during the day as its experiences. States of consciousness change in every person in 24 hours.

Now, honored attendees, when the world of facts is to be explored, that which can be called clairvoyant human consciousness comes into play. With this word, I have expressed what may seem like something fantastic or foolish to the very enlightened of the present, especially at first. What is this clairvoyant human consciousness? First, let us clarify this consciousness through a comparison. You imagine, honored attendees, you are leading a person born blind into this hall. For you, these lamps shine, these doors appear brown. For the man born blind, this hall does not appear in this way; the lights and colors are not there for him. If you were to succeed in operating on this man born blind here, what would enter his field of vision is what was there before, but what he did not see. What was there before has now become perceptible to him.

What this man born blind can experience through the operation can be experienced in relation to the spiritual abilities of the soul. Just as in this man, whom you operated on, the ability to see was dormant, so in every human soul there is something dormant of higher abilities that can likewise be brought out of the human soul through an operation. What Goethe, for example, referred to as spiritual eyes, slumbers in the soul of every human being. And then, when these spiritual eyes are awakened in the soul of a person, it is just as much on a higher level as it is for a person born blind on a lower level whose physical eye has been operated on. A new world invades him, the world that is always around us, the spiritual world. But man's soul is also in this world during the state of sleep, during the night.

Why can't the human soul see this spiritual world in its normal state? It is easy to see why. Imagine that you were standing here with your body alive, but you lost your sight and could see nothing. If you also lost your hearing and other senses, the world would be imperceptible to you. So how can we know that a world exists for us? Only on the fact that we have organs for this world. When a person is in the spiritual world at night while sleeping, then in his normal present state he has no organs for this world, he has no spiritual eyes. But when a person develops what are called these spiritual eyes, then it is not dark and gloomy around him, but then he lives in the sleeping state so that he perceives: There is a world, I have left the physical world; I have entered another world. Now another world has become visible, a fact, as the world of physical colors and lights for the blind man who has undergone an operation.

What is described here as opening the spiritual eyes is called awakening or initiation. Such initiated people, who had developed their spiritual abilities, have always existed. Because they had developed their spiritual abilities, they could see into the spiritual world, into the world of which they now had to say: When a person falls asleep, what we call his outer physical body remains in bed, and a spiritual-soul entity leaves this physical body. This being really does leave the physical body when we fall asleep. During sleep it is in another world. In the morning, the soul once again enters the physical body. It then uses the eyes and ears again and perceives the physical world. What is the difference between the unawakened person and the awakened person? The difference is that in that part of his being that goes out at night, there are no spiritual eyes; but in the awakened person, spiritual eyes have developed. Those who want to study these questions more deeply and thoroughly will see that what has been said is not something plucked out of the blue, but something definite and real. Of course you can ask the question: Yes, but how does one achieve this awakening? The answer to this question is also given. There are certain methods and certain practices that a person must apply to his soul, and then he draws out of his inner being the dormant spiritual eyes, the slumbering soul abilities. It can only be hinted at that by allowing very specific inner soul experiences, which have been established for thousands of years in what is called concentration, meditation, or inner contemplation, to take effect on his soul, man can change his soul and develop spiritual eyes as a result. Then man becomes clairvoyant in a world that is otherwise closed to him.

If you look through the little booklet on initiation and mysteries, you will see that there is a very specific way of making the soul clairvoyant, just as there are methods for making microscopes. Certain ideas have an effect on this soul, and then it transforms, and then abilities arise, which you can call hallucinations or visions if you like, but they change very quickly so that they become the mediators of the spiritual worlds that are around us. In this development, one very soon learns to distinguish from one another what a vision is and what corresponds to reality in the spiritual world. Just as in the physical world you can only come to distinguish between ideas and reality through experience and living, the same applies to the spiritual world.

Someone may say: I believe in Schopenhauer that the world is my idea. We say: Very well, just imagine a piece of burning iron or glowing steel. It does not burn you, but now, if you touch it, you will very soon realize the difference between your idea and reality; the imagined glowing steel does not burn, but the real one does. You will have the same experience as you develop your spiritual powers and abilities.

When I said this once in southern Germany, someone said: But you can evoke the ideas in your mind so vividly that they even have a physical effect; so someone could have hallucinations through contemplation and other exercises that they mistake for reality. You can also, he said, make your mouth water when you imagine lemon juice. “Then I said that he should try to quench his thirst with imagined lemon juice. You can only do that with real lemon juice, and you notice the difference. It is the same in the spiritual world. Those who are spiritually awakened and have developed their spiritual senses know from experience where the boundary is between imagination and spiritual reality.

These are the facts on which spiritual research is based. When someone comes and says: Yes, these people claim not only the physical body, but what they – oh, these fantasists and fools – call the astral body, these awakened ones claim that. They should just prove it and list all the facts. Well, ladies and gentlemen, firstly, the person who makes such a speech has not thoroughly informed himself about the nature of proof. I would like to advise him to think about the proof that the horse has its head in front and its tail behind. Just because people always see normal horses, that is why they take such a thing for granted. Proofs, which are to be based on facts, must be based on these facts. The spiritual researcher is on no different ground than the natural scientist. If someone comes and says, “There are natural scientists who say that plants consist of cells.” “I have never seen cells, only leaves and flowers.” What I have not seen, I do not believe. — Then the natural scientist will say to him: You must get a microscope and learn to work scientifically, then you will see the cells as facts. Only if you take the appropriate precautions will you see them.

But the methods by which the invisible, supersensible aspects of human nature can be seen are accessible to everyone. If he undergoes the methods that the initiate has to undergo, if he develops clairvoyance, then he undergoes something similar in the spiritual life to what the person working with the microscope undergoes in the physical life. The analogy of the facts is complete, at most the matter is more uncomfortable in the spiritual life. It is more uncomfortable in the spiritual life because a microscope can be fabricated. But what the spiritual microscope is, everyone must develop in their own soul; they must transform themselves if they want to see for themselves. But there have always been such initiates who knew what message to bring from these spiritual worlds.

And now let us present to our soul what these initiates have to say about the cycle of man through the different worlds. It is presented in much the same way as if someone were to tell you that he has seen this or that through the microscope. The spiritual researcher speaks from his research: What you call the human being is by no means as simple as you imagine. This human being consists of many, many parts; he has visible, tangible parts, but in addition he also has invisible, supersensible parts. The first part is the physical human body. This physical human body he has in common with all other inanimate beings, with crystals, rocks, with mineral beings. In addition, he has an invisible part that is a loyal fighter in the physical body. This second link, which only a clairvoyant can see, is the etheric or life body. This permeates the human being. If one did not have it, the human body would be in every moment what it becomes with death: a corpse. A crystal follows its own physical and chemical laws. The human body cannot follow its own chemical and physical laws during its lifetime. If it did follow them, then what it is as a corpse would show up, it would dissolve. But the etheric body is a faithful fighter against decay. The human being has the etheric or life body in common with all plants.

The third link of the human being is the astral body; it is the carrier of desire and suffering, joy and pain, of all the feelings and passions that arise and ebb away in the waking consciousness, etc. This astral body is just as real and true for the spiritual researcher as the physical body, indeed even more real. If someone objects: You are not going to imagine that such astral bodies can fly around in the air, then the spiritual researcher answers: I can imagine it very well; not only imagine it, but to the spiritual researcher the astral body shows itself as an independent part of the human being.

Today, such an awareness would be considered fantasy; but the real fantasy lies on the other side. A healthy understanding of human nature will say: Here I see the person, the tear rolls out of his eyes. Therefore, I assume that he is sad. The grief is an experience of the soul or the astral body. This experience has a physical effect, it presses tears out of the eyes. Here we see how physical effects arise from experiences of the soul. Some schools of philosophy say that this is a mistake. They say that when a person cries, a secret effect occurs that is mediated by material things, and this secret effect presses tears out of the eyes and when the person notices this, then he becomes sad. So the person does not cry because he is sad, but he is sad because he cries.

The third part of human nature, the astral body, is shared by humans and all animals. Then there is a fourth element, which is the carrier of self-awareness, the carrier of our ego. Through this element, humans rise above all the beings that surround them in the sensory world. He towers above his fellow creatures, he is the greatest of earthly creation. In spiritual research, we speak of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body in animals. In the case of humans, we speak of four members: the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I-vehicle.

What is sleep for spiritual research? When a person falls asleep, his physical body and ether body remain in bed, while the astral body and the I-bearing body separate out for the clairvoyant. In the sleeping person we have a separation of the four limbs. Because in today's normal consciousness the I and the astral body have no organs of their own, but only in clairvoyant consciousness, these organs are dark and there is darkness around the person. In the morning he plunges into his physical and etheric bodies. Throughout life between birth and death, except in states of emergency, the physical body is firmly connected to the etheric body. The astral body goes out at night.

After death, something very special happens. The mere physical body remains behind and the connection between these three invisible members, ether body, astral body and I, goes out. And from that time on, the physical body begins to be a mere physical body, that is, it follows its physical and chemical laws; it dissolves; it is a member of the mineral world.

But then, when spiritual research follows what emerges from the physical body, it shows that the person remains connected to their etheric body for a while. After death, there occurs for a time what could be called a review of the whole past life. You will already have heard that people who are close to death in abnormal conditions – for example, when drowning – review their whole life like a panorama. This gives the person a shock because the entire etheric body is detached from the physical body. The entire life is written in the etheric body, it is the carrier of memory, and only the physical body prevents it from showing this. But it immediately shows this memory of past life when it is freed from the physical body for a moment.

The same is also evident after death. Man then has a review of the past life. Then comes the second cadaverization. After a few days, the etheric body detaches itself from the actual inner core of the being, just as the physical body detached itself earlier. What remains is an extract of this etheric body, and the etheric body dissolves into the general etheric matter just as the physical body dissolves into the physical matter. After the human being has freed himself from his etheric body, he now consists of the ego, the astral body and an extract of the etheric body. This extract represents the fruit of the last life, what we have experienced in the last life. You can say to yourself: when you have grown older, you have experienced more than you did earlier. The whole of life consists of becoming more and more attuned to the spiritual; that is not lost, it is written into your etheric body, and you take it with you as a fruit.

After death, something very special happens. What I am about to say is a fact for clairvoyant research, but it can also be grasped by common sense. We have seen: the physical body has fallen away, we will leave the etheric body out of consideration for the time being, but what has lived in man, lust and suffering, joy and pain, that has not only existed as an effect in the physical body, but we must consider that as reality, and then we can say: what is the reason why the desires should immediately fall away when the physical body falls away? There is no reason for it. Spiritual research now shows that the astral body remains present after death with the desires.

An example: a person was a gourmet in life, he had desires for these or those delicious foods. This desire does not depend on the physical body - minerals have no desires - but it depends on the astral body. Now the physical body is dead, the craving has remained, and now the person is in a special situation: in life he satisfies it by eating the food in question, but for that he needs the palate and tongue, organs of the physical body. After death, he still has the craving, but he lacks the organs to satisfy it. The human being is in the same situation as someone who suffers from thirst in solitude and finds no water or beer far and wide. It is the same after death with everything that lives in the human being's astral body and that can only be satisfied through connection with the physical body. After death, spiritual research can confirm that the human being gradually weans from everything that can only be satisfied by the organs of the physical body. This state lasts until the person has given up all impulses in life that require physical organs. This period, which varies in length in different individuals, is called in spiritual science the time of man's passage through the world of souls or Kamaloka; what is meant is a state. After death, man has to go through this state. Certain religions call it purgatory, a time of trial, purification, cleansing. Then the parts of the astral body that contain only what can be satisfied by the physical body fall away from the person like scales. Then the soul is able to make something out of what it has taken with it as an extract, out of what it has taken with it as the fruit of life.

And now the time of the actual spiritual life begins, the time in which man lives in increasingly spiritual worlds, which first begins with man reversing his activity from the physical world. What does that mean? What man does first among many other things, we can understand, honored attendees, if we look at the light with common sense. It is true that if man had no eyes, he would not see the light. But for those who always claim that without eyes there would be no world of light, the other side, the other side, must also be asserted. Where do eyes come from? Goethe speaks from a deep knowledge of the world when he says, “The eye is formed by light for light.” That is to say, if there were no light, if the sun did not give off light, there would be no eye. Light has formed and shaped the eye out of indifferent organs.

The organs that we have as human beings have been formed gradually, after undergoing very imperfect states. So how could an eye come into being? Because there was light around the human being. If you look at certain animals that live outside in the world, they have eyes. When such animals change their way of life and come into dark caves, their eyes wither, they recede, they lose their sight because there is no light in their environment. As the missing light takes the eyes, so the light has also given them. But in the same way, what we encounter as a person's soul with these or those abilities can only be built up by the surrounding spiritual world. But in this world is the human being after Kamaloka, and in this spiritual world he has the fruit of his last life. From this spiritual world he begins to build up his spiritual organs with what he has learned in the last life, what he has experienced. Bit by bit, he now builds up his spiritual organism with the experiences he has had in the last life. It is true that the human being builds up this spiritual organism bit by bit. Just as he builds his destiny in the physical world according to the experiences he has in the physical world, so he directs his actions in the spiritual world according to the spiritual experiences around him. And he is busy, among many others in the spiritual world, creating a kind of archetype, spiritual model for his spiritual organs.

When this spiritual organism is now created out of the materials of the spiritual world, then the human being experiences the longing to realize in the physical world what he has built spiritually, to descend again into the physical world. So those bodies that he had previously discarded are built up again piece by piece around this spiritual organism according to the conditions of the physical world. For what the human being has taken from the physical world has been prepared for him in the physical world. That which is in the physical and etheric bodies must be given back to him from a world to which he had given it back; his parents give it to him. The physical and etheric bodies are brought up to him by his parents from a world from which he has only just departed, and what has taken shape as an archetype in the spiritual world is connected with him. And we can see how this archetype works on the formation of the physical body.

Physical science is not a counter-proof of this. Once the facts of natural science are properly examined, then natural science will correctly find the fact of spiritual life. Look at the child after it is born. The child has developed certain parts of its brain that can be said to be sensory centers, nerve pathways; these are already developed in the first week after birth. On the other hand, if you examine the brain at the end of the first month, you see that almost two-thirds of the brain is only formed during the last four weeks after birth. Bit by bit, the inner two-thirds of the cerebral cortex are permeated with nerve marrow, which transmits one sensory impression to another. The child sees colors and hears sounds, but cannot connect them. The nerve cords that transmit the impressions of the senses are built up bit by bit. Those who insist that these nerve cords build themselves can cling to their superstition; but they should also claim that some complicated apparatus also assembles itself.

We take on board what science says. We see the physical body and its mechanism, but we also make the comparison: No mechanism can be built without intelligence. No machine is made in the world by itself. That which is formed in the human brain does not do itself. What works on it? The archetype, which for the clairvoyant consciousness comes from that spiritual organism, works on this brain. And when this brain is worked through more and more, the fruits of life are woven into it. Man had, after all, taken the fruits of life into the spiritual world. He transforms his brain into this archetype. Depending on how he has used this life, his brain is now transformed by this archetype. For example, someone who has lived in dullness will think nothing of what happens when he sees a church lamp burning and swinging. But for the one who has used life in a different way, it works in such a way that he discovers the influential laws of the pendulum and gives them to humanity, like Galilei, who first saw the laws of the pendulum vibrations in the church lamp in the cathedral of Pisa. Indeed, with him the archetype worked differently than with the thousands upon thousands who also saw that lamp and who did not notice anything. Here we have a tangible example of how the spiritual works on the physical.

Those who do not admit this can be said to be beyond help, not admitting obvious facts. They cannot demand: prove your case, but rather it is a matter of the other person creating conditions to produce evidence. Those who look deeper will realize that the best evidence requires recognition.

Thus we see how man, passing through the gate of death, enters into other worlds: first into a preparatory world, then into the world of spiritual creation, where he prepares a new life. Then, through conception and birth, he enters into a new life. After birth, the human being still works on his brain. Either say: it all takes care of itself —, or there is no other possibility than that the human being is accepted with such a spiritual life.

Now one could say: Of course I will admit a soul that exists before conception; but I will not admit that the soul owes its working capacity and form to a previous life; rather, it descends from the spiritual world anew each time. — Under today's conditions, such a soul that descends anew would not fit well into the present world. That is another necessary assumption of common sense, that one turns one's attention to the harmony and fit between what descends and what is brought in the line of inheritance. Only such a soul can come into harmony with the conditions in the physical world that has acquired the prerequisites for a life in the present conditions in a previous life.

This is how we move from the present life to a previous one. When the soul descends again and develops in the body in this life, it is exactly the same as in the previous one, except that the person has woven in the fruits of the earlier existence. Thus enriched, the person lives again between birth and death, and so it goes on.

Thus man passed through the cycle from the sensual world through the world of the mere soul, the world of purification, to the spiritual world, and then again he descended into the sensual world, and so on. He goes through this cycle again and again, and therein lies, honored attendees, the guarantee of an ever-higher development of man. This teaching, which shows us the causes of our present life in previous lives, is not a bleak one. One can only say: if you build up this life in an inadequate way, then the cause lies in a previous life. But one can also point to the future and say: use your life well and you will carry the fruits of this life over into the following one; then confidence and energy follow from such a realization.

For those present, who approach this sentence with common sense, the facts of clairvoyant consciousness cannot, of course, be proven externally, but they can understand them. They can say to themselves: If I accept the facts, then life becomes understandable to me. Facts cannot be proven; I would like to see someone prove that there is a whale when no one has seen it. But by creating the appropriate organs, one can come to see the facts of spiritual life. Only connections can be proven, never facts.

Now, dear audience, common sense may want to object to some things and say: If you tell me that the human being descends from spiritual heights and connects with the physical, I don't believe it, because I don't see it.

Today, certain abilities are attributed to heredity. In the radical case of genius, people today try to present a genius and say: Now we go peddling and see if we can find the qualities that the genius has in the father or mother or up to aunt-like ancestors, and so the genius should be the last link in the line of inheritance. The fact that genius always appears at the end of the line of inheritance is cited as proof that genius arises through inheritance. For those who want to think in a thoroughly materialistic way, this sounds reasonable; but there is no logic behind it at all. For the doctrine would really be proven if the ancestor had the genius and this had inherited its properties to the descendants. But that is not the case. Those who take a closer look at human life will know that certain traits are inherited. We know that there are 29 musicians of varying ability in the Bach family. There is nothing miraculous about that. To become a proficient musician, one needs not only mental and spiritual qualities, but if the soul descends and meets no parents who can give it a developed ear, then it cannot become a musician. So just as the soul's qualities come from past lives, so the inner physiognomy of the ear depends on the ancestors. But when man becomes a closer observer of life, when he, as a thinking educator, sees this human soul developing in its manifold individualities, then he sees how the spiritual abilities by no means develop out of the physical human being, but he gets the feeling that something is working its way in that has lived in the spiritual world before. One then notices that the human being has often existed in this world, that he has adapted to this world in his various stages of existence.

Today we know that an earthworm can only develop from an earthworm germ, that it cannot grow from river mud, which all natural scientists believed 300 years ago. Today, people think that the wonderful human soul can arise without being transmitted from the spiritual and soul realm. Living things can only arise from living things, and spiritual and soul qualities only from spiritual and soul qualities. If one leads the spiritual-mental, which works in from a dark background, back to earlier spiritual-mental, and one is clear that the consequence of the spiritual-mental lies again in the spiritual-mental, that it goes beyond our present life, and that these different lives have nothing to do with what is called the line of inheritance.

A worldview like this will give courage and strength. The more materialistic people have become, the more they have become afraid of things. What is more widespread today than the fear of hereditary burden? The view has changed, and the result of this view, which is based on materialistic ideas, is fear of people, and this has an enormously paralyzing effect on life. If people live their soul unused and do not want to be filled with spiritual content, then what they inherit is indeed fatal for them. For they are weak in their soul.

The soul, like the body, wants to be nourished. It wants to be nourished with truths and insights. If a person trains himself in soul knowledge, he becomes strong and can control and overcome the laws of inheritance. Of course, today's materialists do not believe this. When the soul becomes desolate, then life remains unused, then what is called heredity carries a great deal of weight. It is therefore up to man to make his soul strong and powerful. A world view is not without practical consequences. He who has no idea that the soul really exists, lets his soul become desolate. The materialistic world view brings with it a desolation of the soul's feelings and emotional life. And it is true that such a soul has more to fear than a soul that strengthens itself with spiritual content. Here we see how the spiritual worldview provides enlightenment and security for life. At any time, so to speak, the two things interlock: the facts that arise in the clairvoyant consciousness about the fate of the soul, and the common sense that can say: I can understand life. And so the soul works its way through the individual lives to ever greater perfection. There is for the human soul, apart from the sensual life, a soul life and still another spiritual one. The soul passes through these lives, only to undergo a new one.

Even if life in the material world sometimes appears to be in decline, in general, life on earth and the intervening lives in the spiritual worlds are a continuous ascent. This worldview offers a wonderful perspective on the goal of life. This goal is becoming more and more spiritual in nature, both physically and spiritually. Indeed, we can say “spiritualization”, because the human being will increasingly recognize the foundations of physical life. More and more, he will work from the spiritual world. Ultimately, his own act will be his deliverance from the sensual world.

Thus man progresses towards his perfection in a way that is completely comprehensible to us. Those who extend the law of cause and effect, which is a scientific fact in the physical world, to the spiritual world, say to themselves: “Let people call you a dreamer and a fantasist – the time will come when the sentence: spiritual-mental can only come from spiritual-mental, will be recognized, where the realization will come of man's passage through all worlds, through many lives, and of man's perfection. When one comprehends the human development in this way, then one has certain concepts not only for the physical, sensual world, but also for the soul and spiritual world. These are not fantastic ideas, but concepts with which one connects something, just as man connects these or those concepts with ordinary sensual things.

And so today we can say: Yes, of course, the things that are facts for the initiate, such as the cycle of life through the different worlds, are still little recognized; but they will be recognized, and they will become a fact of the inner soul life for people. Humanity is moving from progress to progress, and it will also have to accept this progress. And those in particular who today still do not want to recognize these facts will have to recognize this progress, which solves the riddles of life, from the mystery of death.

Then people will understand that at first they can believe that what the initiates say is a reality, just as they believe when a microscopist says that a plant consists of cells. If we are willing to think through the analogy correctly, we will gain the courage to develop our own spiritual abilities, our spiritual eyes and ears, as Goethe says, and to learn to recognize what can give us a truly new religious religious consciousness, a religious consciousness that already lies in what we know as the truth of Christianity, which shows us that life in the world of the senses also has value for eternal, heavenly and spiritual life. With Christianity, a religious consciousness has entered into people that sees redemption not only in the spiritual world, but also in the taking over of the fruits of physical life, of what one has learned here.

Finally, let us visualize two images. The progress in our religious life goes from Buddha to Christ. We can only express our admiration for the great figure of Buddha to those who can understand the depth of the Buddha's soul. What Buddha expresses as the great truths of life is infinitely profound. It seems like a legend when Buddha, emerging from wealth and the king's environment, finds a corpse outside, a poor, miserable, sick man. He looks deep into the depths of life and speaks his great truths: life is suffering, death is suffering, illness is suffering, old age is suffering; being separated from what one loves is suffering; being connected to what one does not love is suffering. Desire for what cannot be obtained is suffering. The teaching of Buddha is that the thirst for existence, for re-embodiment and for new life must be quenched and mankind must be released from this sensual existence, which is called Nirvana. Buddha proclaims the fourfold suffering. Liberation from the suffering of this world, that is, ascending to the Buddha's teaching. And then Christ came into the world, that was a strange advance. Those who understand the essence of Christianity, who understood it in the first century, for example, had a different feeling about the name Christ. They had a feeling for how the spiritual life is clothed with the sensual existence, the material for which is supplied by the physical, sensual world. But we do not say with Buddha: We only want liberation and salvation from the sensual world. We say: This earth is worthy and dignified, because the body of Christ is also taken from the material of this earth. The earth over which Christ walked gives fruit for eternal life. And so, for those who recognized him, the existence of Christ became a certainty that from life to life, man takes the fruits of his existence into the spiritual world. And now the teaching of the Buddha changed. In the schools of spiritual science, it has always been expressed that the truth of life through Christ has changed. Birth, that is, entering life, is not just suffering, because we enter a life in which Christ has lived. Illness is not just suffering, because by connecting with Christ's powers we become master over illnesses. In the future, people will learn how to work externally on physical illnesses; the conqueror of illnesses is Christ in the human breast. And old age is not suffering, because as a person ages and the physical body declines, he will carry the fruits he receives in the physical body over into the spiritual world. And death is certainly not suffering, because it is a wonderful image of contrast: Buddha goes out of his royal castle and sees the corpse and there he comes to the great truth: death is suffering. And in the first centuries of Christianity, we gradually see people turning their eyes to the wood of the cross and seeing the corpse. And this is the guarantee of eternal life, of glorious eternal life, of the victory of eternal life. This corpse is not the proof that life is suffering, but that life is victory over all suffering.

The one who comprehends Christianity knows that he cannot be separated from what he loves, because the spiritual bond is woven from soul to soul. It is impossible not to be connected in a spiritual sense to what one loves, because one learns to embrace the whole universe and to purify one's desires.

The full meaning of Christianity will only be revealed by research, which we call spiritual science, not from any documents, but from the clairvoyant consciousness, independently of all records. Then Christianity will show itself as something that has not yet by a long way brought its deepest impulses to the surface. But not just a dead observation of the course of development of Christianity, but a deepening into the spiritual world and a bringing forth of these living germs from Christianity will mean the progress of Christianity. Spiritual science does not seek the Christ where he walked the earth, but is a faithful follower of the words:

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Therefore, we rediscover the Christ every day, and we find him, if we want to seek him today, through spiritual science, which, independently of all documents, looks into the spiritual world and sees the Christ as a guide to ever higher progress in it. This is how the cycle presents itself, and this is how it will always present itself to those who will understand spiritual people.

That everyone will experience this one day was the profound realization expressed by Goethe at an early age. He confirmed that he recognized a spiritual world to which the human being belongs just as he now belongs to the physical world. Yes, it was from the depths of his discerning soul that he spoke when he pointed out what can be renewed again and again in the human soul, what can constitute the happiness and blessing and blessedness of the human soul, which this spiritual world recognizes, which Goethe also recognized when he said:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead.
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted,

The earthly breast at dawn!

My dear friends:

Let us, first of all, turn our thoughts to those who stand out there upon the battlefields, where historic events are being enacted, and who must be answerable with body, soul and spirit for these tremendous happenings of the present time.

Spirits ever watchful. Guardians of their souls,
May your vibrations waft,
to the Earth-men committed to your charge.
Our souls' petitioning love:
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may helpfully radiate
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

And for those who, in consequence of these events, have already passed through the gate of death:—

Spirits ever watchful. Guardians of their souls,
May your vibrations waft,
To the Men of the Spheres committed to your charge,
Our souls' petitioning love:
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may helpfully radiate
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

And that Spirit whom we seek to know through our Spiritual Science, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha for the salvation of the earth, for the progress and freedom of mankind—may He be with you and your difficult duties.

It is our striving to penetrate, knowingly and at the same time livingly, in so far as this is possible, into those worlds which are closed to the usual everyday knowledge, the usual intellectual knowledge—bound to the physical plane.

For, in the life in which man is enclosed in his physical body, he stands in a world, as we have become accustomed to think during the course of years, which is only a part, a small part, of the entire actual world. As we come together so seldom, it is not possible, at these meetings, to explain everything from its foundations. How well founded these things are, that must be spoken of at such meetings, which take place only at less frequent intervals, and by what means they are established—this we must assume to be known from other meetings and through our books. For particularly at such a gathering it may, indeed, be our desire to learn something more important and more essential about what has just been referred to, about the greater, real world, which embraces both the physical and the spiritual world.

Since we last gathered here, many things have taken place within the circle which nurtures our spiritual science. A larger number of our dear friends have passed through the portal of death. Also, since the beginning of this hard war time, friends have passed through the portal of death who had to take part directly in these great events. In other words, within our circle, we are ourselves touched by the great spiritual world, because souls who were among us have entered this spiritual world after laying aside their bodies. It lies within the attitude which results from our Spiritual Science that, for us, the souls who have left the physical plane, who are received by another world, remain united with us, as they were united with us while they still looked at us with physical eyes and could speak to us by means of the instrument of the physical body.

Precisely when we approach the world which has received into itself our dead, in this moment, as we draw nearer to the souls of the so-called dead, we learn to know all those shattering experiences which must heap themselves upon our soul where it seeks to look across the threshold which separates us from the spiritual world, when it seeks to enter the world which can only be seen in the disembodied state of the soul. And you will perhaps understand that many of the words spoken here to-day resound out of the many feelings which have passed through my own soul in the course of the year, since we last saw one another.

Particularly during the last year, I have often had to say to our friends, that the right confidence can be gained only gradually, by one who sees into the fundamental conditions of existence, when he knows that those who have passed through the portal of death and who were faithful fellow-workers here on earth, will remain so also after death; so that in our work we quite certainly do not lose those souls who have won an understanding of our work, because they were already united with us here before they passed through the portal of death. And just among such souls there are such faithful fellow-worker that we may say: Even if the enemies and the lack of understanding here on the physical plane are sometimes so strong in opposition to our work, and become ever stronger, as we can well see, yet we may still have faith that Spiritual Science will penetrate into the evolution of mankind, because we can win this faith through our connection with the disembodied souls who have reached an understanding of the whole significance of our work for the course of man's development.

Of course, just when the human being, by means of his opened soul, approaches the world in which the so-called dead are—we can speak in this way, although it is, of course, the entire spiritual world in which the dead are to be found—precisely then, when the human being is able to approach this world as a visitor, as one who accompanies the dead into the spiritual world, he learns to know again and again that which has also been emphasised here: that, in reality, the concepts, the percepts and ideas which we form concerning the world, since we form them as we do because we are in a physical body, must be changed, must be made pliant, flexible, so that they can also encompass the secrets of the spiritual world. The man of to-day is adapted very strongly to the purely material perception of his surroundings, and thus he also forms concepts according to a purely material perception. For this reason, it becomes especially difficult for him to penetrate into the spiritual world even by means of concepts. In fact, many people believe that it is not possible to attain to an understanding of the spiritual world, if we are not able to see into it. They believe this, however, only because their ideas have become stiff and dead, through the fact that they have too strongly accustomed themselves to think only about the physical world.

Now that I have made these introductory remarks, I should like to speak to you to-day particularly about certain things in connection with the life of the so-called dead.

We know that, if we wish to consider the life between death and a new birth, we must consider and notice carefully how the human being forms himself of four parts, which are well known to us: physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego.

If we consider, to begin with, the most outward fact regarding the dead a fact visible even from the physical plane, we find it to be the fact that man lays aside his physical body. We do not need to go into the different ways by which this physical body becomes united with the earth, be it by means of fire or decay—these differ, after all, only in regard to the time which they require.

But, even when we consider this fact, that the physical body falls away from the whole being of man in the moment of death and unites itself with the earth, as we say,—if we consider even this fact only with regard to its meaning for the physical plane, we shall have considered it, in reality, in a very inadequate way. And, in fact, it is often considered in a most inadequate way by persons of all manner of spiritual-scientific tendencies, who allow themselves still to be led astray by all sorts of moral conceptions, which do indeed penetrate into spiritual realms, to a certain extent, but are unfitted, in many respects, to understand in the right way the penetration of the spiritual into the physical world.

All physical events have also their spiritual significance. There is no physical event which has not, at the same time, a spiritual significance. In this case, then, the physical event is that our physical body falls away from us and is at the same time separated into its parts, into its molecules, into its atoms, and given over to the earth.

Now, it is a great prejudice of the modern materialistic world-conception, which has, however, held mankind more or less in its grip already for a long time, that the human body, as we carry it about from birth until death, or let us say from conception until death, that this human body simply falls into the smallest possible parts, into atoms, and that these atoms are then incorporated in the earth, or the sphere of the earth, and thereafter remain atoms, and then pass over as such into other beings.

Through the modern materialistic mode of investigation one comes very easily to such a preconception. But this mode of conception is, after all, nothing but nonsense, in view of spiritual science. It is nonsense. For, in reality, there are no such things as atoms, in the sense in which the chemists assume them. What the smallest parts of our bodies finally become, under all circumstances, regardless of the way in which we, as bodies, are united with the earth, is warmth. Our whole physical organism finally transforms itself, in reality, in one way or another, in a short or a long time, into warmth.

For this reason, we often speak, as you know, in spiritual science of warmth as a fourth physical state of aggregation, whereas physics does not acknowledge it as such, but only as a kind of characteristic. But it is this warmth which is, in reality, given to the earth; this is given over to the earth. Thus, from our physical body, we give to our earth—Warmth.

The warmth which is to be found in the earth, is, in reality, intimately connected with what human beings leave behind. Man does not transform himself into air, water, etc. These are only transitional stages through which he passes. Those parts of him which become air and water become at last warmth. Yes, even though it may be after a long time, even though the last remnants of matter may pass over into warmth only after hundreds of years, indeed, even though what belongs to the bone-system may pass over into warmth only after thousands of years, it is transformed finally into warmth.

If you go into Museums to-day, you will find skeletons of ancient men who lived upon earth in bygone ages, yet the time will indeed come when what is present there to-day as skeletons, will exist only as warmth within the body of the earth.

In any case, however, the way in which we are united with the earth, through warmth, is the materialistic way. The fact that even our physical body remains connected with the earth, has a great, an essential, importance for the one who has passed through the gate of death. He passes into the spiritual world. He leaves his body to the earth. This is an experience, an event, for the so-called dead. He has the experience:—“Your body passes away from you”. We must realise that this is an experience.

What is an experience? Well, you can form a conception of what it is, if you consider the experiences on the physical plane. It is an experience, if you have some new sensation, or feeling which you have never had before, and you learn to understand this. You have added something to your soul which you did not possess before a new concept, a new perception.

But now imagine such a small experience increased into a very great one. It is something mighty, something unfathomably mighty, that the human being experiences, which gives him the possibility between death and birth to see, to realise, to grasp the fact that he lays this physical body aside, that he gives over to the planet which he is leaving. It is a very great experience, an experience which naturally cannot be compared with any experience on earth—a mighty experience. The value of an experience lies in the fact that something remains in our soul as a result, as a consequence, of this experience. We may, therefore, ask the question:—What then remains as a result, as a consequence of this experience of the falling away of the physical body from the entirety of our being?

Indeed, if we were not able to have this experience when we pass through the gate of death, of knowingly participating in the falling away of our physical body, we should never be able to develop an Ego-consciousness after death. The Ego consciousness is aroused after death through this experience of the falling away of the physical body. For the dead it is of the greatest significance that he is able to say:—“I see my physical body slipping away from me and disappearing.” And, on the other hand:—“I see growing within me, out of this event, the feeling—I am an Ego.”

We may express this with the paradox words:—“If we were unable to experience our death from the other side, we would not have an Ego-consciousness after death.”

Just as the human soul entering existence through birth or, let us say, through conception—gradually becomes accustomed to the use of the physical apparatus and thereby acquires the Ego-consciousness within the body, so does the human being acquire the Ego consciousness after death, from the other side of existence, through the fact that he experiences the falling away of the physical body from the whole human being.

Consider now, for a moment, what this means. When we contemplate Death from the physical side of existence, we may say that it appears to us as the end of existence—as that which has beyond it, as far as the physical outlook is concerned, “Nothing”. Viewed from the other side, Death as such is a most wonderful thing, which can ever anew stand before man's soul. For it signifies that man can always have the feeling of the victory of spiritual life over physical life. And just as long as we can always have before us the conception of our birth here, in physical life—for no one can have the conceptual nature of his birth through physical means alone, indeed, no one knows anything about his birth through his own physical experience—just so surely do we always have before us, when we become fully conscious after death, a direct experience of the event of our death.

At the same time, this event of our death contains nothing which is in any way depressing; on the contrary, this death event, viewed from the other side, is the greatest, most wonderful and beautiful event which can appear before our soul. For it always places before us, in its entirety, the greatness of the idea that in the spiritual world, consciousness, self-consciousness is the result of death—that death stimulates this self-consciousness, in the spiritual world.

Secondly, we must observe the second member of our human existence, the etheric body. We find, with the help of the elementary presentations which we have all shared in, in the interval since we last met together, that this ether-body remains with us for a brief—a relatively brief—period after death, but after this, it is also laid aside. We know, too, that a certain importance must be attributed to the fact that our etheric body—the same one we possessed on earth—remains still united with us after death, for several days.

So long as we still carry this etheric body, after having laid aside our physical body, we can still think everything that we were able to think during our physical existence. We can, therefore, survey all the thoughts which we carry in us, as in a mighty picture. We see those thoughts which we experienced during life, in the life-picture which has often been described to you. Our whole life lies before us like a panorama, during the days in which we still carry our etheric body with us; and we have it before us simultaneously, i.e. we see it all at one glance. For, what we call memory, here, in the physical world, arises, to be sure, in the etheric body, but it is bound, nevertheless, to the physical body. This physical body we have laid aside. We see our thoughts. We do not draw them out of the depths that are connected with the physical body, but we see them; and we survey, as if in a panorama, the life which we have just passed through.

We then lay aside this etheric body. But this etheric body which we lay aside, remains visible for us, throughout our entire remaining life after death. It is outside, but it remains visible to us. It unites itself with the whole universe; nevertheless, whatever happens to it there, remains visible to us—we see it.

And this is one of the mysteries of death: that, so long as we carry our etheric body, we see in a panorama what we had in us in the form of thoughts while we were alive—we survey, as it were, what is outside us as being united with, woven into, the world; we see that, after death, it forms part of our surrounding world, not of our Ego. In this experience, it actually is as if that which weaved and lived in us as our etheric body, during life, were now entering the life of the etheric world outside.

Then comes the time, as you know, when we carry with us—of that which we carried here on the physical plane—only the Ego and the astral body, and when we, of course, look back. upon what we were. We then experience ourselves in an entirely different way from the way we did in the physical body—we experience ourselves with an enhanced consciousness, with a consciousness which death has founded in us.

We must never think, for instance, as the fanatics so easily do, that this life between death and a new birth is an unconscious experience for the soul. Connected with this life, is a stronger, more intensive consciousness, than is the consciousness belonging to the physical body—only that it has an entirely different form. And, of course, we can approach the way in which we should imagine the dead, only by taking all that Spiritual Science can give us, to help us to transform those conceptions which are suited to purely physical objects and events here on the physical plane.

Thus we now live, as we see, within our Ego and our astral body. We have cast off our etheric body. It is united with objective existence.

For one who is able to enter the spiritual world, it is a moving experience, indeed—and from this standpoint also, I may say—to visit and accompany the dead with whom one is able to find a contact; it is a moving experience to follow, not only the individual life of the dead between death and a new birth, but also, for instance, to follow what the dead beholds: that part of himself which is now contained, as his etheric body, in the woof of the world, which is now for him an exterior world, an objective world. It is deeply moving to observe what, the dead has just given over to the etheric world. Thus we may experience the dead in a twofold way, as it were. We can experience that part of him which he has passed on to the etheric world; and we can experience also that part which contains his consciousness after death.

I repeat, that this first contact with what the dead leave behind in the etheric world, is deeply moving. It would move us even if we were unable to come into contact with the Being itself, which continues to live between death and a new birth, and which carries both the consciousness and the self-consciousness of the deceased, but could come into contact only with what he had left behind. Even then this kind of experience would move our souls most deeply—it would have that moving quality peculiar to all contacts with the spiritual world.

And a part of what especially moves us is the actual, living experience that such spiritual substance as has here been indicated—indeed, that etheric spiritual thing which has been left behind by the dead—is, in reality, always round about us. Just so truly as we are living in the air which surrounds man everywhere, just so truly are we, at the same time, surrounded by what the dead have left behind them, as etheric spirituality. In this world, in which we stand, even with our physical bodies there is also that spiritual element which I have just mentioned. Just as we are surrounded by the air, so are we, in the same way, surrounded by what the dead leave behind. It is only states of consciousness that sever us from the spiritual world—we are not separated from them through spatial conditions, but only through conditions of consciousness.

Consider, for instance, the following fact:—Let us imagine a human being who is striving to carry out the following soul exercises. But I should like to emphasize that such soul-exercises must be carried out in perfect calmness of soul. If anyone becomes in any way excited through these exercises, he will damage himself. If soul-exercises are carried on in the way described here and in our literature, so that they are real soul-exercises, and our physical being does not take part in them, then they can never damage a human being in the very least—they cannot even damage his soul. Yet we should not on the other hand, be able to penetrate into spiritual knowledge, did we not call attention to such things, now and again.

Let us suppose that someone does the following exercise, and that he says to himself:—With my eyes I see red, blue, etc. And now he proceeds by experiencing something that is in a certain sense alive—when he sees red, blue green, etc.

Gradually, we begin to realise that, after all, we live in the physical world—especially our modern materialistic age—in a very coarse way—that we do not notice the finer experiences which come to us.

This finer element may be experienced if we take notice of the more purely soul-impression made upon us—let us say by colours—but also by other sense-impressions. Of course everybody knows, roughly speaking, that when he looks upon a blue surface, the impression it leaves will not be the same as that left by a red surface. A red surface—and I must emphasize this particularly—even when a person is not made nervous by looking at it, has something that attacks something which comes out of the surface, as it were, and thrusts itself at us. Whereas blue, for instance, awakens the opposite sensation—it remains quietly in its place; nothing comes toward us, out of the blue. On the contrary, we feel—if we are able to accompany colour-impressions with a fine feeling—that we can penetrate into this blue with our soul forces, that we can press through it.

Green is, as it were, in a rythmical state of balance. This is why it has so beneficent an effect upon us, as the plant's covering of the earth. Green works upon us in such a way that we are able, in part, to penetrate into it, while at the same time it comes back again toward us. When we look out upon the wide green field, we have this impression, that we enter into something; yet, at the same time, that it comes toward us. This is what constitutes the refreshing effect made upon us by a wide green field.

You will be able to convince yourselves of this fact: that human beings have noticed that it is possible to live with colour as it were, and if you read in Goethe's Theory of Colours—which, to be sure, is understood by very few persons of to-day—the chapter on the ethical effects of colours, you will find indicated the corresponding feeling to be experienced through each colour. Thus we find that we can experience colours ... we can also experience other sense-impressions; but, for the moment, we are speaking about colours, in order to have an example.

We can live with colours in such a way that blue, for example, calls to life in our souls a force that resembles the longing which goes forth from us and which is taken up kindly by blue.

In the case of red, something always arises which seems to come toward us and will not leave us alone—something that wishes to overpower us, as it were.

When we thus feel colours, we may have a soul-experience—a moral soul-experience, as it were. Of course, not every human being can carry on such experiences in any one incarnation; but I am describing them to you, in order that you may see how the different worlds are interrelated.

If, accordingly, a man were to carry on these exercises, he would live far more purely in the world of colours. And if he did them in connection with other sense-impressions, he would likewise live more purely in the other sense-impressions. In that case, however, something else would very soon have to arise—something different would take place.

Suppose that such a person were to experience the blue sky in this living way; he would in this case, not simply have the blue above him, (this is, moreover, a very subjective blue; for, in reality, there is no vault above us) but he would feel it above him as the inner surface of a beneficent, inner hemisphere, everywhere receiving his soul-life—a hemisphere, behind the apparent surface of which the soul's experience could penetrate.

It is because of this that human beings who experience the world in a deeper sense, speak as did Jacob Böhme, for instance, who did not say:—“When we see the blue vault of heaven ...”, but, rather:—“When we see the depths”. In these words, “When we see the depths”, we find contained the whole experience of “blue”.

But there is another parallel phenomenon which arises, if we so completely penetrate into the life of colour, that soul-experiences begin to light up when we see colours. There is then awakened in us the ability to make use of a very brief space of time, which we should otherwise not use at all.

When you face an exterior object in ordinary physical life, you see it—you see a certain colour. And, indeed, this is the starting-point of your impression. Then you are able to think about it. You can form a conceptual idea of the colour. But it is with the act of vision that you begin to live with the object. Yet, nevertheless, this is not the actual beginning of what takes place. Even the modern physiologist, working in the laboratories, knows that a certain time elapses between the effect upon our eye, and the arising of the idea connected with the colour blue. Thus, we see that, first of all, the blue colour works upon our eye. We do not immediately perceive it, but a certain time elapses, and only then do we become conscious of it.

You may read, even in ordinary books, how experiments connected with these things are carried on nowadays in the laboratories. Certain kinds of apparatus are constructed; and then the attempt is made to cause a certain impression—the student is the experimental rabbit. He must register, by means of another apparatus, when he receives the impression, so that one can establish the small fraction of time which elapses between the moment an impression strikes our sense-organs, and the moment we grow conscious of this. A certain space of time elapses. In this short interval, we do not as yet, for instance, experience the blue colour, (in the case of an impression of blue), but we do experience the moral effect of the colour. This works in us. Thus, the whole process of how the soul pours itself into the blue colour, how it is accepted with a kindly pleasure—all this lives in us already—the soul-element of the colour is active in us before anything else. Only, this activity remains unconscious; man does not perceive it. Man does not begin to develop his consciousness of the colour, until the colour arises. He does not notice what precedes the colour-sensation.

Now, let us think for a moment: when one is impelled to notice more particularly this moral impression of colours, this soul-experience of colours, then something special appears. We notice this when we should colour some sort of a surface—i.e. when we paint, or transmit colours in any way at all, which ought first to arise out of thoughts. In any real painting, the artist works out of the soul-impression of the colours. In this case, it is not as it is with the artist who simply uses a model—who simply imitates the model; but, rather the real artist knows that, because he has called forth a particular soul-impression, he must therefore use red; whereas, on some other surface, he uses blue, because he has called forth this or that soul-impression.

This is the way, you see, in which all of the painting has been worked out in our Dornach Building. The application of the colours has here arisen entirely out of the soul-element—which indeed must then shine through the colours. Yet, in order to achieve this, it was necessary, in the deepest sense of the word, first of all to have the Building in ourselves—as a Soul Being. The way in which the Building faces the world will be identical with the way in which it has grown out of “the Building”, as a Soul-Being.

People would perceive the thing out of which this Dornach Building has grown, were they able to make use of that short interval of time elapsing between the moment in which the Building strikes their sense-organs, and the moment in which the impression reaches their consciousness.

Any one, moreover, who has a share in the erection of the Building, must himself create all that is in it—its forms and colours—out of that short interval of time.

I have led you in a more scientific way, I might say, to something which may appear difficult to you. But we must also overcome difficulties such as these. Moreover, the possibility may arise, even in this modern Age, as if through an act of grace—and, in a certain sense, we are constantly being favoured by an act of grace, through the simple fact that we are in the world—for man to hold fast, in some way, to this moment. He will see something, and will at times be able to feel that something reciprocal has taken place between himself and the object which he sees outside—if he succeeds in bringing it to his consciousness. He will say to himself, when he sees something:—When I am looking at it, it seems almost as if I had already seen it before this moment.

Perhaps you have all become familiar with the experience of facing a being or an object, and then feeling, as it were, as if, after all, it is not there before you for the first time, when it makes an impression on your consciousness, but that it had already come nearer—indeed, it had come quite close. This creeping nearer—as one might call it—can indeed at times be observed. But, in ordinary life, what here takes place within this brief space of time, lies beyond our consciousness—beyond the threshold.

The moment we are able to bring into our consciousness what thus lies just beyond the threshold, we make an important spiritual discovery. I shall again bring it to your minds by citing a special case. Many of you have already heard about this. Perhaps I have also mentioned it here, in this place. Last year, a little boy died in close proximity to the Goetheanum Building; he was crushed by a furniture-van. The etheric body of this little boy is now united with the Dornach Building—forms the aura of the Dornach Building and lives in this aura. And when some artistic work must be carried out, in connection with this Building, forces come out of this etheric body, which then, of course, appears enlarged. We can feel these forces in us, in the same way that we feel the Building within our souls.

Why is this so? Because the world of which I have just spoken—that world which is always round about us, but which we do not perceive because it remains unnoticed until its impressions reach us—contains the etheric bodies of the dead, and the dead are looking on these bodies. What the dead see of our world—what the dead look upon—is contained in the etheric world which surrounds us. And we should always see it, if we could, so to speak, look into it before we look out into the physical world—if we were able to take even a little step across the threshold.

This does not, however, prevent the dead from being active in this world, through what they have left behind. We are surrounded by a world in which the etheric bodies of the dead are living. In some way or other, they are connected with that world. And only because what lives in the etheric must first come into contact with our physical body, and must set the physical apparatus into movement, do we fail to perceive this powerful weaving around us, of what the dead leave behind them, in etheric form, in our world. But we must acquire the feeling that it is our duty to enrich our world, in our conceptual ideas, by including in it, in the first place, what is contained in the whole etheric world, through the etheric bodies of the dead.

The dead themselves are not in this world—but only the etheric bodies which they have left behind. We cannot find the dead themselves in so easy a way—although even this “easy way” is difficult.

The dead, after they have laid aside their etheric bodies, continue to live in their astral bodies and their Egos. You can gauge to what extent we must transform our conceptions, if you bear in mind that everything pertaining to thought, is stripped off with our etheric bodies, which pass over into the exterior etheric world. After death, we do not keep the thoughts which we have collected here, in our physical body. All that pertains to thought becomes an exterior world. The one who has died, does not look upon his thoughts after death in the same way in which he looked upon thoughts which he formed during his life, and which he then remembered and drew up out of his sub-consciousness. After death he looks upon his thoughts as if they were an etheric painting; he sees his thoughts in the world outside. Thoughts are something exterior for one who has passed through the portal of death—they are outside. What reveals itself here through feeling and will, remains connected with our individuality. It continues to live in our astral body and in our Ego.

Our Ego lights up in self-consciousness through the contemplation of the moment of death. Our astral body is kindled because the thoughts contained in the picture before us, penetrate into the astral body. Thus we experience them in our astral body.

In the physical body, on the other hand, we experience thoughts by drawing them up from within us. After death, we experience thoughts by looking at them as we look at the stars, or as we look out at the world and the mountains, and they make an impression upon us; we take up this impression and experience it in our astral body and our Ego. Thus we see that just the opposite thing takes place: Whereas here on Earth we look upon thoughts as something within us, we must consider them as being something external, after death. Our life then dissolves in the world, flows out in the world.

It is important for us to bear this in mind and not to adopt the idea that the world after death is like a fine, thin repetition of the physical world here—an idea which is often accepted in spiritist circles. It is in fact something entirely different. And it is different, for the reason that our thoughts are Beings outside of us. Now, at the moment we begin to call up before our souls, conceptual ideas like these, we notice not only that we need a certain freedom from prejudice, as I might say, in order to accept Spiritual Science, but also that we must have a certain kind of ability to render our concepts more fluid, to transform our concepts—and that we cannot claim to be able to picture what is in the spiritual world with the same concepts and ideas which we have here, in the physical world.

Consequently, one who is in a position to visit—let us say—a so-called dead person, must first learn how to carry on this intercourse with the dead. Whereas, here, when we meet a person, we come into contact with his inner life through the fact that he expresses this inner life in words or gestures, we find instead, in the case of the dead, that if we wish to come into contact with him, he shows us what he wishes to tell us in the objective world. We see, as it were, in the form of imaginations, which he shows us, what it is that he experiences, and what he wishes to say to us. I might say that the dead person, when we ask him something, says to us: Look over there—it is there that you will find what I am now experiencing.

But all of this is a rapid process. The dead, accordingly, as you see from what I have said, have the capacity to see supersensibly the thoughts which we, here on earth, can experience only in an inward, invisible way. Only if we acquire the capacity to behold thoughts in union with him, are we able to share in his experience, for this reason, he has the special capacity, as a dead person—as a so-called dead person—to share with us the experience of our thoughts.

We are particularly struck by this in the case of a certain phenomenon which I should like to touch upon. When someone whom we have loved has departed from us, we continue, as we all know, to cherish our thoughts of him within our souls. We think about the experiences we have had in common, about the feelings we have shared with him, and so forth. The dead person, as I have said, beholds thoughts. He can also see our thoughts, and he can even distinguish very soon the thoughts which he himself has, in the form of impressions of the spiritual world—these are Imaginations of what is contained in the spiritual world, and thoughts living in the soul of a human being who is still dwelling in a physical body. He can distinguish these thoughts. His own inner experience enables him to make this distinction. For, you see, the difference is really very great. When a deceased person (and exactly the same thing applies to an initiate) has to experience a thought about something which exists only in the spiritual world, he must himself experience this thought, actively. He must himself first follow the thought—every position of it, as it were. It is difficult to make this process clear; but I might explain it as follows:—Suppose a painting were hanging before us, here. But supposing you were to see this painting only when you yourself had traced its lines and painted its colours—followed all the details. This is what the dead can do. He paints every thought he sees; he himself creates the thoughts anew, as it were, and experiences his own activity. A large portion of the life between death and a new birth consists in this—in a creative copying of what exists in the spiritual world as thought-formations. We must learn to create these anew, with the dead—then we know that these are forms of thought which pertain only to the spiritual world.

The experience is different when we look down from the spiritual world upon the thoughts living in the human beings who have been left behind in the physical world. In this case, it is not necessary to re-create them; but these thoughts actually come to meet us, so that the dead person can remain passive. Just as a flower does not need first to be drawn or painted by us, but immediately makes an impression upon us, so it is with the thoughts coming from those who are still alive. These thoughts actually arise in a way similar to the way in which impressions arise, here in the physical world.

And this is just what uplifts, gladdens and warms the dead, in the thoughts of the living whom they have loved. For it is a very special sphere of activity for the dead—this being able to look into the thoughts of those whom they have left behind and who loved them. This is a special world for them.

It would be possible—would it not—for us to experience the physical world, as if it contained only what arises in the mineral, animal and vegetable kingdom and in the kingdom of man. In this case, for example, the physical world would contain no Art. Art would have to be added to all this—it would have to be created in addition to what we actually need. Yet Art is the very element which, from a soul-aspect of human evolution, must not be absent in the world, in spite of the fact that Nature would be just as perfect as it is, even if there were no Art. Thus, the dead could go on living, if necessary—although it would be like the human being living in a barren, lifeless, naked world of Nature, a world devoid of Art—were the peculiar circumstance to arise that everyone who had died were to be immediately forgotten, after death, by those who had loved him. Whatever can be seen as thoughts, remaining in the souls of those who love the dead, is something which is, to be sure, an additional element, going beyond the immediate requirements of the world of the dead; yet, at the same time, it uplifts and beautifies the life of the dead. It cannot be compared with Art in the physical world—that is to say, it can be compared, but the comparison is a lame one—for it means for the dead, as I have said, an uplifting, a beautifying element, yet in a far higher sense than the beautifying influence of Art is for us, here, in the physical world.

Thus it is deeply significant for the whole existence of the world, if we unite our thoughts with the thoughts of the dead, and especially if we do this in the form which we have often spoken about, here. Above all, we should approach the dead with thoughts clothed in that language, in that language of concepts which is common both to the living and to the dead—in the language which we speak here, in Spiritual Science. For the dead understand what constitutes the contents of Spiritual Science, just as well as do the living. And, moreover, it never becomes alien to the dead.

It is precisely through the bringing together of conceptual ideas such as these, I believe, that we shall be able gradually to form a plastic picture of the spiritual world. We can thus find our way into what lies beyond the threshold—whence, in reality, there flows forth all that exists for us on this side of the threshold.

In the face of these phenomena, we must bear in mind that present-day humanity is shortsighted in its vision of the world—and this is justified, to be sure, because it forms part of the universal plan—at the same time, it really is more shortsighted than it needs to be. For, you see, when a materialistic person of the present day forms his ideas, his conceptions of the world, he thinks that these are the universally-accepted human ideas and conceptions. You know how difficult it is to convince a materialistically-minded person that there are also other ways of thinking than his own. The standpoint taken by the materialist causes him to say that anyone who does not think as he does is a fool. There is no greater inward intolerance than that of a materialist.

Hence, a materialistic person actually thinks, generally speaking:—“Oh, of course, in the past, men thought all manner of things as to the existence of the spiritual; they could hardly move a step, in their daily life, without suspecting the presence of spirits everywhere, or indeed without seeing them. But all this was sheer fancy—now, at last, we have progressed so far that we have discarded this childish play of the human race.”

And yet it would seem as if human beings ought to be able to see at each step how nonsensical such a conception really is.

I shall try to make this clear to you, by citing an example, which may appear to be far-fetched, and from an entirely different side than the one we have discussed to-day in essence.

Let us think, for a moment, about that picture, which we have often discussed from various aspects, relating to the first stage of human evolution on earth—of man's life in Paradise, as we find it described in the Bible. Let us think about this picture of Adam and Eve in Paradise, the first human beings—Eve biting into the apple and giving the apple to Adam. Let us think of the picture of the Serpent on the Tree, tempting Eve.

When the painter of our day paints this picture—and even to-day, the modern painters still occasionally do paint it—he paints it, to be sure, in such a way that the picture will show a woman as true to Nature as possible, and a still more naturalistic man, because this is modern ... Impressionism, Expressionism, and I do not know what else; in any case, a very naturalistic woman and a still more naturalistic man, then a naturalistic landscape, and a naturalistic serpent showing, of course, greedy naturalistic teeth, etc. This is actually the way it is painted.

Painters have not always painted in this way, however; for such a picture would not render the true facts, as we know them. We know that in the Serpent, we may recognize a symbol of the real Tempter, Lucifer. Moreover, Lucifer is a Being who, as we know, remained behind during the Moon Period, and who—in the way in which he appears during the Earth Period—may be symbolized by the Serpent. Nevertheless, the Serpent is not Lucifer, and this must somehow become evident, spiritually. In other words, this Lucifer must also be seen with the forces of the soul—he must be seen from within, through the effort of inner forces.

How is it possible to see him, my dear friends? Indeed, we bear within us all the impressions of Lucifer. We actually carry them about within us. Just as we carry about the impressions of Ahriman, so we carry these in us, also.

Now I shall explain to you as briefly as possible, without any proofs or detailed explanations—these you must find for yourselves, in our already existing literature on this subject—how it is possible to form a conception of Lucifer.

Man carries about within him the impulses of Lucifer. They live in him in such a way that they are centred in his head, and from there they permeate the astral body where the Luciferic principle has remained within him; that is to say they force their way into his head—whereas otherwise it is the Spirits of Form which have moulded his head—and they also force their way into what is formed by the astral force into the spinal cord.

Thus, if we were to draw the head of a man and prolongation, the spine, the result would be a Serpent, a serpent like form, with a human head. Of course, the whole thing should be imagined as an astral form—the head to some extent still resembling a human head, and the spinal cord appended to it and turning around like a serpent. Imagine this projected objectively—and you will have a serpent with a human head. That is, Lucifer viewed externally, in the form of an image, assumes the aspect of a serpent with a human head. Not a serpent with a serpent's head, for that would no longer be a Lucifer—that would be an earthly serpent, which has already, as an earthly creature, been subjected to the influence of the Spirits of Form.

Hence, if a painter wished to paint Lucifer on the Tree, he would have to imagine the Serpent coiled around the Tree with a human head looking out above. He would then be painting out of the knowledge gained through our Spiritual Science.

Thus, we should have to picture Adam and Eve by the side of the Tree, and—coiled into the Tree—the astral shape of the spinal cord, resembling, as I have said, a serpent body, together with the image of the human head. If the woman Eve, sees it first, it will, of course, take on the form of a woman's face.

If you go into the Museum here, and look at the painting of Master Bertram, you will see there, that in the Middle Ages this kind of serpent was still portrayed coiled on the Tree, as I have explained. It is most striking and sublime; for it proves to us that a painter living in the very heart of the Middle Ages could paint from out of the true and real concepts of the spiritual world. This is an undeniable proof for the fact that we need not go back so very many centuries; and there are many documents, still existing to-day, to show us that in those days people still knew something of what our present materialistic humanity has already forgotten.

Of course, in an exterior history of Art, this fact which I have just mentioned is never touched upon. Nevertheless, anyone—by adopting not only the modern materialistic attitude, but also the materialistic standpoint or conception—can convince himself that both the vision of the spiritual, and the disappearance of this vision, are events of only a few centuries ago. Anyone here in Hamburg can convince himself of this, by going to the Museum and looking at this Paradise-picture of Master Bertram, he will find, there, the irrefutable proof, furnished on the physical plane, that it was not at all so long ago that men were able, by means of atavistic clairvoyance—as we may call it—to look into the spiritual world, and to have knowledge of its mysteries in a way that was entirely different from the way of to-day.

We need only think how blindly people go through the world to-day; how, if they only wished to do so, they could convince themselves, even externally, on the physical plane that evolution takes place, in the human race.

The significant fact is that during the course of the last three to four centuries, the formerly extant, more atavistic and unconscious clairvoyance has been disappearing. For, naturally, Master Bertram would not have been able to develop Spiritual Science. He merely saw, still saw in the etheric world, what Lucifer was really like, and then painted him accordingly. It was an unconscious, instinctive clairvoyance.

In order that man should acquire the external form of vision, the old way of looking at the spiritual world had to disappear. But it must be acquired anew by man. And the time must gradually come, only of course, this must be in the sphere of consciousness—when what has been lost, must be striven after anew. For this reason, the way must be prepared by Spiritual Science. People can approach the spiritual world again only if they study Spiritual Science. But this Spiritual Science must really bring an insight into the spiritual world.

To-day it is possible to prove scientifically, as it were how far natural science can bring the world forward. When a scientifically-trained person to-day speaks about such matters, he really speaks about the soul-apparatus, about the bodily instrument of soul-life. Now, if you try to investigate in the descriptions available to-day—they are generally called psycho-physiology—even those written by the most significant modern scientists, you will find there, what they have to say about the soul-instrument. You will find that these people express themselves, everywhere, in a most peculiar way. They say, for instance:—Let us consider the life of impressions and reactions, and the life of conceptual ideas; to this life of impressions and conceptual ideas belongs, in every case, the soul-apparatus. And then they describe what happens in the brain and in the nervous system when a man has impressions or forms conceptions. The parallel bodily process can always be found. But when these scientists approach feeling and the will, they cannot find a parallel bodily process. They cannot find anything.

That a thing like this does not come to light, but remains unnoticed, is due only to the fact that natural science and its rear-guard—we cannot really say rear-guard, because a rearguard is useful, and the monistic rear-guard of natural science is entirely superfluous—because natural science and its rearguard, the Monists, simply crow about the fact that for every process of thought and sensation, a certain physical parallel process is to be found, and that thought and sensation are bound to the brain. But they do not speak of shades of feeling or will. At the most, they speak of shades of feeling—in other words, a certain nuance of conceptual thought. But they do not go as far as feeling and will.

And the honest scientists say:—Our science does not extend as far as feeling and will. You can read for yourselves what I have just said, in the natural-scientific literature. It is possible to corroborate it in all spheres of science. For instance, in the case of Dr. Th. Ziehen, the well known modern psychiatrist and psycho-physiologist—in his book, you can find most easily of all a confirmation of what I have just said. He points out the single processes which correspond to thought and to sensation. He goes as far as certain shades of feeling; but he does not reach to actual feeling and will. Thus he disavows feeling and will. They do not exist at all, he says.

Now could we really find any clearer scientific proof than this, for the fact that natural-scientific thought extends only over the sphere of the temporal—only over that which we lay aside with death; whereas, at the same time, there is something that extends beyond this, living, precisely, as I have indicated, in feeling and will, and yet so far removed from the body that the scientist simply does not find it, indeed he rejects it and disavows it!

This is, accordingly, the reason why the scientists boast that feeling and will do not exist: because they cannot be found by the ordinary science. Indeed, it is natural science itself, as we see, that proves to us today that feeling and will are not bound to the body as such, like thought and sensation.

This is connected with the fact that our thoughts separate themselves from us; after death they appear spread out, outside of us. Feeling and will remain ours. And out of feeling and will springs forth the power to create the thought-tableau. He who wishes to do so to-day, can show by means of what is strictly scientific, that feeling and will are not connected with what we call “Nature”, but that, on the contrary, they pass out after death, as astral body and Ego, and remain united with the human individuality—kindling themselves to a new consciousness, in the way that I have described, through the fact that what spreads itself out is all etheric, that is, mirrors itself first in the astral body and then in the Ego when the astral body has been laid aside.

This is all as it should be. Modern science does not refute Spiritual Science, but confirms it. It really does confirm it. If it were possible to arouse even a little understanding, it would be seen that, for a right understanding, it is precisely an honest natural science that points to a justification of Spiritual Science, even in all its separate details.

Spiritual Science is, as you see—in view of all that has been said—something which must in our day begin to enter into the development of humanity, which must begin to have a grip on humanity, because otherwise the human race will reach the point where it will understand only the temporal, and when it will know nothing of the eternal, which lives in us. The time will come, when people will first recognise this, and when they will also concern themselves more with the development of their feeling-life. For only through feeling and will do we unite ourselves with the world which is not devoid of thought.

The objection might be made:—Very well, then, you feel the spiritual world, but you do not will it. But no, it is precisely through feeling and will that we are united with the objective thought-world—with the thoughts that live, and which we do not merely think. And just as truly as in the past mankind possessed a power of seeing into the spiritual world, just so truly will it have to win this power again in the future. Man will be able to win it again, however, only if he determines first to enter a little way into the thought-world which is no longer recognised by our generation, as coming from the spiritual world.

In order to attain this, a very great deal of what is rumoured about to-day as concept and percept will have to be corrected. Indeed, it would be hard to believe how thoughtlessly, as a matter of fact, human beings of to-day—allow me to use a paradox—how thoughtlessly human beings think. This really would be hard to believe. They make definitions which they are unshakably convinced are right, and cannot be refuted in any way. It belongs to the task of the spiritual scientist, however, to test all the more carefully what it is that convinces people so unshakably—just because it appears to them to be entirely logical and thus they are convinced of it. What, for instance—they think—could be a better definition than this, when someone is asked, in this modern materialistic Age of ours “What is a true concept?”—that he answers by saying:—“It is a true concept, when I form an inner picture of an object which is actually present, outside in the world. This is then a true picture of an object which exists outside.” In other words, everyone, in our day, would give this definition: “Truth consists in the conformity of a picture which we form in thought, to something actually existing outside.” We can now very easily show, however, if we examine concepts, that true concept has nothing to do with what we usually call by this name—has nothing whatever to do with it, in so far as it is supposed to be a picture of something having actual existence. It can easily be shown that actual existence goes along quite another path than does the picture which we fancy to be concept. You see, if this were true: that a concept is only true when it conforms with something having actual existence, naturally, then, it would also be true only so long as that which has actual existence verifies it.

Thus a concept might be compared with a portrait which someone has made of a human being. The portrait is good, if it resembles the person in question. Yet it has nothing to do with his being. The fact that the picture corresponds to the person, does not lead to an inner truth in the picture. Imagine to yourself that you have painted the picture of some man who then dies, soon afterwards. At first, the picture corresponded to what was there, but afterwards to what no longer exists. There is no connection between actual existence or life, and the portrait; as far as life is concerned, it is an entirely indifferent matter whether the picture is a true one or not. Such a connection is quite imaginary, when we look at things really logically. The essential thing is to experience things inwardly. It is this inner experience which humanity must again acquire.

In order to acquire this, however—and it is just during these hard, sorrowful days that we can be brought to realise in a special measure how necessary this is—in order to acquire this, it is necessary above all that humanity should acquire again a feeling for Truth, for real Truth.

Materialism gradually estranges us completely from Truth. We have gone astray through materialism—and especially where the idea of Truth is concerned. Compare for yourselves, for instance, the journalistic descriptions of today—and how many people read nothing but the newspapers, nowadays—compare these with the real events, which you may happen to have seen yourself! When you read this again, in the newspapers, you will find that the reporter has written it up in the way that he believes will make an impression on his readers. All feeling that such descriptions should correspond to the Truth grows weaker and weaker. And so long as this feeling for Truth does not permeate humanity, the impulse that leads from the sense-world into the spiritual world cannot be awakened to activity in human souls. For, with this want of any concepts of Truth in our thoughts, our concepts become falsified. How often, for instance, do we come across the following case:

Someone writes about Spiritual Science—let us suppose about what I have published in connection with Spiritual Science. He writes about this, and he cannot help saying—owing to his materialistic mentality—that everything is invented, and that it is not permissible to invent such things. And then he continues by investigating the question of how it can be possible for a man to be so fantastic.

As a matter of fact, this article actually appeared not so very long ago. The writer tries to find out how it is possible that a man can be so fantastic! And then he relates where this man comes from—in this case, it was I—where he used to live (not his recent abode, but where the writer reports him to have lived) and how it is because of his peculiar race-mixture that he can invent such fantastic things. And then this reporter himself invents the most incredible things, impelled by his materialistic mentality. And here you have an example of what I mean: People simply take hold of lies, and allow truth to become inwardly distorted.

Of course, no direct proof can be supplied for this. Yet what could be more false than to accuse someone of inventing fantastic things, and then to invent the most incredibly fantastic things about him, oneself! If you will study our modern life carefully, you will find that there is a very widespread lack of any feeling of responsibility, which would see to it that everything one says should correspond to the Reality. Unless we possess this feeling for Truth most intensively, we cannot gain access to the spiritual world. Nor can we understand why we must believe to be true, what Spiritual Science brings down for us as Truth, from the spiritual world.

But our thinking is far too inadequate for a true contemplation of this sort—and we cling too much to our own personal interests, to be able to see how untruthfulness glitters in everything and how its fragments can be found in all the happenings of life.

A true feeling, a true conception of this is what should occupy our thoughts, and should constitute the first preparatory steps in Spiritual Science. Thoughts like these should be, I might say, a kind of conscious preparation for what Man's future really should be. For, the welfare of the human race can become a reality only if our souls become united again with the spirit. Spiritual Science is not something that we seek in the form of a new kind of sensation, but something whereof we know that it must arise, because humanity needs it. And we ought to feel indebted, as it were, to Spiritual Science, if we observe, in a clear and lucid way the course of human evolution.

How much richer we grow, through what Spiritual Science can give us, because the world widens out for us more and more, through the fact that spiritual reality is added to physical reality, in human evolution! Human beings have been more and more cut off, in this materialistic age, from the world in which man lives between death and a new birth. Spiritual Science must give back to them, again, that life which comprises the whole human being—including that part which remains when man no longer possesses a physical body. In this respect, the physical world has nothing to give us.

It can weigh heavily, very heavily, upon our souls—especially just at the present difficult time—to see a volume like the one by Ernst Haeckel, which has just appeared. He calls it “Thoughts of Eternity”. Now, Ernst Haeckel is one of the most distinguished men of our day. This book, “Thoughts of Eternity”, starts out with the present Great War. What is the chief content of this book? The chief content of this newest book by Haeckel, “Thoughts of Eternity”, is expressed in these words: What can this particular war teach us? Thousands and thousands of people die a death of external violence, without any necessity whatsoever. “Must we not see”—asks Haeckel—“in this very war, the proof for the fact that all thoughts on eternity and infinity are absurd? Does not this same war, which ruins men's lives through outer chance, such as a bullet, for example—does it not show us that there is nothing beyond ordinary physical life?”

Of course, there will be other people of our day, who will be led to a different kind of thinking about eternity, through these events—to quite the opposite kind of thoughts of eternity, to thoughts which, in any case, call up in us the feeling that those who pass through the portal of death in times such as these continue their tasks for humanity in other worlds, and that the very sacrifice which they make, partly constitutes, in their new life, the starting point for what they have to fulfil when they no longer carry a physical body.

It is possible to prove all sorts of things, through ordinary science: it is possible to prove, for instance, that ordinary science enables man to construct all sorts of excellent kinds of apparatus, which raise the standard of human life and advance human civilisation—in a peaceful sense. Yet this same science can also construct the most terrible things—for the destruction of human life. External science enables man to construct both good and destructive things, and to prove all sorts of facts.

In order really to penetrate into the world where the eternal lives, there is need for Spiritual Science. And this Spiritual Science—I have already spoken to you about this, at least to some of you—shows us, among other things, and makes it quite clear to us, that those who leave their physical body at an early age, before the ordinary span of life on the physical plane has elapsed, give over their etheric body to the etheric world, and continue to live as individualities. Then, the spirit and the sense of Spiritual Science show us that such an etheric body, which would still have been able to support a physical body for a long time, still contains vital forces, when it is handed over to the etheric world—forces which would have been able to keep the physical body alive for decades. It exists in the etheric world, as illustrated by the example I have already cited to you.

What a human being acquires, through his sacrificial death continues to live in his individuality. It continues to live in him, especially at a time like the present; and we are able to gain an insight into the significance of what is taking place only when we look at things with our spiritual eyes, through Spiritual Science. Then our attention will be drawn to the fact that the spiritual counterpart of what is now happening on European soil, as the spiritual correlation, the spiritual parallel process of the mighty and sorrowful events taking place on the physical plane, here in Europe—since all physical events are under the guidance of the spiritual world—must flow through physical events, into the future of human evolution.

But this will bear fruit only if human souls, living in physical bodies on the earth, acquire a consciousness of the fact that an active and helping influence is going out to them—from those forces which live in the spiritual world as the result of thousands and thousands of sacrificial deaths: and that they can submit themselves to this influence, in a sense, in order to be able to continue in the future their activity on this earth—united with the dead through that consciousness of the reality of a spiritual world, which can be acquired by the human soul.

This is what Spiritual Science must give to men—also in connection with these events now taking place. And human beings will then be able to render fruitful for the future, in the right way, the spiritual counterpart of this mightiest of all world-events, and they will be able also to think and to feel, in the right way.

From the courage of fighters,
from the blood of battles,
from the sorrow of those who are left behind,
from a nation's sacrifice,
will ripen spiritual fruit—
if, toward the spirit-kingdom,
souls will spirit-conscious turn.

We have often approached the question that must interest us all: Where does it actually come from that relatively few people today still find access to the spiritual knowledge of the world order? This question can be answered from a wide variety of points of view. Today we want to consider a point of view that can then bring us certain thoughts that may be very important to take in, especially in the present time. When we consider man's relationship to the spiritual world, we are naturally interested in various things in this field. One that interests us most is the relationship that a person can have with those human souls who, from his own circle, from the circle with which he is connected karmically, have passed through the gates of death and are now in the spiritual realm. The relationship with the so-called dead will always be of the greatest interest for the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world. This relationship shows particularly how fundamentally different the view of the spiritual world approached man than the view of the physical-sensual world. I have often mentioned that when man confronts the spiritual world, it very often happens that he has to radically break with the ideas he has formed about physical existence. He has to break radically because the things and processes of the spiritual world often have to be grasped by concepts that are the opposite of those of the physical world. But one must not believe that one can come to a knowledge of the spiritual world by imagining, for example, that one simply has to turn the physical world upside down and reverse everything. That is not the case. Each one must be specially experienced, specially investigated. But just when it concerns the relation of man to the so-called dead, there it is indeed the case, at least for the time being, that we must acquire the ordinary concepts opposed to the physical ones.

The spiritual researcher can initially only relate how things are. What he has to say about the relationship to the so-called dead is more or less present in every person in reality, but only remains in the subconscious if the person is not a spiritual researcher. So I will tell you things that are present for all of you. I will speak about relationships to the so-called dead in which you all find yourselves. Only that this relationship is unconscious at first. Spiritual science has to bring these things into consciousness.

Let us assume that someone to whom the spiritual world has revealed itself is confronted with a particular dead person. It turns out that when we address the dead person in speech, we naturally do so not with physical words but in thought. When we turn to the dead person in thinking and speaking, then, if the relationship with the dead person is a real one, the feeling arises: What we ask the dead person or what we tell them comes from them. We are accustomed to imagining things differently in our physical lives: when we ask someone something or tell them something, we hear ourselves speaking and address the words to them. It is the other way around when we enter into a relationship with the dead. If we want to communicate something to him and the relationship is to be a real one, we have the feeling that we ourselves are inwardly at peace. For when what we have to ask or communicate really reaches him, it seems to us, in contemplation, as if the words, and thus the thoughts, come from him to us. He speaks to us. And what he says to us rises from the depths of our own soul as an answer or a message. The relationship that I have just described, which is quite the opposite of the relationship we have with a person in the physical world, is something that people do not easily notice in ordinary life because it is quite different from what they are used to. If it were not so extraordinarily difficult for people to get used to the unusual, many more people would be able to tell of their relationship with the dead.

Take a particular case. You are always in a relationship with some karmically connected dead person. If you want to make this relationship particularly intimate and particularly real, then you would do well to bear in mind an important rule: abstract thoughts and abstract ideas have the least significance for the spiritual world. Anything that remains abstract does not reach across into the spiritual world. So if you only think in abstracto, let us say, of the dead, if you - one can also say it that way - abstractly love the dead, not much comes across. On the other hand, if you strongly link this relationship to something concrete, then it comes across. I mean it like this: you remember, for example, a certain situation in which you were with the dead person when he was still alive. You imagine it very precisely: how he stood or sat opposite you, how you went for a walk with him. You imagine him in very specific situations, you imagine what it was like, what he said, what you said to him, you imagine the tone of his voice and try – which is the most difficult thing – to let the feelings you had for him become present in your soul again. You tie in with specific experiences you had with him. And then, starting from there, you try to say something to the dead person, something you would say if he were still alive in some situation, something you want to ask him, something you want to tell him. And you do this as if he were still there, again very specifically. That is enough to make the connection. In the moment when you have the feeling: I am now telling the dead person something – or: I am now asking the dead person something – the connection will not be made immediately. You have to allow time for this. Time is really something that has a completely different meaning for the spiritual life than it does for physical existence.

Even if you are not a spiritual scientist yourself, you can still establish a connection with the dead through what I have just characterized, so that it is a reality. But time itself will be waiting, so to speak, so that what you want to send to the dead person really does get through to him. For someone who is not consciously initiated, who does not consciously have a relationship with the spiritual world, the situation will usually be such that one moment seems particularly important for establishing this relationship with the dead: that is the moment of falling asleep. The moment of transition from waking to sleeping is at the same time the moment that usually carries what you have directed to the dead during the day, as I have described it, over to the dead. The path that leads you into the spiritual world when you fall asleep also leads what you have directed to the dead into the realm of the dead. Therefore, you must be careful when interpreting dreams. Dreams are very often only reminiscences, memories of daily life, but they do not have to be; they can also be reflections of realities. And in particular, dreams in which the dead are dreamt do not always, but very often, actually originate in connection with real dead people. But people usually believe what appears to them in the dream, what the dead person communicates to them, as being as direct a reality as it appears in the dream. It is not so, but what you wanted to communicate to the dead person when you fell asleep, that is received by the dead person, and what appears in the dream is how he receives it. So just when the dead person communicates something to you in a dream, it is intended to show you that you were able to communicate something to him. There you have what I characterized: You are much more likely to say, when the dead person appears to you in a dream and says something to you, than to believe that you dreamt of the dead person, that what you said to the dead person has really reached the dead person; by dreaming of him, he shows me that what I wanted to communicate to him has reached him.

For a message from the dead to come back – let's say a reply or something similar – the moment of waking up is again of particular importance. What is transmitted from the spiritual realms is what the dead person has to communicate to us living, as we say, at the moment of waking up. And then it comes up from the depths of one's own soul. It is peculiar to people that they do not like to pay attention to what comes up from the depths of their own soul. In our time, people do not have much sense of paying attention to what comes up from the depths of the soul. People prefer to be impressed only by the outside world, to absorb only what is outside; they would prefer to numb themselves to what rises from the depths of the soul. But when someone becomes aware that something is rising from the depths of the soul, a thought, an idea, they take it for inspiration. That satisfies vanity more. We consider all things that arise from the depths to be our inspiration. They may be, but mostly they are not. Most of the time, the things that arise from our soul as inspiration are the answers that the dead give us. For the dead live with us. What seems to come from you is actually what the dead say. It is only important that we interpret the experience in the right way. I have often mentioned what can be said in detail about our relationship with the dead: reading aloud and so on. The more vividly, the more emotionally, the more pictorially one lives in these things, the more meaningful the connection with the dead will be.

It is not meaningless to have these conditions clearly before one's soul. For our time has a great need to allow the truths that relate to such things as I have just mentioned to come closer together. We live in a time in which, for many long ages, the human organism has actually been in decline. We are all much more spiritual, much wiser than it appears because of the decline of our body. The Greek bodies were still better able to reflect what the person was in spirit. Actually, since the middle of the Atlantean period, the human being has been in decline in relation to his body, and in our age it is becoming particularly pronounced that the body can no longer reflect what the person actually is in spirit. Thus it happens almost incredibly often in our age that when we die - I would like to call it that - we are not yet finished with our development. If only people would understand that! We develop throughout our lives, but we can only become aware of this development to the extent that the body reflects it. We are sometimes so wise as people when we die – only our declining body is not able to bring these things out for us – that we could still do very important work for the earth, not only in the spiritual field, but could do great service to the earth through our insights if they could be applied. These services could be applied if people, as I have indicated, were to establish relationships with the dead. The dead still want to have an influence on physical life, but they can only do so indirectly through human souls, when human souls devote themselves to them in the appropriate way.

I have probably already mentioned here that I can actually express what is personally close to me on this very point: I have never believed that I only process in a literary-historical or historical way that which ties in with Goethe in the fields of world view, but I have always believed that I am not only dealing with the Goethe of 1832, but with the Goethe of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: with the living Goethe. With the Goethe who in 1832 carried much out of the physical world, but which can still have an effect if one is only willing to grasp it. Therefore, what I have written has not been merely literary-historical research, but the communication of what he has told me. However, our so-called contemporary culture, our contemporary education, works radically against what I have just explained.

It is actually necessary that spiritual science always ties in with life and is made fruitful by life. In our time, I would say, there is an ideal that completely opposes what I have just expressed as a peculiarity of our time. This ideal can be characterized something like this: People are striving more and more to believe in life as little as possible. They actually only believe in life until their twenties. This can already be seen in the practical goals that people set. Even if we go to Greece, we see that people believed that when they got older, they would be wiser than when they were young. The older person can know better things about state and city institutions than a young person. This belief has been completely discarded, because the ideal of most people today is to set the age at which one can be elected to city or state parliaments as early as possible, because people only believe in life until their early twenties. But life really requires us to believe in it as a whole, to believe in the development of all life. Just think how our social life would change through moral impulses if we knew once more that all of life is developing around the human being. How young people would relate to the elderly if this were deeply rooted in the human soul! Imagine what a difference it makes to one's consciousness when one says to oneself again and again: Now I am just a young badger of thirty, thirty-five years old, but I will also get older one day, and growing older means hope for me, an expectation: there will be something that will come when I get older that cannot come while I am young. Do you realize how much joy and strength of life a human being has when he has this consciousness throughout his whole life until death and still says to himself before death: Yes, I cannot get so far as to reflect everything that life offers me into my consciousness; I will carry something through death; then people will believe in the dead and let the dead be co-advisors. Just think how foolish one would be considered if one were to express this, which must become a practical principle today, as such. I am quite serious when I say that our parliaments throughout the world would come up with better ideas than they do today if the dead were also consulted, if we were to ask today: What do not only the young badgers of thirty, thirty-five years say about this? – but: What does Goethe, for example, or what do other dead people say who are a hundred and so and so many years old? – This is something that must immediately become a practical reality for the future.

Today there are certain, well, let's say secret societies; they cultivate all kinds of old symbols. They would do better if they understood the times and made themselves into places where the counsel of the dead is explored. This is so infinitely significant! For humanity will not move forward if it does not imbue itself with the awareness that the divine-spiritual is at work in the development of our entire life; we are not finished in our twenties.

I have already drawn your attention to this here: in the early days of human development, it was the case that people felt their whole life developing, purely through their physical and bodily development, including emotionally and spiritually. Just as today people only feel their soul and spiritual life going along with their physical and bodily life during puberty or otherwise only into their twenties, so in ancient times people felt their soul and spiritual life going along with their physical and bodily life up to their forties or fifties. But from the age of thirty-five onwards, if one remains capable of development, precisely those spiritual powers develop, because the body then declines, which the human being does not come to if he does not allow them to sprout through spiritual science. In the past, people revered the elderly because they knew that something was revealed in them that cannot yet be revealed to young people. I have pointed out that humanity is getting younger and younger. If we go back to the original Indian culture, it was the case that at that time people remained capable of development until their fifties. In the original Persian culture, they remained capable of development until their forties, in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture until the second half of their thirties, and in the Greek-Latin culture until their thirty-fifth year. When Greco-Latin culture came to an end in the 15th century, people were only capable of development until the age of twenty-eight; today it is until the age of twenty-seven. Which person is therefore particularly characteristic of the present time, of this present age of materialistic development? You see, that would be a person who completely rejects being inspired by the soul for a spiritual development, who only absorbs what flows into him from outside, what the present itself offers.

Let us imagine, I would like to say, an idealized figure who is particularly characteristic of the present. It would be a personality who does not go through any of our intellectual high schools – because there one takes in the old, there one already stimulates the soul – but who only absorbs what comes to people from outside. A self-made man, a man who makes himself, who also absorbs everything else that one experiences in reality today in terms of feelings, sensations, emotions. So, from the age of seven, eight, nine, he grows up with a certain social aversion to the privileged classes, who does not tip his hat to anyone who has a title or power or the like, who then does not attend a Greek-Latin school, but learns by living life alone. He then enters a profession similar to that of a lawyer, not by studying law, but by going through the practical experience in a law firm and making his way through it; by the time he is twenty-seven, everything has come to him in this way, but not in the extraordinary way of repeating ancient culture, but what the present can bring to him. In the twenty-seventh year he should get himself elected to Parliament. Then he comes before his contemporaries, and as he has developed by himself until then, he presents himself to people, not believing in further development. One can become a minister from Parliament. Development is no longer good in the opinion of our contemporaries, otherwise people say that one contradicts oneself, one said something completely different earlier, and now one contradicts oneself. If you are elected to parliament, you can no longer say anything different. Is there such a person in the present? Do you know a particularly characteristic person who is the most concentrated expression of the present time? That is Lloyd George. You cannot understand the peculiarity of certain contemporaries today if you do not look at these things, do not really look at the peculiarity of the person in this way. Lloyd George is a self-made man. Up to the age of twenty-seven he has only taken in what the present itself offers; but because he has no inner drive of the soul, it stops at twenty-seven. He is then elected to parliament. Lloyd George is in Parliament, sitting there with his arms folded, his eyes turned inwards towards the axes, speaking aptly everywhere, watching for his opponents' weaknesses. Now came the Campbell-Bannerman Ministry. One wonders: what is to be done with Lloyd George? He criticizes everything the Ministry does! What is to be done? Well, he is taken into the ministry; inside he can do less opposition than outside. He becomes a minister. And it turns out that he quickly finds his feet in this situation too, because he is truly a representative of our time. Now, of course, people are asking themselves: Which portfolio should we give Lloyd George? After all, the important thing is that he is a capable person. So they agreed to give him the portfolio he didn't understand: public works. But lo and behold, in three months he had familiarized himself with the subject and achieved great things as a minister in precisely this field, which he had previously understood nothing about.

That is a characteristically modern figure. There are many of them in one sense or another. You only have to ask: what kind of people are they who, by the age of twenty-seven (which is the cut-off point today), have developed to such an extent that they have absorbed everything their environment has to offer, then immediately entered public life and no longer continued their development?

A personality who is somewhat closer to us is Matthias Erzberger. Study his biography and you will find the same if you look at it in this occult way. It is something that arises in the culture of our time in a very remarkable way. But to look a little into the human heart in an occult way is something that must be included in the history of the development of mankind. You see how the culture of our time reveals itself when we penetrate to its core in this way. Now, however, the culture of our time demands of us that we penetrate more deeply than we are accustomed to doing today. But this will only be possible if we become aware that the dead also have their say. Those who are truly characteristic representatives of our time will, of course, reject this in the most eminent sense.

If you want to study a person in whom you see the continuous striving for further development, this unconscious belief in the lasting reality of the divine-human in the human soul until death, it is Goethe. Goethe is much more characteristic in this respect than is usually thought. Goethe wanted to look back on the age, on the years of life in which he took in from the outside world what the outside world brings in, but he wanted to continue his development. He has described his youth in “Poetry and Truth”. It breaks off with his entry into Weimar. Born in 1749, he came to Weimar in 1775, and so he continued his life story, as he wanted to tell it, until the age of twenty-six. He ended it before the age of twenty-seven because he unconsciously knew that this was an especially significant moment. In the age of thirty-five, a person experiences a moment that today he usually sleeps through. It is the moment when the burgeoning, ascending life passes into the descending life in relation to the body. But then the spirit is driven to reveal itself, and to reveal itself more and more.

The thirty-fifth year of life is an important moment in human life. This is really something where man first truly gives birth to his soul in physical life. Ask yourself how this turns out for a person like Goethe, who remained capable of development throughout his entire life. In 1786, after the thirty-fifth year, just the important time from thirty-five to forty-two years, Goethe goes to Italy. If you look more closely at Goethe's biography, you will see what a turnaround this meant in his life. In an essay that will now appear in a small book, I have shown how Goethe actually personally relates to his Faust in “Goethe's Spiritual Nature as Revealed through his Faust and through the Fairy Tale of the Serpent and the Lily”. I have discussed it with a few hints at least. Precisely with regard to this, one is rather confused than enlightened by what is otherwise written. That is not particularly important, which is what people usually point out complacently, that Faust says right at the beginning:

I have now, alas, thoroughly studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
unfortunately! also theology
with great zeal.
There I stand, I poor fool

And I am no wiser than before... People are complacent and point out: He went through all four faculties and didn't get anywhere, doubts all knowledge. Especially the actors often feel that they have to despise the four faculties. But that is not the characteristic, that is not the specifically Goethean, what matters, that is just a prelude. Many people in Goethe's time said that. When the Goethean element in Faust comes into play, things change. It is when Faust picks up the book of Nostradamus and sees for the first time the sign of the macrocosm. This sign shows how man fits into the whole macrocosm. How his spirit is connected with the spirit of the world, his soul with the soul of the world, his physical body with the physical body of the world, all this is depicted in the great picture of the intermingling buckets of the world - planets and suns, with the hierarchies behind them. But Faust turns away with the words: “What a spectacle! But alas, only a spectacle!” He sees images, a spectacle. Why? Because at this moment, in a moment, he would like to grasp the secret of the world. But this can only happen in the whole of human life, insofar as the physical world exists, the whole of evolution. Knowledge can only give images. Then he turns to the sign of the microcosm. There he does not have the spirit of the macrocosm, but only the spirit of the earth. The earth spirit gives what history, what is human on earth encompasses.

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!

Faust seeks self-knowledge through the earth spirit, he rejects world knowledge. That is the Goethean, that is where the Goethean begins. Before that, there is a prelude. In his youth, Goethe was indeed at a loss, and could say no more than: Everything that relates to the macrocosm gives me only images, we cannot penetrate it. Only from within can the riddle of life be solved. But this earth spirit, that is, the spirit of self-knowledge, said to him:

You resemble the spirit that you comprehend! Not me!

Faust falls to the ground. What spirit does he resemble? You see, here is an opportunity in 'Faust' to get to know a poet who does not theorize! There is nothing theoretical about it, but you have a poet who presents things in living artistic reality. Listen: “You resemble the spirit you comprehend! Not me!” There is a knock at the door: Wagner enters. That is the answer: you resemble Wagner, not me! - Here, we must change our thinking about this point in Faust. It must not be presented on the stage as it usually is: that Faust is only the ideal-striving man who wants to reach the heights of the spirit, who is absolutely right, and then Wagner limps along. I would, if I had to present it, present it in such a way that Wagner wears the mask of Faust, that both stand there in the same form, because Faust should be pointed out: Look at your own image, you are at a standstill! And what Wagner says is a conclusion in itself; what Faust says is actually all just stuff of longing. But the Faust expounders, and people in general, want to make things as comfortable as possible. People like to quote: “Feeling is everything, name is sound and smoke,” even though Faust coins this for a sixteen-year-old girl. So a teenage girl's wisdom is actually always dressed up as a philosopher's wisdom. Wagner confronts Faust with his self-awareness – as I said, I have expanded on this in the little book – but Faust has nevertheless been touched by the spirit. The earth spirit has appeared to him, he has come close to the spiritual world, he must go further and must make up for what he has neglected up to the age of forty. Faust is forty years old when he appears at the beginning of the poem. Yes, he must also make up for what he did not go through: the Bible. He begins a kind of retrospective view of the missed youth. Then another self-knowledge approaches him: Mephisto. After the self-knowledge through Wagner, another self-knowledge.

But now something strange happened. In the nineties, in 1797, Schiller became very urgent: Goethe was to continue his “Faust”. In 1797 Goethe was forty-eight years old. Another important point in time. Seven times seven is forty-nine; that is the point in time when a person comes out of the special development of the spirit self and into the spirit of life. Schiller urged him on. People have made it easy for themselves with the explanation. Minor, who wrote an interesting book about Goethe, says: Goethe is gripped by age, he is no longer really capable of poetry. But just think, if that were true, a “Faust” could never be written! It would be impossible to depict the life of a human being in old age, and Faust was indeed in old age! Goethe is now approaching the age at which the ancient Indians said: Now man enters the age when he can ascend into the realm of the fathers, can gradually ascend into the deeper secrets of spiritual life. - That is when Goethe encounters his Mephisto in a remarkable way.

You know that when one tries to get to know the powers that oppose man, there are two, Ahriman and Lucifer. Goethe has confounded the two, thrown them together. He did not feel this earlier, and so Mephisto has become a contradictory figure. You only need to consider a few aspects to see that Mephisto is not a unified figure: Goethe combined Lucifer and Ahriman. He realized this in 1797, which is why it became so difficult for him to continue Faust. The humanities had not yet reached the point where man's opponent could be split into two opponents; Goethe stopped at one. You can see Goethe's nature when you consider that he should have actually created two figures but threw them together into one. Goethe really went through something inwardly in that he felt Mephisto was a contradictory figure. That “Faust” was created after all and stands tall as a piece of poetry can, of course, be attributed to Goethe's great poetic power. But this, in turn, is something that Goethe found surging within him from the unconscious. You see, a person can be capable of development; in his soul, he can feel in a very elementary way that which works together with the spirit through the whole of life in us, not just into our twenties.

What you know as the “Prologue in Heaven” was not written by Goethe until 1798. What happened in Faust? He did not say it, but it is in his soul: he let Faust reach for the book again, and now he is face to face with the spirit! Now it is no longer a play. Here the spirits are weaving the spheres. Here Faust stands in the midst of the struggle between good and evil in the macrocosm. One should not view Faust from beginning to end in such a way that one sees everything as if it were the same. Goethe broke with the view of his youth and introduced Faust more and more into the spirit of the macrocosm. I just wanted to show you how regularly this developing Goethe life is shaped. In it one can show how the human developmental periods go from seven to seven years until death. One must lift the subconscious more and more into consciousness, according to the meaning and spirit of the present. There is much talk about the subconscious, but it is not viewed in the right way, not viewed deeply enough.

Today there is something called analytical psychology, psychoanalysis. This is, as it were, brought to bear on the subconscious spiritual and soul life in the human being, but with inadequate means; for the adequate means are the spiritual-scientific ones. The classic example, which psychoanalysts cite over and over again, shows precisely how people work with inadequate means. Let us introduce an example from the soul that actually led to the development of psychoanalysis: there is a woman who knows a man. The man is married; she knows him in a way that may have been all right for the husband, but not for the husband's wife. Lo and behold, the husband's wife falls ill for various reasons, one of which may have been this lady herself. She becomes nervous. These days, people get nervous, neurasthenic, so there's no need to be surprised. She has to go to a spa for several months. She is supposed to leave one evening, but before that, supper is organized – a souper, as they say in German – to which the lady, who is well acquainted with the man and with the whole family, is also invited. The supper goes quite well. Then the lady of the house has to go to the train. The company also gradually disperses, as they say. A group of the party is walking on the street with this lady, who is well acquainted with the gentleman of the house. Now, as it happens here and there, not only late at night, people no longer walk on the sidewalk, but in the middle of the street. But lo and behold, a cab, not a car, but a cab, turns the corner, and that lady, who is a friend of the gentleman of the house, does not move aside like the others onto the sidewalk, but she runs in front of the horses. The driver curses, cracks the whip; but she runs in front of the horses, runs and runs until they come to a bridge. Then she has an idea: she must save herself. It is a dangerous situation. So she saves herself by jumping into the water. She is pulled out and saved, and society carries her into the house from which she has just come: into the home of the master of the house. She stays there for the night. The others go home again. And something has been achieved, which I will not characterize further now. The psychoanalyst now studies this case for hidden psychological motives: perhaps the lady has gone through something special with horses in the last seven or eight years, which resounds again from the soul, and at that moment she loses consciousness, it only comes up through the fear of horses. So one searches for “hidden provinces of the soul”. But that is not the truth. The truth is this: there is a subconscious in the soul of a person that can be smarter and more sophisticated than the conscious mind. This lady was a very decent lady, but she was in love with the master of the house. Her conscious mind would not have admitted: I want to stay in this house – but the subconscious does. It considers very carefully: If I run in front of the horses and jump into the water, then they will take me back! – That is what happened. In her conscious mind, the lady would never admit this, but in her subconscious she goes through these things, that is where it is present. Man carries within himself this subconscious, which is much wiser, much more cunning, for good or ill, than the conscious mind. As I said, the present time is becoming somewhat aware of this subconscious, but it seeks it with inadequate means. It must be clear that it can only be found by adequate means through spiritual science if one wants to show that, alongside the ego, which lives through the body, the eternal spiritual lives in us, which is not just an angel and can therefore also be refined, depending on its karma. What this subconscious always is in its revelation through man must be studied in a spiritual scientific way. We must realize that we have to get to know the truth, reality. Today the subconscious is knocking at the consciousness, and we can no longer cope in life if we ignore this, if we do not also follow with our consciousness the paths that the subconscious takes. Many people do not want that, so they do not want to approach spiritual science.

So on the one hand there are certain reasons for not being able to understand spiritual science: people do not want to understand that things are completely reversed when it comes to the dead. One must completely change one's way of thinking. While in ordinary life we are accustomed to our words coming out of our mouths when we speak or ask something, in our intercourse with the dead it is the case that what we say comes out of his soul, what he says comes up out of our own inner being. This is a natural thing.

The other is the antipathy that people have towards the spirit because they do not like to admit how this spiritual strikes at the door of consciousness. In many places one finds this spirit knocking at the door of consciousness. In people who, for example, have been somewhat abnormal in their lives, a loosening of the spiritual and mental in the physical and bodily today results in the subconscious making a more correct impact on the conscious than in those who have nothing loosened in them. It is by no means certain that relaxation should be aimed at, truly not, but in some people something is relaxed in a natural way, as for example in Otto Weininger. He was truly a talented person; he had completed his doctorate at the beginning of the 1920s, then formed the book “Sex and Character” out of the doctoral dissertation, which is quite amateurish and even trivial in many respects, but is nevertheless a remarkable phenomenon. Then he took a trip to Italy, kept a diary during which something quite remarkable happened. Certain spiritual-scientific insights are expressed as a caricature. This relaxed spiritual-soul-like already sees many things, but it caricatures them! The moral is also usually somewhat tainted. But Weininger was a genius. He then rented a room in the Beethoven House in his twenty-third year and shot himself inside. From this you can see that he was a very abnormal person. But I just want to mention: if you read his last book, you will also find a strange passage among all the other things. There he says: Why does man not remember his life before birth? Because the soul has brought itself so low that it wants to submerge itself in unconsciousness with regard to the previous life! - I mention this only - and I could multiply the example a thousandfold - to show: There are many people who are very close to spiritual science but cannot find it because the present time does not want to let people approach spiritual science at all. I mention this as an example because it can certainly be seen: Weininger comes to it by loosening the spiritual and soul, as a matter of course, to express that the human being connects with the physical and bodily. He expresses it as a matter of course, as many other people still do today, only in a very shamefaced way. But this is a fundamental demand of our time: that people really pluck up the courage, educate themselves in strength, to face the spiritual world in its concrete manifestations.

And one such concrete manifestation is precisely the one I particularly wanted to talk to you about: that people allow the dead to have a say; that people's social lives are again determined by feeling the differences between people and people according to age, but also by the fact that something becomes different, that people believe in their entire human life. God does not only reveal Himself up to the age of twenty. In the past He revealed Himself physically, but now He must be felt through spiritual science. But the human being must believe in the gifts of the divine spiritual world. Throughout his entire life he must have the encouraging, sustaining feeling that When I am fifteen years older, I will bring to the Divine-Spiritual what it can take up differently than before. Imagine how one can live into the future when one is so expectant! How this pours a different soul-spiritual aura over our entire social life! It must be known that people will need this aura as they develop towards the future. This is of infinite importance. Try to feel how many things must change! We live in an age in which many, many things must change. Above all, it must be so that certain things are no longer seen in a hypocritical way, but are seen in reality. It is of no use to tell lies to oneself about certain things. And I would like to discuss one such self-lie.

How many people are there today who say: I do not look up to the various hierarchies, to angels, archangels and so on, but I look up to “my God”. And how many continue to declaim what great progress it is that humanity has come to the one God, to monotheism. But one must ask the question: To whom do people actually turn when they seek to enter into a concrete relationship with the spiritual world and speak of “their God” in doing so? Whether one is Catholic or Protestant, when one speaks of one's God, one can only speak of that which really enters one's consciousness. This can only be one of two things: either it is the one angel that protects him, whom man then calls God, who is no higher god than an angel – and since every human being has an angel whose task it is to protect him, we are in a pluralism – or he means his own ego. But man is mistaken in that he has the same name for it, because everyone calls their particular angel by the same name “God”. In contrast to this, one should consider one thing, which is actually very instructive. There is a word whose origin people know nothing about, despite all their research: that is the word “God”. That is interesting and makes one think! Look it up in the various dictionaries in which the words are treated linguistically and philologically: there is complete uncertainty about the word “God”. People do not know what they are actually designating with God. And in our time, people either mean their angel, or, by speaking of their God, they become, so to speak, unconscious followers of our teaching: they speak namely of their own ego, as it has developed since the last death until this birth. That is the concrete thing they call God: either the angel that protects them intervenes – it is only the angel, they call it God – or it is only the individual ego. Whether one reinterprets this or not, it does not matter: it is the egoistic religious confession that is in many souls today, but one does not want to admit it to oneself. Only spiritual science will make people aware of it. Then people will hate spiritual science and will fight it more and more because it is so convenient for people to call their closest neighbor, who stands above them in the hierarchical order, their god. When people talk about God today, they mean either their own ego or the angel.

One can only get beyond such a view by entering into the concrete spiritual-scientific relationship. This is one of the points about which people will have to become more and more enlightened as the future approaches. And there must be truth among people. This will have to be a particular demand in the future, and truth is not very widespread in the present, not at all widespread. Particularly in learned circles, one sometimes encounters very strange ideas about what truth is. You will recall from my book 'Puzzles of the Soul' (if I may refer to it briefly) the peculiar way in which the remarkable man Max Dessoir dealt with the truth. What one reads in the last issue of the Kant journal is truly heartbreaking! I may mention this in particular because anthroposophy is not mentioned there; so this essay does not hurt in relation to its own cause. But in this “scholarly” journal one finds an essay that is not only the most banal in the anthroposophical field, but also, through and through, the most amateurish for anyone who understands the matter. But it is taken seriously.

You know from my book how one has no choice but to point out to Dessoir, in a schoolmasterly manner, that he has not read my books but distorts everything possible. I would like to mention just one of the most stupid distortions: Dessoir states in the first edition of his book 'Beyond the Soul' that my 'Philosophy of Freedom' was my first work. Now, this 'Philosophy of Freedom' was published in 1894, ten years after my first work; but he is so superficial about everything that he does not get it right. So the 'Philosophy of Freedom' was my first work. I also dared to say this about it among more important things to show him his nature. A second edition is being published. In the preface, he asserts all kinds of things that are precisely such that one can see from them what kind of person this university professor is. But now he has said in the first edition that the Philosophy of Freedom is my first literary work; now he says that he did not mean that, but that it is my “theosophical first work”. If you now take this together with the way in which the Philosophy of Freedom is again taken by others as something that would be denied by my “theosophy”: you will see a real quagmire! But it is very easy to see into the present through such things, and it is very important to get complete enlightenment about these matters. And this is possible only if one unreservedly arms oneself with the weapons of spiritual science.

Historical observation, too, will have to become something quite different under the influence of spiritual science than it has been up to now, because history, for the most part, is actually nothing other than a fable convenue, as it is offered. Where one really gets to the facts, one is led into something quite different from what popular history presents.

I will give you one example. You will see shortly what my point is in this consideration. We know that the fourth post-Atlantic period ended with the 15th century. That is the Greco-Latin period; in its last stages it extends into the 15th century. In 1413, the fifth post-Atlantic period begins, and a mighty upheaval occurs. If we bear this in mind, we may perhaps ask ourselves: how did this Roman Empire, into which everything that is Greek-Latin culture was finally drawn, come to its downfall? There are various causes, but one of the important ones is the following: the Romans waged great wars; these wars gradually expanded the territory beyond its borders. Many new border peoples emerged. This had a very specific consequence. Anyone who studies the time of the first Christian centuries will find that the peculiar nature of the Roman Empire, in its administration and internal social structure, with the border peoples and towards the Orient, has resulted in a continuous outflow of metal money from the Roman Empire to the Orient. And this is one of the most important events in the second, third and fourth centuries A.D., when the Roman Empire was gradually coming to an end: that metal money flows over to the neighboring peoples in the Orient. And the Roman Empire, despite having a complicated military administration, is becoming increasingly poorer in gold and money. This is the external expression, the image of the internal processes. I mention this external picture, the impoverishment of the Roman Empire in gold and money, because it is the external expression of the inner mood of the soul. What arose out of this inner mood of the soul? Of course, this inner mood has a definite significance in the whole sense of world-historical events. Something had to come out of this impoverishment of the Romans in metallic money. And what came of it? Individualism arose, which is the characteristic feature of our age. There was much talk of the art of making gold. How did this art come about? Because Europe became materially poor in gold, this external physical longing for making gold arose until America was discovered and gold came from there. These great connections must be grasped. What one comes to know by really studying the fall of the Roman Empire had an effect all the way into alchemy and thereby into the development of human souls: poverty of gold through the expansion of the social structure beyond the peripheral peoples into the Orient.

We now live in a time when people have to admit to themselves: the time of instinctive living is over. We cannot achieve social structures if we are unable to invigorate social thinking with thoughts that come from an understanding of the spiritual world. That is why the social sciences are so sterile and why humanity has brought itself into this catastrophic present, in which social structures create chaos throughout the world because people cannot let spiritual scientific thoughts flow into community life. These thoughts should flow from the impulses of human development into social thinking. There are spiritual causes for this catastrophic present. This is the rebellion of people against the influx of the spirit. That is the true origin of the present catastrophe. For people everywhere turn against the spirit that wants to come in.

I will give you an example that you might find characteristic. Let us suppose that someone is thinking today about the different world views that exist and, purely superficially, classifies them as: Catholicism, Protestantism, socialism, naturalism and so on. Take the cycle that I once gave in Berlin, where I built the world views more on inner categories, on the number twelve and on the number seven. You really do get seven world views: Gnosticism, Logism, Voluntarism, Empiricism, Mysticism, Transcendentalism, Occultism. Of course, anyone who just picks them up will not call them by these names. And yet the music of the spheres reigns everywhere! So just imagine someone who is nothing more than a materialistic observer, who reads the world views as they are accessible to him. How many would he have to find? He would have to find seven. He may call them something else, depending on how they present themselves externally, but they must appear in seven links. Read the current issue of the “Preußische Jahrbücher”. In the first essay you will find an observation according to which a person wanted to register the worldviews as they currently exist. He lists them. How many does he find? Seven: Catholicism, Protestantism, rationalism, humanism, idealism, socialism and personal individualism. There are indeed seven. The categories are only shifted, but one cannot find more than seven. There you have an example of how what we find as a sense of development overlaps with ordinary external development. People do not want to admit this, but it is necessary to acknowledge it in the present; that we should not ignore these things, but have the courage to face them.

What is actually happening in the present? In ancient times, in the third post-Atlantic cultural period, there was a far-reaching impulse from east to west, across the entire globe, an impulse that did not come merely from material life, as do today's impulses, but from the spiritual. In those days, spiritual impulses also intervened in social life. A certain impulse developed from the East to the West. It can be characterized by saying that some people at that time were striving to pass on to others what they had obtained from the spiritual world as enlightenment, what came to them more or less through their age or through initiation from good or bad mysteries; they wanted to impose what they had on others. In those days there was an impulse that went from the Orient to the West: a few spiritual powers in the sense of spreading progress to humanity, filling the earth with a few spiritual maxims, with powers that came from the fading mysteries. Even then, social life was based on this. It was in the third post-Atlantic period; historically, little is recorded. But the repetition of what happened then is happening now. Imagine what spread in those days as the urge from east to west, implemented purely materially in the fifth post-Atlantic period: in those days it was the atavistic-spiritual forces that brought about a social structure in which strong spiritual impulses were to be given to people; these were to be brought into humanity. Now imagine the opposite: some people want to conquer the material world of the earth of their own accord, to take it away from other people. At that time, the aim was to give spiritually, and that is precisely what caused the catastrophes that befell the Earth so many years after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the process, the Roman Empire fell. At that time, spiritual catastrophes befell the Earth, culminating in the fact that certain peoples from the East wanted to flood the Earth's countries with individual maxims. The same is now taking effect, in that the British-American people want to take the earth away from people. That is behind the whole thing. And it is exactly the same: it appears as a mirror image. What is happening in the present can only be understood by looking at the real course of human development, by replacing what is taught as history with the real history. For it is necessary that people be placed in full awareness in what is really happening, in the direction of the future. Today's economic life has long been a chaos, and this is how the catastrophe developed. Now you have two things that are having an effect. From west to east: the mirror image; from east to west: what has become old. There you still have the remnants of the old spiritual outlook of the entire Asian Orient, what it did to spread the spiritual and push the soul into the background. If you study the present catastrophe, you have a war of souls from the east, with souls fighting to assert the oriental-Slavic concepts; and from the west, a purely material war for sales territories. These things can only be understood if they are viewed from the great perspective of human development. But it would be necessary to be able to speak freely about these things for once. People should be allowed to be enlightened about what it actually is that they live in. This is of tremendous importance. What must stop, however, is people literally oversleeping what is happening. The most important things can happen without people being able to understand them. They can no longer grasp their significance because at present one can only do so if one is able to illuminate them with the light of spiritual-scientific knowledge. They cannot be illuminated in any other way.

But what is the attitude of the most learned people today towards spiritual-scientific knowledge? Yes, here we have a good example. In various places I have repeatedly mentioned the interesting fact that a book was written by a Haeckel student, Oscar Hertwig, an excellent book: “The Origin of Organisms, a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance.” In it, Oscar Hertwig pointed out the various downsides of Darwinism. I have praised this book highly. But in our spiritual scientific movement you will have to get used to there being no absolute authority. For a short time ago another book appeared by the same Oscar Hertwig: 'In Defense of Ethical, Social and Political Darwinism'. Now you must not say: Well, Steiner praised Hertwig, so we will now also study his latest book with this in mind, because then you will be in for a disappointment. The disappointment that I have to say: While the one book is an excellent book, this latest book is the most amateurish, most nonsensical thing one can possibly say about the chapters in question. If you just want to say: Steiner praised it, so we can accept it as gospel in turn, then you can never be sure that I will not be forced to give the opposite rating to something that is created on the same ground. Blind faith must not flourish in our ranks, only our own observations and our own opinions. But where does that come from? It stems from the fact that Daf Hertwig is an excellent naturalist; but the concepts of natural science must not be introduced into social life. If they are, then one finds everywhere only the dead, the dying of history, as for example with Gibbon, who wrote the excellent history of the decline of the Roman Empire. That is one secret – I have already presented this too – of historical development, that if you want to observe this historical development with the concepts that apply in science, you will never find that which grows and sprouts, but only that which turns into a corpse. You only encounter signs of decay in historical life if you want to use the concepts that are well applicable in science. People have suspected this from time to time. That is why Treitschke said that the driving forces in history are the passions and follies of men. It is not so. There are unconscious forces that descend in historical becoming. Therefore it is true that if you want to introduce decay into public life, and thus also into practical life, then you put scholars and theorists into parliaments. These people will concoct nothing but laws that lead to decadent phenomena, because with what is considered scientific today, only the decadent phenomena in history can be found. These things must enter into the consciousness of the people. This is far more necessary than most people realize, and it must be grasped if one is honest and sincere about what is to lead humanity out of the present catastrophic time. It is no longer acceptable to continue to oversleep the important events that unconsciously occur in human life, which people will not be able to cope with through their consciousness if they do not illuminate them with spiritual science. But the point is to grasp life in its reality, to really look into the true nature of life.

Here we must take into account the interaction of these three impulses: the normal human, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. For we must not treat these things in such a way that we say: I want to be a normal human being, and so I avoid everything Ahrimanic, everything Luciferic! Those who want to be really good and avoid everything that is Ahrimanic or Luciferic will flounder all the more into the Luciferic on one side and into the Ahrimanic on the other.

The point is not to avoid things, but to bring the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic into balance. The Luciferic is more characteristic of youth, the Ahrimanic of the age that is passing away. The Luciferic is more characteristic of woman, the Ahrimanic of man. When we look into the future, we look mainly into the Ahrimanic; when we look into the past, into that which is still to germinate, we look mainly into the Luciferic. If we look at the British Empire, we look into an Ahrimanic realm; in the case of oriental state institutions, we look into a Luciferic realm. The point is that we find these forces interfering with human life everywhere. We must not be blind to these things.

Take just one example: in the entire social structure of human life, the Luciferic has sometimes played a highly disastrous role because people did not know how to channel it into a right current, because they allowed the scales of Lucifer to swing too far. That is why Luciferic impulses have played a major role in the way the social structure has developed. Even at school, young children are accustomed to 'being first', 'being second', 'being third'. Think of the Luciferian ambition that has been at work when people want to be first! Then there are the titles and medals and everything that goes with them! Imagine how the social structure has been built up by the Luciferian! But this time is coming to an end; that too would be something to be recognized! The time is coming to an end, the Luciferic is dwindling more and more to its shadowy areas. That too would be a good thing if people were a little more vigilant with regard to the dwindling of the Luciferic - for the time being, for the near future. But they are unwary of something that is coming in again in a different way to do harm. This is: an Ahrimanic takes the place of the Luciferic. The slogan has been dropped: Free rein to the brave! - I have already said: What use is it to say “Free rein to the brave” and then still consider the nephew to be the bravest! No, it depends on looking into the concrete, looking into the real. But that is not what I mean now. What I do mean is that an entire Ahrimanic system is emerging, with very dangerous side effects. This Ahrimanic system is somewhat connected with the buzzword that is now used in the field of education and is called the gifted test. This gifted test is praised everywhere. People are possessed of it in a purely devilish way when they talk about it. From a number of hundred gifted boys and girls who have particularly good grades, the most gifted are to be selected, the best in terms of intellectuality, power of concentration, memory and so on. And so they are tested using the latest psychological methods. For example, intelligence is tested in a very peculiar way in experimental psychology. Three terms are presented to the children: murderer, mirror, rescue. Now they are supposed to find the connection through their intelligence. The one who merely finds the connection: the murderer sees himself in the mirror like the other people – he is merely stupid. But the one who finds the “most obvious” connection: the person looks in a mirror, sees the murderer who is just creeping up on him, and can save himself - that person is normal. A “gifted” person would be the one who says, for example, that the murderer creeps up to the mirror, sees his own face in the mirror, is frightened and desists from murder. Particularly clever would be the one who would say something like this: Near the one whose life is to be ended by the murderer, there is a mirror; in the darkness, the murderer bumps into the mirror, makes a sound and then desists from the murder. That is even cleverer! This is how you test cleverness! This is supposed to be something particularly great, whereas it is nothing more than the transfer of a purely Ahrimanic method, which applies to machines, to humans. The most terrible thing will come out of the mechanization of human life if one wants to find out about giftedness in this way. People need only reflect on what they themselves assumed until recently. I could show you the evidence of how nonsensically people talk when they carry out such tests. Take a whole series of people whom those people themselves also regard as important, very important people, who are now the spiritual heirs of the gifted test, let us say, for example, Helmholtz, the physicist, and others. If all of them had been tested using the gifted test method, many would have been shown to be untalented, including Helmholtz, for example. These things must all be taken much more seriously, because the salvation of the future depends on them. Nothing can be left to chance in this area. Today, events themselves teach an enormous amount.

Take the following: Imagine the period from 1930 to 1940. There could be certain people then in their forties or early fifties. Imagine you had had this thought in 1913, you would have thought: Of those living in 1913, a certain number will still be alive in 1930 and will be in leading positions; the social structure, and even the outer physical life in various areas of the earth, will depend on them. You can roughly imagine how things would have gone from 1930 to 1940 if the eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, the current young people, had then turned forty. Now take another thought and ask yourself: How many of those who would have done what you assumed for 1930 have now fallen on the battlefields and will no longer be able to physically participate in the management of physical earthly affairs? Others will take part! Imagine these two pictures side by side: the one picture: if this catastrophe of war had not occurred, then what would have been formed from the antecedents would have been in accordance with how you would have imagined the future at that time. And now the other picture that you must now imagine: How perhaps all those who could have had the most important positions have fallen on the battlefields! If you paint such a picture for yourself, you will come to a very tangible concept of the Maja, of the great deception of the outer physical plane. Is this physical plane in 1930 as it should have been if all those who were young in 1913 had lived? It would have become quite different. To think through such things is not without significance. But only spiritual science, by thinking through such things, can offer the possibility in the right sense of thinking realistically in the real world as well. Spiritual science leads you to such concepts that break away from the merely physical brain. Our present concepts are mainly bound to the physical brain, which is why the thinking of the present has a certain quality. It is precisely because the concepts of natural science, which are most closely bound to the brain, dominate the present, that our thinking in the present has a special quality: narrow-mindedness, limitation. For that is the most limited thinking, which is preferably bound to our brain. Spiritual science must tear thinking away from the brain, must set thoughts in motion. Today we have tried to present a whole series of thoughts before our soul, thoughts that are easy to move, that broaden the horizon.

But not only the horizon of thought must become broader, but also the horizon of feeling. How people became philistine because their thoughts were tied primarily to physical life! Besides narrow-mindedness, philistinism is the most important characteristic of our age. Narrow-mindedness! Men are interested in the narrowest circle. Spiritual science must lead men out again into the vastness of the universe, must unfold before them great fields of happenings, because the present can only be understood from them. Spiritual science must lead men out of narrow-mindedness. It must fight against narrow-mindedness and philistinism.

The will, too, has gradually acquired certain qualities. As a result of a certain social structure having grown out of materialistic culture, people have become unskillful. Ineptitude has arisen! People are pigeonholed into very specific subjects and actually know nothing but their subject, and are highly inept with regard to everything else. Today one meets men who, because they have not become tailors, cannot sew on a button. But spiritual science has the peculiarity of developing such concepts that are alive, that pass into the limbs, that also make man more skillful. The remedy for narrow-mindedness, for philistinism, for clumsiness is spiritual science. We need an age that leads people out of narrow-mindedness, out of narrow-mindedness, out of clumsiness, into wide horizons, into broad-mindedness, into skill. Spiritual science must be taken as full of life and with a sense of life. If we just look at the simplest concepts from spiritual science in relation to our time, we will see that the misfortune, suffering and pain of our time, which have not yet reached their peak, are intimately connected with humanity's resistance to the spirit. People have cut themselves off from the divine spiritual life, people must find the connection again with the divine spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to bring before your soul this time. Do you get more and more the feeling: the signs of the times speak clearly and audibly! But only those who have learned to read them with the means of spiritual science will find what they speak. No matter how far one goes, one can never find enough spiritual science as a vigorous and serious matter. One must always go further and further in penetrating life through that which spiritual science gives. People in our time have little courage to think through life through the forces that come from the spirit. This must be learned; that is what is mainly missing. If it is not learned, if it continues to be lacking, then what has befallen humanity as a catastrophe will last a long, long time. Therefore, one can say that one should seek a way out of the conflict of the present with spiritual science. Please take it very seriously and very deeply: then what we wanted to speak to each other about at this meeting will bear the right fruit in your hearts, in your souls.