The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the development of the individual human being as well as of the whole of humanity, we must always look for something that is not too simple, not too straightforward, otherwise we cannot really understand the complicated processes of life as they occur before our eyes every day. Even in the individual human being, we must be clear that, so to speak, two developmental currents converge. You will recall that we distinguish individual periods in the life of an individual human being (this is explained in the little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'), for example, the period from physical birth until about the 7th year, year, into the time of the change of teeth, then from the 7th to about the 14th year, then again from about the 14th to the 21st year, so these are periods that run from seven to seven years approximately. This division of human life into such individual periods is fairly regular in the first half of a normal life. This division, this structuring into seven-year periods, becomes irregular in the second, descending half of life. This is because, in the first half of our lives, we are actually living out those laws and facts that have been a kind of repetition of the regular course of human development since time immemorial, whereas in the second half of our lives we are not yet living out something that has already happened in the outer world, but rather something that will only happen in the future. Therefore, in the future, the second half of a person's life will become much more regular than it is today, more and more regular. But that is only said to point out that such a regular development takes place in human life. We know that it expresses itself in such a way that we can say: Up to the age of seven, the human being is still in an etheric, in an etheric shell. In relation to his etheric body, he is only born at the age of seven, so to speak. In relation to his astral body, he is born around the age of fourteen, and so on. What we are indicating here is actually one current of human development; it is the more external developmental current. Besides this developmental stream, there is also an inner stream, which to a certain extent runs independently of the outer stream. The inner stream includes everything that we actually have in the deeper processes, causes and effects of our karma, which continues from incarnation to incarnation.

When we say that a person develops in a very definite way up to the age of seven, fourteen, or twenty-one, then we must realize that this applies more or less, and indeed on average, to all people. We can consider these rules, which are given for example in the small writing mentioned, to be correct for all people. These rules are correct for the education of a person in our time who has few talents and abilities, but they are also correct for geniuses, for all people, because they are a law according to which the human being develops. What lies in this line of development therefore applies more or less to all people, but it is not unimportant what these people have gone through in their previous embodiments. One person has experienced many clever, beautiful, and good things. His abilities are shaped by this, his destiny is shaped by this; the actual inner core of the person is shaped by this, and this is now individual for each person. What runs alongside the outer one like an inner developmental current is, so to speak, what constitutes the particular shade of a person's nature. As a result, it may happen that, although the general division into seven-year periods applies to all human beings, the secrets of development are different for different people. Someone may come into the world with great, developed abilities. In that case, although he will also have to wait until his seventh year for the complete formation of the form of his physical body, and until his fourteenth year for the complete development of his etheric body, yet what works within is quite different from that in someone with fewer abilities.

Thus two lines of development run parallel to each other, and from this we can now also see how, so to speak, certain conflicting states of mind can arise in a person. In terms of outer development, one cannot think otherwise than that, in line with spiritual science, up to the age of 14, let us say, the abilities of the etheric body develop. At the age of 14 or 15, his astral body is actually released and born. It may then be that we are dealing with an individuality, that is, with someone who comes from previous embodiments and who has strong, great inner soul abilities. We are thus assuming the case of a person who, through his karma, through his earlier development in previous lives, has strong inner abilities. In order to live out these abilities in the world, one needs the forces, the organs of each human shell. Now, let us assume that we neglect to educate the person who has such abilities so that he can live them out through the astral body in particular. We neglect the development of his astral body in the right time. What will happen then? In order to understand what will happen, let us imagine something specific.

Let us assume that we have such a child. It grows up. We take care to ensure that it develops regularly up to the age of seven, we make sure that it eats and drinks well, that it becomes chubby. This is taken care of quite well. The child looks well-fed. We continue to ensure that the child is well-fed from the age of seven, but now we begin to disregard the rules by which the education of the child from the age of seven should reasonably be governed. We now begin to disregard these rules and make the mistake, for example, of succumbing to materialistic prejudices and saying that we want to see to it that the child comes to intellectual judgment as early as possible, that he learns to have his own judgment as early as possible. This is the case today because of our materialistic way of thinking. I have often given this example.

While between the ages of seven and fourteen particular attention should be paid to developing memory, the focus is on teaching arithmetic. Whereas in the past children were taught 2 × 2 = 4 and similar facts before they had understood the concepts, today we say that children should not be taught anything that they merely learn by rote; they should only be taught things about which they can form an opinion. They work with red and white balls. Instead of accustoming the child to authority, which should be the source of truth for the child between the ages of 7 and 14, they teach the child to become precocious in judgment. While the child of this age should feel: “I must believe what the revered authority says,” the child is made to feel – the fact that the child needs to have parents and teachers whom it looks up to with heartfelt reverence and from whom it accepts truth out of a sense of self-evident authority is neglected.

Let us assume that we disregard this, that the word authority must be sacred for the period between the ages of seven and fourteen. If we disregard such important laws between the ages of seven and fourteen, then from the age of fourteen or fifteen a properly developing astral body cannot arise out of an inadequately developed etheric body. And now let us assume that we are dealing with a person who has brought special powers with him from previous lives, good and strong abilities, but for which he needs an astral body that can be ignited by high ideals. It depends, for example, on the astral body that one can flare up with righteous anger when one sees an injustice in one's surroundings, long before one can judge it in independent, clear thinking. Such qualities of a healthy astral body would have to be present, according to the nature of the person concerned, because he needs them so that what lives in him after his previous incarnations can come out. Now let us assume that we have neglected the principles that must be observed in order for the astral body to be born capable of devotion and enthusiasm at the age of 14 or 15. Then, despite significant talents, great abilities brought from earlier, the possibility of developing these talents is still lacking because the astral body does not allow these talents to emerge. It does not have those forces, those currents, which the I, which passes from embodiment to embodiment, must use to unfold its abilities. Now we have an I that could develop high abilities; but the organs of the astral body, through which this I could express its abilities, are crippled. The developmental current that regulates the progress of the sheaths has not come into its own.

Anyone who observes life, especially in our terribly materialistic time, will find that the case I have just described is actually true of life countless times. Countless times in life it happens that someone who can see through life – trained in occult development can see through it – sees with a bleeding heart: There is something in the individuality that cannot get out because the other developmental current has not been properly taken care of by the corresponding point in time. Then, at the very point in time when the non-existent organs would be needed, the characteristic phenomena arise, which are referred to as “youthful insanity” or “dementia praecox”. All kinds of evil, bad passions arise, aberrations of the most terrible kind. Where do these aberrations come from? They do not come simply from the fact that the person in question also has tendencies that incline towards evil, but from the fact that in the present incarnation he does not have the organs to develop his good tendencies. It may be a blessing for him that these inclinations of the ego destroy, tear apart the cover, in order to create a better possibility for his development in a following embodiment. However strange this may appear, it must be taken into account, because often the development is considered far too straightforward, even by people who come to spiritual science.

Inner evolution and outer possibilities for development must coincide. This is the case for the individual human being, and it is also true for the development of an entire era. I have given you only a radical example to make it easier for you to understand what exists in many cases. It will not always appear in this radical way, but it does appear quite often in our time in the form of discontented moods, hopelessness, and not knowing what to do with oneself, especially in the period from the 14th to the 21st year. Then it remains and cannot be remedied in life. Then it remains as an inner mood of hopelessness, aimlessness, pessimism and dissatisfaction. And in this milder form it would occur more and more frequently if humanity were not to be led onto a different path by a spiritual, spiritual-scientific world view, in that materialistic thinking has made itself felt more and more in the deepest thoughts and feelings of human beings.

When one hears what has just been said, then, as a spiritual researcher, one must say: spiritual science, if one has understood just a little of it, must appear to one as something that one does not pursue as a hobby because one likes it, because one finds subjective satisfaction, bliss through it, but rather, when one has approached its deeper sides a little, one must pursue spiritual science as a duty, as a duty towards all humanity. — For those worldviews that are prevailing today lead to an ever-decreasing understanding of life. One will understand non-life ever better. And in order to understand non-life more and more, materialism was necessary for a time. Out of a mere understanding of life, one would never have been able to build steamships, railways, tunnels. Nor could one have hoped to lead our external, physical science as far as it is today, and to make further progress in this field.

People had to be led in such a way that they absorbed, as it were, into their souls such world views that could correctly express all types of cultures as special directions of the conception of existence.

No one may say: Was it not unjust that people had to absorb materialistic views over the past centuries? No, one cannot say that. It is the same souls that, after having had to endure the influence of materialism, will in future be led to spiritual life again in other incarnations.

But everything must happen in its time, at the right time. You only have to consider that certain things can be very good, quite excellent, if they are done by day. If the same things are to be done by night, then they are just bad. There is a time for everything, and so it is also in the great development of humanity, in the development of humanity. What was good in past centuries would be a terrible sin against humanity if it were to be maintained for the next centuries. Today we have arrived at the point in time when, in place of materialistic thinking, thinking and looking must come that lead into life in the spirit itself. What has been done in the past according to materialism must be followed by a spiritual world view, and people must be found who will do something to bring this spiritual world view into the human race and its history. They should know: If what one might call a spiritual world view does not arise at this time to complement the materialistic world view, then humanity will miss out on the right moment. But there are many other ways in which we could miss out on the most important things in our time. And we understand how it is that we can miss the most important things in our time when we now consider these two developmental trends, which were previously indicated for the individual, in the context of humanity as a whole.

The human being goes from incarnation to incarnation, from embodiment to embodiment. But he does not go from one embodiment to another in vain. Why does man always descend from spiritual heights to earth again and again? Why is not one incarnation on earth sufficient? The reason for this is that the earth itself changes over long periods of time, in relation to everything that is physical on it, and in relation to everything that is spiritual and soul-like on it. Compare the outward appearance of the earth, what has grown here, and what was here already 2000 to 3000 years ago. Compare the soil as it looked around Pforzheim then with how it looks today. Even ordinary natural science can provide information about what the soil looked like here 2000 years ago. But also compare what a person learned in his childhood and youth then with what he learns today, and you will have to say to yourself: The physical and spiritual life on earth is changing. The earth was quite different 2000 to 3000 years ago and has always been and will always be changing. The earth is constantly changing. And every time we descend to the earth, we encounter new conditions, we can learn new things, experience new things and live new things, combine them with our being and carry new experiences up into the spiritual world. Therefore, because we are to absorb the experiences of the earth in successive periods, we are born in successive lives on earth. We tune in to what external life can give us in the course of successive periods and what we are to learn within this life on earth. These must be in harmony.

Let us take the example of any soul that would live today. He has already lived in the time of ancient Egypt, in the time of ancient India. All the souls sitting here today have lived on earth countless times, have lived here in different circumstances and are living again today because what they learned and experienced at the time is no longer there on earth today, and new things can be experienced and learned today. Let us assume that a person, for example, in ancient Egypt, did not apply his incarnations correctly, did not extract what could be extracted on Earth at that time. Let us assume that people, as they were still isolated in ancient Egypt according to the karma of the Earth and the individual karma, had failed to unite with their soul that which could be experienced in ancient Egypt. That would not have prevented them from dying in ancient Egypt at the appropriate time. But it would have prevented them from bringing with them, when they were born the next time, what they then needed to be fully-fledged human beings. They cannot acquire this so easily in the following incarnations. But in order to avoid having stunted souls, one needs in a later incarnation what one was able to acquire in the previous incarnation from the earth conditions at that time in terms of abilities and powers. There are things that, if you have missed them, you can no longer catch up on. Perhaps you will say: Now he is painting a pretty picture for us! We cannot know whether we have missed out on something incredibly important in previous embodiments. That would be a truly bleak prospect, because we may have missed out on something terrible in previous incarnations, and then nothing would help us now! What good does it do us, for example, if we now want to turn to spiritual science as much as we can and use our current incarnation as well as possible? We may not even be able to do it, precisely because we missed something very important in our previous incarnations!

So it seems as if this truth that I have just expressed could cast a terrible perspective into your soul, making you feel desolate. Because if you can no longer make up for what you have once missed, then I have to say that no matter how hard I work on my soul, it will no longer help, because I can no longer make up for what I have missed, which I could only have poured into this soul, perhaps in ancient Indian or Egyptian times.

This bleak prospect would only apply if the conclusion drawn from it were the right one. But it is not the right conclusion, because the matter is different. It is absolutely true that what our soul would not have acquired in the ancient Egyptian, Indian, Persian, Greek times, it could no longer make up for today, that would be impossible. The only thing is that at present, in our time, there are the first incarnations of man at all in which one can consciously, through one's own fault, miss something in this direction. And that will continue for some time. And now there can also be an explanation for why spiritual science is only now beginning to come into the world: because only now are people beginning to have the opportunity to miss out on something. Now these truths must begin to reach people, because now people are beginning to have incarnations in which, if they are not properly applied, it would be more difficult to make up for what has been missed in later earthly conditions. And now it is also the case that people, if they only want to, can access the spiritual scientific explanation of reincarnation and karma and other spiritual scientific truths, so that they do not need to burden themselves with this guilt. Spiritual science will do everything in the coming centuries and millennia to ensure that people have the opportunity to use these incarnations in the right way and do not need to take on this guilt. It does not matter so much for a single incarnation, but if in our age, which has just begun and will last 2000 to 3000 years, two to three incarnations are used in such a way that one has not extracted the right thing from what one can gain on earth, then one will have missed something important in the following times. That is why spiritual science is now emerging and telling people how important it is to use their incarnations in the right way.

Now we ask ourselves: But why could not people in earlier times make these mistakes? The reason is that man has developed from incarnation to incarnation in such a way that in the distant past he himself was a comrade of the spiritual worlds. What our abilities are today, especially the limitation of our senses to the physical world, was not always there. In earlier times, man had a dim clairvoyance; he could see into the spiritual worlds. And this clairvoyance was always stronger the further back we go. In those times, man knew: I come from the spiritual world. And he not only had this abstract knowledge, but he also knew what it looks like in that world, he knew the laws of the spiritual world. He fulfilled these laws as if by instinct; instinctively. Because they were still connected to the spiritual world, our souls essentially used their incarnations properly. Because people were still connected to the divine spiritual worlds, the knowledge continued to work in them and they instinctively did the right thing under the influence of the old knowledge. It is only in our time that we live in an age where, so to speak, the gates to the spiritual world are closed, where man between birth and death is completely dependent on perceiving only in this sensual-physical world.

This age, in which the old clairvoyance has disappeared, through which people received knowledge as if from heaven, this age began – we can state the date fairly accurately – 3101 years before the Christ walked on earth. In former times there were such ages in which men, even if they did not have today's strong self-confidence, could still see into the spiritual worlds, even further back, they could see clearly into the spiritual worlds. We come to an age before the year 3101 in which men had a rather clouded but still knowledge of the spiritual world. This epoch is called Dvapara Yuga. This Dvapara Yuga or iron epoch extends over the older Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldean and Persian times. Then still further back, in even older times, we find an even deeper insight into the spiritual world among people in the Treta Yuga or silver epoch. And then we come up to just after the Atlantic catastrophe, when those people who were incarnated at that time were still able to see into the spiritual worlds in such a way that they felt they were companions of those beings that you can only recognize today in the state between death and a new birth. That is then the Krita Yuga, which begins there.

In the year 3101 BC, the age begins in which, little by little, all possibilities for people to look into the spiritual world through external natural, normal forces gradually cease. In this age - from 3101 BC to the present day - there were only old inherited remnants of dull, dim clairvoyance in some people. In this age, one could only regularly ascend into the spiritual worlds through real esoteric training. But the normal abilities of the human being developed in such a way that they only extended to the external physical world. This age is called, in an oriental expression, the Kali Yuga, the dark age, because man no longer sees into the spiritual world through his natural abilities. The Kali Yuga is therefore this age, which began around 3101 BC, and which has led people more and more to the physical plane.

The most important events that take place on the spiritual plane are not usually noticed by people because they are not sufficiently aware of them. Important things are happening in our age. The most important thing is that the Kali Yuga expired in 1899. That is to say, the age of human development has expired that was intended to lead human abilities to the observation and perception of the physical plane. And now, since 1899, an age is beginning in which, over a period of about 2500 years, other abilities will slowly be developed in human souls as normal abilities. We are already living in an age in which other abilities are being developed. Kali Yuga has come to an end, and people are living towards an age in which — without them being able to do anything for or against it — certain new abilities will develop naturally in the soul, different from those that developed during Kali Yuga.

What are these abilities? Under the influence of the Kali Yuga, those powers of man became stronger and stronger that make man an inventor, a discoverer, a processor of the physical forces of the physical plane. This is, of course, continuing, because the abilities that have once been acquired are, of course, not lost again. So one should not say that the ability to work with natural forces now ceases. But other abilities are added. In addition to what the human being acquired during the Kali Yuga, there is a special ability to see naturally in the etheric plane. This means that the age is now beginning when certain clairvoyant abilities will awaken as normal abilities in human souls, first in a few, then in more and more human souls. We must therefore distinguish these from those acquired by those who apply the methods of spiritual training to themselves, although these are much higher abilities. In every age, their abilities will go beyond what is intended as normal for humanity. But now an age is beginning in which the ability to see not only the physical, but also that which underlies the physical as the etheric, will be awakened as a normal one. That is to say, there will come souls with such abilities, and in a time that is already here, that has already begun, only they will come more and more frequently. Now, for the time being, they are still quite rare on earth. But these abilities will begin to spread more and more among people. They will be clearly evident in the years 1930 to 1940. This will be an important epoch, for then people's new abilities will be seen to emerge. Whereas today a person only sees the physical body, then he will also gain the ability to see some essential parts of the etheric body at first, but then more and more of it. This will happen. The way humanity is developing in the near future is such that there will be people, and more and more of them, finally a large number of people – actually it is intended for all of humanity – who will not only see the physical body of the human being, but this physical body as if enclosed in an etheric, as if with etheric rays and an etheric aura. That is one thing they will see. The other thing is that it will be quite strange to them: there will be images in front of them, and all kinds of things will show up in these images. At first people will not notice what it is all about, then they will think it is pathological, but then more and more people will notice that such an image is an event that takes place in two to four days and that is reflected ethereally beforehand. These abilities will already develop in the first half of our century.

There are two possibilities. One is that people today will stop at what they have acquired from the Kali Yuga through their thinking, feeling and perceiving. Those who, with their world view, their philosophy, their thinking and perceiving, stop at what they have learned up to now will very soon be finished with their judgments of fellow human beings who see such things. They will say that they are fools who are beginning to go mad, who see all kinds of deceptive things that do not exist. But there will be other people who will have heard from spiritual science that these are realities. And this will be emphasized again and again in the coming decades and centuries. They will have heard that there is such a thing as reality, and they will find the right relationship to these newly emerging abilities.

What do we do by doing spiritual science? So we are not doing something that satisfies our curiosity and is therefore our favorite pastime, but we are doing something that prepares people for what must and will come. And this, what will come, that one would simply not be able to understand when spiritual science would not exist. Mankind would lose what is to be won. And that could very well be if it should happen that spiritual science would be completely forbidden on Earth, if it could happen that all those who work for spiritual science would perhaps be starved, perhaps pushed out of their positions and left to starve. Then humanity would completely lose the opportunity to understand what will come as a natural development. If that should happen, human development would become barren and wither. It would have to continue without this impact and would wither and become barren. That is what makes spiritual science a responsible duty.

If we look at it this way, we can also ask: in what way, for example, will the effect just described become apparent? Well, the souls that are sitting here now will be embodied again in an age in which the soul abilities just described will already have been present in human souls for a long time. What will that bring about? With those abilities something else will come. It will come about that the person will be able to look back into the present incarnation. A natural ability will arise with those abilities that have just been described – belonging to them – a memory not only of the life between death and birth, but of the previous life, as a natural quality. But now it will be a matter of developing something in the present or following incarnation that can be remembered. What we do for the day, for what will have long since perished by the time we are born again, will not initially be something that can be remembered. What can be remembered will only be what has taken place in the central power of our inner being, in our I. One cannot then remember what happened as everyday occurrences. That which remains from the present incarnation until the following one must already be grasped and felt in the I. But it is true that most people do not yet have the inclination to penetrate so deeply into their inner being that they feel themselves to be an I. For, as Fichte said, most people still consider themselves to be a piece of cinders in the moon rather than an ego! But if we do not cultivate this ego, if we do not learn to recognize it through spiritual science, if we do not learn to feel it, then it is not there at all as inner soul-good. First we must create that which we are then to remember in the next incarnation.

In this way, spiritual science, by teaching man to know, creates the elements of the world that find their best expression in his I, and as facts creates that which he is to remember in his next incarnation. If a person does not apply what is offered to him in the right way, then in the next incarnation he has the ability to remember, but nothing can occur to him as the object of his memory, because he has not created anything to remember.

It is one of the greatest torments that a person can have: to have an ability and to possess nothing with which to exercise it. One will want to look back into earlier incarnations, because one will have the ability to do so, but find no object within oneself that one can bring into this power of remembrance. There will be a terrible thirst to look back into earlier incarnations. But it will be like an inner torment, an inner desire to look back, and one will see nothing because one has created nothing that one could see. So we work out in the present incarnation what is to be created as a fact, as an object for remembrance, for we attain the ability of remembering the past through the natural course of human development.

Here we have two currents again. An outer one: people acquire abilities; and an inner one: people must do what they can apply these abilities to. Everywhere we find these two currents. But the most important thing that acts as a force, as an impulse, is that people, by living their way up into this time, by getting the new ability to see the ethereal, will have a great, a greatest experience in connection with this in the course of the first half of the 20th century.

Back then, when the Kali Yuga had lasted about 3100 years, people had arrived at a state where they had to say to themselves: We can no longer look up into the spiritual realms of heaven. The gates are closed to the spiritual world. But then came first the Baptist John, then came the Christ, and they showed men that on the physical plane, through a corresponding inner development, that which is the central power of the soul, which is I, can be awakened and that through this the spiritual can be understood. The God descended as the Christ to the physical plane because human abilities had become such that they could only understand things on the physical plane. The Christ made this sacrifice to descend to the physical plane because the gods, who had not descended to it, were no longer comprehensible to people who had now developed the ability to stand only on the physical plane.

Now, however, abilities are developing again to see the supernatural, to see the ethereal. As a result, around the period from 1930 to 1940, a number of people who will be the first pioneers of this ethereal clairvoyance will see what the Christ is in this our time. Christ only lived on our Earth once in a physical body. However, our Earth has changed since that time. If someone became clairvoyant in the time before Christ's birth and looked into the world of spiritual beings and phenomena that directly surround our Earth, they did not find anything that they found after the event of Golgotha had taken place, when the Christ descended to Earth. One personality knew this exactly. There was a personality who knew from his teaching: When people become clairvoyant, they see something not yet on earth, but which will be in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth in the future, once the Christ has descended from the sun. This personality said to himself: We will experience on earth the great moment when the Christ will appear spiritually to people who are becoming clairvoyant, because he will then have descended to earth and will also be spiritually visible in its atmosphere. This personality knew this, but he had not yet reached the point where he could gain the faith from the events in Palestine that this expected being, the Christ, had already existed in Jesus of Nazareth. He could not recognize the Christ Jesus, he did not recognize him. Then the time came, when the event of Golgotha had long since passed, in which this personality became clairvoyant: Then she saw the Christ in the etheric body. Now she could see something in the earthly environment! Now this personality knew that the Christ was there. The physical reality, the physical vision did not convince him, this person, but the clairvoyant perception of the Christ in the etheric body did convince him. This personality was Paul. He was the first to see the Christ clairvoyantly in his etheric body at the event of Damascus, as He has been seen ever since the event of Golgotha by those who elevate themselves to clairvoyance.

This is even the most important event that is granted to the clairvoyantly trained today: that he sees the Christ in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. Because this ability will now occur in a larger number of people during that period, this number of people will then have the direct vision of the Christ, of the Christ in his etheric body, through natural vision, with which people will then deal as with a physical personality. The Christ will not descend to a physical body a second time, but people will ascend through their abilities into the etheric, in which He is now revealing Himself. The Christ will have come to them again in the realm of their expanded experience.

This is the return of the Christ, beginning approximately in the years 1930 to 1940 of our era. This event could pass unnoticed by people if they do not prepare to understand this great event. Humanity has to prepare itself spiritually for this future event. It should not pass unnoticed by humanity. If it were to pass unnoticed, humanity would become desolate and wither.

What I have now expressed will be proclaimed in the next two decades from this and that place, expressed in this or that form, because it is an extremely important truth, a truth that should prepare people for the most important events of our time. The times are fulfilled again, that the most significant is to happen. But in our time a materialism of most terrible kind lives, and it can happen that even those who hear and receive these teachings are tempted by the materialistic attitude and seduced by the materialistic attitude to the belief that Christ only appears again when he appears in a fleshly body. That would be a materialistic belief, only those can believe that who in truth have not risen to the contemplation that the spiritual is more real than the physical. Now, materialism could lead people into this temptation, to confuse the return of Christ in the real etheric body, visible to the higher developed abilities of people, with a carnal physical return. But if that were to happen, it would be another great misfortune for humanity. But there are enough individuals in our time, enough personalities, who will use this and who, either by falling victim to an illusion, to self-deception, or by falling victim to their own evil instincts, will present themselves as false Christs, as Christs in the flesh.

False Christs will appear in this age, in which humanity is to see the true Christ in the etheric body. But anthroposophists are called upon to be able to distinguish between the spiritual and the material and to be firmly armed against all assertions, wherever they may come from, that a Christ would come in the flesh. Anthroposophists are called upon to recognize that this would be materialism, the worst tempter, which could arise at one of the most important events in the development of humanity, at the event that we call the return of Christ, and at which it will have to be proven whether people have already come so far as not just to speak of the spirit, but to be able to recognize the nature of the spirit as something higher than the nature of matter.

It remains to be seen whether people will be ready to recognize the Christ in all His significance, precisely because He shows Himself to them as a spiritual being. This will be the greatest test for people, that the greatest impulse on our earth will show itself to them and say: You can only recognize me if you not only talk about the spiritual, but know that the spiritual is more real, more real, more valuable than the merely carnal material. - That is part of what we are to take into our feelings in order to be able to meet the coming decades, which we are heading for, in the appropriate way. This event will be important not only for those who will still be in the physical body, but also for those souls who will already be between death and a new birth. For that will be just as important for the so-called dead as death on Golgotha was not only important for the contemporary people in the physical body, but also for the souls who were in Kamaloka or Devachan. Symbolically speaking, it was said that the Christ also descended to those who were in the other world: “descended to hell”. The great test of spirituality in our century will be important for those on the physical plane, as well as for those on the spiritual plane, the so-called dead.

After the opening of the Pforzheim branch we are together again and will best fill our time by immediately entering into a spiritual theme, a theme which, through Anthroposophy, shows that we don't only absorb teaching and thoughts but that our life of feeling and of experience is enriched, calmed and protected. We do not dare imagine that teaching, imagining and thoughts are unimportant in our life of feeling. It's like this: in our time we will gradually come to say: Of thoughts and science there is enough in the world and we only need to take some or other book of instructions regarding the starry worlds or whatever else, to fill our minds with enough science. Theosophy however should be involved with mood or experience.—That is definitely correct because science, as encountered through popular lectures and publications, can offer little for the heart and soul. We don't dare conclude however that teaching, observation and knowledge are worthless.

Spiritual scientific knowledge is quite different to teachings of outer science. When we allow spiritual knowledge to really work into us, it becomes transformed in us as feelings, as soul impulses, as a way of thinking and in no other way can we acquire courage, certainty and power than through the deepening of this knowledge. It is quite different to merely recognise and know sense perceptible things and pioneering events, how things come about, than it is to penetrate behind the sensual things into the preceding spiritual events. When we allow spiritual events to work through the soul, we become warm, healthy and strong. We recognise the connections between us and that which weaves throughout the entire world as spirit and soul, the originators of all appearances. Consequently we want to come to grips with the relationship between the outer sensual world, outside, and our soul. On looking at our own souls, we find so to speak those things closest to us—suffering, joy, pain and pleasure—and now the question arises: When spiritual sciences says that everything in the world is spirit-penetrated, then we can argue that suffering, joy, pain and pleasure can also be found in those things which surrounds us, as well as in those things which we also meet as being callous, painless and insensitive.—We need to acquire the right way of thinking about things around us, through Anthroposophy.

We see for instance the various plants, animals and minerals around us. Not only do animals equally give us joy and suffering, pleasure and pain; that no one doubts. With plants and the apparently lifeless world of stones we can come to doubt that feelings, pleasure, joy and pain can be inherent in them. It is exactly this, which we acquire as experiences related to the entire surrounding world, that all beings are not only physically linked to us but that these beings link to us in such a way as to have soul content, just as we have soul content. Now we need to deepen within us, in the right way, what spiritual research and spiritual knowledge has to say about it. It is even understood in our time, from more sensory thoughts, that the plants could posses something spiritual, yes, one may be tempted to admit that an apparently lifeless stone could contain something spiritual.

When you consider you can still easily make mistakes if you don't take into account spiritual scientific research, you can easily say: If I cut the physical body of a person then I cause hurt, the same with animals; but when I cut a plant, will it also feel hurt?—Hence I can infer that if I crush a stone, I'm hurting it also. As a result, when people think about these things they come to believe that everything happening to other beings is experienced in the same way as to human beings, and because of this belief, they find it so difficult to enter with their thoughts into knowledge of spiritual knowledge. Occult science offers us quite a different way of recognising the soul nature of plants and stones, for instance. It appears, when we contemplate the plant, that certainly, when the plant is partly damaged where it grows out of earth towards the heights, no feeling of pain penetrates the plant, that it doesn't hurt but that the opposite is the case. That which comprises the actual soul of the plant feels pleasure, almost joy, when over the surface of the earth sensitive parts of plants are destroyed. Pain only starts for the plant soul when the plant is pulled out of the earth, uprooted; a similar pain is experienced when we or animals for instance have hair pulled out. This is something which a soul can gradually experience when on the so-called way or path of knowledge.

These things only allow us to experience them in our own souls when we transform our souls in such a way as to wake the slumbering, true powers of knowledge. Then the ability begins for the soul not only to feel compassion towards other people but to have compassion for the whole of the rest of nature, and the rest of nature becomes understandable in a wonderful way.

Now we could say: what do we get from spiritual scientific research if we ourselves can't feel such things?—It is an incorrect objection if we believe Anthroposophy has no meaning. It already has an account of spiritual-soul facts of great value. When such knowledge for example speaks about the relationship of plant suffering to plant joy then we really need to think about this knowledge and should allow such thoughts to work on us. Through our mere reflection regarding this knowledge we lure out contained forces and we will soon feel that it is indeed so, what is said by spiritual science. We learn however through knowing that when we look into the wisdom of nature, the plant soul experiences pleasure when we pick it. From this we can get the notion that we can think what is going to happen should the plant have been able to experience pain. Just think about it, what a large part of the earth's beings are nourished through plants, and how, through the nourishment of people and animals the pain could increasingly be spread over the earth. That isn't the case, but pleasure and joy spreads over the earth when an animal grazes in a pasture. Whoever has knowledge about this, feels entire streams of joy weave over the earth when in autumn the sickle cuts through the blades of grain. When the young animal sucks milk from its mother it does not mean there is pain, but a definite feeling of pleasure. Thus we see into the wisdom of nature when we go through life this way.

Against these things one should never turn your back: yes, it can appear gentler under the circumstances when a plant is dug out with its roots and replanted, instead of picking flowers.—Certainly, but this doesn't change the facts that uprooting causes actual pain to the plant soul. Deliberate ripping off blossoms can naturally from a certain point of view be rebuked, but even that changes nothing about the plant soul undergoing pleasure. From various points of view it looks different. A person may consider for example, from a standpoint of beauty, that pulling out the first grey hairs seems quite justified, even though it causes pain. Something else comes to our notice when we take this comparison of the uprooting of plants and the uprooting of human hair. We start to understand what it means when spiritual science considers not a single plant, but so to speak looks at the plant growth over the entire earth. Just as hair belongs to all human beings, so plants and earth create a unity, and we understand and can also think that, what we call the “I” (Ich) in spiritual science regarding a person, we can't find in a single plant but in the central point of the earth. The plant is absolutely not a single being, but becomes part of the great living being, existing out of many single living beings, but which has their “I” in the centre of the earth.

No one dares ask the question: Is there a place for this “I” everywhere?—Certainly, because it is spirit and can penetrate all. So our earth becomes a living being. So every single plant becomes something which grows out of a large supersensible being and, on the surface, becomes what nails or hair is to the human being. When we take such a fact seriously then we no longer argue about dry cerebral concepts regarding a physical planet on which we are living but then we feel that not only are we living beings but that we are linked to a great living being which is our planet. We learn to take cognisance of this spiritual being and we learn that it concerns more than just a comparison, when, in the sap flowing through the plant something happens similar to when blood courses through the human body. We learn to transform these things in our feelings by understanding them spiritually.

When we touch a plant we experience the soul-spiritual, we feel safe within the soul-spiritual. Gradually it becomes possible to add the thought given in spiritual science: The earth has gone through divers metamorphosis. We discover, when we go back in the most distant past, that the earth appeared quite different, that for example such solid rock masses as we have today, were not present then. There had been a time when the earth existed of only air and water and a certain condition of warmth. Only gradually solidity developed from the fluid and soft conditions. On contemplating this whole development, the activity within the entire development appears to us as one of growing and thriving. At one time the earth was young and in time it will become old and aged.

If we apply all imaginings which we relate to ourselves, to the earth, then we will understand that during our earth development certain extraordinary important stages were reached. We will bring such important stages in our earth development before our souls when we contemplate the following: Already from our earth's plant growth we realize, by considering the earth as a whole, that it is a living being. Similarly various other heavenly bodies are living beings which stand in a certain relationship to us. Let us look at our sun and moon. Consider the sun. You all know what we owe to the sun. You all know that when you have rested for the night, when you had been in a state of consciousness which had brought about the astral body and the ego (Ich) leaving the physical and ether bodies—you know, when the astral body and ego return, that it so to speak expects everything which the earth owes to the sun. What would the earth be without the sun? The sun surrounds our entire earthly mass with warmth and light. But we have to consider the activity of such a heavenly body on another not only as merely substantial and materialistic but we need to be clear that this sun does not only have a physical body floating in space but the sun is inhabited by spiritual beings and that in each ray of sunshine not only physical light but also spiritual activity streams to us.

A spiritual exchange between sun and earth was always there, but it has essentially changed in the course of earthly development. While no great difference in the physical exchange between sun and earth has come about during many, many millions of years, a spiritual and meaningful stages were reached. High beings these are, who live in the light and warmth of the sun and who work into the earth from there, flooding us with light and warmth.

A Sun Being, who had up to a specific moment in time his stage in the sun, which man could through long, long earthly cycles only observe clairvoyantly, this Being descended at a specific moment from the sun down to the earth. This is something which allows us to see in depth into spiritual development: through the event which we call the Mystery of Golgotha, or in other words, through the passage of Christ on earth, the spiritual Being who had been up to that point on the sun, united himself with the earth. He connected himself with the earth. Humanity's division of earthly time into pre-Christian and post-Christian has its origin in this: that this living being, which we call the earth, underwent through this deed an important development through the appearance of Christ on earth. What was previously only found in the sun, since then can be found in the astral body of the earth. The astral body of the earth changed through the Mystery of Golgotha: at the very same moment the blood flowed out of the wounds of the Redeemer, at that moment the Christ-Soul felt itself uniting with the body of the earth.

This has to be understood in order for us to consider the reported story of Christianity in the correct light. We can ask ourselves: what then was one of the most important events with reference to the spreading of Christianity? When one looks at the propagation of Christianity one can say: firstly more had been accomplished by Paul than those who were the physical companions of Christ Jesus in Palestine; Paul who was no physical companion of Christ Jesus, who had even persecuted the Christ. Paul didn't become a believer through sharing the life and suffering of the Christ, but he became a warrior for Christ through the Event of Damascus.

In theology much dust is raised over the Event of Damascus. Yet no one comes to an understanding of the Events of Damascus but through spiritual science. Let's try to bring this into harmony in only a few words—which will be uttered now. The moment Paul's reasoning consciousness changed into the higher consciousness, what did he see? He saw in that moment this spirit in the astral world, who had become the earth spirit; he saw the living Christ, who since the Event of Golgotha had united with the earth. One can well ask: what was this light which he saw, which people could not see before?—Paul first learnt to know the Christ from the time Christ united with the earth. Thus we may point out this important moment of the earth by saying: the earth prepared itself for this, to become a worthy body for the Christ-Spirit and while the earth was preparing for the uniting of itself and the Christ-Spirit, during this time the Christ-Spirit worked into it. Christ said according to the St John's Gospel: “Whoever eats my bread, treads me with their feet.” People who walk on earth step on the earth with their feet. “Whoever eats my bread, treads me with their feet,” is an expression for the mystery which lies in this important stage of earthly development.

How endlessly profound this becomes with the inauguration of Communion with this in mind, that the earth became from then on the body of Christ! How meaningful this becomes with reference to the words: “This is my body” and that which flows through the plants: “This is my blood.” We learn to take literally what we only dared pronounce in words. So we come, when we consider the earth as alive, as a living being which gradually matures, to the right moment, ready for the acceptance of the Christ-soul.

So from all sides it appears that we encounter the physical planet as spiritual; it appears penetrated by spirit. We then learn to understand connections between that which we meet daily and the super-sensible. When we turn our attention from the plant kingdom to the stone realm then it will not appear through clairvoyant consciousness that we inflict pain when we crush a stone to dust; by contrast, when a stone is turned into dust, what we could call the stone-soul, experiences pleasure and joy. Those who have the sight know that with crushing the stone world, joy streams out of the rock. When, for example, salt is dissolved in a glass of water, pleasure spreads through the water as the salt particles move apart. The opposite is the case when through cooling the solution of salt crystallizes; through the crowding together of the stone particles pain takes place. We look again deeply into the way in which the Initiates speak to us, when they want to tell humankind something like this.

These things are not simply said. We must go through them in a spiritual way to reach an understanding of the great religious documents. It has already been said that originally no hard rock kingdom existed, that the earth was fluid. Its solidity came into existence through the gathering of parts and by hardening. What does man and animal owe to the earth's condensing? Surely so man and animal can live in the present state? Without solid ground and land the earth couldn't offer a base for man and animal. Now bring this imagination into our souls as actual spiritual history. This is hardly understood when only considered with the mind of a physicist. Only when we, with our hearts and minds, explore the earth's coming into being, then we can become conscious of what lies in the stone kingdom, that soul processes are at play, while the was earth solidifying. Pain and suffering was involved—through this, man and animal owe the possibility to live on the earth.

These are the facts that lie at the basis of Paul's words after his Initiation and perception into these things: “All creatures suffer and sigh under the gradual solidification, all creatures sigh and wait for the spiritualisation.” He points with these deep words to the innermost, to the soul of the earthy beings. Now we may en-soul everything, by looking through the eyes of spiritual science, and only through glimpsing the soul and spirit in everything, will we gradually find the world around us becoming more and more comprehensible. We come to an understanding that the world which surrounds us, as in physiognomy, is an outer expression of an inner life. Then we will learn to grasp that the world looks exactly as it appears to people. Further we will learn to understand that behind all physicality is the soul-spiritual which has to be the origin of everything physical, and when the spiritual researchers take us back they show us how in the far, distant past, everything gradually developed out of the spiritual. The human being gradually descended from the spiritual world into the physical, and we must not imagine this descent as something as materialistic as is usually done these days, but rather ask: where does this actual material world which surrounds us, originate from, which is spreading ever more around us?

Mankind were for some time through and through spiritual, embedded in the soul-spiritual. Mankind developed only gradually out of this soul-spiritual. If we glance back to a relatively short time ago—when the realms of time were long, but for the spiritual researcher they are short to name—we find that our earth didn't appear as it does today, that her countenance has thoroughly changed, above all things through the event of the Flood, which in spiritual science goes under the name of the Atlantean Flood. Under this Atlantean flooding we may consider that through air and water activity the face of the earth was completely transformed. Previously the people lived in an area of the earth where the Atlantic Ocean is today. Land existed and there our souls actually lived in previous embodiments in Atlantean bodies. If we look spiritual scientifically at these people at the beginning of this Atlantean time, they appear quite differently to our souls from today. They appear in the early Atlantean times as if they perceived everything in a different way to later. Today, when one of us, during our waking hours glances around, we perceive objects in colour and light. When in the night, the physical and ether bodies are released from the ego and astral bodies, this world disappears. We call this unconsciousness.

During early Atlantean times it was not the case that unconsciousness surrounded people when they entered into another condition during night time. Everything emerged at that time that was soul and spirit in the physical world. People for instance saw flowers before they fell asleep. During sleep they perceived the soul-spiritual of the flower in the soul-spirit world. Therefore these things were, what we call physical outer objects today, not sharply defined as today, because the people saw these as if in a mist surrounded by edges of colour. So we see how the soul too has gradually changed its look. When we go back even further, we will find that the souls only perceived the spiritual, because the physical had not solidified out of the soul yet.

Now the people on our earth were subject to an important point in their development and this moment lay in the middle of their Atlantean development. At this midpoint the people would, if a certain achievement hadn't already been reached, not have ceased perceiving the spiritual world with their nocturnal consciousness. If a certain event hadn't intervened, the people of the middle Atlantean time would for instance not have seen some or other object, like a flower, as yellow, but as it were the spirit of the plant would have appeared to them. That this happened differently was due to people allowing Lucifer and his supporters to exert their influence earlier. The Atlantean was so to speak unaware of the outer physical world; it would have appeared transparent. He had perceived the spiritual world behind everything.

What now happened for the physical world to be not spread under a transparent crystal blanket but to become opaque? Through the spiritual world becoming concealed, yet another possibility, the influence of Ahriman, or as Goethe called him, Mephistopheles, could be expressed. As a result this spirit, which we call the ahrimanic, could penetrate, and after a certain time error and illusion stepped in. That which we call Maya, illusion, could mix into the conception of the world. So behind everything which we take as the physical world, stand the principals of this world, as we call them in the Bible. Their influence penetrates everywhere. Without these influences, matter would appear transparent and reveal the underlying spiritual. As a result an enormous change came about through these events within the souls of people. When we consider how human beings developed on the earth, we see how at a certain time the luciferic and at another time the ahrimanic influences made themselves effective.

When we look back at that time when the human being was still spiritual, when solidity hadn't crystallized, we see how the forces of nature and humanity were not as separate as they are today. They were in that time much closer while the earth was still penetrated by the watery element. The softer the earth was, the more spiritual were the people—human thoughts and human feelings influenced forces of nature. When we go even further back behind the Atlantean times, we find: As human will impulses turned to anger it had quite a definite influence on fire, and thus a large portion of the earth was destroyed in order for the human being to go through the luciferic influence and stimulate evil instincts, through which in an alternate hindsight mankind acquired his freedom and independence. Thus, what we call forces of nature, were linked to human thinking during the Atlantean time.

Now it happened, through humanity's so called luciferic influence granting them independence, that it was given the possibility to influence the forces of nature through the will. Gradually human beings withdrew from the influence of nature forces. This went hand in hand with the influence of Ahriman who wanted to mask the spiritual world from the human being. People who could still see the spiritual world were able to influence nature's forces. Single people were able to withdraw from these influences, the majority of mankind not. Even today actually very few individuals have a direct influence on the forces of nature, in comparison to humanity as a whole, and when we consider humanity in its entirety then we will see accordingly that besides individual karma there exists earth karma for the whole of humanity.

This is a result of what once were a luciferic and then an ahrimanic influence. This being we call Ahriman stands in a mysterious connection to the powers of earth fire which goes back to the direct influence of a few single people. These fire powers of the earth is a life element of ahrimanic spirits and through the ahrimanic influence the collective karma of the whole human race is bound in a certain extent to Ahriman. When specific soul attitudes of mind and events enter into human development, then again the relationship between people and Ahriman is valid, and that, which enabled people to influence forces of nature, still takes place today through Ahriman and his spiritual horde.

Every time Ahriman stirs, it indicates nothing other than that something had happened in human history which attracted Ahriman and brought him into turmoil and rage. In the soul of man something happens, something which for instance lets the largest part of mankind fall into materialism. This enables Ahriman to work in his own element—he then has a living element—because human materialism attracts him more than people who become spiritual. Ahriman awakens storms, volcanic outbursts and earthquakes. Here we really have something which shows how nature and spirit are connected. Nothing happens on earth without a spiritual connection. Our soul is connected to its good and evil deeds as a result of what is going on, on earth. When the earth rages during an earthquake, we will never say it is as a result of a single person's karma, but mankind's karma. Everyone can thump his heart and say his individual karma is included here, the single must perish, because right here the valve of the earth had to open up. He will be recompensed in future.—A materialistic point of view will say this is superstitious but whoever says this doesn't realise how childishly the argument is. How can a flower grow without a spiritual basis, how can it be an expression of spirit and soul, just so no earthquake, no volcanic eruption can be without a spiritual origin, without a spiritual cause. When we, as we said, stare karma in the face, then we make it valid for the entire life of humankind.

Only when we don't bring spiritual scientific teaching into movement, it appears cold and calculated by the mind. When we however allow our feelings, our attitude of mind and our experiences to be penetrated, then we will see the earth as a living being, through and through soul and spirit, and then you will see that this earthly body is bound to spiritual beings of the most various kinds and that a very important event has come to the fore, whose effectiveness is only beginning: the appearance of Christ on earth. Through Christ alone are the consequences of Ahriman's power driven out.

As a result of spiritual science's infusion into the human heart with this Christ-Spirit, that which spreads out on earth as the entire spirit of humanity, now enables the earth right into its nature elements to come to peace and harmony.

When all human hearts in the true sense experience the Christ-Spirit then the power which will stream from this will be so strong, it will calm fire and water. Then the Christ-Spirit would bring peace and harmony into the elements of nature, and the earth itself become an expression of the spirit. The earthly body, which is a living being, would become soft and mild and rise with the human spirit and human soul towards its spiritualisation. To a higher spiritual existence the earth will rise. We can place this as a higher, further ideal and can allow this to penetrate us each moment. No moment is lost in the development of humanity which is applied in such a way that knowledge and will impulses are inter-penetrated by spirit.

In our age it has become of ever increasing importance that those souls who, by reason of their karma, have been led to Spiritual Science, should acquire a deep understanding of that which we call “The Mystery of Golgotha.” Those friends who were present at our recent Group meetings have already heard much concerning this Mystery: that it had a spiritual pre-history and that it was, as it were, the conclusion of a series of events. It was also explained that at that time in our Earth-evolution there took place the union of the Christ-Being with the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that thereby a Being walked upon the Earth of whom it may be said, “By virtue of this Being moving on the physical plane the Cosmic Christ was present in our Earth-existence.”

It is important for the whole future of human evolution that through a deeper understanding of this Mystery men should develop more and more reverence and loving and true heartfelt devotion for what occurred through that event for the evolution of mankind.

It has been said repeatedly, and is well known to you, that in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha two Jesus-children were born. The one was the Jesus who descended from the line of Solomon and bore the Ego of Zarathustra. The other, coming from the Nathan line of the House of David, was a very special Being. In the twelfth year of the life of the latter the Ego of Zarathustra passed over into him from the child of the line of Solomon, and from that time until his thirtieth year the Nathan child with the Ego of Zarathustra made himself ready to receive the Christ-Being. This event is indicated through the Baptism in Jordan when Jesus of Nazareth was permeated by the Christ-Being. At His death the Christ-Being poured Himself out into the spiritual Earth-sphere, so that mankind may become more and more able to participate in that which, proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha, can pour forth spiritual forces into the souls and hearts of all men.

In a certain sense as preparation this Mystery, as I have already pointed out, had already been accomplished three times before for the salvation of mankind: once in the old Lemurian epoch, then in the Atlantean, and once again at the end of Atlantean times. That is, three times and then a fourth time in the post-Atlantean epoch at the beginning of our own era. That which we know as the Mystery of Golgotha, however, was the only one enacted on the physical plane. The other events, which were preparatory, took place wholly in the spiritual world; but the forces which were thus developed flowed down into the earthly souls and bodies for the salvation of mankind. In all three of these preparatory events that same Being was present who was born later as the Nathan-Jesus and who was permeated by the Christ-Being. This is the essential fact in the Mystery of Golgotha that the Jesus-Being who grew up as the Nathan boy was permeated by the Christ-Being. He who was later the Nathan-Jesus had been present in the three earlier events, but not incarnated as physical man; he lived in the spiritual worlds as a spiritual Being of the nature of the Archangels; and in the spiritual worlds, in the preparatory stages of the Mystery of Golgotha, in the Lemurian age and twice in Atlantis, he was permeated by the Christ-Being.

It may be said, therefore, that there were three Archangel-lives in the spiritual world, and that the Being who lived those lives was the same as he who was later incarnated as man and is described in the Gospel of St. Luke as the Jesus-child. Three times had this Angelic being, who later sacrificed himself as Man, offered himself for permeation by the Christ-Impulse. As in Christ Jesus we have a Man permeated with the Christ-Impulse, so it may be said that three times previously we have an Angel permeated with that Impulse. And as that which was accomplished by the Mystery of Golgotha streamed forth into the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth, so did that which was brought about by the first three events pour into the Earth from out the Cosmos. Looking at the course of our human evolution we note that the Mystery of Golgotha stands in its very center. Everything that went before was in preparation for and pointed to this Event, which was the center-point of human development, and everything that has since happened is a gradual advance in the streaming of the forces of the Mystery into the hearts and souls of men.

The human principle into which these forces stream, if it makes itself receptive, is that which is able to develop its consciousness in the world of the physical plane. We cannot speak to a newborn infant about Christ Jesus; there are no means whereby we can make him understand what He is. We may show him a picture such as the Sistine Madonna with the Jesus Child, or a representation of the Crucifixion, but could we look into his soul we should know that he cannot possibly be approached in these first stages of his life by means of our external methods of education on the physical plane. We may indeed, when he first begins to lisp, accustom him to pronounce the name of Christ, and we can surround him with ideas about Christ, but we find that the deeper understanding of the heart is not yet ready. One thing is clear to everyone able by means of Spiritual Science to look into the child's mind: only when he has reached an age when he can look back in memory, and his Ego-consciousness has awakened, is it at all possible for us to convey to him by our external education even the faintest glimmerings of a feeling for Christ. Nor during the first few years after the awakening of the Ego-consciousness will there be any great understanding. Nevertheless all that we can give him in the way of ideas about Christ without dogma, and all we can convey by means of words and ideas containing something of the Christ-Impulse, will be of advantage throughout the whole of his later life. After the awakening of the Ego-consciousness, though it be only a glimmer, and when we are still unable to work on the child by physical means, he will look upon a picture of the Madonna and Child or at the Cross on which hangs the Christ in quite a different way from before. For just as the Mystery of Golgotha has entered the earthly evolution of man, so is it also destined to work in the advancement of spiritual life on the physical plane. Man, in fact, only enters the physical plane consciously when his Ego awakens. What occurs before this? Three things, which I have pointed out in former lectures, precede the awakening of the Ego in the child—three things of immense importance.

The child learns to walk; that is to say, he learns to raise himself from the position in which he was incapable of lifting his body from the earth level towards the heavenly heights of the Cosmos. He is now in that position which, above all, distinguishes man from the animals. Having learnt by his own inner forces to assume it, he turns his gaze away from the earth at which the animal is compelled to look by reason of its nature and form. (There are exceptions in the animal world, but they are only apparent.)

It is this upright position that the child learns to acquire before the awakening of his Ego-consciousness. In our present post-Atlantean life we recapitulate those things which, as man, we have acquired only in the course of the ages. This power to stand and to walk in an upright position was acquired by slow stages in the old Lemurian epoch, and we now recapitulate it in infancy before our Ego awakens to consciousness. This pre-knowledge is crowded into a time of life when the process does not yet depend upon our consciousness but works as an unconscious impulse towards the upright position.

In the case of the animals which have an approximately upright walk the whole organism is so arranged that they assume this attitude by nature. But like so many of the comparisons which are made this one is incomplete. Man, in the early stages of his life and before his Ego-consciousness has awakened, is destined by means of the rudiments of this Ego to bring himself to a vertical position, to raise himself out of the condition he still occupied during the old Moon period when the line of direction of his spine was practically horizontal, parallel with the Moon's surface. During the old Lemurian time he learnt to alter the Moon direction to that of the Earth. This came about because, during the Earth development, the Spirits of Form poured the Ego into man out of their own substance. And the first manifestation of this in-flowing of the “I” was that inner force by means of which man raised himself into an upright position. Thus, through this position, he is wrested from the Earth. The Earth contains within itself spiritual forces capable of streaming through the spine as in the case of the animal body where in its natural growth it remains horizontal. But the Earth has no forces enabling it directly to serve the human being who, through his Ego after it awakens later to consciousness, can raise himself upright. In order that man may develop harmoniously with an upright position and vertical walk, forces had to stream into the Earth from the Cosmos, the extra-earthly.

If, during the old Lemurian epoch, the first Christ-Event had not taken place, Lucifer and Ahriman would have been able to bring about disaster to the whole of humanity since man, through his upright position, was wrested from the spiritual forces of the Earth. In that old Lemurian epoch, in the realm which is the nearest spiritual sphere to our Earth, the Being—at that time, however, of an angelic nature—who later on became the Nathan-Jesus, was permeated with the Christ-Being.

This was a first stage of the Mystery of Golgotha. The consequence was that in that old Lemurian epoch—but in etheric spiritual heights—the being who later became the Nathan-Jesus, and who otherwise would have had the form of an angel, took on human form (not of flesh, but a human etheric form). In the super-earthly region Jesus of Nazareth is to be found as an etheric angel-form. Through permeation with the Christ he then assumed etheric human form. Thereby something new entered the Cosmos and rayed down upon Earth and made it possible for man, the physical earthly human form, into whom streamed the force of the etheric super-earthly Christ-Being, to protect himself from that destruction which must have overtaken him had not the Formative Force, which enabled him to become an upright harmonious being, permeated and lived on in him. Disorder must inevitably have entered had not this form-giving force, which was able to stream into mankind because of the first Christ Event, poured in with the forces of the physical Sun. This which man received into himself in the old Lemurian epoch has since lived on in the evolution of humanity. We take the right view of a growing child when we see him emerging from the crawling, wriggling, helpless state and managing for the first time to stand upright or walk, when we realize that his being able to do so has only become possible because the first Christ-Event took place in the old Lemurian time for the help and salvation or mankind; because he who, as the Nathan-Jesus, was permeated by Christ, took on as a spiritual etheric being the human etheric form as the result of that permeation.

Yes, my dear friends, Spiritual Science is here that we may enrich our feelings. Such a feeling as can live in our souls when we see a little child learning to stand upright and to walk has most certainly a deep religious background. We should often call to mind why the child walks and realize how we must thank the Christ-Impulse for it. Then we have enriched our conception of the world through Spiritual Science and acquired a feeling for our environment which we could not possess otherwise. Through Spiritual Science we take note, as it were, of the protectors and guardians of a child's growth and development and see how the Christ-Force radiates around his being.

You will have seen from my descriptions of Atlantean times taken from the Akashic Records that our Atlantean forefathers were dumb. The Atlantean man was actually the first to learn to speak, and the Akashic Records show how that came about. Learning to speak is the second capacity which a child acquires before the actual Ego-consciousness awakens, the awakening coming after he has learnt to speak. Learning to speak depends altogether on a kind of imitation, the aptitude for which, however, is deeply embedded in human nature. Speech came to man as a consequence of progressive development. The Spirits of Form poured themselves into man and permeated him, and thereby he became able to speak a language, to live his earth life on the physical plane.

Thus, by means of two principles, viz., the upright position and speech, he wrests himself free from those spiritual forces that are active upon the Earth. Animals are permeated by those forces; they do not in reality speak. Speech through gestures is not the speech of man. If, by means of training or other methods, animals were to be taught a speech similar to man's, special conditions would arise external to their bodily structure. These conditions must some day be dealt with by Spiritual Science, but they are outside our subject to-day. We will restrict ourselves to the normal development of man by saying that human speech was established in man from out of divine heights through that which the Spirits of Form poured into him, and we will consider how he has transformed himself from a dumb into a speaking being.

Man has made himself independent of those forces which spiritually flow through the Earth, just as through acquiring the power to stand upright he made himself independent of the first stream. If he had been abandoned entirely to the Earth, if Cosmic-spiritual influences had not come down to Earth and poured into him, everything connected with his speech must have become debased through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. If nothing had been brought about by Christ, man in the Atlantean epoch would so have developed his whole life-culture—all his bodily organs: larynx, tongue, throat, etc., and indeed even the organs lower down such as the heart in so far as they are connected with the former—that he would only have been capable of expressing his own selfish joy or pain, desire or bliss, in poor babbling sounds somewhat like the utterances of Sibyls or mediums. Certainly he would have been able to utter much more artistic or intelligent sounds than an animal can produce, but these sounds would only have been expressive of that which lived within him, of the bodily processes taking place in his organism. He would have found expressive interjections for these only; his speech would have consisted entirely of interjections. Whereas we now limit our interjections to a few words, the human art of speech with all its subtleties would have developed at that time only as far as a language of such interjections. This disorder in the power of speech in so far as it would have affected man's inner being was averted; the second Christ-Event prevented it from entering human evolution. Through the fact that for the second time the Being in the etheric heights, who later became the Nathan-Jesus child, received into himself the Christ-Being who henceforward permeated the bodily organs of man, man became capable of uttering more than interjections. The power of grasping the objective was brought about through the second Christ-Event.

But the human capacity for expressing the working of the mind in words was again faced with danger. Through the second Christ-Event it might indeed have come to pass that man would have found not only sounds, interjections and words to express the feelings of his inner being; in a certain sense he might also have been able to give out what he had called forth as an inner speech movement. But the power of so describing outer things in words, in order that the words should rightly indicate them, was still in danger from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences right into the Atlantean epoch. Then came the third Christ-Event. For the third time that Being in the spiritual heights, later to be born as the Nathan-Jesus, united himself with the Christ-Being and again poured the forces so received into the human power of speech. The force of this Christ-Jesus Being now permeated once more the organs of the human body in so far as those organs come to expression in the power of speech. In this way it was made possible for the power of speech to create, by means of words, actual signs representative of the external environment, thus enabling mankind to create language as a means of communication between the different inhabited regions. A child learns to speak, but he could never do so if these two Christ-Events had not taken place during the Atlantean epoch. Through Spiritual Science we can enrich anew our inner feelings if we remember, when we see a child beginning to speak and gradually improving his power of expression, that the Christ-Impulses rule within the unconscious nature and that the Christ-Force lives in the child's power of speech, guarding and stimulating it.

After the occurrence of the three Christ-Events, which have again been described to-day from a certain standpoint in their influence on human evolution, came the post-Atlantean epoch. In this evolution the mission of the peoples belonging chiefly to that stage of man's development known to us as the Egyptian-Chaldean was to recapitulate what had happened for humanity in the Lemurian epoch; but at the same time to permeate it with consciousness. Quite unconsciously man learnt to stand upright in the Lemurian epoch, and to become a speaking being in the Atlantean epoch. Quite unconsciously he took in the Christ-Impulse at that time because his power of thought had not been awakened. In the post-Atlantean times he has had to be led slowly to understand what it was that he had thus taken in unconsciously in prehistoric ages. It was the Christ-Impulse which enabled him to stand upright and look up into the cosmic heights. In the Lemurian epoch man lived as he was obliged to do. Later the peoples of Egypt, who were not yet fully conscious but in a condition preparatory to the attainment of full consciousness, had to be led to revere what dwells in the human power of erectness. The Initiates, whose mission it was to influence the culture of Egypt, taught the people to revere that power by causing them to build the Pyramids which reach up from the earth towards the Cosmos. Even now we cannot but marvel at the way in which, through the working of the cosmic forces into the whole form and position of these structures, this power of the upright is brought to expression. The Obelisks were erected so that man might begin to penetrate into the power of the perpendicular. The wonderful hieroglyphics in the Pyramids and on the Obelisks, which were intended to point to the Christ, awakened to consciousness the super-earthly forces of the Lemurian epoch.

As regards the power of speech, however, the Egyptians could not even acquire that dim comprehension which they had for the power which enables man to stand upright. Their souls had first to undergo the right schooling, so that in later times they might be able to understand the riddle—how the Christ lives in man's gift of speech. That riddle was to be received with the most sacred reverence by the maturing human soul. This was provided for in the most wonderful way by the Hierophants, the Initiates of the Egyptian civilization, when they erected the enigmatic Sphinx with its dumb, granite form which only produced sound under the influence of the Cosmos when the human beings of that day were in an exalted state of consciousness. In the contemplation of the silent Sphinx, from which sound only proceeded at sunrise under certain cosmic conditions and in certain relations, there came to man that deep reverence by which the soul was prepared to understand the language which must be spoken when it would be brought to higher consciousness how the Christ-Impulse gradually enters into the evolution of earthly humanity. That which the Sphinxes themselves could not yet say, although they prepared the way for it, had to be said to mankind. In the forming of the word-movement lies the Christ-Impulse.

This was announced to mankind in the words:

In the Primal Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.
The same was in the Primal Beginning with God.
It was there where all things came into being,
And nothing came into being but through the Word.
In the Word was the Life, and the Life was the Light of men.

“In the Word was the Life, and the Life was the Light of men.” These words are to be found where the Gospel was born out of the fourth post-Atlantean age; when man, prepared by the Greco-Latin civilization, had reached the stage when he was to recapitulate in the fourth post-Atlantean age what had taken place before. Just as the reverence for the upright position was recalled in the Egyptian epoch, so now the reverence for the Word was recalled. Thus do the super-human spiritual forces work into the evolution of humanity.

A third thing which the child has to learn before he actually awakens to the Ego-consciousness is to form ideas, to think. This power of thinking was reserved for the humanity of the post-Atlantean epoch; and, indeed, for the humanity of the fourth age in that epoch. Before that men thought in pictures. I shall treat of this subject further in my book, Riddles of Philosophy, which is about to be published. The child, too, thinks in pictures. It was only gradually given to humanity to think in thoughts, this faculty not being aroused in man until the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ. From that time onwards the thinking of thoughts has developed more and more; we now stand in the middle point. It is through the development of this power that the Ego can be grasped. In order that thinking, too, might be united with the Christ-Impulse, that thinking as such might not come into disorder in its activity on the Ego, there came the fourth Christ-Event, the Mystery of Golgotha.

If our thinking is gradually to be brought more and more into order, to develop on the right lines so that our thoughts shall no longer be chaotic and confused, but filled, permeated with inner feeling, if there is to be an increasing development of healthy thinking based upon truth—it will be because thinking has acquired, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the fourth Christ-Event, the impulse which it could only acquire as a result of the Christ-Impulse having poured itself out into the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth.

This outpouring occurred for the first time in the Lemurian epoch when the upright position of man was threatened by Lucifer.

It occurred for the second time in the Atlantean epoch when man's power of speech which, as an expression of his inner being, was in danger of being disordered, was saved.

Towards the end of the Atlantean epoch it occurred for the third time. When the Christ permeated the spiritual being of the later Jesus of Nazareth, the gift of speech, inasmuch as words are signs which represent things in the outer world, was delivered by Christ from danger.

The fourth danger was to man's thinking, the inner representation of his ideas. From this danger man is saved by permeation with thoughts on such forms as live within him—forms such as that which flowed out into the spiritual sphere of the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. This can be the case even now if man will prepare himself for it through Spiritual Science.

My dear friends, we have progressed so far in the evolution of humanity that the first words of the Gospel of St. John may be set forth in another form, in the following form:—

In the Primal Beginning is the Thought,
And the Thought is with God,
And a God-like being is the Thought.
In it is Life,
And the Life shall become the Light of my Ego.
And may the Divine Thought shine into my Ego
That the darkness of my Ego may grasp the Thought Divine.

It was not expressed quite clearly, but human evolution strove forward in this direction.

The fourth post-Atlantean civilization began in the eighth century before Christ. About three and a-half centuries later thought had ripened sufficiently to be expressed by the Greek philosophers with such clarity that it led to the Platonic Philosophy. Then the life of man was permeated with the Christ-Impulse. With the dawn of the fifteenth century after Christ the fifth post-Atlantean age began. There was exactly the same length of time between the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean age and the understanding of thought as there was between the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age and the conscious utterance of the nature of thought, that is to say, until Hegel. Human thought attained its highest point with Hegel: “The living and weaving of thought in truth is the causative Spirit.” What Hegel says, in a form so apparently quite incomprehensible, can really be expressed as follows:—

In the Primal Beginning is the Thought,
And Infinite is the Thought.
And the Life of the Thought is the Light of the Ego.
May light-giving Thought fill the Darkness of my Ego,
That the Darkness of my Ego may grasp the Living Thought
And live and weave in its Divine Primal Beginning.

Thus with rhythmical steps the evolution of humanity goes forward. Humanity has not yet advanced very far; even Hegel was much maligned. It may well be said that “The Light-giving Thought did indeed shine into the Darkness, but the Darkness wished to know nothing of it.” When man learns to understand the Life of Thought he will understand what devolves upon humanity in its further existence.

And now there is still something more to be said, as we are standing on the ground of Spiritual Science. Later epochs are always being prepared for during those that precede them. And inasmuch as we stand within the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, inasmuch as we foster Spiritual Science and have continuously more to contribute to the understanding of living thought, of the thinking which is becoming clairvoyant—we have at the same time the sixth Post-Atlantean epoch.

Just as the Christ-Impulse now streams into the thoughts of life, so will it stream later into something which is indeed one of the qualities of the human soul but must not be confused with mere thinking. The child develops his capacities out of the unconscious. When he attains to Ego-consciousness he enters the sphere in which he can acquire, in which he must develop, all that can come to him from outside through the Christ-Impulse. When the child has learnt to walk, when he has learnt to speak, and when with learning to think, he has begun to work through to the Ego, we can see how the conscious Christ-Impulse, which entered through the Mystery of Golgotha, begins gradually to work upon him. At the present time there is something else among the powers of the human soul which is not yet able to take in the Christ-Impulse. It is possible to introduce the Christ-Impulse into the power of walking upright, and into speaking and thinking; these things are possible because of that which has been done for the civilization of mankind for centuries.

We have now to prepare for the introduction of the Christ-Impulse into a fourth element, a fourth human capacity, if we truly stand on the foundation of Spiritual Science. We must consider this, too! The soul-capacity into which the Christ-Impulse cannot yet be directed, but into which we must prepare to direct it, is the human memory. For in addition to the walking and standing upright, the speaking and thinking, the Christ-Force is now entering the memory. We can understand the Christ when He speaks to us through the Gospels. But we are only now being prepared as human beings for His entrance also into the thoughts which live in us and which then, as remembered thoughts and ideas, live on further in us. And a time will come for humanity which is now being prepared but which will only be fulfilled in the Sixth Great Period of humanity when men will look back upon that which they have lived through and experienced, upon that which lives on within them as memory. They will be able to realize that Christ Himself is present in the power of Memory. He will be able to speak through every idea. And if we make concepts and ideas alive within us Christ will be united with our memories, with that which as our memory is so closely and intimately bound up with us.

Man, looking back at his life, will realize that just as he can remember, just as the power of recollection lives within him, so in this recollection there also lives the Christ-Impulse which has streamed into it. The path which is shown to man is to make the words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” more and more true. And the way will be made smooth through the Christ-Impulse gradually drawing into man's power of memory. The Christ-Impulse is not yet within the memory. When it actually comes, when it lives not only in the understanding of man but is poured out over the whole length and breadth of his memories, he will not have to turn to external documents to learn history, for then his whole power of memory will be extended. Christ will live in this memory. And when Christ has entered into the power of Memory, when Christ lives in that power, man will know that until the Mystery of Golgotha Christ worked outside the Earth; that He prepared for and went through that Mystery, and that He works on further as an Impulse in history. Man will be able to survey this in the same way as he now perceives facts which live in his ordinary life as Memory. He will not be able inwardly to survey the earthly evolution of humanity otherwise than by seeing the Christ-Impulse as the central point. The whole power of Memory will be penetrated, and at the same time strengthened, by the entrance into it of the Christ-Impulse. In time to come, if we grasp Christianity in a living way, the following words will also hold good for us:—

In the Primal Beginning is Memory,
And the Memory lives on further,
And Divine is the Memory.
And the Memory is Life.
And this Life is the Ego of Man
Which streams into Man himself,
Not he alone, the Christ in him.
When he remembers the Divine Life
In his Memory is the Christ.
And as the radiant Life of Memory
Christ will pour Light
Into every Darkness of the immediate present.

We shall be able to say that Christ is in our inner soul-life. Many of us will feel it to be so if we learn to unite ourselves with the Christ-Impulse, even as the human child learns to stand upright and to speak because he has united himself with the Christ-Impulse. Looking upon our present faculty of memory as a preparatory stage, many of us also realize that it must fall into disorder in the future unless it has the will to allow itself to be permeated with the Christ-Impulse. Should there be upon the Earth a state of materialism in which the Christ is denied, the power of Memory would fall into disorder. More and more people would appear whose memory was chaotic; who would become duller and duller in their dark Ego-consciousness if memory were not to shine into this darkness of the Ego.

Our power of Memory can only develop in the right way if the Christ-Impulse is perceived aright. History will then be a living memory because a true understanding of events has entered the memory; human memory will understand the central point of world-evolution. A perceptive faculty will then arise in man and his ordinary memory, which at present is only directed to one life, will extend over former incarnations. Memory at the present time is in a preparatory stage, but it will be endowed through the Christ. Whether we look without and see how as children we have developed as yet unconsciously, or through an intensive deepening of our soul forces look within to what remains in our memory as our inner being—everywhere we behold the living force and activity of the Christ-Impulse.

The Christ-Event which is now approaching us—not in the physical but in the etheric, and connected with the first kindling of the power of Memory, with the first kindling of the Christ-permeated Memory—will be such that Christ will approach man as an Angel-like Being. For this event we must prepare ourselves.

Spiritual Science is not simply to enrich us with mere theories. It is to pour into us something which will enable us to accept that which meets us in the world, and that which we ourselves are, with new feelings and perceptions. Our life of feeling and perception can be enriched if, through Spiritual Science, we penetrate in the right way into the nature of the Christ-Impulse and its sovereignty in man, in the spiritual being of man. It is well for us to think often on the following:—

In the Primal Beginning was the power of Memory.
The power of Memory shall become Divine;
And a Divinity shall the power of Memory become.
All that arises within the Ego shall become
Something which has arisen
Out of the Christ-permeated, God-permeated Memory.
In it shall be the Life;
In it shall be the radiant Light
Which, out of the Thinking which remembers,
Shines into the Darkness of the present time.
May that Darkness as it is to-day
Comprehend the Light of the Memory which has become Divine!

When we take into our hearts the meaning of such words as these, we take in something which is right for us human beings to receive. Just as the plant forms the seed for the next plant life, so do we learn to perceive and feel within ourselves not only the fruits that come to us from former incarnations, but also how to pass over into our future incarnations. It would go ill with our power of Memory in future incarnations if we were not permeated with the Christ-Impulse. Our Thinking is at yet permeated with the Christ-Impulse in the barest measure, and already this Impulse is approaching our Memory. May we learn, through Spiritual Science, to live not only for the transitory man who exists between birth and death but for that man who passes through ever-recurring incarnations. Let us learn, through Spiritual Science, what it means for the full development of the individual soul to have the right understanding, the right feeling and perception for the most powerful Impulse in the whole evolution of humanity—the Christ-Impulse.

Question: When the Bible speaks of both the “Ascension” and the “Descent of Christ into Hell,” where did the body of Christ go?

Rudolf Steiner: There are four [main] points of view regarding the Bible: Firstly, there is the point of view of the] believing mind. Here one simply says: Isn't the Bible enough for us? Secondly, we have the point of view of the free thinkers: here one becomes wiser than the believers. Thirdly, we see the advancement to a higher point of view: here the Bible stories are no longer viewed merely childishly, but everything has a “symbolic meaning”, is myth. Everyone can then interpret the Bible as they want, more or less ingeniously. Fourthly, there is the view that points to the spiritual facts. [If we take this point of view, we can say:] It is about an earthquake that took place; a crevice opened into which the body could fall and which then closed again. The clothes were blown around by the storm and then lay as described in John. This correspondence between spiritual vision and the Bible story is quite moving. The “descent into hell” expresses a “transformation” of life between death and a new birth through Christ.

Question: Can work alone be religion?

Rudolf Steiner: This question seems to me to be like saying: Can you feed everyone with apples? What is work? Everything that is done is work; the most physical of tasks and the most delicate of spiritual tasks are both work. Religion, on the other hand, has a relationship to divinity and to immortality. There is not much to begin with in such a question.

Question: What is meant by the “ascension of Christ”?

Rudolf Steiner: Those closest to Christ began to see that Christ had found the transition into the earthly atmosphere. This appears to the clairvoyant souls of his closest followers as his ascension.

Question: Why do we need spiritual science? Isn't the Bible enough?

Rudolf Steiner: Those who speak in this way are expressing a preference. One must draw from the facts that which appears to be one's duty towards humanity. Only superficial people today believe that they “have” the Bible. One could also say: it is nourishment for the simplest and can never be fully understood by the wisest, because it contains such depths.

Question: What does it mean to pray in the Christian sense?

Rudolf Steiner: To engage with Christ. It is only questionable when it is done in an egotistical way. One person may ask for rain, the other for sunshine, and both pray to the same God. Similarly, when two armies face each other, about to fire bullets, both pray for victory. It does not even have to be the case that the bullets are consecrated, which has indeed happened. “But not my will, but yours be done” - that is the good tone that belongs to every prayerful mood.

Question: Is the Buddha a similar phenomenon to the Christ?

Rudolf Steiner: Buddha stands at the end of an epoch, Christ is the beginning of an epoch. Buddha's speeches were more heartfelt: for example, the parable of the chariot, [in which the sage asks the king, who has come by chariot, what the chariot is: the shaft, the wheels? And he teaches him: the chariot is] only name and form. Can you - Buddha asks - drive with the shaft and the wheels alone? Can you then drive with name and form alone? [Just as only a name or a form holds the individual parts together - wheels, shaft, carriage body and seat - so also the individual abilities, feelings, thoughts and sensations of the soul of man do not hold together anything that can be described as a special reality, but is also only a name or a form.] – Goethe's words apply here:

Whoever wants to recognize and describe something living,
first seeks to expel the spirit,
then he has the parts in his hand
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

The Christian way of thinking provides this spiritual bond everywhere. Six hundred years before Christ, the Buddha said: illness is suffering, death is suffering; six hundred years later, the crucifix, the dead Christ on the cross, became the symbol of life; such are the changes of the times.

Question: Can music convey spiritual life?

Rudolf Steiner: It can be a help, but one cannot claim that it contributes to the elevation of the soul today.

Question: [Is Drews right when he describes the Greek logos as “vague” ?]

Rudolf Steiner: We certainly do not want to agree with Drews when he describes the Greek logos as vague. It is not unclear, but it would be inappropriate to enter into a debate about it at this time. We must not forget the development of time. Take today's astronomy with all its knowledge, for example: one could call Copernicus unclear in comparison, but he was a starting point, especially for today's astronomy.

Question: Judging by your lecture, Jesus could only be considered the Christ from the age of thirty: didn't the Jesus being already have divinity within it before the baptism in the Jordan?

Rudolf Steiner: It did not; [the Christ] first had to descend from the divine worlds. Today, people often think that Christ and Adonis are the same. This is like confusing a person who wore certain clothes ten years ago with a person who is wearing the same clothes today as that person wore ten years ago. A famous theologian in Berlin said: “Show me a single word in the New Testament that cannot be found somewhere else in the Bible.” [It depends on who says these words and in what context], because when a schoolboy speaks the same words as the schoolmaster, it is not the same. In the sayings of Christ, everything that has been said before becomes something quite different, something new. Robertson Smith believes that he has found the Lord's Prayer as an earlier, [pre-Christian] prayer because the wording sounds somewhat similar. Let us assume that a child has a poem by Goethe – it cannot understand it because it is too young, even though it may have heard all the words from the poem before. It hurts when such [superficial] judgments are made over and over again, because they hinder the progress of culture. [That such judgments are taken seriously] stems only from people's belief in authority: science has proven it.

Question: Has humanity deteriorated since the Mystery of Golgotha?

Rudolf Steiner: Before [the Mystery of Golgotha] it deteriorated, then [after the Mystery of Golgotha] it improved.

The title of the today's talk How Does One Disprove Theosophy? may appear strange at first. However, it seemed to me that it could be a good introduction to understand the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview to let our thoughts wander over this subject. If spiritual science wants to gain the hearts of many contemporaries, it is particularly necessary that it is not only a worldview but also that from this worldview and philosophy of life impulses originate which should give us strength, security, and hope for life.

Nothing is more dangerous for a worldview than fanaticism. This asserts itself just with the various worldviews; everybody knows this. If theosophy or spiritual science should give an impulse just in this direction, it has to be unfanatical, that means to understand its opponents and their objections completely. How easily does one regard an opponent as an illogical, maybe even as a bad person? Spiritual science should get itself into understanding the opponent and his reasons. It has every reason to do this. Indeed, it can satisfy some longings of life, but one must say on the other side, the way is rather far to the depths to recognise the validity of its assertions and teachings. The difficulties that face someone who wants to find the way conscientiously to theosophy from the everyday life are just the biggest ones.

Hence, I want to prepare the talk that I will hold on 25 March here and that shall introduce into the being of theosophy in positive way with a consideration of the possible and up to a certain degree entitled objections. However, to be able to speak about such objections, we have only to come to an agreement what theosophy—meant here—wants to be. Since it is sure that one cannot be successful with any theosophical book. Above all, I want to speak of theosophy as far as it claims to be taken seriously as science. What is now theosophy if we disregard everything that sticks to its heels in dilettantish way?

Theosophy wants to be a worldview that leads to the spiritual world. It wants to give scientific reasons of that view which states that behind everything that our senses say about the outside world that our mind engaged in the brain says about the outside world one can recognise a spiritual world. In this spiritual world, only the reasons of everything are that takes place in the sensory world and in the intellectual world.

With it, however, we would not differ as theosophists very much from supporters of this or that worldview. Since today more and more people, also of the outer science, are convinced that behind everything that the outer science can investigate something else is concealed that is unknown at first. Now it is not substantial for theosophy or spiritual science that one admits that something spiritual exists behind any physical, but the essentials are that the human being recognises to a certain degree and recognises in higher and higher measure—if he enables his own soul—what there is behind the physical world. Theosophy or spiritual science cannot agree with those who state that there are limits of human knowledge.—We have to confine ourselves, however, as human being to that which the senses recognise what methodical science can investigate. However, we can assume that one can extend these limits of human knowledge more and more, so that the human being develops his cognitive forces to be able to recognise worlds that are different from the world in which he is at first with his normal consciousness. From this viewpoint theosophy is inextricably connected with the requirement that the human being can develop spiritual senses, spiritual eyes and ears, higher organs, not higher physical organs, but higher spiritual-mental organs, so that for him at a certain time the great moment takes place. If this also happens on a higher level, nevertheless, you can compare it to the moment that a blind-born experiences if he can see after an operation. While before he had darkness around himself, now the world of light, of forms and colours presents itself to him. Thus, it is possible for every soul to experience the moment of awakening in another world, to behold different from in the world with the normal consciousness. In the characterised sense, one has to regard this new world as a higher, supersensible one.

Then theosophy shows the means to cause such a moment of awakening. About these means, I speak particularly in the next talk. Today I want only to outline the theosophical worldview.

Let us envisage the moment of falling asleep where all outer impressions stop, and where the reason that spreads out like a net about the sensory perception stops functioning. We may say, in such case the human being is in another form of existence; he can perceive nothing around himself if the impressions of the sensory world and the work of the reason stop. Of course, only the real experience can decide whether it is necessary that the human being always must get another condition if he receives no impressions of the sensory world which resembles the sleep, or whether there can also be another state. Only the experience of those can decide this who have gone through the intimate work of the soul by which they have developed such strong soul impulses so that something can happen to them that resembles the moment of falling asleep and, nevertheless, is radically different from it. It resembles falling asleep in this respect that all outer sensory impressions and intellectual activities stop. It is different because that who wants to become a spiritual researcher makes his soul active with exercises and gets such forces from its depth that he is not unconscious if he himself arbitrarily stops all outer sensory impressions and the intellectual activities, but he leads an inner conscious life. The soul orients itself, brings up abilities and forces from its depths of which the normal consciousness has no idea.

You can compare it with bringing up the eyesight of the blind-born after he was operated. From the depths of the soul, we can bring up forces which work if, otherwise, unconsciousness had to occur, and which work now in such a way that they connect the soul with a spiritual world that as really exists for the human being as our sensory world exists. Thus, that which leads the spiritual researcher to his science is, indeed, something subjective at first, still the observations of those who have done this experience got to according results.

At first, we want only to describe what refers to the human being how he faces us immediately. The human being appears to the immediate consciousness as physical body at first, with everything that one can touch with hands, can see with the eyes. However, theosophy shows us that the nature of the human being is not exhausted in that which we perceive with the senses, but that the physical body is embedded in supersensible, higher members that one can investigate only in the just mentioned way. Then there we speak of the fact that everything that causes the life phenomena in the human being is due to a supersensible member, to the so-called “etheric body” or life body. We speak of this etheric body in such a way that it can appear to the spiritual eye as the colour appears to the physical eye that it is an outer, indeed, only supersensible spiritual reality.

We further speak of the fact that except this etheric body another supersensible member exists—do not take exception to the term, it should be only a technical term—, the astral body. We call “astral body” the supersensible bearer of that which we experience, otherwise, only in our inside as our passions, as joy and sorrow, as pains, but also as the whole imagining surging up and down. Then we distinguish beside the etheric body and the astral body still the next supersensible member; since as the human being has a physical body in common with the entire mineral realm, he has the etheric body in common with all living beings, and the astral body with the entire animal realm. However, the human being still has a fourth member for himself by which he is the crown of the earthly creation that we call the ego-body or the ego being which the other earthly beings do not have.

Thus, theosophy says that we understand the human being completely if we consider him as consisting of these four members. It also shows that with the human being if he falls asleep a separation of his members takes place, while in the bed the physical body and the etheric body remain, and the astral body and the ego are separated from these and ascend to a higher world. As long as the astral body and the ego are separated from the physical and etheric bodies, the human being is so organised that his consciousness remains dark. Hence, the unconsciousness of sleep. Only the physical body and the denser part of the etheric body are subject to the temporal decay, the human essence consists of the ego, the astral body, and a part of the etheric body. This essence cast off the outer cover of the physical body and a part of the etheric body at death and goes through a life under other conditions in the spiritual world.

Then theosophy speaks of the fact that life does not only run between birth and death, but that the spiritual essence of the human being goes through repeated lives on earth in a physical body, while the forces which belong to the human being reach from that life to the other. Everything that we take up in our life as experiences between birth and death because we learn, everything that we do, everything that we accomplish while we burden ourselves with guilt or merit: all that develops forces in our souls. It does not die when the human being dies but remains united with the human essence. After the essence of the human being has processed these forces in a spiritual life between death and a new birth, he builds up a new bodily existence according to his destiny, so that we have the results and effects of former lives in this life on earth. We have created our physical body by our essence so that it has this or that ability now, can do this or that.

We call this law of cause and effect, which puts us at this or that place, in these or those conditions which our destiny develops after the former lives with the Indian word—because we have no suitable term in the western literature—the law of karma. With our essence of which we are not aware at first in the normal life, we have prepared our destiny. The human being experiences successive lives on earth. One could say that he experiences the chain of life that points beyond time and proves the eternity of the human being.

With it, I have today abstained from proving these things and have stated the knowledge only sketchily which forms the most elementary level of the theosophical worldview. What one can bring forward as documents, as proofs of reincarnation and karma, I want to treat that in the next talk. Today I wanted only to point out that it is hard for the scientifically educated human being of the present to find access to the just characterised truths of theosophy.

Now we want to discuss some of the possible serious objections that those persons can do who have only developed their worldview from the concepts and mental pictures of the present. For these persons it is exceptionally difficult at first to familiarise themselves generally with the idea that the soul can develop “spiritual senses”—if I may use this contradictory expression.

Let us assume that a person has done inner exercises, has tried to develop the willpower in such a way that he can imagine something if no outer impressions are there; that he has internalised himself so that he believes, even if he perceives nothing with the eyes and ears, that he sees and hears something. Why—somebody may ask—should one accept this generally as something entitled?—One has nothing at all to argue against the fact that a person gets by certain inner exercises to such experiences that have a certain liveliness, maybe even a higher liveliness than the outer sensory impressions and everything that our reason can attain. However—an opponent may say—does one not know illusions, hallucinations? Does one not know self-deceptions? Do not those swear who are subject to such self-deceptions and who are mentally ill that everything that they see is real that everything that they hear are real voices and regard them as real? Why should the visions that are artificially caused by soul exercises have another objective value?—We have to answer this at first

Spiritual science takes the view that they are not pathological states, but something that one attains by “artificial” soul exercises. What I have said now, is actually trivial. However, it does not matter that such a statement is more or less trivial or brilliant, but it matters what it releases in our souls how we position ourselves to it with our belief and our convictions. There one has to say, the conscientious researcher of truth has many reasons to speak about soul experiences this way, and we understand that serious research rejects them. We need only to imagine how evident it is for the human being of the present that serious scientific research could only have beneficial effects after all similar tendencies had been forced back as such which also seem to exist in spiritual science.

There we need only to go back to ancient times. Then we could prove how everywhere—even until the Middle Ages—in that which the human being perceived with his senses which he could investigate with the methods of his reason something was mixed that the human being believed to experience with inner mystic knowledge and how the sense percepts were interwoven with the inner experiences. You need only to look with the experienced eye into any natural-historical book of the Middle Ages. You see very odd fantastic animals there, and you soon recognise that any knowledge and view of that time were based on the fact that the human beings saw that inexactly which they had seen and then imagined it with that which they experienced in their souls. In what way did one overcome these deceits?—With the exact science that rests upon the experiences of the senses and on that which these senses teach our reason by observation and by experiment. We have sure scientific results only, since we have such a research by which every human being can check the results at any time. Today the human being is right if he wants to check everything.

Only spiritual science or theosophy can argue something against it. We look back at the times of the aurora of natural sciences, at a person like Kepler. In his mind not only those outer laws of the celestial mechanics lived which we can study today as Kepler's laws, but also a real spiritual-scientific view of the harmony of the universe. From the spiritual penetration of the universe he got his laws of the celestial mechanics only. There the spiritual scientist can say, look how fertile it is if we turn the spiritual-scientific view to Kepler. Nevertheless, Kepler's laws almost prove a spiritual world. Nevertheless, Kepler can persuade us of a spiritual world.

An opponent may say now, just with such a spirit like Kepler you can realise that he had, nevertheless, some weaknesses. With him, you could convince yourself how bad it is for the scientific security if in his soul such a thing lives like a certain mystic contemplation of the cosmic relations; since there you come again to the medieval mysticism and with it close to rather doubtful spiritual operations as, for example, astrology is with all its outgrowths.

This arose just because one developed the idea of the general celestial harmony in abstract way and said, nevertheless, there must be a connection of the big world of the macrocosm and of that which happens in the single human being. Then the medieval astrology arose from it. Now, however, astrology has a rather doubtful aspect. Nothing stirs up the human egoism as strong as just astrology if future events should be forecast using the constellations of the stars. If the human being wants to know them beforehand, it always has an egoistic reason. Kepler knew this and it distressed him very much that he had to cast a horoscope of a lord on order of his prince. In a letter to a friend, Kepler informs of his pain when he had to forecast particular things for a high personality. In this case, he said, it would be bad to inform the personality concerned of something and it would be better if this person did not know it because he would develop, otherwise, no care and no energy.—In another case he said, one had to call the person's attention to the possibility that a misfortune could approach.

An opponent may say, with Kepler the tendency of a doubtful morality also exists when he says, one must help in a way if one can determine the destiny of the human being from the spiritual world, one must not say the truth everywhere only, one has to consider whether the truth is good or harmful. Briefly, you can see with Kepler himself that a neighbouring area of spiritual science, astrology, just goes to the bad. Tragically can be experienced just with Kepler how a way that leads on one side to the highest areas of spiritual life can lead on the other side to the biggest superstition. Kepler himself had to fight with the crassest superstition of the Middle Ages to save his mother from the stake because she was charged to be a witch. Here we stand in a point where we can close the chain completely between beholding into the spiritual world and the crassest superstition. Who does not know how easily people who want to get to know the spiritual world also want to do this comfortably today and rather want to call the spirits in a doubtful spiritistic way and to make them manifest, than to rise by spiritual development into the spiritual world. Thus, an opponent may say, we see a proof with Kepler how the theosophical way of thinking can lead as the astrological one into doubtful areas. We could bring in many examples. We want to point only to an example that can be characteristic for others.

Someone who studied Hegel thoroughly, as I did, is also allowed to say the following: Hegel strove for a worldview that is independent of every sensory view. As long as one remains generally in a kind of blurred pan-theism, one can discuss about the authorisation of single things. However, if one pretends to know anything about the special constitution of that which arises from the supersensible world, then one has to be controlled by the facts. Now one of the areas which spiritual research enters first is the area of numbers and their harmony laws. Some philosophers have accepted such laws, Hegel too. Hegel tried to prove that a certain number rule forms the basis of our planetary system, and that according to this number rule we can know that our solar system must have so and so many planets, and that these move in certain distances. So Hegel meant, by reflection one must be able to control the planetary system. Hence, he supplied evidence that according to the number rules only so and so many planets are possible and except these no other planets were possible. Nevertheless, the planet Neptune was discovered later.

We could bring in many such examples, because they are knitted after the just characterised pattern. One just realises with it that not only the experiences are a source of evidence for the today's science, but that also a healthy control [must be there by the facts]. Where science accepts hypotheses, it accepts something only if the experience confirms the theories. Now the opponents of theosophy may say, science has positioned itself on a healthy ground; and now spiritual science comes and wants to mix something in science that comes from quite different sources, from a higher beholding, from karma laws and the like.

The spiritual researcher will maybe say, yes, but you could approach me so far that you admit that which I claim, for example, the teaching of karma and repeated lives on earth, as something that one calls a useful working hypothesis in science.—At that time when the so-called oscillation theory of the light originated, no one saw in it something else than “ether oscillations.” You can argue a lot against it; the whole theory was an invented system. One said, if we suppose that a world ether penetrates all material processes that everything is in motion, then these oscillations must take place according to the mathematically computable rules in such a way that this and that arises.—Then [the calculations] also turned out to be correct in the experience, for example, with light, heat et cetera. One calls this a useful working hypothesis if one says, this hypothesis even avails us to discover new facts; even if the hypothesis is wrong in itself, nevertheless, it led us just to the true.

Nevertheless, accept the ideas of karma or reincarnation as a working hypothesis, the spiritual researcher could say to the opponents of theosophy. Now against it one could argue: where it concerns so essential and important things that intervene so deeply in life, one cannot get involved with the possibility that the outer life can be explained if one does certain hypothetical requirements. Someone who has looked around a little more thoroughly in the logic knows that one can conclude correctly even from wrong requirements. Theosophy could be quite wrong, even if one supposes that the ideas of karma and reincarnation are right. The conclusions could be right concerning the outer life—even if the requirements were wrong.—However, a strict, succinct logic could say; with it, the theosophical ideas are rejected as useful working hypotheses.

It is even worse if one considers it epistemologically. There an opponent of theosophy may say, concerning knowledge it matters above all to investigate the objective validity. Now there is no possibility at all to distinguish truth and error of illusions, hallucinations and of any soul life generally than the control by experience. If one excludes experience and the soul life should proceed without [control by] experience, one gets into the area of absolute arbitrariness, of the uncontrollable. That means, a science that searches the principle of controllability has to consider the whole method of higher beholding as unjustified, and it has to agree with modern science that says, what one should consider as scientific, must be independent from all subjective experiences. It has to take place while we exclude everything that belongs to our soul life.

However, you say—the modern epistemologist may say to the spiritual scientist—that you want to remain just within your soul life and want to isolate it; that means that you enter an area which science has just excluded. Modern science has shown that it has found its sure results just because it has proceeded in such a way that it has excluded all subjective experiences. So one must say to the theosophists, do not mix anything into science that is warmed up old methods which one has overcome since the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries.

Thus, the mood, the sensation of someone may speak who faces spiritual science with the attitude of our time. However, one can penetrate even deeper and ask, is there any possibility generally to state that that which a human being beholds who has attained a higher beholding has a meaning also for other human beings?—There, however, spiritual science says, this higher beholding is necessary to visit the supersensible world and to investigate its truths. However, if the truths of the supersensible world have been found and are told, then they can be understood with any impartial logic and any natural sense of truth. As well as every human being cannot go to the laboratory to inform himself of the methods of biology and zoology and other fields and can still accept the results of these researches, one can also accept and understand—spiritual science says—what is investigated in the supersensible world.

Now one could ask, is such an assertion of spiritual research entitled? It would be entitled only if that which the spiritual researcher has to say could be understood by us after the pattern which we have formed for understanding in the usual scientific world. There the spiritual researcher says, for example, our current life between birth and death is an effect that arises from the causes of former lives; the former lives reach into our current life. I experience that which I experience now as good luck or misfortune, as my abilities, as my forces, my hopes, and my life security because I caused them in former lives. I must learn to consider the present life as an effect of those reasons that I caused in former lives. Against it, the opponent may say, we have such things also in the outer world that the effects go back to causes and that we recognise that something former lives on as effect in something later. Let us take an example that plays a big role in modern natural sciences. There we have the law that a being briefly experiences all those forms in its embryonic development that certain animals worked through in the course of their evolution from imperfect levels to more perfect ones. We know that the human being goes through a level during his embryonic development—possibly, from the eighteenth day after conception on—which copies the fish shape; then later he goes through other forms, so that he grows up gradually into the forms in which he is born. From that, natural sciences conclude that the outer, physical human being has descended from the more imperfect living beings, and that the figure of the more imperfect living beings has a lasting effect in that which is the human being before birth. There we see those forms working which we see in the lineage. You, spiritual researcher, have to show us that really in the life of the human being, in his mind and soul and in his destiny something lives with which one can recognise the origin of the former causes, as well as one just recognises the lineage by the embryonic development of the human being in which he accepts the animal forms.

However, spiritual research can now show that one cannot explain the certain soul processes which are individual with every human being as a product of heredity that his innermost essence gives something else than that which is the lineage. If then one pursues how the human life develops how the human being grows up gradually, then one realises how forces and abilities appear step by step. Then one can already recognise with outer means that heredity does not only give that, not only the education at first, but also that it has worked its way out of that which exists with every single human being. This is added to the inherited, and this must originate—if one does not regard it as miracles—from other causes that one can only lead back to a spiritual-mental life that the human being has already experienced earlier. One can find the causes neither in heredity nor in education. Such a conclusion is possible. The spiritual researcher may say, I can make people understand what I know from the spiritual beholding by such a logic as I have characterised it now.

The opponent may respond, something enters into life that would not be miraculous if you only consulted all usual conditions. Someone who looks with scientific methods deeper into life knows which big influence just the very first childhood experiences have on our souls. They are forgotten, remain concealed in the soul, but at the suitable opportunity they emerge, and we could easily believe if we see them emerging later that none of them lead back to education, also not to heredity, one has to explain them as originating from a former life. However, we do this only because we do not mind how the first childhood experiences take hold in the soul and that they have a much bigger significance than everything does later.

Hence, the outer science may say, we are not yet so far to investigate the life of the child sufficiently to be able to say how for the soul of the child the experiences of the first years develop. We have to wait, until we get deeper and deeper into this area, then we can explain something about which you, spiritual researchers, state that it comes from former lives, by things which happen in quite natural way.

Yes, the opponent can still go on further. He may say, for example, even those human beings who get by soul exercises to a spiritual beholding have to express what they perceive in a higher world—only to be understood—in the forms, in the symbols of physical reality. It is very strange: those people who have become clairvoyant, so to speak, express—the opponent would state - themselves in each case quite different. Around the turn of the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries nobody beheld something in the spiritual world that referred, for example, to electricity or to railways; now they behold the things which refer to electricity or railways in the spiritual worlds. Who would not doubt that unconscious things interplay in the soul which are transformed in such a way that these illusory spiritual experiences appear. Nothing could justify the pretensions of those who speak of ways to spiritual, supersensible worlds. The more exactly one investigates, the more the ideas of former lives, of karma dissolve. One should point repeatedly just to the first childhood experiences if such things are brought forward like the karma idea.

Spiritual science may probably say now, let us assume that a parental couple has three, four children—every child is endowed with other characteristics. If everything should be rooted in heredity, nevertheless, one cannot understand why the children of a parental couple do not have the same qualities because they originate from the same father and the same mother. Just this shows us, some defenders of spiritual science probably say, that in that which the human being has received as inherited an individual being was born, and from it, the difference explains itself.

Against it, the opponent wants only to argue, nevertheless, that which is handed down is handed down from both parents or also from the ancestors. The different qualities [of the ancestors] intermingle. Why should not different mixtures appear with the children and thus the most different individualities? If one could look once into the complex structures of heredity—the opponent may say—, all pretensions of the spiritual researchers would have be silenced which take the viewpoint of reincarnation. If—to support the idea of reincarnation—the theosophical literature points out particularly that even twins show different qualities, the opponent could reply, everything that one can show in such a way with children of different ages applies particularly to twins.

Others say—to prove the teaching of reincarnation—, the human being shows conscience, moral responsibility in his essence. If you consider yourself responsible for an action that you do, nevertheless, you must be able to have another opinion of your actions than to have done it only. You have to ascribe another origin to the human being than only that from the lineage. Certain theosophical authors understand conscience, responsibility and the like in such a way that they are evidence of the individual essence that goes through various lives on earth.

One only needs to point to the fact that already astute investigators explained conscience and responsibility in such a way that the human being developed slowly and gradually within the human society. For one can easily show in the case of conscience, for example, that the human being notices that certain actions bring him certain disadvantages. In his mind, he connects the concepts of the action with the resulting disadvantage. This settles down in him, so that he concludes, in the end: you are not allowed to do this.—Imagine that changed into an impulse and this impulse is handed down, and then we have conscience with the following descendants. However—the opponent may argue—it is superficial if you assume an inner essence of the human being that goes through various lives on earth from the fact of conscience.

Seen from without many a thing could appear to that who does not exactly look in such a way, as if one cannot prove it. Just a spiritual researcher has to watch out for the difficulties that just conscientious people have if they want to approach spiritual science. Since what I have said today is just for such people an obstacle; they do not get over it.

If we go on and investigate how an opponent can put the question, how does spiritual science behave in the area of morality - then theosophy normally says, which moral impulse that gives the human being if he hears that his current life is caused by reasons which the human essence, that is he himself, put in a former life, and that he prepares the causes for the next life with that which he does now. How are the moral views of such a human being designed? The opponent could ask that way.

He will say, such a human being will easily be persuaded to say about a not good action to himself, if I do it, I carry it into my next life and I myself get the punishment in my next life.—With such an impulse, he will omit certain actions. However, it is the most selfish impulse that there can be if the human being does the good because it brings effects in the next life which he wishes, and he refrains from the bad ones because they bring rather disagreeable and fatal effects. Hence, one appeals to the egoism of the human being if one refers him to the karma and says to him, by this or that action you cause bad effects in the next life!—

Where does remain there the great word that one acts morally if one does the good for the sake of the good? If anybody who believes in karma says to himself, I still do something that maybe brings disadvantage—then it brings an advantage in a later life, the good is not done in such a way for the sake of the good, but the human egoism is stirred up in the subtlest way. We take another case. We assume that a person believes that he experiences happiness or misfortune because he caused this in a former life to himself and he has to accept this without grumbling.—Such a disposition—so the opponent could say—turns out to be fatalism if the person ascribes everything that happens to his former actions. Instead of pulling himself up and intervening actively in life, he will rely simply on the principle: this you have let yourself in for that! Then this will cause that a theosophist if he is weak says, why should I pull myself up? My karma has made me weak; this has its good reasons in a former life.—In this way, a dreadful fatalism comes out. We can learn from it how the opponent can state egoism and fatalism as something that one can bring forward in the most substantial way against the theosophical principle of moral.

If we want to visualise now how theosophy has to work on the religious life, then we realise how leaders of the theosophical life define theosophy as a kind of religion of wisdom, as something that leads into the religious area from knowledge and cognition. Religion cannot exist without a spirit living in the world—no matter whether you imagine this spirit as many spirits or as one spirit. Without living spirit, that impetus of feelings and sensations cannot take place in the soul, which is necessary for a real religious life. This looking up at something spiritual—so the opponent could argue-, this devotion of an outer spirit which is the origin of the earthly events and the human destinies is clouded by the belief of a human individuality who goes from one life to the next. He has to come to terms with himself concerning the religious life; that means, to refer everything to himself. Thus, the heart cannot widen and the mind cannot open itself as it is, otherwise, the case if the human being not only looks into himself, but can also look up at something divine to which he belongs in which he has interest and with which he is in a living relationship.

If we want to summarise everything that one can argue against theosophy, an opponent could say, in moral and religious respects spiritual science leaves much to be desired. This appears in particular in the fact that people who are internally undisciplined or have a lax scientific conscience from the start, gradually develop quite strange impulses toward life. There one realises—and that applies to all followers of theosophy,—as it arises from observations—that people if they get involved with spiritual-scientific truths would lose the interest for the fresh, full life; one realises that they withdraw from the immediate problems of the outer world. They brood over that which has put them into life and even start despising the outer reality and feel fine only if they do no longer want anything from the outer world.

I want to speak only about that to which opponents of theosophy rightly could refer. They could point rightly to the fact that numerous theosophists with a more lax scientific truth feeling become useless for all performances which a strong, healthy life demands. For they do not stand in life, but are or become eccentrics; such people arise from theosophy!—The opponent could point to numerous examples. Furthermore, he could show how the lacking control by experience can become rather bad if the human being who wants to develop spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in himself has not developed a sense of truth and such an impulse of truth as the outer experience controls us. Then the spiritually beholding, the so-called clairvoyant human being loses the inner control that must be the more important if the outer control is absent. There it appears that a human being can get into untruthfulness—unaware at first—, into errors and finally into conscious untruthfulness, into lies whose consequences he does not figure out because he cannot distinguish illusion from truth.

Therefore, the need to behold into the spiritual world has to be founded on truth and morality. It turns out, why it could become such a big problem that, for example, Goethe expressed in his Faust. There Faust faces us, the typical human being, who wants to get into the spiritual world and to extend his individual life who, however, often has the possibility to stray, in spite of conscientious striving, and who says, after he has nearly completed his life: could I only remove magic from my path.—The confession of spiritual research can become so tragic.

However, we have to consider the human soul not only theoretically but also in the full life. There only the experience itself can give us the appropriate teachings. One may reason ever so much why our soul has this or that constitution if it wants to follow spiritual research—one can know for sure: theoretical sentences are the one side, mental impulses the other side. Everything may be theoretically quite logical, and the soul can stray, nevertheless, if it has not found security in itself. The opponents can rightly point to such a thing that exists in the most different forms. This can show us that we must not take objections easily because they are to be found easily.

You can find references in spiritual science or theosophy that an individual essence lives in the human being. One shows that only for the human being a biography is possible because only the human being has that characteristic, individual course of life that makes a biography possible. For the greatest as for the most unimportant human being, a biography is possible. We show the same interest for the single human being which we have for a genus of the animal realm. It is a superficial objection if anybody says, nevertheless, one could also write a biography of a dog or a cat. Indeed, one could do this. When I was a pupil, the teacher tormented us once to write the biography of our pen. One can transfer everything to everything, but one has to take the essentials of a thing into account. No spiritual researcher states that a dog or a cat cannot have a sum of individual qualities. One only says that we show the same interest, which we have as a human being for a single person, for the entire animal genus. Even the interest in an animal can be bigger than for a human being, but it is not the same interest. We consider every human being as an own type or genus.

A difference exists whether we face real opponents of theosophy or those who cannot overcome the difficulties that our whole thinking and feeling and our science give us. Today I wanted to tell such objections. Of course, we could go on talking until tomorrow morning, increase the objections, and go into details. I am aware that I have not even told the most important objections. I have only shown how one can consult epistemology, morality, religion and life security if one wants to deliver proofs against theosophy.

It is maybe the nicest result that can arise from spiritual science that one learns to practise true tolerance. One can have true tolerance only if one understands the various individualities, different thinking, and feeling. As long as we hear the proposed objections, they can stimulate us if we do not take them easily, but can find that which the opponent argues in ourselves. If we make, so to speak, a part of ourselves our opponent to cope with the entitled objections, then we practise theosophical tolerance.

In this characterised way, the spiritual researcher should always face all other objections that could be done from opposing side. The supporters as well as the opponents should consider facing the opponents with the counterpart of fanaticism that must be an impulse of the theosophical attitude so that you always ask yourself, which importance do their objections have?—Hence, no objection surprises the theosophist. Theosophy can advance only in right way if such an inner discussion can take place with every opponent.

The fact that this is a demand with which also our time struggles can appear if one believes repeatedly that the opponents could not estimate at all the weight and the importance of their objections. I have already pointed many a time to the viewpoint of Eduard von Hartmann that he represented especially in his Philosophy of the Unconscious which negative reception it had with his opponents, how he anonymously wrote a refutation that his opponents liked very much. Then he revealed that he had written the refutation himself and showed that he could very well do the same objections and nobody possesses the absolute truth.

However, the theosophists should not only know the objections [against theosophy], but it is also their duty as it were to deal with these objections. After we have today opened ourselves to these objections, we want to see in the next talk how this area appears from the other side from which we have shown the reverse more or less today. We want to see whether there are substantial reasons for the opponents if they state, leave us alone with your theosophy, because it is not only unscientific, but it also contradicts any higher morality, it founds inadequate ethics, it gives no life security, and it is religiously absolutely inadequate.

On the other hand, could anything be wrong that shows that all these objections are still wrong? However, we do not want to take these objections in such a way, as if we wanted to dismiss them simply as errors, but in such a way that we can learn from them. It is difficult for some contemporaries to find the way to theosophy. However, it could be also exemplary for some people who become light-hearted supporters of theosophy to confront themselves once with such difficulties. Since also the way to the stars could be rough, and it could be good unless we make ourselves too comfortable.

In the next talk, I show how the human being can familiarise himself with this world of the spiritual stars, and that he must not succumb to the objections characterised today but can overcome them.

The previous talk should provide the basic mood for the today's explanations. In that talk, I wanted to show in particular that in the basic mood of the theosophist nothing of fanaticism should be contained. It has maybe arisen from the whole tone of the last talk that one should not consider the reasons against theosophy, as if one should disprove them bit by bit in this talk. One should rather consider them in such a way that they show a part of those thoughts, sensations, and feelings that arise to someone who approaches theosophy from the today's consciousness. Putting it another way, one should not consider the arguments against theosophy as unjustified but as highly entitled arguments in the sense of modern consciousness, as those which arise as real and not only as putative difficulties. However, from it I feel justified to speak in this talk in such a way that everything that I argue for theosophy today is considered in the same light as the refutations of theosophy I gave “tentatively” as it were in the previous talk.

I have there characterised the contents of theosophy briefly with few words, and I have said how one has to think about the origins of theosophy, about the real origins of that knowledge. These origins do not arise to the usual normal consciousness, but they arise only if the human being submits himself to certain inner exercises that reach beyond the normal experience, and cause that condition which happens, otherwise, while falling asleep—but in completely different way—that all the outer impressions are quiet and also all thoughts and sensations which evoke them. Unless then by the processes of the soul life the unconsciousness of sleep occurs, but such strong inner forces are unfolded that the consciousness remains, and if forces are brought up from the soul which slumber, otherwise, under the surface of the consciousness, then a higher intuitive faculty appears in the soul. Then such a soul is on a higher level in the same situation as a blind-born who is successfully operated and sees the world of light and colours spread out. In the same sense, all things and beings of the spiritual world are around us of which theosophy or spiritual science speaks. However, they can dawn on us if the spiritual eyes, the spiritual ears are woken from slumbering as it were by inner mental-spiritual energy. Then a new world appears before us.

I have said that the outer science must take offence at such a thing just because it strives seriously and conscientiously for making the contents of knowledge independent from the human subject. Since one argues rightly that that which the human being experiences in his inside is nothing but something subjective that everybody experiences different which can have an individual subjective validity only. If the human being may get from his subjective soul experiences to convictions about another world different from the physical world—an opponent of theosophy may say—, he may sort that out for himself. For one cannot prove this in the same way as those things which we get as knowledge with experiments, scientific observation or historical research.—Hence, some people will probably accept these things and say, indeed, the outer research has its limits; it cannot lead us into the areas that are maybe the most valuable ones to us; but everybody has to sort out for himself what exceeds the outer research, because everybody must have an individually coloured picture of that which exceeds sense perception.

However, if this were right, one could not maintain theosophy, then everything would be only something that every single human being would have for himself as his subjective conviction, and theosophy could not at all claim any objective validity. However, this is not in such a way. The human being can only find out this if he does the soul exercises to get to such origins of the supersensible knowledge.

In such an orienting talk, I can indicate only sketchily, what it concerns. From the comparison of the waking state with the sleeping one arises that the forces of our soul can grow weak with falling asleep and do no longer bring up cognitive forces from the depths. Hence, the darkness of unconsciousness spreads out while falling asleep. Therefore, that who wants to go through this state consciously has artificially to cause such moments of seclusion from the outside world in which he still has an inner experience. He has to evoke strong inner forces. You attain them by meditation and concentration of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Unless we consider that only which the outer world gives us as a mediator of knowledge or as impulses of our action, but if we start delving into important, strong impressions of the outside world at first, while we solve these strong impressions from the outside world using them not directly, but taking them in our souls—separated from the outside, then we gradually develop forces slumbering in the soul. I would like to show that at an example.

We can see how one human being helps the other. This can cause such a strong impulse of compassion in our souls that this impulse moves us to tears. We may be minded in such a way that we get such an impulse of compassion every time when we see such an action. This can be increased in us in such a way that we ourselves act benevolently if we see the hardship of a fellow man that we can have empathy with him and are stimulated to an action of compassion from the impression of the outside world. Perhaps we can advance so far that we unfold the same feeling that expresses itself in the tears even if we have faced a picture of such an action only. There are numerous people who, for example, if they read a novel get to a passage where only the picture of human misery and human compassion is conjured up before their souls, and then tears appear. They are touched by that which is only a picture of outer reality so that in their souls a similar impulse is released as it can be released, otherwise, only by an outer impression of physical reality.

However, if we assume now that we think in the usual consciousness simply about such an action, then we will already notice that this impulse is endlessly weaker that we are not able to increase it in such a way that it moves us to tears.

If we are able by soul exercises to think a thought which is associated with compassion, with helpfulness, with empathy without being induced from the outside world anyhow,

If we let such a thought emerge freely and can delve into it in such a way that we completely identify with it,

If we let this picture become strong so that it shakes our soul in such a way as it can happen, otherwise, only by an outer impression,

We have made a start with a “feeling meditation.”

If you let such a feeling meditation be active in yourself not once, not fifty times, but over and over again, you notice that such a meditation conjures up forces into such feelings from our soul which develop it internally. To someone who does such exercises these pictures appear which are still vivid in another way than possibly pictures of usual imagination are. If you delve into such meditations repeatedly, you experience yourself really in such a way, as if you were full of inner life as you only feel, otherwise, if you have impressed the inwardness into your outer body.—Yes, while the soul is stressed and penetrated with that which the meditation emits and immediately enters our consciousness, you experience something so that you say to yourself, I live now with everything with which I have secluded myself, otherwise, in sleep from my physical body. I live in it so strongly and vividly as I only can live if I am in my physical body and my eyes and ears and the other senses carry the outer impressions to me.

What I characterise here one cannot prove anyhow theoretically but only experience. After one has experienced it, it is available in our consciousness as an immediate feeling: Now you are free of your outer body; now, however, you do not live in nothing, but in a spiritual-mental essentiality that is as real as the experiences of the physical body.—Such a consciousness has to exist before doing research in the spiritual world. Someone who has attained such a consciousness is possibly as far as somebody who has prepared everything for an outer experiment, so that he only needs to set all things in motion to recognise a physical principle by this experiment. Then he is so far that he can penetrate into the origins of the spiritual world that are always around us.

However, I have to stress repeatedly that such soul exercises are only necessary to do research to experience in the spiritual world; however, they are not necessary to understand what the spiritual researcher gets down from the spiritual worlds and tells as results. Since the messages of theosophy can be understood with the natural feeling of truth and with healthy logic. The spiritual researcher can only investigate the facts and beings of the spiritual world, however, every unprejudiced person can understand them with natural feeling of truth and healthy logic.

Thus, we have to say, the origins of this worldview that we call theosophy are gained only by developing the soul. If now anybody wants to argue, everything that the human being produces this way as knowledge that is not controlled by the outer reality is the opposite of scientificity in modern sense because it is something individual and, besides, every human being must get to something different. On the other side, one has to stress that it is, indeed, completely right which is said this way but only for certain preparatory levels of soul development. The human being has to survive some serious fights and many a thing that only is significant for himself if he wants to advance to such knowledge. He probably gets to know how difficult it is to separate himself from the world to which we belong anyway with these subjective soul experiences. Immense difficulties thereby arise. There many things happen in us that apply only to us.

Then, however, you reach a point of soul development where you know immediately: now I am way beyond the subjective; now I experience truth, which is free of everything subjective. Now one has the immediate feeling, one has penetrated into the world of spiritual-mental realities. A simple consideration shows that there is also within our usual sciences a particularly prominent one with which knowledge is gained in such a way, as I have just characterised: mathematics. Already with the simplest mathematical operations, you can convince yourself that truth is gained with entire isolation of the soul. He who has found, however, such a truth knows that everybody who carries out the same operations must get most certainly to the same results. Nobody can recognise the theorem of Pythagoras—even if one visualises the operations of thought on the board—other than that one experiences the suitable relations internally. Someone who has worked once internally on the theorem of Pythagoras knows that everybody must get to the same result. Thus, it is with the mathematical cognition. Now we can say that the method of spiritual research takes place after the same principle as in mathematics that one considers as the surest science. Millions of people may think different about a mathematical theorem, somebody who has experienced it in his inside once knows that it is true. That also applies to the knowledge that you attain in the spiritual world.

Somebody who wants to do epistemological objections could say, one attains the mathematical truths in the deepest inside of the soul, but one cannot directly apply them to existence. Indeed, we can figure relations out in reality with the mathematical knowledge—somebody may say—, but no mathematics can decide on whether beings really exist who carry these mathematical principles in themselves; one has to experience reality in other ways than with mathematical judgements.

This objection is completely justified. It belongs even to those, which one holds to the theosophist, so that he cannot easily defend theosophy. However, with this objection, one has to consider that the human being does not experience with mathematical judgements what he experiences if he rises to a supersensible world. No mathematical judgement can give the view of the own ego as an object of the own ego, as if we leave our personality and look at ourselves. We cannot find our ego as an object with mathematical judgements. The view of the own ego is essential. With the mathematical judgements, we remain within our personality, with them we cannot penetrate into the outer reality. At the moment when we face ourselves, we have withdrawn from our body with a part of our being and have entered into objectivity. We feel in the things, we are inside of reality. This is the difference, the fact that mathematics gets, indeed, to inner certainty, but does not reach reality. Against it, the supersensible knowledge reaches reality. Hence, someone who advances on the way of spiritual research also gets to a new concept, a new idea of reality. Now with this new concept of reality that is at the same time a visual conception the human being can approach the consideration of human life. We want to bring that home to ourselves with the help of an example.

For the sensory view, the human being enters existence at birth and he finishes it at death. For the time before birth or conception and for the time after death the outer sense perception cannot recognise anything of man's objective nature. However, if the human being faces himself and has learnt to look from without at the human being in the just characterised way, her realises at the same time that this outer nature, which the senses can perceive, is based on something supersensible that is the real creator of this sensory organism. He realises that from the moment of birth on the mysterious human development begins. There we can realise how from a deep subsoil of human existence in the still uncertain features of the child certain trains gradually impress themselves, how his gestures and abilities develop more and more certain from within outwardly. The brain, the tool of our thinking, develops after birth still long; it is still transformed and organised. Now, however, the brain is the tool of our mental experience. If we look at this human life spiritual-scientifically, we have to ask ourselves, when does the moment take place in the human life where the mental-spiritual is completely able to use its tool, the brain? This is not yet the case in the first childhood years. Since, otherwise, the child did not need to attain many things by the impressions of the outside world and by imitation, and we did not need to educate the child. Only in the course of the first years, we can gradually use the tool of the brain. We can express this spiritual-scientifically in such a way: our brain becomes able first in the course of our life to become the tool of the ego.

When we are somewhat older—twenty years or more—, we have completely learnt to use our brain, to go back to former life epochs, then the spiritual-scientific observation shows that the brain has been only worked out during the early childhood. It becomes obvious to the spiritual researcher that that which is later in the human being to use the brain is the same as that which has worked on the development of the brain from forces that no sensory eye can see. Someone who approaches these matters with reason can say, so you state that you behold a childish spiritual atmosphere around the child head and that from this childish atmosphere, from a kind of head aura spiritual forces are emitted which work on the brain of the child, so that it can later become the tool of the ego. Then, you state, this head aura, which like an astral form surrounds the child head, slips into the inside to use this as tool from within on which it itself has worked in childhood. Thus, you state that that which uses the brain is a spiritual thing in childhood. It moves from without inwards, is active in the human organism first, then it enters into its inside and considers and understands as ego the world with the tool which has come about with its own power. No tool can be put into the service of the intelligent human culture that the human intelligence itself has not produced.

If you have attained such a spiritual view that you behold the spiritual-mental of the human being working on the configuration of your figure as it develops in life, then you can almost say to yourself: therefore, it is the spiritual-mental that is involved in that which is its physical.—You may still say to yourself, so we have to acknowledge the mental-spiritual in such a way that it exists before the physical-bodily because the physical-bodily has to be developed only.—However, you have to advance with observing and have to ask yourself then, is that spiritual-mental which has formed the brain the same for all human beings that works before birth on the human being? Alternatively, is it anything individual for every human being?

Of course, a real observation of life cannot help admitting that every human being is built individually that he has, hence, individual abilities that depend on the use of his outer instruments, on his outer forces, and, hence, he cannot be built up by a general human nature but by a human individuality.

That is, if we ascend to the creator of the human figure that appears to the clairvoyant in the aura of the child, we have to say, it is created completely individually. If we look as an expert educator at the adolescent human being, we can see how certain abilities appear, with one human being this way and with the other that way. About these abilities, we have to say, they search for that which is available just in a certain cultural region, for example, one child has an artistic talent, the other has a manual talent, a third an intellectual one, and so on.

Where from does that originate which appears in our present life? What urges the adolescent child to such performances that are given in our culture? That has developed beyond the child for which it strives. The child has this or that ability, this or that particular talent. If, however, we want to recognise this coherence, we have to go back in our culture to former states. If such a child were not related to that which happens on earth, it could be, indeed, inclined to something general, but not to something particular that originated from our cultural life. Hence, it is comprehensible that the child must have acquired certain relationships with that which it searches within the culture for its ability. Hence, we cannot think different, the souls which embody themselves and show this or that ability were already on earth once and have prepared themselves at that time to that for which they develop such affinity.

However, in the normal consciousness we can only think this. Then, however, we realise that spiritual science can ascend from this mere possibility of thinking to the view of the facts. Now one can ask, where can one observe the childish aura outwardly, which immerses itself in the inside to use the brain as its tool?

Yes, this moment appears very clear. Every human being who tries to remember his former living conditions gets to a certain point only—then memory breaks off, and at most still the parents or those who were around him can tell him what was before. However, every human being has to suppose that his ego also existed in the times that he cannot remember. To the precise observer this time coincides with the time when the human being learns as a child to say “I" to himself; that is when the ego-consciousness appears. Up to this time, the memory of a human being also goes back. What exists before the awakening of the ego-consciousness escapes from memory. Here we have the time: the child that has said: “John is there”, “Mary is there”, says now: “I am there.” At the time when the human being starts feeling as an ego, the clairvoyant consciousness beholds the childish aura moving into him.

From this fact, we may conclude that our memory is determinative in no way of the existence of our ego. We are also allowed to stress that beyond doubt there is a time in our life where the ego exists and still the human being cannot find this ego in his memory. However, someone who would like to believe that the ego awakes only then or would be impressed into the human being when the child learns to say "I", would believe something absurd. If our ego extends more backward than our memory reaches, we also are not surprised if spiritual science states that it is possible to expand the ego even more—behind birth to former lives. However, one just gets gradually to the view of the ego in these stadia of development which are not accessible to the normal consciousness, with particular soul exercises, meditations et cetera. I would like to describe the most elementary of such soul exercises here.

The human being has to develop a particular mood in himself that one may call “calmness” if he wants to behold into the future. If he can behold with calmness into the future, he has reached a lot to attain the higher beholding. One can describe this mood possibly in such a way: the human being says to himself, the world may praise us, it may condemn us, this or that may be imposed to us in future, dreadful or nice things—I shall stand upright and accept everything that may come with equanimity and face future intrepidly.

You can describe this very easily—but you can attain it only with long soul practise of meditative kind. If the human being develops this mood in himself, he learns to push the gate open at first that separates the usual consciousness from the experiences of the first childhood; then he learns to look into the first childhood years and then even further. Briefly, he makes the retrospect of former lives on earth accessible to himself. We bring in as a special method of it the achievement of an intrepid mood for the future. With absolute calmness toward the future, we acquire the possibility to pursue the course of our ego up to the point where the ego-consciousness appears in life. Then, however, the spiritual researcher does not want to stop, but he can extend his consciousness beyond the usual measure, and the repeated lives on earth can become reality to him.

One can still argue a lot against that which I have indicated today. However, I wanted only to give the ways on which you can find the methods to defend theosophy. I could only break the first ground, but the pursuit of this way can gradually lead to defending theosophy against such attacks that are completely justified, seen from the other side.

It is similar if these attacks concern the moral area. There we had to say that those have a certain authorisation who say, your teaching of reincarnation almost supports egoism. Since people may say to themselves, we have to do the good; since if we do the bad, we have to harvest the fruits of the bad in the future life. However, if we do the good, we harvest the fruits of the good. It is subtle egoism only which arises from it. One can expand this also to the work of karma. If we dwell on this idea, we may possibly say the following, we consider a human being, for example, who says to himself, I want to do the good, because the good brings me good fruits, and it is not advantageous to do the bad, because I have to carry the fruits of the bad, so I abstain from it.—We compare such a human being with another who thinks in a upright way about the things with which he is concerned, we assume, for example, parents who have the principle of educating their children to competent human beings. If we could ask these parents, why they do this, we would maybe get the answer, when we have grown old once, we have children who are able to cope with life who can support us then.—There we have a case that shows us that the good is done because of the fruits, which are to be expected once, because such an education is carried out certainly also from a selfish viewpoint.

Where to may such a viewpoint still lead, even if it is selfish? Since the fact that people have the viewpoint to educate their children to capable persons, so that they have support in old age, this is at first—quite objectively considered—a thing that one cannot manage with moral declamations. It is rather something that shows that the proposition of the philosopher is true: preaching morality is easy, founding morality is hard.—However, that is not to say that one should not educate his children from such a viewpoint, but that one recognises how the human beings have become under such an influence. If the parents use any care to educate their children to capable human beings, and then the children become capable in life, they do not only help their parents, but they are also useful members of the human society. However, we can notice an additional effect. If the parents start educating their children in such a way—even if their viewpoint was selfish at first—, then something unselfish awakes soon with such an education. That is reached which could not be reached by mere preaching moral: life itself educates us from egoism to altruism.

Just as with education, it is with the principle that we may have if we do the good and omit the bad, so that we have the fruits of the present life in the next life. This is selfish at first, but we know that the human nature has such an egoism. However, it does not concern that that is in such a way, but it concerns the question: how does life overcome egoism?

There we can realise that a human being can accept the teaching of karma in such a way that he says to himself, I abstain from the bad because it brings me bad fruits, and I will do the good because I have the good fruits. However, then under the influence of this principle the selfish attitude changes gradually into an unselfish one.

Hence, we have to say, if any ethics puts up ever so nice principles, nevertheless, it resembles—if it only preaches the good—a person who stands before an oven and says, dear oven, you know that it is your nature to warm up the room.—There you may preach long; it does not become warm. However, if we spare our sermon and give coal and wood as fuel into the oven, it makes the room warm, and then we found its oven morality without preaching. That also applies to the human beings. The expert of psychology is clear in his mind how little is done in life by mere preaching morality. Morality has to flow as a force into the human nature. If we give the soul the karma doctrine as fuel material, then it is maybe accepted at first because of egoism, but the soul forces are thereby stoked up, so that then from egoism the unselfish action can arise.

Thus, theosophy as doctrine does not only concern ethics, but we understand it as a sum of ideas that work in the soul and change us into other human beings. Nobody understands the karma doctrine in such a way that he says, I still have many lives before myself; I still have time up to the next life to become a decent human being.—Nobody can think this way. Someone who penetrates himself with the karma doctrine knows: you experience the fruits of your current life in the next life; now you lay the foundation for a decent, human being you can be in the next life. However, if you do not create the causes for a decent human being now, you cannot become one in the next life.

If you understand the karma doctrine correctly, you cannot carry egoism too far. Ssince it will persuade us any time to transform not only egoism into altruism, but also to realise that we do not fatalistically build on that which destiny imposes to us. We recognise that we ourselves have caused what works then in our karma.

Now I would still like to come on that which could be argued from the religious view against theosophy. There one may say, the theosophist acknowledges that in the human being something highest lives, as a drop is from the sea of the divine. There that which the human being can gain to himself is put, so to speak, like a divine force into the human soul, and then with such an attitude one cannot develop that devotion to that Being that interweaves the world. The mood—anybody may say—which the really religious human being feels in the most unselfish devotion to God who penetrates the universe would be impaired by the theosophical mood which transfers a spark of the divine into the human being as his “higher ego” which gradually struggles through to the viewpoint of Paul: not I—but Christ in me. One has to say, everything that the human being can recognise is got out from that which interweaves the universe.

Is not anything else possible? If one understands that which I have represented in the best sense, you may say to yourself, so a part of God's power lives in you. You are given not only to yourself, but you stand there with a part of God's power. If you have proceeded for a while—in this or in the next life—then consider what was your duty there. It was your duty to develop the seeds of God's power, which are laid in you—in other words, to make yourself more and more similar to that which this power demands from you. Gradual development, gradual perfection becomes the duty, so that God's power can arise in you more and more active. Theosophy does not demand such a religious feeling that consists only of the mere devotion to the divine, but such one that says to itself, I have to work on my perfection. If I do not do this, I let God's seeds in myself undeveloped, and then I do not become a picture, but a caricature of the divine. However, this must not happen. I have the duty to perfect myself.

That is active devotion to the divine. That is a religious mood that calls on the human being to do more and more for his knowledge, to care more and more for his moral, to be keener and keener to develop those forces that have been put as divine forces into his soul. Thus, we live with a religious mood in the future that does not provide a passive devotion to the divinity, but a mood that demands from us to make our egos more and more divine. Toward the divine that interweaves and lives in the universe, it would be the biggest breach of duty if we left our egos imperfect. We are not allowed to leave the talent unused that we have received; we have to make the most of our talents. One has to take this active mood into consideration if one speaks about the religious element that can come from theosophy.

Thus, you can realise that there are many things, which one brings in as elements to show that theosophy can strengthen life on one side, can change egoism into altruism, and cause a religious mood which can unfold an active piety for the future. We considered the other side of the question last time. We may say, the objections and refutations are entitled which one may argue against theosophy, but then we can position ourselves against these objections in such a way as I have stated now. Then we can ask our whole human being, not only our mind and our reason unilaterally, and we can say to ourselves, nevertheless, maybe it is true that there are things that begin where reason stops. Then we must set our whole human being in motion, and he has to decide. However, every single soul can decide this. Hence, theosophy is the spiritual element that speaks most intensely to the human individuality, while it calls upon the human individuality to the highest decision even compared with reason.

If the human being feels to be put into such living and holy impulses, he gradually finds the way which reveals him: you stand here on this earth; you belong as a physical-sensory human being to the physical-sensory world, and you belong with your soul and mind to a spiritual world.

You receive your mission from the spiritual world, and you have to impress into the whole earth development what you have brought down from the spiritual world. You have the mission to be a mediator between the earth process and the spiritual that forces its way to the earth, which wants to flow into the earth existence. If you learn to recognise by theosophical meditation that it is in such a way, and you can change the theosophical deepening into a disposition which gives you that infinitely blissful fulfilment of your mind, of your heart which can express itself in the consciousness of the connection with the temporal, the transient as well as with the everlasting, then you can say to yourself that you are rooted with your being in the everlasting that you are bound, indeed, as a sensory human being to the earth, but only to realise the everlasting in earthly form with your mission.

Theosophy can become such an attitude, if it changes in the human being with a basic mood that one can artistically express with the words:

The things of cosmic space
Speak to the human senses,
They change in the course of time.
The human soul lives recognising,
Spatially unlimited and not
Confused by the course of time,
In the realm of the eternal spirit.

In their simplicity, legends and fairy tales often express the yearning and searching of the human soul better than the problems, philosophies and questions that the mind poses. Therefore, perhaps we may be permitted today, when we want to reflect on the relationship between the scientific creed and the spiritual scientific worldview, to recall a fairy tale that is, however, far removed from us, a Mongolian fairy tale that can really awaken in us a sense of what man longs for in all his knowledge and research. This Mongolian fairy tale says: A woman who has an eye on her forehead, that is, no second eye, only one eye, wanders the wide world, and everything she encounters, every stone, every object, is taken up by her, lifted to the one eye, looked at and then flung far away, and a feeling of bitter disappointment is expressed on the woman's face. The fairy tale goes on to tell us that the woman has lost her only child, which has largely caused her to lose her mind, and now she is wandering the wide world, searching for her child again. She believes she can pick up her child in every stone, in every object, and again and again she has to realize how she has been deceived, and out of her disappointment she hurls the object far away from her.

With a certain wistfulness, this fairy tale can evoke in our soul that mood that a person can often develop, that mood that comes from the human soul's search and yearning for truth. A person is searching for something; he knows that in a certain respect he cannot live without the object of this search, that this object is connected with what is most important and meaningful to him. And he searches and searches the whole world. He seizes on all things because he senses that something mysterious must be hidden behind all things, which should finally reveal the truth to him. And again and again, it may be that man, through the objects he finds here and there and through which he wanted to find the answer to the riddle of life, sees that he has been deceived and has to throw these objects away again.

And if you look at things superficially – and it is said with care – you could almost be tempted to believe that, since the development of humanity, the human soul itself has been a seeker like the woman in the Mongolian fairy tale when it comes to deeper truths. In particular, today, in contrast to what the culture of our time can offer people in their striving and searching for truth, today in particular, such a mood will be able to arise in many, because we live in a time in which, in the broadest circles, that satisfaction and that bliss have vanished from the hearts of people, which once came over people when they sought answers to the great riddles of existence from the old traditions, from the religious traditions.

Many of our contemporaries say to themselves, oh, what people believed about spiritual, about soul worlds behind physical existence, that was nothing more than childish fantasies, humanity has now entered into manhood , in the stage of maturity; admirable results have been given to the human spirit by external science, especially in the last century, and it is only fitting for man today to build a worldview on the basis of these certain results of natural science. And all old beliefs and prejudices, all old fantasies of nations, must fade. And we have heard of many a genuine and honest striving for truth in the time when so-called enlightenment has taken hold in the widest circles, that he who looks at the results of natural science can do no other than throw overboard the old, traditional views of nature and adhere solely to what the solid ground of facts shows.

But many a soul has never been able to overcome the feeling that, however admirable and magnificent the results of natural science may be, and however profound and incisive the thoughts of the bold minds that have drawn from these facts may be, these external sciences have increased rather than decreased the riddles for man. And so many a person, when they pick up some popular book on these things, for example Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle) or his “Naturliche Schöpfungsgeschichte” (Natural History of Creation), stands there and says to themselves: Yes, actually what is offered to me here is not a solution to the great riddles of existence, but an even greater riddle itself.

On the other hand, however, we must say – and it is important that we do not ignore it – that anyone who today immerses themselves in the field of natural science and honestly and sincerely strives to gain a world view from this field of natural science, that such a person basically has a very difficult time with anything that, to a certain extent, is based on different premises than natural science. In our time we see two directions: one is that which wants to form a world building solely on the basis of external scientific facts. And we see another school of thought, which is almost the spiritual-scientific, or - as one has become accustomed to calling it - theosophical, a school of thought which in turn wants to point to the spiritual facts and spiritual entities behind the physical-sensual world. This spiritual science tells us: Certainly, the great achievements of natural science are admirable, and particularly in the nineteenth century, magnificent, admirable instruments and methods have been invented through which man is able to look into the most distant regions of the heavens. All this is certainly admirable, but all of it lacks one instrument: the one through which man can look into the spiritual world.

Such an instrument does exist, but this instrument must be prepared no less carefully than any instrument of the external sciences if it is to be of use. This instrument is none other than man himself.

All spiritual science is based on two principles: firstly, that there is a spiritual world behind the sensual one; secondly, that man is able to penetrate into this spiritual world with his capacity for knowledge. However, one should not penetrate into this spiritual world if one takes the view that one wants to remain as one is. For this it is necessary that man first awakens certain powers and abilities that lie dormant in his soul for ordinary life, that he first develops himself up to these abilities, to the point of view that we cannot otherwise describe than as that of “awakening”.

There may come a great moment for a person when, in terms of the soul and spirit, they will be like a blind person who has been born and is operated on.

If we were to bring a blind person into this room, they would see none of the light and colors that surround us. But if we were lucky enough to give them their sight here, they would suddenly see a world around them that was also there before, even if they were unable to perceive it – a physical awakening to the ability to see would have occurred for them.

In no other sense does spiritual science assert the reality of the spiritual world than when the blind man is surrounded by a world of light and colors, even if he does not perceive them. The spiritual world, the higher world, is also around us, within our ordinary world. It is only a matter of man learning to see it, of him penetrating to what Goethe calls the eyes of the spirit, the ears of the spirit. Then the human being becomes an instrument for seeing new things around him, so to speak.

If we speak of the spiritual world in this sense and then communicate what the seer, the awakened one, sees in this spiritual world, what he learns to recognize, what he learns as the very foundations of this existence there, then the person who today stands firmly on the ground of natural science has great difficulties of understanding in the face of such communications. But it would be completely unjust to assume ill will or something similar in the person who considers the spiritual scientist to be a dreamer or fantasist. Because what is called “staying on the ground of natural science” makes it very difficult for a person to let go of their thought habits and to acknowledge what must first be acknowledged in spiritual science.

Of course, you can say: What use is it to us when individuals make themselves into such an instrument and tell us this or that from the spiritual world, what use is it to you if you cannot see it for yourself? But now ask yourself: has the person who studies natural science actually seen everything they learn? That is certainly not the case. Just as one relies on the accuracy of the methods, how one adheres to what one perceives through the instruments, the microscope and so on, so it could well be in spiritual science. But things are not even like that. In spiritual science, it is even made easier for a person than in ordinary natural science. It cannot be emphasized enough that one can only research and investigate in the spiritual world if one applies the method that must be applied for this research and that is described in “Lucifer - Gnosis” in the essay “How to Obtain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”. If you apply this to yourself, you will already notice how little it is fantasy or reverie.

So one comes to see the spiritual world behind the sensual one. Certainly, one can do it, but when those who have applied this to themselves tell the results, tell what they have seen and experienced, then the quite ordinary, unprejudiced human understanding is enough to grasp it too. Research and investigation are only possible after this method has been applied to oneself. To recognize that what is being said is correct, all that is needed is an unprejudiced, healthy human understanding. This human understanding, however, must not be clouded by all sorts of suggestions and prejudices. Basically, spiritual science makes it easier for people than natural science. It demands only that what the seer has to tell be examined without prejudice and logically, and then one will find that it is internally consistent and stands up to logical examination.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to accept the results of spiritual science if one stands on the ground of a more materialistic world view. This can become clear to us in a certain respect through our present consideration.

First, let us consider the difference between the two schools of thought that are relevant to our present situation: spiritual science and natural science, the science that is based on mere external facts.

Let us start from one point. Let us start from that which is connected with our own human development. Through tremendous progress, the nineteenth century has managed to prove that there is a relationship between humans and higher animals. Who would want to object to the comprehensive sense of fact and the tremendous talent for combination of Charles Darwin? Who would deny that Ernst Haeckel has achieved something tremendous in penetrating the inner facts in the development of living beings up to the point of man? As far as facts are concerned, we must fully recognize from a spiritual-scientific point of view what great and significant work has been done. To object to facts would not be to pursue science, but to be insane.

But now something else comes into consideration. Nineteenth-century natural science has derived from this sum of facts a kind of creed, a creed which, when it comes right down to it, is not at all a necessary result of the facts, but is believed by many as such. It says: Man, with the perfections that we recognize in him, has developed out of the lower animal world, and the line is traced from the simplest, most subordinate living creature up to man. And it is to be shown that these simplest living beings, up to man, are increasingly structured and receive more and more organs, and that man has developed in this way through the external penetration of facts.

The aim is to link the human being more and more to the animal world. The aim is to bring his expressions of life, his soul and spirit, closer to what is also found in the animal world. Even the human being's feelings and will impulses should only be higher results of animal ancestors, perfection brought about at a higher level by our organs, a variation of what is also found in the animal kingdom. Yes, even the moral life of man is said to be only an elaboration of certain instincts. Some have even gone so far as to derive the origin of religious aspirations in man from the attachment of animals.

We can say: Those who are grounded in external science think of the development something like this: If we look at our environment today, we see animals of different kinds up to man. We trace the development back and we come further and further back to more and more imperfect and imperfect human beings, finally to people who stand at a very low level of human culture. Then finally further backwards we would urgently come to beings that cannot yet be called people. We would come to beings between people and ape-like animals, then to epochs where man was not yet present, but where everything that was physically present on earth had developed into man. And one would like to say: If such an observer could take a chair and place it in outer space, and sit on it, he would believe he could see how all this has happened purely externally. That is the picture of this view.

Let us now ask: What is the picture from the point of view of spiritual science? We want to see what this conclusion looks like from the point of view of spiritual science. We will involve ourselves as little as possible in the mere telling of the facts today, but also point out how this spiritual science proceeds quite scientifically in terms of its conclusions and thoughts. For the time being, it must be assumed that spiritual science regards the spirit, the actual spiritual, as the original, and it regards everything material as an effect of the spiritual. So it says: Let us assume that a large cloud or water is spread out in front of us. Because it is transparent, it cannot be seen at first. So someone who stands there and wants to rely on nothing but his own eyesight would not see the cloud. Now let us assume that the parts of these water masses become compressed through some process into ice blocks, then the person who relies only on appearances would see how pieces of ice come out of nowhere and would say: There is nothing around the ice blocks, they are the reality.

Spiritual science says: the spiritual world is all around us, and in a much wider sphere than the physical world, the spiritual world is full of facts, full of realities. This spiritual world is a real one. Out of it emerge, as if through a condensation, the facts, events and happenings of the physical-sensual world. Now, the one who relies only on the physical senses sees only the effects, but not the causes. The physical-sensual materiality is like a condensation of the spiritual. In the spiritual, spiritual science sees the cause of the physical-sensual.

And now we want to tie in with a well-known fact in order to explain how spiritual science thinks about these things. Let us take two feelings of the human soul that everyone knows: fear and shame. Fear occurs in the human soul and makes a person pale. What has happened here? The fact that a person has been overcome by fear has caused a change in the processes of his blood. The blood has receded. So an inner feeling, the person's feeling of fear, has brought about a rearrangement of his material parts. A material event is the consequence of its psychological cause. It is the same with the feeling of shame. When the soul wants to hide something within itself, then a blush appears on the face, which is again a rearrangement of the blood. Physical processes are thus directed by soul and spiritual processes. Here we have something on a small scale, on an extremely small scale, which shows us how physical and sensory processes can be the effect of soul and spiritual processes.

Spiritual science now says: What we encounter today in these two examples, that soul-spiritual causes physical processes, is a last remnant of ancient spiritual-soul processes that, in a broader sense, represented the same thing. It now shows – how it shows this is not our concern today – it also shows this in accordance with facts that still exist today. She says: If we go back into the far, far reaches of the past, we are dealing with simpler material processes than today, but with more comprehensive spiritual-soul processes. Today, man is a physically and sensually complex being. Today, through his emotional agitation, man can only direct physical processes on such a small scale as in the case of shame and fear. But if we go back far, far into the development of the earth, we find that now the spiritual-soul not only evokes processes, events and facts, but that it has also, through its own condensation, brought forth matter itself out of itself. And going still further back, we come to ancient times when only the spiritual-soul was present in man. And then we see the physical form emerging from the spirit in a simple way at first – the physical was directed by the spiritual-soul – and because the spiritual is complicated, the physical has gradually become more and more complicated.

Natural science says: If we go back in time, we will arrive at a point in the not too distant past when humans did not yet exist, when only animals were present. And then humans developed from the higher animals.

Spiritual science says: Yes, if we go back far enough in the development of the earth, we do see that physically and sensually the earth is only populated by animals and plants. Man, in the time when he does not yet appear as a physical and sensual being, is connected spiritually and soulfully with the earth. Our earth was surrounded by our spiritual and soul, as we are surrounded by the air today. We are going further and further back in time. We do not come from a time when the earth was without people, because humans have been connected to our earthly body far earlier than all other beings: animals, plants, minerals.

How did animals, plants and minerals come into being at all? Originally there was actually nothing but the potential for human beings. Yes, let us form a picture of how the lower creatures actually came into being in the course of the earth's development. The process is a very complicated one and is described in detail in my book 'Geheimwissenschaft'. We assume that there are lower and higher civilized peoples on earth. We do not want to argue about the difference now; we take it as it is in ordinary life. Let us take a specific example, such as the decline of the Native Americans and the Europeans. Those who think in terms of today's more materialistic approach will say that all the people who live today in nations that are at a higher cultural level originally belonged to nations that were at a lower cultural level, and they have simply developed to a higher cultural level.

Spiritual science says: Those peoples who are today “primitive”, so-called wild peoples, would never be able to develop directly as peoples to a higher level of culture, but the fact is that in the progress of human development, certain peoples had the potential to develop higher. They waited, so to speak, to develop until a later time. They kept their abilities more inwardly and only brought them out at a later time. Those peoples who remained at a lower level entered the dense earth sphere too early, so to speak. They lost themselves too soon in the physical-sensual existence, they held nothing back. They remained standing with all their abilities, the others progressed. Yes, we have to say: the less developed a human species is, the less it could expect to descend into the physical, while others waited until favorable conditions existed on earth.

Now we apply this thought to the whole of earth's development: let us look at the time when our earth was still at the beginning of its development and man was spiritual and soul-like. Now, certain spiritual-soul abilities cannot wait for favorable earthly conditions to arise; they come into existence too early and become lowly beings. Others wait and come into existence at a certain time, and so we see that at a certain time those beings from which our ape race developed descended too early into physical development. And further, we see that man is the being that has embodied itself the latest, that has preserved its spirituality the longest. The other lower beings have been left behind because they entered physical, sensual existence too early.

Thus we see that man is spiritually and psychically more advanced than all other creatures, but that he waited the longest before entering into physical existence. He developed out of the spiritual, but later than the other beings, which also developed out of the spiritual. The differentiation that the beings are at different levels of development is rooted in the spiritual. We must not say that man developed from a lower animal form, but we must say that man comes directly from the spiritual, and that the lower animal forms also developed from the spiritual, but entered physical existence too early. This also helps us to understand the relationship between animals and humans. Animals must bear the same forms and traits as humans, because they have undergone the same line of development, but have condensed too early.

This is, of course, a picture that is very difficult to understand for those who only want to accept physical and sensual facts about human development. Another example, a second fact, is given to show how completely different natural science and spiritual science facts are.

You all know for certain that the course of scientific creeds in the nineteenth century – especially towards the middle of the century – led to the construction of a so-called atomistic worldview. Let us recall in all simplicity how this atomistic creed came about. A person hears a sound and says to themselves: I hear the sound with my ear, and I realize that the air is in a certain vibration. A cannon has been fired somewhere far away from me. The vibration has propagated. My ear perceives this air vibration as sound. You can also say: Take a string and stroke it with a bow, and you can prove that the string vibrates in a regular manner, and you perceive the vibrations as a tone. If we allow these vivid facts to enter our soul, it is easy for us to say: Apart from myself, there is nothing at all except vibrating matter, and the ear and hearing perceive the vibrating air as a tone.

But the course of the scientific creed has been such that this fact has gradually been transferred to the field of vision, that is to say, to the field of light and colors. In numerous writings, you can read again and again how that which is color is something that does not exist outside of us. Outside of us, science says, there is nothing but moving matter. Just as the air vibrates when we hear sounds, so fine matter, called ether, vibrates when we perceive colors and light. This ether makes certain movements and our eye perceives a certain number of vibrations as blue, as red. Outside of us is not blue or red, outside of us is not light, outside of us is vibrating matter, and what we perceive as color and light is caused by us in that these vibrations reach our eye and propagate to the brain.

Similar things have been claimed for other areas, for example, in what occurred in the last third of the nineteenth century as the so-called mechanical theory of heat. For example, when our hand comes into contact with gas and we feel heat, the heat of the gas is not outside of us. In the gas itself there are millions upon millions of parts that move, and this movement causes the feeling of warmth inside us. Thus a strange doctrine could develop that could be called an atomistic world view.

If you follow this doctrine to its ultimate conclusion, you end up saying to yourself: everything we perceive, all the sounds that rise and fall, all the colorful and wonderful carpet of color and light, all the warmth and cold, everything we perceive through our senses, all this is only something we experience within ourselves, and outside of us there is nothing but moving matter, vibrating atoms. If there is nothing else outside, what must the next conclusion be? Then there is nothing in our brain but vibrating matter. Well, what does that get us?

We have filled the perceivable space with atoms and think that they vibrate, that they dance, that they swirl together into the most diverse tissues, that they affect our eyes and ears and evoke sounds and colors. This naturally leads to the conclusion that the world of reality is composed of atoms, that it is nothing but a world of atoms in motion. And in this world of moving atoms, what is seen as the inner life of different beings arises as a phantom.

If such a theory is put forward as a science, it may be useful in some respects; but if it is put forward as a worldview, then one would also have to draw the consequences, and these cannot be anything other than that the only reality in the world is a world of atomic motion, and then man would also be nothing more than a sum of moving atoms.

What remains of a person when they die? When they die, these atoms scatter, nothing remains of the person, nothing of what their soul was, nothing of what their spirit was, only the atom is eternal. The atoms are the only thing that is eternal and indestructible. Thus this train of thought, when thought out, becomes a creed of the eternity of the most indifferent: the little atomistic idol.

It was basically only out of a certain feeling of inadequacy that Du Bois-Reymond said in his famous speech: Natural science can lead to nothing other than an explanation of all the facts of the world through the movement of atoms. He said: To explain the human being scientifically means to understand these atomic movements down to the last detail. But he found the inadequacy of this explanation, and he said to himself: But it is something else whether I see movements, moving atoms, or whether I experience the unique fact in myself: I see red, or I smell the scent of roses, or hear the sound of an organ.

Du Bois-Reymond was drawing attention to something that the German philosopher Leibniz had already said: Imagine the human brain as a giant machine, so big that you can walk around in it. While I am thinking, “I see red,” you are observing what is going on. Like the wheels and belts of a machine, you can all see the movements of the atoms in my brain while I am thinking this. But what the soul experiences while these movements are taking place, you cannot see. The fact does not become clear to you why I feel: “I see red”. Du Bois-Reymond felt the same way, and he said: natural science can give no other explanation for any inner experience than the movement of atoms and molecules – and he called that the astronomical realization of man. He said that it is impossible for science to advance from what are merely movements of atoms to a real explanation of what is present after all as certain ideas in the soul. Why should a group of atoms not care about how they are arranged or will be arranged, how they swirl and dance? Why should they evoke the ideas that cannot be denied: One time I see red, the other time blue, and so on? Never will science be able to bridge the gap from external perception to my inner imagination, Du Bois-Reymond said.

That was the one confession of the natural scientist about the limits of science at the time. At the same time, it was the confession that struck this atomism in FCSSCII'I.

Now, where natural science ends, spiritual science begins. What does spiritual science have to say about all this? It has this to say: Yes, no matter how much you state that there is only moving air out there, when you hear a sound, you must not conclude from this that the ear creates the sound. That is about as clever as the following: suppose I receive a telegram from America: “Send me immediately such and such,” and I go and examine the wire and find material processes going on in it and want to conclude from that: So my own inner being or the telegram official creates the content of the telegram.

The wire, the material, is used here – reasonably – to mediate between the recipient and the sender. We never have the right to believe that only this material process exists as reality when we see it. We must not judge a field for which we have not yet created the organs of perception; we have no more right to do so than a blind person has to judge color and light.

Spiritual science says: Sound belongs to the real world, and it was the sound that caused the vibrations of the air.

What is an atom? How do we know that a thing is in front of us in space and has a material existence? We know it first of all through our external sensory perception, in that it appears to us with a certain color or a certain shine, or in such a way that it can make a sound, or shows us a certain warmth, smells or tastes; we perceive it through its properties, which it reveals to our senses and through which it stimulates us to have sensations of color, sound, smell, taste and warmth.

What then is an atom? An atom is not a real thing in space. It has no inherent warmth, because warmth arises only from the movement of atoms; it has no inherent color, because color is only produced by the movement of atoms; it has no other properties either, because all these properties are only produced by the movement of atoms. This atom, which has no reality, is nothing at all for the one who thinks in real terms. It is something that has been invented in addition to things, a unit of account for research, a human thought that makes it possible for us to understand the world from a certain perspective.

The world of atoms is a dreamy, purely imaginative world, not even as real as color and light, but only thought of in addition to everything.

Spiritual science is thus completely grounded in Goethe, whom very few people know was as great a naturalist as he was a poet. And just as he saw reality in what is before our senses, so does the person who thinks in spiritual terms. He sees nothing in the sensory world but a compilation of what we experience in the spiritual world.

When we see a rose and it is yellow, we see a certain shape, a color, perceive a certain degree of warmth, a particular smell and so on, and then we have to say to ourselves: if you want to look behind things, you must not examine the atoms that you have invented, but the spirit that stands behind things and that your soul can experience. The phenomenon itself is the reality, the spirit in it, that is what we can seek in the expanse of space. Just as ice condenses out of water, so the physical world has condensed out of the spiritual.

Natural science and spiritual science are opposed to each other: spiritual science does not invent fantastic atom dances behind the physical-sensual world, but sees spiritual entities behind colors, behind sounds, behind warmth and so on.

It is difficult to achieve an understanding between the two currents, but only if one remains on the ground of materialistic thinking. If we approach the world of facts by way of an example, we find that precisely as scholars of spiritual science, as true confessors of the spiritual world, what has been considered the firm foundation for the scientific creed has crumbled away piece by piece in recent years. Just two years ago it was claimed that man descended from higher animals.

Let us consider the question: What about the descent of man from the higher animals, from the apes? There is a certain similarity between the body of a human being and that of a higher ape. This has led Huxley, in his more superficial consideration, to say that there is less difference between the structure of a human being and that of a higher ape than between the higher and lower ape species. In recent years, however, it has become clear that it is impossible to base the human build on the ape build. In some respects, however, humans do bear a great similarity to gibbons, except that gibbons have terribly large front feet, almost touching the ground. In this respect, they are much more similar to much lower-ranking ape species than to gibbons.

If you wanted to stick with the idea that humans descended from gibbons, you would think: Well, the story goes like this: First, they, the apes, have short hands, but then, when the gibbon ape was created, they got long hands, and then they became short again in humans. So they gradually came to the conclusion that, although the gibbon is most similar to humans in terms of certain characteristics, this human being must in turn have descended from a lower-ranking ape, and the gibbon would only be a kind of side line that had developed particularly long hands.

This is a simple case; but in relation to such comparisons, it has been shown that it is quite impossible to derive man from the higher apes. You would have to go back to lower apes, so that all higher apes would be only side lines. But it still does not want to be right. Yes, important voices have been raised that man would have to go back to much lower animal forms, and one has been forced, so to speak, to move those groups of animals that are closest to man further and further away from man. This path will continue, and it will be found that everything that is directly related to man is not found, and the line of development will have to be traced further and further back, and it will be realized that the being from which man is derived was not physical at all, but spiritual.

Natural science does not yet know this, but the facts have pushed it onto the path that is mapped out by spiritual science. The physical world of facts will increasingly prove to be a confirmation of spiritual science.

And now we ask ourselves: What about our other example, the atomic world? On the basis of certain more penetrating theories, a more recent naturalist, the chemist Ostwald, has rejected the whole atomic theory. At the Lübeck Naturalists' Conference at the end of the 1880s, Ostwald had spoken about overcoming materialism and pointed out the contradictions of it. He did not advocate the view of the eternal material atom, but rather said: “Everything that occurs as atoms is a center of energy.”

He used an analogy and said: “When I receive a blow with a stick, am I not affected by the matter of the stick and only the force with which I received the blow, the essence? The energy that is released on you? Everywhere there are forces, energies, and when man perceives the forces as filling space, then he perceives matter.

That was still speculation, others have already been further developed by the facts. Let us assume that copper and chlorine combine. These combine under the appearance of fire. Heat occurs. If you now want to separate these bodies again, you have to supply the same heat again. So this heat proves to be something very real, which is supposed to be only movement.

Certain researchers who thought more deeply about this said to themselves: heat occurs when certain atoms combine and come into contact with each other; if you want to separate them again, you have to add heat again. From this they concluded: we must imagine the atoms in a similar way to children's balloons filled with air. When you squeeze them, the air comes out. If you want them to be plump again, you have to let air in. Heat in atoms is like the air in these children's balloons, they reasoned. We have to imagine atoms and molecules themselves as a kind of sack, and heat is what fills the sacks, like flour in flour sacks. When copper and chlorine are free, these sacks are completely filled with heat. But when these bodies combine, these sacks are pressed together and the heat is expelled. If we separate them again with something, then we also have to add the heat again.

Such thinkers have been forced to recognize heat – something that is otherwise only seen as a movement – as something real, although it is still supposed to be in a shell. The humanities scholar would now say: So you are reckoning with warmth as something real and tangible, and you are only adding the shell so that you can still save your atom. I'll give you the shell too. — The humanities believe that the atom and molecule are nothing more than the condensed quality of warmth itself, and not only the filling, but also the sacks for it. If we leave out the shell, what remains is shaped warmth, and we imagine nothing other than the shaped sensation under a material particle. That is then what is really real.

Others have gone a step further. If you conduct an electric current through pumped-out glass tubes, so-called Geissler tubes, light phenomena occur in them.

This led to the assumption that it was not just moving matter inside, but it has been shown that one cannot think otherwise than that electricity detaches from matter and continues to flow independently. It has been seen that electricity flows at all. What was previously regarded as just a property of matter was now seen as something independent. The property itself flows in electricity and such flowing electricity was called electrons.

In a speech in 1904, the former British Prime Minister Balfour pointed out that such views must lead to significantly different ways of looking at matter... /Lücke] that matter is nothing more than electricity frozen in a certain way.

Does this revolution in thinking not clearly show us how science is on the way to the theosophical teaching that spirit is the original and the rest is only condensed spirit?

Thus, what used to be considered merely the movement of matter is now seen to be something else entirely: flowing electricity. Matter itself is basically condensed, flowing electricity.

But the crowning achievement in all this is a discovery that has only emerged in recent years: radium. What has radium research shown? You all know that radium has drawn people's attention to the fact that certain substances – radioactive substances – have strange radiations that can only be detected by their effects, for example, that they make the non-conductive air electrically conductive and that they affect the photographic plate. These emanations of radium could not be explained in any other way by the thinkers concerned than by assuming that the emanation goes right into the atom. The atom itself emits these emanations, and indeed one has been forced to the idea that the atom gradually radiates itself completely in its effects. We see that the atom is completely broken down and fragmented, so that we can only perceive it in its effects, in its properties.

Yes, we see even more. The ingenious English physicist Ramsay showed that a certain radiation, an emanation of radium, can be transferred to another substance, another element, helium. Physicists are beginning to calculate when the properties of such a substance will cease altogether, when such an atom will completely fragment. We see how it is calculated today – I do not want to talk about the correctness of the calculation, but only about the transformation of the way of thinking – how certain substances will be so far in 5000 million years that they have lost all their properties, that they will no longer be there as material substance, but will have dissolved into space. Only the chemical elements, the atoms are eternal, everything else passes.

These new research results now bring facts into people's view, the factual results that show how that which had been considered the most solid, the atom, dissolves, splinters, how the body of this atom disintegrates in the hands of the natural scientist into the properties that should have been created by its movements alone. Thus the idea of an eternal atom had to be shattered; it is transient, it disintegrates, and nothing remains in the hands of those who want to be atomists in the old sense.

Thus, in our time, science is at a crossroads. Either it can continue to build on its old theories and then have theories that increasingly contradict the facts, against which the facts are almost a mockery, or it can go the way that gradually leads to moving further and further back from the ancestors of man, into the spiritual and soul, and dissolving matter more and more - and the last product of dissolution will be the spirit. Thus we see how spiritual science is a pioneer, working ahead of the future, and before us in this future stands something that we can express with the words: We foresee peace between natural science and spiritual science, between what is the knowledge of nature and what, through the knowledge of the spirit, can fill man with certainty and bliss.

Of course, more than 100 years ago it was still too early for such a connection between these two currents, and Schiller was right when he said: Both would still have to go separate ways and only in later times could they unite.

The nineteenth century has now shown the way: the science of the external, the sensory, has found facts and produced results that themselves go beyond the purely sensory-real. Alongside this, theosophy has developed. It, theosophy, will be able to show the way to the facts from within itself, from its spiritual knowledge. It will be able to show how the external sense world is an expression of the spiritual. In this way spiritual science will lead philosophy down, knowledge of the supersensible, which a hundred years ago still lived only in abstract concepts, hovering in cloud-like heights. It will lead philosophy down so that it does not just deal with abstract concepts and ideas alone, but points to the real, concrete knowledge of facts in the spiritual, and natural science will rise and find its way from the purely external sense phenomena to the spirit, and so the two will meet, while more than a hundred years ago the philosophy of concepts could not come down to the facts of concrete reality.

Time had to pass for that. It has now passed. The spirit presses down into reality and wants to be applicable and fruitful in this outer reality as well. And so we can present a beautiful horizon, a beautiful perspective of the spiritual world, and can say: Just when we realistically face the facts, both the sensual and the spiritual world, we see how natural science and spiritual science converge to give something that is life for the human being, that will transform in the human soul and give the human being strength and security and confidence in themselves in life and what will also give them strength to feel and sense and recognize that which can only be recognized through the spirit: the eternal in the human soul.