The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture is also known as: Mysteries of the Pleroma: the Corruption of their Influence in Europe and Asia Today. It is lecture 7 of 12 from the lecture series: Cultural Phenomena—Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy.

In a time of great and momentous decisions like the present it is all the more necessary that in their study of contemporary events and happenings, men's minds should also be raised to the Spirit. The Spirit is no abstraction but a reality which transcends and works into the physical life of humanity. It is by no means enough to admit that the Spirit pervades all things physical, for this is to recognise one fragment only of the world in which man lives and moves as a thinking and acting being. For many centuries it was justifiable to hold such a view, but in our age this justification has ceased. In the lecture to-day, therefore, we will consider how certain happenings in the physical world are connected with impulses emanating from the spiritual world.

To begin with, we will study the character of certain spiritual impulses which have been at work in the course of evolution and have led on to the present state of affairs in the world. For long ages now, Western civilisation and its offshoots have paid attention to one fragment only of the whole story of the evolution of the world, and from a certain point of view this was quite right. In times when the Old Testament became the authoritative record, it was proper to regard the creation of man by Jahve or Jehovah as the dawn of world-evolution.

But in still earlier times the intervention of Jehovah was regarded not as the incipient but as a much later episode in the evolutionary process. It was said that another, more purely spiritual phase of evolution had preceded the creation of the world by Jehovah as it is described in the Bible and as it is ordinarily understood. In other words, it was held that the intervention of Jehovah had been preceded by that of other Beings, that the creation of man had occurred after the passage of an earlier phase of the evolutionary process.

Those men in Greece who meditated upon the earliest stages of world-evolution spoke of a primordial Being for the understanding of whose nature a much more highly spiritual mode of knowledge is required than for an understanding of the events described in the Old Testament. These men spoke of the Being whom they held to be the actual Creator of the world—the Demiurgos.

The Demiurgos was a Being dwelling in spheres of lofty spirituality, in a world devoid of every element of that material existence with which in the Bible story the humanity created by Jehovah is naturally associated.

We must therefore think of the Demiurgos as a sublime Being, as the Creator of the world who sends forth other Beings from Himself. The Beings sent forth by the Demiurgos were ranked in successive stages, each stage being lower than the last. (Such expressions are, of course, quite inadequate, but no other words are available.) The life of these Beings, however, was held to be entirely free from the conditions of earthly birth and earthly death.

In Greece they were known as Aeons—of the first rank, the second rank and so on. The Aeons were Beings who had issued from the Demiurgos. Among these Aeons, Jahve or Jehovah was a Being of a relatively subordinate rank. And this brings us to a consideration of the teachings of the Gnostics, as they were called, in the early centuries of Christendom. It was said that Jehovah united with matter and that from this union man came into existence.

According to this Gnostic conception, therefore, Jehovah was a somewhat lower descendant of the more lofty Aeons who had proceeded from the Demiurgos, and as the outcome of Jehovah's union with matter, man was created.

“Pleroma” was the name given to a world which transcends, although it has its basis in the phenomena of the world of sense. This conception was thoroughly intelligible to the Ancients although it was utterly beyond the grasp of a later humanity. The Pleroma was a world at a higher level than the physical world but peopled none the less by individualised Beings. And at the lowest level, at the lowest stage of the Pleroma, the human being created by Jehovah comes into existence. At this same stage, another Being appears, a Being incorporate not in the individual man nor yet in a nation, but rather in humanity taken as one whole, a Being who remembers its descent from the Demiurgos and strives again to reach the spiritual world. The name of this Being was Achamoth and in Greece, Achamoth was a personification of the spiritual strivings of mankind. The urge which lives in men to reach the spiritual world again was therefore said to be due to Achamoth.

Another conception was then added to this world of ideas, namely, that in order to reward the strivings of Achamoth, the Demiurgos sent down an Aeon of a very high rank. This Aeon—so it was said—united with the man Jesus in order that the strivings of Achamoth might be fulfilled. The Gnostic teaching was that in the man Jesus there had dwelt a Being belonging to the ranks of the Aeons, a Being of a far more highly spiritual order than Jahve or Jehovah.

And so, among those in whom these ideas lived during the early Christian centuries—and the hearts of many men in those times were turned with the deepest fervour and reverence to the Mystery of Golgotha—there grew up the conception of the great mystery connected with the man Jesus in whom a holy Aeon had come to dwell.

Study of this mystery took many different forms but no essential purpose would be served to-day by entering into a detailed consideration of the various ideas current in Greece, Asia Minor and its neighbouring districts, as to the manner in which this Aeon had been incorporate in the man Jesus. The kind of ideas which in those days men brought to their study of a mystery of this character have long since passed away from the sphere of human thinking. Man's thought to-day is concerned with all that surrounds and is connected with his life between birth and death and at best there dawns upon him the realisation that spiritual foundations underlie this physical world of sense. Direct, inner experience of the kinship of the human soul with the Pleroma which was once a matter of immediate experience and referred to as naturally as we refer to-day to man's connection with the spiritual world—which was moreover of far greater interest to human beings in those days than the physical world—this too has passed away. There is no longer any direct experience of kinship with the spiritual world. Such ideas lived in European civilisation no longer than the first three, or rather no longer than the first three and greater part of the fourth centuries of our era. By that time the minds of men were no longer capable of rising to the sphere known as the Pleroma, and the dawn of another age had broken. This was the age of thinkers like Augustine and Scotus Erigena who were among the first. It was the age of Scholasticism, of European Mysticism at its prime, an epoch when the language of the mind bore little resemblance to the language used in the early days of Christendom. Men's minds were now directed to the physical world of sense and on the basis of this material world they endeavoured to evolve their concepts and ideas of the super-sensible world.

Direct experience of kinship with the spiritual world, with the Pleroma, had died away. The time had come for man to pass into an entirely different phase of development. It is not a question here of the respective merits of two epochs of time, or of forming an opinion of the inherent value of the medieval mind. The point is to realise and understand that civilised humanity is faced with different tasks during the different epochs. In an earlier age, kinship with the world known as the Pleroma was a matter of immediate experience, and it was man's task and function to activate the spiritual forces of knowledge in the innermost recesses of the soul—the forces of spiritual aspiration. But as time went on, darkness crept over the world of the Pleroma. Faculties of an entirely different character began to function in the human mind and the development of rationalistic thought began. In the ages when there had been direct experience of kinship with the Pleroma, the faculty of individual thinking had not begun to function in the mind of man. Knowledge came to him through illumination, through inspiration and through an instinctive realisation of the super-sensible world. His thoughts were revealed to him. The springing-forth of individual thoughts and the building of logical connections in thinking denoted a later phase, the coming of which was already foreshadowed by Aristotle. This later phase of evolution cannot really be said to have begun in any real sense before the second half of the fourth century of our era. By the time of the Middle Ages the energies of the human mind were directed wholly to the development of thought per se and of everything that is associated with the activity of thinking.

In this connection, medieval culture and, above all, Scholasticism rendered inestimable service to the progress of civilisation. The faculty of thinking was turned to practical application in the shaping and association of ideas. A technique of thought of the very purest kind was worked out, although it too has been wholly lost.

The re-acquisition of the technique of Scholastic thought is a goal to which humanity ought for their own sake to aspire. But it goes against the grain in our days, when men prefer to receive knowledge passively, not by dint of their own inner activity. The urge to inner activity is lacking in our present age, whereas in Scholasticism it lived and worked with a tremendous power. And that is why even to-day it is possible for the thought of men who understand the essence of Scholasticism to be far more profound, far more consistent than the thought emanating from the world of science. Modern scientific thought is formal, short-winded, often inconsistent. Men should really learn a lesson from the technique of Scholastic thought, but the learning will not be of the kind that finds favour to-day. It must be an active learning, not a learning that consists merely in assimilating knowledge that has already been laid down as a model, or deduced from experiments.

The Middle Ages, then, were the period during which man was meant to unfold an inner faculty in his soul, namely the faculty of thought. The Gods drew a veil over the Pleroma—which was a direct revelation of their life and being—because, if this revelation had continued to influence the human mind, men would not have unfolded that strong, inner activity of thought which came to the fore during the Middle Ages and from which sprang the new mathematics and its kindred sciences, all of which are the legacy of Scholasticism.

Let us try now to summarise what has been said. Throughout many centuries the Pleroma was a revelation vouchsafed to man. Through an Act of Grace from on high, this world of light revealed itself in and through the light that filled the mind of man. A veil was then drawn over this world of light. Yonder in Asia, decadent remains of the world behind this veil were still preserved, but in Europe it was as though a precipitous wall arose from Earth to Heaven, a wall whose foundations stretched across the districts of the Ural Mountains and Volga, over the Black Sea and towards the Mediterranean. Try to picture to yourselves this great wall which grew up in Europe in consequence of the trend of evolution of which I have told you. It was an impenetrable wall, concealing from men all traces even of those decadent remains of earlier vision of the Pleroma which were still preserved over in Asia. In Europe, this vision was completely lost. It was replaced by a technique of thought from which a vista of the spiritual world was entirely absent. There you have a picture of the origin and subsequent development of medieval thought. Great though its achievements were, men's eyes were blinded to all that lay concealed behind the wall stretching from the Ural and Volga districts, over the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Medieval thought was incapable of piercing this wall and though men hankered after the East, the East was no reality.

This is not a symbolic but a true picture of Europe as it was in the Middle Ages. Under the influences of a Giordano Bruno, a Copernicus, a Galileo, men felt the call to set about understanding the Earth beneath their feet. And they then proceeded to work out a science of the Heavens modeled upon their conception of the Earth, in contrast to the older science of the Earth which had been a reflection of heavenly lore and of the mysteries of the Pleroma.

And so in the darkness there arose a new mode of knowledge and a new mental life, for the light was now shut off by the wall of which I have spoken.

The course of evolution is such that when the time is ripe for the development of certain definite faculties in one portion of the human race, other portions of humanity are separated off as it were behind a veil. And in the case of which we are speaking, a decadent culture grew up in the East behind the wall which had now been erected on the Earth, while Europe saw the beginnings of what was later to develop into Western culture in its most characteristic form. As a matter of fact the position to-day is fundamentally the same, except that men try now by means of historical documents and an external mode of knowledge devoid of all insight into the mysteries of the Pleroma, to inform themselves about the dark secrets of existence. The significance of these things in the present age becomes quite apparent when we look over to the East, behind the great wall, where decadence has corrupted an earlier insight into the world known as the Pleroma. What was once an instinctive but at the same time a highly spiritual form of knowledge has become corrupt; the life of the human soul in the spiritual worlds has descended to the material world which from the time of the Middle Ages onwards was the only world that remained accessible to the mind of man. Over yonder in the East we see a culture which in the true sense is not culture at all but an impulse to give an earthly, physical garb to purely spiritual experiences awakened by insight into the mysteries of the Pleroma.

Deeds of the Gods in the world of the Gods were conceived as the deeds of idols and the worship of idols superseded the worship of the Gods. Forces belonging in truth to the world of the Pleroma were dragged down to the material realm and gave rise to the practice of corrupt magical arts in the regions of Northern Asia. The magic arts practised by the Shamanic peoples of Northern Asia and their aftermath in Central Asia (Southern Asia too was affected to a certain extent but remained somewhat freer), are an example of the corrupt application of what had once been a direct vision of the Pleroma. What ought to have been achieved, and in earlier times was achieved by the inner activity of the soul was now assisted by earthly magic. The forces living in the Pleroma were dragged down to the material world in an Ahrimanic form and were applied not only on Earth but in the spiritual world bordering on the Earth, the influences of which pour down upon human beings. And so, Eastward of the Ural and Volga regions, in the astral world which borders on our physical world, there arose during the later Middle Ages, continuing through the centuries to our own day, an Ahrimanic form of magic practised by certain spiritual beings who in their etheric and astral development stand higher than man but in their development of soul and Spirit stand lower than man. Throughout the regions of Siberia and Central Asia, in the spiritual world immediately adjacent to the earthly world, terrible etheric-astral Beings are to be seen, Ahrimanic beings who practise an earthly, materialised form of magic. And these forces work upon human beings who are unskilled in such arts but who are infected by them and so come under the influence of this astral world.

In connection with these matters we must remember that ancient mythological lore was the outcome of a wonderfully spiritual conception of Nature. When men spoke in Greece of the Fauns and Satyrs and of the activities of the Fauns and Satyrs in earthly happenings, these beings were not the creations of fantasy as modern scholars would have us believe. The Greeks knew the reality of the Fauns and Satyrs who peopled the astral sphere adjacent to the earthly world. Approximately at the turn of the third and fourth centuries of our era these astral beings withdrew into regions lying Eastwards of the Ural, the Volga and the Caucasus. This territory became their home and there they entered upon their later phase of development.

Against this cosmic background the faculty of thought in its pure form began to evolve in the souls of the men of Europe. So long as they adhered rigidly to an inwardly pure, inwardly austere activity of thinking of which Scholasticism affords a splendid example their development was thoroughly in harmony with the aims of the spiritual world. They were preparing for something that must be achieved in our present age and in the immediate future. But this purity was not everywhere maintained. Eastwards of the great wall of which I have spoken, the urge had arisen to drag down the forces of the Pleroma to the earthly world and apply them in an earthly, Ahrimanic form of magic. And Westwards of this wall, the urge towards rationalistic thought and towards a purely intellectual grasp of the earthly world mingled with the element of lust in material existence. In other words, a Luciferic impulse gradually insinuated itself into the working of the faculty of pure reason now dawning in the human mind.

The result of this was the development of another astral world, immediately adjacent to the Earth, together with the efforts that were being made to unfold the faculties of pure reason and a pure, inwardly active form of thought. This astral world was ever-present among those who strove with the purity of purpose of men like Giordano Bruno, Galileo and others to promote the development of the faculty of earthly thought and to establish a standard and technique of thought. In and among all this activity we can divine the presence of beings belonging to an astral world—beings who attracted not only to themselves but to the religious life of men, forces proceeding from the element of lust in earthly existence, and whose aim was to bring the strivings for rationalistic thought into line with their own purposes. And so the efforts of the human mind to unfold the faculty of pure thought were gradually tinged with earthly, material considerations.

The technique of thought manifest in the latter part of the eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth century was influenced in a very high degree by the astral forces which by this time had insinuated themselves into the sphere of rationalistic thought. The material lusts of human beings which a pure and developed technique of thought ought to have been capable of clarifying and to some extent dispersing, gave birth to an element well-fitted to provide nourishment for certain astral beings who set out to direct the forces of this astute, keen thinking to the needs of material existence.

Such is the origin of systems of thought of which Marxism is an example. Instead of being sublimated to the realm of the Spirit, thought was applied merely to the purposes of physical existence and of the world of sense. In this way the realm of human thinking became easy of access to certain Luciferic beings indwelling the astral world. The thoughts of men were impregnated through and through with the thoughts of these astral beings by whom the Western world was obsessed just as the East was now obsessed by astral beings whose existence had been made possible by the decadent magic arts practised among the Shamanic peoples. Under the influence of these astral beings, the element of earthly craving and desire crept into the realm of an astute but at the same time material mode of thought. And from this astral world influences played into and took possession of men of the type of Lenin and his contemporaries.

We have therefore to think of two worlds: one lying Eastwards of the districts of the Ural Mountains, the Volga and the Caucasus, and the other Westwards of this region. These two worlds in themselves constitute one astral sphere. The beings of this astral region are striving in our present age to enter into a kind of cosmic union. Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts live the beings whose life-breath is provided by the thinking of the West, permeated as it is by a Luciferic influence. In the astral sphere Eastwards of the Ural and Volga districts dwell those beings whose life-element is provided by magic arts which are the debased, materialised form of what once was a power functioning in the world known as the Pleroma. These beings are striving to unite, with the result that there has come into existence an astral region in which human beings are involved, and which they must learn to understand. If they succeed in this, a task of first importance for the evolutionary progress of mankind will be accomplished. But if they persist in ignoring what is happening here, their inner life will be taken hold of by the fiery forces emanating from the Ahrimanic beings of Asia and the Lucifer beings of Europe as they strive to consummate their cosmic union. Human beings are in danger of becoming obsessed by these terrible forces emanating from the astral world. Eastwards and Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts, then, we must conceive of the existence of an astral region immediately adjacent to the Earth—a region which is the earthly dwelling-place of beings who are the Fauns and the Satyrs in a later metamorphosis.

If the whole reality is revealed to us as we look over towards the East of Europe to-day, we see not human beings alone but an astral sphere which since the Middle Ages has become the Paradise of beings once known as the Fauns and Satyrs. And if we understand the nature of these beings, we can also follow the processes of metamorphosis through which they have passed since then. These beings move about among men and carry on their activities in the astral world, using on the one hand the Ahrimanic forces of decadent, Eastern magic and on the other, the forces emanating from the Luciferic, rationalistic thinking of the West. And human beings on the Earth are influenced and affected by these forces.

In their present state, the goat-form which constitutes the lower part of the bodily structure of these beings has coarsened and become bear-like, but on the other hand their heads are radiant and possessed of a high order of intelligence. They are the mirrored personifications of Luciferic rationalism developed to its highest point of subtlety. The beings indwelling this astral Paradise are half bear-, half goat-like in form, with semi-human countenances exhibiting a subtle sensuousness but at the same a rare cleverness. Since the later Middle Ages and on through the centuries of the modern age this astral region has become a veritable Paradise of the Satyrs and Fauns in their present metamorphosis, and there they dwell.

And in the midst of all these mysterious happenings a laggard humanity goes its way, concerning itself merely with physical affairs. But all the time these forces—which are no less real than the phenomena of the world man perceives with his physical eyes and grasps with his physical brain—are playing into earthly existence.

The conditions now developing as between Asia and Europe cannot be fully intelligible until we understand them in their astral aspect, their spiritual aspect. The decadent forces emanating from Shamanic arts which have been preserved in the astral regions of Central and Northern Asia are striving to consummate a kind of cosmic union with the impulse which has received the name of Bolshevism, and Eastwards and Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts endeavours are being made to consummate a union between a certain form of magic and Bolshevism. It is a world of myth and is for this reason well-nigh incomprehensible to the modern mind. Luciferic elements in the form of Bolshevism are striving to unite with the decadent forces proceeding from Shamanic arts and coming over from the East. From West to East and from East to West forces are working and weaving in this astral Paradise. And the influences which pour down from this astral world into the earthly world emanate from the passionate efforts for union between the beings known in olden times as the Fauns and Satyrs who surge over from the East, and the spirits of the West who have developed in a high degree, everything that is connected with the head.

The spectacle presented to super-sensible sight may be described in the following way: The nearer we come to the Ural and Volga districts, the more do these cloud-like, spiritual forms seem to gather together into a mass of heads, while the other parts of the bodily structure become indistinct. Seething over from the East we see those other beings, known in days of yore as the Fauns and Satyrs. Their once goat-like form has coarsened to a bear-like form and the further West they come in their efforts to consummate their astral union with the Luciferic beings of the West, the more do their heads seem to disappear. These beings come into existence in the astral world and the Earth-sphere is their home just as it is the home of physical humanity. They are the tempters and seducers of humanity on Earth because they can take possession of men; they can obsess human beings without in any way needing to convince them by means of speech.

It is urgently necessary that these things should be realised to-day. Men must awaken those inner faculties of soul which once gave birth to the mythological lore of olden times. For it is only by rising to the sphere of Imaginative knowledge that we can stand with full consciousness in the onward-flowing stream of human evolution.

If we want to give its proper place among familiar things of life to what we come to know as stages on the road into the spiritual world, it is important first to have the right conception of the three states of our ordinary human consciousness. These three states – waking, dreaming, sleeping – we have described over and over again.

And we know how the human being is fully awake only in his thinking, in his conceptual faculty; how feeling, although its experience appears to differ from that of dreams, in the whole mood of its relation to a man is yet of the same nature. In ordinary consciousness feelings are experienced in just as vague a way as are dreams – not only that, but they seem to be connected in a similar manner.

The dream produces picture after picture without any regard for connections in the external world. It has its own connections. On the whole the same is true of the world of feeling. And anyone whose world of feeling in ordinary consciousness is of the same kind as his conceptual world, is terribly prosaic, dreadfully dried up and frigid. In the conceptual world when we are fully awake we must have an eye to what in the ordinary sense is logical; but we should never get anywhere in real life were we to feel in the way we think.

Then – as we have often said – there rises up from a man’s hidden depths, the will. It is possible to have some conception of it, but its essential being, how it works and weaves in the human organism, is something of which a man remains as ignorant, or as unconscious, as of his dream experience. It would be profoundly disturbing for him were he to experience what his will is actually doing.

In reality the will is a burning, consuming process. And for a man throughout his waking life always to be perceiving how in his willing he actually consumes his organism and, by food or sleep, has to replace what is thus consumed, would in ordinary consciousness certainly not conduce to his comfort.

Now, with regard to their pictures, we can to a certain extent compare a man's feeling world in his waking state, in his waking dreams, with the dream-world when he is either in deep sleep or halfway there. In this way we find that a man does not perceive these pictures as belonging to his ego but as part of the external world. While dreaming, he has so strong an impression of the action of the dream-picture being the world outside, that, at times, he can even perceive himself in the picture.

Today the following should be of particular interest to us. We go through ordinary life having one experience after another, and our dreams shake up all these experiences together, paying little heed to the connection between them which holds good for a man when awake. The dream becomes a poet developing the strangest tendencies.

A philosopher, describing his own experience, once said that he constantly dreamed he had written a book. He had not really written it but when dreaming thought he had, thought too that it was a better book than any of his others. But he dreamed the manuscript was lost. It was mislaid and he could not find it. In his dream he hurriedly searched everywhere, without success. A terribly uneasy feeling grew upon him that the manuscript of his best book might be irretrievably lost. In the midst of his discomfort he woke up. In the particular case of this philosopher this was a natural experience, for he had published a great many books. So great was their number that once when I went to see him, and his wife happened to be in the room, she told me he had written so many that the success of one was detrimental to the others.

In this philosopher’s house you always felt a remarkably practical atmosphere. On another occasion, when I called on him with a publisher, wanting to discuss an epistemological problem, this rather annoyed me. I had insisted on the publisher coming in with me – or, rather, he had insisted upon it himself – and the moment the philosopher saw him, he began: As an expert can you tell me how many copies of my book (I cannot remember which) are to be found in second-hand bookshops? – You see what a sense of the practical there was in this philosopher's house! I have no wish to be scornful; I am merely giving you a characteristic example. Others, too, may have had dreams in which their experiences appeared in fanciful guise.

Everybody knows that in dreams things do not take the same course as in our ordinary experience; the connections in them are different. On the other hand, it is easy to see how intimately related the dream is to the characteristics of the dreamer. It is a fact that many dreams are actual reflections of what is going on within our body, and we move about in our dreams as if in a perfectly familiar element.

Little by little we become aware that the dream has its own way of grouping experiences. By thinking clearly we gradually learn how we actually live in our dreams; we live there when on the point of leaving our physical and etheric bodies or at the moment of return. It is always on the transition from waking to sleeping, or from sleeping to waking, that the dream really takes place. I have frequently given you examples showing that even our dreams of greatest import take place when we are either waking up or on the point of falling asleep. Among these examples you may remember the dream of a student: how he dreamed that two students were standing at the door of a lecture-room, when one of them said something to the other which, according to the students' code in Germany, demanded satisfaction, and how it came to a duel. The whole dream was very vivid – the setting out for the scene of action after the due appointment of seconds, and so on, up to the very moment of firing. The dreamer hears the report which, as he now wakes up, changes into the noise of a failing chair that he himself has overturned. By this time he is fully awake, for the fall of the chair has cut short the dream. Thus the dream has taken place at the very moment of waking, containing within it its own time, not the time of its actual duration. According to their own inner time dreams often last so long that no one would ever sleep to that extent. Yet the dream maintains a close connection with what the sleeper is inwardly experiencing – the experience going right into his physical body.

The men of old knew quite well about such things, and a certain kind of dream was said by the old Jews to be God's punishment of a man "in his reins". Thus there was known to be a connection between the functioning of the kidneys and certain dreams. On the other hand, you have only to read a book like "The Seer of Prevorst" to find there how out of dreams people described what was wrong with their organs. Such men have a special gift for perceiving, symbolically in mighty pictures, any defective organs, so that beside it the cure can be seen. In those days this was made use of to encourage the sick person himself, out of the explanation of his dream, to prescribe his own remedy. On this point we should also study what was the authorised practice in the Temple-sleep.

When we consider the relation of the dream to our ordinary experience, the dream must be said to be a protest against the laws of nature, the laws according to which we live from the moment of waking till we go to sleep. The dream pays no heed to those laws – it makes them appear foolish. And what for the external, physical world is found to be natural law is no law for the dream, which is in itself a living protest against it. If we ask of nature on the one hand what the facts are, she will answer in accordance with natural law; but if we ask the same question of the dream, the answer will be different. Anyone who judges the course of a dream in accordance with natural law will say there is no truth in the dream – which is so, indeed, in the ordinary sense. But the dream approaches the supersensible, the spiritual, in a man, even though its pictures belong – to speak in the abstract – to his subconscious. We shall not judge correctly unless we realise that the dream has to do with a man's inner spiritual reality.

Now this is something people are slow to admit; they want to make an abstraction of the dream, to judge it only according to its fantastic character. They refuse to recognise it as something connected with the inner nature of man. And if the dream has this connection and it protests against nature’s laws, surely this is a sign that man's inner nature does the same itself.

I beg you to grasp the importance of this – that, when we come to the real man, what is within him protests against the laws of nature. Now what does this signify?

Today natural law is studied from nature around us, in the scientific way customary in the laboratory, and we find the same world-outlook extended to the investigation of man himself. He is treated as if natural law held good within him – as if it continued to do so inside his skin. But that is not by any means the case. The dream with its rejection of natural law is far nearer to what is within a man than the natural law itself. The inner human being does not act according to natural law. The dream, which in its composition is an image of what is within man, is evidence of this. Anyone who understands this is bound to call it nonsensical to believe that within the heart, within the liver, the same laws hold sway as those in nature outside. Logic belongs to external nature; to what is within man belongs the dream. And whoever calls the dream fantastic should also speak of man's inner nature in the same way. This can be actually perceived. For in the course it takes during earthly life, between birth and death, when sickness arises in one part, well-being in another, the inner nature of man is far more like a dream than like ordinary logic. Our present mode of thinking, however, has no such approach as this to what a man has within him, but is utterly given up as people are to their observations of nature outside or in the laboratory; and what they observe in this way they would like to find repeated in human beings.

It is of great importance in this respect to realise for example, how science today often treats what has a part in a man's physical make-up. Albumen is known to play a part in his life, fats, carbohydrates and salts – in essentials, naturally. That is well-known. Now what does science do? The scientist analyses the albumen, finding in it a certain percentage of oxygen, a certain percentage of nitrogen, a certain percentage of carbon and hydrogen; he analyses the fats, carbohydrates and so on. He then knows how much of all these the man contains. But from such an analysis scientists never learn what effect, for example, the potato has had upon European culture. There is hardly any mention of the influence that potatoes in the diet have had on the cultural life of Europe. For this analysis, by which you simply discover the various amounts of oxygen, nitrogen and so on, in one food or another never shows you how, for instance, rye is digested mainly by the lower bodily forces whereas the digestion of potatoes calls upon forces which are right up in the brain. This means that anyone who consumes an undue amount of potato has to use up his brain in the process of digestion, and thus partly deprives his thinking of brain-force.

Such matters as these show that neither our materialistically-minded science nor a more theological outlook arrives at the truth. When science gives an account of our food it is as if I were to describe a watch by saying: The silver is procured from a silver mine, in such and such a way; it is then loaded up and conveyed to various towns, and so on. – But when it gets to the watchmaker there is a full-stop; and what goes on in his workshop does not come into the picture. Perhaps the porcelain dial may be described, how porcelain is made, but again nothing is said of what goes on in the workshop. This is how food today is treated by science; it is just analysed. For what science tells us is actually worthless as regards the effect of the various nutriments on the human organism. In spite of any analysis there is a great difference between eating the fruits, say of rye or wheat, and eating tubers – as in the case of potatoes.

In the human organism there is quite a difference between the absorption of tubers and that of fruits or seeds. It can really be said of our present mode of thinking that it no longer goes to the heart of material existence. Materialism is therefore a world-conception with absolutely no knowledge of the working of matter, and we have to gain that knowledge by the light of spiritual science. Therefore those whose attitude is that of materialistic science say: Anthroposophy is spiritual to a fantastic degree. On the other hand, theosophists or theologians are content with abstract spirit that is never actively creative and does not show any real connection with material activity; and these call Anthroposophy materialistic because it extends its knowledge to what is material.

Thus we find ourselves caught up between two factions: those who treat everything ideally, in the abstract, and those who deal with everything materialistically. The former learn nothing about the spirit, the latter never know anything about the material. On these lines today, a way of thinking is developing which is quite unable to approach man himself.

Now recently in our spiritual evolution something most remarkable has appeared. At least the nocturnal side of spiritual life can no longer be denied – unless people want to be pig-headed. It is characteristic of the way people steeped in natural science react when they meet the darker side of spiritual life – or something else I am going to discuss – which they are unable to deny.

A noteworthy example of this is a book by Ludwig Staudenmaier – the (translated) title of which is "Magic as an Experimental Science". One might almost say: The nightingale as a machine. – Anyway this book is characteristic of our time.

How, then, does this man go to work? In his case the peculiar feature is that his very way of life led him to experience magic in himself. And the day came when he felt impelled to start certain experiments on himself – which might be said to reveal the darkness of his destiny. He was unable to deny after these experiences of his that there is such a thing as automatic writing. You know that I never recommend anything of the kind, always describing it as dangerous. But when it comes to what these people have actually done, then we are faced by something exceedingly strange, and need all our critical faculty to distinguish the true from the false. Now this committing to writing of things never previously entering the writer's head, this automatic writing, became for Staudenmaier a problem on which to experiment. Accordingly he set himself down with a pencil, when, lo and behold, things burst forth to which he had never even given a thought, and what he wrote was indeed most peculiar! Just imagine how surprising it must be to a scientific thinker when, on taking up a pencil, he turns himself into an automatist, believing all the while that it cannot be done. But the pencil suddenly takes command, guiding his hand to write quite astonishing things. That is what happened to Staudenmaier.

Now his greatest surprise was when the pencil began to show temper, as dreams do; it wrote what was very far from his thoughts. Thus remarks appeared such as "You're a silly fool!" – and it can be gathered from this how completely the pencil was now in control.

These indeed are things this gentleman would never have thought! After repeated remarks of this kind, and the pencil had written the craziest things, Staudenmaier asked who was really the writer. The answer came: "Spirits are writing." In his view this again was not the truth, since for a scientific writer spirits do not exist. Whatever was he to say? Certainly not that it was spirits who were lying; so he said that his subconscious was always telling lies. For how terrible for a man if his subconscious suddenly convinces him that he is a silly fool, and moreover records it in writing, so that – as the expression goes – it is there in black and white.

However he continues to behave as though spirits were speaking and asks why they do not tell the truth. To which comes the reply: Oh – that is just our way; we are spirits who have to lie, for it's part of our very nature.

This was a most apt description. Here begins a sphere where things are certainly very questionable, for, you see, when it appears that truth has its home above while below it is always being contradicted, this naturally creates an awkward situation. But if anyone is entirely at the mercy of a scientific world-conception, in a case such as this he can but conclude that the liar is in him. Staudenmaier, therefore infers that it is not objective spiritual beings speaking but his own subconscious – and in such general terms anything can be summed up.

Now it is quite typical of such spirits that they did not make use of Staudenmaier's hand to write down any new way of proving some mathematical problem, or a solution in the realm of natural science; characteristically they always said something of a different sort.

There was indeed every reason for Staudenmaier to be upset, and a medical friend of his advised him to go out shooting. Advice of that kind is popular with the medical profession; for example, doctors are very fond of recommending marriage. In Staudenmaier’s case, however, the advice was to go shooting, to shake off this foolishness by diverting himself.

But just imagine! In spite of setting out to shoot magpies in the way he described, here too everything was delusion, for all kinds of demon-like forms peeped from the trees instead of magpies. Sitting on the branches were creatures, half-cat, half-elephant, making long noses at him and putting out their tongues. And when he looked down he did not see hares, for example, on the ground but all manner of fantastic figures up to every sort of trick.

Thus it was not only that the pencil was scribbling nonsense, but now things became still more fantastic; so that instead of magpies appearing it was demons, with all their ghoulishness – in fact, more delusion.

Actually all he saw was as it is in a dream and, if his will had remained intact, he might have shot instead of a magpie some kind of horror, half-cat, half-elephant. By the time this came to the ground it would certainly have changed into something else – perhaps half-frog, half nightingale, with a devil's tail. It would certainly have changed in falling.

In any case we may say that our experimentalist gained access to a world resembling that of dreams; a world which also protested against anything to do with the laws of nature.

For what would have been the natural course of events? On lowering his gun after shooting a magpie, Staudenmaier would have found a magpie on the ground. It was not this, however, that happened, but what I have just described; which was another protest against natural law on the part of the darker side of the spiritual world into which the man was plunged. Had he kept consistently to his idea of the subconscious, he should at least have admitted: If all this is in my own subconscious then this subconscious is evidently protesting against the laws of nature. For what was this subconscious actually telling him? As I have described, it conjured up all kinds of demons; and these told him quite different things about himself from what he had ever thought. Thus, he could but conclude: If the world were organised entirely in accordance with natural law, what now constitutes my inner being could not exist – as a man I should not be able to exist. For when what is within me speaks, this has nothing to do with natural law. Within a man, therefore, an entirely different world holds sway from the one where there are laws of nature – a world that in its very conditions reject these laws.

That is the one interesting point about this maker of experiments in magic, about the magician who with his experiments impressed so many people. It shows how – even though in a different way – a man can in fact come to the perception of a world which, in its connections, is like the world of dreams we so frequently meet in life.

This leads us, through a right conception of ordinary human existence to recognise that, bordering on this ordinary world that is interwoven by natural law, there is another world where these laws are no longer valid.

If these matters are looked at rightly, we can only infer that, adjoining the world ruled by the laws of nature of which we make a study, there is another world independent of these laws and ruled by quite different ones of its own. By sinking into the world of dreams in a realistic way we come to a world where natural laws are no longer effective. That the human being, with his ordinary consciousness, perceives this world as fantastic, is due to his inability to understand the conditions he meets there. He himself introduces the fantasy. But what weaves and lives in it belongs to an altogether different world-sphere, and it is this sphere into which a man sinks in his dreams.

This leads us on directly to another thing. If we talk to somebody wedded to the usual world-conception of today, he will say: I study what law it is that governs the fall of a stone, and discover the law of gravitation. Then I go further out into the universe and apply the same law to the stars. – And this is what thinks: Here on earth I discover the laws of nature; there outside is the cosmos (drawing is made). The laws I have discovered for the earth I imagine still to be valid for the nebula of Orion, or anything else.

Now everyone knows that, for example, the force of gravity diminishes in proportion to the square of the distance, becoming weaker and weaker; and he knows that light too decreases. I have already told you that the truth of our natural laws also diminishes. What down on earth is true as regards them is no longer true in the cosmos; it is true only for a certain distance. Beyond that distance, out in the cosmos, the same law begins to hold sway which we meet with in our dreams. Hence we should be clear that, looking out at Orion with its nebula and in order to understand it, we must not think in accordance with the experimental method of physics, but begin to dream – for Orion shows its conformity with dream-law.

It can be said that various details of such things have actually been known in the past, and in later times an inkling of them has still been preserved, especially by those thinkers capable of genuine concentration.

Such a thinker was Johannes Müller, the natural scientist who lived not, it is true, in the second, but in the first part of the 19th century. He it was who taught Haeckel. He could at any time really concentrate, and lived absolutely in what he undertook. By being able to live thus entirely in what he was doing, a man may sometimes discover a great deal, though – as I will show you – in certain respects this may have its disadvantages. For instance, Johannes Müller, on being asked a question during a course of lectures he was holding in summer, replied: I only know about that during the winter-course – not in the summer. – During the summer-course he was so completely engrossed in the subject of the lectures he was actually giving, that he openly admitted it would only be when winter came that he could turn his thoughts to a different matter.

Another very interesting thing was admitted by Johannes Müller – that he could spend a long time dissecting bodies to discover something he wanted to know without success; but that afterwards he often dreamed about these experiments, when he would see far more deeply into the matter, and it became quite clear. This was in the first half of the 19th century, and in those days anyone, even a famous scientist, could own up to such eccentricities.

In his dreams, therefore, a man is in a quite different world with quite different laws. And weighing the matter rightly, it must be presumed that, if we want to follow in the steps of Johannes Müller, we must not think of Orion and its nebula in the way customary in observatories and other astronomical centres – we have to dream. Then we learn more than by thinking things over. This reminds us of the shepherds of old, who, sleeping in the fields at night, had dreams about the stars, thus getting to know more about them than the people who lived later. That is really so.

In short, whether we enter man’s inner nature and approach the world of dreams, or go out into the wide cosmos, we meet – as was said in olden days – beyond the circle of the Zodiac a world of dreams.

Then we reach the point of understanding what was meant when the Greeks – who still had knowledge of such things – used the term "chaos". I have seen every possible explanation of chaos but not one anywhere near the truth. For what had a Greek in mind when he spoke about chaos? He was thinking of the law concerning which dreams give us some notion, or which we must suppose to hold good in the outermost regions of the cosmos. This law that differs from natural law was ascribed by a Greek to chaos. He said indeed that chaos begins where natural law is no longer to be found, where another kind of law holds good. A Greek considered the world to have been brought forth out of chaos, out of a condition, that is, not yet in accordance with natural law, but as it is in dreams or, as is it still today, in the far reaches of the cosmos – in the Dog star near the constellation of Orion and so on. There we come to a world which still makes itself known to man in the fantastic but living land of dream-imagery.

If here we have the physical world of nature (a drawing was made), when we sink into the land of dreams we come, as it were, to a second stream. Then beyond the dream world there is a third stream without any immediate relation to natural law. The world of dreams protests against this law; but in the case of this third world it would be nonsensical to say it was guided by them at all. It absolutely opposes these laws – even boldly – for it has more to do with human beings, whereas the dream still appears as living pictures, this third world comes to expression chiefly in the moral world-conception through the voice of conscience.

If next to one another we had, on the one side, the world of nature, on the other the world of morality, there would be no bridge to connect the two. The bridge, however, is formed by the world of dreams, or by that world experienced by our friend who made experiments in the realm of magic, where things were said to him having nothing to do with natural law.

Between the world in which nature weaves her laws and the world from which the voice of conscience streams to us, there lies for ordinary consciousness the dream-world. Since this is the waking world, while this is the dream-world, and this is the world of sleep, we are led to conceive that during sleep the gods actually speak to man – not of what has to do with nature but of what is moral; and when man wakes, this remains within him as the divine voice, as conscience.

In this way the three worlds are merged together, two things becoming clear: on the one hand, why the world of dreams protests against natural conditions; or the other hand, the extent to which the dream-world is a bridge to a world the reality of which is hidden from ordinary consciousness – that is, the world out of which moral perceptions arise.

If we make our way into this world we find the further spiritual world that is no longer comprehensible in accordance with the laws of nature, a world with spiritual laws. In dreams the two are mingled – spiritual law with natural law, natural law with spiritual law – because the world of dreams is a stream connecting the two.

Thus we have thrown light from yet another aspect on how the human being is an essential member of these three worlds.

[ 1 ] [ I would like to reciprocate Mr. Ingerö's kind words by assuring you that it gives me the greatest satisfaction to be able to speak to you again in such internal lectures about anthroposophical matters in more detail. It so happens that I have been granted the opportunity here in Norway to repeatedly develop incisive anthroposophical truths in cycles. Here I was also allowed to speak about the European folk souls, a cycle that is always before my mind's eye, and many other anthroposophical things were allowed to be spoken about here. This is brought about by the special circumstances that exist in Norway, as I have repeatedly characterized on previous occasions, at a remarkable point in the development of European civilization, and that the future of Europe will have a great deal to expect from Norway.

[ 2 ] But now I would like to add another word to these words of deepest satisfaction. That is, when I now speak to my dear anthroposophical friends about anthroposophy, the sad event of New Year's Eve 1922-1923 will always be in the background. Many of our Norwegian friends have seen the Goetheanum, yes, Norwegian friends have devotedly worked on this Goetheanum during the ten years while we have been working. And finally, it is with the greatest satisfaction that I recall the fact that it was precisely Norwegian friends who gave us their material help in the most generous way, just at the time when we needed it most to build the Goetheanum, which has unfortunately now been taken from us. The self-sacrificing activity of our Norwegian friends in this regard will be deeply ingrained in the history of the Goetheanum, for spiritually, that which was built into this Goetheanum remains connected with the history of anthroposophical development. And those who have made such great sacrifices, such as some of our Norwegian friends, will also have made a significant spiritual contribution to the annals of spiritual development associated with the Goetheanum.

[ 3 ] In the background, I would like to say, there is the terrible flame that we saw consuming our Goetheanum on New Year's Eve, in one night that which has been achieved through long work. And the only consolation for this terrible and painful event is the fact that something exists in anthroposophy itself that comes from an indestructible source, so that it must prevail in the development of humanity, even if this external monument and symbol has disappeared from the earth for the time being and can only be rebuilt in a makeshift manner, even under the most favorable conditions. So in a sense, a tone of melancholy must now permeate our reflections, as we have to send our feelings after this painful event. ] ¹

[ 4 ] In the course of this short cycle, I should like to set forth several things connected in the most intensive way with the being of man, the formation of man's destiny, and what might be called the relationship of man in his entirety to world-evolution. I shall proceed immediately to the center of this matter by pointing out that the whole evolution of man's being, within the realm of earth-life, is connected not only with what we observe with our ordinary, waking consciousness while participating in earth-life, but is also connected closely and intensively with what takes place during sleep, from the time of falling asleep until awaking.

[ 5 ] Doubtless external earthly culture, external earthly civilization derives its significance primarily from that which man is able to think, feel and accomplish out of his waking being. Man, however, would be utterly powerless, in an external sense, unless his human forces were continuously renewed, in the period between falling asleep and awaking, by contact with the spiritual world. Our spirit and soul being or, as we usually call it in Anthroposophy, our astral body and our ego, withdraw from the physical and etheric body when man falls asleep; they enter the spiritual world, penetrating the physical and etheric body again only after our awaking. Thus, if leading a normal life, we spend one third of our earthly existence in the sleeping state.

[ 6 ] If we look back on our earth-life, we always join day to day; we leave out of this conscious retrospect all that we experience between falling asleep and awaking. We skip, as it were, all the things contributed by the heavenly realms, by the divine worlds to our earth-life. And we take into account only what is given us by earthly experiences. Yet, if we desire to attain correct conceptions of our experiences between falling asleep and awaking, we should not spurn ideas which diverge from those of ordinary life. It would be naive to assume that the same things occur in the divine-spiritual worlds that are occurring in the physical-sensible worlds wherein we dwell between awaking and falling asleep. For, on falling asleep, we return to the spiritual worlds—and here things are quite different from things in the physical-sensible world. All this must be taken into account most decidedly by anyone wishing to form a conception of man's super-sensible destinies.

[ 7 ] In mankind's religious records, we find many strange allusions which can be understood only if penetrated by means of spiritual science. Thus a passage occurs in the Bible which, although known to everybody, is generally too little regarded: unless ye become as little children, ye may not enter the kingdom of God.

Often such passages are interpreted most trivially; nonetheless, they are always intended to convey an extraordinarily deep meaning.

[ 8 ] The knowledge from which is drawn a conception of the spiritual-super-sensible has often been called by me, as well as by others, the Science of Initiation. We speak of this science of initiation when we look back at what went on in mankind's ancient Mysteries. Yet we also speak of the science of initiation—modern science of initiation—if we wish to characterize Anthroposophy in its deeper aspects.

Science of initiation points, as it were, to the knowledge of primeval conditions, of original conditions. We seek to acquire knowledge concerning that which existed in the beginning, which marked the starting-point. All these endeavors are connected with a matter of yet greater profundity which presently will be envisaged by our souls.

[ 9 ] If we have fallen asleep on May sixteenth, nineteen twenty-three, and have slept until May seventeenth, nineteen twenty-three, we assume that this time has been spent by us in the same way as by a person who happens to stay awake and roam all night long through the streets of some city. We somehow picture to ourselves the experiences of our spirit and soul (ego and astral body) during the night as though similar to the experiences—although in a somewhat different state—of a reveler seeking nightly adventures.

[ 10 ] Things, however, are not as they seem to us. One must consider that on falling asleep in the evening, or even in the daytime (it really does not matter when; but I want first to discuss the nightly sleep enjoyed by every respectable person), one invariably goes back in time until a phase of life is reached lying at the very beginning of one's earthly existence. Moreover, one goes back even beyond one's earthly existence: to pre-earthly life; to that world from which we descended after acquiring a physical body by means of conception. At the moment of falling asleep, we are transported backward through the whole course of time. We are brought back to that moment when we descended from the heavenly realms to earth. Hence, if we fall asleep, for instance, on May sixteenth, nineteen twenty-three, we are transplanted from this date to that period which preceded our descent to earth; and also to that time which we cannot remember, because our memory stops at a certain point of our childhood. Each night, if we pass through it in real sleep, we actually become children again with regard to spirit and soul. And just as we can walk, in the physical world, for two or three miles through space, so a person can walk, at the age of twenty, through time for a span of twenty years, thus arriving at a stage before he was a child—when he began to be a human being. We return, across time, to the starting-point of our earth-life. Hence, while the physical and etheric body are lying in bed, the ego and astral body have gone back across time to an earlier moment. Now the question arises: if we go back every night to an earlier moment, what happens to our ego and astral body while we are awake?

[ 11 ] We would not ask such a question unless being aware of this nightly going backward. And, at bottom, even this going backward is only an illusion. In reality, our ego and astral body have not emerged, even during our waking day-time consciousness, from the state in which we existed during our pre-earthly existence.

[ 12 ] If we desire to recognize the truth about these facts, we must grasp the idea that ego and astral body have, initially, no share in our earthly evolution. They remain behind; they stop at the point where we began to acquire a physical and an etheric body. We thus, even when waking, leave our ego and astral body at the point marking the beginning of our earth-life.

Fundamentally, we live our earth-life only with the physical body and, in a certain way, with the etheric body. Our physical body alone becomes old. As for the etheric body, it connects our beginning with that moment at which we happen to stand during a certain period.

[ 13 ] Let us suppose that someone was born in nineteen hundred. His ego and astral body have come to a standstill at the moment of his birth. The physical body has reached the age of twenty-three; and the etheric body connects the moment at which this person entered earth-life with the moment experienced by him as the present one. Hence, if we did not possess an etheric body, we would awaken every morning as a newborn babe. Only by entering the etheric body before entering the physical body do we accommodate ourselves to the physical body's actual age. This accommodation must take place every morning. The etheric body is the mediator between the spirit-soul element and the physical body. It is a mediator forming the connecting link across the years of life. If a man reaches sixty or more years of life, the etheric body still forms the link between his very first appearance on earth—the point at which his ego and astral body have remained—and the age of his physical body.

[ 14 ] Now you will say: Well, after all, the ego is ours; it has aged with us; so also has our astral body aged with us, our thinking, feeling, and willing. If someone has become sixty, then his ego, too, has become sixty.

This would be quite correct if our everyday ego and our true, our real ego were identical. Our everyday ego, however, is not the same as our real ego; that remains standing at the starting-point of our earth-life. Our physical body reaches, let us say, the age of sixty. By means of the mediation of the etheric body, the physical body reflects—corresponding to the respective moment at which it is living—the mirrored image of the real ego. And what we see is the mirrored image of the real ego reflected back to us, from moment to moment, by the physical body; but resulting from something that has not accompanied us into earth-life. This mirrored image we call our ego. This mirrored image will naturally grow older as the reflecting apparatus, the physical body, gradually loses the freshness of early childhood and finally becomes wobbly and unstable. Yet this “ego,” which is only the mirrored image of the real ego, appears to age for the sole reason that the reflecting apparatus functions less efficiently after the physical body has grown old.

Like a perspective, the etheric body stretches from the present moment to the real ego and astral body, both of which do not descend into the physical world.

[ 15 ]

[ 16 ] You can imagine that these facts shaping human earth-life must acquire especial significance at the moment of human death. The physical body is the first that we discard in death. This body, however, is the one that determines our earthly age. In discarding this body, what do we retain? Primarily, that which we have not carried with us into earth-life, but which we have filled with all the experiences of earth-life: the ego and astral body. They have, as it were, stood still at the starting-point. Yet they have always looked at that which the physical body, helped by the etheric body, has reflected back as a mirrored image.

Thus, in passing through the portal of death, we stand at our life's starting-point; not filled, however, with what we carried within us when descending from the spiritual world, but filled with what was reflected back to us during earth-life as the mirrored image of this earth-life. With that we are filled to the brim. And this fact engenders an especial state of consciousness at the end of earth-life.

[ 17 ] This especial state of consciousness at the end of earth-life can be comprehended only by someone who, endowed with imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge, is able to see that which generally remains unconscious, that which man experiences between falling asleep and awaking. [ 18 ] Then one recognizes how man, during every night, retraces the life of the past day. One person does it faster, another slower—in one minute or five minutes. Concerning these things, however, time-conditions are entirely different from those of ordinary, outward earth-life. If we are gifted with super-sensible knowledge, we may take a look at what is experienced by the ego and the astral body. You may then actually, by going backward, recapitulate what you have experienced in the physical world since waking up in the morning. Every night we repeat the experiences of the day in reverse order. Every night we first recapitulate the experiences we had just before going to sleep; then the preceding hours; then those lying back still further, and so forth. Having passed in review, in reverse order, all the day's events, we usually awaken after arriving at the moment when we started in the morning.

[ 19 ] You might make the following objection: But people are sometimes awakened by a sudden noise. You must consider, however, that time may elapse in different ways. For instance, someone goes to bed at eleven in the evening, sleeps quietly until three in the morning and, having recapitulated in reverse order all that he experienced during the past day up until ten in the morning, is roused by a sudden disturbance. In such a case, the rest of the time can be retraced very rapidly in the last few moments before waking. Thus events that have stretched themselves out over several hours may, in such a case, be passed through again almost instantly. The conditions of time change in the sleeping state. Time may be completely compressed. Hence we may truthfully say that the human being, during every period of sleep, passes through in reverse what he has experienced during his last waking period. He recapitulates the events not only by seeing them before him, but also by interweaving his experiences with a complete moral judgment of what he did during the day. The human being, as it were, is summoned to judge his own state of morality. And when, on awaking, we have finished this activity, we have passed something like a world judgment on our worth as human beings. Every morning, having experienced in reverse what we did during the day, we appraise ourselves as a being of greater or lesser worth.

This description conveys to you what man's spirit and soul element undergoes, unconsciously, during every night; that is, during one third of our earth-life (if spent in a normal way). The soul passes through life in reverse; only somewhat faster, because merely one third of our earth-life is taken up by sleep.

[ 20 ] After our physical body has been discarded in death, the part called by me in my writings etheric body, or formative-force body, gradually separates itself from the ego and the astral body.

This separation takes place in such manner that the human being, having passed through the portal of death, feels his thoughts, heretofore considered by him as something inward, becoming realities which acquire ever greater expansion. Two, three or four days after his death man has this feeling: Fundamentally, I consist of nothing but thoughts. These thoughts, however, are driven asunder. The human being, as a thought-being, takes on ever greater dimensions; and finally this whole human thought-being is dissolved into the cosmos. But the more this thought-being (that is, the etheric body) is dissolved into the cosmos, the more arise experiences derived from other sources than ordinary consciousness.

[ 21 ] Essentially, all that we have thought and visualized in the waking state is scattered three days after death. This fact cannot be evaded by hiding our heads in the sand. The content of conscious earth-life has vanished three days after death. But just because the things seemingly so important, so essential during earth-life are dissipated within three days, there arise from the depth memories of that which could not come forth until now: memories of what we always experienced at night, in a preliminary way, between falling asleep and awaking. As the waking life of the day is scattered, dissipated, our inward depth sends forth the sum of experiences undergone by us during the night. These are none other than our day-time experiences, but passed through in reverse order and acquired, in every detail, by means of our moral sense.

[ 22 ] You must remember that our real ego and our real astral body are still standing at life's beginning; whereas the mirrored images that we have received from the physical body, regardless of its age, now flutter away with the etheric body. What we have not looked at in the least during earth-life, our nightly experiences, now come forth as a new content. Therefore we do not really feel as if our earth-life were ended, until three days have passed and brought about the scattering of our etheric body. If someone dies, let us say, on May sixteenth, nineteen twenty-three, he seems to be carried to the end of his earth-life by the arising, from nocturnal darkness, of his nightly experiences. At the same time, he is seized by the tendency to go backward.

[ 23 ] Hence we pass again through the period spent by us, night in, night out, in the state of sleep. This amounts to about one third of our earth-life.

The different religions describe this stage of existence as Purgatory, Kamaloka, and so forth. We pass through our earth-life, just as we passed through it unconsciously in successive nights, until our experiences have gone back to its very beginning. The wheel of life, ever rotating, must again return to its starting-point. Such is the course of events. Three days after death our day-time experiences have fluttered away. One third of our earth-life has been passed through in reverse; a period during which we can evaluate, in full consciousness, our human worth. For what we have passed through every night unconsciously, rises into full consciousness once the etheric body has been discarded.

[ 24 ] In ordinary life, we can conceive only of paths leading through space. Space, however, has no significance for the spirit and soul element; it is significant only for the physical-sensible. When reaching the spirit and soul state, we must also conceive of paths leading through time. After death, we must go backward across the whole span of time traversed by our physical body since breaking away—as might be said—from the heavenly realms. Actually we go back thrice as fast, because the time is balanced through the experiences undergone by us every night. Thus we return anew to the starting-point; but enriched by all that we experienced as physical beings. Enriched not only by what remains as a memory—for what flew away with the etheric body still remains as a memory—but also by the judgment passed unconsciously each night, out of our full human nature, on our worth as human beings.

Thus, depending on the kind of life lived by us, we sooner or later enter again (approximately after several decades) into the spiritual world whence we had departed—but departed only inasmuch as our consciousness was concerned. Actually, we have stood still at the starting-point, waiting until the physical body's earthly course would have been fulfilled, so that we might return again to what we were before birth, respectively before conception.

[ 25 ] In describing these things, especially in public, we must beware lest people be shocked by such unusual concepts. Speaking metaphorically, it could be said that we advance after death. In reality, however, we retrace our steps after death; we live our life in reverse. Time, as it rotates, returns to its starting-point. The following might be said: the divine world remains where it stood at the beginning. Man but bursts out, wanders out of the divine world. Then he comes back to it, bringing with him all that he conquered while dwelling outside of the divine realms.

[ 26 ] Then, in its turn, comes life. After returning once more to the spiritual world, enriched not only by conscious but also by unconscious earth-life; after “becoming as little children” who stand again within the heavenly realms, we pass into a kind of life that might be described in this way: now the human being beholds what he really is. Just as he perceived, with his ordinary consciousness, the plants, stones, and animals among whom he dwelt on earth, so he now perceives his new surroundings. What I am describing is the life after death. Here man sees himself surrounded by human souls who, having died or not yet having been born, undergo no earthly experiences, but those of the divine world. Moreover, he perceives the higher Hierarchies, such as the Angels, the Archangels, the Exusiai, and others still higher. You know these names and their significance from my Occult Science.

The human being gathers experiences in this purely spiritual world. I could characterize these experiences by saying: it is as if the human being were carrying his own being into the cosmos. What he experienced during the waking earth-life, during the nightly unconscious earth-life, he now carries into the cosmos. It is needed by the cosmos.

[ 27 ] While standing amidst earth-life, we judge the whole surrounding cosmos, sun, moon, and stars, only from a terrestrial viewpoint. As astronomers, we calculate the movement of the sun, of the planets, the latter's' relationship to the fixed stars, and so forth. This entire astronomical-scientific method, however, could be compared to the following procedure: suppose, that a man stood here and a tiny being—for instance, a ladybug—observed him. Then this tiny creature would found a science. An “Association of Ladybugs for the Study of Mankind” would observe how man comes to life. (I presume that ladybugs, too, have a certain life-span.) This association would observe what happened to man; would investigate all the phenomena backwards and forwards. One thing, however, would be ignored: that the human being eats and drinks, thus renewing his physical being again and again. The ladybugs would believe that man is born, grows by himself, and dies by himself. They would not be able to recognize that man's metabolism must be renewed from day to day.

As an astronomer the human being behaves somewhat similarly in regard to the world. He pays no attention to the fact that the world is a gigantic organism which needs nourishment, otherwise would the stars long ago be scattered in all the directions of universal space and the planets would have deserted their orbits. This gigantic organism, in order to live, needs a kind of nourishment that must be received again and again. Whence comes this nourishment?

[ 28 ] Here we encounter the great questions concerning man's relationship to the universe. It is simply stupendous how much physical science can prove. Only, somehow or other, these proofs have little meaning. People, who have been told that Anthroposophy contradicts ordinary science in many things, are inclined to believe that this ordinary science can prove anything in the world. This is true and not denied by Anthroposophy. Science can prove anything in the world. Only things happen to be constituted in such a way that, in certain cases, these proofs have nothing to do with reality.

[ 29 ] Let us suppose that I could calculate how the physical structure of the human heart changes from one year to the next. Then we might say: a man of thirty-three will have such and such a heart structure; at thirty-four he will have a certain heart structure; at thirty-five he will have still another heart structure, and so forth. Having made these observations over a period of five years, I calculate how the heart structure of this man was constituted let us say thirty years ago. This can be done. Now the whole physical structure of the heart lies before me. I can also calculate how it was constituted three hundred years ago. Here, however, arises a slight difficulty: three hundred years ago this heart did not exist and could, therefore, have had no physical structure of any kind. The calculation was absolutely correct. We can prove that the heart was constituted three hundred years ago in such and such a way, only it did not exist. We can also prove that the heart will be constituted three hundred years later in such and such a way, only then it will have ceased to exist. But the proofs are completely infallible.

[ 30 ] Geology can be handled today in the same manner. We can calculate that a certain layer of the soil indicates this or that fact. Likewise, we calculate how everything was twenty millions of years ago, or will be twenty millions of years later. The proof clicks with marvelous accuracy: only the earth did not exist twenty millions of years ago. It is the same as with the heart. Neither is the earth going to exist twenty millions of years later. The proofs are flawless, but have nothing whatever to do with reality. This is how things actually are. The possibilities of being deceived by physical life are immeasurably great. We must be able to penetrate spiritual life if we desire to gain a standpoint from which the physical world can be judged.

[ 31 ] And now let us go back to that which was to be elucidated by this digression concerning proofs that have no point of contact with reality. Let us go back to the moment after death, as I characterized it, and observe how the human being adjusts his life to the world of spiritual facts, spiritual beings. He brings into this spiritual world what he has experienced on earth while waking and sleeping.

[ 32] Just consider that these experiences are the nourishment of the cosmos; that they are continuously needed by the cosmos in order to live on. Whatever we experience on earth in the course of an easy or hard life is carried by us into the cosmos after death. We thus feel how our being as man is dissolved into the cosmos to furnish its nourishment. These experiences, undergone by man between death and a new birth, are of overwhelming grandeur, of immeasurable loftiness.

[ 33 ] Then comes the moment when man appears to himself no longer as a unity, but as a multiplicity. He appears to himself as if some of his virtues and qualities moved, as it were, towards one star; others towards a different star. Now man perceives how his being is scattered out into the whole world. He also perceives how the parts of his being fight with one another, harmonize with one another, disharmonize with one another. Man feels how that which he experienced on earth by day or by night is scattered into the cosmos. And just as we held fast to our nightly experiences when, three days after death, our thoughts—that is, the essence of our waking life—dissipated out into the cosmos and we, concentrating on our nightly experiences, lived again over, but backward, our whole earth-life until the starting-point of our earth-life is reached; so now, when our entire earthly human experience is scattered out into the cosmos, we hold fast to that which we represent as human beings belonging to a super-sensible world order.

[ 34 ] Now our real ego emerges from what might be called the Dionysically disjointed human being. Gradually there emerges the consciousness: You are nothing but spirit. You have only dwelt in a physical body; have only passed through—even in the nightly experiences—the events brought upon you by the physical body. You are a spirit among spirits.

[ 35 ] Now we enter a spiritual existence among spiritual beings; whereas our substance as physical man is scattered and dissolved into the cosmos. What we passed through here on earth is divided and given to the cosmos: so that it might nourish the cosmos and enable it to live on; so that the cosmos might receive new incentives for the movement of its stars, the sustenance of its stars. As we must partake of physical nourishment in order to live as physical men between birth and death, so must the cosmos partake of human experiences, take them into itself. Thus we feel ourselves more and more as cosmic men; find our whole being transfused, as it were, into the cosmos—but a cosmos taken in a spiritual sense. And then the moment approaches when we must seek the transition from death to a new birth; from man become cosmos to cosmos become man. We have ascended by identifying ourselves more and more with the cosmos. A moment comes—I have called it in my Mystery Plays the Great Midnight Hour of Existence—which brings to us this feeling: We must again become human beings. What we carried into the cosmos must be returned to us by the cosmos, so that we may come back to earth.

[ 36 ] Today it was my foremost purpose to describe man's being, as it is carried out of earth-life into the vast cosmic space. Thus this sketch—which will be enlarged upon during the coming days—has placed us into the center of life between death and a new birth.

• 1. First three paragraphs about the fire in Dornach not included in original translation and is added here for completeness. —rsarchive.org

Yesterday I tried to give you a picture of the states undergone by the human being after he passes through the portal of death and arrives in the spiritual world. Let us briefly summon before our soul the picture of the most essential stages. Immediately after passing through the portal of death, the human being first experiences the withdrawing of his ideational world. The ideas, the powers of thought, become objects, become something like active forces spreading out into the universe. Thus man feels at first the withdrawal from him of all the experiences he has consciously undergone during his earth-life between birth and death. But whereas earth-life, as experienced through thinking, withdraws from the human being and goes out into the vast cosmos (a process that occurs a few days after death [See: Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York.]), man's inner depths send forth a consciousness of all that he has undergone unconsciously during earth-life while asleep. This stage takes shape in such a way that he goes backward and recapitulates his earth-life in a period of one third of its actual duration.

During this time, the human being is intensely wrapt up in his own self. It might be said that he is still intensely connected with his own earthly affairs. He is thoroughly interwoven with what he passed through, while asleep, during the successive nights of his earthly life.

You will realize that the human being, while continuously occupied with his nightly experiences, must necessarily be led back to his self. Just consider the dreams, the only element in man's earth-life that surges up from the sleeping state. These dreams are the least part of his experiences while asleep. Everything else, however, remains unconscious. Only the dreams surge up into consciousness. Yet it could be said that the dreams, be they ever so interesting, ever so manifold, ever so rich in many-hued colors, represent something that restricts the human being completely to his own self. If a number of persons sleep in the same room, each of them has, nevertheless, his own dream world. And, when they tell their dreams to one another, these persons will speak of things that seem to have happened in entirely different worlds. For in sleep, each person is alone within himself. And only by inserting our will into our organism do we occupy the same world situated in the same space as is occupied by others. If we were always asleep, each of us would live in a world of his own.

But this world of our own which we pass through every night between falling asleep and awaking is the world we pass through in reverse, after death, during a period encompassing one third of our life-span.

If people possessed nothing but this world, they would be occupied for two or three decades after death (if they die at an old age) exclusively with themselves. This, however, is not the case. What we experience as our own affairs nevertheless connects us with the whole world. For the world through which each of us passes by himself is interwoven with relations to all those human beings with whom we were associated in life.

This interweaving of relations is caused by the fact that, when looking down from the soul world on the earthly experiences of those persons with whom we were associated in some way, we experience together with them what occurs on earth. Hence anyone willing to try may perceive, if he acquaints himself with spiritual-scientific methods, [See: Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Anthroposophic Press, New York.] how the dead, immediately after their transition, are helped to participate intensively in earthly events by those of their former companions who are still alive. And so we find that the dead, in the measure in which they shared this or that interest with others, underwent common destinies with others, remain connected with all these earthly interests; are still interested in earthly events. And, being no longer hindered by the physical body, they judge earthly events much more lucidly and sagaciously than men who are still alive. By attaining a conscious relation to the dead, we are enabled to gain, by means of their judgment, an extraordinary lucidity concerning earthly events.

Furthermore, something else must be considered. We can see that certain things existing within earthly relations will be preserved in the spiritual world. Thus an eternal element is intermingled, as it were, with our terrestrial experiences.

Descriptions of the spiritual world often sound almost absurd. Nonetheless, since I am addressing myself presumably to anthroposophists of long standing, I may venture to speak frankly of these matters. In looking for a way to communicate with the dead, it is even possible to use earthly words: ask questions, and receive answers. And now a peculiar fact is to be noticed: The ability lost first by the dead is that of using nouns; whereas verbs are retained by them for a long time. Their favorite forms of expression, however, are exclamatory words; all that is connected with emotion and heart. An Oh!, an Ah!, as expressions of amazement, of surprise, and so forth, are often used by the dead in their language. We must, as it were, first learn the language of the dead.

These things are not at all as the spiritists imagine. These people believe that they can communicate with the dead, by means of a medium, in ordinary earthly language. The character of these communications immediately indicates that we are concerned here with subconscious states of living persons, and not with actual, direct utterances of the dead transmitted through a medium. For the dead outgrow ordinary human language by degrees. After the passing of several years, we can communicate with the dead only by acquiring their language—which can best be done by suggesting, through simple symbolic drawings, what we want to express. Then the answers will be given by means of similar symbolic forms necessarily received by us in shadowy outlines.

All this is described by me for the purpose of indicating that the dead, although dwelling in an element akin to sleep, yet have a vast range of interests and sweep the whole world with their glance. And we ourselves can greatly assist them. This may be done by thinking of the dead as vividly as possible; especially by sending thoughts to them which bring to life, in the most striking way, what we experienced in their company. Abstract concepts are not understood by the dead. Hence I must send out such thoughts as the following: Here is the road between Kristiania and a near-by place. Here we two walked together. The other person, who is now dead, walked at my side. I can still hear him speaking. I hear the sound of his voice. I try to recall how he moved his arms, how he moved his head.—By visualizing, as vividly as possible, what we experienced together with the dead; by sending out our thoughts to the dead whom we conjure up before our soul in a familiar image, we can make these thoughts, as it were, soar or stream towards the dead. Thus we provide the dead with something like a window, through which they can look at the world. Not only the thought sent by us to the dead comes forth within them, but a whole world. They can gaze at our world as if through a window.

Conversely, the dead can experience their present spiritual environment only to the degree in which they formerly reflected, as much as earthly men are capable of doing, on the spiritual world.

You know how many people are saying now-a-days: Why should I worry about life after death? We might as well wait. Once we are dead, we shall see what is going to happen.—This thought, however, is completely misleading. People who have not reflected, while still alive, on the spiritual world, who have lived in a purely materialistic way, will see absolutely nothing after death.

Here I have outlined to you how the dead are living during the period in which—commensurate with their experiences in the sleeping state—they pass through their life in reverse. The human being who has now discarded his physical and etheric body, feels himself to be at this time in the realm of spiritual moon forces. We must realize that all the world organisms—moon, sun and stars—inasmuch as they are visible to physical eyes, actually represent only physical formations of a spiritual element.

Just as the single man, who is sitting here on a chair, consists not only of flesh and blood (which can be regarded as matter), but also of soul and spirit, so the whole universe, the whole cosmos, is indwelled by soul and spirit. And not only one unified spiritual entity dwells therein, but many, innumerably many spiritual entities dwell therein. Thus numerous spiritual entities are connected with the moon, which is seen only externally as a silver disk by our physical eye. We are in the realm of these entities while retracing our earth-life, as has been described, until we arrive again at the starting point. Thus it might be said: Until then we dwell in the realm of the moon.

While we are in the midst of this going backward, our whole life becomes intermingled with certain things, which are brought to an approximate conclusion after we have left the moon realm.

Immediately after the etheric body has been discarded by us in the wake of death, a moral judgment on our worth as human beings emerges from the nightly experiences. Then we cannot do otherwise than judge, in a moral sense, the events through which we pass in reverse. And it is very strange how things develop from this point.

Here on earth we carry a body made of bones, muscles, arteries, and so forth. Then, after death, we acquire a spiritual body, formed out of our moral qualities. A good man acquires a moral body radiating with beauty; a depraved man a moral body radiating with evil. This is formed while we are living backward. Our spirit-body, however, is only partly formed out of that which is now joined to us. Whereas one part of the spirit-body received by us in the spiritual world is formed out of our moral qualities, the other part is simply put on us as a garment woven from the substances of the spiritual world.

Now, after finishing our reverse course and arriving again at the starting-point, we must find the transition to which I alluded in my Theosophy as the transition from the soul world into the spirit realm. This is connected with the necessity of leaving the moon sphere and entering the sun sphere of the cosmos. We become gradually acquainted with the all-encompassing entities dwelling, in the form of spirit and soul, within the sun sphere. This we must enter. In the next few days, I shall discuss to what degree the Christ plays a leading role in helping the human being to make this transition from the moon sphere to the sun sphere. (This role is different after the Mystery of Golgotha from the role He played before the Mystery of Golgotha.) Today we shall describe the passage through this world in a more objective way.—What ensues at this point is the necessity of depositing in the moon sphere all that was woven for us, as it were, out of our moral qualities. This represents something like a small package, which we must deposit in the moon sphere in order that we may enter, as purely spiritual beings, into the pure sun sphere. Then we see the sun in its real aspect: not from the side turned towards earth but from the reverse side, where it is completely filled with spiritual entities; where we can fully see that it is a spiritual realm.

It is here that we give as nourishment to the universe everything that does not belong to our moral qualities, but which has been granted to us by the gods in the form of earthly experiences. We give to the universe whatever it can use for maintaining the world's course. These things are actually true. If I compared the universe to a machine—you know that I do this merely in a pictorial sense, for I am certainly not inclined to designate the universe a machine—then everything brought by us into the sun sphere after depositing our small package in the moon sphere would be something like fuel, apportioned by us to the cosmos as fuel is apportioned to a machine.

Thus we enter the realm of the spiritual world. For it does not matter whether we call our new abode the sun sphere, in its spiritual aspect, or the spiritual world.

Here we dwell as a spirit among spirits, just as we dwelled on earth as a physical man among the entities of the various natural kingdoms. Now we dwell among those entities which I described and named in my Occult Science; and we also dwell among those souls which have died before us, or are still awaiting their coming earth-life. For we are dwelling as a spirit among spirits.

These spiritual entities may belong to the higher Hierarchies or be incorporeal men dwelling in the spiritual world. And now the question arises: What is our next stage?

Here on earth we stand at a certain point of the physical universe. Looking around in every direction, we see what lies outside the human being. That which lies inside him we are utterly unable to see.

Now you will say: What you tell us is foolish. It may be granted that ordinary people cannot see man's inside; but the learned anatomists, who cut up dead people in hospitals, are certainly familiar with it.—They are not familiar with it in the least! For what can be learned about a man in this way is only something external. After all, if we regard a human being merely from the outside, it does not matter whether we investigate his outer skin or his insides. What lies inside the human skin is not that which anatomists discover in an external way, but what lies inside the human skin are whole worlds. In the human lung, for instance, in every human organ, whole universes are compressed to miniature forms.

We see marvelous sights when admiring a beautiful landscape; marvelous sights when admiring at night the starry sky in all its splendor. Yet if viewing a human lung, a human liver, not with the anatomist's physical eye, but with the eye of the spirit, we see whole worlds compressed into a small space. Apart from the splendor and glory of all the rivers and mountains on the surface of the earth, a still more exalted splendor adorns what lies inside of man's skin, even in its merely physical aspect. It is irrelevant that all this is of smaller scale than the seemingly vast world of space. If you survey what lies in a single pulmonary vesicle, it will appear as more grandiose than the whole range of the mighty Alps. For what lies inside of man is the whole spiritual cosmos in condensed form. In man's inner organism we have an image of the entire cosmos.

We can visualize these things also in a somewhat different way. Imagine that you are thirty years old and, looking into yourself with a glance of the soul, remember something which you experienced between your tenth and twentieth year. Here the outer event has been transformed into an inner soul-image. In a single moment, you may survey widely spread experiences undergone by you in the course of years. A world has been woven into an ideational image. Only think of what you experience when brief memory-images of widely spread events passed through by you come forth in your soul-life. Here you have the soul-essence of what you experienced on earth. Now, if viewing your brain, the inside of your eye—the inside of the eye alone represents a whole world—your lung, your other organs in the same way as your memory-images; then these organs are not images of events passed through by you but images—even if appearing in material form—of the whole spiritual cosmos.

Let us suppose that man could solve the riddle of what is contained in his brain, in the inside of his eye, in the inside of his lung; just as he can solve the riddle of the memories contained in his soul-life. Then the whole spiritual cosmos would be opened up to him; just as a series of events undergone in life are opened up to man by a single memory-image. As human beings, we incorporate the whole memory of the world. If you consider these things in the right way, you will understand the following: The human being, who has undergone after death all the states described by me previously, now becomes manifest to the vision of man himself. The human being is a spirit among spirits. Yet, what he sees now as his world is the marvel of the human organism itself in the form of the universe, the whole cosmos. Just as mountains, rivers, stars, and clouds form our surroundings here on earth; so, when dwelling as spirit among spirits, we find our surroundings, our world, in man's wonderful organism. We look around in the spiritual world; we look—if I may express myself pictorially—to the right and to the left: as here we found rocks, river, mountains on all sides, so there above we find the human being, MAN, on all sides. Man is the world. And we are working for this world which is fundamentally man. Just as, on earth, we build machines, keep books, sew clothes, make shoes, or write books, thus weaving together what is called the content of civilization, of culture, so above, together with the spirits of the higher Hierarchies and incorporeal human beings, we weave the woof and weft of mankind. We weave mankind out of the cosmos. Here on earth we appear as finished products. There we lay down the spiritual germ of earthly man.

This is the great mystery: that man's heavenly occupation consists in weaving, in cooperation with the spirits of the higher Hierarchies, the great spiritual germ of the future terrestrial human being. Inside the spiritual cosmos, all of us are weaving, in magnificent spiritual grandeur, the woof and weft of our own earthly existence, which will be attained by us after descending again into earthly life. Our work, performed in cooperation with the gods, is the fashioning of the earthly human being.

When we speak of germs here on earth, we think of something small which becomes big. If we speak, however, of the germ of the physical human being as it exists in the spiritual world—for the physical germ maturing in the mother's body is only an image of the spiritual germ—we must think of it as immense, enormous. It is a universe; and all other human beings are interlinked with this universe. It might be said: all human beings are in the same “place,” yet numerically differentiated. And then the spiritual germ diminishes more and more. What we undergo in the time between death and a new birth is the experience of fashioning a spiritual germ, as large as the universe, of our coming earthly existence. Then this spiritual germ begins to shrink. More and more its essence becomes convoluted. Finally it produces its own image in the mother's body.

Materialistic physiology has entirely wrong conceptions of these things. It assumes that man, whose marvelous form I have tried to sketch for you, came forth from a merely physical human germ. This science considers the ovum to be a highly complicated matter; and physiological chemists investigate the fact that molecules or atoms, becoming more and more complicated, produce the germ, the most complicated phenomenon of all.

All this, however, is not true. In reality, the ovum consists of chaotic matter. Matter, when transformed into a germ, is dissolved; it becomes completely pulverized. The nature of the physical germ, and the human germ particularly, is characterized by being composed of completely pulverized matter, which wants nothing for itself.

Because this matter is completely pulverized and wants nothing for itself, it enables the spiritual germ, which has been prepared for a long time, to enter into it. And this pulverization of the physical germ is brought about by conception. Physical matter is completely destroyed in order that the spiritual germ may be sunk into it and make the physical matter into an image of the spiritual germ woven out of the cosmos.

It is doubtless justified to sing the praises of all that human beings are doing for civilization, for culture, on earth. Far from condemning this singing of praises, I declare myself, once and for all, in favor of it when it is done in a reasonable way. But a much more encompassing, a much more exalted, a much more magnificent work than all earthly cultural activity is performed by heavenly civilization, as it might be called, between death and a new birth: the spiritual preparation, the spiritual weaving of the human body. For nothing more exalted exists in the world order than the weaving of the human being out of the world's ingredients. With the help of the gods, the human being is woven during the important period between death and a new birth.

If yesterday I had to say that, in a certain sense, all the experience and knowledge acquired by us on earth provide nourishment for the cosmos, it must be said again today: After offering to the cosmos, as nourishment or fuel, all the earthly experiences that could be of use to it, we receive, from the fullness of the cosmos, all the substances out of which we are able to weave again the new human being into whom we shall enter at a later time.

The human being, now devoting himself wholly to a spiritual world, lives as a spirit. His entire weaving and being is spiritual work, spiritual essence. This stage lasts for a long time. For it must be repeated again and again: to weave something like the human being is a mighty and grandiose task. Not without justification did the ancient Mysteries call the human physical body a temple. The greater the insight we gain into the science of initiation, into what takes place between death and a new birth, the deeper do we feel the significance of this word. Our life between death and a new birth is of such a nature that we, as spiritual beings, become directly aware of other spiritual beings. This condition lasts for some time. Then a new stage sets in.

What took place previously was of such a nature that the single spiritual beings could really be viewed as individualities. The spiritual beings with whom one worked were met face to face, as it were. At a later stage, however, these spiritual entities—to express it pictorially, because such things can be suggested only in images—become less and less distinct, finally being merged into an aggregation of spirits. This can be expressed in the following way: A certain period between death and a new birth is spent in immediate proximity to spiritual beings. Then comes a time when one experiences only the revelation of these spiritual beings; when they become manifest to us as a whole. I want to use a very trivial metaphor. On seeing what seems to be a tiny gray cloud in the distance, you would be sure that this was just a tiny gray cloud. But, by coming closer, you would recognize it to be a swarm of flies. Now you can see each single fly. In the case of the spiritual beings, the opposite took place. First you behold the divine-spiritual beings, with whom you are working, as single individualities. Then, after living with them more intensively, you behold their general spiritual atmosphere, just as you beheld the swarm of flies in the shape of a cloud. Here, where the single individualities disappear more and more, you live—I might say—in pantheistic fashion in the midst of a general spiritual world.

Although we live now in a general spiritual world, we feel arising out of our inner depth a stronger sense of self-consciousness than we experienced before. Formerly your self was constituted in such a way that you seemed to be at one with the spiritual world, which you experienced by means of its individualities. Now you perceive the spiritual world only as a general spiritual atmosphere. Your own self-consciousness, however, is perceived in greater degree. It awakens with heightened intensity. And thus, slowly and gradually, the desire of returning to earth again arises in the human being. This desire must be described in the following way:

During the entire period which I have described and which lasts for centuries, the human being—except in the first stage when he was still connected with the earth and returned to his starting point—is fundamentally interested in nothing but the spiritual world. He weaves, in the large scale that I have described, the fabric of mankind.

At the moment when the individualities of the spiritual world are merged together, as it were, and man perceives the spiritual world in a general way, there arises in him a renewed interest in earth-life. This interest for earth-life appears in a certain specialized manner, in a certain concrete manner. The human beings begin to be interested in definite persons living below on earth, and again in their children, and again in their children's children. Whereas the human beings were formerly interested only in heavenly events, they now become, after beholding the spiritual world as a revelation, strangely interested in certain successive generations. These are the generations leading to our own parents, who will bear us on our return to earth. Yet we are interested, a long time before, in our parents' ancestors. We follow the line of generations until reaching our parents. Not only do we follow each generation as it passes through time; but—once the spiritual world has been manifested to us as a revelation—we also foresee, as if prophetically, the whole span of generations. Across the succession of great-great-great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers, great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and so forth, we can foresee the path on which we shall descend again to earth. Having first grown into the cosmos, we grow later into real, concrete human history. And thus comes the moment when we gradually (in regard to our consciousness) leave the sun sphere.

Of course, we still remain within the sun sphere; but the distinct, clear, conscious relation to it becomes dim and we are drawn back into the moon sphere. And here, in the moon sphere, we find the “small package” deposited by us (I can describe it only by means of this image); we find again what represents the worth of our moral qualities. And this package must be retrieved.

It will be seen in the course of the next days what a significant part is played in this connection by the Christ-impulse. We must embody within us this package of destiny. But while embodying within us the package of destiny and entering the moon sphere, while gaining a stronger and stronger feeling of self-consciousness and transforming ourselves inwardly more and more into soul-beings, we gradually lose the tissue woven by us out of our physical body. The spiritual germ woven by ourselves is lost at the moment when the physical germ, which we shall have to assume on earth, is engendered through the act of conception.

The spiritual germ of the physical body has already descended to earth; whereas we still dwell in the spiritual world. And now a vehement feeling of bereavement sets in. We have lost the spiritual germ of the physical body. This has already arrived below and united itself with the last of those successive generations which we have watched. We ourselves, however, are still above. The feeling of bereavement becomes violent. And now this feeling of bereavement draws out of the universe the needful ingredients of the world-ether. Having sent the spiritual germ of the physical body down to earth and remained behind as a soul (ego and astral body), we draw etheric substance out of the world-ether and form our own etheric body. And to this etheric body, formed by ourselves, is joined—approximately three weeks after the fecundation has taken place on earth—the physical germ which formed itself out of the spiritual germ, as I have previously described.

It was said that we form our etheric body before uniting ourselves with our own physical germ. And into this etheric body is woven the small package containing our moral worth. We weave this package into our ego, our astral body, and also into our etheric body. Thus it is joined to the physical body. In this way, we bring our karma down to earth. First, it was left behind in the moon sphere; for, had we taken it with us into the sun sphere, we would have formed a diseased, a disfigured physical body.

The human physical body acquires individuality only through the circumstance of its being permeated by the etheric body. Otherwise, all physical bodies would be exactly alike; for human beings, while dwelling in the spiritual world, weave identical spiritual germs for their physical body. We become individualities only by means of our karma, by means of the small package interwoven by us with our etheric body which shapes, constitutes and pervades our physical body already during the embryonic stage.

Of course, I shall have to enlarge during the next days on this sketch concerning the human being's transition between death and a new birth. Yet you will have realized what a wealth of experiences is undergone by us: the great experience of how we are first merged into the cosmos and then, out of the cosmos, again are shaped in order to attain a new human earth-life.

Fundamentally, we pass through three stages. First, we dwell as spirit-soul among spirit-souls. This is a genuine experiencing of the spiritual world. Secondly, we are given a revelation of the spiritual world. The individualities of the single spiritual entities become blurred as it were. The spiritual world is revealed to us as a whole. Now we approach again the moon sphere. Within ourselves the feeling of self-consciousness awakens; this is a preparation for earthly self-consciousness. Whereas we did not desire earth-life while being conscious of our spiritual self within the spiritual world, we now begin, during the period of revelation, to desire earth-life and develop a vigorous self-consciousness directed towards the earth.

In the third stage, we enter the moon sphere; and, having yielded our spiritual germ to the physical world, draw together out of all the heaven worlds the etheric substance needed for our own etheric body. Three successive stages: A genuine life within the spiritual world; a life amidst the revelations of the spiritual world, in which we feel ourselves already as an egoistic self; a life devoted to the drawing together of the world ether.

The counterparts of these stages are produced after the human being has moved again into his physical body. These counterparts are of a most surprising nature. We see the child. We see it before us in its physical body. The child develops. This development of the child is the most wonderful thing to behold in the physical world. We see how it first crawls, and then assumes a state of balance with regard to the world. We observe how the child learns to walk. Immeasurably great things are connected with this learning to walk. It represents an entrance of the child's whole being into the state of equilibrium of the world. It represents a genuine orientation of the whole cosmos towards the world's three spatial dimensions. And the child's wonderful achievement consists in the fact that it finds the correct human state of equilibrium within the world.

These things are a modest, terrestrial counterpart of all that the human being, while dwelling as a spirit among spirits, underwent in the course of long centuries. We feel great reverence for the world if we look at it in such wise that we observe a child: how it first kicks its limbs awkwardly in every direction, then gradually learns to control itself. This is the aftereffect of the movements which we executed, during centuries, as a spiritual being among spiritual beings. It is really wonderful to discover in the child's single movements, in its search for a state of equilibrium, the terrestrial after-effects of those heavenly movements executed, in a purely spiritual sense, as spirit among spirits.

Every child—unless some abnormal condition changes the sequence—should first learn to walk (attain a state of equilibrium) and then learn to speak.

Now again the child, by an imitative process, adjusts itself through the use of language to its environment. But in every sound, every word formation shaping itself in the child, we find a modest, terrestrial echo of the experience undergone by us when our knowledge of the spiritual world becomes revelation; when this knowledge is compressed, as it were, into a uniform haze. Then the World Logos is formed out of the world's single being, which we experienced previously in an individualized way. And when the child utters one word after the other, this is the audible terrestrial counterpart of a marvelous world tableau experienced by us during the time of revelation, before we return again to the moon sphere.

And when the child, having learned to walk and speak, gradually develops its thoughts—for learning to think should be the third step in a normal human development—this is a counterpart of the work performed by man while forming his own etheric body out of the world ether gathered from every part of the universe.

Thus, in looking at the child as it enters the world, we see in the three modest faculties needed to gain a dynamic static relationship to the world—learning to maintain equilibrium (what we call learning to walk), learning to speak, learning to think—the compressed, modest, terrestrial counterparts of that which, spread out into grandiose cosmic dimensions, represents the stages passed through by us between death and a new birth.

Only by gaining a knowledge of the spiritual life between death and a new birth, do we gain a knowledge of the mystery coming forth from man's innermost depth when the child, having been born in a uniform state, becomes increasingly differentiated. Hence, by pointing to every single being as a revelation of the divine, we learn to understand the world as a revelation of the divine.

Yesterday we had to speak of the path pursued by man between death and a new birth; and the whole gist of my remarks will have shown you that every night during sleep we must return to the starting-point of our earth-life.

We can indeed gain insight into these significant matters if we realize that on sinking into slumber we do not stand still at the date reached in the course of our earthly existence (as was already explained in the previous lectures), but that we actually go back to our starting-point. Every time, during sleep, we are carried back to our childhood, and even to the state before our childhood, before our arrival on earth. Hence, while we are asleep, our ego and our astral body return to the spiritual world, to the world of our origin which we left in order to become earth men.

At this point of our discourse, it becomes necessary to let pass before our soul in greater detail what the human being undergoes while asleep; undergoes unconsciously, but, nonetheless, most vividly.

The duration of our sleep does not really matter. Although it is difficult for our ordinary consciousness to conceive of the fact that time and space conditions are utterly different in the spiritual world, we must learn to form conceptions of such a kind.

I have already said that the human being, when suddenly awakened after he has fallen asleep and hence lost consciousness, experiences during that brief moment whatever he would have experienced, had his sleep continued for a long time. In measuring the length of our sleep according to its physical duration, we take into account only our physical body and our etheric body. Utterly different time-conditions prevail for that which is undergone by our ego and astral body. Hence the things that I shall presently explain to you are valid for either a long or a short sleep.

When the human personality enters the realm of sleep with his soul, the first state experienced by him—all this takes place in the unconscious, yet with great vividness—engenders a feeling in him of dwelling, as it were, in a general world ether. (In speaking of feeling, I mean an unconscious feeling. It is impossible to express these matters otherwise than by terms used in ordinary conscious life.) The person feels himself, as it were, disseminated into the whole cosmos. We cease to have the definite perceptions, which formerly connected us with all the things surrounding us in our earthly existence. At first, we take part in the general weaving and surging of the cosmos. And this is accompanied by the feeling that our souls have their being in a bottomless element. Hence the soul, while existing in this bottomless element, has an ardent desire for divine support. Thus we experience every evening, when falling asleep, the religious need of having the whole world permeated by an all-encompassing divine-spiritual element. This is our real experience when falling asleep.

Our whole constitution as human beings enables us to transfer this desire for the divine into our waking life. Day in and day out, we are indebted to our nightly experiences for renewing our religious needs.

Thus only a contemplation of our entire being enables us to gain insight into the various life-experiences undergone by us. Fundamentally, we live very thoughtlessly if we take into account only the conscious life passed between morning and evening; for many night experiences are interwoven with this. The human being does not always realize whence he derives his living religious need. He derives it from the general experiences undergone by him every night just after having fallen asleep—and also, although perhaps less intensively, during an afternoon nap.

Then, in our sleep, another stage sets in—all this, as was said before, being passed through unconsciously, but nonetheless vividly. Now it does not seem to the sleeper that his soul is, as it were, disseminated into the general cosmos, but it seems as if the single parts of his entity were divided. Were our experiences to become conscious, we would feel as though we were being disjointed. And, from the bottom of our soul, an unconscious fear rises up. Every night, while asleep, we experience the fear of being divided up into the whole universe.

Now you might say: What does all this matter, as long as we know nothing about it? Well, it matters a great deal. I should like to explain, by means of a comparison, how much it matters.

Suppose that we become frightened in ordinary daily life. We turn pale. The emotion of fear is consciously felt by the soul. A definite change in our organism makes us turn pale. The blood streams back into the body's interior. This is an objective process. We can describe the emotion of fear in connection with an objective process taking place, in daily conscious life, within the physical body. What we experience in our soul is, as it were, a mirrored image reflecting this streaming away of the blood from the body's surface to its inner parts. Thus an objective process corresponds, in the waking state, to the emotion of fear. When we are asleep, a similar objective process, wholly independent of our consciousness, occurs in our astral body.

Anyone able to form imaginative and inspired conceptions will experience this objective process in the astral body as an emotion of fear. The objective element in fear, however, is actually experienced by man every night, because he feels himself being divided into parts inside his soul. And how is he being divided? Every night he is divided among the universe of stars. One part of his soul substance is striving towards Mercury, another part towards Jupiter, and so forth. Yet this process can only be correctly characterized by saying: During ordinary sleep, we do not actually penetrate the worlds of stars, as is the case on the path between death and a new birth. What we really undergo every night is not an actual division among the stars, but only among the counterparts of the stars which we carry within us during our entire earth life. While asleep, we are divided among the counterparts of Mercury, Venus, Moon, Sun, and so forth. Thus we are concerned here not with the original stars themselves, but with their counterparts in us.

This emotion of fear, experienced by us relatively soon after falling asleep, can be removed only from that human being who feels a genuine kinship to the Christ. At this point, we become aware how much the human being needs this kinship with the Christ. In speaking of this kinship, it is necessary to envisage man's evolution on earth. Mankind's evolution on earth can be comprehended only by someone having real insight into the significant turning point brought to human evolution by the Mystery of Golgotha. It is a fact that the human beings before the Mystery of Golgotha were different with regard to soul and spirit from the human beings after the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred on earth. This must be taken into account, if man's soul is to be viewed in its true light.

When the human beings who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha—and these human beings were actually we ourselves in a former life—fell asleep and experienced the fear of which I have just spoken, then the counterpart of the Christ in the world of stars existed for the human beings of that time as much as did the counterparts of the other heavenly bodies. And as the Christ approached the sleeping human being, He came as a helper to dissipate fear, to destroy fear. People of earlier ages, still gifted with instinctive clairvoyance, remembered after awaking, in a dream-like consciousness, that the Christ had been with them in their sleep. Only they did not call Him the Christ. They called Him the Sun-spirit. Yet these people, who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, avowed from their innermost depth that the great Sun-spirit was also the great guide and helper of the human being, who approached him every night in sleep and relieved him of the fear of being disseminated into the universe. The Christ appeared as a spirit strengthening mankind and consolidating its inner life.

Who binds together man's forces during his life? asked the followers of ancient religions. It is the great Sun-spirit, who firmly binds together man's single elements and combines them into one personality. And this avowal was uttered by the followers of ancient religions, because their consciousness was pervaded by the memory that the Christ approached man every night.

We do not need to be amazed at these things. In those ancient times when the human being was still capable of instinctive clairvoyance, he could look back at significant moments of his life into the period passed through by him before his soul and spirit descended to earth and was clothed in a physical body. Thus it seemed quite natural to the human being that he could look upward into a pre-earthly existence.

But is it not a fact that—as we explained before—every period of sleep carries us back into pre-earthly existence, into an existence preceding the stage before we became a truly conscious child? This question must be answered in the affirmative. And just as human beings knew that they had been together, in their pre-earthly existence, with the exalted Sun-spirit who had given them the strength to pass through death as immortal beings, so they also consciously remembered after every sleep that the exalted Sun-spirit had stood at their side, helping them to become real human beings, integrated personalities.

The human soul, while acquainting itself with the world of planets, passes through this stage during sleep. It is as if the soul were first dispersed among the counterparts of the planets, and then united and held together by the Christ.

Consider that this whole soul-experience during sleep has changed, with regard to the human being, since the Mystery of Golgotha. For the Mystery of Golgotha has originated the unfolding of a vigorous human ego-consciousness. This ego-consciousness, pervading human culture only gradually after the Mystery of Golgotha, became especially apparent after the first third of the fifteenth century. And the same vigorous ego-consciousness, which enables the human being to place himself as a free, fully self-conscious being into the sense world, this same consciousness—as though trying to maintain equilibrium—also darkens his retrospect into pre-earthly existence; darkens his conscious memory of the helping Christ, Who stood at his side during sleep.

It is remarkable that, since the Mystery of Golgotha, human evolution has taken the following course: On the one hand, man acquired a vigorous ego-consciousness in his waking state; on the other hand, utter darkness gradually overlaid that which had formerly radiated out of sleep-consciousness. Therefore human beings are obliged, since the Mystery of Golgotha, to establish a conscious relationship to Christ Jesus while they are awake. They must acquire, in a conscious way, a comprehension of what the Mystery of Golgotha really signifies: That, by means of the Mystery of Golgotha, the exalted Sun-spirit, Christ, descended to earth, became a human being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, passed through earth-life and death, and, after death, still taught His disciples who were permitted to behold Him in His etheric body after death.

Those personalities who acquire, in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, a waking consciousness of their kinship with the Christ, and gain a living conception of what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha: to these the possibility will be given of being helped by the Christ impulse, as it is carried from their waking state into their sleep.

This shows us how differently human sleep was constituted before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ invariably appeared as Helper while the human being slept. Man could remember even after awaking that the Christ had been with him during his sleep. After the Mystery of Golgotha, however, he would be utterly bereft of the Christ's help, if he were not to establish a conscious relation with the Christ during the day while awake and carry its echo, its after-effect, into his sleep. Only in this way can the Christ help him to maintain his personality while asleep.

What the human being had received unconsciously from the wide heavenly reaches before the Mystery of Golgotha: the help of the Christ, the human soul must now acquire gradually by establishing a conscious relation with the Mystery of Golgotha. This inner soul-responsibility has been laid upon the human being since the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus we are unable to study the nature of human sleep, unless we are able to envisage the immense transformation undergone by human sleep since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When we enter the realm of sleep, our whole world becomes different from that experienced in the waking state. How do we live as physical men while awake? We are confined, through our physical body, by natural laws. The laws working outside in nature are also working within us. That which we recognize as moral responsibilities and impulses, as moral world order, stands like an abstract world amidst the laws of nature. And because present-day natural science takes into account only the waking world, it is completely ignorant of the moral world.

Thus natural science tells us—although hypothetically, yet in conformity with its principles—that the Kant-Laplace primeval fog marked the starting-point of world evolution; and that this world evolution will be terminated through a state of heat which will kill all living things and bury them, as it were, in a huge cosmic cemetery. (These conceptions have been modified, but still prevail among natural scientists.) Natural science, in describing the evolution of the cosmos, begins and ends with a physical state. Here the moral world order appears as a stranger. The human being, however, would not be aware of his dignity, would not even experience himself as a human being, unless he experienced himself as a moral being. But what moral impulses could be found in the Kant-Laplace primeval fog? Here were nothing but physical laws. Will there be moral impulses when the earth shall perish from heat? Then, also, nothing but physical laws will prevail. Thus speaks natural science. And out of the natural process germinate all living things, and out of living things the human soul-element. The human being forms certain conceptions: One should act in a certain way; or one should not act in that way. He experiences a moral world order. But this cannot be nurtured by natural law. To the waking human being, the moral world order appears like a merely abstract world amidst the rigid, massive world of natural laws.

It is entirely different when imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive consciousness passes through that which the human being, between falling asleep and awaking, experiences in his ego and astral body. Here the moral world order appears real, whereas the natural order below appears like something abstract, something dream-like. Although it is difficult to conceive of these things, they are nonetheless true. The whole world has been turned upside down. To the sleeper acquiring clairvoyance in his sleep, the moral world order would seem something real, something secure; and the physical world order of natural laws would seem to sink below, not rise above, the moral world order. And if the sleeper possessed consciousness, he would not place the Kant-Laplace theory at the starting-point of world evolution, and the death through heat at its end. At the starting-point, he would recognize the world of spiritual hierarchies—all the spirit and soul beings who lead man into existence. At the end of world evolution, he would again recognize the spirit and soul beings who extend to man who has passed through the course of evolution a welcome to enter their community. And below, as an illusion, the abstract physical world order would have its welling and streaming existence. If you were gifted with clairvoyance in the very midst between falling asleep and awaking, you would view all the natural laws of which you have learned during the day as a mirage of dreams, dreamed by the earth. And it would be the moral world order which would give you a firm ground. And this moral world order could be experienced by us if we worked our way—after having received the help of the Christ—into the peace of the fixed stars in the firmament, seen by us again, during nightly sleep, in the form of their counterparts. Soaring upward to the fixed stars, to their counterparts, we look down into the physical realm of natural law.

This is the wholly divergent form of the experiences undergone by the human being between falling asleep and awaking, and leading his soul every night into the image of the cosmos. And just as the human being is led at a certain moment between death and a new birth, as I explained yesterday, by the moon forces into earthly existence and is beset by a sort of longing for earthly existence, so is he beset by the longing, after experiencing heavenly existence in his sleep, to immerse himself again into his physical body and etheric body.

While we get accustomed to earth-life after our birth, we live in a sort of sleep and dream state. If we, disregarding our dreams, look back in the morning, after being awake for an hour, to the moment of awaking, our consciousness is halted abruptly and we see behind us the darkness of slumber. It is similar when we look back into our childhood. In our fourth or the fifth year, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, our consciousness comes to a stop. Beyond the last stage that we can still remember lies something which is as deeply immersed in the darkness of the sleep and dream life of early childhood as is the life of the human soul immersed every night in the darkness of sleep. Yet the child is not wholly asleep, but is wrapt in a sort of waking dream. During this waking dream occur the three important phases of human life which I indicated yesterday. As they occur in the sequence characterized by me, we can see in them echoes and after-effects of the life between death and a new birth. First the child learns, out of a life wrapt in dream and sleep, what we call simply learning how to walk.

Something all-encompassing happens when a child learns how to walk, something which appears as a grandiose and overwhelming process to anyone able to perceive how the subtlest parts of the human body are changed at this time. The child, by adapting himself to the relationships of gravity, learns how to attain equilibrium. The child no longer falls down. By unfolding inner forces, he conforms to spatial directions.

What if we had to do all this consciously: overcome the lack of equilibrium that pulled us to the ground, adapt our organism to a firm state of equilibrium with regard to the three spatial directions, and even maintain this state of equilibrium by swinging our legs like pendulums as we learn how to walk? The child, in performing such a grandiose mechanical task, performs it as an echo of what he experienced while dwelling among spirits between death and a new birth. Here we encounter something so comprehensive, so marvelous, that the most eminent engineer, with all his earthly scientific equipment, could not calculate how the child's human forces adapt themselves to the world's spatial connections. What we, as a child, attain unconsciously is the most miraculous unfolding of mathematical-mechanical, physical forces. We call it simply learning how to walk. Yet in this learning how to walk lies an element of utmost grandeur.

Simultaneously, the correct use of arms and hands is attained. And by placing himself, as physical being, within the three spatial directions, the human being receives the foundation for all that is called learning how to talk.

The only thing known to physiology about the connection between man's dynamics of walking and standing and the faculty of speech is the fact that the speech-center of right-handed persons lies in the left portion of the brain. The gestures of the right hand, vigorously executed by means of man's willpower, are led, by some mysterious process, into the interior of the brain whence the faculty of speech is brought to the human being.

More, however, exists than this connection between the right hand and the third convolution at the left, the so-called Broca cerebral convolution. The whole mobility of arms and fingers; the human being's whole ability to move and maintain equilibrium reaches up into the brain, becomes part of the brain, and thence reaches down into the larynx. Language develops out of walking, out of the grasping of objects, out of gestures flowing from the organs of movement.

Anyone viewing these things correctly will know that a child with the tendency to walk on his toes speaks differently from a child walking on his heels; employs different shadings of sound. The organism of speaking develops from the organism of walking and moving. And speech is again a counterpart of that which I described yesterday as the outpouring of revelation upon the human being passing through the stage between death and a new birth. The child, when learning how to speak, does not grasp the words with his thoughts, but alone with his emotions. He lives in the language as if it were an emotional element; and a child of normal development learns conceptual thinking only after acquiring the faculty of speech. A child's thoughts actually develop out of the words. Just as walking and the grasping of objects, the gestures of legs and hands, reach up into the speech organism, so all that lives in the speech organism and is gained through adaptation to the language of the surrounding world, reaches up into the thought-organs. In the third stage, the child learns how to think.

While encompassed by this dream and sleep state, the child passes through three stages: walking, speaking, and thinking. These are the three terrestrial counterparts of that which we experienced between death and a new birth: living contact with the spiritual world, revelation of the spiritual world, and the gathering of the world ether in order to form our etheric body.

The child's development during these three stages can be correctly estimated only by someone observing the adult human being during his sleep. Here we can observe how we, when sleep puts a stop to our thoughts—for our thoughts are silenced by sleep—let our thought-forces be nurtured, between falling asleep and awaking, by those beings known to us as angels, as Angeloi. These beings, approaching us during sleep, nurture our thought-forces while we cannot do so ourselves.

During sleep, the human being also ceases to talk. Only in abnormal cases, which could be explained, does he talk in his sleep. At present, however, we may disregard these things. The normal human being ceases to talk after going to sleep. Would it not be altogether too dreadful, did people keep on chattering while asleep? Hence speech ceases at that time. And what makes us speak is nurtured during the time between falling asleep and awaking by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archangeloi.

If we disregard the sleep-walker, who is also in an abnormal condition, human beings are quiet while asleep. They do not walk, they grasp no objects, they do not move. That which pertains to man's waking life as forces which call forth the movements out of his will is nurtured, between going to sleep and awaking, by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archai.

By comprehending the manner in which the hierarchical beings above the human kingdom—Angels, Archangels, Archai—approach the ego and astral body, approach the entire human being during sleep, we can also understand how the little child masters the three activities of walking, speaking, and thinking. We recognize how it is the work of the Archai that brings to the little child, as he masters the dynamics of life, as he masters the faculty of walking and handling objects, what the human being has experienced, between death and a new birth, by coming into contact with spirit and soul beings. Now, the counterpart of these experiences comes forth with the learning to walk of the little child. It is the Archai, the primeval powers, who transmit to the child that learns how to walk the counterpart of all the spiritual movements emanating, between death and a new birth, from spirit and soul beings.

And it is the Archangels that transmit what the human being experiences, between death and a new birth, by means of revelation; they are at work when the child masters speech. And the Angels carry down the forces developed by the human being when, out of the whole world ether, he gathered the substance for his etheric body. The angels, bringing down these forces, mold their counterparts within the thought-organs, which are plastically formed in order that the child may learn thinking by means of language.

You must keep in mind that Anthroposophy does more than look at the physical world and say: It is based on something spiritual. This would be much too easy. By such a way of thinking, we could acquire no real conception of the spiritual world. Someone who is determined to repeat in philosophic terms that the physical world rests on a spiritual foundation, would be like a man who when walking across a meadow is told by his companion: Look, this flower is a dandelion, these are daisies, and so forth. The first man, however, might reply: Indeed, I am not interested in these names. Here I see flowers, just flowers in the abstract. Such a person would be like a philosopher who recognizes only the pantheistic-spiritual element, but refuses to discuss the concrete facts, the particular formations of the spiritual.

What we are given by Anthroposophy shows us how the divine spiritual dwells everywhere in life's single formations. We look at the way in which the child passes from the clumsy stage of crawling to that of walking. Looking in admiration and reverence at this grandiose world phenomenon, we see in it the work of the Archai, who are active when the experiences we undergo between death and a new birth are transformed into their earthly shape.

We follow the process through which the child produces speech out of his inner self; we follow the activity of the Archangels; and, when the child begins to think, the activity of the Angels. And all this has a deeply significant, practical side. In our materialistic age, many people have ceased to regard words as something genuinely spiritual. More and more, people use words only for the purpose of naming physical objects in the outer world. Think how many people in the world are unable to form the slightest conception of spiritual things; this is because the words have no spiritual significance for them and are used merely in connection with physical objects.

For many people, speech itself has assumed a materialistic character. It can be used only in connection with physical things. Undeniably, we live within a civilization making language, more and more, into an instrument of materialism. And what will be the consequence?

The consequence will become apparent to us if we look, with regard to language, at the connection between the waking and the sleeping state. While we remain awake during the day, we talk with others. We make the air vibrate. The way in which the air vibrates transmits the soul content which we wish to convey. The soul impulses of our words, however, live in our inner being. Every word corresponds to a soul impulse, which is the more powerful, the more our words are imbued with idealism; the more we are conscious of the spiritual significance contained in our words. Anyone aware of these facts will clearly recognize what lies behind them. Think of a person who uses words in a merely materialistic sense. During the day, he will not differ greatly from others whose words contain an idealistic, spiritual element, who know that words must be given wings by the spirit. At night, however, the human being takes the soul and spirit element of language, together with his ego and astral body, into the spiritual world. He returns again to his spiritual origin.

Those possessing only a materialistic speech cannot establish a connection with the world of the Archangels. Those still possessing an idealistic speech are able to establish this connection with the world of the Archangels.

The tragedy inherent in a civilization whose materialism is expressed even by its language has the consequence that the human being, by letting his language become wholly materialistic, may lose the nightly connection with the world of the Archangels. For the genuine spiritual scientist, there lies indeed something heart-breaking in present-day civilization. People who forget more and more to invest their words with a spiritual content lose their rightful connection with the spiritual world; with the Archangels. And this terrifying fact can be perceived only by someone envisaging the true nature of the sleeping state.

It is impossible to become a real anthroposophist without rising above mere theory. We may remain perfectly indifferent while developing theories on June bugs, earth worms, and cells. Such theories shall certainly break nobody's heart. For the way in which June bugs and earthworms grow out of a cell is not apt to break our heart. But if we acquire anthroposophical knowledge in all its fullness, we look into the depths of man's being, of man's evolution, of man's destiny. Thus our heart will ever be interlinked with this knowledge. The sum of this knowledge will be deposited in the life of our feelings, our emotions. Hence we partake of the whole world's feelings, and also of the whole world's volition.

The essence of Anthroposophy consists in the fact that it grasps not only the human intellect but the whole human being. Thereby it illuminates, with the forces of feeling and sentiment, the destinies of culture and civilization, as well as the destinies of single persons.

We cannot take part genuinely in human experiences on earth, unless looking also at the other side, the spiritual side, as it is unveiled to us through our knowledge of the sleeping state that leads us back into the spiritual world. Thus spiritual science can be truly at one with human life, understood in its spiritual and ultimately its social, religious, and ethical significance.

This spiritual science is to become real science which leads to wisdom. Such life giving science is greatly needed by mankind, lest it fall into deeper and deeper decline, instead of making a new beginning.

In viewing the soul of man, we find its inner element composed of thinking or forming of mental representations, feeling, and willing. You know that these three soul-activities have been often discussed by me. Nevertheless, I should like to say a few words today about this threefold constitution of the human soul, inasmuch as it is in especial connection with the present cycle.

Life in the waking state is essentially concerned with our mental activity. Of what we are thinking we are fully conscious in the waking state. If you ask yourself: Are we as conscious of the feelings that we experience in the waking state as we are of the mental representations? the answer would have to be in the negative. In a certain sense, feelings are apprehended but dimly and vaguely by waking consciousness. And if you compare the experiences of your world of feelings with those confronting you in the manifold imagery of the dream-world, you will find the same degree of consciousness in the world of feelings that you do in the world of dreams. In the world of feelings, we dream in a different way; yet also in that world it is still only dreaming.

We may be easily misled regarding the character of this world of feeling by translating that which is felt into mental representations. We make a mental image of our feelings. In this way, the feelings are raised into waking consciousness. Yet the feelings, as such, are no more conscious than dreams.

What remains still more unconscious—it might be said, wholly unconscious—are man's will-impulses. Try to visualize what you know of the faculty generally called willing. Suppose that you stretch out your hand in order to grasp something. First, you have a mental image of the fact that you are going to stretch out your hand. This is what you intend to do. But how this intention streams down into your whole organism; how it is imparted to the muscles, the bones, so that your hand be enabled to grasp an object: of all this you know as little as you know, in your ordinary consciousness, of what happens to your ego during sleep. Only after grasping the object, you become aware—again by means of a mental image—of having carried out a movement.

What lies between the mental image forming the intention and the image engendered within you after this intention has been acted upon externally, what happens within your organism between these two stages is hidden by a sleep which takes possession of you even in the waking state. Willing is a matter of sleeping, feeling a matter of dreaming. And only mental activity, thinking, is a matter of real waking.

Here we have, even in the waking state, the threefold human soul: the waking soul that forms mental images; the dreaming soul that feels; and the willing soul that sleeps. Hence man can never know, out of his ordinary consciousness, what goes on in those regions where the will is weaving and living.

If, however, we illuminate by the methods of anthroposophical research the regions where the will is pulsating, we discover the following: The intention of carrying out a will-impulse is primarily a thought, a mental image. At the moment when this intention streams down into the organism, something is produced which might be called a process of inner combustion. Invariably, this combustion is kindled in the organism along the entire path followed by the will-impulse. The combustion of metabolic products existing within you brings forth the movement used by the arm in order to carry out a will-impulse. Hence someone who wills an action undergoes, in a physical sense, a burning-up and consuming of his metabolic products. The metabolic products must be renewed for the reason that they are being constantly burned up, consumed by the will-impulse.

It is different in mental activity. Here a constant depositing of salt-like particles takes place. Earthy, salt-like, ash-like particles are excreted from the organism. Thus, in a physical sense, thinking or mental activity is a depositing of salt. Willing is a combustion. To the spiritual view, human life appears as a continuous depositing of salt from above, and a combustion from below. This combustion has the effect of preventing by the fire within our body—if I may express it in this way—our perceiving, by means of our ordinary consciousness, the real nature of will. This combustion puts us to sleep in regard to our will, or will-impulses.

And what becomes invisible to our ordinary consciousness while we are asleep? If by the methods of spiritual research, we illuminate the organic fire constantly being kindled through the will, we perceive that this fire contains the effects of our moral behavior during previous earth-lives. What lives in this fire may be designated as human destiny, human karma.

It is actually true that a certain fact may assume an entirely different significance if looked at from a correct, spiritual viewpoint instead of an external, sensible-intellectual one.

For instance, a man may become acquainted, in a certain year of his life, with another man. This is generally considered as accidental. And it really seems as if the two persons had been led together by the accidents of life and become acquainted at a chance moment. Things, however, happen otherwise. If we use the methods of spiritual research and look into the whole connection of human life, if we look into everything made invisible by the previously mentioned process of combustion, we then find that an acquaintance made in a man's thirty-fifth year has been longed for and striven for by this man during his entire life according to a definite plan. If we follow someone's life from his thirty-fifth year back into his early childhood, we may uncover and reveal what paths were pursued in order to arrive at the point where the other man was encountered. All this has been carried out in accordance with a plan harbored in the unconscious.

If we look at a human being's destiny in this way, it is remarkable to discover what wiles were occasionally employed by this person in order to arrive at a certain place, in a certain year, and to encounter a certain person. Anyone having real insight into human life cannot help but say that, if someone is undergoing an experience, he himself has sought it, with all the force at his command, during his entire earth-life.

And why do we seek a particular experience? Because this seeking has been poured into our soul out of former lives. These former earth-lives, however, do not show their effect inside our waking thought-consciousness. They show their effect in that state of consciousness constantly lulled to sleep by the process of combustion. Although striving unconsciously, we are nonetheless striving for the attainment of our earthly experiences.

Now, if something of this kind is said, various objections may arise in our thoughts. First of all, the following argument might be raised: If all this be true, then our whole life is determined by destiny; we have no freedom. But do we lose our freedom through the fact that our hair is blond and not black? This, too, is predestined. We are nevertheless free, even if our hair is blond instead of black—although we might possibly prefer black hair; we are nevertheless free, even if we cannot pull down the moon, as we might have longed to do as children. We are nevertheless free, even though we have sought certain experiences since the beginning of our earth-life. For not all of human life is composed of such destined experiences; these experiences are always joined to freely chosen experiences.

And these freely chosen experiences joined to the others are found by spiritual science in a different place.

I have often spoken of the three stages of spiritual knowledge: Imagination, when we first view a world of images; inspiration, when this world of images is penetrated by spiritual reality and essence; intuition, when we stand amid spiritual reality and essence.

If the human being, in the course of his spiritual research, attains imagination and hence sees before him the tableau of his life, something else always becomes visible at the same time. One cannot be attained without the other. We cannot attain imagination, real spiritual knowledge of the life lived by us heretofore on earth, without seeing emerge, in a strange, memory-like manner, the experiences undergone by us during sleep between going to sleep and awaking. I have told you of what these experiences consist.

When attaining imagination on the one hand, we attain, on the other, by means of the inner silence enveloping our soul, an especially profound view of what the human being experiences during sleep. I have already described to you many things experienced by us during the sleeping state. What, however, is mainly set before our inner eye in sleep concerns destiny, as it forms itself anew.

If we illuminate the sleep that encompasses our will even in the waking state, we can see at work the karma resulting from previous earth-lives.

And, if we see in their true light the experiences undergone by us between going to sleep and awaking, we recognize how the karma that will be realized in our next earth-life is being woven out of the free deeds performed by us in the present earth-life.

You might believe that those able to fathom the realm of sleep might be perturbed when saying to themselves: Your own moral conduct during the present earth-life is preparing your karma. Yet this fact is no more perturbing than the knowledge that the sun has risen, climbed to its highest position at noon, sunk in the evening below the horizon, and will repeat the same course on the morrow. The lawfulness rising from the depth of slumber does not perturb us; because through freedom all that has been formed in the sleeping state of the present earth-life can, in the most manifold ways, be brought forth during the next earth-life.

And, when we envisage that which begins to weave itself in sleep, hidden from our ordinary consciousness, as new karma, we can clearly see karma at work in the subconscious states of our will—clearly see karma being spun anew.

We can also see how the past is being interwoven in the human being with the future; we can see how that which is veiled to the waking human being by sleep in the day-time, that is to say, the inner secrets of his will, is being spun together with that which is veiled to him by sleep at night: namely, the inner secrets of his ego and astral body as they have separated themselves from the physical and etheric bodies and are taking part in weaving the future karma.

Consider that the things thought by man in his ordinary waking state are mostly concerned with outer matters. These outer things thought by us remain fixed, by means of our soul-life's ordinary content, in our memory.

All this, however, represents only the surface of our soul-life. Beyond this thought-level lies a soul-life of much greater profoundness. Whatever we experience during the waking state as our thinking, we experience in the etheric body, the formative-force body. All that happens at a deeper level in the astral body and the ego can be experienced only by consciously penetrating the events passed through by the astral body and the ego when they have separated themselves from the physical and etheric bodies and fallen asleep. Then the future karma is being spun.

In the day-time, this future karma is veiled to us by the outward thoughts contained in the etheric body. In the depth of the soul, however, it is being woven together, also during the day, with that which dwells in unconscious, sleeping will as the karma emerging from the past. Hence the karma of the human being can be accurately divulged.

Here we find several interesting facts. The age of the human being's earliest childhood is especially revealing for the observation of karmic connections. The resolutions of children appear to us as utterly arbitrary; and yet they are not at all arbitrary.

It is indeed true that the child's actions imitate what goes on in the child's surroundings. I have indicated in my public lecture how the child, completely at one with his sense-organism, inwardly experiences every gesture, every movement made by the people around him. But he experiences every gesture, every movement, in its moral significance. Hence a child who is confronted with a choleric father experiences the immoral element connected with a choleric temperament. And the child experiences, through the subtlest movements of the people around him, the thoughts that these people harbor. Hence we should never permit ourselves to have impure, immoral thoughts in a child's presence and say: Such thoughts are permissible, because the child knows nothing about them. This is not true. Whenever we think, our nerve-fibers are always vibrating in one way or another. And this vibration is perceived by the child, especially during his earliest years. The child is a subtle observer and imitator of his surroundings.

The strangest and—it might be said—the most interesting fact, in an exalted sense, is the following: The child does not imitate everything, but takes his choice. And this choosing is done in a very complicated manner.

Let us assume that the child has before him a hot-headed, choleric father who does many things that are not right. The child, wholly one with his sense-organism, must absorb all these things. Since his eye cannot protect itself, it must perceive what takes place in the child's surroundings.

What the child absorbs, however, is absorbed only in the waking state. Eventually the child goes to sleep. Children sleep a great deal. And during sleep the child is able to choose: What he wants to absorb is sent out of his soul into his body, his physical organism; what he does not want to absorb is ejected during sleep into the etheric world. Thus the child takes into his bodily organism only those things that have been predestined for him by his destiny, his Karma. The working of destiny is seen with especial vividness in the child's very first years.

A person with a merely intellectual bent often feels that he is tremendously clever and the child tremendously stupid. After acquiring insight into the world, we discard this opinion and begin to realize how stupid we have become since our childhood. Our present cleverness, as opposed to that of childhood, is a conscious one. Yet far, far greater than all the wisdom given to us in later years is the wisdom with which the child, as was previously described, chooses between that which, according to the destiny resulting from former earth-lives, he must incorporate into himself, and that which he may eject into the general etheric world. And what is brought by man from former earth-lives into his present one becomes especially visible during the first years, when the question of freedom does not matter as yet. At the age when the consciousness of freedom arises, we have already brought into the present earth-life most of what had been destined to be garnered from previous earth-lives. And if someone has a certain experience at the age of thirty-five, he has blazed a trail towards this experience since his first childhood years. The first steps of life are the most important and essential for all that is determined by destiny.

I have tried to point out how wise we were as children and how, fundamentally, we become less and less wise as life continues. Our consciousness expands: hence we value conscious rationalism, and do not value the child's unconscious wisdom. Only by acquiring the science of initiation are we taught how to value this wisdom.

I have called attention to these things in the very first chapter of my booklet: Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity [Anthroposophic Press, New York.] Official philosophy has taken me severely to task on this score. It is important, nevertheless, that we are capable of looking at the first years of childhood in the right way.

People, once they have understood these things, will attain a sounder judgment on something that is mentioned today again and again, but not understood in the least: the question of inherited qualities.

In present-day literature and science the tendency is to base everything on qualities that have been inherited from the parents. If we once realize how the child, in a karmic sense, gathers from previous earth-lives whatever his wisdom urges him to select, we shall comprehend the correct relation between that which is determined by destiny and that which represents external inheritance and garb. For this inheritance is nothing but an external garb. That the latter exists will not seem strange to those comprehending in the right way how the human beings connect themselves, at a certain point between death and a new birth, with the sequence of generations. Turning their glance from the Beyond to the earthly realm, they are able to foresee who their parents are going to be. From the Beyond, we help to determine the qualities that our parents will have. Hence it is no wonder that we inherit these qualities. Yet—as was previously described—we make our choice concerning the qualities that we inherit.

To observe the human being during his first childhood years is a study as interesting as it is exalted. I must use this expression again and again. You will remember that I called your attention to the three things learned by the child in his first years: walking, which includes so many things that were discussed yesterday, speaking, and thinking. These three faculties are attained by the child.

Now let us observe correctly how the child takes his first steps. He may put down his little legs and feet firmly or gently; advance courageously or timidly; bend his knee vigorously or with less vigor; use his index finger or his little finger more frequently. Those who have the right insight into what is connected with walking, what is connected with the sense of equilibrium through which the child orientates himself in the three spatial directions—all those will recognize that the child's karma is symbolically expressed in his attempts at walking. We see a certain child, as he learns how to walk, put down his little feet with firmness. This shows us that he has proved himself as brave and courageous in various situations belonging to previous earth-lives. This brave and courageous quality coming from previous earth-lives is expressed, in a sensible image, by the firm manner in which the child plants his little feet on the ground. Thus we may observe just in the child's first attempts at walking a miraculous image of human karma. A man's personal karma is especially expressed by the manner in which he learns how to walk.

In the second place, we learn how to speak. We imitate what is spoken around us. Every child does this in his own way; yet all human beings who learn how to speak their mother tongue within a lingual province imitate just this one language. Hence we find that the human being's folk destiny is expressed by the way in which the child adapts himself to the imitation of sounds. The child, when learning how to walk, expresses his individual destiny; when learning how to speak, his folk destiny. And, when learning how to think, he expresses the destiny of universal mankind living in a certain period all over the globe. Thus a threefold destiny is interwoven in man.

It is true that we clothe our thoughts with diverse languages. Yet, when penetrating across language to the thoughts, we assume that these can be understood by every person anywhere in the world. A Chinese and a Norwegian language exist; nonetheless there is no difference—except an individual one—between Chinese and Norwegian thoughts. For it must be admitted that thoughts as such, with regard to their truth or untruth, are the same everywhere. They are differently colored for the sole reason that human beings express themselves through language and individual traits. The thought-content, however—not the form—is alike for all men. By adjusting himself to thought-life in his third stage, the child adjusts himself, at a certain point, to all of mankind. Through language, he adjusts himself to the folk destiny; through his orientation in three spatial directions (by learning how to walk, how to handle objects, and so forth) he adjusts himself to his personal, individual destiny.

In order to understand man's being in the right way, these things must be viewed from all sides. Now I should like to explain to you by means of another fact how the whole of human life is constituted.

Let us go back to the sleeping state; to those experiences undergone by us between falling asleep and awaking. Here we go back, with our ego and astral body, into the spiritual world; we go back to the starting-point of our life. Yet the ego and astral body are weaving our future destiny.

When the ego and astral body return again to the physical body, then destiny has been woven anew night by night. Man's ordinary consciousness, however, does not yet know anything of this destiny. He enters again into his physical and etheric bodies. In the etheric body, he had left behind his thoughts. We only assume that we do not think while lying in bed. We think unceasingly, but unbeknown to ourselves, because our ego and astral body dwell outside our thoughts. Thinking is an activity of the etheric body. You can easily observe this fact even in every-day life. For instance: you have heard, for the first time, a symphony that excited you greatly. If you are inclined to wake up during the night, you will do so again and again, always finding yourself amid this symphony's sounds, which continue to vibrate within your etheric body. These vibrations do not cease. It is not necessary that your ego be present while the symphony reverberates within you. If your ego were present, you would be aware only of the etheric body's vibrations. It is the same with other thoughts. You are thinking all night long while lying in bed; since your ego is away, however, you do not know that you think.

I can even disclose to you that waking life often spoils our thinking. Generally, our thoughts are much keener when our ego is away at night. This is true, whether you believe it or not. Most people's judgment on life is much sounder at night than in the day-time. If the etheric body, which is in harmony with the laws of the universe, thinks by itself and man does not ruin these thoughts, then man's thinking, no longer muddled up by the ego (as happens so often in the day-time) becomes much sounder.

While our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric bodies, we are engaged in weaving our future karma. What as ego and astral body lives and weaves outside us between falling asleep and awaking must pass through the portal of death; it must enter and pass through the super-sensible world. It is true that the astral element is subsequently merged with the ego, which thus undergoes a change of substance and must continue its way alone. Yet all that which has been weaving, in the sleeping state, outside the physical and etheric bodies must pass through the portal of death and must, between death and a new birth, pursue its path across the stages described by me during the recent days. My description has shown you how the ego passes through a stage where it works in unison with the beings of the higher Hierarchies, in order to prepare the spiritual germ of a future physical body.

This work necessitates the experiencing of profound wisdom between death and a new birth—an experience that can be undergone only if sharing a spiritual activity with beings of the higher Hierarchies.

Many other things must be merged with the karma, as it is woven between falling asleep and awaking, in order to unite all the elements into a future physical body. For you must consider what kind of path has to be pursued. All that is being woven as karma dwells in the ego and astral body. It must descend into those regions possessed by us, in the next earth-life, as the unconscious will-regions. All these elements must be thoroughly blended with our entire bodily organism. During the ordinary sleeping state, the ego and astral body have as yet but little of what they must attain during their transition between death and a new birth.

From the sleeping state, the ego and astral body must return to the physical body; and, when they wake up, they do not quite understand how to deal with this physical body. For, having received this body as the result of a previous earth-life, they do not know how to immerse themselves into it in the right way.

Because the astral body and ego can form the physical and etheric bodies only in the next earth-life, working on them in childhood during the first and second seven-year period and because the ego and astral body will only then encompass all that can work in the right way on the physical body: therefore now, when the ego—on falling asleep—has just absorbed the human being's moral conduct and karma has just begun to weave itself, this ego, on awaking, does not rightly understand all the things contained in the physical body.

The ego, when again immersing itself in the physical body, is utterly unconscious. Yet, as it passes through the region of mental activity, confused dream-images arise. What do these signify? Why do they correspond, in many cases, so little to life? Because the ego and astral body try to immerse themselves in the physical and etheric bodies, but find it difficult to do so. This discrepancy between that which the ego cannot do, but which it should do according to the wise principles of the physical and etheric bodies—this discrepancy is expressed by the confused images dreamed by us just before awaking. These dreams show us pictorially how the ego tries to bring what it has not yet attained into a certain harmony with the physical body and etheric body. And only when the ego, suppressing consciousness in regard to the will, immerses itself in subconscious regions, and hence no longer relies upon its own wisdom, can it enter again into the physical body without producing confused mental images.

If the ego, on awaking, plunged into the physical body when fully conscious, or half conscious as in dreams, then the most terrifying dreams would arise from man's entire physical body. Only the circumstance that we plunge, at the right moment, into the unconscious will subdues the fleeting dream-images and lets us sink down as proper egos and proper astral bodies into the regions of the unconscious will.

It is quite clear to anyone looking at these things without prejudice that every dream can show us the disharmony existing in the present life between what the ego and astral body have acquired in this present life and the fully developed physical and etheric bodies. First that which has been woven as moral element must unite itself, during the transition between death and a new birth, with the spiritual germ of the physical body. Then, whatever has been woven in the present life between falling asleep and awaking, becomes so powerful that it is really able to sink down during the next childhood life, during this dreamy, half asleep childhood life, into the physical and etheric bodies, using them as tools for earth-life.

We carry within us the result of preceding earth-lives. Only all that we carry below in our will-organism as forces of the preceding earth-life is concealed by an inner fire which consumes our physical substance and products. Yet these forces, although consumed by fire, are nonetheless active. We pursue our path across the world by means of our karma. There exists an especial path for every single experience. By choosing, from childhood on, what we want to imitate from the surrounding world, and by so doing, initiating an event that may not occur until our fiftieth year, and at the same time by exerting our will for the purpose of bringing about this experience, we undergo within ourselves a combustion of that which is bodily substance. And, because the fire renders us unconscious with regard to our life-path, our inner perception transposes what is really a continuous course of destiny into something appearing to us like momentary desires, instincts, urges, varieties of temperament, and so forth. Below courses the life-path determined by destiny. The fires are always flaming forth anew. We, however, can only see the fires' surface. And on this surface, out of the seething flames, as it were, there comes to life what dwells in our souls as passions, desires, instincts. Here is only the outer semblance, the outer revelation of that which weaves in the depths as human destiny.

What men observe are the single passions, the single instincts, the single desires, momentary likes and dislikes, deeds carried out or not carried out because of momentary sympathy or antipathy. In making such observations, however, we behave like someone who has a sentence before him and says: “Here I see g,o,d,r,u,l,e,s,t,h,e,w,o,r,l,d.” All he can do is to spell the single letters. Then another person comes and says: “The letters spelled by you mean God rules the world.” Just as spelling differs from reading, so does ordinary science differ from spiritual science.

Ordinary psychology is able to spell. By looking at a human life, it finds certain instincts and urges in the child. The scientist, who only knows how to spell, registers these things, and thus it continues during the human being's entire existence on earth.

Those understanding spiritual science are able to read. Looking beyond the fire's surface, they see what is below: man's destiny-determined life-path.

Between ordinary psychology, such as it is still practiced today, and genuine knowledge of human soul-life there is a difference akin to that between spelling and reading.

We could make ourselves understood with less difficulty, if we could only tell the others that they are wrong. But, if someone spells g,o,d,r,u,l,e,s, it is impossible to tell him: “What you say is wrong.” For it is perfectly correct. Only the other, lacking the knowledge that the letters can be combined and read, will say to us: “You are a crazy fellow. All that I can see is g,o,d, and so forth. It would be utterly foolish to combine the letters.” He cannot understand that we are not only able to spell but also to read.

This fact makes our position very difficult. The anthroposophist could easily reach an understanding with the others; he does not have to refute them. Neither is he entangled into polemics against external science. If this science, however, begins to call him a crazy fellow—then, naturally, he is forced to state that this is wide of the mark and point out his willingness to consider as valid what the others want to consider as valid. Only he would have to exclude the following principle: Whatever this or that person does not see is non-existent. For this principle is no criterion of truth. And those persons who hold to it should first ascertain whether others can see what they themselves cannot see.

In view of these things, those standing on anthroposophical ground must be able to fathom this difficult relationship between Anthroposophy and other world views. At most, we could come to the conclusion that the one tolerating nothing but g,o,d,r,u,l,e,s, should be considered as semi-illiterate. Likewise, we might possibly say to the one who could not wean himself of the habit to spell out the single instincts, urges, passions, temperaments, and so forth: “You are a semi-Philistine, a semi-blockhead. The trouble with you is that you cannot soar.” We could not tell him, however, that he was wrong.

The issue between Anthroposophy and other world views is of such nature that no understanding can be reached until those, who know only how to spell, will have a mind to learn how to read. Otherwise no mutual comprehension is possible; and for this reason all the customary debates lead to no result whatsoever. This fact is noticed by very few opponents of Anthroposophy. In my opinion, it is essential that these things should be known to you.

The opponents of Anthroposophy increase with every month. Yet they are unable to find a foothold. For, since Anthroposophy always agrees with them, but they refuse to agree with Anthroposophy, they cannot attack very well what the Anthroposophist says. And for this reason they attack his personality: defame it, tell lies about it. Unfortunately, polemics tend more and more towards such a form. This must be envisaged by those standing on anthroposophical ground.

You must consider that a very odd assortment of antagonistic books exists now-a-days. Many of their authors, who have read anthroposophical literature, may have found out that I myself, in certain passages of my own books, mention all the objections that could be raised. I engage in polemics against myself, in order to show how that which I affirm could be blotted out. Hence all possible objections against Anthroposophy can be found in my own books. Consequently, many of my opponents busy themselves with copying the arguments which I myself, in my own books, have cited against Anthroposophy. They then distribute these writings to others in order to attack Anthroposophy. Thus you can find hostile writings plagiarizing my own books and simply copying my words when I say: this or that objection could be raised. The fact that the anthroposophist himself has to point out all the arguments that can be advanced against him makes his opponents' task rather easy.

I mention these things not for the purpose of harrowing my opponents, but in order to characterize how one must progress if one desires to read life-experiences (with regard to the will-impulses) instead of merely spelling them out. Spelling only shows us what momentarily wells up in the form of urges, of animal life expressed by desires, passions and wishes. Those able to combine these letters and read them will penetrate every individual human destiny. This human destiny is working at the source of life; and, by means of this destiny, the human being joins himself to the ever continuing course of mankind's whole evolution. And only by comprehending in this way a single human being's entire life are we able to comprehend human history. During the following days, we shall contemplate mankind's history; contemplate it as the life of mankind in its destiny before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. And we shall also see how the Mystery of Golgotha has influenced mankind's development on earth.

First, however, I had to erect a foundation and show what is at work within the human being. Only thus can it be recognized in the right way how the gods and the Mystery of Golgotha are at work within the individual man, within his entire destiny.

We cannot fully estimate the nature of man's being, as it appears at present, without fixing our eyes on extended periods through which he has passed in the course of his evolution. This will become evident when considering the facts described by me during recent days. Our souls undergo repeated earth-lives that are always separated from one another by the life between death and a new birth. In this manner our souls have passed through the most manifold periods of human evolution. By reflecting on these things, we shall clearly recognize that the nature of the human being can be comprehended only when we consider extended periods during which our souls have repeatedly lived on earth.

These matters have been discussed by me in previous Kristiania (Oslo) lectures, dealing with the sequence of evolutionary epochs, such as those that preceded and those that followed the Mystery of Golgotha. Today I wish to discuss this subject from a particular standpoint.

Mankind has undergone great changes in the course of its evolution. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated. People know that a Greek period existed, an Egyptian period, and other earlier periods. But, although they are aware of evolving culture-impulses, they believe that human beings in regard to their soul-life were just the same (at least, in historic ages) as they are today. This is not true. At a certain stage we come to a stop in this historic retrospect. We come to a long pause leading to a period which present-day scientists are very fond of describing as that of man's supposedly ape-like ancestors.

Mankind's evolution, however, was not in the least as people now imagine it. In order to understand the changes it has undergone, let us envisage the relatively great dependency, existing in the present age during the human being's first years of life, of the spirit and soul organism on the physical-bodily one.

You need only to consider the stage of early childhood until the change of teeth, and the extensive transformation accompanying the change of teeth which must strike every unprejudiced observer. The child's entire soul-constitution becomes different. We then find another life period lasting until puberty. We all know that at this age the development of spirit and soul is dependent on the development of the body. And, if we observe these things without prejudice, we notice the same dependence of spirit and soul on the body also at a later age lasting until the twenties, although today, in the time of youth movements (this is not said in a critical sense) it is just the young people who do not like to emphasize this dependence. Naturally, they consider themselves, at sixteen or seventeen, fully developed young women and young men; and those vaunting unusual mental faculties write newspaper articles at twenty-one. These young people would thus like to hush up the fact that their spirit and soul is greatly dependent on their bodily organism. At any rate, the present-day human being becomes more or less independent of the body once he has reached a certain age. A man in his twenties is an adult who does not feel himself as dependent upon his body as would a child were it to pass in full consciousness through the stages between change of teeth and puberty.

There was still a feeling in comparatively recent ages that the human being matured gradually. It was then clearly realized that the so-called apprentice had to be treated differently from the journey-man; and a master's rank could not be attained until relatively late in life.

As regards present-day man, however, it can be asserted that after a certain age, his spirit and soul are no longer greatly dependent on his body. Of course, on reaching a venerable age, we notice a renewed dependence on our physical organism. When the legs become shaky, when the face becomes wrinkled, when the hair becomes grey, we cannot then deny the influence of the body. This, however, is not ascribed to a genuine parallelism of body and soul. People of today feel that, even though the bodily forces decline, soul and spirit remain, and must remain, more or less independent of the bodily-physical. Yet this was not always the case. If we go back to earlier epochs of mankind's evolution, we find the human being even in his old age remaining as intensely dependent on his body as does a child's soul today remain dependent on its body between the change of teeth and puberty. And if we are enabled—not by external history, but by spiritual science—to go back to the first period of evolution after the great Atlantean catastrophe which caused a new configuration of the earth's continents, we come to what I called in my Occult Science the primeval Indian epoch. The human being then felt himself, even after having reached his fifties, to be just as dependent on the physical as the child's soul is dependent on the change of teeth, and the youthful person's soul on puberty. This means: Just as we experience today during childhood the ascending line of growth, so ancient man experienced, in his fifties, the descending line within spirit and soul. Then things happened in such a way that a man, on reaching his fifties, matured inwardly just by becoming older, in a similar manner as modern man matures on attaining puberty. And at that time, seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings eagerly looked forward, during their whole life, to this stage of existence. For everyone could say to himself: Something will be revealed to me out of my bodily constitution that I could not experience in younger years, before I became forty-nine or fifty. Naturally, such an idea is bound to shock modern men most profoundly. You only need to think of a present-day man who is absolutely sure of being a finished product after reaching the twenties. What could be said if he had to wait until the age of maturity revealed something to him which he could not know before, which he could not feel, and experience before!

In ancient India, however, man's bodily constitution enabled him to feel, already in his fifties, something like a gradual separation of the physical body from spirit and soul. He felt more and more how the physical approximated, as it were, the corpse-like. And he felt in this estrangement of the physical body, in this approach of the physical body to the earth-elements, a liberation of spirit and soul. By considering the body merely as a garment, he felt its relationship to the earth, to all that would belong to earth after death. It was less amazing to ancient than to modern men that the body had to be discarded, delivered to the earth-forces. For ancient man passed slowly and gradually through this process of discarding the body.

This sounds paradoxical, because it implies the terrifying conception of having a physical body that is slowly becoming a corpse. Ancient man, however, did not think of his body as a burdensome object passing, as it were, into a kind of putrefaction. Instead, he thought of it as an independent sheath or shell which, even though becoming earth-like, was yet full of life. Yet the physical body, at the age of fifty, assumed a sheath-like, shell-like character.

This gradual becoming similar to the earth taught ancient man something that can be known today only through abstract science. The inner nature of metals, for instance, became known to him. At the age of fifty, he was instinctively able to differentiate between copper, silver, and gold. He felt the resemblance of these metals to his own organism gradually turning to earth. A rock-crystal called forth in him other feelings than furrowed soil. By aging, man gained wisdom concerning terrestrial matters.

This fact influenced primeval civilization. The young, looking up to the old, said to themselves: These ancients are wise. Once I have become as old as they are, I shall also be wise. Such an attitude caused a profound veneration and a tremendous respect for old age.

In those ancient days of mankind's evolution (the epoch of primeval India), a lofty civilization, connected with a wondrous veneration, a wondrous respect for old age, existed in a certain part of the world (not in that part, however, inhabited by men with receding foreheads, such as are excavated today by anthropologists). And we must ask ourselves: How did it actually happen that men passed through these experiences?

It did happen, because primeval man lived less intensively in his physical body than we do. Today man crawls into the very core of his physical body, the experiences of which he shares. Thus he feels himself to be identical, at one with his physical body. And we must undergo a common destiny with whatever is felt to be at one with us. Because, in those ancient times, men felt themselves more self-dependent within the physical body; because their thinking was more imaginative; because their feeling was like an inward weaving and living in the world of reality—for all these reasons their physical body from the beginning seemed to them like a sheath in which they were encased. This sheath began to harden as life drew near its end. A man in his fifties could feel how the body developed increasingly in accord with the outer world, thus becoming a mediator that could instill in him wisdom concerning the outer world.

The situation changed when civilized mankind of those days passed into the next age, called by me in my Occult Science the primeval Persian. Then a man in his fifties could no longer experience this dependence of his physical body upon the earthly. Instead, the aging physical body exerted a different influence on those still in their forties, from the forty-second or forty-third year to the forty-ninth or fiftieth. During these years, they participated intensively in the change of seasons. They experienced spring, summer, autumn, winter within their body. As it were, their body began to bud and blossom during spring and summer, and went into decline during autumn and winter. Human life took part in the seasons, the changing air-currents ...

And this perception of the changing air-currents, the changing seasons, was connected with another thing. Man felt that his speech was being transformed into something no longer belonging essentially to him. Just as the primeval Indian felt that, once he had attained the fifties, his whole physical body did not really belong to him, but more or less to the earth, so the primeval Persian felt that the body, by producing speech, belonged to the people around him. At fifty, a member of primeval Indian culture no longer said: I am walking. If expressing his own feelings, he would say: My body is walking. He did not say: I enter through the door; but instead: My body carries me through the door. For he experienced his body as something related to the outer world, to the earth. And, five or six millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, a member of the Persian civilization felt that speech came forth by itself, that he had it in common with his whole surroundings. At that time, people all over the world did not live in such an international way as today, but as members of definite folk communities. They felt how speech became alienated from them; how, if expressing their real feelings, they could say: “It is speaking within me.”

It was really the case that people after attaining the forties expressed the following in a certain, very respectful sense: Divine-spiritual forces are speaking through me. And the human being also felt as if his breath did not belong to him any longer, but was dedicated to the surrounding world.

On reaching his late thirties, a member of the Egypto-Chaldaean culture—which lasted from the third or fourth millennium until the eighth or ninth pre-Christian century—had a similar feeling with regard to his thoughts, his mental images. The Egyptian or Chaldaean felt in his thirty-fifth year as if his mental images were connected with heavenly forces, the course of the stars.

As the primeval Indian, at the end of his life, felt the connection of his body with the earth, as the primeval Persian felt the connection of his speech, his breath, with the seasons and the surrounding world, so a member of ancient Egyptian, of ancient Chaldaean culture felt that his thoughts were directed by the course of the stars. And he felt how divine star-powers were interwoven with his thoughts.

In Egypto-Chaldaean culture, the human being felt this dependence of his thoughts upon heavenly powers until his forty-second or forty-third year. Subsequently no new element entered into human development. The primeval Persian, too, felt as if his thoughts had been given to him by the stars; but he attained, moreover, in his forties the relationship to speech that I have described. Likewise, the primeval Indian, from his thirty-fifth year, possessed this relationship to the star-powers. Therefore he considered astrology as something self-evident. In his forties, he also attained the dependence of speech upon his surroundings. In his fifties, moreover, he experienced how his physical body became objective, became shadow-like. He accustomed himself, as it were, to the dying, because dying had approached him already in his fifties. The soul was less firmly joined to the body. Hence outer conditions could bring forth these bodily changes. This fact was perceived by the soul, experienced by the soul. And thereby man, as he grew older, merged himself more and more with the world.

Then came the Graeco-Latin era, which lasted from the eighth pre-Christian century until the fifteenth post-Christian century, for until then, the echo of Graeco-Latin culture still resounded in all civilized countries. This marked the age when man felt himself until his thirties still dependent upon his physical body, but no longer dependent on the stars, the seasons, the earth. He felt himself firmly entrenched within his physical body. The Greek felt a concord, a harmony between the soul and spirit element and the bodily-physical. Only this bodily-physical element no longer separated itself from him. This is all very difficult to express, for we are prevented, by the customary and totally inadequate historical teaching given to us in school, from forming a conception of these changes in mankind's evolution.

There then came the time when the human being became connected with his physical body in such a way that his physical body was committed no longer to participate in the course of the universe directed by spiritual laws. Now man was completely bound to his physical body. Mankind did not reach this stage until the eighth pre-Christian century.

Thus a great transformation of mankind's whole evolution occurred in as far as it concerned civilized mankind. Although the human being on reaching the thirties felt himself still at one with his physical body, he no longer was separated from it. He felt himself united with his physical body. It could no longer unveil to him the world's mysteries. During this period, therefore, mankind attained an entirely new relation to death. At an earlier time, when the human being prepared himself for dying, as it were, by undergoing a separation from his physical body, this dying signified for him nothing but a transformation in the midst of life; for, in his fifties, he became familiar gradually with the process of dying. He experienced dying as a process which merged him, in a wisdom-filled and blissful way, with the universe. He experienced death as something guiding him into a world in which he had already lived during his earth-life. Death at that time was something entirely different from what it became later. It might be said: More and more the human being was confronted by the possibility that soul and spirit might participate in death.

Let us compare Hellenism with the primeval Indian epoch. In primeval India, the body gained independence. The individual was aware of being something else besides his body which became independent and sheath-like. He could not have possibly conceived the thought that death might be the end. Such a thought did not exist among human beings of the primeval Indian period. Only by degrees, and most decisively in the eighth pre-Christian century, did man say to himself (still out of an unconscious feeling, because he was unable to think about these things in a rationalistic way): My body dies; but, with regard to soul and spirit, I am at one with my body. No longer did he notice the difference between the bodily and the spirit and soul element.

The human being became dominated by a thought that terrified him when it first arose out of dark spiritual depths in the ninth or eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha. It was the thought: Might not my soul pursue the same path as my body—die, as my body dies?

This thought which in the primeval Indian epoch would have been totally inconceivable now came more and more to the fore. Out of this mood emerged words like those famous ones of the Greek hero: Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shades.

This was the time when mankind nurtured a mood that grew in the right way towards the Mystery of Golgotha. For, what brought forth in ancient human beings the ability to preserve a freshness of soul which made it impossible for them to conceive that the soul might take the same path of death as the body?

This freshness of soul, this independence of soul with regard to feeling, was given to ancient man by this knowledge: I have had a life—for he could look into this life—which was pre-earthly; through it I passed with my soul and spirit before I descended to the physical world. While dwelling in this higher world, I was united with the exalted Sun-Being.

The ancient Mysteries had evolved a teaching which pointed out that man, in his pre-earthly existence, was united with the spirit of the sun, just as in earth-life his body is united with the physical light of the sun.

The teachers in the ancient Mysteries told the following to their pupils who, in their turn, told it again to others (they did not designate the exalted Sun-Being as the Christ, but He was the Christ, and we may therefore be permitted today to use this name): The Christ is a Being Who shall never descend to the earth. You, however, dwelt in your pre-earthly existence, before descending to earth, within spiritual worlds in communion with the Christ. And the force of the Christ has given you the faculty of making your soul independent of the body.

This instinctive memory of a pre-earthly existence was lost through the soul's increasing identification with its physical body. And, in the Greek epoch, earthly man could employ his instinctive consciousness-forces only by looking at physical life. The Greek was able to live such a harmonious earth-life, because his outlook into the divine worlds of the spirit had faded away. He was so successful in subduing the sensible-physical that the spiritual vanished more or less from his life's horizon. No longer did civilized men have a consciousness of the fact that before descending to earth, they dwelt in the presence of the exalted Sun-Being Who was later called the Christ. Now darkness encompassed those who looked at pre-earthly, prenatal existence. And thus arose the mystery of death.

What happened henceforth must be envisaged as something concerning not only mankind but also the gods. The divine-spiritual powers who sent the human being down to earth gave him the impulses towards the development that I have just described. Since his spirit and soul became increasingly merged with the physical body; since, as it were, his spirit and soul became identical with the physical, and since, therefore, the mystery of death confronted also the spirit and soul, the divine-spiritual powers who had sent the human being down to earth were threatened with the danger that he might be lost to the gods, that his soul, as well as his body, might die.

Yet man would never have become a free, independent being, had he not grown into his body during this epoch. Man could only become free in evolution if his view of the pre-earthly was dimmed. He was obliged to stand on earth—totally forsaken, as it were—within his physical body's abode. Thus his independent ego could radiate and gleam up.

For this shining forth of the independent ego can be best accomplished by the human being entering completely into his physical body. When man grows upward into the worlds of spirit and soul, his ego retreats; he is being merged with the objective element of spirit and soul. Man could become a free ego-being only if given the impulse by the gods to merge himself more and more with his physical body. He was thus, however, confronted by the mystery of death; for the physical body was bound to be claimed by death.

Now, if man's vision had not been awakened in another way, all of mankind on earth would have become more and more convinced that the soul and physical body were both dying together. And, if nothing else had happened; if history had continued its course in a straight line, all of us today would have come to the common conviction that the soul as well as the body are doomed to be laid in the grave.

At this point, the divine-spiritual powers decided to send down on earth the exalted Sun-Being, the Christ, in order that men, who no longer had any knowledge of their communion with the Christ during pre-earthly existence, could gain consciousness of their communion with the Christ after He had descended on earth and had shared on Golgotha and in Palestine their human destiny in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The God descended into the earthly world at the moment of mankind's world historic evolution when men had lost their feeling of communion with the Sun-Being beyond the earthly world.

Why did the Christ come down on earth? Because human beings, having fought their way to the attainment of complete ego-consciousness, needed Him on earth. Men had to experience the presence of a victor, who could die and resurrect himself—be the vanquisher of death.

In the course of history, this mystery had to be set before mankind at a time when man, no longer able to look back into pre-earthly existence, was granted a view of his communion with the giver of man's immortality, with the Christ. It is a divine event, and not merely for mankind, that the Christ was sent down on earth from higher worlds. For the human race would have fallen away from the gods, had they not sent down upon earth the loftiest among them, in order that He undergo a human destiny, a human existence, thus interweaving a divine event with earthly-human events and mankind's entire world evolution.

The Mystery of Golgotha cannot be comprehended unless we regard it not only as a human event, but also as a divine event. The fact must be grasped that something which could be envisaged previously only in the divine worlds could now be envisaged in the earthly world.

Possibly you might raise the objection: Not all men have become followers of the Christ; many do not believe in the Christ. Must all these have the opinion that at death their soul would be laid in the grave with the body?

This, however, is not the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha may be interpreted. It is valid through all the centuries preceding ours that the Christ, in His infinite compassion overflowing with grace, died not only for His immediate followers, but for all men in all ages, everywhere on earth.

All men on earth have been redeemed from the riddle of death by the Christ. At first, this deed did not touch human consciousness. It is natural, however, that some men were found who could consciously grasp the grandeur and significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet the Christ did die and did rise as much for the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus as for the Christians.

Just because since the fifteenth century human evolution must increasingly regard intellectualism as its highest soul-force, and just because this intellectual impulse will become more and more powerful in the future, have we approached an epoch when it is incumbent upon the earth's entire population to grasp, with its ever growing consciousness, what was brought forth by the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus it will become necessary that the Mystery of Golgotha be penetrated by a knowledge that can be really understood by all men on earth.

In preceding centuries, Christianity developed in a way that still conformed to the peculiarities of ancient ethnic religions. Christian development had not yet attained universality. The Christian missionaries who went among the followers of other religions found little or no understanding, because the Christ was presented as a separate god who had the same qualities as those possessed by the ancient heathen folk deities. This was the manner in which Christianity had been disseminated. Why had Constantine, why Chlodvig, accepted Christianity?—Because they believed that the Christian god would be a more powerful helper than their former gods. They exchanged, as it were, their former gods for the Christian god. Hence the Christ had to take on many qualities of the ancient folk deities. These qualities have adhered to the Christ through the centuries.

In this way, however, Christianity could not become a universal religion. On the contrary, it had to retreat more and more before intellectualism. And we have seen, particularly in the nineteenth century, many a theological development which understood nothing whatsoever of the Christ-event in its super-sensible aspect. Here the desire was to speak only of Jesus, the man, although conceding that as man he towered above all other men. Yet, henceforth, the desire was only to speak of Jesus, the man, and not of Christ, the God.

We must, nevertheless, be able to speak again of Christ, the God, because this Christ, while undergoing His destiny through the Mystery of Golgotha, manifested to men on earth what He had formerly signified to them, before they had descended to earth from the high heavens.

Hence, we must state that the ancient folk religions were primarily local religions. People prayed to the god of Thebes, to the god on Mount Olympus. They were local deities who could be worshipped only in near-by places. Thus, from the beginning, these ancient faiths were bound to certain territories.

Later the local gods, who had their abode in a definite spot, were replaced by gods bound to the personalities of single men, of the guiding folk heroes. Yet a people's god was either a still living folk hero or his surviving soul, the ancestral folk soul. All religious faiths had a restricted character.

With Christianity, however, there appeared a world religion which bestowed a spiritual element upon the whole earth, just as the sun bestows a physical element upon the whole earth. The climate in the vicinity of Mount Olympus is different from the climate in the vicinity of Thebes; the latter, in its turn, is different from the climate in the vicinity of Bombay. If a religious faith nestles close to a locality, it cannot spread beyond this locality. The sun, however, sheds its light on all the earth's localities, shines upon all men as the same sun.

When, however, the human form was taken on by that God Whose physical reflection shone forth in the sun's radiance, then the human race received a God who could be accepted as God by all men on earth. If the possibility is found of penetrating the being of this Christ-Divinity, we shall be able to represent Him as the God acceptable to all mankind. Today we stand only at the beginning of anthroposophical teachings. As it were, we are still stammering the language of Anthroposophy. Yet Anthroposophy will continue to develop more and more. And a part of this development will consist in its capability of finding words to describe the Mystery of Golgotha—words of a kind that spiritual science can bring to the Hindus, the Chinese, to all men on earth; and which will elucidate the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese will be unable to reject what is told them concerning the Mystery of Golgotha.

For this purpose, we must attach a genuinely serious significance to all that represents Christian tradition. Throughout the centuries, people have subjected themselves more or less to the words of the Gospels. They have studied these Gospels in a way commensurate with their understanding of these ancient books. We have certainly no intention of speaking against the validity of the Gospels. Our cycles on each of the Gospels attempt to penetrate, by means of special anthroposophical interpretation, into the deeper meaning of these Gospels. Yet one thing must be said: Why is the passage at the end of one Gospel taken so lightly? There it is written: 1 have still many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. And why are the words of another Gospel not taken more seriously: And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth-cycles? For the Christ spoke the full truth. He could have said to men other things than those recorded in the Gospels. Only those Christ-words are recorded in the Gospels, for the understanding of which the men of that epoch—few in number—were ready. But mankind must become more and more mature in the course of earthly evolution. From the Mystery of Golgotha on, the Christ dwelt among men as the Living Christ, and not as the dead Christ. And He is still present among us. If we learn to speak His language, we shall recognize His presence; we shall recognize the truth of His words: And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth-cycles. And the anthroposophical world view desires to speak His language, His spiritual language. The anthroposophical world view desires to speak in such a way of nature, of all the beings on earth, of the starry sky and the sun that, by means of this language, the Mystery of Golgotha may be understood; that the Christ may be experienced as the One Who is ever present.

And, also after the Mystery of Golgotha, we may regard as Christ-words all that we have gained from the spiritual world; aided by that power which, through the Mystery of Golgotha, descended from heaven to earth. If as men we speak of the spiritual worlds, we may make true the word of St. Paul: Not I, but the Christ in me. For today we have entered an age in which we cannot even emulate the Greeks who, although feeling themselves still at one with their physical body, yet felt this physical body as something harmonious and independent. Today we penetrate at a still earlier age than the Greeks into that which underlies our physical body, thus separating ourselves from the spiritual around us. We can deepen our being only by seeking the union with the God Who descended from heaven to earth. And we can feel ourselves united only with that God Who entered the earthly sphere, because men on earth could no longer enter the heavenly sphere with their immediate and ordinary consciousness. By finding the Christ, we also find anew the approach to the super-sensible world; not now, however, by means of the physical body (this was the case in ancient times), but by means of heightened soul-power. And today, when the parallelism between the development of body and soul lasts only up to the age of twenty (later on it will last a still shorter period), this heightened soul-power can be attained alone by immersing ourselves, in the midst of the sensible events of earthly evolution, into the knowledge of a super-sensible event: the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything on earth took place in a sensible way. Only in the Mystery of Golgotha something super-sensible mingled with earthly events. And this can be understood only out of a super-sensible knowledge.

Hence the union with the Christ awakens in our human souls the powerful faculty of attaining a relationship to the super-sensible world—a relationship formerly attained by human beings through being connected with their physical body in such a way that the body could become sheath-like. Thus, feeling the approach of death before physical death occurred, they merged themselves with the spirit prevailing in their surroundings.

We must attain by means of the soul what could be attained, in earlier days, through the mediation of the body. For, although we admire in the highest degree what has been preserved of Indian writings—which did not originate, however, from the earliest primeval Indian epoch, but from a later period—although we admire what has been bequeathed to us through the glory of the Vedas, the grandeur of the Vedanta-philosophy, the radiant splendor of the Bhagavad-Gita, we must, nevertheless, recognize the fact that this could be attained in ancient times only because the body reflected to the human being, as he grew older, a certain spirituality. Ancient man was compensated for the waning of his physical existence, which set in after the thirty-fifth year, by having, as it were, the spirit pressing out of his body, as the latter became hard, withered and wrinkled. And this spirit was perceived by the human being. The great philosophical poems of ancient times were not composed by youths, but by patriarchs who had acquired wisdom. It resulted from what was given by the body. In the present stage of human evolution, which differs from the ancient ones, we must receive from the soul, as it grows more powerful, what was formerly contributed by the body. Our body becomes old. We must remain united with it. We cannot let the spirit emerge from this body, because we have utilized it since early childhood.

If we did not do this, we could never be free men. This must be accepted as our rightful earthly destiny. One fact, however, must be made clear to us: Our soul has to gain strength. Since the spiritual strength formerly corresponding to the waning body flows to us no longer we must attain it by strengthening our soul through our own effort. And we shall experience this strengthening of the soul by looking, in a genuine and living way, toward a great and powerful event: The divine event that took place as the Mystery of Golgotha in the midst of earthly life. In beholding the Mystery of Golgotha and becoming conscious that its after-effect is still dwelling among us, is still existing in the spiritual-super-sensible sphere, our spirit and soul become strengthened and approach the spiritual world anew.

The Christ has descended to earth in order that men, who no longer see Him in heaven by means of their memory, may be permitted to see Him on earth. Seen from today's viewpoint, this is what rightly places the Mystery of Golgotha before our spiritual eye.

The disciples, who had preserved a remnant of ancient clairvoyance, could still have the Christ as their teacher when He dwelt among them after the resurrection in the spiritual body.

Yet this power gradually fell away from them. And its complete disappearance is symbolically represented through the Festival of the Ascension.

The disciples sank into profound sadness, because they were forced to believe that the Christ was no longer among them. They had taken part in the event of Golgotha. Now, however, they had to believe that the Christ had moved away from their consciousness, that the Christ was no longer on earth. Thus they were plunged into deep sorrow, for they had seen the Christ-figure disappear in the clouds, that is, move away from their consciousness.

But every genuine knowledge is born out of sorrow, of suffering, of grief. True, profound knowledge is never born out of joy. True, profound knowledge is born out of suffering. And out of the suffering, which encompassed the disciples of the Christ at the Festival of the Ascension, out of this deep soul-anguish arose the Mystery of Pentecost. The disciples could no longer view the Christ by means of their outer, instinctive clairvoyance. But the force of the Christ unfolded within them. The Christ had sent to them the spirit enabling their soul to experience the Christ-existence in their innermost depths.

This experience gave meaning to the first Festival of Pentecost occurring in human evolution. The Christ, Who had disappeared from the outer, clairvoyant view still clinging to the disciples as a heritage of ancient evolutionary periods, appeared at Pentecost within the disciples' inner experience. The fiery tongues signify nothing but the arising of the inner Christ in the souls of His pupils, the souls of the disciples. Out of inner necessity, the Festival of Pentecost had to follow the Festival of the Ascension.

In looking back at the considerations set forth here during the last few days, we shall see, on the one hand, standing there before our soul the relations existing between the individual man and the universe, and, on the other, the relations existing between a single human being living at a certain time and mankind's whole earthly development.

Today I should like to round out these considerations by adding a few thoughts. You will have inferred from what was said that the human being, in ancient times preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, stood much closer than we do today to outward nature, to the external world. This statement goes counter to the present-day belief that we, by means of our science, stand extremely close to nature. We do nothing of the kind. We have intellectual thoughts on nature drawn only from external observation, but we no longer experience nature.

Had the human being remained dependent on the spiritual element in nature, he would not have become the free being into which he developed during the recent stages of historical evolution. He would not have attained his full ego-consciousness.

If today we look into our own self, into that which we carry within us as the memory images of things experienced by us previously, what do we find in ourselves (and rightfully so)? We find our ego with all its experiences. When ancient man, living several millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, looked into himself, he did not find his ego. He did not say: “I have experienced this or that ten or twenty years ago.” Just by means of his memory, it was clear to him that he had to say: “the Gods let me have this or that experience.” And he did not say: “the ego within me had this or that experience,” but: “the God within me had the experience.” It was just because the human being participated spiritually, by means of his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body, in the processes of nature outside of himself, just because he stood in a closer, more intimate relationship to nature, he could say: “The God within me experiences the world.”

Today man acquires a knowledge of nature by means of his intellect. His knowledge is concerned exclusively with dead nature. Thus he has become able to speak of himself, out of his innermost feeling, as an ego; to be a free ego-being.

This was felt with especial strength by Paul when passing through the event of Damascus. For Paul, before passing through the event of Damascus, was an initiate in the sense of ancient initiation. He had learned in the Semitic wisdom-schools of those days that the God Whom one might justifiably call the Christ could be seen only in pre-earthly existence. This he had been told in the wisdom-schools.

The disciples and pupils of the Christ, however, whom he came to know, made the following assertion: “The Christ has dwelt among us within the man Jesus of Nazareth. He was here on earth. While we were His contemporaries, we experienced Him not only in our memory going back to a pre-earthly existence, but here on earth itself.” And Paul answered out of his initiatory knowledge: “That is impossible, for the Christ can be seen only in pre-earthly existence.”

And he was an unbeliever persecuting Christianity until the vision, the imagination of Damascus revealed this to him: The Christ lives now in connection with the earth. Then he, Paul, coined the expression which has since become so significant for inner Christianity: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

Man can recognize his ego in a natural way. He simply needs to look into himself. But in order to reach God anew, he must unite himself, in full consciousness, with the Mystery of Golgotha and say to himself: “the Christ in me.”

The men of ancient times have said: “We were together with the Christ, and hence with God the Father, before descending to earth.” Now they had to say: “the Christ is on earth.” Physically, Christ was on earth during the Mystery of Golgotha. Spiritually He has, since the Mystery of Golgotha, remained united with all men on earth.

Such knowledge is also contained in Christianity. We are told that the Christ revealed to man that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. Yet just the interpretation of this word shows clearly that the human beings, although outwardly believing, are inwardly unbelieving. You need only consider what many modern theologians have to say about this coming near of the Kingdom of Heaven. They say: “Well, in this respect the Christ depended on the judgment of his age. Then people believed that the earth would become more spiritual at a certain time. Here the Christ was mistaken.”

It is not the Christ, however, Who was mistaken. Human beings were mistaken. They have interpreted these words in such a way as though the Kingdom of Heaven, by coming near, would make the grapes grow ten times larger and let the earth overflow with milk and honey. Such was not the meaning of what the Christ said. The Christ spoke of the Kingdom of the Spirit which He had brought near. It is not allowable to say: “What the Christ told us was a mistake. Today we must think differently.” Instead of this we should ask ourselves: “How can I understand what the Christ has said?”

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, it has indeed become more and more necessary for us to find the spiritual within the earthly and perceive the truth of the saying: “The spiritual worlds are descended to the earth.” They are descended. We need only to look for the path upon which they can be found. In order that we find something of that which leads towards this path, I would like to discuss once more certain points that are apt to bring about a better comprehension of these matters.

In those ancient times when men, in their fifties, felt the paralysis of their physical bodies setting in, it was still possible to recognize individual destinies by means of the stars. Since then, every sort of astrological calculation has become the practice of amateurs. The ancient human being felt himself related to the transformation of his physical body into the earthly element. But this transformation of the physical body into the earthly element, this perception of the earth by means of the physical body enabled him to recognize, in the course of the stars, the spiritual element within destiny. Thus, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha, the wisdom of the stars was highly estimated.

Then came the age during which, as I have told you, the human being acquired a greater feeling for his surroundings. After reaching the forties, he felt language in such a way that he could say: “Within me the folk spirit, the folk genius is speaking.” Man learned to regard language as something objective.

In connection with this feeling, the human being experienced that which rotated around him, as it were, in a circle. At a later time, he still experienced the daily sunrise, the daily sunset. To a certain extent, he arranged his life in accord with these phenomena. The course of the year, however, was no longer really understood by him.

Yet there was a time, during the sixth, fifth and fourth millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, when men lived in unison not only with day and night, but also with the year. This unison with the year has been partly preserved, especially up here in the North. For instance, a relic of this past unison can still be felt in the Olaf-Saga, where Olaf experiences the course of the year in such a way that around and after Christmas he enters the life of the spiritual world. Here appears a memory of the unison between human life and the course of the year as it came to flower in very ancient times in the Orient, which was the scene of mankind's loftiest civilization.

At that time, human beings understood what later became known to them only by means of tradition, namely, how to arrange their festivals in accord with the course of the year. They took part in the course of the year. In what way was this accomplished?

Today we have no immediate experience of the fact that we breathe in and breathe out; that the air is alternately within and without us. The present-day human being would be hardly aware of these things were he not told by science. He does not experience, so vividly as did the people of ancient times, the process of inspiration and expiration.

Yet it is not only man that breathes, but also, even though in a different way, our earth. Just as man possesses a soul element, so does the earth possess a soul element. In the course of one year, the earth first breathes in, and then breathes out her soul element. And the wintry days, during which the Christmas Festival takes place, approach at a time when the earth's breathing-in process is at its height; when the earth-soul is entirely within the earth. Then the earth has the greatest amount of soul-life within herself. Hence, at this time, the spirit and soul element becomes visible in the earth.

If we can inwardly experience how the earth, having concluded this breathing-in process, is now inhabited by her whole soul and thereby lets come out of the earth-element the elemental beings, who live with the snow-covered trees, who live with the earth's surface where the water congeals at a time when the earth covers herself with a blanket of ice—if we can inwardly experience all this, then the spiritual beings within the earth begin to stir. The mere naturalist would say: The husbandman scatters the seed, which lies in the earth all winter and sprouts forth in the spring. This, however, could not happen unless the elemental beings preserved, during the winter, the spiritual force of the seeds. The spiritual beings, the spirits of nature, are most wakeful when the earth has breathed in during the winter-time, during the Christmas-time, her whole soul. Thus the birth of Jesus could be best understood through the fact that it took place at Christmas, when the earth is inhabited by her entire soul.

Yet, even at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, there were very few people who had been able to retain an understanding of this spirit and soul element contained in the earth during winter.

Men of earlier ages, however, knew that in mid-summer—around the Day of St. John, on the twenty-fourth of June—the state of the earth is just the opposite to her wintry state. In midsummer, the process of exhaling is at its height. Then the earth has given her soul to the extra-terrestrial cosmos. From Christmas until the Day of St. John, this breathing out of the soul-element into the vast universe is perceived more and more. The soul of the earth is striving towards the stars. The soul of the earth wishes to know something about the life of the stars. And, in its own way, the soul of the earth is most firmly united through the light of the summer sun with the star movements at the season of St. John's Day.

All this could be recognized, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha, in certain parts of the world. And out of this knowledge arose the inception of Summer Mysteries.

In the mid-summer mysteries, the mysteries of St. John that were celebrated especially in the North, the pupils of initiates under the guidance of these initiates, tried to accompany the earth-soul to the vast expanse of the stars, in order to read out of the stars what spiritual happenings and facts are connected with the earth. And, during the time between Christmas and the Day of St. John, they pursued this soaring of the earth-soul towards the world of the stars, this striving of the earth-soul towards the stars. And an echo—but only a traditional echo—of this striving of the earth-soul towards the stars is still to be found in the way the date for the Easter Festival is set.

The Easter Festival is set for the first Sunday following the vernal full moon and thus takes place in conformity with the stars. The reason for this must be sought in ancient times, when it was said: the soul of man desires to follow the earth-soul on her path to the stars and consider the star-wisdom as something whereby man may be guided.

Thus the Spring Festival, the Easter Festival, was set not according to earthly calculation, but according to heavenly calculation, to star calculation.

Especially in the span of time between the eighth pre-Christian century and the fourth post-Christian century, the feeling prevailed in the folk souls of civilized people that human beings were saddened by mankind's cosmic destiny. For there still existed the longing to follow the earth-soul, which desired to soar up to the stars in springtime. But the human soul, which was tied to the body, could do so no longer. There was no possibility of gaining from nature the ability to soar upward to the world of stars, such as it had existed in ancient times.

Human beings, therefore, could easily comprehend why the Easter Festival, which was to celebrate the Christ's death and resurrection, should occur just in springtime.

And the Deity came to their aid, by letting the death of Christ Jesus occur in the spring. Even the setting of the Easter Festival, however, revealed the fact that it was not permissible to use earthly calculations. The Christmas Festival could be computed by earthly means; for then the world-soul was inhabiting the earth. Thus the Christmas Festival had to be set for a definite day.

This setting of the Easter Festival contains profound wisdom. Yet the modern age thinks differently. About twenty-four years ago, I had weekly meetings with a well-known astronomer. Our meetings took place in a small circle of friends. This astronomer could reason only in the following way: All the account books of the earth are thrown into disorder by having the Easter Festival take place on different days. According to his opinion, the least one could do was to set the Easter Festival for the first Sunday in April, or regulate the date in some abstract way. As you know, a movement exists in the world which strives for such an abstract regulation of the Easter Festival. People want to have order in their debits and credits, which play such an important part in modern life. And now the Easter Festival, whose celebration, after all, requires several days, causes a great deal of disorder. It would be much more efficient to set one definite day of the year for its observance!

These things are an outward symbol of the fact that people want to banish from the world all that conforms to spiritual standards. Here is preeminently shown that we have become materialists who want to banish the spiritual more and more from human existence.

Formerly, however, the human being experienced the course of the year in such a way that, by accompanying the earth-soul into the cosmos in springtime and around the time of St. John's Day, he also learned every year how to follow the spiritual entities of the higher Hierarchies and, above all, the human souls who had passed out of this world.

In ancient times, people were conscious of the fact that, by experiencing the course of the year, they learnt how to follow the souls of the dead; learnt to find out, as it were, how their dead kinfolk were faring. And people felt that springtime not only brought them the first blossoms, but also the opportunity of discovering how their kinfolk were faring. Something spiritual was united, in a very concrete way, with this experiencing of the seasons.

And people in ancient times were much concerned with that which is connected with the earthly element, to the degree that the earthly is influenced by the stars. All this, however, has been outgrown by modern man. When we observe St. John's Day—the time when we could accompany the earth-soul soaring upward to unite itself with the stars—the antipodes celebrate Christmas. Thus, in that part of the world, the earth-soul retires into the earth.

You must consider that human beings during ancient, spiritualized times knew so little of the antipodes that the earth was thought of as a disk. Therefore it was impossible to have any relation to the antipodes.

By learning to think of the earth as a rounded body, one became independent of the course of the year. As long as one lived in a restricted region, the course of the seasons was an absolute fact. Today, when one travels across the globe without hindrance and, entering different localities, minimizes the incidents of the seasons, one is unable to experience their course. One also lacks the former intensive relation to the Festivals. You will realize how much less concrete and much more abstract our Festivals have become. People know by tradition that Christmas is the time for exchanging presents—and, besides, children enjoy their few days' vacation. At Easter, one or the other ritual may be witnessed. But in what way do present-day people concretely experience the spiritual world by means of the seasons? Today we are unable to understand the connection between our Festivals of the year and the course of the seasons.

Not only the human being has, in regard to his own person, become an Ego-being, a free being, but also the earth has emancipated herself from the universe. In modern times, the earth stands no longer in so close a relation to the universe as was formerly the case, at least as far as mankind's evolution is concerned. Hence man has become increasingly obliged to seek in his inner being what he cannot find outside.

As men became more and more intellectual, they acquired a natural science concerned with all that is outside of man. What I have in mind is not physics or chemistry which, in a purely external sense, are concerned only with what lies outside of man. I am speaking of biology. This science occupies itself in an intensive way with the lower, and also the higher animals, right up to the very highest species. And we have attained to a marvelous, admirable science in regard to the animal form, so that we are able today to have conceptions of how one animal form has developed out of another. Out of this grew the Darwin-Haeckel conception that the human form has developed out of the animal form. Yet this theory teaches us extraordinarily little about our own nature. It only marks the end of a zoological line. The human being does not attain a knowledge of himself as man, but only as the highest animal. This is a great scientific accomplishment, but it must be interpreted in the right way. People must learn to concede that science can only teach us what man is not.

As soon as it has become general knowledge that science must concern itself not with what man is, but with what man is not, then science will become enlightened. Then we shall be able to study all the forms living in the animal kingdom, as well as those in the plant kingdom.

Then we shall be able to say: “There outside, we have all the animal shapes. These we had to leave behind in the outer world; for, if they were still within us, we could never have become men. Natural science tells us of the things that we had to conquer within ourselves. We evolved by discarding, more and more, the natural forms, by ejecting them and retaining that which is not nature, but which pertains to spirit and soul.”

Man must come to the point where he can address science in the following way: “You are great, for you have taught me what man is not. Hence I must look for man's being in a sphere totally different from external, physical science. I can become a true scientist only by recognizing that man is not a product of nature, topping the line of animals, but that the animals are formations cast off and left behind by man. Only thus can I attain a correct relation to science.” In order to speak such words, man will be compelled to recognize things, now not through external observation, but out of his inner nature. And at the moment when man is able to say to himself: “Science, in the modern sense, does not inform us about man, but it only informs us concerning what man is not”—at this moment it will be recognized how much the world has need of spiritual science. For there is nothing else that gives us the possibility of recognizing man as Man. Without spiritual science, we can come to know only the external sheath of man as the final product of the animal kingdom.

Just by standing correctly on natural-scientific ground, we may fully appreciate natural science as something lying outside of man. To attain a knowledge of man—also with regard to his physical attributes—we must pursue a different path.

Anthroposophy has to strive for this spiritual observation. I shall demonstrate this fact by a few concrete examples.

Because we are influenced by the materialistic spirit of the age, there is a tendency in our schools to educate children by pointing to their bodily nature. Nowadays people make experiments involving the memory, even the faculties of willing and thinking. I do not object to such things, which may be quite interesting, inasmuch as science is concerned. It is, nevertheless, terrible to apply such experiments in a pedagogical way. If we can approach the child only by means of external experiments, this proves how completely estranged we have become from man's real being. Anyone inwardly connected with the child does not need external experiments. I wish, however, to emphasize once more that I am not opposed to experimental psychology. Yet we must acquire the faculty to enter man's being by the inward means of spirit and soul.

For instance, we are told: “A child's memory, his power of remembering, may be exerted too much or too little in his ninth or tenth year.” The clamor against over-exerting the memory can lead to the result of exerting it too little. We must always try to find the middle course. For instance, we may make too great demands on a nine or ten-year-old's memory. The real consequences will not appear before the person in question has reached the age of thirty or forty, or perhaps still later. Then this person may develop rheumatism or diabetes. By overexerting a child's memory at the wrong time—let us say between the ninth and tenth year—we cause during this youthful stage an exaggerated depositing of faulty metabolic products. These connections, lasting during a man's entire earth-life, go generally unnoticed.

On the other hand, by exercising the memory too little—that is, by letting a child's memory remain idle—we bring forth a tendency to all kinds of inflammations appearing in later years.

What is important to know is the following: that the bodily states of a certain life-period are the consequences of the soul and spirit states of another.

Or let us mention something else. We make experiments as to how quickly eight, nine, or ten-year old children in the grammar school tire during a reading lesson. We can work our graphs which show that the pupils tire after a certain length of time when doing arithmetic, and again after a certain length of time when doing gymnastics. Then the lessons are arranged according to these charts.

Of course, these charts are very interesting for purely objective science, to which I pay all due respect. I have no quarrel with such methods; but, with regard to education, they are of no use whatsoever. For between the change of teeth and puberty—that is, just at the grammar school age—we can educate and teach in the right way only by not over-exerting either the head or the limbs, but by stressing the use of the respiratory and circulatory system, the rhythmical system. Above all, we should inject into gymnastic exercises rhythm and time-beat: an element of art should be introduced.

Hence the art of eurythmy is so well adapted to educational purposes. Here the artistic element enters into the child's movements. Similarly, we should relieve the child's head by keeping him away from too much thinking; but teach him instead in a pictorial, imaginative way, present things to the child pictorially. For then he is not made to exert either his nervous-sensuous or his motor system, but mostly his rhythmic system. And this system does not become tired.

You only need to consider that our hearts must beat all night long, even when we are tired and want to rest. We must ceaselessly breathe between our birth and death. It is only the motor and sensuous-nervous systems that tire. The rhythmic system never tires. Therefore the child's schooling, at a time when he must take into his soul things of the greatest importance, should be organized in such a way that those of the child's faculties are called forth which never tire. If we calculate, however, that some subject exhausts the child in a stated period, and then employ charts of this kind, the educational methods are worked out in a wrong way, and not in a correct way. We must realize one thing: What experimental psychology makes clear is essentially the non-human. The human must be inwardly recognized.

In this way, medicine too will be penetrated by thoughts pertaining to spirit and soul. In ancient times, medicine was dominated by such thoughts, and the activities of healing and educating were designated by the same word. When the human being entered the world, he was considered of being in need of healing. Education was tantamount to healing. This will again be possible once the knowledge given by spirit and soul will have advanced to a point where the deeper connections of these things can be discerned. As I said before: Too little exertion of the memory causes subsequent inflammations; too great exertion causes deposits of metabolic products.

By looking at the effect of the action of spirit and soul on the physical, the spiritual element can be found in every single illness. And, conversely, we learn to recognize the cosmos; to recognize the spiritual state of matter within the cosmos. Then therapy may be added to pathology. And here we are filled with the thought that since the Mystery of Golgotha we are obliged to appeal to the soul's inner essence. We can no longer draw the spirit-soul element out of our external surroundings. By considering, in the lecture-halls of anatomy, merely the physical-sensible, we shall call forth a cry such as was uttered during a recent medical Congress. Impelled by the misery of the age, a medical scientist called out: “Give us corpses! Then we shall be able to advance in medicine. Give us corpses!”—Certainly, this cry is perfectly valid today; and, again, I do not fight against this demand for corpses. All this, however, can develop in the right way only if, on the other hand, the cry is uttered: “Give us the possibility of looking into spirit and soul, so that we may recognize how they continually build up the body, and continually destroy it.”

All this is connected with the right comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. For the Christ wanted us to comprehend again how to heal out of our inner being. Because of this, He sent the Healing Spirit. What He wanted to implant into mankind will bring us physical knowledge, but a physical knowledge permeated by the spirit.

Thus we comprehend the Christ correctly by grasping, in the right way, this word of the Gospel: “Whoever utters incessantly the cry: Lord, Lord! or Christ, Christ! should not, therefore, be considered a true Christian.” Anthroposophy is often reproached for speaking less of the Christ than does external religion. Then I often say to those who blame Anthroposophy: “Is there not an ancient Commandment recognized also by Christians, but forgotten in this eternal mentioning of the Christ: `Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain?' This is one of the ten Commandments.”

Whoever speaks ceaselessly of the Christ; whoever has the Christ's name constantly on his lips, sins against the sacredness of His name. Anthroposophy wants to be Christian in all it does and is. Therefore it cannot be reproached for speaking too little of the Christ. The consciousness that the Christ is living permeates everything brought forth by Anthroposophy. And thus it does not want to have Lord, Lord! incessantly on its lips. The less it speaks of the name “Christ,” the more truly does it desire to be Christian.

Throughout the ages, understanding the world has been closely associated with understanding man himself. It is generally recognised that in the days when not only material existence, but also spiritual life, was taken into consideration, man was looked upon as a microcosm, as a world in miniature. This means that man in his being and doing, in the whole part he plays in the world, was viewed as a concentration of all the laws and activities of the Cosmos. In those days it was insisted that understanding of the universe could be founded only on an understanding of man.

But here, for anyone who is unprejudiced, a difficulty arises at once. Directly he wants to arrive at so-called self-knowledge—the only true knowledge of man—he finds himself confronted by an overwhelming riddle; and after observing himself for a time, he is obliged to own that this being of his, as it appears in the world of the senses, is not completely revealed even to his own soul. He has to admit that for ordinary sense-perception part of his being remains hidden and unknown. Thus he is faced with the task of extending his self-knowledge, of thoroughly investigating his true being, before he can come to knowledge of the world.

A simple reflection will show that a man's true being, his inner activity as an individual, cannot be found in the world that holds good for his senses. For directly he passes through the gate of death, he is given over as a corpse to the laws and conditions of this sense-perceptible world. The laws of nature—those laws which prevail out there in the visible world—seize upon the physically dead man. Then that system of relationships, which we call the human organism, comes to an end; then, after a time depending upon the manner of his disposal, the physical man disintegrates.

From this simple reflection, therefore, we see that the sum of nature's laws, in so far as we come to know them through sense-observation, is adapted solely to breaking down the human organism and does nothing to build it up. So we have to look for those laws, for that other activity, which, during earthly life, from birth or conception to death, fight against the forces, the laws, of dissolution. In every moment of our life we are engaged with our true inward being in a battle with death.

If now we look round at the only part of the sense-world understood by people today, the mineral, lifeless world, this certainly is subject to the forces that signify death for the human being. It is pure illusion for natural scientists to think they could ever succeed, by relying on the laws of the external sense-world, in understanding even the plants. That will never be so. They will go some little way towards this understanding and may cherish it as an ideal, but it will never be possible really to fathom the plant—let alone the animal and physical man himself—with the aid of the laws which belong to the external world perceived by man.

As earthly beings, between conception and death, in our true inner being we are fighters against the laws of nature. And if we really want to rise to self-knowledge, we have to examine that activity in the human being which works against death. Indeed, if we are to investigate thoroughly man's being—which is our intention in these lectures—we shall have to show how, through a man's earthly development, it comes about that his inner activities ultimately succumb to death—how death gains the victory over the hidden forces opposing it.

All this is intended to show the course our studies are meant to take. For the truth of what I am now saying will be revealed only gradually in the various lectures. To begin with, therefore, we can merely indicate, by observing man without prejudice, where we have to look for his innermost being, for his personality, his individuality. This is not to be found within the realm of natural forces, but outside it.

There is, however, another indication—and such indications are all I want to give to-day—that as earthly men we live always in the present moment. Here, too, we need only be sufficiently unprejudiced to grasp all that this statement implies. When we see, hear, or otherwise perceive through our senses, it is the actual moment that is all-important for us. Whatever has to do with the past or the future can make no impression on our ears, our eyes, or on any other sense. We are given up to the moment, and thereby to space.

But what would a man become were he entirely given up to the present moment and to space? By observing ordinary life around us we have ample proof that, if a man is thus completely engrossed, he is no longer man in the full sense. Records of illness give evidence of this. Well-authenticated cases can be quoted of persons who, at a certain time in their lives, become unable to remember any of their former experiences, and are conscious only of the immediate present. Then they do the craziest things. Contrary to their ordinary habits, they buy a railway ticket and travel to some place or other, doing everything necessary at the time quite sensibly, with more intelligence, and perhaps with more cunning, than usual. They have meals and do all the other little things in life at the normal time. On arrival at the station to which they booked, they take another ticket, going possibly in an opposite direction. They wander about in this way, it may be for years, until they come to a stop at some place, suddenly realising they don't know where they are. Everything they have done, from the moment they took the first ticket, or left their home, is blotted out from their consciousness, and they remember only what took place before that. Their life of soul, the whole of their life as human beings on earth, becomes chaotic. They no longer feel themselves to be a unified person. They had always lived in the present moment and had been able to find their way about in space, but now they have lost their inner feeling for time; they have lost their memory.

When a man loses his inner feeling for time—his really intimate connection with the past—then his life becomes a chaos. Experience of space alone can do nothing to help towards the health of his whole being.

To put this in other words: A man in his sense-life is always given up to the moment, and in some cases of illness it is possible for him to detach his immediate existence in space from his existence as a whole—but he is then no longer man in the full sense.

Here we have an indication of something in man belonging not to space but only to time; and we must say that if one human experience is that of space, there is also another which must always be present in a man—the experience of time. For him to remain man in the full sense, memory must make the past present in him. Being present in time is something indispensable for a man. Past time, however, is never there in the present moment; to experience it we must always carry it over into the present. Therefore in a human being there must be forces for conserving the past, forces that do not arise out of space and are therefore not to be understood as laws of nature working spatially, for they are outside space.

These indications point to the fact that if a man is to be the central point of knowledge of the world and has to begin by knowing himself, he must seek first of all within his own being for that which can raise him above spatial existence—the sole existence of which the senses tell—and can make him a being of time in the midst of his spatial existence. Therefore, if he is to perceive his own being, he must summon up from within himself cognitional powers which are not bound up with his senses or his perception of space. It is at this particular stage of human evolution, when natural science is having so momentous an effort in focussing attention on the laws of space, that, for reasons to be shown in these lectures, the true being of man has in general been entirely lost to view. Hence it is particularly necessary now to point out the inner experiences which, as you have seen, lead a man out of space into time and its experiences. We shall see how, going on from there, he actually enters the spiritual world.

The knowledge leading over from the world of the senses to the super-sensible has been called, throughout the ages, Initiation-knowledge—knowledge, that is, of what constitutes the true impulse, the active element, of human personality. It is of this Initiation-knowledge that I have to speak in these lectures, as far as is possible today. For our intention is to study the evolution of the world and of man, in the past, present and future, in the light of Initiation-knowledge.

I shall therefore have to begin by speaking of how such Initiation-knowledge can be acquired. The very way in which these matters are spoken of to-day clearly distinguishes present Initiation-knowledge from that of the past. In the past, individual teachers wrestled their way through to a perception of the super-sensible in the world and in man. On the feelings of the students who came to them they made a strong impression by dint of their purely human qualities, and the students accepted the knowledge they offered, not under any compulsion, but in response to the teacher's personal authority.

Hence, for the whole of man's evolution up to the present time, you will always find described how there were separate groups of pupils, each under the guidance of a teacher, a “guru”, to whose authority they submitted. Even on this point—as on many others we shall come across in these lectures—Initiation-knowledge to-day cannot follow the old path. The “guru” never spoke of the path by which he had achieved his own knowledge, and in those bygone times public instruction about the road to higher knowledge was never even considered. Such studies were pursued solely in the Mystery-centres which in those days served as universities for those following a super-sensible path.

In the view of the general level of human consciousness which has been reached at this moment in history, such a path would no longer be possible. Anyone speaking of super-sensible knowledge to-day is therefore naturally expected to say at once how this knowledge is to be acquired. At the same time everyone must be left free to decide, in accordance with his own way of life, his attitude to those exercises for body, soul and spirit, through which certain forces within man are developed. These forces look beyond the laws of nature, beyond the present moment, into the true being of the world, and therewith into the true being of man himself. Hence the obvious course for our studies is to begin with at least a few preliminary remarks about the way by which a man to-day can acquire knowledge of the super-sensible.

We must thus take our start from man as he really is in earthly existence, in relation to space and the present moment. As an earthly being a man embraces in his soul and bodily nature—I say deliberately soul and bodily nature—a triad: a thinking being, a feeling being and a being of will. And when we look at everything that lies in the realm of thinking, in the realm of feeling and in that of the will, we have seen all of the human being that takes part in earthly existence.

Let us look first at the most important factor in man through which he takes his place in earthly existence. This is certainly his thinking. To his thinking nature he owes the clear-headedness he needs, as earthly man, for surveying the world. In comparison with this lucid thinking, his feeling is obscure, and, as for his willing—those depths of his being from which the will surges up—all that, for ordinary observation, is entirely out of range.

Just think how small a part your will plays in the ordinary world and in ordinary experience. Say you make up your mind to move a chair. You first have the thought of carrying it from one spot to another. You have a concept of this. The concept then passes, in a way you know nothing of, right into your blood and muscles. And what goes on in your blood and muscles—and also in your nerves—while you are lifting the chair and carrying it elsewhere, exists for you only as an idea. The real inner activity that goes on within your skin—of that you are wholly unconscious. Only the result comes into your thought.

Thus, of all your activities when awake, the will is the most unconscious. We will speak later of activity during sleep. During waking activity the will remains in absolute obscurity; a person knows as little about the passing of his thought into willing as in ordinary life on Earth he knows of what happens between falling asleep and waking. Even when anyone is awake, he is asleep where the inner nature of the will is concerned. It is only the faculty of forming concepts, of thinking, that enters clearly into man's life on Earth. Feeling lies midway between thinking and willing. And just as the dream stands between sleeping and waking, as an indefinite, chaotic conception, half-asleep, half-awake, so, coming halfway between willing and thinking, feeling is really a waking dream of the soul. We must take the clarity of thinking as our starting-point; but how does thinking run its course in ordinary life on Earth?

In the whole life of a human being on Earth, thinking plays a quite passive role. Let us be perfectly honest about this when observing ourselves. From the moment of waking until going to sleep a man is preoccupied with the affairs of the outer world. He lets sense-impressions flow into him, and with them concepts are then united. When sense-impressions pass away, only representations of them remain in the soul, turning gradually into memories. But, as I have said, if as earthly beings we observe ourselves honestly, we must admit that in concepts gained from ordinary life there is nothing which has not come into the soul from the external world through the senses. If without prejudice we examine what we carry deep down in our souls, we shall always find it was occasioned by some impression from without.

This applies particularly to the illusions of those mystics who—I am saying this expressly—do not penetrate to any great depth. They believe that by means of a more or less nebulous spiritual training they can come to an inward experience of a higher divinity underlying the world. And these mystics, these half or quarter mystics, are often heard to say how an inner light of the soul has dawned within them, how they have had some kind of spiritual vision.

Anyone who observes himself closely and honestly will come to see that many mystical visions can be traced to merely external sense-experiences which have been transformed in the course of time. Strange as it may seem, it is possible for some mystic, at the age perhaps of forty, to think he has had a direct, imaginative impression, a vision, of—we will take something concrete—the Mystery of Golgotha, that he sees the Mystery of Golgotha inwardly, spiritually. This gives him a feeling of great exaltation. Now a really good psychologist, who can go back through this mystic's earthly life, may find that as a boy of ten he was taken by his father on a visit, where he saw a certain little picture. It was a picture of the Mystery of Golgotha, and at the time it made hardly any impression on his soul. But the impression remained, and in a changed form sank deep down into his soul, to rise up in his fortieth year as a great mystical experience.

This is something to be stressed particularly when anyone ventures, more or less publicly, to say anything about the paths to super-sensible knowledge. Those who do not take the matter very seriously generally talk in a superficial way. It is just those who wish to have the right to speak about mystical, super-sensible paths who ought to know about the errors in this sphere which can lead people astray. They ought fully to realise that ordinary self-knowledge is chiefly made up of transformed external impressions, and that genuine self-knowledge must be sought to-day through inner development, by calling up forces in the soul not previously there. This requires us to realise the passive nature of our usual thinking. It deals with all impressions in the way natural to the senses. The earlier things come first, the later ones later; what is uppermost in thought remains above; what is below remains below. As a rule, therefore—not only in ordinary life but also in science—a man's concepts merely trail after processes in the external world. Our science has gone so far as to make an ideal of discovering how things run their course in the external world without letting thinking have the slightest influence on them. In their own sphere the scientists are quite right; by following this method they have made enormous advances. But they are more and more losing sight of man's true being. For the first step in those methods for developing inner forces of the soul leading to super-sensible cognition, called by us meditation and concentration, is by finding the way over from purely passive thinking to thinking that is inwardly active.

I will begin by describing this first step in a quite elementary way. Instead of a concept aroused by something external, we can take a concept drawn entirely from within and give it the central place in our consciousness. What is important is not that the concept should correspond to a reality, but that it should be drawn up out of the depths of the soul as something active. Hence it is not good to take anything we remember, for in memory all manner of vague impressions cling to our concepts. If, therefore, we draw upon our memory we shall neither be sure that we are not letting extraneous things creep in, nor sure that we have really set about meditating with proper inward activity. There are three possible ways of proceeding, and there need be no loss of independence on any of them. A simple, easily apprehended concept is preferable, a creation of the moment, not having anything to do with what is remembered. For our purpose it can even be something quite paradoxical, deliberately removed from any passively received idea. We have only to make sure that the meditation has been brought about through our own inner activity.

The second way is to go to someone with experience in this sphere and ask him to suggest a subject for meditation. There may then be fear of becoming dependent on him. If, however, from the moment the meditation is received, one is conscious that every step has been taken independently, through an inner activity of one's own, and that the only thing not determined by oneself is the subject, which, since it comes from someone else, has to be actively laid hold of—when one is conscious of all this, there is no longer any question of dependence. It is then particularly necessary to continue to act in full consciousness.

And finally, the third way. Instruction can be sought from a teacher who—one might say—remains invisible. The student takes a book he has never seen before, opens it at random and reads any chance sentence. He can thus be sure of coming on something entirely new to him, and then he must work on it with inner activity. A subject for meditation can be made of the sentence, or perhaps of some illustration or diagram in the book, so long as he is certain he has never previously come across it. That is the third method, and in this way a teacher can be created out of nothing. The book has to be found and looked at, and a sentence, a drawing, or anything else chosen from it—all this constitutes the teacher.

Hence it is perfectly possible nowadays to take the path to higher knowledge in such a way that the active thinking required will not be unjustifiably encroached on by any other power. This is essential for present-day mankind. In the course of these lectures we shall see how necessary it is for people to-day, especially when they wish to make progress on the path to higher worlds, to respect and treasure their own free will. For how, otherwise, is any inner activity to be developed? Directly anyone becomes dependent on someone else, his own will is frustrated. And it is important that meditation to-day should be carried through with inner activity, out of the will in thinking, which is hardly at all valued to-day, with modern science putting all the emphasis on passive observation of the outer world.

In this way we can win through to active thinking, the rate of progress depending wholly on the individual. One man will get there in three weeks, if he perseveres with the same exercises. Another will take five years, another seven, and someone else nineteen, and so on. The essential point is that he should never relax his efforts. A moment will come when he recognises that his thinking has really changed: it no longer runs on in the old passive pictures but is inwardly full of energy—a force which, although he experiences it quite clearly, he knows to be just as much a force as the force required to raise an arm or point a finger. We come to know a thinking that seems to sustain our whole being, a thinking that can hit against an obstacle. This is no figure of speech, but a concrete truth that we can experience. We know that ordinary thinking does no such thing. When I run up against a wall and get hurt, my physical body has received a blow through force of contact. This force of contact depends on my being able to hit my body against objects. It is I who do the hitting. The ordinary passive thinking does not hit anything, but simply presents itself to be hit, for it has no reality; it is only a picture. But the thinking to which we come in the way described is a reality, something in which we live. It can hit against something as a finger can hit the wall. And just as we know that our finger cannot go through the wall, so we know that with this real thinking we cannot fathom everything. It is a first step. We have to take this step, this turning of one's own active thinking into an organ of touch for the soul, so that we may feel ourselves thinking in the same way that we walk, grasp or touch; so that we know we are living in a real being, not just in ordinary thinking which merely creates images, but in a reality, in the soul's organ of touch which we ourselves have become.

That is the first step—to change our thinking so that we feel: Now you yourself have become the thinker. That rounds off everything. With this thinking it is not the same as with physical touch. An arm, for instance, grows as we grow, so that when we are full-grown our proportions remain correct. But the thinking that has become active is like a snail—able to extend feelers or to draw them in again. In this thinking we live in a being certainly full of force but inwardly mobile, moving backwards and forwards, inwardly active. With this far-reaching organ of touch we can—as we shall see—feel about in the spiritual world; or, if this is spiritually painful, draw back.

All this must certainly be taken seriously by those with any desire to approach the true being of man—this transformation of one's whole nature. For we do not discover what a man actually is unless we start by seeing in him something beyond what is perceived by our earthly senses. All that is developed through the activity of thinking is a man's first super-sensible member—later I shall be describing it more fully. First we have man's physical body that can be perceived by our ordinary sense-organs, and this offers resistance on meeting the ordinary organs of touch. Then we have our first super-sensible member—we can call it the etheric body or the formative forces body. It must be called something, but the name is immaterial. In future I will call it the etheric or formative forces body. Here we have our first super-sensible member, just as perceptible for a higher power of touching, into which thinking has been changed, as physical things are perceptible to the physical sense of touch. Thinking becomes a super-sensible touching, and through this super-sensible touching the etheric or formative forces body can be, in the higher sense, both grasped and seen. This is the first real step, as it were, into the super-sensible world.

From the very way in which I have tried to describe the passing over of thinking into the experience of an actual force within one, you will realise how little sense there is, where genuine spiritual development is concerned, in saying, for example, that anyone who wishes to enter the spiritual world by this path is merely indulging in fantasy or yielding to auto-suggestion. For it is the first reaction of many people to say: “Anyone who talks of the higher worlds in connection with a training of this kind is simply picturing what he has suggested to himself.” Then others take up the refrain, perhaps saying: “It is even possible that someone who loves lemonade has only to think of it and his mouth immediately begins to water, just as though he were drinking lemonade. Auto-suggestion has such power!”

All this may certainly be so, and anyone who is taking the rightful path we have indicated into the spiritual world must be well up in the things that physiologists and psychologists can get to know intellectually, and he should have a thoroughly practical acquaintance with the precautions that have to be observed. But to anyone who believes he can persuade himself by auto-suggestion that he is drinking lemonade, although he has none, I would reply: “Yes, that is possible—but show me the man who has quenched a real thirst with imaginary, auto-suggested lemonade!” That is where the difference begins between what is merely imagined passively and what is actually experienced. By keeping in touch with the real world and making our thinking active, we reach the stage of living spiritually in the world in such a way that thinking develops into a touching. Naturally it is a touching that has nothing to do with chairs or tables; but we learn to touch in the spiritual world, to make contact with it, to enter into a living relation with it. It is precisely by means of this active thinking that we learn to distinguish between the mystical fancies of auto-suggestion and the experience of spiritual reality.

All these objections arise from people not having yet looked into the way modern Initiation-knowledge describes the path for to-day. They are content to judge from outside a matter of which they may have heard simply the name, or of which they have gained a little superficial knowledge. Those who enter the spiritual world in the way here described, which enables them to make contact with it and to touch it, know how to distinguish between merely forming a subsequent concept of what they have experienced through active thinking and the perceptive experience itself. In ordinary life we can quite well distinguish between the experience of inadvertently burning our finger and a picturing of the incident afterwards! There is a most convincing difference, for in one case the finger is actually painful, in the other it is painful only in imagination. The same difference is encountered on a higher level between ideas we have of the spiritual world and what we actually experience there.

Now the first thing attained in this way is true self-knowledge. For, just as in life we have for our immediate perception a table here, chairs over there, and this whole splendid hall—with the clock that isn't going!—and so on; just as all this stands before us in space, and we perceive it at any moment, so, to the thinking that has become active and real, the world of time makes itself known—at first in the form of the time-world that is bound up with the human being himself. Past experiences that can normally be recovered only as memory-images stand before him as an immediately present tableau of long past events. The same thing is described by people who experience a shock through the threat of imminent death by drowning perhaps; and what they describe is confirmed—I always add this—by persons who think in an entirely materialistic way. To someone in mortal peril there may flash up an inward tableau of his past life. And this in fact is what happens also to people who have made their thinking active; suddenly before their souls arises a tableau of their life from the moment when they first learnt to think up to the present. Time becomes space; the past becomes present; a picture stands before their souls. The most characteristic feature of this experience—I shall have to go into it more closely tomorrow—is that, because the whole thing is like a picture, one still has a certain feeling of space, but only a feeling. For the space now experienced lacks the third dimension; it is two-dimensional only, as with a picture. For this reason I call this cognition Imaginative—a picture-cognition that works, as in a painting, with two dimensions.

You may ask: When I have this experience of only two dimensions, what happens if, still experiencing two dimensions, I go further? That makes no difference. We lose all experience of a third dimension. On a later occasion I will speak of how, in our day, because there is no longer any consciousness of such things, people searching for the spiritual look for a fourth dimension as a way towards it. The truth is that when we go on from the physical to the spiritual, no fourth dimension appears, but the third dimension drops away. We must get used to the real facts in this sphere, as we have had to do in others. It was once thought that the earth was flat, and ran off into an indefinite region where it came to an abrupt end; and just as it was an advance when people knew that if we sail round the earth we come back to our starting-point, so it will be an advance in our inner comprehension of the world when we know that, in the spiritual world, we do not go on from first, second, third dimensions to a fourth, but back to two dimensions only. And we shall see how, eventually, we go back to only one. That is the true state of affairs.

We can see how, in observing the outer world, people today cling in a superficial way to numbers: first dimension, second, third—and so a fourth must follow. No, we turn back to two dimensions; the third dissolves and we arrive at a truly Imaginative-knowledge. It comes to us first as a tableau of our life, when we survey in mighty pictures the experiences of our past earthly life and how we have inwardly gone through them. And this differs considerably from simple memories.

Ordinary memory-pictures make us feel that they come essentially from conceptions of the outside world, experiences of pleasure, pain, of what other people have done to us, of their attitude towards us. That is what we chiefly experience in our purely conceptual memories.

In the tableau of which I am speaking, it is different. There we experience—well, let us take an example. Perhaps we met someone ten years ago. In ordinary memory we would see how he came to meet us, what he did to us that was good or bad, and so on. But in the life-tableau we re-live our first sight of the man, what we did and experienced ourselves in order to gain his friendship, what our impressions were. Thus in the tableau we feel what unfolds outwardly from within us, whereas ordinary memory shows what develops inwardly from without.

So of the tableau we can say that it brings us something like a present experience in which one thing does not follow another, as in recollection, but one thing is side-by-side with another in two-dimensional space. Hence the life-tableau can be readily distinguished from memory-pictures.

Now what is gained from this is an enhancement of our inner activity, the active experience of one's own personality. That is the essential feature of it. One lives in and develops more intensively the forces which radiate from the personality. Having gone through this experience, we have to climb a further step, and this is something that nobody does at all willingly. It entails the most rigorous inner discipline. For what is experienced through this life-tableau, through the pictures presenting one's own experiences to the soul, gives us, even in the case of past experiences that were actually painful, a feeling of personal happiness. A tremendously strong feeling of happiness is united with this Imaginative knowledge.

It is this subjective feeling of happiness which has inspired all those religious ideals and descriptions—in Mohammedanism, for instance—where life beyond the Earth is pictured in such glowing terms. They are an Imaginative result of this experience of happiness.

If the next step is to be made, this feeling of happiness must be forgotten. For when in perfect freedom we have first exerted our will to make our thinking active through meditation and concentration, as I have described, and by means of this active thinking we have advanced to experience of the life-tableau, we have then to use all our strength in blotting this out from our consciousness. In ordinary life this blotting out is often all too easy. Those who go in for examinations have good reason to complain of it! Ordinary sleep, too, is finally nothing but a passive wiping out of everything in our daytime consciousness. For the examination candidate would hardly wipe out his knowledge consciously; it is a passive process, a sign of weakness in one's command of present events. When, however, the required strength has been gained, this wiping out is necessary for the next step towards super-sensible knowledge.

Now it easily happens that, by concentrating all the forces of his soul on a subject he himself has chosen, a man develops a desire to cling to it, and because a feeling of happiness is connected with this life-tableau, he clings to it all the more readily and firmly. But one must be able to extinguish from consciousness the very thing one has striven for through the enhancement of one's powers. As I have pointed out, this is much more difficult than the blotting out of anything in ordinary life.

You will no doubt be aware that when a person's sense-impressions have been gradually shut off; when all is dark around him and he can see nothing; when all noise is shut out so that he hears nothing and even the day's impressions are suppressed, he falls asleep. This empty consciousness, that comes to anyone on the verge of sleep, now has to be brought about at will. But while all conscious impressions, even those self-induced, have to be blotted out, it is most important for the student to remain awake. He must have the strength, the inner activity, to keep awake while no longer receiving impressions from without, or any experiences whatever. An empty consciousness is thus produced, but an empty consciousness of which one is fully aware.

When all that has been first brought to consciousness through enhanced forces has been wiped out and the consciousness made empty, it does not remain so, for then the second stage of knowledge is entered. In contrast to Imaginative knowledge, we may call it Inspired knowledge. If we have striven for empty consciousness by preparation of this kind—then, just as the visible world is normally there for our eyes to see and the world of sound for our ears to hear—it becomes possible for the spiritual world to present itself to our soul. It is no longer our own experiences, but a spiritual world that presses in on us. And if we are so strong that we have been able to suppress the entire life-tableau all at once—letting it appear and then blotting it out, so that after experiencing it we empty our consciousness of it—than the first perception to arise in this emptiness is of our pre-earthly life—the life before conception and descent into a physical body. This is the first real super-sensible experience that comes to a man after he has emptied his consciousness—he looks at his own pre-earthly life. From that moment he comes to know the side of immortality which is never brought out to-day. People talk of immortality only as the negation of death. Certainly this side of immortality is as important as the other—we shall have much more to say about it—but the immortality we first come to know in the way I have briefly indicated is not the negation of death, but “unbornness”, the negation of birth; and both sides are equally real. Only when people come once more to understand that eternity has these two sides—immortality and “unbornness”—will they be able to recognise again in man that which is enduring, truly eternal.

Modern languages all have a word for immortality, but they have lost the word “unbornness”, although older languages had it. This side of eternity, “unbornness”, was lost first, and now, in this materialistic age, the tragic moment is threatening when all knowledge of immortality may be lost—for in the realm of pure materialism people are no longer willing to know anything whatever of the spiritual part of man.

To-day I have been able to indicate—and quite briefly—only the very first steps on the path to super-sensible worlds. During the next few days something further will be described, and then we shall turn back to what can be known on that path about man and the world, in the present and past, and also to what needs to be known for the future.

Let us once more call up before our souls whither modern Initiation leads, after the first steps to Imaginative knowledge have been successfully taken. A man then comes to the point where his previous abstract, purely ideal world of thought is permeated with inner life. The thoughts coming to him are no longer lifeless, passively acquired; they are an inward world of living force which he feels in the same way as he feels the pulsing of his blood or the streaming in and out of the air he breathes. It is therefore a question of the ideal element in thinking being replaced by an inward experience of reality. Then indeed the pictures that previously constituted a man's thoughts are no longer mere abstract, shadowy projections of the outside world, but are teeming with an inward, vivid existence. They are real Imaginations experienced in two dimensions, as indicated yesterday, but it is not as though a man were standing in front of a painting in the physical world, for then he may experience visions, not Imaginations. Rather is it as though, having lost the third dimension, he were himself moving about within the picture. Hence it is not like seeing something in the physical world; anything that has the look of the physical world will be a vision. Genuine Imagination comes to us only when, for example, we no longer see colours as we do in the physical world, but when we experience them. What does this mean?

When you see colours in the physical world, they give you different experiences. You perceive red as something that attacks you, that wants to spring at you. A bull will react violently to this aggressive red; he experiences it far more vividly than does man, in whom the whole experience is toned down.

When you perceive green, it gives you a feeling of balance, an experience neither painful nor particularly pleasant; whereas blue induces a mood of devotion and humility. If we allow these various experiences of colour to penetrate right into us, we can realise how it is that when anything in the spiritual world comes at us in the aggressive way red does in physical life, it is something corresponding to the colour red. When we encounter something which calls up a mood of humility, this has the same effect as the experience of blue or blue-violet in the physical world. We can simplify this by saying: we have experienced red or blue in the spiritual world. Otherwise, for the sake of precision, we should always have to say: we have experienced something there in the way that red, or blue, is experienced in the physical world. To avoid so many words, one says simply that one has seen auric colours which can be distinguished as red, blue, green, and so on.

But we must realise thoroughly that this making our way into the super-sensible, this setting aside of all that comes to us through the senses, is always present as a concrete experience. And in the course of this experience we always have the feeling I described yesterday, as if thinking had become an organ of touch extending throughout the human organism, so that spiritually we feel that a new world is opening out and we are touching it. This is not yet the real spiritual world, but what I might call the etheric or formative-forces world. Anyone who would learn to know the etheric must grasp it in this way. For no speculation, no abstract reflection, about the etheric can lead to true knowledge of it. In this thinking that has become real we live with our own formative-forces or etheric body, but it is a different kind of living from life in the physical body. I should like to describe this other way by means of a comparison.

When you look at one of your fingers, you recognise it as a living member of your organism. Cut it off, and it is no longer what it was; it dies. If this finger of yours had a consciousness, it would say: I am no more than a part of your organism, I have no independent existence. That is what a man has to say directly he enters the etheric world with Imaginative cognition. He no longer feels himself as a separate being, but as a member of the whole etheric world, the whole etheric cosmos. After that he realises that it is only by having a physical body that he becomes a personality, an individuality. It is the physical body that individualises and makes of one a separate being.

We shall indeed see how even in the spiritual world we can be individualised—but I will speak of that later. If we enter the spiritual world in the way described, we are bound at first to feel ourself as just one member of the whole etheric Cosmos; and if our etheric body were to be cut off from the cosmic ether, it would mean for us etheric death. It is very important to grasp this, so that we may understand properly what has to be said later about a man's passage through the gate of death.

As I pointed out yesterday, this Imaginative experience in the etheric, which becomes a tableau of our whole life from birth up to the present moment of our existence on Earth, is accompanied by an extraordinarily intense feeling of happiness. And the flooding of the whole picture-world by this inward, wonderfully pleasurable feeling is a man's first higher experience.

We must then be able—as I also mentioned yesterday—to take all we have striven for through Imagination, through our life-tableau, and make it all disappear at will. It is only when we have thus emptied our consciousness that we understand how matters really are in the spiritual world. For then we know that what we have seen up to now was not the spiritual world, but merely an Imaginative picture of it. It is only at this stage of empty consciousness that—just as the physical world streams into us through our senses—so the spiritual world streams into us through our thinking. Here begins our first real experience, our first real knowledge, of the objective spiritual world. The life-tableau was only of our own inner world. Imaginative cognition reveals only this inner world, which appears to higher knowledge as a picture-world, a world of cosmic pictures. The Cosmos itself, together with our own true being, as it was before birth, before our earthly existence, appear first at the stage of Inspiration, when the spiritual world flows into us from outside. But when we have arrived at being able to empty our consciousness, our whole soul becomes awake; and in this stage of pure wakefulness we must be able to acquire a certain inner stillness and peace. This peace I can describe only in the following way.

Let us imagine we are in a very noisy city and hear the roar of it all around us. This is terrible—we say—when, from all sides, tumult assails our ears. Suppose it to be some great modern city, such as London. But now suppose we leave this city, and gradually, with every step we take as we walk away, it becomes quieter and quieter. Let us imagine vividly this fading away of noise. Stiller and stiller it becomes. Finally we come perhaps to a wood where all is perfectly silent; we have reached the zero-point where nothing can be heard.

Yet we can go even further. To illustrate how this can happen, I will use a quite trivial comparison. Suppose we have in our purse a certain sum of money. As we spend it from day to day, it dwindles, just as the noise dwindles as we leave the town. At length comes the day when there is nothing left—the purse is empty. We can compare this nothingness with the silence. But what do we do next if we are not to grow hungry? We get into debt. I am not recommending this; it is meant only as a comparison. How much have we then in our purse? Less than nothing; and the greater the debt, the more we have less than nothing.

And now let us imagine it to be the same with this silence. There would be not only the absolute peace of the zero-point of silence, but it would go further and come to the negative of hearing, quieter than quiet, more silent than silence. And this must in fact happen when, in the way described yesterday, we are able through enhanced powers to reach this inner peace and silence. When, however, we arrive at this inner negative of audibility, at this peace greater than the zero-point of peace, we are then so deeply in the spiritual world that we not only see it but hear it resounding. The world of pictures becomes a world of resounding life; and then we are in the midst of the true spiritual world. During the moments we spend there we are standing, as it were, on the shore of existence; the ordinary sense-world vanishes, and we know ourselves to be in the spiritual world. Certainly—I will say more of this later—we must be properly prepared so that we are at all times able to return. But there is something else to come—an experience previously unknown. Directly this peace is achieved in the empty consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to an equally all-embracing pain. We come to feel that the world is built on a foundation of cosmic suffering—of a cosmic element which can be experienced by the human being only as pain. We learn the penetrating truth, so willingly ignored by those who look outside themselves for happiness, that everything in existence has finally to be brought to birth in pain. And when, through Initiation-knowledge, this cosmic experience of pain has made its impression upon us, then out of real inner knowledge we can say the following:

If we study the human eye—the eye that reveals to us the beauty of the physical world, and is so important for us that through it we receive nine-tenths of the impressions that make up our life between birth and death—we find that the eye is embedded in a bodily cavity which originates from a wound. What was done originally to bring about the eye-sockets could be done to-day only by actually cutting out a hollow in the physical body. The ordinary account of evolution gives a much too colourless impression of this. These sockets into which the eyeballs were inserted from outside—as indeed the physical record of evolution shows—were hollowed out at a time when man was still an unconscious being. If he had been conscious of it, it would have involved a painful wounding of the organism.

Indeed, the whole human organism has been brought forth out of an element which for present-day consciousness would be an experience of pain. At this stage of knowledge we have a deep feeling that, just as the coming forth of the plants means pain for the Earth, so all happiness, everything in the world from which we derive pleasure and blessing, has its roots in an element of suffering. If as conscious beings we could suddenly be changed into the substance of the ground beneath our feet, the result would be an endless enhancement of our feeling of pain.

When these facts revealed out of the spiritual world are put before superficially-minded people, they say: “My idea of God is quite different. I have always thought of God in His power as founding everything upon happiness, just as we would wish.” Such people are like that King of Spain to whom someone was showing a model of the universe and the course of the stars. The King had the greatest difficulty in understanding how all these movements occurred, and finally he exclaimed: “If God had left it to me, I would have made a much simpler world.”

Strictly speaking, that is the feeling of many people where knowledge and religion are concerned. Had God left the creation to them, they would have made a simpler world. They have no idea how naive this is!

Genuine Initiation-knowledge cannot merely satisfy men's desire for happiness; it has to guide them to a true understanding of their own being and destiny as they come forth from the world in the past, present and future. For this, spiritual facts are necessary, instead of something which gives immediate pleasure. But there is another thing which these lectures should indeed bring out. Precisely by experiencing such facts, if only through knowing them conceptually, people will gain a good deal that satisfies an inward need for their life here on Earth. Yes, they will gain something they need in order to be human beings in the fullest sense, just as for completeness they need their physical limbs.

The world we meet in this way when we go on beyond Imagination into the stillness of existence, out of which the spiritual world reveals itself in colour and in sound—this world differs essentially from the world perceived by the senses. When we are living with it—and we have to live with the spiritual world when it is present for us—we see how all sense-perceptible, physical things and processes really proceed from out of the spiritual world. Hence as earthly men we see only one half of the world; the other half is occult, hidden from us. And through every opening, every happening, in the physical-material world, one might say, this hidden half reveals its spiritual nature first in the pictures of Imagination, and then through its own creative activity in Inspiration. In the world of Inspiration we can feel at home, for here we find the origins of all earthly things, all earthly creations. And here, as I have indicated, we discover our own pre-earthly existence.

Following an old image, I have called this world, lying beyond that of Imagination, the astral world—the name is not important—and what we bring along with us from that world, and have carried into our etheric and physical bodies, we may speak of as our astral body. In a certain sense, it encloses the Ego-organisation. For higher knowledge, accordingly, the human being consists of four members: physical body, etheric or formative-forces body, astral body, and Ego-organisation. Knowledge of the Ego, however, entails a further super-sensible step, which in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have called “Intuition”. The term Intuition may easily be misunderstood because, for example, anyone with imaginative, poetic gifts will often give the name of intuition to his sensitive feeling for the world. This kind of intuition is only a dim feeling; yet it has some relation to the Intuition of which I am speaking. For just as earthly man has his sense-perceptions, so in his feeling and his will he has a reflection of the highest kind of cognition, of Intuition. Otherwise he could not be a moral being. The dim promptings of conscience are a reflection, a kind of shadow-picture, of true Intuition, the highest form of cognition possible for man on Earth.

Earthly man has in him something of what is lowest, and also this shadow-picture of what is highest, accessible only through Intuition. It is the intermediate levels that are lacking in him; hence he has to acquire Imagination and Inspiration. He has also to acquire Intuition in its purity, in its light-filled inner quality. At present it is in his moral feeling, his moral conscience, that he possesses an earthly image of that which arises as Intuition. Hence we can say that when a man with Initiation-knowledge rises to actual Intuitive knowledge of the world, of which previously he has known only the natural laws, the world becomes as intimately connected with him on earth as only the moral world is now. And this is indeed a significant feature of human life on Earth—that out of a dim inner presentiment we connect with the highest realm of all something which, in its true form, is accessible only to enhanced cognition.

The third step in higher knowledge, necessary for rising to Intuition, can be achieved only by developing to its highest point a faculty which, in our materialistic age, is not recognised as a cognitional force. What is revealed through Intuition can be attained only by developing and spiritualising to the highest degree the capacity for love. A man must be able to make this capacity for love into a cognitional force. A good preparation for this is to free ourselves in a certain sense from dependence on external things; for instance, by making it our regular practice to picture our past experiences not in their usual sequence but in reverse order.

In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings, and we gradually enable the inner experiences of our soul and spirit to reach a point where soul and spirit break loose from the bodily and also from the etheric element. A man can well prepare himself for this breaking away if every evening he makes a backward survey of his experiences during the day, beginning with the last and moving back. When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.

You will probably say: “But there are so many hours during the day, full of experiences.” Then first try taking episodes—picturing, for instance, this going up and down stairs in reverse. One thus acquires inner mobility, so that gradually one becomes able to go back in imagination through a whole day in three or four minutes.

But that, after all, is only the negative half of what is needed for enhancing and training spiritually our capacity for loving. This must be brought to the point when, for example, we lovingly follow each stage in the growth of a plant. In ordinary life this growth is seen only from outside—we do not take part in it. We must learn to enter into every detail of plant-growth, to dive right down into the plant, until in our own soul we become the plant, growing, blossoming, bringing forth fruit with it, and the plant becomes as dear to us as we are to ourselves. In the same way we can go above the plants to picture the life of animals, and down to the minerals. We can feel how the mineral forms itself into the crystal, and take inward pleasure in the shaping of its planes, corners, angles, and having a sensation as of pain in our own being when the minerals are split asunder. Then, in our souls, we enter not only with sympathy but with our will into every single event in nature.

All this must be preceded by a capacity for love extending to mankind as a whole. We shall never be able to love nature in the right way until we have first succeeded in loving all our fellow-men. When we have in this way won through to an understanding love for all nature, that which made itself perceptible first in the colours of the aura, and in the resounding of the spheres, rounds itself out and takes on the outlines of actual spiritual Beings.

Experiencing these spiritual Beings, however, is a different matter from experiencing physical things. When a physical object is in front of me, for example this clock, I stand here with the clock there, and can experience it only by looking at it from outside. My relation to it is determined by space. In this way one could never have any real experience of a spiritual Being. We can have it only by entering right into the spiritual Being, with the aid of the faculty for loving which we have cultivated first towards nature. Spiritual Intuition is possible only by applying—in stillness and emptiness of consciousness—the capacity for love we can first learn in the realm of nature. Imagine that you have developed this capacity for loving minerals, plants, animals and also man; you are now in the midst of a completely empty consciousness. All around is the peace which lies beyond its zero-point. You feel the suffering on which the whole existence of the world is founded, and this suffering is at the same time a loneliness. Nothing yet is there. But the capacity for love, flowing up from within in manifold forms, leads you on to enter with your own being into all that now appears visibly, audibly, as Inspiration. Through this capacity for love you enter first into one spiritual Being, then into another.

These Beings described in my book, Occult Science, these Beings of the higher Hierarchies—we now learn to live in our experience of them; they become for us the essential reality of the world. So we experience a concrete spiritual world, just as through eye and ear, through feeling and warmth, we experience a concrete physical world.

If anyone wishes to acquire knowledge particularly important for himself, he must have advanced to this stage. I have already mentioned that through Inspiration pre-earthly spiritual existence rises up in our soul; how in this way we learn what we were before we came down into an earthly body. When through the capacity for love we are able to enter clairvoyantly into spiritual Beings, in the way I have described, there is also revealed that which first makes a man, in his inner experience, a complete being. There is revealed what precedes our life in the spiritual world; we are shown what we were before ascending to the last spiritual life between death and rebirth. The preceding earthly life is revealed, and, one after another, the lives on Earth before that. For the true Ego, present in all the repeated lives on Earth, can manifest only when the faculty for love has been so greatly enhanced that any other being, whether outside in nature or in the spiritual world, has become just as dear to a man as in his self-love he is dear to himself. But the true Ego—the Ego that goes through all repeated births and deaths—is manifest to a man only when he no longer lives egotistically for momentary knowledge, but in a love that can forget self-love and can live in an objective Being in the way that in physical existence he lives in self-love. For this Ego of former lives on Earth has then become as objective for his present life as a stone or a plant is for us when we stand outside it. We must have learnt by then to comprehend in objective love something which, for our present subjective personality, has become quite objective, quite foreign. We must have gained mastery over ourselves during our present earthly existence in order to have any insight into a preceding one.

When we have achieved this knowledge, we see the complete life of a man passing rhythmically through the stages of earthly existence from birth or conception till death, and then through spiritual stages between death and rebirth, and then returning again to Earth, and so on. A complete earthly life reveals itself as a repeated passing through birth and death, with intermediate periods of life in purely spiritual worlds. Only through Intuition can this knowledge be acquired as real knowledge, derived directly from experience.

I have had to describe for you—in outline to begin with—the path of Initiation-knowledge that must be followed in our time, at this present stage of human evolution, in order to arrive at true spiritual knowledge of the world and of man. But as long as human beings have existed there has been Initiation-knowledge, although it has had to take various forms in different evolutionary periods. As man is a being who goes through each successive earthly life in a different way, conditions for his inner development in the various epochs of world-evolution have to vary considerably. We shall be learning more about these variations in course of the next few days; to-day I should like to say only that the Initiation-knowledge which had to be given out in early times was very different from what has to be given out to-day. We can go back some thousands of years, to a time long before the Mystery of Golgotha, and we find how greatly men's attitude to both the natural world and the spiritual world differed from that of the present time, and how different, accordingly, was their Initiation-knowledge from what is appropriate today.

We have now a very highly developed natural science; I shall not be speaking of its most advanced side but only of what is imparted to children of six or seven, as general knowledge. At this comparatively early age a child has to accept the laws relating, let us say, to the Copernican world-system, and on this system are built hypotheses as to the origin of the universe. The Kant-Laplace theory is then put forward and, though this theory has been revised, yet in its essentials it still holds good. The theory is based on a primeval nebula, demonstrated in physics by an experiment intended to show the earliest conditions of the world-system. This primeval nebula can be imitated experimentally, and out of it, through the rotation of certain forces, the planets are assumed to have come into being, and the sun left behind. One of the rings split off from the nebula is thought to have condensed into the shape of the Earth, and everything else—minerals, plants, animals, and finally man himself—is supposed to have evolved on this basis. And all this is described in a thoroughly scientific way.

The process is made comprehensible for children by means of a practical demonstration which seems to show it very clearly. A drop of oil is taken, sufficiently fluid to float on a little water; this is placed on a piece of card where the line of the equator is supposed to come; a pin is run through the card and the card is whirled round. It can then be shown how, one after another, drops of oil detach themselves and rotate, and you can get a miniature planetary system out of the oil, with a sun left in the middle. When that has been shown to us in childhood, why should we think it impossible for our planetary system to have arisen out of the primeval nebula? With our own eyes we have seen the process reproduced.

Now in moral life it may be admirable for us to be able to forget ourselves, but in a demonstration of natural phenomena it is not so good! This whole affair of the drop of oil would never have worked if there had been no-one there to twirl the pin. That has to be taken into account. If this hypothesis is to hold good, a giant schoolmaster would have had to be there in the Cosmos, to start the primeval nebula revolving and keep it turning. Otherwise the idea has no reality.

It is characteristic of this materialistic age, however, to conceive only a fraction of the truth, a quarter, an eighth, or even less, and this fraction then lives with terribly suggestive power in the souls of men. Thus we persist to-day in seeing one side only of nature and of nature's laws.

I could give you plenty of examples, from different spheres of life, clearly showing this attitude towards nature: how—because a man absorbs this with the culture of the day—he considers nature to be governed by what is called the law of cause and effect. This colours the whole of human existence to-day. At best, a man can still maintain some connection with the spiritual world through religious tradition, but if he wishes to rise to the actual spiritual world, he must undertake an inner training through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—as I have pictured them. He must be led by Initiation-knowledge away from this belief in nature as permeated throughout by law, and towards a real grasp of the spiritual. Initiation-knowledge to-day must aim at leading men from the naturalistic interpretation of the Cosmos, now taken for granted, to a realisation of its spirituality.

In the old Initiation-knowledge, thousands of years ago, the very opposite prevailed. The wise men of the Mysteries, the leaders in those centres which were school, church, and art-school at the same time, had around them people who knew nothing of nature in the Copernican sense, but in their soul and spirit had an instinctive, intimate experience of the Cosmos, expressed in their myths and legends, which in the ordinary civilisation of to-day are no longer understood. About this too we shall have more to say. The experience that men had in those early days was instinctive; an experience of soul and spirit. It filled their waking hours with the dreamlike pictures of imagination; and from these pictures came the legends, the myths, the sayings of the gods, which made up their life. A man looked out into the world, experiencing his dreamy imaginations; and at other times he lived in the being of nature. He saw the rainbows, the clouds, the stars, and the sun making its speedy way across the heavens; he saw the rivers, the hills arising; he saw the minerals, plants, animals.

For primeval man, everything he saw through his senses was a great riddle. For at the time of which I am speaking, some thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha—there were both earlier and later times when civilisation was different—a man had an inward feeling of being blessed when dreamlike imaginations came to him. The external world of the senses, where all that he perceived of rainbow, clouds, the moving sun, and the minerals, plants, animals, was what the eye could see, while in the starry world he saw only what the pre-Copernican, Ptolemaic system recorded. This external world presented itself to people generally in a way that led them to say: “With my soul I am living in a divine-spiritual world, but there outside is a nature forsaken by the gods. When with my senses I look at a spring of water, I see nothing spiritual there; I see nothing spiritual in the rainbow, in the minerals, plants, animals, or in the physical bodies of men.” Nature appeared to these people as a whole world that had fallen away from divine spirituality.

This was how people felt in that time when the whole visible Cosmos had for them the appearance of having fallen away from the divine. To connect these two experiences, the inward experience of God and the outer one of a fallen sense-world, it was not merely abstract knowledge they needed, but a knowledge that could console them for belonging to this fallen sense-world with their physical bodies and their etheric bodies. They needed a consolation which would assure them that this fallen sense-world was related to all they experienced through their instinctive imaginings, through an experience of the spiritual which, though dim and dreamlike, was adequate for the conditions of those times. Knowledge had to be consoling.

It was consolation, too, that was sought by those who turned eagerly to the Mysteries, either to receive only what could be given out externally, or to become pupils of the men of wisdom who could initiate them into the secrets of existence and the riddles that confronted them.

These wise men of the old Mysteries, who were at the same time priests, teachers, and artists, made clear to their pupils through everything contained in their Mysteries—yet to be described—that even in this fallen world, in its rising springs, in the blossoming trees and flowers, in the crystal-forming minerals, in rainbow and drifting clouds and journeying sun there live those divine-spiritual powers which were experienced instinctively in the dreamlike imaginations of men. They showed these people how to reconcile the godforsaken world with the divine world perceived in their imaginations. Through the Mysteries they gave them a consoling knowledge which enabled them once more to look on nature as filled with the divine.

Hence we learn from what is told of those past ages—told even of the Grecian age—that knowledge now taught to the youngest children in our schools, that the sun stands still and the earth circles around it, for instance, is the kind of knowledge which in the old Mysteries was preserved as occult. What with us is knowledge for everyone was for that age occult knowledge; and explanations of nature were an occult science. As anyone can see who follows the course of human development during our civilisation, nature and nature's laws are the chief concern of men today; and this has led the spiritual world to withdraw. The old dreamlike imaginations have ceased. A man feels nature to be neutral, not entirely satisfying, belonging not to a fallen, sinful Universe, but to a Cosmos that by reason of inner necessity has to be as it is. He then feels more sharply conscious of himself; he learns to find spirituality in that one point only, and he discovers an inner urge to unite this inner self with God. All he now needs—in addition to his knowledge of nature and in conformity with it—is that a new Initiation-knowledge shall lead him into the spiritual world. The old Initiation-knowledge could start from the spirit, which was then experienced by people instinctively, and, embodied in the myths, could lead them on to nature. The new Initiation-knowledge must begin with a man's immediate experience to-day, with his perception of the laws of nature in which he believes, and from there it must point the way back to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Thus, in human evolution, a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see the significant moment of time when men, starting out from an instinctive experience of the spirit, found their way to concepts and ideas which, as the most external form of occult science, included the laws of nature. To-day these laws of nature are known to us from childhood. In face of this indifferent, prosaic attitude to life, this naturalism, the spiritual world has withdrawn from the inner life of man. Today, Initiation-knowledge must point back from nature to the spirit. For the men of old, nature was in darkness, but the spirit was bright and clear. The old Initiation-knowledge had to carry the light of this brightness of the spirit into the darkness of nature, so that nature too might be illumined. Initiation-knowledge to-day has to start from the light thrown upon nature, in an external, naturalistic way, by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others. This light has then to be rescued, given fresh life, in order to open the way for it to the spirit, which in its own light must be sought on the opposite path to that of the old Initiation.