The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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And each group represents one of the two main currents that make up the intellectual life of the second half of the century.

In the youth of each of us there is a struggle between these two currents. One current can be characterized by the word: longing for freedom in all its forms:

— independence from divine providence.

— independence from tradition and the inherited sentiments of our ancestors.

— Independence from the influence of social and state powers.

— Independence from prejudices acquired by education.

The other current is that which stems from modern science.

We descend from the most highly developed mammals. Our nature is similar to that of these creatures, only more perfect. We can only act as we are organized. Our actions are more complicated, but the political revolutions of the century are not, because they thought, they felt, as one has thought and felt for millennia. As long as the old worldview lived in people's minds, the old forms of society and state were also justified.

Hegel recognized this. He understood that the old world order is the way it must be according to the old world of ideas. Reality corresponded to the old way of thinking, the old reasonableness.

Hegel was one of the most intelligent people of all time; a person of sophisticated thinking who knew the world of ideas of his time down to the finest ramifications and who could see that the existing reality in [here are missing two manuscript pages] original natural forces, which work out of themselves, without divine intervention. One could explain nature from its own source. And with that, a completely new position within the natural order was indicated to man. According to the old worldview, he had to derive his origin from the wise creator, from whom he derived all the rest of nature. This wise creator determines the laws of nature, this wise creator also determines the fate of men. Man had to bow to the will of this wise creator. He had to look up to him in humility, to explore his counsel and to follow it. With the new world view, this being standing above man was now extinguished. Man felt that he could feel like the highest being in the order of natural things; he could give himself direction and purpose in his existence. He could feel that he stood above all other beings, but he no longer needed to feel a power above him. In place of the philosophy of humility, the philosophy of pride, of self-confident humanity, could arise.

In this change in the world of feeling lies the great revolutionizing of minds in the nineteenth century.

The first person in German intellectual life to awaken this new world of feeling within himself and to proclaim it to the world was Goethe. Forty to fifty years before Geoffroy, in his dull and elementary way, proclaimed his battle cries against Cuvier, Goethe had already proclaimed the new gospel.

At the end of the last century, Goethe lived, thought and wrote poetry in accordance with the new view, which even today has remained the possession of only a few.

The way in which Goethe developed the new world view is a psychological fact of the very first order.

It grew in him as if out of nothing, as if out of the productive imagination of the individual genius, while he was surrounded by minds that were thoroughly in the thrall of the old world view. Goethe did not know that he was a century ahead of his time in terms of feeling. He did not know the future-proof impact of his thinking and feeling, and because it was a completely new plant in modern times that flourished in him, because he saw only contradiction and other views surrounding him, he felt insecure.

A mighty urge for knowledge lived in Goethe. An urge that expresses itself in the speeches of his Faust in such a moving way. He strove for truth, for knowledge of the deepest reasons for things. For he was imbued with the eternal truth, and that was what he, as a poet, wanted to proclaim to the world. He was not one of those lucky people who stick to the surface of things and believe that if they describe this surface faithfully, they are telling the truth. He felt that those who seek truth must delve into the depths of things, far below the surface.

The direction that his quest for knowledge took was such that all his immersion in the works and speeches of his contemporaries was of no use to him.

This contrast between Goethe's view was most clearly expressed in the conversation with Schiller, which Goethe himself described.

This old world view sees a deep chasm between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit, the world of thought. Goethe believes he can see his ideas with his eyes, just as one sees colors and light with the eyes. And for him, the human mind is an organ for seeing the ideas that belong to things just as colors belong to things.

That ideas belong to things contradicted all feelings of European cultural humanity at the time of Goethe.

Centuries of education in a false world view have thoroughly driven out this natural feeling.

The first person we can say with certainty has worked on this false education of European humanity is Parmenides.

Plato was Plato's foundation. The world of the senses is an illusion. The world of ideas alone is the truth. Despite Aristotle, European humanity was educated in this wrong world view. Christianity greedily adopted Platonism. From the illusion of the world of the senses, which has no truth, it made the sinful, the bad world, the earthly vale of tears. From the world of ideas, it made the hereafter, after man's longing. From the Platonic world of ideas, Christian providence was made. The ideas were transferred to the mind of God.

Nature was deprived of its rights. The mind, which belongs to nature, was snatched from it. And since man also belongs to nature, the spirit was also wrested from him, that is, this spirit was no longer to rule within man, no longer to be a part of him, of which he is master, which he possesses, with whose help he rules the world. No, the spirit was to lead an independent existence outside of man and through divine grace the blessings of this spirit were to flow to man. Man could not say: I am the spirit and what I do, I do by virtue of my spirit, but had to say: The spirit is above me and I do what it commands; man could not say: I descend into my spiritual being and explore the world of thoughts within me if I want to know the truth, but had to look up to God if he wanted to have knowledge.

Humanity was oppressed by the spirit throughout the Middle Ages. And when a new light dawned on some minds in modern times, it could not possibly unfold equally brightly; it could only dawn.

Christianity has not only filled the head with unhealthy thoughts, it has also led the heart and the life of feeling astray.

This can be seen in Baco and Descartes. The former restored the sense world to its rightful place, but the spirit was neglected. Descartes did not respect sensory knowledge. And Spinoza wanted to develop all wisdom and virtue from the spirit. The bond between the sense world and the spiritual world had been broken. One had become accustomed to the contempt of the sensual world. Therefore, the spiritual production also remained empty. Spinoza spun a logical web that makes the healthy person shiver.

Kant [gathered] the errors of the centuries in himself. He was full of the educational prejudices of these centuries.

Kant's gospel was the distressing gospel of Faust, that we cannot know anything. And Goethe, when he realized the bleak bleakness of this world view, could well say: it almost makes my heart burn.

What no German philosopher could give him, Goethe found in the contemplation of Greek works of art in Italy. In these works of art he found the sure truth, the ideal essence of the things he was seeking.

The high works of art.

The subject: nature.

(“When healthy nature works in man as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified [and valuable] whole, when harmonious comfort gives him pure, free delight – then the universe would rejoice if it could feel itself and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.”)

In man, nature reveals its secrets.

But Goethe lacked something for the full development of the proud human consciousness.

How did you get this far?
They say you have done well!

My child! I have done it wisely,
I have never thought about thinking.

And so he fell back into the old world view, into the old world of feeling. And it was in the spirit of this old world of feeling that Goethe rewrote his Faust.

What would have become of Faust if Goethe had remained true to his old world view?

What happened to him under the influence of his age?

Goethe the old man could not resist the world of feeling and imagination that assailed him from all sides; he finally bowed. But when he sensed Geoffroy's spirit in his spirit, all the thoughts and feelings that he had had in his own youth were kindled again. Geoffroy's cause was his cause after all.

And this cause of his has become the spiritual driving force of the nineteenth century.

Feuerbach came; Stirner came.

They were the two destroyers of the old misunderstood world of ideas, the restorers of the mistreated nature. Stirner marks a milestone.

The great Mephistopheles of the nineteenth century.

In his Nothing we hope to find the All.

The yawning abyss, the great Stirnerian Nothing had to be filled.

It had to be filled in a different way than Goethe did. With high [two manuscript pages missing here] there. When man says I will, this wanting is an earthly one. Man no longer needs to feel respect for a higher being; he is the highest being he knows; he has become the master of himself.

For Goethe, it is not important that the petal or carpel of a perfect plant was once a real leaf in an imperfect plant form; rather, it is important to find the idea of the plant. It is only from this idea that it is possible to understand that the individual moments of a more complicated form can also form a simple form as such. We do not understand how the composite is formed from the simple, but rather we always understand the simple through the composite. We understand the whole world through its most composite product, through man. What does it mean to understand? We experience processes. The highest experiences are those that we experience in ourselves. In analogy to this, we think other processes. It is quite ridiculous to want to explain what is perceptible to the ordinary eye through the microscopic. When we observe the act of procreation under the microscope, we basically have no more before us than what we see in ordinary life. A new organic form develops from a male and a female. By using the microscope, we expand the range of our perceptions, but not the sum of our concepts and ideas. And it is these that ultimately matter. Everything else can be seen as an enrichment of our experience.

The existence of the present human being is characterized not by just one, but by several states of consciousness. The usual one is the one in which the human being finds himself from awakening to falling asleep. In this state, he perceives things through his senses and forms ideas from his sensory perceptions. This is how the physical world comes into being for him. And the powers of his soul, his thinking, feeling, willing and acting, also relate to it.

This state of consciousness is now followed by two others: dream-filled sleep and deep, dreamless sleep. These states are often referred to as 'unconscious'. However, this term obscures the facts under consideration here. They are in fact only different types of consciousness. One could call them duller types of the same.

The dream-filled sleep does not show objects like the waking day consciousness, but images that arise and fade in the soul. However confusing these images may appear to the ordinary consciousness, the illumination of their essence is apt to lead deeper into the nature of the world. What they present themselves as in the nightly life of the soul cannot provide a proper basis for their knowledge. Such a basis is only available to the human being who, in the sense of such a training as described in this book, develops his higher powers of knowledge that lead him to an insight into the supersensible worlds. This chapter is intended to give a description of the facts that apply to these higher worlds. Those who themselves enter the path of knowledge into these regions will then also find these facts to be true.

What must first strike us about the world of dreams is the symbolic character that appears in its images. With a certain subtle attention to the colorful diversity of dream experiences, this character can become clear. From simple symbols to dramatic events, all intermediate stages can be found in this world that flits through the soul. One dreams of a conflagration; one wakes up and realizes that one had fallen asleep next to the lamp. The light of the lamp was perceived in the dream; but not as it presents itself to the senses in the ordinary world, but as a symbol, as a conflagration. Or you dream of a troop of riders that you hear trampling past; you wake up, and the horse trampling continues immediately as the beating of the clock, which has been symbolized in this way. - You dream of an animal scratching your face; when you wake up, you feel pain in that particular place, which has found its dream symbol in the way described. - A longer “dream could be something like the following. Someone dreams that he is walking through a forest. He hears a noise. As he continues walking, a person emerges from a bush and approaches him. The attacker shoots. At this moment, the dreamer wakes up and realizes that he has just knocked over the chair next to his bed. The impact of the chair has been transformed by the dream consciousness into the symbolic action described. In this way, external events or even internal facts, such as the example given above of the animal scratching, can be perceived as symbols through the dream. Affects and moods can also be represented in this way. For example, someone suffers from the oppressive feeling that an unpleasant event will occur for him in the next few days. In the dream, this feeling presents itself in such a way that he is in danger of drowning.

The examples given above serve to characterize two properties of dream consciousness: first, its pictorial, allegorical character, and second, something creative in it. This creativity is not inherent in day-consciousness. Day-consciousness presents the things of the environment as they are in the physical outer world. Dream consciousness adds something from another source.

How is this source opened? Through nothing other than the fact that the sense activity on which day consciousness depends has ceased during sleep. The silence of this sense activity is expressed by the fact that the self-consciousness of the person disappears. This self-consciousness is bound to the activity of the external senses; when these are silent, it sinks into an abyss. In occult science this fact is expressed by saying: the human soul has withdrawn from the physical world. If one does not want to assert that a person ceases to exist when falling asleep and is reborn when waking up, it is not difficult to recognize that during sleep a person exists in a world other than the physical one. This world is called the astral world. The reader may accept this term for the time being as a name for that world of which man gets a presentiment through his dreams. The justification of this term will appear from other chapters of this book.

During sleep, the human being dwells in the astral world. The facts and beings of this world present themselves in images. Consciousness perceives these images, but the self-consciousness of the human being is absent. A comparison with everyday life can give an idea of what is actually taking place here. The human being perceives an external world only insofar as he has organs for it. Without ears, there would be no world of sound for him; without eyes, no world of light and color, etc. If a person were to develop a new organ in his body, something completely new would appear in his environment, just as light and colors appear as something completely new for the blind-born after his operation.

Just as the physical body of man perceives the physical world through its [organs], so during the dream another body - a soul body through its own organs - perceives the other world, the astral world. Only that there is no self-awareness associated with this body. In this state, this is outside the realm of man.

If it were impossible for the human being to become self-aware in this state, he would never be able to understand the conditions under consideration here. However, this is possible through the higher schooling mentioned above and described in this book, which is also called initiation. Through this training, the human being learns to develop similar organs in his astral body to those in his physical body for perceiving the physical world. And when these organs are developed, then a self-awareness arises during the dream that is also similar to that which he has during the waking day. When such a level of existence is reached, the entire dream world is indeed transformed to a considerable extent. It loses the confusing colorfulness that it has in the ordinary sleeper; and in its place comes an inner order and harmony that not only does not fall short of the ordinary physical world, but in terms of these qualities, it greatly surpasses it. Man becomes aware that there was always another world around him, in the same sense that the world of light and colors is around the blind man. He could only not see it because of the lack of organs of perception, just as the blind person before his operation can not see the world of light and colors. The significant moment when the astral organs of perception begin to be active in man is called awakening or rebirth in the occult science.

In this moment of awakening, the human being experiences that he is surrounded by a higher world in which not only the things of the sensual world that he previously knew have different properties, but in which there are facts and entities that were previously unknown to him. - And now it also becomes clear to him that in this other world the images from which the things of the sensual world are formed are present. It is not an inappropriate comparison to say that the way the physical world arises out of the astral world is like the formation of ice from water. Just as ice is transformed water, so the physical world is the transformed astral world. And just as water is a fluid element, so the astral world is the background of the physical world as an ever-changing world of images. Nothing fixed or closed can be found in its forms, as in the ordinary world. Everything flows into each other, transforms itself. And a physical thing or a physical being only comes into being when one of these flowing images freezes for a moment. Anyone who tries to apply the concepts of the physical world, with its fixed boundaries, to the astral realm, only reveals their lack of real insight into this very different world.

Just as the beings of the physical world are embodied in the physical body, so the astral images are the expression of entities that do not enter the physical world. They find this expression in a different substance from that of the physically living human being, who finds his in flesh and blood.

What then is this astral substance? It is none other than that which man actually has within himself. It is only during the waking hours of everyday life that it is, as it were, covered over by the sensual perceptions. These sensual perceptions are linked to human desires, wishes and abominations, to his sympathies and antipathies. He desires one object and rejects another. The source from which the dream consciousness also draws when it transforms things into symbols is to be sought in nothing other than these desires, wishes and abominations. The self-awareness of daytime life, with its external perceptions, provides the desires and longings with the corresponding nourishment. When the activities of the external senses cease, another creative force takes over and forms images out of the material of desires and longings. Secret Science says that the dreaming person is in the astral body, which is woven from desires and longings, and that the physical body is abandoned by the self-consciousness. In the case of the initiate or the awakened person, the situation is such that he has also abandoned his physical body, but his self-consciousness dwells in his astral body. Just as the physical body can mediate the perception of physical things because its organs are formed from the same substance as the physical world, so the initiate can perceive the beings of the astral world because he has organs made of the substance of desires and longings, in which they find their expression.

The difference between the uninitiated and the initiated person is that the astral world is not visible to the former as an external world, and is to the latter. This astral world remains for the unawakened a mere inner world; he experiences it in his desires and longings; but he does not see it. The initiate not only feels his desire; he perceives it as a thing of the external world, just as the unawakened perceives tables and chairs.

Now, the ordinary dream world is only a faint echo of this world of the initiate. It can only be this because self-awareness is not involved in it. But where is this self-awareness during the dream? It has withdrawn into a higher world in which the human being is not present as such at first. The relationship between the human being and this world can initially be clarified by means of a comparison. Think of a human hand and a tool that it is holding. As long as the hand holds the tool, the two form a unity, as it were. The latter performs the actions determined by the former. But as soon as the hand lets go of the tool, the tool is left to its own devices; and the movements of the hand are only expressions of the will in the person to whom it belongs. Thus, during the waking hours of daily life, the physical body must be seen as a tool of the limb of a higher being. When this higher being extends a member into the physical body, sensory activity and thus self-awareness occur in the body. When this member leaves the body, self-awareness ceases. Thus, the innermost being of the human being, which can have self-awareness, is a member of a higher being, from which it is temporarily extended and covered with the physical body. But we shall form an even better idea of this if we regard the stretching out as a severing, as if during wakefulness a drop detached itself from the higher being, and during sleep it is absorbed again. For during wakefulness man is not conscious of his connection with a higher entity; he is therefore actually cut off from it. During sleep he must lack self-consciousness, for it withdraws into the higher entity; this absorbs it; and he thus rests enclosed in it.

When dreamless sleep sets in, the world of images disappears. The physical body appears to lie there completely unconscious; in reality, however, its state of consciousness is only one that is even duller than in dream-filled sleep. The power that generates images has also left the physical body. Therefore, only the insights of the awakened can provide enlightenment about this state. The unawakened lack the perceptions about it. For the awakened, however, the image-generating body, which was previously loosely connected to the physical body, appears to be lifted out of it. And it is now not inactive, but has the task of restoring the physical body's energies, which are showing signs of exhaustion due to fatigue, to their proper strength. This explains the refreshing effect of healthy sleep. The physical body sinks into sleep exhausted. In this moment it surrenders its self-awareness to higher beings. In the intermediate state of dream sleep, the soul still remains in a loose connection with the physical body. The characteristic of this soul is its creativity. With the moment of waking up, it begins to apply its creative power to processing the perceptions mediated by the senses into the human inner life. At the moment of falling asleep, external sensory perceptions cease. In the intermediate state of dreaming, the creative process is still shaping itself into the symbols described; then these symbols also fall away; the soul applies its entire creative power to the body, which it now works on from the outside. - Anyone who wants to disregard the communications of esoteric science could, from the fact of refreshing himself in the morning upon awakening, see what characterizes the soul's nocturnal activity. The life of the day has something disharmonious and chaotic about it. The things of the physical environment affect people from all sides. Sometimes this, sometimes that, finds its way into their inner being. This disrupts the inner formative forces, which are accorded by their original nature. During the night, this is balanced out again. The soul restores order and harmony. During the waking life, the physical body gradually looks like an air mass, which is permeated on all sides by wind currents, and whose parts move in an irregular manner. When we awaken, however, it can be compared to an air mass that is set into regular vibrations by the rhythm and harmony of a piece of music. And in fact, for the initiate, the soul's work on the body during sleep appears as a resounding of the two. During sleep, the human being immerses himself in the harmony of the soul's life. And this is the same harmony from which he was formed. Before the physical body first opened itself up to the outer world through the sense organs, it was completely under the influence of this harmony, which structured it. This harmony permeates the whole world as the harmony of the soul. Man is surrounded by its sounds just as he is surrounded by the images described above. Just as this world of images becomes perceptible to the awakened one through schooling as his real environment, so too, on a still higher level, this third world. It begins to resound and resound around him. And in these tones, the meaning of the world reveals itself to him. Just as the form of the physical world arose out of the images, so these forms received their inner meaning and essence from the sounds described. From this point of view, all things are sounds that have become form.

Thus, during waking hours, man is a being composed of three parts: the physical body, which perceives the physical world through the organs implanted in it from the external world and encompasses self-awareness; a body that has mobile character; its images are at the same time the archetypes of the physical body, whose clearly defined forms have arisen, as it were, through solidification from the changing images of the second body; and furthermore, both the physical and the image body are permeated by a harmony of sound, a third body. In the dream-sleep the soul withdraws from the physical body; it still remains in connection with the other two bodies, permeating the tone body and interspersing the image body with images. These latter penetrate into the physical body and communicate the shadowy images of the dream to it. In dreamless sleep the soul is connected only with the sound body; what was in the physical body during waking is now outside it and works upon it from without. The activity flowing from the soul into the physical body produces in it such a dull consciousness that it is not perceived by the person.

In fact, there are three states of consciousness of the physical body: waking consciousness, dream consciousness and dreamless sleep consciousness. For the initiate, the dullness of the last two states of consciousness brightens; through this illumination, he lives in higher worlds, just as the unawakened person lives in the physical world during waking life. There are thus five states of consciousness, which, according to their increasing brightness, can be categorized as follows:

1. the consciousness during sleep without dreams
2. the dream-sleep
3. the waking consciousness during the day
4. the consciousness of the pictures of the initiate
5. the consciousness of the sounds of the initiate.

If we consider that through training in esoteric science the last two states of consciousness are attained by the initiate as a higher stage of development of humanity, it will readily be apparent that the waking consciousness also represents a higher stage of the two subordinate states of consciousness, and thus has developed out of them. This is what is presented by esoteric science. It explains that in the distant past man passed through a stage of development in which he had only a dull consciousness of sleep, interspersed with no dream images; then he rose to a dull dream consciousness, to finally arrive at the waking day consciousness of today. The person to be initiated continues this line of development. He develops the two higher forms of consciousness. But now an even higher kind of consciousness is attainable for this initiate. It can be seen from the above that even in sound consciousness the soul is still connected with the human body. This connection can cease altogether. The soul can leave the body completely. This is what the initiate learns. And then he must have developed organs of an even higher kind than before if he still wants to perceive anything. If this is the case, then the meaning of the world is expressed directly in his surroundings, without the mediation of sound. This is called the highest level of consciousness, the spiritual or purely spiritual consciousness. In the sense of the preceding list of levels of consciousness, this would have to correspond to a state in the present-day human being that represents an even duller consciousness than the dreamless consciousness of sleep. In terms of meaning, this is certainly the case. But the present human being cannot live this state in reality. His soul would then have to be completely outside the body; the dreamless sleep would have to be interrupted by a completely soulless state. This would in fact be tantamount to the physical body being temporarily abandoned to itself, that is, to a temporary killing. The physical body must not be exposed to this if it is not to run the risk of no longer being receptive to the soul.

In development, however, this state has indeed preceded dreamless sleep consciousness, so that the complete series of human consciousness levels is this:

1. a low, dull consciousness
2. a dreamless sleep consciousness
3. a dream consciousness
4. the bright day consciousness
5. the image consciousness
6. the sound consciousness
7. the spiritual consciousness.

The human body has only penetrated as far as the fourth level of consciousness in the present. The initiate can reach the higher levels of consciousness. But they also lead him to higher worlds. The development of man is to be imagined in such a way that the physical body has formed itself through the first three stages and has currently assumed such a form that it still shows two other forms of consciousness during sleep as remnants of previous stages. The first stage has been completely erased by evolution. The three higher levels of consciousness of the initiate cannot at present express themselves in the physical human body because the body cannot develop organs for them. They are prophetic prefigurations of forms that this physical body will yet take.

If we start from these considerations and try to form a correct picture of the present world, it presents itself as fourfold: first the physical world of the bodily senses, then, enveloping and permeating the former, a world of images, then a world of sound that interpenetrates both of these, and finally a spiritual world that underlies them all.

This world was preceded by another in which man lived like a dreaming creature. His physical body was then in the state in which it is during dream-filled sleep. The surroundings resembled a panorama of moving pictures. There were no fixed outlines of things. This state was interrupted by another one, which corresponds to the present dreamless sleep. And this in turn was followed by one that can no longer be realized today and that was filled by the first of the forms of consciousness characterized above.

In an even earlier world, man could not rise to an experience of dream images either. His highest consciousness was that of dreamless sleep, and this state was interrupted by the lower, dullest consciousness, which is already blurred at present; this in turn was interrupted by a state that has lost all significance for present development.

In the first world, to which occult science points back, man also lacked the dull consciousness of sleep; the first of the described states is his highest; two others, which are not considered today, alternated with it.

Thus we look back into the remote past of evolution; we survey four stages through which the physical human body has passed. But we also look into the future, in which the three forms of consciousness, which are today accessible to initiates in higher worlds, will find their realization in the physical world. Our world will be replaced by a future one in which physical human bodies will have organs through which a self-aware human being will perceive an eternally moving world of images, and indeed see himself as such. And further on, one sees a world in which the images will be permeated by harmonious sounds that will express their inner essence. Finally, a world with a spiritual nature, but which will have poured out its spirit into physical nature.

This is how esoteric science presents the development of the world in which man passes through his successive stages. And it designates these stages of development by names, which have then been transferred to the planets surrounding the earth as designations. The stage of development at which man stood with the most dull consciousness is called Saturn development; the second, in which man lived with the consciousness of dreamless sleep, as solar development; the third, in which dream consciousness appeared, as lunar stage; the fourth, the present one, in which man has struggled to the point of clear day consciousness, as earth development. And the stages of the future, on which the levels of consciousness that are currently attained by initiates in higher worlds will find their physical expression, are successively called the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan developments.

The difference between the states of consciousness of the initiate and the states of consciousness of future human beings during the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan developments lies in the fact that the former must rise to higher worlds in order to live in the corresponding consciousnesses, whereas future human beings will have them in the physical world. This is because the initiate of the present time forms corresponding organs of perception out of the forces of the higher worlds; in the future, equivalent ones will arise out of the physical environment in the physical body of man. Man can perceive as his environment precisely that world which provides the material for his organs. In the future, the physical environment will have formative forces that currently still belong to the higher worlds alone. Thus, the development of the world can be described as a succession of higher and higher physical embodiments. The earth is a fourth embodiment. Its physical structure enables it to impress the organs for clear day-consciousness on the human body. In the sense of esoteric science, it developed out of another physical state in which it could imprint on the body only the organs for dream consciousness. This state is designated by the name 'moon'. Thus the earth forms out of this 'moon' by acquiring a new faculty, namely, the development of the organs for waking consciousness. The 'moon' has come into being out of the 'sun'. That which has now become Earth was therefore then “Sun”. Secret science describes as the “solar state” the state in which the world body that is in a human body can only generate the organs for dreamless sleep consciousness. And before the Earth was “Sun” in this sense, it was at the stage of “Saturn”.

How does such a world body acquire the power to form the corresponding organs in the human body? It could never do so if these organs were not preformed in relation to higher worlds by human beings that are ahead of us. By preforming the Jupiter organs in the present in higher worlds, the initiates create the possibility that the surrounding world of images takes on a physical character. The solidification into the physical-corporeal is effected by the forms that are to take it on first being there in a spiritual way. Thus the initiates become the transformers of the world body they inhabit. The formative forces radiate from them, as it were, which subsequently call into existence the things of the physical human environment.

Thus the initiates of the lunar stage have spiritually prefigured the physical form of the earth. The present-day earthly environment of man formed the content of their soul experiences. They perceived the earth as their object of a higher world.

In this sense, esoteric science recognizes seven great world cycles, or world periods, through which passes that being which, in its fourth stage, represents the earth. Each such period is linked to an upward transformation of the human body. - Out of this knowledge, this science sees in the “fourfold” that which characterizes the present stage of world development. What, for example, Pythagoras and his school designated by the “fourfold” is characterized by this. The “four” is the number of the “great world”, that is to say, of the world which man now inhabits. It has raised him to the fourth stage of consciousness.

Secret Science contrasts the human being with this “small world” of this “great world.” In his potentialities, he already has within him, as soul, that which the “great world” is to become physically. He is therefore on the way to expanding his inner “small world” into the “great world.” Within him is the creative womb of the latter. In this sense, esoteric science sees in the soul a creative germ for the future, an “inner being” that strives to realize itself in an outer being.

But in order to be creative in the outer world, this soul must first mature. It must first experience inwardly what it is later to shape outwardly. For example, before the soul possessed the ability to impress organs upon the physical body for the waking consciousness during the day, it itself first had to go through a series of developmental stages in which it gradually acquired this ability. Thus, the soul first had to experience within itself the first state of consciousness before it could create it; and so correspondingly for the other forms of consciousness. In The Secret Science, these developmental stages of the soul that precede the creation of the types of consciousness within it are called stages of life. There are therefore seven stages of life, just as there are seven stages of consciousness. Life differs from consciousness in that the former has an inner character, while the latter is based on a relationship to the outer world.

Applied to the earth, one can say that before the bright state of daytime consciousness appeared on it, this world body had to pass through four states, which can be understood as four stages of life.

The stages of soul experience arise when one thinks in an internalized way about what is perceived in the states of consciousness as the external world. First, there is the dullest state of consciousness that precedes dreamless sleep. In this latter state, the soul works harmoniously on the body; its corresponding state of life is the harmonization of one's own inner being. It thus permeates itself with a world of sounding movement. Before that, in the dullest state of experience, it was in its own motionless inner being. It felt this inner being through on all sides with indiscriminate indifference. This lowest state of life is called the first elemental realm. It is an experience of matter in its original state. Matter comes into being through the most diverse directions of movement and agitation. The first level of life is the first elementary realm, which is the self-awareness of this mobility. The second level is reached when rhythm and harmony arise from these movements. The corresponding level of life is the inner awareness of rhythm as sound. This is the second elementary realm. The third stage develops when the movements transform into images. Then the soul lives in itself as in a world of images that are both formed and dissolved. This is the third elementary realm. In the fourth stage, the images take on fixed forms: a single element emerges from the changing panorama. This means that it can no longer be experienced inwardly, but perceived outwardly. This realm is the realm of the outer bodies. In this realm, one must distinguish between the form that it has for the bright day-consciousness of man and the form that it experiences in itself. The body actually experiences its form within itself, that is, the substance forming itself into regular shapes. On the next level, this mere experience of form is overcome; instead, the experience of changing form occurs. The form forms itself and transforms itself. It can be said that at this stage the third elementary realm appears in a higher form. In the third elementary realm, movement from form to form can only be experienced as an image; in this fifth realm, the image solidifies into an external object, but this external object does not die in the form, but retains its ability to change. This realm is that of growing and reproducing bodies. And its ability to transform itself is manifested in growth and reproduction. In the next realm, the ability to experience the external in its effect on the internal is added. It is the realm of sentient beings. The last realm to be considered is that which not only experiences the effect of external things within itself, but also experiences their internal reality. This is the realm of compassionate beings. Thus the stages of life can be categorized as follows:

1. dull material experience
2. experience of inner movement
3. experience of inner shaping
4. experience of a fixed boundary
5. experience of transformation
6. experience of the effects of the outside world as sensation
7. experiencing the outside world.

The inner experiencing of the soul must first be preceded by the creative activity of this life. For nothing can be experienced that has not first come into existence. While the Science of Mystery designates the inner experiencing as soul-life, it designates the creative activity as spiritual life. The [physical body] perceives through organs; the soul experiences itself inwardly; the spirit creates outwardly. Just as the seven stages of consciousness are preceded by seven soul experiences, so these soul experiences are preceded by seven types of creative activity. In the realm of creativity, the dull experience of matter corresponds to the bringing forth of that matter. Matter flows into the world in an indifferent way. This realm is called formless. In the next stage, the substance divides and its parts enter into relationship with each other. Thus we are dealing with different substances that combine and separate. This realm is called the realm of form. On the third level, matter itself no longer needs to enter into a relationship with matter, but forces emanate from matter, matter attracts and repels matter, etc. This is the astral realm. On the fourth level, something material appears, shaped by the forces of the environment, which on the third level merely regulated the external relationships and which now work on the inside of the beings. This is the realm of the physical. A being at this level is a mirror of its environment; the forces of the latter work on its structure. Further progress consists in the fact that the being not only structures itself in accordance with the forces of its environment, but also takes on an outer physiognomy that bears the imprint of this environment. If a being in the fourth stage presents a mirror of its environment, then one in the fifth stage expresses this environment physiognomically. This is why this stage is called the physiognomic stage in esoteric science. At the sixth stage, the physiognomy becomes an emanation of itself. A being at this stage forms the things in its environment in the same way that it has only just formed itself. This is the stage of forming. And at the seventh stage, forming develops into creating. The being that has arrived there creates forms in its environment that replicate, on a small scale, what its environment is on a large scale. This is the stage of creativity.

The development of the spiritual is thus divided into the following stages:

1. Formlessness
2. Shaping
3. Incorporation of power
4. Shaping in the sense of the forces of the environment
5. Physiognomic expressiveness
6. Formative power
7. Creative ability.

When the development of Saturn began, the human body was in a state of formlessness. It first had to develop the creative ability before a soul could experience its first material life in it. This means that the body first had to develop through the seven stages of creative activity before its soul could live through it. This soul must now come so far that it can communicate its inner movement to each of the seven forms of the body. The first time the body passes through its seven forms, it is still quite lifeless. It only comes to life at the seventh stage, when the body becomes creative. And it must now awaken, because the body expends substance in its creative activity. These must be replaced by the soul. And now a second cycle begins. The substance that flows into the body as a replacement passes through the seven stages from formlessness to creative ability. When it has reached this point, the soul no longer limits itself to the experiences that the movement of the incoming substance brings about, but instead begins a new stage of life. The incoming substance, having itself become creative, begins to fill the body internally. Before, it only made up for what was lost; now it is deposited in the body. And again it passes through all forms from formlessness to creative ability. First it is deposited in the body without taking on form, then it gradually takes on forms, develops powers, fashions structures, gives them a physiognomic expression, etc. During this entire cycle, the soul undergoes its third stage of life. It harmonizes this inner structure and balances what has been disturbed by the inner processes. When the material has been shaped internally, it then proceeds to a fourth stage, in which it allows the outside world to have an effect on it. It can do this because the soul that inhabits it has now matured to experience the impressions of its surroundings in a dull way and thus to repeatedly restore order to the disorders caused by the outside world. In the next cycle, the body no longer stops at organizing itself; it transforms itself under the influence of the outside world. The soul has matured to regulate this transformation. Then a cycle begins for the body in which it perceives the effects of the outside world as sensations. The soul again forms the regulator of this level of existence. Finally, the body has reached its last stage: it can experience the outside world. The soul is now so far that it experiences a next stage, namely the next level of consciousness in a higher world for the Saturn existence. It thus undergoes the dreamless state of sleep during this last Saturn cycle. And it now transfers this to the physical body during the first solar cycle.

It is evident that the physical human body has gone through a physical stage seven times during the Saturn cycle. Each time it reached such a stage, the soul attained a higher level of experience. At the seventh stage, it went beyond Saturn's development and pointed to the stage of the sun in its experience.

When the solar cycle begins, the physical body is ready to take on its own form. Whereas the soul used to be the regulator of this form, it now has its own form within it. This is called the etheric body. The soul is no longer in direct contact with the physical body; the etheric body stands between them as a mediator. Its experiences are transferred to this etheric body, as they were previously transferred to the physical body. Now, the seven formative states must first be passed through again by this etheric body, from formlessness to creative activity. As the etheric body has a formative effect on the physical body, it loses its tension progressively. And this is repeatedly regulated by the soul. In a similar way, the development of the sun also passes through seven physical stages. And in each of these, the soul appears at a higher level; in the seventh, it presents a new state of consciousness. While it is still witnessing how the etheric body becomes the creator of new forms that replicate the entire solar world, it already senses within itself a world of images that undulates within it.

During the first cycle of the moon, she transfers this world of images to the etheric body, which now shapes the physical body in accordance with these soul images. Just as the formative etheric body has been interposed between the physical body and the soul at the stage of the sun, so now the characterized image body is interposed between the physical body and the soul. In esoteric science, it is called the sentient body. For just as human sensations flow from the outside world into the inside world, as it were, and thus make the content of the outside world the property of the inside world, so the images of the image body work from the inside out, imprinting their content on the ether body, which in turn transmits it to the physical body.

During the development of the moon, the human being again passes through all states of form seven times, in order to allow the soul to mature to a higher level in each of them. During the seventh stage, the soul has the ability to give its images the most perfect form; it can experience everything that is going on around it on the world body, so that its world of images is an expression of the whole moon world. At the same time, it has the heightened state of consciousness of the next stage as a previous experience; it begins to see fixed forms within its world of images. This makes it ripe to also affect the etheric body in such a way that it forms organs within itself that have something lasting. - And with that, the transition can be made to the first earthly cycle. Within it, the physical body takes up the fixed forms of images; these become its organs. Thus a fourth link begins to develop in the human being. Between the image body and the soul, the perceptions of external objects are inserted. In a certain sense, the body has now outgrown the soul; it has become independent. What occurred in it before were the results of the images that the soul has appropriated from the outside world. Now the outside world directly causes perceptions in it. And the inner life of the soul proceeds as a co-experiencing of these perceptions. The expression of this inner life of the soul is self-consciousness. But self-consciousness matures only gradually. First, the human being must go through a cycle of forms in which only a dull material life is felt in his organs; in a second cycle, the influence of matter causes an inner movement; the etheric body thereby experiences the outer world and transforms the organs into living tools of the physical organism. In a third cycle, the body of images also becomes capable of reproducing the external world. It now stimulates the organs in such a way that they themselves produce images that live within them, but are not yet copies of external things. Only in the fourth cycle does the soul itself become capable of permeating the bodily organs; in doing so, it detaches the images from these bodily organs and covers external things with them. Thus an external world stands before it, with which it enters into opposition as an inner, independent being. But now it is also the case that from time to time the bodily organs it uses become exhausted. Then the possibility of being in contact with the outer world ceases. Sleep sets in, during which the soul again acts on the physical body in a balancing way through the image and etheric bodies. Thus, for esoteric science, sleep appears as a vestige of earlier stages of development. In the present day, human beings have gone a little way beyond the middle of the fourth Earth cycle. This is expressed in the fact that they not only perceive external objects in their clear day-time consciousness, but also the laws on which they are based. The soul has begun to experience the inner transformation of things.

During the Saturn development, the human body was at the stage of dullest consciousness. However, one should not assume that other levels of consciousness were not present in beings that had their existence in connection with this earlier embodiment of the earth at that time. Above all, there was a being present at that time that had a consciousness equivalent to the present waking day consciousness of man. But since the conditions in the vicinity of Saturn were quite different from those on Earth, this level of consciousness also had to operate in a significantly different way.

The Earth human has minerals, plants and animals around him as objects of perception. He regards these entities as being below him, and regards himself as a higher being in relation to them. With the Saturn being, the opposite was the case. It had three groups of entities above itself and had to consider itself the lowest link in the realm of what was perceptible to it. In The Secret Science, these three higher groups of entities were given different names, depending on the language of the people and the time to which the secret teachers belonged. The designations of Christian esoteric science, listed from top to bottom, are: dominions (Kyriotetes), powers (Dynamis) and authorities (Exusiai). The being characterized joins as the fourth and lowest link, just as the earthly human being joins the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms as the highest link. In keeping with these very different conditions, the nature of perception itself was also different. The initiate knows this nature from experience, for it is equivalent to what he reaches as his third stage, beyond waking day-consciousness: spiritual consciousness. It is as if the impressions do not come to the senses from external objects, but as if they push their way to the senses from within, flow outwards from them and encounter objects and beings out there, in order to reflect on them and then appear in their reflection to consciousness. This was the case with the Saturnian being. It poured its life-force out upon the things of the planet, and from all sides the reflection was thrown back to it in the most manifold ways. It perceived its own life from all sides in the form of a mirror image. And the things that reflected back its essence were the beginnings of the physical human body. For the planet consisted of them. What was otherwise perceived did not appear on the planet, but in its surroundings. The beings called Exusiai (forces) appeared as radiant beings that illuminated the world body from all sides. Saturn itself was a dark body in itself; it received its light not from dead sources of light, but from these beings that inhabited its surroundings and illuminated it as radiant beings. Their light revealed itself to the perception of the Saturn being in the same way that the animal body is presently perceived by man. The beings, which are called Dynamis (Powers), revealed themselves in a similar way from the periphery through spiritual tones, and the Kyriotetes (Dominions) through what is called in esoteric science the world aroma, a kind of impression that can be compared to the present smell.

Just as the terrestrial man rises above the perceptions of external things to ideas that only live within him, so the Saturnian being, in addition to the entities mentioned, which revealed themselves to him from within, also recognized entities that he perceived from without; in Christian esoteric science they are called seraphim, cherubs and thrones. There is nothing in the sphere of experience of man on earth that can be compared with the exalted characteristics in which they appeared at that time. Finally, this Saturn being was aware of a third kind of fellow inhabitants. They populated the interior of the planet. This consisted only of a composition of human bodies, as far as they had developed at that time. If you want to get an idea of these bodies, you can do so by comparing them to automata made of the finest ethereal material during the times when they appeared in physical form. As such, they reflected the life of the Saturn beings; but they themselves were completely without life and without all sensation. But they were inhabited by two kinds of beings, which developed their life and their ability to feel within them. These needed a certain basis for this. For they lacked their own physical body, and yet they were so predisposed that they could only develop their higher abilities in one. Therefore, they used the human physical body.

Thus, the physical, soul and spiritual elements were present on Saturn in a similar way to how they occur on Earth. However, on Earth they come together to form the threefold nature of man: his body, his soul and his spirit. Each of these parts of the human being consists of three sub-parts: the body of the physical, the etheric body and the sentient body; the soul of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul; the spirit of the spirit self, the spirit of life and the spiritual man. On Saturn, the physical, the soul and the spiritual are not present as members of one entity, but as independent entities: the physical body as the first formation of the human body and the actual material basis of the planet itself; the etheric body as an angel, the sentient body as an archangel; the sentient soul is represented by the characterized Saturn being itself, the mind soul by the forces, the consciousness soul by the powers, the spirit self by the dominions, the life spirit by the thrones, the spiritual being by the cherubim; the seraphim stand above all.

Saturn, in the times when it was on its physical level, thus represented a composite body consisting of fine etheric bodies; within it, the angels and archangels ruled as the life and nerve forces currently do in the human body. And just as the human body has sensory organs on the outside, so Saturn itself was covered with nothing but senses on its surface; only these senses were not receptive, but reflective. They reflected everything that made an impression from the orbit of the world body. There the luminous powers irradiated the surface of Saturn, and their light was reflected back many times over from the surface of the same. Sounds from the powers resounded, and these sounds were reflected back into space as a manifold echo; finally, the surface of Saturn was illuminated by the aroma of the powers, and it returned this in a manifoldly changed form. And the soul life of that marked Saturn being consisted in the perception of all these reflections. One can call this being the actual planetary spirit of Saturn. For there was indeed only one of its kind, just as in the human being there is a multiplicity of members, senses, etc., but only one self-consciousness. The whole of Saturn was the body of this planet spirit.

The development of Saturn now consisted of seven cycles, which represent the unfolding of the soul's life. In each of these seven cycles, the planet passes through the seven forms, from formlessness to creative ability. In the first cycle, the Thrones form the directing soul element; in the second, the Dominations; in the third, the Powers; in the fourth, the Authorities; and in the fifth, the Saturn Planetary Spirit itself. This did not have full, clear consciousness right from the beginning of Saturn's development, but only acquired it in the fourth cycle. It is only then that it actually experiences the planetary processes in a spiritual way. Thus, in the fifth cycle, it can itself work as a soul. During the fifth cycle, the archangels develop an inner soul life, the content of which is taken from the Saturn processes. They can do this by making use of the human bodies that have been developed for them into the appropriate instruments. This enables them to lead the sixth cycle as independent souls. The same applies to the seventh cycle with the angels.

In the fifth cycle, the planetary spirit of Saturn could not function as a soul in the way characterized if it remained within the body of Saturn. For the nature of the latter does not permit such a thing. The Saturn spirit must therefore step out of the body of Saturn and act upon it from the outside. Thus, in this cycle, a separation of Saturn into two celestial bodies takes place. Of these, however, the one that has emerged can be described as the soul of Saturn. It is, as it were, the prophetic prefiguration of the next planetary embodiment: the sun. Thus, during its fifth, sixth and seventh cycles, Saturn is orbited by a kind of sun, just as the Earth is currently orbited by its moon.

Something similar must occur in the sixth cycle for the archangels. They leave the mass of Saturn and orbit it as a new planet, which is called Jupiter in the secret science. And in the seventh cycle, something similar happens with regard to the angels. They draw their mass out of that of Saturn and orbit it as an independent planet. In esoteric science, this planet is called Mars. These are processes that have already taken place in a similar way during the previous Saturn cycles. In the third cycle, the forces guided the soul's development. During the fourth, they left the planet and orbited it as a brightly shining independent planet, which in esoteric science is called Mercury. In the third cycle, the same thing happened with the powers, which became independent as the planet Venus.

Within the development of the sun, the previously automatic body of man comes to life within itself. This happens because the light, which previously irradiated Saturn from the orbit as an emanation of the luminous beings, is now absorbed by the components of the solar body itself. The Sun becomes a shining planet. The perfected human bodies develop a shining life. The world aroma now sounds in from the surroundings, and it flows from the corresponding beings.

A transformation has taken place with the Saturn planetary spirit. It has multiplied. Seven have come out of One. Just as the seed is one and in the ear that forms out of it there are many, all of the same nature as the one, so out of the One Saturn Planetary Spirit, in the transition to the sun stage, seven shoots germinate. And his life now becomes different. He acquires the ability to perceive a sphere that stands one stage lower than he does. This is possible because a number of human bodies, having remained behind in their development, have stopped at the Saturn level. They are thus unable to receive the radiant life of the Sun. They form dark spots within the radiant Sun planet. They perceive the seven Sun Spirits, who have emerged from the Saturn Planetary Spirit, as a kingdom of nature standing above them. And so these seven entities live on the surface of the sun. Among them they perceive a realm whose beings have bodies that are one level lower than the bodies of the human beings on the sun. These bodies themselves, however, give them the nourishment they need in the light they radiate. While the Saturn bodies were only the reflectors of the Saturn spirit, the sun bodies take on the same position in relation to the sun spirits that the sun currently occupies with its light in relation to the beings of the plant kingdom. In terms of bodily organization, the human being during the development of the sun is on the same level as a plant being. It would not be correct to say that he himself passed through the plant kingdom at that time. For a plant kingdom, as it is today, can only develop under the unique conditions of the earth. If one wants to use a comparison in this regard, one would have to imagine the human body of the sun as a plant being that turns towards its own planet organs similar to those that a plant currently develops as a flower. And just as the present plant receives its light from an external sun, so the human sun plant received its light from its own planet, which was, after all, a sun. What the plant sinks into the earth as its root was turned towards the incoming sounds and odours in the solar body; it absorbed them and processed them within itself. One could call the present plant a human body that has remained at the stage of the sun and has turned completely around. It therefore stretches the organs of growth and reproduction, which the human being has covered and turned downwards, chaste towards the sun upwards.

In this way, the human body was only fully developed during the fourth solar cycle. The three previous cycles were a preparation for this. The first cycle is actually only a repetition of the existence on Saturn. And its seven stages of formation are seven repetitions of the stages of life in the cycle on Saturn. But it is only in the second solar cycle that life flashes in the human body. The human body is not yet fully developed enough for the archangels, who take up their position on the sun that the planetary spirit occupied on Saturn, to find satisfaction in this life. Rather, the powers that can flow from this life absorb the strength. During the third cycle, the seven entities that arose from the spirit of Saturn take their place; and during the fourth cycle, the archangels live in the life of the earthly bodies, as the planetary spirit was reflected in the bodies of Saturn. During the fifth course of the sun, the archangels ascend to a higher level of existence, and the angels take their place on the planet. During the sixth course of the sun, the angels have also developed so highly that they no longer require the physical part of the human body; they only use the incoming and outgoing light for their purposes in order to live in it. The physical human body has become an independent entity, the model for the present physical body of man. And at this stage it also behaves entirely like a physical apparatus; only like one whose parts are alive. It is, so to speak, a living sensory instrument, but its perceptions are not absorbed by itself. It lacks the necessary degree of consciousness for this. He is in a plant-like sleep, which is his highest level of consciousness. What is conceived in him as perceptions passes into the consciousness of the angels, archangels, etc., depending on the sequence of the various solar cycles. These higher beings watch over the sleeping human body.

What, then, are the causes under the influence of which the sun developed out of Saturn? We can recognize them by taking a look at the final stages of Saturn's development. Let us assume that the seventh cycle has reached the fourth stage of form, the physical. The human body has developed to such an extent that it can serve the angels as sensory organs that reflect their nature. At this stage, they have a kind of human consciousness, which, however, is only granted to them through the use of the senses of the human body. Higher beings work on the planet from the same orbit. They successively develop the higher levels of consciousness. At the moment when the angels also develop into such higher forms of consciousness, they can no longer make use of the human body. The consequence of this is that they leave the body. The person must die. But this means nothing other than that the physical Saturn body disintegrates before the physiognomic form of the seventh orbit develops. This physiognomic stage is therefore no longer physical at all. The planet only exists as a soul planet. The physical form sinks into the abyss. In the soul-planet the angels live in a superphysical consciousness of images. And the higher beings are active in it with corresponding higher forms of consciousness. At the moment when the angels, too, have outgrown this consciousness of images, the soul-planet must also disintegrate. In its place comes another on which the formative form is developed. But it only hovers in the world in which the earthly initiate finds himself when he dwells in the higher tone consciousness. For the same reasons, another planet develops from this planet, which belongs to an even higher world at the end of the seventh Saturn cycle. In it, the creative form of existence is realized. It has been shown that as the higher beings ascend into corresponding forms of consciousness, side planets of Saturn always separate out and have to float in higher worlds because Saturn's main form cannot accommodate such types of consciousness. But now Saturn itself is ascending to such higher worlds. The consequence of this is that every time he arrives in such a higher world, he unites with the secondary planet that is present in the same world. At the end of Saturn's seventh cycle, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury and the Sun are reunited with Saturn for this reason. Everything forms one world again. But in this One World is found the creative form of the Saturn life-power. Through this world, which has spiritualized itself in the manner indicated, is led back again to the lower stages of existence. This takes place in the evolution of the sun. In the course of its cycles, the planets formed out of Saturn emerge again. Each of them now appears only one step closer to physical existence.

If a human observer with senses could watch the development of the planets in their present form, he would only see the world body emerging from the darkness at certain intervals; in the long periods in between, when it only exists in higher worlds, it would disappear from such an observer. It would only remain recognizable to an observer whose consciousness can dwell in higher worlds. Therefore, one differentiates between the physical states of planetary existence during twilight or nighttime. However, one should not imagine that during such interim periods the planet and its beings fall into inactivity. This activity only falls into higher worlds and expresses itself in a much more real existence than the mere physical.

When the sun has completed its seven cycles, the time begins when the human body is so far developed that it can not only receive the influxes of light and be enlivened by them, but it acquires the ability to let the world of sound that flows around it, which is formed from the “powers”, take effect within itself and to reproduce it as sounds. At this stage of existence, which is called the development of the moon, the human body becomes a resounding entity. While the sound reflected back from the planet into the environment at the Saturn level was only an echo of the surroundings, it now sounds out into this environment in a changed way. It is so changed that it reflects what is going on in the human bodies in the most diverse way. These human bodies have thus taken up a third element into their being, the sentient body. For it is their inner nature: their world of feeling that resounds outwards. — But the seven entities that developed out of the Saturn spirit during the development of the sun have become seven times seven. Their environment has now become such that they experience their own world of feeling in the sentient bodies that have formed. These sentient bodies are the bearers of their bright day consciousness. They now feel themselves surrounded by two realms that are below them, and one that is above them. This realm hovering above them can be sensed from the realm of space as the aroma of the world; they experience themselves as sounding beings, and the two realms that are below them have come about because one area of human bodies has remained at the Saturn level, and a second at the sun level. Thus these moon beings are surrounded by automaton-like beings, who continue their Saturnian maturity on the moon under completely different conditions than they existed on Saturn itself; and furthermore, by plant-like sun bodies, which are in a similar situation. Thus, three types of beings are present in the actual mass of the moon. Those automaton-like beings that are dark within themselves and that have retained from Saturn the ability to radiate life around them. They are not inanimate beings in the sense of the present minerals. A mineral foundation such as the earth has did not exist on the moon at all. In its place was one that consisted of the characterized being. One gets an idea of it if one imagines it with a life that runs through it completely, so that on the moon, for example, instead of the mineral arable soil of our planet, there is a living, pulpy mass; in this, lignified parts are inserted like the rock masses into the softer rock of our earth. In this living foundation, which in its parts can be called plant minerals, the characterized solar beings were rooted, standing on a level between the present animal and the present plant. And the mobile beings that inhabited the moon were the human bodies, standing in the middle between animal and human in terms of their development. They were the hosts of the descendants of the Saturn planet spirit. But this could not have developed an alert day-consciousness in them. To live in such a consciousness, these beings had to step out of their bodies each time. When they were within the body, that is, when they were living its life, then they were only imbued with a consciousness filled with dream images. In this consciousness, they saw nothing of their physical surroundings; but they sounded their inner experiences into the environment. What was expressed in sounds during the sleep of the moon beings were their passions and desires. To emphasize only one aspect of this experience, it should be noted that what is now called the love life, for example, and which underlies reproduction, took place on the moon during the dream-filled sleep. The waking life of the day was without love or desire, devoted entirely to observing the world around him. The human ancestor on the moon knew nothing of sexual relationships in his waking life. What man today feels in sexual love was played out on the moon in dream images that only expressed in symbols what is now objective reality. Thus it was not the human forebears who experienced the world of images in an awakened state on the moon; rather, the beings who stood immediately above humanity, the angels, lived in this world. For them, the dream world of humanity played out, as it were, as bright reality of day. They watched over the dreaming world of humanity as the archangels watched over the world of the sun as it slept in a plant-like state.

The first two lunar cycles were only repetitions of earlier developmental states. The seven forms of the first cycle repeated the seven Saturn cycles, and the seven forms of the second the seven solar cycles.

In the third lunar cycle, the human body is so developed that the beings on the archangelic level experience its dream images as their environment; in the fourth cycle, this is the case with the angels. In this cycle, the descendants of the Saturn planet spirit can use the human body to such an extent that, when they envelop it from the outside and make use of it, they attain a bright daytime consciousness through it. In the fifth cycle, these beings have risen to such a height that they no longer need the physical human body; the latter now perceives its surroundings, but it only attains a low level of consciousness in relation to these perceptions. During this time, these beings require only the etheric body and the sentient body. In the sixth cycle, they also leave the etheric body to itself, and in the seventh, the sentient body.

The moon is a re-embodiment of the sun planet. Now, in the period in which the stage of sun development is repeated on the moon, that is, in the second cycle, the sun body emerges from its mass. Within this emerged sun body live those beings who have attained a level of consciousness and life for which no conditions can be found on the moon itself. During the second cycle, these are the elemental forces; during their life on the sun they have also experienced the life of the physical human body. Now on the moon, this stage of the sun only leads a stunted, retarded existence in the animal plants described above. The elemental forces cannot live in them. Rather, they animate these beings from the outside, sending them the light they need from their sun. During the third lunar cycle, the descendants of the Saturn planetary spirit have also risen to a level where they can no longer find existence on the moon. And so, during the fourth cycle, the archangels leave the moon, which in this period of time is also the dwelling place of the “angels”, just as the earth is later, in its fourth cycle, the dwelling place of human beings.

Just as the other planets gradually emerged during the development of the sun, so it happens to them again during the development of the moon. Only this time they are one step closer to physical existence: at the point in time when the moon is at the height of its development, that is, from the physical form of its fourth cycle onwards. During the fifth orbit, Mars, which is then inhabited by angels, takes on a fine, ethereal-physical form in the vicinity of the moon; during the sixth orbit, a similar process takes place in relation to Jupiter, the dwelling place of the archangels. During the seventh lunar cycle, finally, the same thing happens to Mercury. Mars and Jupiter have become even denser in the meantime; the former has a density that enables it to develop heat through the movements of its components and to flow out into space.

The development of the earth takes over the fruits that have ripened on the moon. The human body has passed through three stages of development. In the first stage, it was able to serve as a physical instrument of perception for those beings who had already advanced so far at the solar level that they could dispense with such an apparatus. Thus they already belonged to those beings who, from the outside, could dedicate their activity to the sun planet as creators. The place they held on Saturn was taken by the archangels on the sun. The Saturn planetary spirits did not have their corporeality on the sun planet, but in the creative powers that sustained the sun life. On the moon, the archangels had then become the creative powers. The angels of the moon, who at that time had a bright day-consciousness, could admire their corporeality when they looked up at their creators.

These three planetary stages of development were now repeated in the first three earth cycles. During these, the human body was to prepare itself to transform into experiences the images that had formed during the moon consciousness. It had to become capable not only of harboring a life and image body within itself, but also of inwardly reflecting its environment in its images. On the moon, he had progressed so far that his images could be contemplated by the angels. The moon body of man was the environment of the angels. And they had also progressed at the same time in the contemplation of the moon man; they had struggled through so that they could now create at a higher level what they had perceived on the moon. After all, in addition to the two realms that were below them, they still had the beings of their own kind in their environment. After the developments on the moon had come to an end, they were able to imprint their nature on the human body. The human being on earth could then see this in his physical surroundings while inhabiting his body, which the angels on the moon could only see when they ascended to a higher world: their own kind.

But only gradually could the human body be directed to such an ability. And that happened during the three earth cycles. In the first, he was able to perceive himself as he was on Saturn; in the second, as he was on the sun; in the third, as he was on the moon. During the first cycle of the earth, his fellow human beings were still nothing more than walking automatons to him; during the second, they appeared to him as plant-like creatures; and during the third, with animal-like characteristics.

When the fourth cycle began, man had become able to perceive the creations of the angels, his own kind, around him. But the angels were three levels of consciousness above him. They could create what he perceived. The human body now acquired four aspects: the physical aspect, which became a mirror of the environment; the living aspect, which could translate perceptions of the environment into internal movement; the aspect of images, which was able to transform internal movements into the character of symbols , and finally the body, which became the carrier of bright day-consciousness, which harmonizes the inner images with the impressions of the environment, and thus creates the connection between inner experience and the processes of the environment. But the bright consciousness of day remains limited to the outer world of the physical; the processes of life and the images of the body of images are experienced inwardly, but not perceived as the environment. His body of images remains the object of the next higher level of being, the angels, and his life body even that of the archangels. Everything in a person that is connected to the life body, the laws of its growth and reproduction, is therefore hidden from the person themselves; they only have the consciousness of it that is present in dreamless sleep. For the archangels, however, these processes are things of the external world and their workings, just as a person's work on a physical machine is present for them. And everything that is connected with the consciousness of images, the laws that are more mysterious to man, that give his face a certain expression and play of features, his walk etc. certain forms, thus what is expressed in his character, temperament etc., that is under the rule of the angels. Only what he achieves in his environment is under his own laws.

In the fourth cycle on earth, man has developed into a being that can be characterized in this way. But the angels, who during the stage of the moon had developed to the consciousness of creators, could no longer find a place for themselves on earth at the moment when the body of images began to belong to man himself, that is to say, from the time when the second cycle had passed its midpoint. Then they withdrew to a higher community with new living conditions; the sun separated itself from the earth again and from then on sent its forces to it from the outside.

In the third cycle of the earth, those human bodies that had not progressed far enough in the second cycle to have their image body supplied by the powers gathered on the sun, had to decline to a subordinate existence. They sank to the animal level from the animal-human level. Where could they now get the powers for their image body? They were no longer receptive to the solar powers of the perfected angels. But at every stage, beings fall behind in their development. They had fallen behind in their development until the third cycle of angels, and therefore could not find a place on the sun. During the second half of the third earth cycle they could not yet find the disposition to ascend to the sun. But they were also not made to continue to work on the image bodies of the perfecting human being. They had the gift of working only on such image bodies that had remained at the stage of lunar existence. Therefore, they withdrew from the earth's mass as the present moon. This is therefore a world body, which represents an earlier stage of the development of the earth in a hardened state, as it were. It is the dwelling place of those entities that did not want to become creators of the perfect human body. Their activity is found in the image bodies of animals; but they also continually direct their attacks at the image body of man, which is, after all, the sphere that has grown out of them. As soon as man strays even a little from devotion to his higher nature, which is revealed to him through the impressions of his senses, as soon as he falls prey to the powers that work in his image body, these beings gain influence over him. Their activity shows itself in wild dreams, in which the animal desires coming from his lower nature are reflected.

When the third cycle of the earth reaches beyond its center, where the earth has become physical for the third time, there are initially no conditions for the existence of the form of the physical human body, which can receive external perceptions. The physical element decays. The consequence of this is that the omission sin of the remaining angels is no longer felt so painfully by the beings that have ascended to the sun. The moon is therefore re-incarnated into the earth body. And when the cycle continues, when the whole earth has ascended to a higher world through the existence of images, it also reunites with the sun. In this way, the forces in the human body that were only able to see the animated body in their environment in the third cycle acquire creative ability. This enables them to enter the fourth cycle. At first, they are still in a world that can only be perceived by spiritual consciousness, but they gradually descend to ever deeper worlds. Finally, the human body is ready to develop organs of perception for its own kind in a fine ethereal form. The physical body thus acquires the abilities of its earthly form. This is also the point in time when the earth can no longer be a place of activity for the perfected angels; the sun emerges with them from the earth and shines on it from the outside. The physical body continues to develop. The images of the image body acquire a vividness that was previously not their own; the organs of the physical body feed them in the mirror images of external objects. The time has come when the outer earthly environment snatches these images from the remaining angels. These have to draw the part of the earth that can be their dwelling place out of the earth. The moon separates again from the earth and orbits it as its satellite planet.

What is the state of the human body at this point in time? It has developed its fourfold nature. It is organized in such a way that it can be the carrier of an etheric or life body, that it can house an image body. And in addition, its sense organs allow the earthly environment to be reflected in these images. The physical human body has now reached a completely new level. It reflects inward, just as it reflected outward the essence of the Saturn planet spirit on Saturn. As a result, that part of this spirit, which was then the lowest link of the same, can now live in him. This part therefore disconnects from the Saturn planet spirit; it loses the ability to receive the revelations of the upper realms and becomes the carrier of human self-awareness. Man learns to perceive himself as an 'I'. From now on, he bears within himself the nature that on Saturn the planetary spirit revealed like a circumference of the planet.

Thus, man has reached the stage at which the archangels revealed themselves in his [etheric body], the angels in his image body, and the planetary Saturn spirit in his self-awareness. He can now ascend to the level at which the Saturn spirit within him is able to have a relationship with the image body that is similar to that which the Saturn spirit itself attained when it gradually outgrew its own planetary existence and became an inhabitant of Jupiter. But since man remains an inhabitant of the earth, such forces can only have an effect on him from the outside. That is, the earth comes under the influence of the forces of Jupiter. At a later stage, something similar happens in relation to those beings who were at a stage where they only have an external effect on the etheric body from Mars. The earthly human being comes under the influence of Mars.

When the Sun, Earth and Moon still formed one body, the human body on this planet was made of a substance that had an air-like state. Apart from human bodies, the only ones present with a body in a liquid state were the descendants of the human animals of the Moon. The offspring of those lunar beings that lived there as plant minerals had reached the solid state. In addition to the liquid human animals, however, there were still animal-plant-like creatures in this [earth body] that had emerged from the plant animals of the moon. But while the former had a more watery appearance, the animal-plant-like creatures consisted of a dense, pulpy mass that, when it became coarse, approached the substance that currently forms mushrooms.

When the sun drew its matter out of the earth, so that the latter only had the mass of the moon left in it, all conditions on the planet changed. The substance of human bodies condensed into a liquid substance, which can be compared to today's blood. The previously liquid beings took on a solid form, and the solid plant minerals acquired a very dense materiality. Before the departure of the sun, the life of the human body was essentially a kind of breathing, an absorption and release of air-like material. After that, a way of nourishing itself developed out of the liquid environment. And reproduction was also connected with this nourishment. The viscous human body was fertilized from the reproductive material of its environment and split under such fertilizing influence. Its development, while the moon substance was still within the earth, proceeded in such a way that it formed semi-solid parts within its liquid mass, which condensed to the point of becoming cartilaginous. He could not yet form solid, bone-like limb inlays during this time, because the earth mass was not suitable for this as long as it contained the moon. Only with the departure of the moon, when the coarsest materiality was removed, did a solid framework develop in the human body. And this was also the time when the possibility of taking the fertilizing substances from the environment ceased. With the mass of the moon, the earth substances also lost the ability to have a fertilizing effect on the human body. In the time before, there were not two sexes in the human body. Man was a being of a feminine nature, to which the masculine essence in the earth environment itself was. The whole moon earth had a masculine character. With the departure of the moon, some of the human bodies were transformed into those with a male character. Thus, it absorbed the fertilizing forces that were previously contained in the sap of the earth itself. The female nature of the human body underwent such a transformation that it could be fertilized by the emerging masculinity. All this happened because a kind of double-sex human body changed into a single-sex one. The earlier human body fertilized itself with absorbed substances. Now the one form of the human body, the female, only received the power to mature what had been fertilized. This happened in such a way that the male power in her lost the ability to prepare the fruit material. This power remained only in the etheric or life body, which has to bring about the ripening. The male form of the human body lost the ability to do anything with the fruit material within itself. The feminine in her was limited to the etheric body. Thus it is that in present-day humans, the etheric body of man is female, but that of woman is [male]. The acquisition of these abilities coincides with the development of a solid skeleton.

But this was preceded by another important process. When the human body changed from an airy to a liquid consistency, the ability to absorb airy matter in a special organ was created at the same time. This marked the beginning of separate breathing. One must only realize that at that time the earth did not yet have a separate atmosphere. The substances that later formed the liquid and solid masses out of the common mass were still air-like themselves at that time, enclosed in the air. And when the liquefaction began, the human body did not live on solid ground, but in the liquid element. A kind of floating suspension was its locomotion. And the air above the liquid element was much denser than the later air. It contained not only all the later water, but many other substances in dissolution. Accordingly, the entire respiratory system of the human body was different.

Before the departure of the sun, the whole breathing process had a different purpose than in the period that followed. It consisted of absorbing and releasing heat from the environment and into it. One can say that the warmth that humans today produce within themselves through their blood circulation was then inhaled and exhaled by them from the environment. It was only after the exodus from the sun that the process was transformed in such a way that the air, after it has been taken in, generates warmth through its effect in the body. Thus, with breathing in the present form, the human body had become a generator of warmth within itself.

This transformation in the human body is connected with a cosmic event that is called in esoteric science the withdrawal of Mars from the earth. Mars is the planet whose inherent forces in the human body before this withdrawal brought about what the blood circulation subsequently took over in the human body itself. As the blood on Earth took over the activity of Mars, the spiritual beings were able to lift themselves out of the Earth, so that the influence of Mars on humans became one that worked from the outside. Physically, this came about because iron became an important component of blood; and iron is the substance on which the forces of Mars have a particular effect. Thus, the present form of breathing is connected with this withdrawal of Mars. But through this, man received everything that can be called the inner power of his blood. The inspiration was thus given. Indeed, with the breathing of the air, man breathed in his living soul.

As long as the earth was connected to the sun, the sun's power was what regulated the other effects in the human body. The solar force contained what worked simultaneously as male and female in the human body. And under its influence, the absorption and release of heat emanating from Mars also acquired law and order. When the sun moved out, certain human bodies began to change in such a way that they became infertile. These were the forerunners of the later male natures. As long as the lunar forces were still connected to the earth, the other part retained the ability to self-fertilize. With the moon's withdrawal, it lost it. From now on, the sun was at work, and the beings who now inhabited it, the angels, worked on the ability to reproduce. The male etheric body came under the influence of these sun beings. The female etheric body, which is male, retained its relationship to the beings whose realm had become the moon. Accordingly, the woman's physical body came under the influence of the sun's forces. After all, it had developed the form corresponding to it when the sun was already shining on the earth from the outside. The male physical body, on the other hand, came under the influence of the moon because it had taken on its form, which is infertile in terms of reproduction, under the influence of the planet still united with the earth. Alongside all these processes, the senses are developing at the same time, bringing the world of images of the sentient body under the influence of the earthly environment and thus placing the human being under the influence of the descendants of the Saturn planetary body. Furthermore, the pulsating power of the blood is developed within, whereby the soul is formed and, with the sensory perceptions, an inner life, sympathy and antipathy with the environment can develop.

Man has arrived at this stage when the earth emerged as an independent physical planet in its fourth cycle and had detached itself from the sun, moon and Mars.

At that time, man had thus completed the separation into two sexes. He looked through his senses into his surroundings. He felt attraction and repulsion towards his surroundings. And because he was different from his surroundings, he was endowed with the beginning sense of self. The human body had become a fourfold being. And within the fourth limb, soul inwardness had arisen through the blood, which allowed the forces of Mars to enter.

Thus man had developed within himself all that he could have as the fruit of the first three planetary stages of development. And he had a fourth limb of his body, which had come into being because other influences, which could have nothing to do with its development, had withdrawn from the earth.

In occult science, this humanity is called the third main Earth race. Actually, one can only speak of race formation from this point in time onwards. For only now did human reproduction occur, and with it differences within humanity, which were brought about by the interaction of human beings themselves. That which can be called inheritance and kinship arose. But now the earth, the fourth planetary form of development, had no influence yet. The perceptions of the surroundings had only taken hold of the images of the sentient body. The etheric body was not yet influenced by the earth's environment. The fourth planet had no influence on the inheritance conditions. Only the first three. Therefore, the race in which this was the case is called the third.

It was followed by the fourth, within which the earth environment itself had an effect on the ether body. This could only happen when beings gained influence over humans who had reached such a level in their development that they lacked the creative ability to influence the etheric body in the sense of fertilization, but who were nevertheless beyond merely receiving sensory impressions from the physical environment, just like humans. Those beings who had not ascended to the level of creative beings on the moon, that is, during the previous embodiment of the earth, were those who could populate the sun, but who had nevertheless reached the stage beyond which one can merely lead an inner life through the images of the human body. Within the evolution of the earth, they have the ability to perceive through the senses of man, but not to create these senses. These beings can... [breaks off]

[Beginning missing] Among the greatest of these upheavals is that of the outgoing Middle Ages. One after another, those ideas that had been taken for so long as an external expression of divine creative wisdom faded away. At the same time that the profound Meister Eckhart and the strong-minded Johannes Tauler were preaching to bear witness to the Christian God, who had risen in their hearts in new glory, the ingenious Roger Baco was pondering the workings of natural forces in a different way than the Middle Ages were accustomed to. The latter believed that they were giving this idea of God a new firmness when they showed how every human being spiritually relives his suffering, his death and his resurrection; the former pursued his deeds in the outer world with the acumen of the intellect and the tools of the physicist. And behold: these deeds looked different in this light than they had been believed for centuries. A rebirth of the “Word” was experienced in the meaningful writings of Jacob Böhme; but Copernicus and Kepler transformed the world view in which the creative power of this Word had been so long admired. Those who had first proclaimed the Word had different thoughts about the earth and the stars than those that were now imposed on the searching humanity. Was it not natural that with the doubt about their conception of the world, the associated conception of God and the soul also became shaky? Could one still have confidence in a writing about the nature of the spirit if this writing presented the deeds of the spirit in a way that one could no longer profess? And did not those who saw in this writing the guarantee of the salvation of their souls have to condemn the men who shook what they believed was intimately connected with this writing? Could what Roger Baco achieved in the mastery of the forces of nature come from the spirit of good, if he thereby intervened in the preaching of centuries? Nature seduced these minds to relate to the world differently than this proclamation had commanded them. The view had to arise that research in nature was “sin” and that the spirit that arises from such research is “devil”, as Goethe put it in precise words. The “spirit of nature” had been recognized in its contradiction to the higher spirit that makes its voice heard in the human heart. Faust, the ally of this spirit of nature, who put the Bible under the bench, had to fall prey to evil forces. Lucifer, this spirit of nature, which, like the “morning star”, should point to the sun in eternal harmony, seemed to fight the luminosity of this star. Human wisdom, from which the wisdom of God once originated, seemed to be its worst enemy. And so it has remained throughout the centuries. More and more, human wisdom shone into the eternal workings of the forces of nature. Just as God's creative power seemed to recede from the heavens when Galileo's telescope illuminated the infinite spaces, so in the nineteenth century this creative power seemed to recede from the wonderful structure of living beings when the microscope allowed a view into the forces by which they are built and when the striving gaze revealed the laws according to which the forms of the living are shaped. On the basis of his scientific discoveries, Newton had established a cold, sobering attraction where seraphim had once been. Attraction and natural law were to be viewed with understanding where it had been believed that the love of the seraphim for God moved the heavenly bodies around the Earth, proclaiming the glory of the Creator. Natural selection has displaced the great Darwin from where, according to earlier opinion, God's power of thought had placed species next to species in manifold perfection. Even Carl von Linné, the greatest naturalist of the eighteenth century, was still allowed to say: there are as many species of plants and animals as God originally created. In obedience to eternal, immutable laws, the new spirit of man allows the incomplete to develop out of the complete without the intervention of wisdom. What an evil companion this spirit has become for man in modern times! Lucifer, the morning star, Lucifer, the light-bearer, has changed from a guide to the Divine into a seducer to un-divine things. A barren and terrible faith it is that this Lucifer seems to have given to man. He points his telescope and shows him worlds that, according to their necessary laws, revolve around each other, and in their space the inquiring eye finds no space for the old God. He shows him the forces of life in the cell and in the human body, and promises to reveal to him one day how these laws shape the thoughts of the soul in the parts of the brain. And then this inquiring mind will no longer be able to find the old God in man's inner space either.

We must not blind our spiritual eyes to this process of development! We must not hide from ourselves the fact that the old way of belief and the new way of knowledge have brought about a world war in the hearts of men, which opens up a terrible perspective for the future. People who cover their eyes and form their judgments only according to what they want to see may be of the opinion that this old way of believing will again conquer the circles of the apostates. Those who look at the world with a free and open eye cannot form such a judgment. It fills them with fear and apprehension when they follow the battle between “belief” and “knowledge”. For he knows, he sees it daily, that in the course of the day the power of knowledge is the greater. He sees how, despite all the efforts of the “strong in faith,” a sober, soulless world view is being built up, conquering the masses, freezing the heart, and condemning man to despair of his “eternal destiny”.

These clear-sighted people also know that in the long run this world view will not prevail, that a higher view of God will shine over the earth again. But they also feel that man is not here to stand idly by and watch what happens without him; rather, he is called upon to shape the perfect out of the imperfect, the higher out of the lower. When the weak-willed and strong-in-faith tell us that God will lead people back to the light, then the strong-willed may reply: God's highest earthly tool is man, and he demands that this tool not fail. God's wisdom wants to work through human will. We are called to promote what God's counsel is in the world. We should not be lulled into a sense of complacency by the thought that what is to be will come to pass, but should cling to the search for what needs to be done in order to regain the lost spirit.

From the imperfect contemplation of nature, the great sages have taken the ideas with which they showed how the God who reveals Himself to them in their souls realizes His glory in the external world. These ideas have changed. Is it not perhaps only because of our weakness that we cannot find in our ideas what our ancestors found in theirs? In the book that Faust placed under the bench, these ancestors have told how they saw the ways of eternal wisdom. They too have read in the “book of nature”, and according to what was revealed to them there, they have clothed the inner word of God externally.

Our way of reading has certainly changed. But should the reading destroy the content? Could it not be that the new reading only bothers us for a while? Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to be numbed by the fact that the microscope has enlarged the space in which what previously escaped us is taking place, and the telescope has led us into spaces that previously only the imagination was allowed to inhabit. Could not an intensified power of the soul also find the spirit in the enlarged space, and also in the spaces that have been illuminated!?

You represent a materialistic world view and rely on Copernicus and Darwin. Your ancestors represented a spiritual world view and relied on Plato, Moses and Aristotle. You fight Plato, Moses and Aristotle and say that you rely on your reason, while your ancestors relied on the written word. But be honest and true to yourselves. Is your “reason” anything other than the “faith” of your ancestors? What they proclaimed about the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, they felt, and you call it “faith”; what Darwin and Haeckel say, you feel, and call it “reason.” And ask yourselves, how many of you have examined the paths by which your naturalists have arrived at their assertions? Just as few have followed the paths by which lonely soul researchers have come to the Trinity. You “believe” as they “believed”. And what you think you can deduce from your “reason” you have read in Haeckel's “natural history of creation” just as your ancestors read their ideas into the Bible.

One of those who, under the impression of the new natural science, fought the “old faith” (D. Fr. Strauß) said: “That from the belief in things, some of which are certain not to have happened, some of which are uncertain doubt as to whether they have happened, and only to the slightest extent beyond doubt that they have happened, that belief in such things should depend on man's salvation, is so absurd that it no longer needs refutation today."—No objection is to be raised here against this sentence. At most, that it is self-evident and banal. But the following sentence seems to be just as self-evident: That our entire happiness should depend on things observed through a telescope in outer space, where it is uncertain whether the ideas we associate with them are assumptions or not; and on other things that a naturalist has “overheard” through the microscope about the and of which we certainly do not know how they came to their existence, should depend on the entire happiness of man is so absurd that it should no longer require refutation in the shortest time.

Everything that is aimed at here was already said by the great Master Eckhart in the thirteenth century: What use is it to me that my brother is a rich man and I am a poor man; what use is it to me that so and so many years ago Christ suffered and rose again, if the true man does not rise in myself. Let the divine live in your own soul; do not let yourself be blinded by the telescope and microscope; find the highest in yourself, who is closer to you than the nebulae of outer space and clearer to you than the combinations of substances that the chemist calculates for you. But one thing is necessary for such a discovery. You must listen to the words of those who speak to you of the paths that lead to the matter, just as you listen to the astronomers who teach you about the Milky Way, and just as you pay attention to the zoologists who speak to you about the development of human germinal systems.

When Darwin and Haeckel speak, you listen with faith and form your world view according to their research. Far be it from us to take this belief away from you. Because we ourselves have this belief. We admire the eternal forces of nature in the sense of the “natural history of creation”. But why do you not listen just as attentively when the psychologist speaks to you of the laws of spiritual life? Why do you call him a fantasist when he tells you of the things that have been revealed to him, when he speaks of the destinies of the soul on the basis of his sure research methods, while you treat natural scientists differently? You cannot perceive within yourself what the psychologist tells you. But how many know from their own observation the germinal life of organisms? In order to really judge for themselves, they would first have to become acquainted with the extensive methods by which the natural scientist arrives at his results. Without doubt, they will admit this after some reflection. But few are willing to admit it today for the laws of intellectual life. But just as you cannot fully understand Haeckel without walking in his footsteps, you cannot understand the soul researcher without walking the paths he has walked. No amount of “reason” could give you the right to contradict Haeckel before you have learned how he arrived at his results; but do the same with the soul researchers. Then, and not before, may you speak of a rejection of what they say. But then you will no longer behave so contradictorily.

The paths of those who investigate spiritual life in their own way are much more difficult than those that lead to the external life of nature. But those who speak out against the results of spiritual researchers look no less strange than those who speak out against the results of germinal life without ever having observed an animal germ in its development.

This journal will deal with the facts of spiritual life. It demands nothing, absolutely nothing, of people, except that they approach it with the same attitude that countless people today approach natural scientists. Based on their own, deepest experience, perhaps only a few will be able to immediately verify some of what is said here. But is it any different with the facts of nature? However, no one can be excluded from the possibility of testing it.

And closer to us than any object in nature is what is being discussed here: the human spirit. What everyone here talks about is, after all, none other than the human spirit itself. It is the human spirit to which it is seemingly so close, and yet which it usually knows so little about. There are many who have little inclination to care for this human spirit. What the great Fichte says about them applies to them: the spirit, about which they care so little, will give them sunshine and rain, clothe and nourish them at the right time – for that is what their body demands; their spirit has not yet awakened, they do not care about it.

But for all those who are looking for the sun of the spirit, we want to speak up. We want to seek this sun behind the clouds, which only part when the much-misunderstood signs of the book are read correctly, which Faust once wanted to exchange with the Bible. We do not want to let the microscope or the telescope, the laws by which the planets revolve, or the material processes that we suspect under the skullcap, cloud our free spiritual view into the fate of souls. We want to be allies of science; but not slaves to its misunderstood conclusions, but companions who walk in spirit the paths that it follows in matter.

[Part I]

What the mind, which is directed towards the finite (kama manas), calls truth is only a subspecies of what the esotericist seeks as “the truth”. For the truth of the mind refers to that which has become, which is manifest. And the revealed is only a part of existence. Every thing in our environment is at the same time product, creature (i.e. what has become, what is revealed) and germ (what is unrevealed, what is becoming). And only when we look at a thing as the two aspects (what has become and what is becoming), then we see that it is a link in the One Life, the life that has time not outside itself but within itself. Thus finite truth is also only a becoming; it must be enlivened by an evolving truth. The former is grasped; the latter is “noted”. All mere scientific truth belongs to the first kind. For those who seek such truth alone, “Light on the Path” is not written. It is written for those who seek the truth that is a germ today in order to become a product tomorrow; and who do not grasp what has become, but pay attention to what is becoming. If anyone wants to understand the teachings of “Light on the Path,” then he must generate them as his own and yet love them as completely different, just as a mother generates her child as her own and loves it as different.

The first four teachings, when understood, open the gateway to esotericism. — What does a person bring to the objects of his knowledge? Whoever examines himself will find that joy and pain are his response to impressions from the sensual and supersensible world. It is so easy to believe that one has discarded pleasure and pain. But one must descend into the most hidden corners of one's soul and bring up one's pleasure and pain; for only when all such pleasure and all such pain is consumed by the bliss of the higher self, only then is knowledge possible. One thinks that one will become a cold and sober person as a result. This is not the case. A piece of gold remains the same piece of gold - in weight and color - even when it is transformed into a piece of jewelry. Similarly, Kama remains what it is - in content and intensity - even when it is spiritually transformed. The power of Kama should not be eradicated, but incorporated into the content of the divine fire. Thus the eye's subtlety shall not discharge itself in tears, but gild the received impressions. Dissolve every tear and give the radiance it has to the ray that penetrates the eye. Wasted power is your joy and your pain; wasted for knowledge. For the strength that flows into this joy and this pain shall flow into the object of knowledge. “Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.” He who still abhors the criminal in the ordinary sense, and he who still worships the saint in this ordinary sense, has not weaned his eye from tears. Burn all your tears in the will to help. Weep not over the poor; recognize his situation and help! Murren not over the evil; understand it and change it into good. Your tears only cloud the pure clarity of the light. You feel all the more tender the less sensitive you are. The sound becomes clear to the ear if this clarity is not disturbed by the rapture and sympathy that meet it at the entrance to the ear. “Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.” To put it another way, let the heartbeats of the other resonate within you and do not disturb them with the beating of your own heart. You should open your ear and not your nerve endings. For your nerve endings will tell you whether a sound is pleasant or not; but your open ear will tell you what the sound itself is like. When you go to the sick person, let every fiber of his body speak to you and absorb the impression he makes on you.

And to summarize the first two sentences: Reverse your will, let it become as powerful as possible, but do not let it flow into things as yours, but inquire into the nature of things and then give them your will; let yourself and your will flow out of things. Let the radiance of your eyes flow out of every flower, out of every star; but hold back yourself and your tears. Give your words to the things that are mute, so that they may speak through you. For they are not an invitation to your lust, these mute things, but they are an invitation to your activity. Not what they have become without you is there for you, but what they are to become must be there through you.

And as long as you impose your desire on a single thing, without that desire of yours being born of the thing itself, you wound the thing. But as long as you wound anything, no master can listen to you. For the master hears only those who need him. But no one needs a master who wants to impose himself on things. Man's lower self is like a sharp needle that wants to dig in everywhere. As long as it wants to do that, no master will want to hear its voice. “Before the voice can speak to the masters, it must unlearn the wounding.” As long as the sharp needles of the “/ch will” still stick out of the words of man, his words are the messengers of his lower self. Once these needles have been removed and the voice has become soft and pliable, wrapping itself around the secrets of all things like a veil, it weaves itself into a spiritual garment (Majavirupa), and the master's delicate sound clothes itself in it. With every thought that a person devotes to the inner truth of things in the true sense of the word, he weaves a thread to the garment in which the master may clothe himself when he appears. He who makes himself a messenger of the world, an organ through which the depths of the world's riddles speak, pours his soul's life into the world, his heart's blood moistens his feet so that they carry him swiftly to where work is to be done. And when the soul is where the lower self is not, when it is not where man stands enjoying himself, but where his active feet have carried him, then the Master also appears there. “And before them the soul can stand, the blood of the heart must moisten the feet.” He who remains within himself cannot find the Master; he who wants to find Him must let the strength of his soul - the blood of his heart - flow into his deeds - into his active feet.

Such is the first meaning of the four fundamental teachings. Those who live by this first teaching can have the second revealed to them, and then the following ones. For these teachings are occult truths, and every occult truth has at least sevenfold meaning.

[Part II: The following explanations refer to sentences 17 and 18 from Chapter 2 of “Light on the Path”]

§ 17.2. Chapter.

[Ask the innermost, the One, about its ultimate secrets, which it has held for millennia.

The great, difficult battle, the conquest of your own soul's desires, is a labor of millennia. Therefore, do not expect the prize of victory until you have gained experience over millennia. When the time comes that this last teaching becomes truth, man enters the threshold that lifts him above humanity.

These last few paragraphs of the second chapter of “Light on the Path” contain wisdom of the deepest kind. In No. 17, there is the invitation to ask the “innermost”, the “One” about his “secrets of the last”. Whoever shines a light into the depths of this “innermost being” will indeed find the results of “millennia”. For what man is today, he has become through long millennia. The “innermost being” has passed through worlds, and hidden in its bosom are the fruits it has taken from these worlds. That our innermost being is as it is now, we owe to the fact that countless formations have worked on its structure, that it has passed through many realms and that it has formed organs out of these realms over and over again. Through these organs, it has entered into an exchange with the worlds that have surrounded it in each case. And what it has gained from this interaction, it has taken over into new worlds, in order to have ever richer experiences on new levels, equipped with the achievements of the past. And today we use the differentiated essence of our innermost being to have a sum of experiences on the “planet” we call “Earth”. All the experiences of the “moon planet” and the earlier ones are in our innermost being. They were already in this innermost being when, through a pralaya, it developed into “earth”. And so these experiences were in the Pitri nature of this innermost being, just as the whole lily is - latently - in the lily seed. Of course, the lily seed is still something physically visible. But the Pitrisame, which slept its way from the moon to the earth, was incarnated in the highest kind of matter, perceptible only to the eye opened to the Dangma. But just as the lily seed, when it is placed in suitable soil, organizes the elements of earth, water and air in such a way that a new lily is formed, so the “Pitrisame”, in its cycles through earthly existence, the “Pitrisame” arranges the matters in such a way that in the course of these cycles the full “human being” gradually emerges, who, after the 6th and at the beginning of the 7th earthly round, may truly be called “God's image”. Until the middle of the fourth round - until the end of the Lemurian period - the human Pitrinatur divides itself in the work on its own organism with “formers” of the highest and higher kind; but from this point on, more and more of the human “innermost” must take over this work itself. K. H. says the following about this work: All you have to do is become a complete human being. For know that in your physical nature alone you are now already almost a human being. For you will only be a complete human being in your physical nature at the end of the fourth round. Your astral body, your mental body and your ego body (higher manas) are still unorganized and chaotic. Just as your physical body is complete after the fourth, so must your astral body be after the fifth, your mental body after the sixth, and your arupic (higher mental) body after the seventh, if you are to reach your destiny at the end of the earthly cycles. And only when you have reached this destiny can you, as a normal terrestrial Pitri, pass over to the next planet.

Those, however, who want to walk the occult path should work more and more consciously on this threefold externalization of their higher bodies from their “innermost being”. That is the meaning of meditation. One shapes (organizes) one's astral body by elevating it to the higher self and by self-examination. Just as extra-human forces have worked in past rounds to build the organs of today's physical body, so the inner human higher self works on the astral body so that it may become an “image of divinity” or also “fully human”. Then it becomes suitable to experience the secrets of higher worlds through its organs in the same way as the physical body experiences the secrets of the physical-mineral world through its sense organs. We examine ourselves in the evening with regard to our experiences during the day; we rise to our “higher self” through the well-known formula. In both activities we have an organizing, building effect on our astral body. Only through this do we make it into an astral organism, into a body with organs, whereas before it was only a kind of carrier. This “formula” is this: “Brighter than the sun, purer than the snow, more subtle than the ether is the Self, the Spirit, in the midst of my heart. I am this Self. This Self is me.” However, this opens up the view to a ‘work of millennia’, as it says further in $ 17. Just as millennia were necessary before the outer physical likeness was achieved, so a work of millennia will be necessary before this likeness is achieved for the higher bodies. Only then will man stand at the ‘threshold that lifts him beyond humanity’. And he must come to this threshold in the 7th round in the same way as he had to be at the threshold at the end of the lunarian (moon) epoch, which raised him above the lunarian pitritum.

Through the mental meditation of a sentence from the inspired scriptures, the meditator organizes his mental body. When a person takes such meditation sentences from the Bhagavad Gita or from other scriptures that the theosophical literature provides, then he is working on the organization of his mental body. It must be emphasized again and again that in this meditation it is much less important to intellectually go through the sentence - this should be done separately outside of the actual meditation - than to live with the sentence with a completely free field of vision of consciousness. It should tell us what it has to tell us. We should be the ones to receive from it. If it is an inspired sentence, then it begins to live in our consciousness, then something alive flows out from it, then it becomes abundance in us, previously unsuspected content. As long as we speculate about it, we can only put into it what is already in us. But that does not help us to progress.

The organization of the ego body depends on the devotional part of our meditation. The more we achieve through this devotion, the deeper and more earnest it is, the more we will resemble the being that we are to emerge from our planetary life to the tasks that will be set for us in a later being.

§ 18.

[The knowledge you now call your own is only yours because your soul has merged into one with all souls and become one with the innermost. A treasure from the Highest is entrusted to you. But if you betray its trust, abuse your knowledge, let it slumber when you should use it, then even from the heights you have reached, a fall is still possible. Even at the threshold, exalted ones still recoil, unable to bear the responsibility and unable to soar higher. Therefore, always remember this moment with holy fear, with anxious trembling, and prepare yourself in advance for the fight.

We must experience that we are one with all that lives. We must be clear about the fact that what we call our own has no life if it wants to be an idiosyncrasy. It has just as little life as our little finger would have life if it were cut off from our whole organism. And what for our little finger would be the physical-sensory cutting off, that would be for our peculiarity a knowledge that only wanted to refer to this peculiarity itself. We were one when we entered the planet, which was the third before our Earth, within an all-divine essence; we were within the all-divine essence and yet a peculiarity, just as each note in a symphony is a peculiarity and yet one with the whole symphony. And what we dare call our individuality shall have an effect on whatever it encounters in the 343 worlds through which it passes (seven planets, seven rounds on each planet, seven so-called globes for each round = 7 x 7 x 7 metamorphoses = 343). What we are able to experience there is laid in us at the beginning as an inclination. And that is the treasure, “familiar to you from on high.” And just as the treasure is familiar to us, so we should place it in the harmony of the planetary symphony. An experience will present itself again and again to him who fully understands these things. All deepening within us remains barren and empty if we want it only for ourselves. To strive for our own perfection is only to indulge a higher form of selfishness. Our knowledge must always flow out from us. This is not to say that we should always teach. Each person should teach as they can, and when they can. But the smallest action in everyday life makes it possible to be a living result of selflessly acquired knowledge. And when we have the feeling that all life is one, that all separateness is only based on Maya: then all our deepening into our inner being is also acquired with the living feeling that it should come to life in the All-One Life. But then our deepening is always rewarded with fertility. Then we are sure that we cannot fall. Those who strive for knowledge only to know, only for the sake of their own perfection, only to advance on the ladder of existence, can still fall even if they have already risen very high. And above all, we must be aware of the “responsibility” that we take upon ourselves by acquiring higher knowledge. Only a certain measure of development is allotted to humanity as a whole in the path of development. If we perfect ourselves, if we acquire a measure of perfection earlier than would be possible in normal progression, then we take something from the common measure of humanity for ourselves. We make the scale tip in our favor; the balance leaps up on the other side. Only by giving in some way can we make up for what we have taken. But we must not think that it is better not to take. That would mean being selfish again and avoiding taking so that we would also be relieved of the duty of giving. Not taking and not giving means death; but we are meant to serve life. We must acquire the ability to give; therefore we must take on the responsibility of taking. But we must be aware of this responsibility at every moment. We must constantly reflect on how we can best give when we have taken. This gives rise to a “struggle”, a serious, sacred struggle. But this struggle must be. We must not shy away from it. We must always prepare ourselves for this struggle. In particular, the great significance of this struggle was and is demonstrated to the adepts of all schools of initiation. They are admonished to fulfill themselves, to imbue themselves with the consciousness of this struggle. When our innermost being breathes the life of this struggle as the fundamental mood of the soul, then the inner sight and the inner hearing awaken in this innermost being. And when we are able to be calm, completely calm, on this battlefield, then higher secrets begin to flash across our astral and mental heaven. Then feelings and thoughts are symbolized in us as spiritually tangible realities; and out of the mist of these spiritually tangible realities, the voice of the Master sounds and the form of the Master takes shape. We begin to enter into higher communication. We no longer remain mere actors in the world, but become messengers (angelos) for it.

What is described here as an exegesis of No. 18 is, sentence by sentence, reality, higher reality to be experienced. And whoever imbues themselves with the meaning of this sentence (No. 18) in this way becomes a citizen of higher worlds. (To be continued in the very near future).

From time immemorial, man has been regarded as a “world in miniature” in relation to the “world at large”. Not only the human mind, but also the heart, reaches this conclusion, as it rises up to the lofty starry sky and to the ideals of the human spirit with equal reverence and pious awe. Kant says that two things fill the mind with ever-increasing admiration and awe: “the starry sky above me, and the moral law within me.”

But how unequal the two are: the starry heavens with their eternal immutable laws, in which eternal wisdom is inherent; and the changeable moral and spiritual nature of man, which only uncertainly follows its laws and strays every moment. The greatest admiration arises in the face of the starry heavens in those who know and study its immutable laws. Kepler was filled with admiration when he had explored the secrets of the planetary orbits of our solar system. The human heart, in contrast, with its fickleness and confusion, evokes the most misgivings in those who know it best. Goethe, one of its most profound connoisseurs, liked to flee from its meanderings and wanderings to the unerring laws of external nature.

Why is it that our perception of the two is so different? Goethe was probably on the right track with his: “Noble, helpful and good, be man.” That is a commandment that no one applies to nature. Man is condemned for leaving the paths of justice and virtue, but not for being a volcano that wreaks untold havoc. We have to find harmony with nature, even if it has a destructive effect: we know that its laws are immutable. Have they always been? No; the laws Kepler celebrates in discovering them were only revealed in the solar system: harmony was born out of the chaotic primeval nebula. But this lawfulness has reached a certain conclusion. The battles in this field are over. This is not yet the case with man. He carries his law within himself. He should not be what he is today tomorrow, because he should perfect himself. His development, that is, his life, is perfection in all areas. He works his way from desire to virtue, from error to truth. He will then be what he should be when the law of his inner being completely permeates his outer being, when what he now feels to be his highest ideal will be his immutable law, as the law of the starry sky is presented today on that sky. And it is not only in this respect that man has the feeling of disharmony between his present existence and his law. He applies the principle of justice to this existence of his. He seeks a connection between this principle and his will. At first, external observation shows a discordance between fate and will. The good must suffer, and the wicked are happy. The question of the connection between destiny and character has occupied all ages.

The question can never be resolved by looking at just one lifetime. Just as no one can understand the structure of the human hand without following it from the simpler, unfinished forms of the locomotor organs of primitive creatures, so no one can understand the character of a personality without seeking its causes in a past life. Karma explains facts that would otherwise be completely inexplicable. Our abilities in this life are the fruits of the desires and efforts of previous lives; what we wear as a habit in this life were often cherished thoughts in previous lives; what we possess in the way of wisdom we have acquired through previous experiences, and our conscience is the result of many painful experiences. Our thoughts are facts that shape our desire body, and it shapes the physical body. Sleep is the brother of death because in each new life a person finds what he has prepared for himself in the previous one, just as in the morning a person finds the results of the day's work from the previous day. Fatalism does not follow from karma, because the laws of nature also submit to freedom. And karma does not contradict benevolence. This understanding leads to helping. But karma does contradict the materialistic view of man. It must contradict. For just as a clock does not build itself, so too man's life does not build itself. Man is a citizen of three worlds. But he must open his senses to the higher worlds. He must not pull them down to himself. He must ascend to them. Spiritualism is also a form of materialism. It should not be confused with Theosophy. The person whose senses are opened lives himself into the higher worlds. He also acquires the memory of earlier lives on earth. He becomes more and more like the man-God, who vouched for the eternal existence of the spirit by saying: “Before Abraham was, I am.” All the arguments about the divinity of Christ can only arise in those who do not know that the human soul is of divine nature. The firstfruits of humanity will reach divinity before the others. Then they will become, in their humanity, the carriers of the divine original spirit. Theosophy brings Christianity again. The one that knows why the disciples thought their master had risen again. - Annie Besant's and my book. Then it will be self-evident to think of the Christ-life in the perfection of the sun-myth. Christmas is the birthday of the sun. The Egyptian, the Mithraic, the Budhistic sun-myth.

The Christmas hymns speak of the eternal in human nature: Our savior is born. And when the Christmas bells ring, their sound echoes:

You, man, are on your way to a goal that makes you perfect, like the sun that is born today for a new year – to go your way, unchanging like it: that is its proclamation.

Facts like the lamps.
No one is invited. —

At the beginning of the earth's development, one of the light spirits or Elohim descended from the solar realm into the earthly realm and joined with Eve, the primal mother of the living. From this union was born Cain, the first of the earth humans. Then another of the Elohim, Yahweh or Jehovah, formed the Adam; and from the union of Adam with Eve arose Abel, Cain's stepbrother. The disparity of descent between Cain and Abel (sexual and asexual descent) caused a quarrel between Cain and Abel. And Cain slew Abel. Abel had lost his connection to the spiritual world through sexual descent; Cain had lost it through the moral fall. Jehovah gave the replacement son Seth to Abel's parents. Two types of people descend from Cain and Seth. The descendants of Seth were able to see into the spiritual world in special (dream-like) states of consciousness. The descendants of Cain had lost this ability altogether. They had to work their way up through the generations by gradually developing the human powers of the earth to regain their spiritual abilities.

One of the descendants of Abel-Seth was the wise Solomon. He had inherited the gift of dream-like clairvoyance; indeed, he had inherited it to a particular degree, so that his wisdom was so widely known that it is symbolically reported of him that he sat on a throne of gold and ivory (gold and ivory are symbols of wisdom).

From the Cain race came men who, in the course of time, became more and more concerned with the upward development of human powers on earth. One of these men was Lamech, the keeper of the T-books, in which, as far as was possible for earthly powers, the original wisdom was restored, so that these books are incomprehensible to uninitiated people. Another descendant of Cain's race was Tubal-Cain, who made great advances in the working of metals, and even understood how to fashion musical instruments from them. And as a contemporary of Solomon, Hiram Abiff or Adoniram, a descendant of Cain, had reached such a level of skill in his art that it bordered directly on the vision of the higher worlds, with only a thin wall still to be broken through for him to achieve initiation.

The wise Solomon conceived the plan of a temple, the formal parts of which were to symbolize the development of mankind. Through his wisdom of dreams he was able to conceive the thoughts of this temple in every detail; but he lacked the knowledge of the earth forces for the actual construction, which could only be gained through the training of the earth forces in the Cain race. Therefore Solomon connected himself with Hiram Abiff. He now built the Temple, which was a symbolic expression of the development of mankind.

Solomon's fame had reached as far as the Queen of Sheba, Balkis. One day she went to the court of Solomon to marry him. She was shown all the glories of Solomon's court, including the mighty temple. From the ideas she had gained so far, she could not understand how a master builder who had only human powers at his disposal could have achieved something like this. She had only learned that the leaders of workers, through the possession of atavistic magical powers, were able to gather sufficient crowds of workers to erect the old, mighty buildings. She demanded to see the master builder, who seemed strange and remarkable to her. When he met her, his eye immediately made a deeply significant impression on her. Then he should show her how he leads the workers by mere human agreement. He took his hammer, climbed a hill, and at a sign with the hammer, large crowds of workers rushed to his side. The Queen of Sheba realized that human powers on earth can develop to such significance.

Soon afterward, the queen and her nurse (the nurse is symbolic of a prophetic person) were walking outside the city gates. They encountered Hiram Abiff. At the moment the two women saw the master builder, the bird Had-Had flew out of the air onto the arm of the Queen of Sheba.

The prophetic nurse interpreted this to mean that the Queen of Sheba was not destined for Solomon, but for Hiram Abiff. From that moment on, the queen thought only of how she could break off her engagement to Solomon. It is further related that now, “in her intoxication,” the engagement “ring” was pulled from the king's finger, so that the queen could now consider herself the bride destined for Hiram Abiff. (The significance of this feature of the legend is based on the fact that the Queen of Sheba is seen as the “ancient wisdom of the stars”, which until that epoch was connected with the ancient atavistic powers of the soul, symbolized in Solomon. Occult legends express this in the symbolism of female figures representing wisdom, which can marry with the male part of the soul. The time of Solomon marks the beginning of the epoch in which this wisdom is to pass over from the atavistic old powers to the newly acquired ego powers on earth. The “ring” is always the symbol for the “ego”. Solomon is still thought of as having a not fully human ego, but one that is only a reflection of the “higher ego” of the angels in the atavistic dream-clairvoyant consciousness. The “intoxication” indicates that this ego is lost again within the semi-conscious soul forces through which it was acquired. Hiram is only in possession of a real human “I”).

From this point on, King Solomon is seized by a violent jealousy against his master builder. Therefore, three treacherous companions have no difficulty in finding the ear of the king for an act by which they want to destroy Hiram Abiff. They are his opponents because they had to be rejected by him when they demanded the master's degree and the master's word, for which they are not ready.

These three treacherous companions now decide to corrupt the work of Hiram Abiff, which he is to accomplish as the crowning achievement of his work at the court of Solomon. This is the casting of the “Brazen Sea”. This is an artificial casting made from the seven basic metals (lead, copper, tin, mercury, iron, silver, gold) in such proportions that it is completely transparent. The matter was finished, except for one very last impact, which was to be made before the assembled court – also before the Queen of Sheba – and by which [it] should transform the still cloudy substance to complete clarity. Now the three treacherous journeymen mixed something wrong into the casting, so that, instead of it clearing, sparks of fire sprayed out of it. Hiram Abiff tried to calm the fire with water. This did not succeed, but the flames leapt in all directions. The assembled people scattered in all directions. But Hiram Abiff heard a voice from the flames and the glowing mass: “Plunge into the sea of fire; you are invulnerable”. He plunged into the flames and soon realized that his path was leading him to the center of the earth. Halfway there, he met his ancestor Tubalkain. The latter led him to the center of the earth, where the great ancestor Cain was, in the state he was in before the sin. Here Hiram Abiff received from Cain the explanation that the vigorous development of human powers on earth would ultimately lead to the height of initiation, and that the initiation attained in this way would have to take the place of the vision of the Abel-Seth sons in the course of the earth, which would disappear. Symbolically, the power of bestowing the Mother, which Hiram Abiff receives from Cain, is expressed by the statement that Hiram received a new hammer from Cain, with which he returned to the earth's surface, touched the Sea of Bronze, and thereby was able to make it completely transparent. (This symbolism is given by that which, in proper meditation, elevates to imagination the inner essence of human development on earth. The Iron Age can be seen as a symbol of what man would have become if the three treacherous forces in the soul had not taken hold: doubt, superstition, and the illusion of the personal self. Through these forces, the development of humanity on Earth has come to a fiery unfolding in the Lemurian period, which cannot be dampened by the watery development of the Atlantean period. Rather, such a development of the human powers on earth must take place that the original state of the soul, as it was in Cain before the fratricide, is restored. The dream-like soul powers of the children of Abel-Seth cannot prevail against the powers of the earth, but only the descendants of Cain, who have come to full real ego development.

The flower that is cut from the stem withers. Had it been left on the stem, it would have turned the forces within it to seed formation; and the life of the plant to which it belongs would have been renewed in another. - What has the cut done to the stem? — Has it not transformed one way of being into a completely different one? Has it not robbed certain forces of the possibility of forming that to which they were called according to the order of nature? — Even after it has been cut off, forces still act on the flower. But these are different from those that previously called it into existence and that would have led it to fruit formation afterwards. They are forces under whose influence it gradually decays. The flower has passed into a different realm of forces. Into the realm that can produce no growth and no reproduction, but only chemical and physical effects. With the cut in the stem, a stream of life has been interrupted. And the flower has been taken up by another stream of existence. This current destroys what the flower is destined to become. The flower belongs to one realm of existence. And only in this realm can it become what it is meant to become. It becomes something else when it is snatched from this realm and transferred to another. And then a current that is only at home in its realm is destroyed. The flower must give up its plant character. The aims of the world into which it now enters do not lie in the formation of seeds and fruits. They have nothing to do with growth and reproduction. They impose a direction on the substances of the flower that is not in the nature of the flower.

In nature, therefore, a thing can be snatched from the ends towards which it tends, and its existence can be directed in another direction, one which is not in its nature.

What can happen to a plant can happen to every being, including humans. And it can happen with all the forces that are active in a person. Only with humans is everything less simple, less clear than with the other realms of nature. And everything becomes all the more complicated the more one ascends to the spiritual powers of man. But if we are able to see simplicity in complexity, we can see that the same thing can happen to the human spirit that happens to a blossom when it loses its connection to the stem.

What lives in the spirit of man can be compared to the current that, passing through the plant, constitutes its particular essence. And man experiences this current as the content of his soul. In this soul content he finds the direction and goal of his being. It is his inner life. If he lacked this inner life, he would be like the flower cut off from the stem. He would have to succumb to currents of power that are not his in the truest sense. But the essence of man is not as clearly defined as that of a flower. It has countless gradations. And it acquires its special character from the fact that man himself works on shaping this inner life. It becomes all the more meaningful the more man works on himself.

A person who does not work on themselves lacks inner life. They become entirely what their outer nature makes of them. The impressions of the outer world shape their soul. Yes, that is precisely the breaking away of man from his spiritual roots when he abandons himself to these impressions. The inner life only begins where man really adds something of his own to what he receives from the outside.

How many speak of their inner life and mean nothing but the reflection of the outside world within them. People live busy with what everyday life brings. They learn from the demands of everyday life what they themselves do. They suffer from the events of daily life, or rejoice in them. Depending on whether one or the other is the case, they act in their actions. Yes, their whole character is probably only a reflection of the outside world. One need only recall the differences between the inhabitants of the mountains and the plains, between those of the cities and the countryside, and one will admit that man bears the imprint of the outside world. And yet this imprint arises only when his inner self cooperates. A firm boundary between what the external nature imprints on man and what he forms from within cannot be drawn. But the character traits of the human being that are formed from the inner nature of his soul stand out clearly from those that are impressed on him from outside. Just as the essence of the flower consists in its progression towards the fruit and the seed in its growth, so the essence of the human being lies in the internalization of his life. This inwardness is the ideal towards which he strives to advance. There are many stages of development on the way to this ideal. From the savage to Goethe there are many such stages. The savage can set only a small inner strength against the influences of the outer world. He is torn this way and that by the forces that affect him. Goethe, on the other hand, forms a soul content from a few external impressions that creates a higher world. One need only seriously compare the lives of the two. One will find that the savage's inner life directly reflects the effects of the external world; while Goethe draws from the depths of his soul something that fills the reflection with a content that makes it richer and more exalted than the external object it reflects. Just as plants take substances from the chemical and physical world and imprint their own essence on them, so humans take in impressions from the external world and, through the power of their soul, channel them towards higher developmental goals. Thus, the relationship between the physical and chemical realms and the plant realm can be compared to a similar relationship in the human being: between the realm of external impressions and that in which the inner power of the soul unfolds its effects. And just as the plant part can lose itself in the chemical and physical realm, so the human being can lose himself in outer life.

What is brought about by an artificial intervention in the example of the plant exists in man as the essence of his character. At earlier stages of his development, he is cut off from his inner life; at later stages, he reaches it. In this way, he gradually moves upwards into higher realms. His nature strives for these higher realms. Through this striving, he must find the goal that is inherent in his soul. The lower the stages of his development, the more alien they are to the nature of his soul. The more the goals of the corresponding realms lie in different directions than his own. Man thus finds himself more and more by developing into the higher realms.

Two realms are most clearly distinguished from each other. The realm of external nature, which forms man according to itself; and the inner, spiritual realm, which gives the formation of external nature a character that could never come from it itself. — Nature and spirit: man belongs to both. If he were all nature, he would be only the outer imprint of a human being, not a human being himself. If he were entirely spirit, he would have to have already reached the goal of his development. He stands between the two.

The individual spirit of man, his soul, is rooted in the All-Spirit. It is, in a sense, an illusion when the individual spirit sees itself as an absolutely independent being. However, this delusion is part of the nature of man on the stages of his imperfection. For the delusion would be no less great if the individual spirit, in its isolation, simply wanted to explain its essence as the All-Spirit. It would be as incorrect as if one wanted to mistake the image of the sun reflected by a concave mirror for the sun itself. The All-Spirit lives in every soul; but He lives in it in a special way. It is present in each soul in accordance with its nature. Therefore, one cannot directly recognize the All-Spirit as such. One can only live it within oneself, allow it to flow unimpeded within oneself. “I am the All-Spirit” is just as correct as it is wrong. For “I am the All-Spirit in a special way.” Only this special way in which the All-Spirit comes into being in me can I recognize. I should open my gates as widely as possible to the All-Spirit; I should prepare the places in my journey so that he may find his dwelling place in them in the freest possible way. He flows into me as widely and as universally as I offer him a dwelling place. He does not hold back; only I myself can erect obstacles for him. Man's development consists in removing these obstacles. He lives in veils; and he gradually imbues these veils with the light that he receives from the Universal Spirit. How this is to happen is determined by man's original disposition. The veils in which his soul is clothed are not at his discretion. He finds himself in them. The All-Spirit is in them. But it is not in them as man is meant to place it. First of all, there is the outer physical covering. It is subject to the laws in which the chemical and physical forces operate. This covering, taken by itself, is, in its way, absolutely perfect. There is a harmony in it as in the realm of the stars and of physical nature in general. Security and calm progress are the hallmarks of this realm. And if these formations only exist for themselves, only isolated in their realm, they only strive for the goals that are peculiar to this realm, then they live a perfect life. When we gaze up at the starry sky, we perceive the mood of the soul that streams forth from this realm when it is left to its own devices, when it is not a shell but an entity in its own right. From this primal source of world existence, the realm of the living, the organic, stands out. Beings with growth and reproduction arise within it. The laws originally active in it take on a different direction and assume different forms. Thus the structures of this realm become a shell. Their nature is determined by what they now contain within them. Their laws, which are complete within themselves, become servants of a higher lawfulness. They must adapt to this lawfulness. And this lawfulness itself can only work in such a way that it takes into account the nature of the chemical and physical. The chemical and physical is a substance with which the living works. It must achieve what it is meant to achieve according to its nature; but it can only do so if it finds the way in which the chemical and physical forces can correspond to this nature. An interaction occurs between what is called upon to arise as life forms and the chemical and physical laws. This interaction provides the basis for imperfection in world development. Imperfection could not arise in a realm unto itself. It can arise where the laws of one realm interact with those of another. For it is a matter here of a continual finding of the right way for this interaction. The variety of life forms arises from the fact that this interaction can be effected in the most diverse ways. From mushrooms to oak trees, we have different types of this interaction. And in one case more, in the other less, the outer form is dominated by the inner life formation, and is its true imprint. Where there is no harmony between the form required from within and that which the external physical laws allow, imperfection arises. It is not due to the physical and chemical laws as such that a plant malformation arises, but to the fact that the demands of the inner life do not do justice to these laws in their specificity. What constitutes the “lower nature” of a being is never imperfect in itself; imperfection arises when the “higher nature” pushes the lower nature in the wrong direction. It is not the shell that is imperfect, but the way it is used.

Just as life arises within the chemical and physical, so too does desire and repulsion arise within life, or the world of desire. And the living becomes the shell of desire just as the physical becomes the shell of the living. The laws of life become expressions of what a being finds desirable or what it wants to reject. The interaction that now comes to light will consist in pushing life in the direction of desire. The being in question will no longer merely live; rather, it will live in a way that befits its desires. A new source of imperfection arises.

The human soul is enclosed in three shells. It is in them that man is born as a thinking being. For it is only in his world of thoughts that his true inner being lies. These three shells are illuminated and permeated by this being. Each shell has its own laws; and each shell, in its own way, belongs to a particular realm.

The human being as a being of thought lives in the world of thought; this world of thought is first clothed in the shell of desire, which belongs to a special realm with its own laws; this shell of desire rests in the same way in the shell of life, and this in the physical shell. Man is not simple, but composed of a soul-core and three soul-covers: and his three soul-covers belong to three different worlds, into which he thus extends through his outer garments. And the core of the soul stands in the middle and gives meaning and character to the garments. The imperfection of man will consist in the fact that his soul cannot reconcile the demands of its essence with the laws of the shells, which are also the laws of the realms to which these shells belong. And the soul, what determines it, where do its laws come from? They are none other than the laws of the All-Spirit, only in a different form from that in which they find expression in the outer shells. The soul itself is a shell. Just as it is the core for the three outer shells, so it is itself a shell for the All-Spirit in other forms. And these forms correspond step by step to what has moved into the outer shells of the All-Spirit. Just as the master builder remains an independent person even after he has embodied his skill in the outer structure of the house, so the All-Spirit remains an independent spirit even after he has placed his essence in the three shells of the physical, the animate, and the desiring. Each of the three outer forms of the All-Spirit corresponds to an independent inner form of spirit: in order that the shell of the desiring nature might be laid around the beings, the Primordial Spirit had to develop within itself the form of the renouncing one. Desiring and renouncing belong together like warmth and cold. When warmth arises in one place, it must flow out at another, which thereby becomes colder. If beings arise that desire, their desire can only arise from a primal ground that forms renunciation in itself as its opposite. Likewise, life in the shell must correspond to its opposite in the spiritual primal ground. Life now consists of growth and reproduction, that is, in that which has life moves beyond itself. The opposite is complete inner stillness; beatitude. This is the second spiritual form of the primal ground corresponding to life. The third spiritual form corresponds to the cosmic, chemical and physical laws of the universe. These laws are spread out over space and time in an infinite variety of things. If we contrast this diversity with the unity that dominates it and finds expression in each of its forms, we are led to the unified spirit itself, which lives in the physical diversity. Spirit, bliss, and renunciation are the three forms of the primal source of things, which live externally in the three sheaths, the physical, the animate, and the desiring. The individual human soul is connected to these three basic forms of the primal spirit as if to its tribe. And just as the outer shells enclose them, so they in turn form the shell for renunciation, bliss and spirit. Thus, if the outer man extends into three outer realms, the soul extends into three spiritual realms. Man's own realm is in the middle between these six realms and together with them forms a seventh. Man's being is therefore sevenfold. And the seven realms give their laws to the fundamental parts that make up man: the physical, the living, the desiring, the thinking, the renouncing, the blissful, and the spiritual. Each of the seven realms has its own laws, through which it brings about what takes place in it. Take man's very own realm, that of thought. Thoughts combine within us according to laws that live within the world of thought. If that were not the case, the regularity of our [thought life] would have to be exactly the same as that of external things. But that is by no means the case. Otherwise, one could not speak of logical thinking. I understand a process or a thing only if I associate certain thoughts with them that make them understandable to me. If I left it to the thoughts that arise quite by chance in connection with the thing or the process, I could never arrive at a real understanding. It is an important proposition, originating in the Pythagorean school, that man differs from the animal in that he can count. By counting things, he arranges them according to aspects that are taken from the realm of thought. Things do not count themselves; and as they appear to us in mere perception, there is no immediate reason to count them. We count them because we want to summarize them according to the purposes of thought. And so it is with all the other forms in which thought deals with things. Man attributes the circular form to certain things. He cannot do so until he has explained to himself, by purely logical thinking, what a circle is. He could never gain a pure conception of the circle from the sense world. What one can learn about circles in the world of the senses are only approximate circles, imperfect circles. We recognize them as such because we have an idea of the circle from a purely ideal point of view. And so it is with all real thinking. Those who do real science always move on to ideas that are not present in their purity in the external world of the senses. They idealize. He develops something within himself that none of the senses can provide. He receives the laws for this from a world that is not the sensual one. The thoughts that we relate to external objects still point to another world. They are, to be sure, images of external things; but at the same time they are images of the laws of the spirit of these external things, which the senses cannot gain from them. In addition to the gates of the senses, we must also open the inner gates of the soul if we want to understand the essence of things. This could not be if what is called to us through the gates of the soul did not belong to the essence of things themselves. The thing that I perceive through the sense of sight is only one side of the thing; the other side is apparently absent when I merely open the eye; it hides itself from this organ. It becomes apparent when I open the inner organ of the soul. Then a thought-image enters through this. And this belongs to the external thing. It is the other side of the same thing. The thing is only complete when I familiarize myself with both sides of it. Thus, the essence of a thing is actually in the unknown source of things. And it reveals itself to me from two sides: externally through the senses, internally in the life of thought. A thing is only complete for those who, in addition to perceiving it with their senses, also reflect on it. People misunderstand the facts of the matter here if they believe that they already have the whole thing in what the senses provide and only want to allow themselves to repeat the external thing in thought. They do this because they consider everything that goes beyond external reality to be unreal, a mere figment of the imagination. They do not know that thought is an image that receives its content from two sides: from the external world, in which the external forms of things are, and from the higher spiritual world, in which the deeper meaning, the actual essence of things, lies. The world of thought lives in the middle between the three lower and the three upper realms. Things are both above and below. Everything that is below and tends more or less towards the physical, corresponds to something above that represents the actual spiritual essence of the lower. The two sides of things cast their rays; and these rays meet in the human soul, which thus gives images of things in its thoughts, which receive their luminosity and color from two sides.

Just as it is true that thought reflects the truth because the truth of things illuminates it from two sides, it is also true that, in order to be fruitful, in order to have content, thought must be truly illuminated from two sides. We cannot recognize a plant through mere thought: we need sensory perception for that. Likewise, mere thinking is of little help if one wants to get to the essence of things, which lies in the spiritual. Thought must be illuminated from within, as it is illuminated from without, through the sensory properties of things. People who are up to these things have called this inner illumination enlightenment, inspiration or intuition. It is spiritual perception and the exact opposite of sensory perception. It is only through this that the true inner life of the human being in the higher sense begins. Through it, the soul sees into the spiritual world. And the sensual then appears to it as an external form of this spiritual one, not much more than the figure of a human being recreated in papier-mâché as compared to the real human being. The nature of illumination only becomes noticeable, however, in people who have particularly essential perceptions from the higher spiritual world; and only in them does one hear talk of illumination or inspiration. But it is not only present in them. A certain degree of it can be found in every human being. Something from the spiritual world dawns in every brain. It is just so weak in many cases that, compared to the vivid impressions of the outer world, it appears to many as nothing, as an illusion that only serves to make man understand in thought what the senses perceive.

The realm of life flows directly from the spirit. It carries within itself the germ of becoming separate. Individual life can arise within the All-life. One does not comprehend life if one does not grasp it in its universality and all-livingness. All wishing and desiring is still far from life. The living thing only becomes a separate current in the system of forces of the All. It does not force the other living things into its service. It does not desire or abhor. It takes only to give. It forms itself to give existence to other forms. It lives in transformation (metamorphosis). And it retains nothing, accumulates nothing in the intermediate stages of metamorphosis. Whatever is to be accumulated must arise from desire. Desires must form themselves around a center. Life does not challenge other living things. Desire creates a form that must be dissolved again. The realm of desires is the realm where the forms that gather around centers in this way influence each other. Where they interact. - In the realm of life, we only deal with individuals in a suggestive way; in the realm of desire, the individuals are distinct. Through his desires, man gives the realm of desires a touch that bears the character of his separate existence. Through his life, he gives only life, that is, he forms beings that bear nothing of his separate being, but only correspond to the general nature of life. The living person says only: man is there; and he also only produces men. The desiring human being says: “I, this individual, am here.” The realm into which this sound penetrates thus acquires the special coloration of this individual being. The individual is now here forever. Something has come into being that continues to have an effect. Even if I myself could be completely absent, annihilated, for a moment: I will encounter this effect of mine when I am back again. My new effect belongs to my old one. Both must influence each other.

It is now nature itself that has brought man so far that he animates the three lower realms from that of the thinking soul. Within the thinking soul slumber the parts, the inner cores of the soul, which man awakens in himself by working on himself, going beyond mere nature. Through this awakening, he continues the work of nature. He develops; and with this development, the processes of the three lower realms are brought into the corresponding connections with the higher ones. Into those that are predisposed in them by the fact that the life forms of the higher realms have assumed an external existence in the lower ones. Immediately below the realm of thoughts lies that of desire. An interplay between these two realms first takes place in man. Thoughts first serve desires. Desire can work as a blind force. The sensation arises that something gives pleasure, something else gives displeasure. Desire works according to pleasure.

Thus man can never be in the world without his own being, as he has created it for himself, staring at him. The individual cannot begin at one point of development. He must tie in with what he has previously brought into the world, starting from himself. Here we are looking at the ledger of life. We not only live our personal life within ourselves, within our personality, but we also live it outside of our personality. We can do this consciously or unconsciously. And we can do it more or less consciously. The intellectual person can only come to the general awareness that it is so: the intuitive person recognizes the items of his life book in detail. And they recognize them, looking both forward and back. Intuitive people speak of their calling, of their special mission. This is the result of looking forward. It is the realization of the special task that the All-Soul has assigned to them. As such realization opens up to them, the realization of the past also follows. They get to know the items that they entered earlier in their life account book. For they must bring both into harmony with each other. In another sense, what is later in development relates to what is earlier like the spirit to the forms in which it first lived itself out, revealed itself. What was earlier is the result of a confrontation between forces in different realms. These results are stored as effects. And what happens again can only be a new confrontation with these effects. Now two things can happen. The forces of desire aroused by the personality can have their center of gravity in this world of desire itself, and by giving the personality its character, not the other way around: the personality to them, this center of gravity can remain in the realm of desire. Or the personality can place the forces of desire in the service of the soul's inner life. They lose their center of gravity in the realm of desire and gain another in the superordinate realm. But in doing so, they also lose the character of separateness that prevails in their realm. They no longer collide like strangers; they resonate together, because each individual, separate desire is given such a direction that it does not conflict with the others, but rather delivers a harmonious result with them. Diversity is generated in the realm of desire. Thus this realm acquires full content in itself. The next higher realm, the realm of thought, of the soul, would remain without content if it did not fill itself with the content that it draws from the lower realm. The desires are released from the bonds of their own realm by the forces of the higher realm. This is the course of evolution: the forces of a particular realm are given full expression. In doing so, they take on forms that are an external expression of the original forces. In this way, the first realm withdraws some of its forces. It releases them from itself, externalizes them. The remaining part becomes even more inward, even more spiritual than the original was. This inward part now spiritualizes, as a soul, the form that it previously separated from itself, as a center. Thus what was previously a unity becomes a duality, and the two members of the duality work together. They produce a third. The third is a repetition of the first, only the two members, which were still undivided in the first, are divided and their unity now consists in their harmonious interaction. There are two kinds of unity: one in which the members are not yet separated and therefore work from a common center, and the other in which the members are separated and the unity therefore consists in the harmonious interaction of the separated.

The external experience that man has through the application of his senses and his mind is a school for the higher development of man. He learns the regular use of thought from it. External events constantly correct our thoughts when they take the wrong direction. The upheavals in the world of thought are as much proof of this as everyday experiences. If I see a black object in the distance and mistake it for a cat, then coming closer can teach me that I am only dealing with a balled-up piece of cloth. This is a common example of how the outside world regulates thought. The correction that Copernicus made to the thinking of his predecessors regarding the course of the stars is an example of the same in the great historical life of thought. The things of the inner life do not seem so compelling on the thought. The thought must already be completely clear with itself if it is to absorb the spiritual content in the same way as it absorbs the content of external perception. He must not make any mistakes, because it depends on his self-established correctness whether he can see the spiritual in the right context. The spiritual content needs consciousness as its mature vehicle. Consciousness must therefore work correctly if the spiritual content is not to be distorted. Even though the sensual is transitory and changing, it teaches man the forms of thought. And with these thought-forms he can then comprehend the eternal. These same thoughts belong both to the temporal and the eternal. But as a personal being, man himself belongs to the temporal. He is related to the temporal. He can rise to the Eternal only by taking his starting-point from the temporal. He must learn to think in terms of the temporal. When he has thus acquired the laws of the temporal in the right way, they will be his guide on the soil from which the fruits of the Eternal grow. Man must first think surely, clearly and aright, then he can unlock his thoughts to higher illumination. If he tries to do so earlier, he is like a child who wants to climb a mountain before he has learned to walk. First one learns to read and to calculate, and then one applies reading and calculating in order to comprehend the truths of the sciences. Likewise, one first learns to think in the temporal; then one applies this thinking to the processes in the eternal. One will only make uncertain steps if one ventures into the field of the eternal before one has acquired the prerequisites for doing so. The most important of these prerequisites is to develop, through careful observation of reality, a thinking that flows in a proper way; and with this, an uninhibited, free opening up of oneself to the higher contents of the world with this thinking.

Thoughts take physical form in the human being. Its existence is conditioned by the physical laws that govern the brain and nervous system. But it also comes into its own in different ways in its own realm. Just as it can be applied to external things and also to the individual processes of the inner spiritual life, it is not original. Take the thought of a tree, for example, an oak tree. In the moment when we stand in front of the oak tree, it is a very specific thought image of this very oak tree. In the realm of thought itself, we rise from this particular image to a much more general one. We arrive at a mental image of an oak tree that does not really exist anywhere in detail, and yet it is a lawful thought form. This thought form is in turn connected with others. And when we survey our field of thought, we see that everything in it is connected in a lawful, inner way. This life of thought is the shadow image of the true higher life, in which everything is unity, inner harmony of being. Thought is the image of the super-thought. The super-thought is the creative essence. We merge with it when we transcend thought. From it comes our enlightenment, our inspiration. In it we live and move and have our being. When we rise to this region, we experience what we otherwise merely think. We move in entities that have life as in the human world the physical entities. Only then are these entities not governed by the limiting laws to which physical entities are subject. And the formless thoughts, the exalted images, which do not yet bear the reflection of the lower spheres, are the language that these entities speak to man. These entities themselves, and with them the human souls, are hidden as if behind a wall. We perceive the language - the exalted thoughts; the entities themselves and we with them move and we behind this wall. But it is their power that speaks to us, and it is our power that listens to the speaking. When this happens to us, then our ear listens to the divine message that tells us about the essence of things; then our heart clings to the heart of the world and, while the ear listens, perceives the pulse of the eternal. Space and time cease to have meaning in such moments: What the human being hears applies to many times and many spaces. These are the defining moments of life, in which the human being thus feels at the heart of the eternal; and it is a high stage of development of the human being when he makes such hearing and feeling his whole being. Then the impressions of the lower worlds cease to have any significance for him; they are only small nuances of color and tone in the eternal picture that unfolds before his mind's eye. The small lines of life intertwine as insignificant tendrils with the eternal lines that entwine across time and space and express the laws of the cosmos in eternal harmony.

Every event in the physical world is simultaneously an event in other spheres of the world. When I stretch out my hand, not only the physical process that I see with my eyes takes place, but at the same time a process takes place in the world of desires and another in the world of thoughts; not to mention the other worlds in which the corresponding processes also occur. The human soul dwelling in the physical body perceives only the physical process in its immediate form: of the other processes, it perceives only a kind of silhouette, a reflection that falls on this physical one from the other worlds. Only beings who spend their existence in the corresponding worlds can perceive the processes in these worlds as directly and in their original form as the physical person perceives physical existence. Our physical eyes see physical things; eyes that are made only of desire substance could perceive desires as physical eyes perceive flowers. And before a pure eye of thought, thoughts pass by as they do before human eyes, tables and cupboards. Those who cannot awaken a true feeling for these hidden worlds within themselves will not come to an understanding of what real human development means. Above the physical world lies the life world; and above that, the realm of desire: the place of wishes. Compared to physical matter, everything in this sphere is more subtle and fleeting. Of course, the laws of physics do not apply to this realm. Two beings of the same kind can be in one place, and distant things do not appear foreshortened as they do in the physical world. Colors are not opaque, as they are in the physical realm. They are opaque only because they appear on the opaque physical substance as its boundary. When this realm begins to reveal itself to man, he begins to realize how little he knows about the things of the world without knowledge of the same. How little he knows, above all, about himself and his fellow human beings. What man is otherwise able to keep locked in his bosom, his desires and feelings, his passions and temperament, in short, the whole world of his desires, reveals itself as a second organism in which the physical one is embedded, and which does not appear to the physical eye as color appears to the color-blind eye. The physical body alone can hide the world of feeling from the physical eye; it cannot do so from the eye that sees the organic cloud of desire in which the physical nature is embedded. Man's emotional life becomes an open book to this eye. Just as man spreads out his hands in the lower realm and thereby changes his form, so he sends out mobile rays when he has a desire. And just as his hand grasps a physical object, so the rays of his desires intertwine with the worlds that meet them in the realm of desires. Not hard as in physical space, desires collide in the space of desires; but they flow into each other, mix and mingle, and create complicated desire-forms, somewhat similar to how composite substances arise from simple ones in the physical world. Two people sit together. Their desire-rays flow into each other continuously. And when they leave the place, they have given existence to a being that now has an independent existence in the world of desire. No one can enter a place without leaving behind traces of their desires and feelings. And for our own being of desire, it matters who has entered the place before we do. We always, so to speak, lie down in the bed that our predecessor has prepared for us. People who have developed their sensitivity in this direction know this. And those who have not developed such sensitivity have no idea what others sometimes go through due to influences that are completely unknown to them. But such influences do not only emanate from people. In the world of desire, the receptive person encounters currents that were not previously at home in the physical world and that can only become so through him. He encounters the actual beings of desire that have no physical form. Almost all people are exposed to such encounters, but many are not aware of them. One must realize that much of what lives in the physical has its origin in the sphere of desire, and we just do not see the intrusion of their entities. For those who can perceive in this direction, much becomes evident in terms of its origins, of which the ordinary person sees only the effects. Man is almost always surrounded by extra-physical influences. The joker who tickles the funny bones of those around him is surrounded by a host of beings of desire and covetousness, who point his stories in the right direction. One sees the effect, but not the origin. Only pure intellectual beings lack this fleeting environment. A colorless cloud hovers around them, keeping out any influence from outside.

Man, realizing that he lives in such a world, cannot remain without an expansion of his outlook on life. His sense of duty and responsibility must undergo a significant broadening. Without such realization, he may believe that his “inner world” belongs to him alone, and that he is only responsible to physical realities. This will change when the third eye awakens. An ethic of desire will be added to his ethic of action. Just as he will deny himself actions that cause harm to the environment, so he will also deny himself desires and longings that must have an unfavorable effect on their realm. He will recognize duties in his heart just as he recognizes duties in the outside world and allows himself to be guided by the rules that can serve the prosperous coexistence of people.

The emotional life of a person who recognizes no higher duties is chaotic and disorderly. It is increasingly seized by noble harmony in those who grasp such a world of duties. Man then fits into the world quite differently. The chaotically surging feelings and passions are something fleeting and insubstantial, because they mutually cancel and destroy each other. Those who waste their feelings today in any direction, on any event, and tomorrow on something else, repeatedly destroy the results of their existence. Those who keep their feelings in strict harmony with each other shape their lives into a whole, which can therefore also be integrated as a whole into the world of desires. A chaotic life flows into the general world of desires like a dirty stream into the sea; one can still see the direction in which the dirt is moving, polluting the sea. A pure river flows into the sea and is absorbed into it without affecting its purity. And just as the sea must gradually overcome the dirt of the stream, so the world of desires must overcome the emotionally impure effects of life. A higher degree of human development brings consciousness to the way a person acts on the world of desires. What otherwise happens unconsciously and therefore completely randomly and arbitrarily, is then brought up into consciousness. Those who are able to do this will no longer desire unconsciously, just as the consciously aware human being acts consciously and not like an automaton in the physical world. Just as we commit harmful acts during our physical lives if we do not know the rules of action that lead to good, so too can we produce harmful effects in the realm of desire; and those who are completely unconscious of this realm become its playthings. The great religious founders of all times endeavored to give people rules for their inner life, so that their feelings and perceptions could become a harmonious link in the realm of desire: so that they would not work as troublemakers in this realm, but as members of its great whole. It is therefore only natural and understandable that such religious founders gave rules not only for external action, but also for the emotional life. How pleasure and pain should affect the heart, how renunciation and love are to be esteemed: these are the things that religious founders speak about, and those teachers of religion and wisdom who know something of the higher worlds. In the great, glorious song of human perfection, in the “Bhagavad-Gita,” one reads: “Respect pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory or defeat equally. Gird yourself for battle, and you will not fall into sin.” Or in another place: ‘It is the desire, the will, the strength that springs from passion. Get to know this all-consuming and devastating enemy.’ Such ethical principles do not refer to external action; they refer to the behavior of man in the world, where desires, longings, and cravings live. And the more a person delves into the depths of the soul, the more he is able to develop the ethics of the world of desires. The mystics of all times have worked on these ethics.

The human soul belongs to an even broader realm than that of desires. It is the realm of thoughts. It is through this that man can truly snatch himself from the temporal and attach himself to the eternal. Thought is the most comprehensive element in man's being. But it also depends on man himself what he makes of the thought with which he lives. He can make it a servant of his desires and cravings; or he can use it to rise to the eternal laws or essences of things. While the beings of the desire realm surround the human being as if arbitrarily, as if they were only loosely connected, forming a unified realm, the world of thought appears as a well-planned, strictly regulated whole. Each link serves the other in a precisely defined way. The desire beings therefore place us in a small circle, the thoughts in a large one. And what lives in us from the world of thoughts forms a far more enduring core of our being than our desire organism. Just as our physical organism is embedded in the desire organism, so are both, the physical and the desire organism, embedded in our thought organism. And when the eye of thought opens, the thought organism can be recognized. It presents itself differently from the desire organism. This is something fluid and flowing, and only becomes more stable at higher levels of human development. The thought organism has a characteristic basic structure. Although the thought rays emanating from a person are variable, usually changing from moment to moment, a certain skeletal structure is always re-established, and this retains certain basic features from birth to death. It is, as it were, the keynote of the personality. This keynote also forms the center from which thought-effects of a certain nature always go out into the thought-environment, and upon which they impinge from without. Through this world of his thoughts man is a participant in a realm in which the effects go far beyond what is possible in the physical world and also in the world of desire. Through his thoughts the beings of this kingdom speak to him. They speak to him more definitely, more gravely, more inwardly than the beings of the desires. The effects that extend from the thought part of man into the thought environment are also accordingly. Now man can let his thoughts be influenced by his desires. He can use his thoughts to best satisfy these desires. Instead of freeing himself from the fetters of desires and passions through the elevating power of thought, he can make thought the servant of those lower forces. The result is an enrichment and intensification of the world of desire through thought. The world of desires is peopled with beings from the Thought Kingdom, whereas, on the contrary, the beings living in him should be liberated. Thus the world of separate existence is fostered. The beings that arise in this way retard the true progress of cosmic evolution. Conversely, he furthers this evolution when the creatures of the world of desire are seized by the power of thought and led to higher goals. Wishes and desires do not cease to be what they are, But they acquire a character that strives towards the goals of the world of thought. People who ennoble their desires in this way, through an idealistic direction of their being, present themselves to the seer in such a way that their desire organism is in beautiful harmony with their own thoughts and these in turn are in harmony with the cosmic world thoughts. Such a person lives harmoniously in the universe of the cosmic system to which he belongs. His wishes advance this system and his thoughts become helpers for the beings of thought that govern this system. A person has reached a higher level of development when nothing more of subordinate wishes and desires disturbs this harmony. A personality in whom this is the case can be the carrier of a being of thought, whose work is in complete harmony with the cosmic powers of will. In this case it is no longer the world of thoughts of the individual personality that speaks, but an all-embracing, superior entity. It then bears the body, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the beings to whom it has to communicate. For in what it has to think and will, nothing flows in of what the personality as such has to desire, to long for and to will. Everything their will is directed towards remains within the sphere of thought. Such beings have reached a summit of humanity. They have ascended to a level that those of a lower standing can perhaps attain through special efforts for a few supreme moments of stability in life. And when they have such moments, they encounter the traces of those highly developed beings whose power comes to meet them for their own further development. It must be man's highest aspiration to meet such traces of beings who have completely withdrawn from the physical and also the desire spheres, and who only embody themselves in human bodies because they are to be teachers of others; and because these others can only understand them when they speak to them with human lips, with a human tongue. For themselves, these beings represent a higher state of incarnation, which hovers over man like an ideal to which he should aspire. But only those who have matured to hear the language of thought, which speaks not of temporal but of lasting processes, can hear the voice of such personalities. To such a person they then impart the higher teaching in wisdom and make him acquainted with the far-reaching purposes of the Cosmos, in which he then learns to cooperate. The higher mystical teaching takes place entirely in this region. And all lower teaching is a preparation for this higher teaching.

The human soul has its own definite place in this realm. Through this place, it is a citizen of its cosmos. And its task is to gather from the lower realms that which is to be carried up from them into this higher realm. But all this must first be purified before it can fulfill its task here. As the blacksmith works the raw iron from nature into the appropriate forms, so the soul takes the raw passions and desires and forms them, purifying them, so that they can be integrated into the element of the world of thought. The human soul has descended from this higher realm to gather the honey of the spirit from the lower realms and return laden with it to its original home. In a state of innocence it was when it began its descent. In a state of purification it will be when it returns. It is an egg before its descent, which carries the germ of its later being within itself. This egg reveals itself gradually, the being with all its organic limbs reveals itself. And these limbs are related to the realms into which the being will be placed on its journey of development. It uses these limbs where their corresponding realm is; and it leaves the characteristics of these realms where they have their element. But it takes with it the results, the experiences. The task of man consists in filling his thought-germ with the honey that can be gathered in the three lower realms. Every train of thought can be such a gathering of honey. Thus, in man, the upper world argues with the lower world. This argument is threefold. The first takes place in the realm of desire. The desire is ensouled. The passions and desires take on an upward tendency. One can observe this tendency in people who have a leaning towards ideals. Their passions turn from passing, changing goals to lasting ideals. What takes place in them is only a shadow of a process that takes place in the purely spiritual, mental realm. Every time an ideal passion develops in a human being, their cosmos has received a jolt forward; an innocent thought-being has taken shape and body, has become in the true sense of the word. It has now become a link in the progressive development in the cosmos, whose power cannot disappear again. It can be taken up again by even higher realms; but its power does not fade in them. When the human being has gained the ability to carry the honey of the realm of desire upwards, he can descend to the actual realm of life. He now purifies the growth forces of his nature. In doing so, he reaches beyond himself as a personality. In a much more general sense than before, he now becomes a co-worker with the cosmos. Just as the plant, unlike the animal, does not desire or abhor anything for itself, but absorbs the substances of its environment in calm serenity in order to pass them on selflessly in growth and reproduction, so at this stage the human being makes himself a transitional being and a helper of the spiritual-cosmic forces of growth. A high level of human development has thus been reached. Man gives more than his body to higher powers than his desire could give. If he previously only hewed the stones to build the cosmic building, he is now working on the building plan itself. He has become a disciple (chela) of cosmic beings. He not only knows what is to be carried from the lower realms into the higher ones: he also knows how the details are to be fitted together. At this stage of development everything becomes clear, transparent and plastic. Space and time have not yet entirely lost their significance, but they have become mobile and their limiting and inhibiting power has dissolved. Now there is only one step left to be taken in the realm of thought. This step leads the various lines of force of the cosmos back to their centers. Man no longer learns only the plan; he learns the intentions of the whole structure. The basis, the framework of his cosmos is revealed to him. He now knows what holds and carries this cosmos of his. The level of mastery has been reached. A master being wills and acts out of the intentions of the cosmic system to which he belongs. These intentions are a great mystery to beings at lower levels of evolution; they are even a great mystery to disciples: the cosmic mysteries. Until now, all those who know something of such a world have often hinted at such degrees of development in isolated passages of their writings. These indications are subtle, but comprehensible to him who has an inkling of higher worlds. Read in Goethe: “In nature, not only the events, but above all the intentions are worthy of attention.”

Through his development, the human being increasingly shapes his will in the direction of the cosmic plan. As long as he only integrates the building blocks of the body of desire into this plan, it will not be able to depend on him for what he accomplishes. The plan of the whole hovers over him, and how he and his actions fit into this plan: he feels this as a commandment given from outside. He must submit to this law. This is how the idealistically minded person feels. To integrate his actions into the harmony of the whole is a sacred commandment for him: an ideal. What he accomplishes, he accomplishes out of duty. If he reaches the next higher level and thus becomes acquainted with the plan, then it becomes self-evident to him that he should proceed in a certain way in each individual case and not otherwise. He not only feels a commandment, a duty; he regards it as senseless to act differently. For it would awaken his disgust, which would arise if he did not act in the sense and direction of this plan. So with increasing knowledge, certainty grows in the behavior of the human being: He does what he is supposed to do out of inclination for the deed: He acts out of love. This is the way the disciple relates to his actions. However, this level must first be acquired. Anyone who believes that they are allowed to act out of love without the necessary level of knowledge will only act in the sense of their particular existence instead of in the sense and direction of their cosmos. And the interests of this particular existence do not necessarily have to coincide with the direction of the will of their cosmos. The right to act out of love must first be acquired through insight and wisdom. The Master reaches an even higher level in this respect as well. He fulfills the intentions of his Cosmos. He does not stand outside of these intentions, but within them. They are his. The idealist is driven by duty, the chela by love; he is driven by nothing, he only realizes his own nature in reality. The Master has arrived at acting out of freedom. It is quite erroneous to argue whether man is free or not. He is neither free nor unfree at any stage of development prior to the highest realm of thought; he is on the path of development toward freedom. Only the Master is completely free. Thus are the stages of man: that of the purification of the passions or that of the intuitive idealist, who forms the building blocks of the world of thought; that of recognizing the plan, working on this plan out of knowledge of it, or the stage of the disciple (Chelas); and finally, the realization of the intentions of the cosmos, the becoming one with the plan of this cosmos, or the stage of mastery. The idealist acts out of duty: he obeys a should. The disciple acts out of love, he realizes his will; the master acts in freedom, he lives out his essence.

Man rises to the Cosmos in insight and wisdom. This wisdom was originally in the Cosmos. Through knowledge, man comes to know the Cosmos, because the Cosmos is formed through knowledge. The knowledge laid in the Cosmos draws the human soul towards itself and becomes one with it. Therefore, everything the human soul does in this direction is a cosmic process. Man, at the lower and middle levels of his development, does not see it as cosmic because he does not see the process itself, but its shadow image, projection, as it can only be given by the brain consciousness. What appears to be taking place within the walls of the skull is not the real process. It is to this as the silhouettes on the wall are to the real people. In reality, the action that takes place there goes through the entire sphere of the world of thought and shakes the whole cosmos. When I move my hand, the eye sees a process of the physical realm in the hand movement. It appears directly in its true form. Even an emotion or passion no longer appears to a physical being in its true form, but in its effect, in its shadow image in the physical world. And this is even less the case with a process in which thought is involved. — Thus, what a person recognizes is limited by his or her respective stage of development, and accordingly, his or her will must also be determined in the same direction. In reality, the human being is always fully present. The original egg contains the whole human being, as formed within the sphere of thought. But this whole human being is only gradually revealed to himself. And he is basically only real to himself to the extent that he reveals himself. He acts out of the essence of his nature only to the extent that he has brought this essence into existence in the lower realms. This essence itself is as a force behind what is obvious to him. From the unknown, it shapes his activities. A being with senses for the higher forms of existence would be able to see what man can only recognize in his shadowy effects in the physical realm. Man thinks, but he does not see his thoughts; he feels, but he does not see his feelings. His consciousness encompasses only a part of his sphere of activity, which is the content of his being. Development proceeds in such a way that ever higher parts of this sphere of activity enter the field of consciousness. And with that, more and more is also done with consciousness; this changes the whole character of the activity. What a person accomplishes consciously is different from what goes on within him without him knowing how it is accomplished. His development thus consists in transforming the unconscious parts of his being into conscious ones. By attaining the higher degrees of consciousness, man also automatically attains the higher degrees in relation to his actions. Only those who unconsciously follow their desires are carried away by them to the wrong things: Those whose minds are awakened in the sphere of desire see what a feeling they harbor in this sphere can accomplish. It is only natural that they then shape their feelings accordingly. And to an even greater degree, this is the case with those who have become enlightened in the realm of thought. His cosmos becomes different for him than it is for the mere thinking person. Just as when someone steps out of a dark room, in which he constantly bumps into chairs and tables, into one brightly lit with intense light, so the life of the mere thinking person is transformed into that of the seeing-thinking person.

And with the awakening of the power of vision in the world of thought, all the essential influences that constantly surround man and of which he knows nothing without this power of vision, become manifest at the same time. To the uninitiated, the effects that flow to him from this sphere remain inexplicable because the causes are not apparent to him. The seer therefore speaks of the gods of the sphere of thought, of such entities that can only be perceived by him because they do not embody themselves down to the physical plane of existence; the outer shell they wear is a garment of thought, and this is related to them as man's physical body is related to man himself. Thus the seer understands the reason for what is often called the sudden appearance of a thought, an instantaneous enlightenment. At that moment a being from the sphere of thought whispers a truth to a person who is receptive to it. The person does not need to know more than that a certain thought has suddenly occurred: the seer sees behind the scenes of the cosmic stage and it is clear to him that a being floating in the sphere of thought is hovering around the person. The one who gains the ability to see into the world of thought enters a richly populated realm, a realm in which all physical experience is initially poor. However, it gains a new richness for the one who sees. For what he experiences in the higher sphere is woven into the physical one and infinitely elevates, beautifies and ennobles its existence. And contact with the beings of thought also reveals much about the physical and the world of desire, which must remain hidden within these themselves. Those who only know physical contact will naturally consider what is being spoken of here to be a figment of the imagination. From their point of view, they are right. He is only wrong in regarding his point of view as the only correct one and making no effort to reach a higher one. He will then also consider dealing with the thought beings to be a highly superfluous activity and talk about this contact to be something harmful that only distracts people from pursuing their real, practical goals.

Just as man's original egg derives its character from the realm of thought, so it also brings up the results of the three lower realms as their lasting legacy in the realm of thought. In this respect, everything that happens through man in the realm of thought is the cause of effects; and man has, so to speak, buried the fruits of his activity in the three realms in the realm of thought, his home. Only that which remains for the individual egg body as the fruit of its pilgrimage through the spheres of physical, life and desire can truly be the result of human development. This egg body is the permanent element in the changing phenomena that pass by the human being: but it is also the keeper of the lasting results: the carrier of all fruits. But only that which can really take on a lasting character is imprinted on this body. That which has only a temporary value dissipates as a wave in the physical or desire realm without leaving a trace in the lasting. For example, consider the development of a person at a fairly subordinate level. Such a person follows his desires and passions according to the strengths and characteristics they have. Only after a long period of time do thoughts arise from these desires and passions that are worth keeping. Thus, the thought core slowly forms within the various shells. When a person has reached the end of a lifetime, he will find himself in the following situation. The physical body is no longer able to maintain the cohesion of its parts through its own powers. It decays. This means nothing other than He steps out of the current in which he was absorbed by the human being and passes into the general physical realm. The parts of life and desire are equally temporary. They too must find the transition to the spheres to which they belong. Ultimately, however, something of the human being remains: the experiences, fruits, and results from the three realms during life, embedded in his original individual egg body. The cohesion of these results can no longer be destroyed. It is a link in the realm of thought of the cosmos to which the human being belonged. Is his task now exhausted and will he now have his entire continued existence in this realm of thought? One could believe this if the contemplation of the cosmos did not immediately reveal this further task. Within this cosmos, we see the permanent body continuing to evolve and descending again and again into the lower realms. The results of a previous life are increased, enriched and strengthened in subsequent lives. Human personalities with the most diverse degrees of development live on earth. This could not be the case if a single original, individual egg of a similar nature were embodied in each personality. But such would have to embody itself if the embodied one came directly from the pure realm of thought. The original thought-germ does not release from itself different perfections, but only equally perfect, i.e. innocent, original individuals. All diversity stems from the diversity of experiences during the passage through the three realms. If one wants to search for the reasons why a person has this or that disposition, one must not look for these reasons in the lofty realms of the realm of thought, but in life within the lower three realms. One personality becomes different from another because the individual bodies descending into the lower realms belong to different degrees of development, i.e., because they already have different life experiences. A life is therefore not explainable from itself. It only becomes comprehensible when it is understood as a repetition of other lives belonging to it. This law of repetition is found throughout nature. And just as it is found in the human kingdom, it is only a repetition of a law also present in the plant and animal kingdoms at a higher level.

Man advances further on his path of development by increasingly determining the goal and direction of his being himself. In the early stages, nature guides man according to its principles. The more the element of thought develops, the more man's self-activity also grows. For his original being is taken from the realm of thought. The more this moves in the realm from which it itself originates, the freer and more unveiled it becomes itself. Now, progress on this path to freedom involves working on certain qualities in the human being. The human being who reaches the stage where he develops his element of thinking more and more as a permanent element has certain qualities that must undergo a complete transformation if he is to achieve higher development. —

The first quality to be developed is determined by the very nature of higher development. This is a continuous ascent of life from the changing and the fleeting to the abiding and the lasting. The cognitive faculty must thereby acquire, to an ever-higher degree, the ability to recognize the lasting in the changing, to draw the fruits from the fleeting in order to carry them forward into the realm of the spirit. Every moment of life and every random thing can be used to develop this quality. For there are exactly two things to be distinguished in every thing: something fleeting and something lasting. We do not need to distinguish between the two as if there were a fixed boundary between them. That is not the case. Rather, they merge into one another without such a fixed boundary. The fleeting is more or less fleeting; the lasting is more or less lasting. Nor can one speak of the lasting as of something “eternal”. Eternal is the last thing to which one can arrive; what is below this “eternal” lasts longer than many a changing thing in the stream of time. But in the end, even the stream of time falls under such permanence and allows only its fruits to enter as links into a still higher, still more enduring realm. By developing this sense for the permanent, man's whole character is changed. And consequently, he seeks to overcome the changing, the temporary, everywhere. His striving takes the direction of the conceptual. What previously seemed particularly full of life and desirable becomes worthless to him, and what previously seemed empty and abstract gains meaningful life. If he previously only wanted the thought in order to get to know an external thing through it, now the external thing is nothing more than the cause of this or that thought. He seeks the thoughts for their own sake, and everything else for the sake of the thoughts. Whoever attains this perfection in his cognitive faculty will, as a result, change his emotional world all by himself. He can no longer attach his feelings to the transitory, since the lasting opens up to him everywhere. The change that takes place in a person as this second character trait develops in him can be seen in a transition of his entire being from small to large lines. He will give his actions a typical character, a certain lawful imprint. There will be constant currents of his will running through the small tasks of the day. More and more, a person who acquires these two basic traits, the ability to distinguish and character type, will distance himself from the passing interests that hold others captive. Something significant, weighty and fruitful takes possession of his thoughts and actions. Through the content of his thoughts and the motives of his actions, he himself becomes a significant link in the realm of thoughts. Once there, in order to develop further, man must cultivate certain further qualities. The realm of thoughts does not bear the one-sided, rigid, immovable basic trait that the physical and the realm of desires also have. Everything in the realm of thoughts is all-encompassing. A tree is by itself a single entity. In this sense, a thought is not by itself. It is connected with other thoughts and ultimately forms a link in the whole world of thoughts in such a way that it can only be fully understood if one understands the whole world of thoughts. The life in thoughts requires that one is aware that a thought must be illuminated by the other. “I am free” is a thought. In a certain sense, it applies to the ego. But the sentence “I am unfree” also applies. Only if one grasps both sentences and illuminates them with each other does one obtain the life that they determine in the world of thought. It should [manuscript breaks off]

[ 1 ] When the work of Michael at the present time is approached through spiritual experience, it becomes possible, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, to obtain light on the cosmic nature of Freedom.

[ 2 ] This does not refer to my Philosophy of Freedom (or ‘Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,’) which is based on the purely human faculties of cognition, where these are operative in the field of the spirit. In order to follow the thought of this book, it is not yet necessary to join company with the beings of other worlds. But it may be said that the Philosophy of Freedom prepares the way for the understanding of the freedom which, in spiritual connection with Michael, can then be experienced. [ 3 ] And this is as follows.

[ 4 ] If freedom is to be a living reality in human action, then that which is accomplished in the light of it must be completely independent of man's physical and etheric organisation. There can be no freedom except through the ‘I,’ and the astral body must be able to vibrate in harmony with the free activity of the ‘I,’ so that it may be able to transmit it to the physical and etheric bodies. But this is only one side of the matter. The other side becomes clear in connection with the mission of Michael. For it is also true that what man experiences in freedom must not in any way affect his physical or etheric body. Were this to happen, he would have to lose entirely what he had gained during his evolution under the influence of Divine-Spiritual Being, and Divine-Spiritual Manifestation.

[ 5 ] What man experiences through this his environment which is but the accomplished Work of the Divine and Spiritual, must take effect on his spiritual nature (i.e. his Ego) only. His physical and etheric Organisation must only be affected by that which flows on, in the stream of evolution, not in his outer environment, but within his own being, and which had its origin in the Being and Manifestation of the Divine-Spiritual. But this must not work together with that in the human being which lives in the element of freedom.

[ 6 ] All this is only made possible because Michael carries over from the far past of evolution something that brings man into connection with that Divine-Spiritual reality which in the present day no longer penetrates the physical and etheric Organisation. Through this the foundation is being laid, within the mission of Michael, for a human intercourse with the spiritual world which does not interfere at all with the working of Nature.

[ 7 ] It is inspiring to see how the human being is raised by Michael into the spiritual sphere, whereas the unconscious and subconscious elements which develop beneath the sphere of freedom are uniting ever more strongly with the world of matter.

[ 8 ] Man's position with respect to the world will in the future become more and more incomprehensible to him if he is not prepared to recognise, in addition to his relations to the beings and processes of Nature, such relations as this to the Michael Mission. Our relations to Nature are recognised by looking at them from without; our relations to the spiritual world proceed from something like an inner conversation with Beings to whom we have opened up the way by adopting a spiritual view of the world.

[ 9 ] In order, therefore, for man to realise the impulse of freedom, he must be able to hold at a distance certain influences of Nature which affect his being from the Cosmos. This ‘holding at a distance’ is taking place in the sub-consciousness, when in the consciousness there are the forces which represent the life of the Ego in freedom. For the inward perception of man himself there is the consciousness of his activity in freedom, but for the spiritual Beings connected with man from other spheres of the Universe it is different. The Being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, who leads human existence from one earthly life to another, sees at once how the matter stands regarding human action in freedom; he sees how man thrusts away from himself cosmic forces which want to form and mould him further—which want to give to his Ego-organisation the necessary physical supports, as they did before the age of Michael.

[ 10 ] Michael, who is a member of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, receives his impressions with the aid of the Beings of the Angeloi-hierarchy. He devotes himself, in the manner here described, to the task of bringing to man from the spiritual part of the Cosmos forces which can replace those from the realm of Nature which have been suppressed.

[ 11 ] He accomplishes this by bringing his activity into the most perfect accord with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 12 ] The forces which man requires for the compensation of suppressed impulses of Nature when he acts through freedom, are contained in the activity of Christ within earthly evolution. But man must then really bring his soul into that inner life in union with Christ, of which we have already spoken in these articles on the Michael Mission.

[ 13 ] When a man faces the physical Sun and receives from it warmth and light he knows that he is living in a reality. [ 14 ] In the same way he must live in the presence of Christ, the spiritual Sun, who has joined His life to that of the Earth, and receive actively from Him into his soul that which in the spiritual world corresponds to warmth and light.

[ 15 ] He will feel himself permeated by ‘spiritual warmth’ when he experiences the ‘Christ in me.’ Feeling himself thus permeated he will say to himself: ‘This warmth liberates my human being from bonds of the Cosmos in which it may not remain. For me to gain my freedom the Divine-Spiritual Being of primeval times had to lead me into regions where it could not remain with me, where, however, it gave me Christ, that His forces might bestow upon me as a free human being what the Divine-Spiritual primeval Being once gave me by way of Nature, which was then also the Spirit-way. This warmth leads me back again to the divine sources, whence I came.’

[ 16 ] And in this feeling there will grow together in man, in inner warmth of soul, the experience in and with Christ and the experience of real and true humanity. ‘Christ gives me my humanity’—that will be the fundamental feeling which will well up in the soul and pervade it. When this feeling is once there, another comes: man feels raised by Christ beyond mere earthly existence, he feels one with the starry firmament around the Earth and with all that can be recognised in this firmament as Spiritual and Divine.

[ 17 ] It is the same with the spiritual Light. Man can feel himself fully in his true human nature by becoming aware of himself as a free individual. A certain darkening is however connected with this. The Divine-Spiritual of primeval times no longer shines. The primeval Light appears again in the Light brought by Christ to the human ego. In the life in union with Christ this blissful thought may shine like a sun through the whole soul: ‘The glorious primal Divine Light is here again; it shines, although its light comes not from Nature.’ And man unites himself, while in the present, with the spiritual, cosmic forces of Light belonging to that past when he was not yet a free individual. And in this Light he can find the paths which lead him aright as a human being, when in his soul he unites himself, with understanding, with the Michael Mission.

[ 18 ] Then in the Spirit-warmth man will feel the impulse which so carries him over into his cosmic future, that in this future he will be able to remain true to the original gifts of Divine Spiritual Beings, albeit he has evolved in their worlds to free individuality. And in the Spirit-light he will feel the power which leads him with open eyes and ever higher and wider consciousness to the world in which as a free human being he will find himself again with the Gods of his origin.

[ 19 ] If man wishes to continue in the original existence and keep the primal naive Divine Goodness which held sway in him, and shrinks from the full use of freedom—it leads him, in this present world in which everything tends to develop his freedom, to Lucifer, who wishes the present world to be denied.

[ 20 ] If man devotes himself to present existence and wishes the natural world alone to hold sway (the natural world which is accessible to the present intellect and which is neutral with respect to Goodness), if he wishes to experience the use of freedom in the intellect alone, then in this present world where evolution needs to be continued in deeper regions of the soul, while freedom rules in the upper regions—he will after all be led to Ahriman, who wishes to see the present world transformed into a Cosmos of pure intellectuality.

[ 21 ] Certainty of soul and spirit flourishes in those regions where man feels that in the direction of the outer world his gaze rests spiritually on Michael, and in the direction towards the inner being of the soul on Christ. It is that certainty through which he will be able to traverse the cosmic path upon which he will, without losing his origin, in the future find his true perfection.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 22 ] 118. That action alone can be free in which no process of Nature, either within man or without him, plays an active part.

[ 23 ] 119. But there is also the other pole, the opposite aspect of this truth. Whenever the individuality of man works freely, a Nature-process is suppressed in him. In an unfree action this process of Nature would indeed be present, giving to the human being his cosmically predestined character.

[ 24 ] 120. To the man who with his own life and being really partakes in the present and future stages of World-evolution, this character is not vouchsafed by way of Nature. But it comes to him by way of the Spirit when he unites himself with Michael, whereby he also finds the way to Christ.

[ 1 ] When one considers the relation of Michael to Ahriman, one may well feel impelled to ask: How are these spiritual Powers related to one another in the cosmic sense, seeing that both of them are active in the unfolding of the forces of Intellectuality?

[ 2 ] In the past Michael unfolded the Intellectuality throughout the Cosmos. He did this as the servant of the Divine Spiritual Powers, to whom both he himself and man owed their origin. And he wishes not to depart from this relationship to Intellectuality. When Intellectuality was loosened from the Divine-Spiritual Powers in order to find its way into the inner being of man, Michael resolved thenceforth to assume his true relationship to mankind in order that in mankind he might find his relationship to the Intellectuality. But he wanted to do all this only in the sense of the Divine Spiritual Powers and as their servant still. For with these Powers he has been united ever since his own origin and that of men. Therefore it is his intention that Intellectuality shall flow in future through the hearts of men, but that it shall flow there as the self-same force which it was in the beginning when it poured forth from the Divine-Spiritual Powers.

[ 3 ] It is altogether different with Ahriman. He is a Being who long, long ago severed himself from the stream of evolution to which those Divine-Spiritual Powers belong of whom we are speaking. In an age of primal antiquity he set himself up beside them as an independent power in the Cosmos. This Being, though in the present day he is there in the world of space to which man belongs, evolves no relationship of inner forces with the Beings rightly belonging to this world. It is only through the Intellectuality, loosened from the Divine Spiritual Beings, which comes into this world, that Ahriman—finding himself akin to it—is able in his own way to unite himself with mankind. For in an ancient and primeval past he already united with himself this Intellectuality which man receives in the present as a gift from the Cosmos. Ahriman, if he succeeded in his intentions, would make the intellect, given to mankind, similar to his own.

[ 4 ] Now Ahriman appropriated Intellectuality to himself in an age when he could not make it an inner reality within him. It has remained in his being as a force, utterly detached from anything of heart or soul. Intellectuality pours forth from Ahriman as a cold and freezing, soulless cosmic impulse. Those human beings who are taken hold of by this impulse bring forth that logic which seems to speak for itself alone, void of compassion and of love, which bears no evidence of a right, heartfelt, inner relationship of soul between the human being and what he thinks and speaks and does. In real truth it is Ahriman who speaks in this kind of logic.

[ 5 ] But Michael has never appropriated Intellectuality to himself. He rules it as a Divine-Spiritual force while feeling himself united with the Divine-Spiritual Powers. And when he pervades the intellect it becomes manifest that the intellect can equally well be an expression of the heart and soul as an expression of the head and mind. For Michael has within him all the original forces of his Gods as well as those of man. Consequently he does not convey to the intellect anything that is soulless, cold, frosty, but he stands by it in a manner that is full of soul and inwardly warm.

[ 6 ] Herein, too, lies the reason why Michael moves through the Cosmos with earnest mien and gesture. To be inwardly united in this way with intelligence means at the same time to be obliged to fulfil the requirement that into it shall be brought no subjective caprice, wish or desire. Otherwise logic becomes the arbitrary activity of one being, instead of the expression of the Cosmos. Michael considers that his special virtue consists in strictly maintaining his being as the expression of the World-Being, keeping within himself all that would make itself felt as his own being. His aims are directed towards the great purposes of the Cosmos; this is expressed in his mien. His will, as it approaches man, must reflect what he sees in the Cosmos; and this is shown in his attitude, his gesture. Michael is earnest in all things, for earnestness, as the manifestation of a being, is a reflection of the Cosmos from this being; smiling is the expression of that which proceeds and radiates from a being into the world.

[ 7 ] One of the Imaginations of Michael is the following: he rules through the passage of time; bearing the light from the Cosmos really as his own being; giving form to the warmth from the Cosmos as the revealer of his own being; as a being he keeps steadily on his course like a world, affirming himself only by affirming the world, as if leading forces down to the Earth from all parts of the Universe.

[ 8 ] Contrast this with an Imagination of Ahriman: As he goes along he would like to capture space from time; he has darkness around him into which he shoots the rays of his own light; the more he achieves his aims the severer is the frost around him; he moves as a world which contracts entirely into one being, viz., his own, in which he affirms himself only by denying the world; he moves as if he carried with him the sinister forces of dark caves in the Earth.

[ 9 ] When man seeks freedom without inclining towards egoism—when freedom becomes for him pure love for the action which is to be performed—then it is possible for him to approach Michael. But if he desires to act freely and at the same time develops egoism—if freedom becomes for him the proud feeling of manifesting himself in the action—then he is in danger of falling into Ahriman's sphere.

[ 10 ] The Imaginations we have just described shine forth from a man's pure love for the action (Michael), or from his own self-love in acting (Ahriman).

[ 11 ] When man feels himself as a free being in proximity to Michael he is on the way to carry the intellectual power into his ‘whole man’; he thinks indeed with his head, but his heart feels the brightness of the thought or its shade; the will radiates forth the essential being of man by allowing thoughts, to stream into it as intentions and aims. Man becomes more and more man by becoming the expression of the world; he finds himself, not by seeking himself, but by uniting himself voluntarily with the world.

[ 12 ] If, when man unfolds his freedom, he succumbs to Ahriman's temptations, he is drawn into intellectuality as if into a spiritual automatic process in which he is a part; he is no longer himself. All his thinking becomes an experience of the head; but this separates it from the experience of his own heart and the life of his own will, and blots out his own being. Man loses more and more of the true inner human expression by becoming the expression of his own separate existence; he loses himself by seeking himself, he withdraws himself from the world which he refuses to love. It is only when he loves the world that a man truly experiences himself.

[ 13 ] From the above description it may be evident that Michael is the Guide to Christ. Michael goes with love on his way through the world, with all the earnestness of his nature, attitude and action. The man who attaches himself to him cultivates love in relation to the outer world. And love must be unfolded first of all in relation to the outer world, otherwise it becomes self-love.

[ 14 ] If this love in the spirit of Michael is there, then one's love of another being will shine back into one's own self. The self will be able to love without loving itself. And on the paths of this love Christ can be found by the human soul.

[ 15 ] One who holds fast to Michael cultivates love in relation to the outer world, and he thereby finds that relation to the inner world of his soul which brings him in touch with Christ.

[ 16 ] The age now dawning requires that humanity should turn its attention to a world immediately bordering upon the world perceived as physical—one in which can be found what we have here described as the Being and the Mission of Michael. For the world which man pictures as Nature when he sees this physical world, is also not the one in which he is immediately living, but one which lies as far below the truly human world as the world of Michael lies above it. It is only that man fails to notice that unconsciously, when he makes for himself a picture of his world, the image of another world really arises. When he paints this picture he at the same time excludes himself and succumbs to the spiritual automatic process. Man can only preserve his humanity by placing over against this picture, in which he loses himself in the picture of Nature, the other, in which Michael rules—in which Michael leads the way to Christ.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing account of the World-Thoughts in the Working of Michael and in the Working of Ahriman)

[ 17 ] 121. We have not fully understood the significance or the Universe of something that is working there—for instance, of the Cosmic Thoughts—so long as we stop short at the thing itself. We must also look to recognise the Beings from whom it proceeds. Thus for the Cosmic Thoughts we must see whether it is Michael or Ahriman who bears them out into the world and through the world.

[ 18 ] 122. Proceeding from the one Being—by virtue of his relation to the world—the same thing will work creatively and wholesomely; proceeding from another, it will prove fatal and destructive. The Cosmic Thoughts carry man into the future when he receives them from Michael; they lead him away from the future of his salvation when Ahriman has power to give them to him.

[ 19 ] 123. Such reflections lead us ever more to overcome the idea of an undefined Spirituality, pantheistically conceived as holding sway at the root of all things. We are led to a conception that is definite and real, capable of clear ideas about the spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies. For the reality is everywhere a reality of Being. Whatsoever in it is not Being, is the activity that proceeds in the relation of one Being to another. This too can only be understood if we can turn our gaze to the active Beings.