The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! Since I have often been allowed to speak here about spiritual science and its results, may I be allowed to speak this evening about a special chapter that undoubtedly lies infinitely close to many souls: the Christ-question - not only because circles in our time there is an ever-increasing need to approach this question, but also because spiritual science in particular has something to say about this question, about how the Christ-question has to be integrated into our culture. Spiritual science does not want to be a germ of a new religion, but to show the way how to penetrate into areas that are not accessible to the ordinary senses, to modern science. It will not be possible to talk about what we want to deal with without briefly pointing out the many changes that have taken place in human hearts with regard to this question. For this, a brief review is necessary.

If we simply visualize Christianity's emergence into the world, we can initially say that at the beginning of our era something happened that gave the whole development of humanity a new impetus, a turn upwards. Even the non-believer will have to admit, for historical reasons alone, that the impulse that came through Christianity was a powerful one. At the time when the Christ Impulse entered the world, the human soul was in a very different condition than it is today, and a change in this condition will have to occur in the future simply because new powers of knowledge will awaken in the human soul. One thing is of historical significance: The most enlightened minds of the Occident, equipped with the deepest knowledge, had to recognize - under the highest tension of the powers of knowledge, through the greatest that they could muster in mental acuity - that something powerful had entered into the life of humanity through the Christ impulse. Let us first consider the view of the Gnostics, who are called “religious geniuses” by the most highly qualified and outstanding scholars of the present day. We do not want to talk about the cognitive value of Gnosticism, but we want to ask: What did the Gnostics think about Christ? We want to try to characterize the Gnostic attitude towards Christ. Gnosticism is a theory of evolution that must seem fantastic to people today. When we talk about evolution today, we ask: How did the human body develop through the various stages? - The Gnostic, on the other hand, said: “If you think impartially, you are led not to a material but to a spiritual origin; if you focus on the point where man came down from the spiritual into matter, you find that something was left behind in the purely spiritual heights in order to later penetrate into the development of mankind. Man could only progress by becoming more and more entangled in matter. If he had not done so, he would never have attained freedom. He had to become estranged from the spiritual in order to find his possibility of freedom in matter. Then, at the point in time when man was most deeply entangled in matter, that which had been held back earlier in the spiritual world at the origin of man had to pour into earthly development in order to prevent man from completely sinking into matter. That which flowed down from the spiritual worlds has been connected with the earth ever since, and Christ lives on with the development of mankind.

If we ask, with the means of spiritual science, how the Gnostics arrived at such ideas, we see on careful examination that these ideas, which the Gnostics brought forth from the deepest spiritual powers, come from an epoch when there was still direct vision, because in previous times the human soul was still attuned quite differently. From this original knowledge, ideas such as the Gnostic ones developed. Gnosticism seems like an heirloom of ancient knowledge. Here we encounter a lofty concept of Christ, which even those who consider Gnosticism fantastic must acknowledge: the Gnostic idea is bold and grandiose. We can quickly pass over the first Church Fathers who worked to establish the [Christian] dogmas. What the Fathers dared to do in those days, men later completely abandoned. In the middle of the Middle Ages, this view was completely abandoned. It was said: Human knowledge is not sufficient to reveal the heights to which Christ's entry into the earthly sphere could reach. Faith was substituted for real knowledge. Thus we see how the conception of Christ changes over the centuries, just as the character of the times changes with culture.

In the sixteenth century, we enter the age of great advances in the natural sciences. A [new] knowledge had to arise for this - a [new] kind of knowledge, which was primarily concerned with recognizing the material world and its laws. This knowledge emerged as an important developmental factor that transformed all commercial and industrial life. Medieval humanity still fully surrendered to faith; the Middle Ages believed what the Gnostics once recognized. The external world, which is our physical environment, shaped the new era. Thus, the whole concept of Christ was transformed: While the Gnostics could speak of a divine being that had only taken up residence in a human being, in more recent times it became increasingly impossible to imagine God incarnate. It would be interesting to show how, in the individual phases, the earlier conception increasingly recedes in favor of a [more outwardly] tangible Christ. Due to their inner state of mind, people were forced to refrain from seeing God incarnate and instead to see in him more and more the human being, albeit one of the most outstanding kind. In a human soul, in the man of Nazareth, one seeks today the starting point of Christianity, instead of seeing in this man only the gate through which the Christ entered [into the earthly sphere].

Enlightened minds, far removed from all theology, have wrestled with the question: How can a modern person relate to the Christ event? It is interesting, though, that the three personalities, who were all born in the same year just over a hundred years ago, endeavored to come to terms with this Christ event. Otto Ludwig wrestled with the material in order to shape it into a drama; Friedrich Hebbel noted the plan for a Christ drama. What they both wrote down shows that they could not cope with the problem, it was too big for them. We also know that Richard Wagner worked on this task and could not finish it.

As for this materialistic view of the mere human being Jesus, it must be said that it has not remained unfruitful; Jesus theology has also produced beautiful blossoms. Rittelmeyer's little booklet “Jesus” is just one example: it is something that can deeply touch the heart and soul. Modern theology has produced much of the same kind. Peter Rosegger, a justly popular poet of the present day, constructed a Jesus for himself. If you imagine Rosegger himself, highly idealized with all his beautiful, sympathetic qualities, you have his idea of Jesus of Nazareth.

Despite all the tremendous achievements of theology in recent times, a remarkable discovery has been made: that if you look at the Gospels with an open mind, Christ Jesus cannot have been a human being at all. Benjamin Smith, for example, claimed that all interpretations of the Christ as the simple man of Nazareth are a slap in the face of any scientific approach, that it is not possible, that it is incompatible with all tradition, to want to see only a human being, even if it is the most ideal, in the Christ; so one sees that the Christ Jesus must be a god. This realization comes at a time when humanity no longer has any conception of what a god is. And so the conclusion is drawn: since there can only be human beings on earth, but the Christ must be a god, he cannot have existed on earth at all. Under such circumstances, from such premises, there has been accomplished what for years has caused so much sensation: the denial of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth.

In brief, this is the course of the conception of Christ through the centuries. How does spiritual science relate to the Christ event? How can it relate to the most important problem of human development? Spiritual science starts from the premise that the human being not only has knowledge based on observation of the external world, but that he can also ascend to higher knowledge by developing dormant powers.

Just as the chemist, by separating hydrogen and oxygen, makes something completely new out of water, producing a substance with very different properties, so too can something completely new arise in the human being through the use of appropriate methods. Just as we cannot see what is in the water, we cannot see what powers a person has within them. Through a kind of spiritual chemistry, using exercises that are described in more detail in my books, something new can be developed in a person; the soul can work beyond the body and become aware of itself in the spiritual world. This is still quite foreign to many people and will only gradually become more common. Today, at the beginning of an epoch in which this knowledge will gradually become common property, it is possible to recognize the spiritual world, [as was once the case with the] Copernican world view, which was also laughed at at first, but which nevertheless became established. Today they no longer burn heretics who speak of a body-free perception of the soul, but they ridicule them and make them look foolish.

If we approach gnosis from this point of view, something emerges that is not just a further development and revival of gnosis: namely, that the human soul carries over what has been achieved in earlier epochs into later ones. If we embrace the doctrine of repeated earthly lives, we arrive at a more precise characterization of the earthly epochs themselves. Historical progress must be observed by spiritual scientific means. Then it becomes clear that just as man comes to hunger and thirst [in a natural way], so in ancient times he came to recognize the inner secrets of existence in images and visions from his own organization. Then the human soul lost this ability; man had to develop the ability to create concepts himself. This ability only arose later - on the basis of ideas (of a pictorial-visionary kind). Only out of shortsightedness can one deny that conceptual knowledge also had to develop first.

The epoch in which the human soul underwent this transformation is the time when the Christ entered into evolution; as a result, the human soul has become something other than it was before the Christ event. In ancient times, man received through images that which was hidden behind sensual existence. That is the characteristic of the old world view, that man attained knowledge in the form of images of how he was connected to the cosmos and the gods. This is still the view of ancient Hebrew times, in which a connection existed between the spiritual and the sensual world through the prophets and seers, as it were. But this connection was felt to be growing weaker and weaker the closer it came to the moment of the Mystery of Golgotha. If a special impulse had not come into the development of the earth at that time, the human soul would have felt more and more isolated, because man was left to his own resources, but at the same time man became isolated from that moment on. It is no exaggeration to say that we are heading towards the age of individualism. But with that, the possibility arose of finding something new that souls in the pre-Christian era could not yet find: the Christ presence. Since the emergence of Christianity, what was previously found in nature can be found in the spirit. Before the Christ event, man could no longer find the connection with the divine powers that he had in ancient times. The development of Christianity so far is only a preparation for the Christianity of the future; people will see that after a relatively short time the world situation will change completely.

There may be many who are satisfied with what is given by Bible and tradition; that is a selfish point of view. In rapid succession, souls will develop in such a way that they will no longer be able to approach the Christ in the old way. Man will stand more and more alone with [conventional] concepts and ideas. Man once felt as a spirit among spirits; the modern man can only feel as a body among bodies. But the souls that long to come to the inexplicable in themselves will ask themselves: How am I, how is my self connected to a spiritual world? If we look at these processes with understanding and soulfulness, a comparison suggests itself: When certain animals prepare for something special, they tend to go hungry. As a result, such processes take place within them that the forces of the organism that are released as a result flow in a different direction. And when we look at people, we see that they have acquired more and more knowledge about matter and its laws, but spiritually they have starved in terms of soul knowledge. At the same time, the direct perception of Christ was being prepared in the spiritual world. Over the centuries, the human soul has deprived itself of spiritual nourishment and thus, through starvation, developed those organs that will unfold in the future.

People are approaching a goal of development where they will find the Christ as they find a law of nature [today]. But they will not find him as a dead law, but as a living entity, and they will know: Since the Mystery of Golgotha, an entity has entered into the development of the earth that was not there before. Laws cannot comfort, they cannot help with pain, but the connection with the Christ can help, and this will be felt in the soul as strength. It will not be possible to find the Christ by dogmatic means; it will be possible to find the Christ in a completely different way; in a completely different way one will find the truth of the word: “I am with you until the end of the earthly days.” A time will come when it will not be considered impossible from a scientific point of view that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Spirit has been living in the earth, in the earthly development of mankind. Until now, only those who know something about the Christ are recognized as Christians. In the future, people will know that the Christ did not come to Earth only to bring a teaching, but to accomplish an act. Then one can also find the Christ-germ in the Hindu, the Japanese, the Mohammedan.

I am fully aware that I am not speaking from a medieval point of view, but from one that fully recognizes everything that science has achieved. But just as one recognizes the laws of electricity, radioactivity and so on, one will recognize that the mystery of Golgotha is a superphysical matter. In order for people to be able to find the Christ, he had to undergo birth, baptism, and death, and by conquering death, he has been poured out into the evolution of the earth.

We have gone through a preparatory time in which Christianity was [merely] taken as a teaching. A time will come when the Christ can be found by those souls who seek him because he is on earth. He always worked through his existence, and people will find his existence as something that can reunite humanity, because he will be the one [for all people], for every [individual] person, as people are becoming more and more individualized. This is the Christ idea [in a time when] man is heading for a future that is even more de-deitified than monism would have dreamed of.

Just as we relate to external substances through physical nourishment, so we relate to the Christ spirit through our soul life. A great spirit, a distinguished thinker of the present day, Eliot, has said that the old religion is a sad, painful one; in the future, a religion will arise that gives joy. There is no denying that pain and death are in the world, and because they affect man, he needs a strong impulse to overcome pain and death - [the Christ impulse]. Modern philosophy suffers from the fact that it cannot find a balance for pain and death. And humanity will advance from the learned Christ, the Christ as a world teacher, to the seen Christ. Those involved in spiritual science will not be afraid of being called a monist; it is not the one who denies the spirit who is a monist, but the one who recognizes the spirit as the origin of being, who finds the monistic principle in the spirit.

Spiritually and psychically, the human being is immortal. In pre-Christian times, the soul was still known to be connected with the gods of nature. It is only in the twentieth century that we will become aware of the spiritual connection between the soul and the spiritual world, with Christ. Angelus Silesius is absolutely right when he says:

A thousand times may Christ be born in Bethlehem, but if he is not born in thee, thou art still lost for ever.

The mystical Christ [of whom Angelus Silesius speaks] has only become possible through the historical Christ. [Just as Goethe says:] If the eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? [so one can say:] If Christ were not there for our souls, how could we rise up to him, how could the sense of Christ arise in our soul? The historical Christ Jesus is as real as the sun is in the universe. Without disregarding the [biblical] traditions, one cannot overlook the fact that Christ is a God. According to the evolutionary theory of the Darwinists, man is merely a link in the chain of development of living beings. But the Darwinists have a great opponent, the great Darwin himself, who writes that it is unmistakable that a God infused life into the beings at the beginning. He writes:

I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from a primal form into which the Creator breathed life.

This is something that the modern Darwinian would like to deny – in fact, this sentence is missing from the German translations. But the person who claimed this is none other than Charles Darwin.

If you look at these things, you can come to a surprising insight: the monistic natural philosophy actually had to deny the spirit, because [according to it] everything depends on natural laws. But then the difference between good and evil basically ceases. That is what one should actually draw as a consequence, but one does not do it. However, however one may think about the great symbol [of the scene of temptation] in Genesis, where Lucifer speaks to man: “You will be like God and know what is good and evil,” something meaningful is said with these words. It is not important to call our time a time of transition; it is only significant to recognize what makes it a time of transition. If humanity did not come to the realization that the Christ is the most significant force in the evolution of the earth, it would come to believe that the experiences of the human soul are only the most highly intensified animal soul forces. If one were consistent, the soul's ability to distinguish between good and evil would cease. Yet another tempter speaks in our time, but one does not have the courage to hear him murmur: You will be made of animals, and no longer distinguish between good and evil.

But there is such a thing as the Christ impulse, which lives to show us that we are of the spiritual world and are in contact with spiritual beings, that our moral world order is intimately connected with the Christ in that with him the principle of love has come into the earth. And his voice says: You will not be of the animals, you will be with me, with me you will distinguish good from evil.

The sonship will be felt effectively. That the son comes from the father is scientifically based. But the father does not necessarily have the son. The moral world is related to the natural world order like the son to the father. Just as the father does not have to have the son, so [from the rule of natural laws, morality does not follow by itself]. The concept of the son makes clear in a wonderful way [the transformation of the natural into a moral world order through Christ].

Spiritual science feels in harmony with what the best, leading spirits of humanity have fulfilled. Schiller, whom people no longer love as much as they used to, but whom they will love again, once said:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought
Leaped from the marveling brain.

Thought will find the way to the one who is meant here: to the Christ of the twentieth century.

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

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

Question: Can work alone be religion?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question: Can music convey spiritual life?

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

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

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

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

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

Question: Has humanity deteriorated since the Mystery of Golgotha?

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

As our subject is arousing the very widest interest everywhere, it seems justifiable to approach it from an anthroposophical standpoint. The manner in which it is being discussed and brought to public notice is, of course, very far removed from this point of view. If it is true that Anthroposophy is little understood and liked to-day, it may be said at once that the treating of this theme in an anthroposophical manner presents peculiar difficulties.¹ It is unusual in our age for the feelings to be so attuned as to appreciate anthroposophical truths bearing on the more obvious matters of spiritual life, and it is directly repugnant to our present-day consciousness when a topic has to be discussed which calls for the application of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science to the most difficult and holiest subjects.

It may be safely affirmed at the outset that the Being around Whom our thoughts are about to centre has been for many centuries the turning point of all thought and feeling, and moreover that He has called forth widely differing judgments, emotions and opinions. Countless as are those who for centuries have held firmly as a rock to all that is connected with the Name of Christ and of Jesus, beyond number also are pictures of Him which have moved souls and occupied thoughtful men ever since the Event in Palestine. Always the picture has been modified according to the general views of the times, to what was felt and considered true at any given period. Thus, when the way had been prepared by the intellectual currents of thought of the eighteenth century, it came about in the course of the following century that what could be intellectually grasped as “Christ” withdrew into the background as compared with what was called later the “Historical Jesus.” It is around the “Historical Jesus” that the widely extended controversy has arisen, and which has here in Carlsruhe its most important protagonists and its most vigorous combatants. For this reason it is as well to give a short indication of the actual position of the controversy before entering on the subject of “Christ Jesus.”

We might say that the Historical Jesus of nineteenth century thought originated under the influence of the intellectual current that takes a merely external view of spiritual life and judges it by means of external documents: that there is evidence of His having lived at the beginning of our era in Palestine, that He was crucified and, according to the faithful, rose again. It is quite in line with the character and nature of the present era, now approaching its termination, that in the case of theological research, faith limited itself to what it was thought could be confirmed by historical documents in the same way as any ordinary event is confirmed by independent writings. It may be said that all the historical written traditions elsewhere than in the New Testament could, in the opinion of one of the most important judges, be “easily contained in a quarto page.” All the other references to the historical Jesus in any documents whatever, such for example as in Josephus or Tacitus, may be put out of court, for they can never be used from the standpoint of that historical science which holds good to-day. Beyond these there are only the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. How did the historical research of the nineteenth century examine the Gospels? Regarded purely externally how do they appear? If taken like other records, such as those of military engagements and so forth, they seem to be very contradictory documents of the physical plane, the fourfold presentation of which cannot be brought into harmony. In face of what we call historical criticism these records fall to pieces. For it must be allowed that everything which the earnest and diligent research of the nineteenth century collected out of the Gospels themselves, in order to gain a true picture of Jesus of Nazareth, has crumbled away through the presentation of the kind of research brought forward by Professor Drews. As to all that can be said against the Gospels as facts of history, it is evident that nothing can come to light about the Person of Jesus of Nazareth if we apply the methods whereby accurate science and strict criticism ratify other historical facts. We can only be considered very dilettante scientists if we do not make this concession to the science of the day.

Is it not the case that those who in the nineteenth century presented the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and wanted to arrive at an historical portrait of Him, had an entirely false conception of the Gospels? Were the Gospels really intended to be historical records in the sense understood in that century?

Whatever was to be said on this subject I endeavoured to state many years ago in my work, Christianity as Mystical Fact, and our present question, as to what was the real object of the Gospels, was intended to receive its answer not merely through the contents of that book but through the tide itself. For the title was not ‘The Mysticism of Christianity,’ nor ‘The Mystical Contents of Christianity:’ its object was rather to show that Christianity in its origin and its whole being is not an external fact but a Fact of the Spiritual world, and one that can only be comprehended by an insight into a realm lying behind the world of sense and behind what can be corroborated by historical records. It was shown that the forces and causes which brought about the Event of Palestine were not to be found in that region wherein external historical events take place, and thus that possibly not only may Christianity have a mystical content but that Mysticism—the actual gazing into the spiritual—is necessary to disentangle the threads that were woven behind the Event in Palestine and made it possible.

In order to realize what Christianity is, and what it can and must be in the soul of man to-day if he is to understand it aright, let us see how deeply grounded in the spiritual facts of human development were the words of St. Augustine: “That which we now call the Christian Religion already existed among the ancients and was never absent from the beginning of the human race up to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh, from which time forward the true religion which was already there received the name of the Christian Religion.” Thus does a standard authority point to the fact that it was not something new which came into humanity with the events of Palestine, but that in a certain sense a transformation had taken place in that which from time immemorial the souls of men had sought and striven for as knowledge. Something was given to humanity which had always been in existence, though hitherto along other lines than the Christian. If we wish to test the other way in which the preceding ages could come to the truths and wisdom of Christianity, we are referred by the historical development of humanity to the Mysteries of Antiquity or the Ancient Mysteries. What is meant by these expressions is little understood to-day, but it will become clearer the more men grasp the conception of the cosmos as presented by Spiritual Science.

Not merely upon the external religions of the people of antiquity must attention be focused, but upon what was practised in pre-Christian times in those mystic abodes designated by the name of the Mysteries. In the book Occult Science is to be found an explanation from the aspect of Spiritual Science, and there are also numbers of secular writers who have declared publicly what was the secret of mankind in antiquity. We read that only a few were admitted to the schools which were designated “The Mysteries,” and that these schools were the homes of the cults. Also there was a small circle of men admitted to the Mysteries by the priestly sages, and for them this meant a kind of retirement from the outer world: they realized that if they were to reach what was to be attained they must lead a different life than they had so far lived openly, and above all that they must accustom themselves to another way of thinking. These Mysteries existed all over the world, among the Greeks and Romans and other peoples, as may be confirmed by referring to extensive literature which still exists. The pupils admitted to the Mysteries were taught something comparable with what is now called science or knowledge, but they did not receive it in the same way, for by what they experienced they became quite other beings. To them came the conviction that in every man there lives, deeply hidden and slumbering so that the ordinary consciousness knows it not, a higher man. As the ordinary man looks through his eyes upon the world and with his thought-power thinks over what he experiences, so can this other man—at first unknown to external consciousness, but capable of being awakened in the depths of his nature recognize another world unattainable by external sight and thought. This was called “The birth of the inner man.” The expression is still used, though in these days it is dry and abstract in character and regarded lightly, but when the disciple of the Mysteries applied it to himself it stood for a tremendous event to be compared in some measure with being born in the physical sense. As man in the physical world is born out of a dark substratum (be it one of nature according to the materialistic idea, or a spiritual sub-stratum in the view of Spiritual Science) so, physically speaking, there was really born through the processes of the Mysteries a higher man who previously had been as little present as was the human being before birth or conception. The disciple was a new-born being. The present view of knowledge, as given everywhere in answer to a deeply philosophic question, is exactly the opposite of that which formed the central point of the whole idea and outlook of the Mysteries. It is now asked in the sense of Kant and Schopenhauer, “Where lie the limits of knowledge? What is it in the power of man to know?” We need only take up a newspaper to meet the answer that here or there lie the limits and that beyond them it is impossible to go. Certainly it was admitted in the Mysteries that there were problems which man could not solve, but it would never have been held in the sense of Kant or in Schopenhauer's Theory of Cognition that “Man cannot know” this or that! What would have been appealed to was man's capability of development, to the powers lying dormant within him which must be evoked so that he might rise to higher capacities of knowledge. The question in those times resolved itself into what was to be done in order to get beyond that which in normal life is the boundary of knowledge; how to develop deeper powers in human nature.

Something more is needed if we are to feel the whole magic charm of the Mysteries that, like a breath, pervades the works of the exoteric writers, Plato, Aristides, Plutarch and Cicero. Here we must be clear that the kind of mental comprehension present in the forming of the disciples of the Mysteries was quite different from that of the men of to-day when they confront scientific truths. What we now call science is open to anybody and everybody in any condition of receptivity whatever. It is just here that we recognize the characteristic of Truth, that it is independent of mood and feeling. For the pupil of the Mysteries the most necessary thing was that, before he was brought to the great Truths, he should go through something whereby his soul was transformed in his feelings and impressions. What to-day appears as a simple scientific truth would not have been put to him so that he could grasp it externally with his understanding, but his natural temperament would have been prepared beforehand so that he could draw near with reverential awe to what could approach him. Consequently his preparation was not one of learning; it was a gradual and radical transformation and education of his soul. The question was how the soul approached the great Truths and Wisdom and how it reacted to them, and hence arose the conviction that through the Mysteries man was bound up and united with the very foundations of the Cosmos and with what flowed from the springs of all cosmic beginnings. Thus was the disciple prepared for the experiencing of something which is described by Aristides. He who, according to what is to be found in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment has lived through what these disciples experienced can himself bear witness. He knows that the words of Aristides correspond with the truth when he writes, “I seemed to be approaching God, I seemed to feel His Presence, and I was in a state between waking and sleeping; my spirit was quite light—so light that no one who was uninitiated could describe or understand it.” There was a way, therefore, to the divine foundations of the Universe which was neither Science nor one-sided Religion, but consisted in a thorough preparation of the soul for the realization of the ideas about the Evolution of the Universe so that it might draw near to God and those spiritual foundations. As we take in the external air with our breath and make it a part of our body, so did the disciple of the Mysteries receive into his soul that which pulsates spiritually through the Universe until he was united with it and so became a new man permeated by the Divinity.

Now, however, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science shows that what was then possible was only an historical phenomenon in human evolution, and when the question arises as to whether the Ancient Mysteries of pre-Christian times are still possible in the same way it can only be said that historical research verily proves that what has just been described did really exist but that it exists no longer in the same form. The pre-Christian method of Initiation is not now possible. A man must indeed be short-sighted if he believes that the human soul is the same in all epochs, or that the spiritual path of the olden times holds good for the present. The path to the divine and primal sources of the world has now become another, and intellectual historical research shows that it did so in its very essence at the time ascribed by tradition to the Events of Palestine. These Events made a deep incision in the evolution of man. Something entered into human nature in the post-Christian period which entirely differed from what was there before. Such a method of thinking as is possible nowadays—the method of drawing nearer to the Universe through scientific thought—did not exist in pre-Christian ages. The Mysteries did not conduct man in the manner described to the very highest treasures of Wisdom in order that he might do something in secret, or acquire something special for himself as a member of a small circle, but because our modern way of combining thoughts through logic was not possible at that time. A glance at the history of humanity will show that in the course of two centuries, during the time of the Greek philosophers, the present mode of thinking was gradually prepared, and that only now has it reached the point of embracing external nature so wonderfully. Thus the entire form our consciousness takes and the way we create our conceptions of the Universe differ entirely from pre-Christian times. For the moment we are only concerned with this fact as showing that human nature has changed. A careful review of human evolution makes it clear that the entire consciousness has altered in the course of evolution (the results arising from research are to be found in my Occult Science. The men of old did not regard things and think about them as we do with our senses and understanding; they had a kind of clairvoyance, but this was of a dim and dreamlike nature (not such as is described in my The Way of Initiation). Herein lies the import of evolution, that an old clairvoyance which in primitive times was spread over all humanity gave way to that form of thought which we possess to-day. The ordinary inhabitants of every country had this kind of clairvoyant power, and a path leading from that to higher stages was provided in the Mysteries. Thereby development was given to the normal soul-faculties of man.

Observation of the world by what we call reasoning and logic having displaced the old clairvoyance, the latter is no longer a natural faculty, but it lasted right through the historical period and reached its culmination in the Greco-Roman era during which the Appearance of Christ occurred. At that point of time collective humanity everywhere had come so far in its evolution that the old clairvoyance had passed away and the old Mysteries were no longer possible. What then took the place of the old Mysteries and what did man acquire through the Mysteries?

These were of two kinds: the one proceeded from that centre of civilization which was afterwards occupied by the ancient Persians, and the other was to be met with in its purest form in Egypt and Greece. They were entirely different throughout those times. It was the endeavour of all the Mysteries to produce in man an extension of his soul-powers, but this was achieved in a different way in Greece and Egypt, than in Persia. In the two former, which agreed essentially, the object was to effect in the disciples a transformation of their soul-powers. This transformation took place under a certain supposition which must be understood before anything else. It was that in the depths of the soul there slumbers another, a divine man; that from the same sources whence the rock forms into crystal and the plants break forth in the Spring the hidden man originated. Plants, however, had already utilized all that was contained within them, whereas man, in so far as he had understood himself and worked with his own powers, had remained an imperfect being, and that which was within him had only come to the fore after much endeavour. Appeal, therefore, in the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries was made to a spiritual, a divine inner man, and when this was referred to, allusion was made also to the powers within the Earth. For according to the views held the Earth was not regarded as the lifeless cosmic body of modern astronomy, but as a spiritual planetary being. In Egypt reference was made to the wonderful spirit-forces and nature-forces, called by the names of Isis and Osiris, when it was desired to contemplate the origin and source of what could be experienced as manifestation in the inner man. In Greece this primal source was referred to under the name of Dionysos. As a consequence of this, profane writers asserted that the nature and being of things were the objects sought for, and in the Greek Mysteries they called what was found of the forces of human nature the “sub-earthly” portion of man, not the “super-earthly.” The Nature of the great “Daemons” was spoken of, and under this tide was represented all that worked on the Earth of the nature of spiritual forces. The nature of these daemons (in a good sense) was sought for through that which man was to bring forth from himself. Then the disciple had to go through all the feelings and perceptions that were possible for him in the course of evolution. He had to experience what was meant by “going down into the depths of his soul;” to learn that a fundamental feeling so dominated all soul-being that in ordinary life no conception of it could be formed, and that that feeling was a deep egoism—the almost unconquerable selfishness lying within the inner recesses of a human being. By means of struggling against and conquering all selfishness and egoism the disciple had to go through something for which we have to-day only an abstract expression, i.e., the feeling of all inclusive love and sympathy for men and beings. Sympathy, in so far as the human soul was capable of it, was to take the place of selfishness. It was clearly understood that if the disciple evoked this sympathy, which belonged in the first place to the hidden forces of the world of feeling, it could draw out from the depths of his soul the divine powers slumbering therein. It was held moreover that as he looked out upon the world with his ordinary understanding he must soon become aware of his powerlessness as a man with reference to the Cosmos, and that the further he projected his conceptions and ideas the stronger this feeling grew until in the end he was led to doubt what indeed could be called knowledge, i.e., Gnosis. Arrived at that point he must then overcome this feeling of emptiness in his soul whenever he desired to encompass the Cosmos with his ideas. This consciousness of a void was accompanied by fear and anxiety, and consequently the Greek disciple of Mysticism first filled himself with a dread of the unknown and then by coupling this with sympathy drew forth the divine powers lying within him. So did he learn to transform fear into awe and reverence, and to realize how the highest kind of awe and reverential devotion for all the phenomena of the Universe was able to penetrate every substance and conception that lay beyond the scope of ordinary knowledge.

Thus the Greek Mysteries, as also those of Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian Mysteries, worked outwards from the inmost nature of man and sought to lead him into the spiritual worlds. It was a living apprehension of the “God in Man.” A real acquaintance was formed between man and God, and immortality ranked not as mere abstract theory and philosophy but as something known, something as firmly grounded as the knowledge of external colours, and this was experienced as an intimate connection with external things. With no less certainty was this experienced also in the Persian or Mithraic Mysteries. Whereas man was led in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries through the unfettering of his soul-powers, he was confronted at once with the Universe itself in the Mithraic Mysteries; not only did the Universe work upon him through the great and mighty Nature which is overlooked by those who regard the world in its external aspect, but by gaining a deep intimacy with Nature, he could gaze upon phenomena that lay outside the limits of the human understanding. By the methods then used the most terrible and magnificent powers were brought before the pupil from Universal Space. Whereas the Greek disciple was affected by a deep feeling of reverence, to the Mithraic disciple alone was given the knowledge of the terrible and awe-inspiring powers in Nature so that he felt himself infinitesimally small in comparison. So powerful was this impression, consequent upon his alienation from the primal source of being, that he felt that in its vastness the Universe could at any moment overwhelm and annihilate him. The first impulse came from his being led through a comprehensive astronomy and science away from external things to the greatness of the phenomena of the Universe, and what he further developed in the Mysteries was then more a consequence of the Truth in all its ramifications when Nature in her details (science in the old sense of the word) worked upon his soul. The Greek disciple became fearless through the setting free of his powers. The Mithraic disciple was brought so far that he drank in the greatness of Cosmic Thought, and thereby his soul also became strong and courageous. A knowledge of the dignity and value of a human being was gained, and with it a feeling for truth and fidelity; the disciple learned to recognize that man must always hold himself under control during his earthly existence.

Such were the benefits obtained especially through the Mithraic Mysteries, and whereas the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries are to be found spread over Greece and Egypt, the Mithraic are diffused from Persia as far as the Caspian Sea, along the Danube into Germany, and even to the South of France, to Spain and to England. Europe was indeed permeated by the Mithraic Mysteries, and everywhere it was seen clearly that something streamed into man from the Universe if only he could learn to understand it, and this that could be received was Mithra, the God that streams through the world in all worlds. It was through this power of action that courage was aroused: the warriors, the Roman legionaries, were filled with the Mithraic service or cult of Mithra. Both leaders and men were initiated into the Mysteries. Thus was God sought on the one hand by the freeing of the individual soul-powers, and it was quite evident that through this process something streamed out from the depths of the soul. On the other hand, however, it was equally evident that when man sought God by devoting himself to the great cosmic phenomena, something streamed into his soul as the essence, the finest life-sap contained in the world. There were found the primordial forces of the Universe. God came as it were into human souls through this development which was attained in the Mystery schools. A veritable process is to be seen here: each soul became a door for the entrance of the Godhead into human evolution on earth. Few were able to undergo such a development, and a special preparation for it was necessary. The teaching consisted in showing that what was hidden in external nature (Mithra) as also in the inner man of the Greek, poured through the world as a stream of divine consecration.

The evolution of man has now changed, and the entire method of Initiation is different. Here we touch upon what must be called the Mystical Fact of the Christ Event. To penetrate deeply into history is to see that the early Christians were more or less dimly conscious that the same force which entered the soul only through devotion to the Mysteries, to the Divine Principle of the Universe (streaming forth from Cosmos as the Mithra or out of the depths of the soul as the Dionysos), was as the deed of a unique Cosmic Divinity in one single Fact in the evolution of the Earth. That which was sought for beyond this, and was not to be found except by those who alienated themselves from outer life in the Mysteries, was at a given time incorporated into the Earth by the Divinity. No human effort was needed, for the Divinity once and for all permeated the Being of the Earth, and henceforth even those who had lost the power to penetrate to the Divine Principle of the Cosmos could meet Him in another way. The God Who could now penetrate into the human soul (neither as Mithra from without nor Dionysos from within) was Himself a fusion of Mithra and Dionysos, and also was related to human nature in its depths. He was embraced and encompassed by the Name of CHRIST. Mithra and Dionysos were united in the Being Who entered humanity in the Event of Palestine, and Christianity was the confluence of both Cults. The Hebrews, who were chosen that they might provide the necessary body through which this Event might take place, had become acquainted with the Mithraic and Dionysian Cults, but they remained far removed from either. The Greek thought of himself as a weak man who must develop deeper powers before he could penetrate into the depths of his soul, while the follower of Mithra felt that by letting the whole surrounding sphere of the air work upon him he might become united with the divine qualities of the Universe. The Hebrew, on the other hand, held that the deeper human nature, with all that was hidden within it, was already there in the first Man, and the ancient Hebrews called this Primal man Adam. According to old Hebraic ideas that which man could seek, and which joined him with the divine, was present originally in Adam, but in course of evolution the descendants of each generation became further and further removed from the Source of Existence. Being “subject to original sin,” as they put it, meant that man had not remained as he was and had been ejected from the sphere of the Divine; regarding himself as standing below Adam he sought the reason in original sin. But though less than that which lived in the depths of human nature, he could unite himself with the deeper powers and thereby be raised again. This point of view, that once man had stood higher and that through the qualities connected with the blood-ties he had lost something, was an historical one. What the adherent of the Mithraic Mysteries saw in humanity as One Whole the Hebrew saw in his own nation and was conscious that its original source had been lost. So that while among the Persians there was a kind of training of the consciousness, there was among the ancient Hebrews a consciousness of a historical development; Adam, by falling into sin, had fallen from the heights where he once stood. Consequently the Hebrews were the best prepared for the thought that that which had happened at the initial point of evolution (and which had brought about a deterioration in humanity) could only be raised again through an historical Event, i.e., by something actually taking place in the spiritual sub-strata of the Earth's being. The ancient Hebrew who rightly understood evolution felt that the Mithra God, equally with the God Who is evoked from the depths of the human soul, could come down without man going through a development in the Mysteries.

Thus in these people, and above all in the case of John the Baptist, there arose a consciousness of the fact that the same which the Mysteries had handed down in the form of Dionysos and Mithra was born at one and the same time in One Man. Those of them who felt this in a deeper sense held that even as through Adam the descent of man into the world was brought about (all men having descended from one forefather and inherited from him all the deeper forces that lead to sin and error) so, through One Being Who descends from the spiritual worlds as the union of Mithra and Dionysos, must the initial point be formed to which men can look when they have to rise again. As in the Mysteries human nature was developed through the setting free of the deeper soul forces or through a view of the Cosmos, the Hebrews now saw in the God Who came down into physical being Him on Whom the soul must look and believe, for Whom it must develop the deepest love, and Who as the Great Example could lead them back to their divine origin.

He who had the profoundest knowledge of this fact of Christianity was Paul. The Apostle recognized that as men looked to Adam as their physical progenitor they could, through the Christ Impulse, look to the Christ as the Great Example, and so attain to what was striven for in the Mysteries and must be born again if they were to know their own original nature. The knowledge that was kept within the recesses of the Temples, and could only be attained after ascetic training, was set forth neither in mundane document nor as some external fact but as having been accomplished as a mystical fact, the God Who pervaded the world having actually appeared in one single Form. What the disciples of the Mithraic Mysteries acquired through looking upon the Greatest Model had now been attained through Christ. The courage, self control and energy acquired by those disciples had also to be acquired by those who could no longer be initiated in the old Mithraic sense; through the Model of the historical Christ and the gazing upon Him the impulse towards this fortitude was now to pour itself out upon the soul. In the Mithraic Mysteries, as has been shown, the whole Universe was in a certain sense born in the soul of the disciple, and the courageous soul was fired with all the inner forces of initiative. In the Baptism of John something was poured down from above of which human nature could be the vehicle; when a man was permeated with the thought that his nature was capable of assimilating the profoundest harmony of the Universe, the view of the Baptism aroused within him the understanding that Mithra could be born in human nature. Those, therefore, who grasped the original meaning of Christianity, acknowledged that the end of the Mysteries had come: the God Who formerly had poured Himself into the Mysteries had now flowed directly into the being of the Earth through the Personality Who stood at the beginning of a new era (our present one).

The connection with the Greek or Dionysian Mysteries has now to be considered. Through the fact that the human gaze was guided to Jesus of Nazareth in Whom Mithra lived and Who then passed through death, an indication was given that Mithra (the bestower of courage, self control and energy) had Himself died with the death of Jesus. It was further seen that because Mithra had so vanished that which man found in his deepest nature, and had attained earlier through the Dionysian Mysteries, had now become in Jesus of Nazareth the immortal conqueror over death. Herein lies the true Christian meaning of the Resurrection if it is grasped in its spiritually scientific sense. The Baptism by John in [the] Jordan demonstrated that the old Mithra had entered into man, that thereby human nature had won the victory over death, and that by the example so created the soul could unite itself in the deepest love in order to come to that which lived in its own depths. In the Risen Christ was seen the fact that man, by living according to the event that had taken place in history, could rise above the level of ordinary humanity.

Thus in the centre of the history of the world was set an historical event in the place of that which had been sought in the Mysteries times without number. The great revelation that came to St. Paul was that human nature had thereby become different, and this was concealed within what is known as “The Event of Damascus.” Writing of what he experienced before Damascus, the Apostle relates how he learned to understand, not from external documents but through a purely spiritual clairvoyant experience, that the moment when the Incarnation itself should take place in an historical personage had already passed. The existence of Christ as a real man could never be experienced by Paul through an external fact, and what he could learn in Palestine did not convince him that the Union of Mithra and Dionysos had lived in Jesus of Nazareth. But when, before Damascus, his spiritual sight was opened, it became clear that a God Who could be called by the Name of Christ not only worked through the world as a super-sensible Being but had actually come to earth and conquered death. Henceforth he preached that what for the Initiates had previously been a streaming substance was now to be found as continuous historical fact. This lies at the basis of his words, “If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

Such was the path by which Paul came to Jesus by the indirect way of Christ, it being clear to him that something had taken place in Palestine which previously could only be experienced in the Mysteries. And this still applies to-day. Because Christ is the focus of all human development and the highest example for the inmost powers of the soul the bond established with Him must be of the most intimate kind. To become a disciple it is required of a man that he set little value upon his own life, and so it must be regarded as of small importance to lay aside all documentary evidence and historical traditions in order to come to Christ. Indeed there is cause for thankfulness that the fact that there ever was an historical Christ Jesus cannot be established, for no document could prove that He was the most significant of all that has passed into humanity.

The connection between Christ and the ancient Mysteries is therefore quite clear. The disciples of the latter had to go through what may be called intimate soul experiences in order to come to God; their inner feelings and sensations were more lively and intense than those of the ordinary man, and so they became aware that they were set fast in a lower nature which hindered them from arriving at the Sources of Being. This lower nature was indeed a seducer leading them away from the upward path, and that which so allured them had also become their own lower nature, and herein lay the “Temptation” that came to every disciple of the Mysteries. At the moment when God awoke within them they became aware also of their lower or sensual natures. It was as though some strange unknown being were urging them not to follow the unsubstantial and airy heights of the spiritual world, but to seize the coarse and material things that lay close at hand. Each disciple had to pass through a time when everything spiritual seemed unreal in comparison with the ordinary way of looking at things, and all that was connected with the senses appeared alluring as against the stress of spiritual effort. At another stage in mystic development these lower forces were overcome, a higher outlook being attained with the growth of invigorated powers of courage and so forth. All this teaching was clothed in certain instructions that may be verified from the writings of exoteric authors, as also in the methods of Initiation given by Spiritual Science and set forth in Occult Science. There were various methods both in the Greek and the Mithraic Mysteries. Finally the disciples experienced the “at-one-ment” with Him Who was the Divine Man, but here the methods were different and varied widely in the many countries where Initiation existed.

In my Christianity as Mystical Fact the purpose is to show that in the Gospels nothing is to be met with but a rebirth of old Initiation instructions. What took place externally had already taken place similarly in the course of the Mysteries, and therefore the Divine Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth after the descent of the Mithra Being had to experience the “Temptation.” As the Tempter came on a small scale to the pupil of the Mysteries so did he also confront the God become man. All that was true in the Mysteries is to be found repeated in the Gospel records which were new versions of the old inscriptions and instructions given in the Initiations. The writers of the Gospels saw that once that which hitherto had lain only in the Mysteries had been enacted on the plane of Cosmic History, it was permissible to describe it in the same words as those in which their directions for Initiation were recorded. It is for this very reason that the Gospels were not intended to be biographies of Him Who was the vehicle for the Christ. This is just the mistake of all modern criticisms of the Gospels. At the time they were written the sole object was to lead the human soul to a real love for the Great Soul, the Source of the world's existence. Strangely enough a clear consciousness of this prevailed almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It is pointed out in isolated writings of remarkable interest that through the Gospels the soul can be so transformed as to find the Christ. Old Meister Eckhardt writes, “Some people want to look at God with their eyes as they look at a cow, and want to love God as they love a cow. They love God as an outward possession and an inward comfort, but these people do not love Him aright ... Simple folk imagine they ought to see God as if He stood there and they here; it is not so; God and I are One in recognition.” In another passage he writes, “A Master says, ‘God has become man, and thereby the whole human race is raised in dignity. We may rejoice that Christ our Brother has through His own power passed beyond the choir of angels, and sits at the right hand of the Father.’ This Master has spoken rightly, but verily I do not pay much attention to it. What help would it be to me if I had a brother who was a rich man, and I was at the same time a poor one? How would it help me if I had a brother who was a wise man, and I myself a fool? ... The heavenly Father begat His only Son in Himself and in me. Why in Himself and in me? I am one with Him, and it is not possible for Him to exclude me. In the same work the Holy Ghost received His Being, and is from me as from God. Why? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost does not receive His Being from me neither does he receive it from God. I am in no way excluded.”

That is the point: that man through mystic development, without external mysteries but through the simple evolution of the soul, will in later times be able to experience that which was once experienced in the Mysteries. This, however, will only be possible because the Christ Event took place. Even if there were no Gospels, no records and no traditions, he who experiences the Christ in himself along with the being filled with Christ has the certainty, as St. Paul had it, that at the beginning of our era Christ was incarnated in a physical body. An historical biography of Jesus of Nazareth can never be gathered out of the Gospels, but through the right unfolding of his soul powers man can and must raise himself up to the Christ, and through the Christ to Jesus. Thus only can be understood what was the aim of the Gospels and what was lacking in the whole of the nineteenth century researches on the subject of Jesus. The picture of the Christ was allowed to recede into the background in order to present a tangible Jesus quite externally from the historical records. The Gospels were misunderstood, and consequently the methods of investigation crumbled to pieces.

Herewith the way is at the same time made clear to Spiritual Science. Its object is to show what are the deeper powers that have lain in man since the coming of Christ, and which he can develop. Not in the depths of externally appointed Mysteries, but in the stillness of his room, man can attain by devoting himself to what happened in Palestine that which was attained by the disciples of the Mysteries. By experiencing the Christ within himself he gains in courage and energy and in a consciousness of his dignity as man, and comes to the knowledge of how he has to take his place in humanity in the right sense. And at the same time he experiences, as could the adherent of the Greek Mysteries, the Universal Love which lives in Christ and embraces all external creatures. He learns never to be afraid or to despair in face of the world, and in full freedom and at the same time humility is sensible of devotion to the secrets of the Universe.

All this comes to the man who permeates himself with the Mystical Fact of Christianity, the successor of the old Mysteries. Simply through a cognitional development of these fundamental thoughts the Historical Jesus becomes a fact for those who have a deep knowledge of Christ. In Western philosophy it was said that without eyes none could see colour nor hear without ears; the Universe would be without light and sound. True as this is with regard to seeing and hearing, it is equally true that without light no eye could have come into existence nor could man have had any perceptions connected with it. As Goethe says, “If the eye were not born of like nature to the sun it could never look upon the sun,” and “The eye is a creation of the light.”

The Mystical Christ, spoken of by those whose spiritual sight is opened and who behold Him as Paul did, was not always in man. In pre-Christian times He was unattainable in any development through the Mysteries in the way in which He was to be found after the Mystery of Golgotha. That there might be an inner Christ and that the higher man could be born an historical Christ was needed, the Incarnation of the Christ in the Jesus. As the eye can originate only through the effect of light, so in order that there could be a Mystical Christ the historical Christ must have been there. Had there been no documents containing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth this could still be said and felt, for Jesus is not to be recognized through external writings. This fact was long known in the evolution of the West and will again be known. Spiritual Science will so formulate that it can draw together from out its various spheres what will lead to a real understanding of the Christ, and thereby to an understanding of Jesus. It has come about that Jesus has been actually alienated from the world and the methods of the Jesus investigations have melted away, but the deepening of ourselves in the Christ Being (in the Christ as a Being) will lead to a recognition of the greatness of Jesus of Nazareth.

This path, by which the Christ is first recognized through inward soul experience, leads through what really has developed out of the soul to the understanding of the Mystical Fact of Christianity, and of the gradual development of humanity, as being such that the Christ Event must take place within it as the most significant point in the evolution of man. The way leads through the Christ to Jesus. The Christ Idea bears fruitful seed that will bring humanity not merely to the apprehension of a general pantheistic Cosmic Spirit, but the individual man to the understanding of his own history; as he feels his Earth to be bound up with all cosmic existence so will he recognize that his past is bound up with a super-sensible and super-historical Event. This Event is that the Christ Being stands as a super-sensible Mystical Fact at the middle point of human evolution, and that so will He be recognized by the humanity of the future apart from all external historical research and documents. Christ will remain the strong cornerstone of mankind's evolution. Man will bring the forces out of himself to renew his own history, and therewith also the history of the evolution of the world.

• 1. Theosophy was the original term, but in later lectures Dr. Sterner changed the word to Anthroposophy.

Nowadays, anyone who lectures on the Christ runs into quite a variety of viewpoints. These fall roughly into two main groups, and a speaker must take them into account, especially if he plans to talk on the subject in the sense intended for this evening's lecture. That is, in the same sense in which other questions and other problems have been dealt with here before. I am referring, of course, to the spiritual scientific or anthroposophical viewpoint.

The first group of views is one that bases itself firmly on the premise that Christ is a real force in life. This might be called the religious viewpoint, which all the Christian confessions share in common. We will find on closer study however that no matter how liberal and tolerant it may seem in some respects, it has little use for any but its own view of the Christ. The various proponents of the religious standpoint are simply unwilling to grant that any progress in thinking about Christ is possible.

The other viewpoint is also one held by thoroughly dedicated modern searchers after truth. In accordance with a certain scientific trend, it maintains that a study of the Christ event, of what is reported to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era, if pursued with the same reliable historical methods that are applied to the study of other events, does not bear out the assumptions made about the Christ.

We realize that this way of looking at things has long been gaining favor. We also know that in the course of recent centuries increasing emphasis has been laid on comparing the Gospels, and that the discrepancies people have discovered in them have forced them to conclude that the Gospels could not be taken as historical documents. After a long period of trying to distill a somewhat reliable picture of Christ Jesus from the Gospel accounts, there have come to be many people today, both in Germany and elsewhere, who cannot reconcile speaking of a historical Jesus or of a historical Christ Event with their scientific consciences.

So we find present day positions ranging all the way from a separating out of those facts in the Gospels that can be historically proven, to out-and-out rejection of the historical Christ Jesus. This has given rise to the opinion that, though Christ may still live today for religious-minded people who feel that their faith lifts them to Him, for an ever more rigorously developing science the Christ idea, the concept of Christ, must vanish entirely. Many people are presently convinced that the Christ force will not continue to play any role at all in future, though these same people do not by any means believe that the day will ever come when religion will be lost to humanity.

Certain facts of the time, however, make it seem unlikely that the belief I have referred to will be proven true, for we can note a strange phenomenon. In our day, it is by no means only the religious-minded and people of feeling, for whom the Gospels have shown themselves a source of uplift and of schooling, who speak of something in the nature of a Christ idea. Earnest, educated, truth-loving men are putting their whole souls into pointing to something that can only be identified as Christ. It is characteristic that the modern American freethinker, Ferguson, voicing what many of his contemporaries feel, can say that Christ is again “the pioneer of a new age” who will unite Europe and America and look with profoundest understanding into the soul of every human being—that He is the one and only right man for the present. Ferguson, a person otherwise famed for his free-thinking views, speaks of Christ exactly as though He went about from one man to the next wielding direct influence upon us. Freethinking spirits are thus beginning to feel the Christ Being directly related to modern humanity. Even though little attention is paid to it as yet, we will find that this tendency, this searching for a force that can only be called the Christ, will make sure headway. John Fiske, a man who did his utmost to further Darwinism in America, stated that all religions assert two basic truths. The first is that all things are related. This is a truth proclaimed by every religion, one that no thoughtful person can deny. The second truth is that what we call good and evil derives from forces external to the human spirit.

I quote these men expressly because they are both personalities whose whole thinking and feeling are firmly rooted in the present, but they do not rest satisfied with an external view of things. Instead, they have worked their way through to deeper forces of existence. The forces at work in the world are not just physical and chemical: they are also spiritual in nature.

For one who takes his stand on a spiritual-scientific view of the world, the concept of Christ just characterized appears to be merely a first dawn glimmering, a preparation for something quite different still to come. I hope I will not be misunderstood in speaking as I have of this preparatory, Twentieth Century form of the Christ concept. Spiritual science has to steer clear of any taint of sectarianism and other such attitudes because they simply do not belong to this age. The spiritual scientist takes the same attitude in speaking of what is to come in human evolution as does the natural scientist who predicts an eclipse of the moon or a transit of Venus: he is not assuming a prophetic role. There are forces in life that can be spiritually investigated in exactly the same sense that natural forces operative in the physical world can be investigated.

It will be helpful to gain a perspective on the past history of the Christ idea, which has indeed undergone tremendous changes through the centuries. If we follow it back to its origin, we come upon a strange fact of the early days. We find popular Christianity spreading through the regions ruled by Rome in a way that enables us to say that, while the old Roman culture developed among the upper levels of the population and then grew decadent, we see those on whom life left its mark, those whose lot it was to suffer, slowly and gradually finding their way into popular Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth is increasingly idealized, to the point that he is looked on as divine. The various confessions that made up this popular Christianity tended more to feeling than to thoughts and concepts. But alongside this popular form we find those most enlightened spirits of the time who concerned themselves with Christianity devoting their loftiest ideas, their most significant concepts, to answering the question, “Who, actually, is this Christ?”

Let us single out, from the abundance of answers given by these illumined spirits, one or two for consideration here.

In Gnosticism, a form of thought to which anthroposophy by no means advises returning but simply studies as a phenomenon of past history, we find many different shadings of certain lofty concepts, all centering in an attempt to grasp the Christ idea. In the main, it can be characterized by saying that this Gnosticism, this longing to grasp the Christ idea with the help of the Ioftiest concepts, is a most marvelous form of spiritual development. Of course, those who adopt the modern view that every last facet of humanness gradually evolved from nature's lower orders, from animals, and rose by stages from the most primitive to ever higher animal forms, are bound to consider the Gnostic doctrine a fantastic dream. But Gnostics, too, traced evolution back even further than does the modern natural scientist. They said that we find a period in ancient times in which all animals, even the highest, were present on the earth, and man could have seen them if he too had been there at that time. The Gnostics, however, had in mind a period of evolution in which the human kingdom had not yet appeared, but they did not conclude from this that men developed out of animals, but rather that they descended later from the spiritual world. They maintained that animals. plants and minerals had also descended from the spirit. had materialized out of spiritual realms, so that we have to ascribe a spiritual origin to animals, plants and minerals as well. But there was a period when man had not yet taken on physical form, a time when he was still waiting in the spiritual world for the moment when the earth provided certain other conditions such as would make human life possible here.

This does not mean that man was not in existence at that time. Man did exist: not, however, as a visible entity, but as a spiritual one. He lived in the spiritual environment of the earth, but had not yet descended onto it, for the conditions of that ancient time were not such as would have made human development possible. Thus, the Gnostics assumed that there was a most important moment, later than that of the descent of the other kingdoms when titan descended to the earth. It was the Gnostic conviction that if man had incarnated with the other lesser kingdoms, one all-important facet of his being, that is the capacity we know as free, independent human thinking would not have developed. In short, man would lack his true human ego that works front a central focus outward into the world and develops between birth and death. The animal's development is kept within certain limits, but man is capable of progressing in an entirely different way as a result of education and experience. In order to achieve this, said the Gnostic, man entered into a more intimate connection with the element of matter than he would have done if he had remained an unfree being, dependent, as the other creatures around him were on his endowment at birth. Man plunged more deeply into matter in order to become less dependent on what he brought into existence with him. Gnosticism held that this deeper involvement in matter took place at a certain moment in very early times, that is, the moment the Bible pictures as the Fall, meaning thereby the fall into matter just described. But by no means every impulse inherent in human nature was believed to have joined in that descent; instead, something of a superhuman element remained in the spiritual world. While mankind was experiencing all this, something that was part of man but did not accompany him in his descent because he plunged so deeply into physical embodiment stayed on in spiritual worlds. Thus, there was still present in the world above a part of man that had dwelt there when all humanity still lived as one in realms of spirit.

On the basis of these assumptions the Gnostics then proceeded to study the Christ Event. A certain moment, described in the Bible as the baptism by John, was of special interest to them. They felt that the human being whose development brought him to that baptism was indeed a most extraordinary man, but nevertheless just a human being. After he had been baptized, something occurred that is hard for modern minds to grasp. Perhaps we can think of it in the sense that many a person has had something happen to him at a certain moment about which he could only say that his whole life was changed in consequence. Many people date their lives from such a moment, feeling it to have been one in which they were spiritually reborn. This is something that can happen to any and every human being. If one pictures this experience raised to a unique and ultimate peak, one understands how the Gnostics felt about the baptism by John in the River Jordan. That element of humanness that had been part of man front the earliest beginnings of his race but which had been waiting in the spiritual world, now left that realm and made its way down to earth, to take up its abode in the unique human being, Jesus of Nazareth. For the next three years Jesus of Nazareth was not just a changed human being. He was one in whom that reserved element of humanness, held over from the very beginning of man's earth life, had come to dwell for the eventual fructification of humanity. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth became the bearer of the superhuman being, Christ for the three years of His earthly life. So the Gnostics held that what had hitherto dwelt in the spiritual world had come into a human body, like a seed planted in the earth. Like a planted seed, which must decompose in order to germinate, this spiritual impulse entering the earth had to pass away in order to spring, seed-like, into hundred-arid thousand-fold fruitfulness. This spiritual element had to pass through death exactly as a seed dies. Far from failing to bear, it poured itself into earth's spiritual-evolutionary stream, where it will be found living on in many kinds of fruiting.

So we find in the Gnostic doctrine a pre-history of mankind leading up to the moment of Christ's coming and a post-history following upon the Event of Golgotha. It is history centered in the living action of the Christ impulse as Christ enters into human souls. To the Gnostic, the Christ impulse was history indeed history's whole content and the source of its ongoingness. If this view sounds alien to the contemporary mind, it must be stated that precisely modern natural science, whose ideas are colored by materialism only now at the outset, will press forward ever more vigorously to an understanding and eventual grasping of the reality that underlay the Gnostic concept.

In order to show how close the present is to taking up again what Gnosticism offered, let me just point out the following—something that is of course only an elementary first step. Science has thought for a long time that it stands on a solid footing. Basing itself on a truly impressive Darwinism, it felt impelled to assert that everything human developed out of animal origins, and that the driving force behind that development was the “struggle for survival.” It said that all the various creatures were launched into life together, but fell to fighting, with the not too surprising result that, as time went on, the more perfect species got the better of the less perfect. Man was the final product of this perfecting process. “The survival of the fittest” became the slogan of the Darwinists. Now, however, researchers are finding themselves forced to adopt quite a different concept in their honest searching of facts. They are now saying that as we study man afresh and compare him with the most developed animals, we can by no means assume that he evolved in straight-line descent from these species. Instead, we have to trace him back to a primeval form no longer to be found upon the earth. These researchers now believe that such a primeval form once existed and that while man and animal both evolved front it, they did so in two different directions. Outstanding investigators have brought forth a further fact. They put the question: How could man develop as differently as he has when all the while animals, too, were evolving? Strange to say, they have not hit upon a “fight for survival.” They assume that man and his form were in a specially protected place where he could continue under the same conditions which originally brought forth that form, whereas all other creatures were caught up in a downward trend. Thus, man today is being traced back to an invisible primeval form that developed as it did because it was protected in a realm where man did not have to take part in a struggle to survive. These researchers subscribe to only one remaining fiction. They believe the protecting realm to have been a physically perceptible locality.

Gnosticism, too. assumes just such a primeval form. But instead of picturing it as having existed on the physical plane, it assigns it to the spiritual world, which was, in fact, able to afford it protection.

If one can conceive the idea that man was a late-corner to the earth, one can also conceive the following thought. Tracing the course of history, we find that a hitherto undivided human race split up into various nations and races and that many different confessions came into being, each shaped in accordance with the feeling of a particular group. In earlier times humanity was so constituted that a person could develop only what was implanted in him by virtue of belonging to a certain tribe. The spiritual force, however, the spiritual being that made man human in the first place, enables him to find the human being in his fellow man instead of what heredity has made of him. Man had to have this capacity restored to him. It was an impulse that could be taken up again only when humanity grew ripe for it.

So we encounter lofty and remarkable concepts of evolution in the first Christian centuries. It must be said that what we are witnessing in present-day natural science as the beginning of something that must eventually outgrow the Chrysalis stage, was already anticipated by the Gnostics in the grandiose conceptions reached by them as they thought about these matters. This could happen only because there is such a thing as evolution in man's history.

If we look back to a period that lies still closer to the time of man's descent to earth, we come upon a wholly different kind of soul life. Comparing it with the soul life of the present we must say that the latter is oriented toward a sense-based and brain-conditioned way of experiencing, whereas earlier times brought us a marvelous heritage of knowledge in the form of pictures. The fact that this heritage exists proves what spiritual scientific research also discovers to be true that human souls did not always perceive their surroundings as they do today, but were once clairvoyant. At that time man did not feel himself so involved with his own ego. Instead, he felt that he was part and parcel of everything around him. A dreamlike state of consciousness brought him into profound contact with the world about. Primeval man's way of knowing things was through a dreamlike clairvoyance that revealed their mysteries to him. His was an experience akin to dreaming as we know it today. Thus, it was possible for a humanity recently descended from spiritual heights to experience the secrets of the spiritual world in what may be called a clairvoyant dream-state.

Evolutionary progress meant, however, an ever-deepening descent of man into physical existence, accompanied by an ever further loss of that ancient clairvoyant capacity, though this need not be thought of as a tragedy. For if man had not lost his old clairvoyance he could never have advanced to the stage of free self-awareness that alone provided the basis for conscious personal experience.

The loss of the old clairvoyant insight that once gave access to secrets of the spiritual world came about gradually. Even when mankind had become thoroughly at home in the physical world, clairvoyant knowledge was still kept alive in sanctuaries that preserved the heritage of the ancient Mysteries, the treasure of wisdom that had come down to them through the ages. After the Christ Event had taken place and entered the stream of earth-evolution, the Gnostics still hoarded that age-old treasure of wisdom won by humanity's clairvoyant insight, and they formed their idea of Christ in accordance with it. Their concept may, therefore, be described as a reminiscence of knowledge gleaned in olden times, not as the product of free, conscious selfhood. They simply applied what men of ancient days had known to explain the Christ phenomenon. The period during which Gnosticism flourished coincided with the dimming of clairvoyant insight. This made it impossible for those who followed after. in the Middle Ages, to go on working with the heritage of Gnostic wisdom as a means of understanding Christ.

Instead, something else took the place of Gnosticism. We find people who lived in the centuries after its demise just as eager to grasp the Christ phenomenon, but wanting henceforth to rely on their own human powers of understanding, on a scientific approach. And we see the most enlightened spirits of the Middle Ages turning from Gnosticism to the teachings of Aristotle for the basis of their understanding of the Christ.

They found themselves forced to say that Aristotle's world conception brought them to a standstill at a certain point, that true spiritual understanding of the Christ was out of reach of human knowledge.

In one respect, however, the view of the world held in the Middle Ages rests on one of Aristotle's main ideas. Aristotle would never have thought of going as far as modern materialism has gone. When we look into his idea of the way soul and body work together, we do not find him subscribing to any such belief as that a man's inner life is conditioned by the heredity that comes to him from parents, grandparents, etc. His view was rather that every person born into the world is given a drop out of the ocean of divinity to unite with his body, that a soul-spiritual core always detaches itself front the universal spirit and enters human beings at their birth. But Aristotle, who was distinguished by a quality seldom met with in our day, that is, the habit of drawing the real consequences of his musing and investigating, does not stop at this point. He goes on thinking, and comes to believe that when a soul passes through the gates of death it does so as a now well- established entity, and as such ascends into the spiritual world. Though prior to birth it did not exist as a separate being, after death it lives on in the world of the spirit as an individual.

What kind of after-death experience does this soul now undergo, as Aristotle sees it? None whatever, since it lacks a body to make that possible. Now its sole content is the memory of its life on earth. It lives on in eternity looking back on its earth-life with the good and evil it has done, wholly given up to memory pictures.

Here, in Aristotle, may be found the origin of the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell. lt began in his concept and made its way into Catholic dogma during the Middle Ages. But let me say at once that it was not possible for Aristotle as a man of his time to do other than picture the soul as an unchanging entity doomed to gaze forever at its earthly deeds.

Modern spiritual science, anthroposophy, recognizes, of course, that the soul can do more after death than just look back as though in memory-pictures on its previous earth-life. It knows that the soul does not have to stay forever in that state. Instead, it sees man taking with him into the spiritual world as the finest fruit of his earth experience the possibility of transforming or building further on the good and bad deeds he committed here: nor does he stay forever in the spiritual world. Rather is he born again into a new incarnation and has opportunities to work out some karmic compensation for what he did or failed to do in previous lives. The soul passes through the gates of death taking with it the impulse to seek further incarnations for the sake of working out a balance. Aristotle could not accept such an idea because he had always thought that every birth meant a detaching of spiritual substance to form the soul. But spiritual science bears witness to the fact that our present lives derive from past incarnations.

So Aristotle may be said to have stood in the way of his own insight. He whom wise men of the Middle Ages called “the precursor of Christ in understanding nature,” did not get as far as the reincarnation concept. We see how he stopped short of the mark in regard to the question of immortality and how for him life's fruit was just eternal contemplation. The inevitable outcome of this was that people could not see into the spiritual world or gain any understanding of the nature of the Christ. For the thinking of the Middle Ages, Christ disappeared into the realm of belief which is closed to knowledge. The age-old tradition of Gnosticism was finally lost. Aristotle could not serve spiritual understanding of the Christ. Thus, a line came to be drawn between what can be known and what must remain a matter of belief. One consequence of Aristotelian thought that lived on was the idea of eternal suffering in hell.

It remained for people of more recent times to take the third step in a gradual weakening of faith. They have come to rely more and more on what can be grasped with the physical senses. The effect of this on the Christ concept has been to make Christ an ever less important figure and to render the prevailing idea of Christ more and more materialistic. Where Gnostics once assumed a spiritual principle, and where the Middle Ages in their turn experienced Christ in a mood of purest faith and devotion, the present sees at the beginning of the Christian era not a human being ensouled with a cosmic element but, increasingly, “the simple man of Nazareth,” a man more or less like any other human being. Nobody remembers anything of what the Gnostics had divined. People want to think of Christ in the same materialistic way they think about other historical events. The fact that they regard Him as a mere human being makes it necessary to apply the same methods to the study of His appearance that are generally applied in ordinary historical research.

It might have been recognized that the historical approach to the whole question is the easy way out because what could possibly be easier than to take the Gospels and show how they contradict each other! This reduces things to simplest terms. But then wouldn't the researchers have had to assume that their predecessors were the greatest dunces ever for having failed even to notice such obvious contradictions?

At any rate, the Gospels were certainly not taken as a schooling, a schooling that enables the soul to lift itself to spiritual perception of the Christ. So it is not surprising that history was pressed into service as a yardstick and that a movement has grown up, associated here in Germany with the theologian, Drews, that denies Christ completely. This happened at the very moment when spiritual science entered the contemporary scene.

Spiritual science bears witness to the fact just referred to, that human beings and what they carry within them are not products of a single life, but of many past lives. Man once lived wholly in the spiritual world. Then he left it to descend to earth, but he was to have more than one life in a physical body. When he had digested the fruits of an incarnation during an interval spent in the spiritual world, he descended again into physical embodiment. The law that pertains here has often been the object of our study. It teaches us how deeply involved man is in the whole ongoing process we call history. Life only begins to make real sense when we assume that we have all been living on the earth in order to take what was given us in the beginning, make it our own, and then go on developing with the march of the centuries toward ever greater perfection. A closer study of these matters brings something quite remarkable to light, to be described here as man's mission on the earth.

I must stress again today, as I have so often done before, that the consciousness that man has thus far developed has by no means reached its final form. Man can really take his development in hand: the right spiritual training can lift him to spiritual perception. That is quite within the realm of possibility if he schools his soul in meditation. Just as one can put oneself, by staring intently at a shining object, into a state where one is aware of nothing else (though this is not a recommended practice!), so do we achieve a single-minded, but in this case quite free condition, when we deliberately concentrate all our attention on some soul-spiritual content to the exclusion of all else. Then forces begin to ray out in our souls through which we attain what may be called a body-free condition. Such a person is then really able to say from experience, “I am no longer perceiving with my eyes or thinking with my brain. I am experiencing as a spiritual being, independent of a body, I perceive what lives and has its being in the spiritual world.”

This elevation to the level of spiritual perception can be achieved with proper schooling. The rigorous discipline that leads to it has been described in several of my books.

It is easier to enter the spiritual world if one has trained one's feeling life to avoid all sorts of over-excited and emotional states and reactions. A person who confronts the world with calmness and equanimity keeps unsquandered reserves of feeling alive within him. The spiritual light, which meditation kindles in us, radiates into such reserves. A person full of selfish demands will never make a disciplined spiritual investigator. But those who achieve real empathy with their fellow-men, who know what selfless love is, who are not absorbed exclusively in their own feelings, have a soul-surplus that can be charged with forces garnered from spiritual schooling. The light of clairvoyance is engendered in feeling that keeps itself free of egotism.

When a person has progressed to the point of being able to live in the spiritual world he can gradually learn to clothe his experiences in ordinary concepts. Handed on in that form, any healthy mentality can grasp them. It is no more necessary for everyone to be a spiritual investigator than for each of us individually to make laboratory tests to see whether what science says is true or not. Those charged with communicating the results of spiritual-scientific research do not shy away from commonsense thinkers. Really healthy minds readily see the truth of statements made by the spiritual investigator. The only people who dispute his findings are those who approach them filled with prejudice. This holds true in the case of spiritual science, which is the fruit of clairvoyant research. It enables human beings to gain access to a world of spiritual experience.

The insight that spiritual scientists can presently achieve by means of a heightened consciousness will—to some degree at least, and in certain fields f be attainable by all men in future. It will fall to the lot of Twentieth Century humanity to realize that the soul develops, that it passes through life after life in the course of earth's evolution, and in so doing absorbs from the various cultural epochs what each such epoch has to offer.

If one looks nowadays with a more than ordinarily perceptive eye at the human race all over the earth, one becomes aware that it possesses two human qualities that were simply not present in antiquity. This is a fact susceptible of proof. The two new qualities are commission and conscience, and they will go on developing more and more fully as man submits his soul-life to spiritual schooling. Compassion and conscience were new acquisitions at a certain point in evolution.

Much that is called compassion is not worthy of the term. True compassion is the capacity to forget oneself and enter another's being so completely that one feels his suffering as he feels it. One's own ego is quite forgotten in such fellow-feeling; one lives entirely in the other's experience. Suppose for a moment that nature were so to arrange matters that at the moment when a person freed himself from narrow self-concern he had the same experience morally that comes to him every day when he falls asleep. When he can no longer maintain control of his body and his brain ceases to serve his soul as its instrument and he goes to sleep, consciousness disappears. A person can, of course, also fall unconscious from compassion. But that would be egotistical in the extreme, for then he could not surrender himself wholly to another's feelings. In that sense, falling unconscious would amount to a moral failing, whereas compassion is one of the two means whereby a person breaks free of himself without losing consciousness. Conscience is the other. It speaks to our innermost being; the listener follows the bidding of a voice that penetrates to where his ego lives. He subjects the self to something larger than itself. Compassion and conscience are thus forces that man is presently engaged in developing. Consciousness will build further on the foundation of the forms that compassion and conscience have thus far taken, going on to develop the spiritual vision that was previously attainable only in abnormal states of consciousness. To say this is not to make a prophecy but to state a fact determined by strictly scientific means.

As he realizes what effect compassion and conscience have upon the human soul. Twentieth Century man will have a certain direct experience in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness. He will understand something that might be put in the following way. We see that at birth man inherits something from his ancestors. Spiritual being though he is, he must incarnate physically in a given family and clothe himself in hereditary qualities. Long before we had such a thing as science, people were familiar with heredity, but they gave it an entirely different name. Their term for it was “original sin.” Anyone who understands what the Old Testament meant by original sin knows that the term conveyed a much fuller meaning than science has as yet ascribed to it because it applies to moral as well as physical qualities. Those in whom compassion and conscience have borne fruit will say, however, that although birth saddles us with predispositions that cannot be thrown off, we are also endowed with something that is not bound up with matter and that enables us to rise above ourselves and enter the spiritual world. There is one realm—the realm of one's own soul—where there will be direct spiritual vision. Human beings will affirm that although they are tied on the one hand to physical matter, on the other the soul harbors a radiant helper capable of lifting us beyond ourselves, it is a feeling that suggests the following comparison. Suppose there were someone who found it hard to believe that air everywhere surrounds us and fills every empty space. All he has to do to convince himself is to create a vacuum and observe how the air rushes into it. Just such an empty space is created in the soul by compassion and conscience, both of which detach us from our ego. Into that vacuum streams the spiritual entity whom we know as the Christ. This gives us personal experience of the fact that we can receive Christ into ourselves. Christ Who is present in the spiritual atmosphere just as air is present in the physical atmosphere and flows into every Space it finds empty.

On this high level, normal consciousness can indeed become spiritual vision, and no one who has this experience will consider it subjective. He will instead recognize that there must be such a possibility. He will realize that there was a time when it was still unknown and a moment when it became possible for the first time. He will be aware that what he is experiencing made its way down to earth from spiritual realms and united with it as the Christ impulse. This Christ impulse will inevitably come to be looked upon by Twentieth Century man as a force that entered earth evolution at a particular moment in time as a real historical event. That will usher in a period when it will no longer make sense to say that Christ is merely an idea. Instead, people will say that the Christ experience can be conceived as taking place only in this or that individual soul, just as philosophers maintain that there could be no such thing as color without eyes to perceive it. But colors do not owe their existence to perceiving eyes; the truth is rather that eyes are created by the light-world. The fact ought therefore to be stated thus: “No eyes without light.” It is equally true that without the historical Christ human beings could not experience Christ or the Christ-power within them. So they will know Christ to be a spiritual being and realize that this Being once actually lived on earth as a fact of history and sacrificed Himself to become one with the earth. They will be able to make their way into the spiritual world and discover Christ there.

Goethe often found just the right way of putting some fact or other, and perhaps we might borrow one of his sayings to express what we have been discussing here; it can serve us as a pointer. Goethe said that the eye was built by light to perceive the light: the eye was conjured forth by light from organs that were originally indeterminate. He goes on to make a further statement that calls attention to the impulse we harbor to discover God within us:

“Were not our eyes profoundly of the sun
How could they behold the light?
Were not our strength from God's own being won.
How could we feel so in Things divine delight.”

Just as the eye is conjured forth by light, so man's power to see God is conjured forth by God Himself as He lives and moves within and all about us. Those whose own Christ-likeness enables them to experience the Christ in beauty of feeling and insight will know that this is possible only because Christ once descended to earth and lived here, an historic figure. Just as the sun's light conjures forth eyes in human bodies so does the historic Christ conjure forth Christ-life in the souls of men.

“Unless the soul of man were Christ-like, how indeed could it experience the Christ? lf Christ had not lived as an historic figure how could man's soul ever come to know that most glorious feeling: feeling for the Christ?” Such will be the tenor of Twentieth Century comment. At the very moment when orthodox science reaches the point of denying Christ any historical reality, spiritual science will say without relying on documents that because man can experience Christ he knows that Christ did indeed live historically as a life-giving force, as the sun in that spiritual realm whence human evolution draws its nutriment.

Today I would like to address myself to a subject specifically requested by our friends here, a subject having great significance for modern spiritual life. It shall be considered from the standpoint I have often taken when speaking of things of the spirit. As a rule, it is difficult to speak of such a unique and deeply significant subject unless it be assumed that the audience keep in mind various things explained in other lectures given on the foundations of spiritual science. This science is neither widely recognized nor popular; in fact, it is a most unpopular and much misunderstood spiritual stream of our day. Misunderstandings can easily arise especially with a subject like the one chosen today, because the opinion is far too widespread that anthroposophy might undermine this or that religious creed, thereby interfering with what someone may hold precious. Anyone willing to go into anthroposophy in any depth sees that this opinion is completely false. In one sense, spiritual science aims to develop further the way of thinking that entered human evolution through natural science. By strengthening the human soul, it seeks to make this kind of thinking fruitful. The way spiritual science must proceed differs significantly, however, from the way taken by natural science. Anthroposophy takes its start, not from the world perceived by the external senses, but from the world of the spirit. Questions pertaining to the spiritual life of the soul must therefore be considered from the standpoint of spiritual science. Undoubtedly for many in our time the most important question in the spiritual life of humanity pertains to the subject of today's lecture, that is, Christ Jesus.

To ensure that we shall understand each other at least to some extent, I would like to make a few preliminary observations before moving on to any specific questions. Spiritual science, though it is the continuation of natural science, makes entirely different demands on the human soul. This fact accounts for the misunderstanding and opposition spiritual science encounters. The kind of thinking derived from natural science is tied up with a problem that more or less concerns human souls today when they consider higher aspects of life. This is the problem of the limits to knowledge. Spiritual science in no way belittles the most admirable attempt of philosophers to ascertain the extent of human thought and knowledge. Thinkers who judge on the basis of what can ordinarily be observed in the soul easily conclude that human knowledge can go so far and no farther. It is commonly said, “This fact can be known; that other cannot.”

On this issue spiritual science takes a completely different stand because it takes into consideration the development of the human soul. Granted, in ordinary life and science the soul does indeed confront certain limits of knowledge. The soul, however, may take itself in hand, transform itself and thereby acquire the possibility of penetrating into spheres of existence radically unlike those usually experienced.

Here I can only indicate what in earlier lectures and in such books as An Outline of Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have already explained, namely, that the soul can completely change itself. Through practicing certain exercises, the soul may bring about an infinite enhancement of its inherent forces of attention and devotion. Ordinarily, the soul-spiritual life uses the human body like an instrument. Just as hydrogen is bound to oxygen in water, so is this life closely connected with the body, within which it works. Now, just as hydrogen may be separated from oxygen and shown to have completely different qualities from water, so may the soul, through the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, separate itself from the body. By thus turning away from and lifting itself out of the body, the soul acquires an inner life of its own.

Not by speculation or philosophy but by devoted discipline can the soul emancipate itself from the body. To live as a soul-spiritual being, apart from the body is the great experience of the spiritual investigator. Here I can only indicate things I have elaborated elsewhere.

Today my task is to show how the spiritual investigator must regard the Christ Jesus Event. Statements of religious creeds concerning this event are derived from experiences of the soul in its life within the body. The statements of the spiritual investigator come from clairvoyant experiences of the soul as it lives independently of the body in the spiritual world. In this condition the soul can survey the whole course of mankind's evolution.

What the spiritual investigator thereby learns of Christ Jesus calls for a certain way of speaking, because the investigator acquires his knowledge in immediate spiritual vision while living separated from his body. Yet he can communicate this knowledge only indirectly by turning his attention to the things of this world. His description, however, must convey what he has experienced in spiritual vision. Thus, what follows in way of explanation of certain processes in man's external life is not meant to be taken metaphorically. It is intended rather to express something in which spiritual science must come to an understanding with natural science. In respect to one point in particular it is most important to come to terms with present-day thought.

In natural science it is admitted that a mere descriptive enumeration of single events in nature is inadequate. It is recognized that the scientist must proceed from a description of natural phenomena to the laws invisibly animating them. These laws we perceive when we relate phenomena with each other, or when we immerse ourselves in them. In this way they reveal their inner laws. In the treatment of historical facts, however, this natural scientific method is not easily applied.

Now, as a rule, I am disinclined to speak of personal matters, but in the following case I can speak of something objective. The title of my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, which was first published many years ago, was not chosen without due reflection. It was selected to indicate a certain way of observing things. It was not entitled The Mysticism of Christianity because I did not intend to deal with this topic, nor was it entitled Christian Mysticism because I did not intend to write on that theme, the mystical life of the Christian, either. What I sought to show was that the Christ impulse, the entrance of Christianity into mankind's development, can be comprehended only by perceiving how the super-sensible plays into the development ordinarily described in history. As these facts are accessible only to spiritual vision, they can be called mystical. They are mystical while at the same time having occurred on earth.

The origin and development of Christianity can be understood only when we realize that facts in history arrange themselves as do facts in our solar system, where the sun has the major role and the other planets less important parts. This arrangement can be recognized when facts are seen from a natural scientific standpoint. In the field of history, however, facts are rarely so viewed. Here, the succession of facts is easily described, but the fact that the way of contemplating the historical facts differs from the way of contemplating scientific facts is lost sight of.

There is a law in natural science whose validity is more or less acknowledged by all, despite this or that detail of it being open to dispute. This law, first formulated by Ernst Haeckel, has become fundamental to biology. It states that a living being recapitulates in its embryonic life, passes through stages of development that resemble those of the lower animals such as the fishes. This is a law recognized in science.

Now there is another law, which can be discovered by spiritual vision, that is of great importance in mankind's development. Because it is valid only in the sphere of spiritual life it presents a rather different aspect than the law just mentioned, but it is as true as any in natural science. It enables us to say what is undoubtedly true, that humanity has passed through many stages in its development, and that as it has passed from one epoch to another, from one century to another, it has taken on various forms. We need only assume that the epochs known to history were preceded by primeval ones. At this point we may ask if the life of humanity as a whole can be compared with anything else. Of course, any comparison concerning mankind's development must be the outcome of spiritual-scientific observation. External facts must be used as a language, as a means of communication, to express what the spiritual investigator perceives. What he perceives is that mankind's development as a whole may be compared with the life of a single man.

The experiences of mankind in ancient cultures—in those of Egypt and China, Persia and India, Greece and Rome—were different from those of our time. In those ancient epochs man's soul lived in conditions different from those of today. Just as in the individual human life the experiences of childhood are not the same as those of youth or old age, so in these cultures mankind's experiences were not the same as ours are today. Human development passes through various forms in the various ages of life.

The following question now arises. What stage in the individual life of man may be compared with the present epoch of humanity? This question can be answered only by spiritual science. Anthroposophy stands upon such a foundation that it can say that when man enters his life on earth he does not inherit everything from his mother and father that belongs to his being. We can say that man descends from a life in the spirit to an existence on earth, and that the spiritual part of his being follows certain laws whereby it connects itself with what is inherited from the parents. Further, we can say that the spiritual part helps in the whole growth and development of the human body. We see how the soul and spirit takes hold of and works upon physical substance. The wonderful mystery of man's gradual development, the emergence of definite traits from indefinite, capacities from incapacities, all bear witness to the sculpting power of these spiritual forces. Through spiritual science we are lead to look back from this present life to former lives on earth. We see that the way our soul-spiritual being prepares the bodily organization and the course our destiny takes depend[s] upon what we have elaborated and gained for ourselves in former lives.

Exact spiritual-scientific investigation shows that during the whole ascending course of our lives, up to our thirties, the fruits won from former lives on earth and brought with us from the spiritual world still exercise an immediate influence upon our physical existence and destiny. Our soul, being connected with the external world, progresses as we experience life on earth. From these experiences a soul-spiritual kernel forms itself within us. Up until our thirtieth to thirty-fifth years we arrange our lives in accordance with the spiritual forces we have brought with us from the spiritual world. From the middle of our lives onward the forces of our soul-spiritual kernel begin to work. This seed, containing what we have already elaborated, continues to work within us for the rest of our lives.

Even after a plant has faded away, the forces capable of producing a new one survive. These forces are like the soul-spiritual forces we gain for ourselves in the first half of life and that predominate in the second. When, in this second period of life, our senses weaken, our hair turns gray and our skin becomes wrinkled, our external life may be compared with a dying plant. Yet, in this period what we have prepared since our birth, what we have not brought with us from a preceding life but have rather elaborated in this life, grows ever stronger and more powerful. It is the part in us that passes through the portal of death, that casts off life as something faded. It is that part in us that passes over into the spiritual world. At an important moment in our life, when the fresh forces of our youth start to wane, we begin to cultivate something new on earth, that is, a soul-spiritual seed that passes through death.

We may now ask ourselves what period in human life can be compared with the present epoch, considering the whole development of humanity. Can our present age be compared with the first part of human life, with the first thirty to thirty-five years, or with the latter part. Spiritual-scientific observation of the present age reveals that our existence in the external world can in fact be compared only with the period of human life lying beyond the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years. Human development on earth has already passed the middle part of life. We need only compare the experiences of mankind in our present culture with experiences undergone in the Egyptian-Babylonian or Greco-Roman cultures. We need only point to our mighty and admirable technical and industrial achievements to show that man has now severed himself from what is directly and instinctively connected with his body.

Men in ancient cultures faced the world as a child does. The child's life is an ascending one, completely dependent upon the body. Mankind's life today, in contrast, is mechanical, cut off from the body. History, science, philosophy and religion all show that mankind in its evolution has reached a point lying beyond the middle of life. Modern pedagogy, with its efforts to be established on rational lines, especially bears out this fact. Modern pedagogy differs markedly from ancient pedagogy. Children growing up under our artificial education become severed from the direct impulses of humanity. An earlier education, one in an epoch lying before mankind's middle life, was derived from intuition and instinct. Observation of the riddles of education strongly confirms the fact that humanity has now passed beyond the point of maturity. We may now ask ourselves what point in humanity's evolution corresponds to the point in the individual life of man that lies between the thirtieth and thirty-fifth years.

When the spiritual investigator, objectively observing the evolution of humanity, turns his gaze on ancient times, he finds a trend that culminates in the Greco-Roman epoch. He finds that then humanity as a whole reached that age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of an individual man. The individual man may use a surplus of vital forces in his body to live beyond the descending point in his life and to cultivate up until his death a soul-spiritual kernel. In the life of humanity as a whole, however, things take a different course. When the youthful forces of humanity cease to flow, as it were, a new impulse is needed for its further development, an impulse not lying within humanity itself. Even if we know nothing whatsoever of the Gospels or of tradition, we need only look at mankind's historical development to discover in the Greco-Roman epoch the entrance of such an impulse. There, at a certain moment, the turning point of man's whole earthly development occurred. A completely new impulse entered the course of man's evolution, when its youthful forces were on the wane. An examination of the ancient mysteries will throw more light on this historical fact.

These mysteries, which existed in every culture and which to some extent have reached our knowledge through literature, were functions performed at centers that served both as schools and churches. Through cultic rites intended to transform the everyday life of soul, these functions enabled men to attain to higher knowledge. These mystery schools took different forms in different countries, but at all centers those souls whom the leaders of the schools believed capable of development received training.

In the mysteries man's soul life was not regarded as it is today. In this ancient viewpoint, which anthroposophy must renew, the soul was deemed unfit in its ordinary state to penetrate into those spheres where its inmost being flows together with the very source of life. The ancients felt that the human soul had to prepare itself for knowledge by undergoing a certain moral and esthetic training. They thought that through this inner training the soul could transform itself and thereby acquire forces of knowledge surpassing those of ordinary life. The soul then became capable of perceiving those mysteries that lie behind external phenomena.

There were basically two kinds of center[s] where pupils were trained to acquire spiritual wisdom and a vision of life's mysteries. Pupils of the first kind, under the guidance of the centers' leaders, especially developed the psychic life. During spiritual vision they could free themselves from the body. The Egyptian and Greek mysteries offered this kind of training. The other kind existed in the Persian mysteries of Asia Minor.

Pupils of these Egyptian and Greek mysteries were trained to turn their senses away from the external world and thus eventually to enter the condition man ordinarily falls into unawares when he is overcome by sleep, when sense impressions cease. The soul of the pupil was led completely into his inner self, and his inner life was given a strength and intensity far surpassing that required to receive merely sense impressions. After pursuing his exercises for a long time, the pupil reached a certain stage in his inner life when he could say to himself, “Man learns to know his real being only when he has torn himself away from his body.” The strange but distinct mood evoked in the pupil's soul gave rise to an experience he could characterize with the words, “In everyday life, when I use my body to connect myself with the world of the senses, I do not really live within my full human nature. Only when I have a deeper experience of myself within my own being am I a man in the fullest meaning of the word.” This experience impressed on him that man can know his spiritual essence by penetrating into his innermost soul. He thereby could draw near to God, the primeval source of his being. Within himself he could feel that point where his soul life united with the divine source of existence.

It must be added that this type of training resulted in an increase of egotism, not a decrease. The leaders of the mysteries thus set great store upon a schooling in human love and unselfishness. They knew that through the wisdom of the mysteries a pupil could indeed unite with his god even though he were insufficiently prepared, but they realized that he could do so only at the price of increased egotism. By withdrawing from the sense world and entering the spiritual world he could experience the human self, the human ego, far more strongly than is usually the case. The men in these mysteries who, by strengthening their inner lives perceived God, remained useful members of human society only if they had first passed through a spiritual development grounded in a sound preparation of the moral life. This, the Dionysian initiation, led man to experience within himself what lies at the base of all human nature, that is, Dionysos.

In the other type of initiation, practiced mainly in Asia Minor and Central Asia, man was led to the secrets of life by an opposite method. He had to subdue all his inner soul experiences, to free himself of the cares and troubles, the passions and instincts of his personal existence. He could then experience the outer course of nature far more intensely than is normally done. Whereas we normally experience only winter and summer, the disciples of these initiation centers had to experience, in a special way, the change from one season to another. Even as our hands share in the life of our bodies, so did the disciple have to share in the life of the earth. When the earth grew cold, when its plant covering began to fade, he had to feel within his soul its life of sadness and desolation. He had to share in these experiences as a member of the whole organism of the earth. Too, he could share in the rising life of spring and of the earth's awakening at midsummer, when the sun stands at its highest point on the horizon. He felt those forces of the sun in union with the whole earth.

In this kind of initiation the disciple's soul was drawn out of his inner being, whereby he could participate in the events of the cosmos and raise himself to the soul-spiritual essence permeating the universe. His experience differed markedly from ordinary contemplation of nature because he felt he lived within the very soul of the universe. In not a bad but a good sense, he was beside himself. He was, though one hesitates to use this word because it has taken on an unpleasant connotation, in ecstasy. Upon achieving this union with the cosmos he could say to himself that through living in the universe and through experiencing its most intimate soul-spiritual forces, he had come to realize that everywhere the final goal of the cosmos is the creation of man. Did man not exist, the whole creation could not fulfill its end, because he was the meaning of the cosmos.

It is one thing to say this; it is quite another to experience it. The disciples of the mysteries felt this fact because they entered into the life of the universe with an enhanced selfconsciousness. Indeed, this proud sense of self was indispensable to their experience of the cosmos. Whereas egotism resided in man's penetration into his spiritual being, pride lay in his union with the soul-spiritual essence of the world. Therefore, those who prepared the disciples for such an experience took care that they did not completely fall prey to pride.

In ancient times, all the truths constituting man's knowledge were acquired through the mysteries on the one or the other path. Humanity's course of development was then on the ascent. Man was unfolding fresh forces and lived in the stage of childhood, as it were. He had to learn through the mysteries how to reach the spiritual worlds. Ancient civilizations always revealed one of these two sides: that derived from man's strengthening his inner life, and that derived from his surveying the whole universe, which enabled him to say that all this pointed to the human being, to the soul-spiritual part he bears within him. Such a disciple of the second kind of initiation could also say when he looked out into the world's spaces, “There, in the wide reaches of the universe, something lives that must enter into me if I am to fully know myself as a human being. But when I live on the earth, unable to look out into the wide world, the spirit cannot come to me, and I cannot really know myself as man.”

Humanity then entered an epoch in which its youthful forces became exhausted. The whole human race reached an age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of the individual man. In this epoch the ancient mysteries, which existed to help humanity in its youth, had lost their meaning. Furthermore, something happened that is most difficult to understand even now. When man attempted to rise to the soul-spiritual essence of the cosmos, this essence no longer drew near him; he could no longer experience the god within himself.

When the ancient Persian surpassed his ordinary state of consciousness, he could feel how God descended upon his soul, how his soul became permeated by the God of the universe. Humanity always had this possibility so long as it possessed its youthful forces. But in the Greco-Roman epoch this possibility ended. Then, everything prescribed in the ancient mysteries to bring inspiration to man became ineffectual, because humanity was receptive to this inspiration only in the time of its youth. Something else now arose. What man could no longer receive because individual human nature had lost the capacity of receiving it even with the help of the mysteries, now entered into the whole evolution of humanity. One human being had to come who could directly unite the two initiation paths.

Purely from the standpoint of spiritual science, apart from all the Gospels, we now see Christ Jesus entering the evolution of the world. Let us imagine someone who knows nothing whatsoever of the Gospels, knows nothing of traditions, but who has entered modern civilization with a soul permeated by spiritual science. Such a person would have to say to himself, “There came a time in the evolution of the world and in the history of humanity when man's receptivity for spiritual life ceased.” But humanity has preserved its soul-spiritual life. How can this be? The soul-spiritual essence that man once took into himself must have entered the evolution of the earth in some other way, independently of man. A Being must have taken into himself what the mystery disciples once received through the power of a most highly developed soul life. In sum, a human being must have appeared who inwardly possessed what the one mystery path enabled the soul to experience directly, namely, the spiritual essence of the external world, the spirit of the universe.

Spiritual science thus regards Christ Jesus as one who inherently possessed those strengthened powers of soul formerly acquired by disciples of the one mystery path. With these powers of soul he could take into himself from the cosmos what the disciples of the other mystery path had once received. From the standpoint of spiritual science we can say that what the disciples of the ancient mysteries once sought through an external connection with the Godhead came to expression in immediate form and as historical fact in Christ Jesus. When did this happen? It happened in that age when the forces that were already exhausted in humanity as a whole were also exhausted in the life of the individual human being. In his thirtieth year of life Jesus had reached the age humanity as a whole had then attained. It was in this year that he received the Christ. Into his fully developed, inwardly strengthened soul he received the spirit of the cosmos. At the turning point of human evolution we discover that a man has taken into his soul the divine-spiritual essence of the universe. What was striven for in the ancient mysteries has now become an historical event.

Let us proceed, bearing in mind indications of the Gospels concerning the life of Christ Jesus from the Baptism in the Jordan to His Resurrection. Spiritual science enables us to say that in this period something completely new entered the evolution of humanity. In the past, man made a real contact with the divine essence only through the mysteries. What was thus experienced in the mysteries went out into the world as revelations, to be accepted in faith. In the event we are now considering, the contact with the spiritual-divine essence of the cosmos happened in such a way that within the man Jesus, Christ entered the stream of earthly life for a period of three years. Then, at the Mystery of Golgotha, a force that formerly lived outside the earth poured itself out into the world. All the events through which Christ passed while living in the body of Jesus brought about the existence of this power in the earthly world, in the earthly part of the cosmos. Ever since that time this power lives in the same atmosphere in which our souls live.

We may term one of the two types of initiation sub-earthly and designate the other, in which man took up the spirit of the cosmos, super-earthly. In either case, man had to abandon his human essence to make contact with the divine essence. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, concerns not only the individual human being but the whole history of man on earth as well. Through this event humanity received something completely new. With the Baptism in the river Jordan something formerly experienced by every disciple of the mysteries entered a single human being, and from this single human being something streamed out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, enabling every soul that would do so to live and be immersed in it. This new impulse entered the earthly sphere through the death and resurrection of Christ. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha man lives in a spiritual environment, an environment that has been Christianized because it has absorbed the Christ impulse. Ever since the time when human evolution entered upon its descent, the human soul can revive itself; it can establish a connection with Christ. Man can grow beyond the forces of death that he bears within him. The spiritual source of man's origin can no longer be found on the old path; it must be found on a new path, by seeking a connection with Christ within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

The Christ Event appears to the spiritual investigator in a special light. It may be of interest to describe what he can actually experience after he has so changed his soul that he can perceive the spiritual world. The spiritual investigator can behold a variety of spiritual processes and beings, but he sees them in a special way, depending upon whether or not he has experienced the Christ impulse during his physical existence. Even today one may be a spiritual investigator without having made any inner connection with the Christ impulse. One who has passed through a certain soul development and attained to spiritual vision may thereby investigate many mysteries of the world, mysteries lying at the foundation of the universe; yet even with this vision, it is possible that he still cannot learn anything of the Christ impulse and of the Being of Christ. If we establish a connection with Christ while in the physical body, however, before the attainment of spiritual vision, if this connection is established through feeling, then this experience of Christ that we have gained while in the body remains with us like a memory when we enter the spiritual world. We perceive that even while we lived in the body we had a connection with the spiritual world.

The Christ impulse thus appears to us as the spiritual essence given to man at a time when the ancient inheritance no longer existed in human evolution. What the individual human being experiences after his thirtieth to thirty-fifth years, the whole of humanity experienced at the beginning of our era. Humanity, which unlike the individual human being does not possess a body, would have lost its connection with the divine-spiritual world had not a superearthly Being, a Being who descended to the earth from the cosmos, poured out his essence into the earth's evolution. This act enabled man to restore his connection with the spiritual world.

I realize that I am presenting things that are even less popular with the public than are the principles of spiritual science. Today I can give but a few indications, which in themselves cannot produce any kind of conviction. In regard to the Christ impulse I can only point out the direction taken by spiritual science, which seeks to be a continuation of natural science. The thoughts I have just presented must gradually enter into human evolution, which they will the more spiritual science enters into it. Unlike many other things being advanced today, spiritual science is not easy. It assumes that before attaining to certain definite experiences the soul must first transform itself.

In respect to the Christ experience in particular, spiritual science points out the significant fact that in the ancient mysteries man could find a connection with the divine essence only by going out of his own being. To experience the divine essence he had to abandon his humanity, become something no longer human. After the turning point of human evolution, however, the wonderful and significant possibility arose that man no longer needed to go out of himself in the one direction or the other. Indeed, man lacked the strength to do so. Nor could he in his youth anticipate a time when this would be possible since humanity had already reached a definite age.

The Mystery of Golgotha enabled man to transcend his ordinary human essence while still retaining his humanity. He could now find Christ by remaining man, not by increasing his egotism or pride. It now became possible for man to find Christ by deepening and strengthening himself in his own being. With Christianity something entered human evolution that enabled man to say to himself, “You must remain a human being; you must remain man in your inmost self. As a human being you will find within yourself that element in which your soul is immersed ever since the Mystery of Golgotha. You need not abandon your human essence by descending into egotism or by rising into pride.”

Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha the quality that each human soul now needs, the quality that in past epochs could be found only outside humanity, must be found in humanity itself, within the evolution of the earth. This deepest and most significant human quality is love. Man in his development must no longer follow the course of strengthening his soul on the one mystery path that leads to egotism, because ever since the Mystery of Golgotha it is essential that man acquire the capacity of transcending egotism, of conquering egotism and pride. Having done this, he can experience the higher self within him. A path of development must now be followed that does not lead us into egotism and pride but that remains within the element of love. This truth lies at the foundation of St. Paul's significant words, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

Only after the Mystery of Golgotha did it become possible to objectively experience Christ as that element enabling man to unite with the divine essence. A pupil of the ancient mysteries may indeed have anticipated St. Paul's words, but he could not have experienced their fulfillment. The mystery disciples and their followers could say, “Outside my own being is a god who pours his essence into me.” Or else they could say, “When I strengthen my inner being, I learn to know God in the depths of my own soul.” Today, however, each human being can say, “The love that passes over into other souls and into other beings cannot be found outside my own being; it can be found only by continuing along the paths of my own soul.”

When we immerse ourselves lovingly into other beings, our souls remain the same; man remains human even when he goes beyond himself and discovers Christ within him. That He can be thus found was made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. The soul remains within the human sphere when it attains to that experience expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” We then have the mystical experience of feeling that a higher human essence lives in us, an essence that enwraps us in the same element that bears the soul from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. This is the mystical experience of Christ, which we can have only through a training in love.

Spiritual science shows how it became possible for the human being to have this inner, mystical experience of Christ. By way of comparison, we find in Western philosophy the thought expressed that had we no eyes we could not see colors. Our eyes must be so built that they can perceive colors; there must be an inner predisposition to colors in our eyes, so to speak. Had we no eyes, the world would be colorless and dark for us. The same reasoning applies to the other senses. They too must be predisposed for the perception of the external world. From this argument Schopenhauer and other philosophers have concluded that the external world is a world of our representations. Goethe has coined the fine motto, “Were the eye not sun-like it could never perceive the sun.” We might say further, “The human soul could never understand Christ were it not able so to transform itself that it could inwardly experience the words, ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’”

Goethe had something else in mind when he expressed the truth that were the eye not sun-like it could not see the sun, namely, that our eyes could not exist had there been no light to form them from the sightless human being. The one thought is as true as the other: There could be no perception without eyes and also no eyes without light.

Similarly, it can be said that did the soul not inwardly experience Christ, did it not identify itself with the power of Christ, Christ would be non-existent for the soul. How can the human soul perceive Christ unless it identifies itself with Him? Yet the opposite thought is just as true, that is, man can experience Christ within himself only because at a definite moment in history the Christ impulse entered the evolution of humanity. Without the historical Christ there could be no mystical Christ. The assertion that the human soul could experience Christ even if Christ had never entered the evolution of mankind is a mere abstraction. Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it was impossible to have a mystical experience of Christ. Any other argument is based on a misunderstanding. Just as it would be impossible for us to have the mystical experience of Christ without the historical Christ, even though the historical Christ can be discovered only by those who have experienced the mystical Christ.

Through spiritual science we are thus led to a vision of Christ not based upon the Gospels. Through spiritual science we can perceive that in the course of history Christ entered the evolution of humanity, and we know that He had once to live in a human being so that He could find a path leading through a human being into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Spiritual research thus leads us to Christ, and through Christ to the historical Jesus. It does this at a time when external investigation, based upon external documents, so often questions the historical existence of Jesus.

The thoughts I have here presented may of course meet with opposition, but I can fully understand it if some say my statements appear to them like a fantastic dream.

From a spiritual contemplation of the whole evolution of humanity we can, through spiritual science, come to a recognition of Christ, and through Christ's own nature we can recognize that He once must have lived in a human body. Spiritual-scientific investigation necessarily leads to the historical Jesus. Indeed, it is possible to indicate with mathematical precision when Christ must have lived in the man Jesus, in the historical Jesus. Just as it is possible to understand external mechanical forces through mathematics, so is it possible to understand Jesus by regarding history with a spiritual vision that encompasses Christ. That Being Who lived in Jesus from his thirtieth to thirty-third years gave the impulse humanity needed for its development at a time when its youthful forces were beginning to decline.

In recapitulation, I can say that a new understanding of Christ is a necessity today. Spiritual science not only tries to lead us to Christ; it must do so. All the truths it advances must lead from a spiritual contemplation of man's development to a comprehension of Christ. Men will experience Christ in ever greater measure, and through Christ they will discover Jesus.

Thus, I have tried to day to take my start from the evolution of humanity, directing your gaze from Jesus, upon whom many look with skepticism, to Christ. In future, Jesus will be found on that path we may characterize with the words, “Through a spiritual knowledge of Christ to an historical knowledge of Jesus.”

When people pay attention to the interests of their soul, then the question to which our today's reflection is dedicated - the question of life and death - is certainly a recognized important and meaningful one, and the answer to this question must meet deep needs of the human soul life. Nevertheless, it is difficult to talk about such things in our present time, because it is difficult to strike a chord in the soul, because the concepts, views and ideas that our time has gained from seemingly established scientific concepts contradict what must be said from spiritual scientific research; and it is difficult to bring an unbiased approach to bear on these scientific concepts.

Now it could be that those who are trying to answer these questions today should be met with an unbiased approach, but one only has to pay attention to what is presented to us in the [contemporary scientific] literature and one will recognize how little healthy thinking, how few healthy concepts there are and have a broad audience.

The concept of “life” - let us take the “physiology” of one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, Huxley: here we have an exemplary book in terms of [contemporary] science, and in this book we find an examination of the concept of life. First, he talks about humans, and it is said that human life depends on the brain, lungs and heart, and if any of these elements do not function properly, then life is endangered. And then a curious transition is made. It is said that if you can, so to speak, deprive a person of his brain but artificially maintain the lungs and heart in operation, then life will continue. From a certain point of view, which is so popular today, this of course makes sense, but from the point of view of a world view that encompasses the whole human being, it does not make the slightest sense, because one would be grateful for a life that is not aware of the things one experiences. The true death occurs where this consciousness ends. Thus, the greatest naturalist of the present day is not at all capable of grasping the concept of “life” in the right way.

[In today's science, it is extremely easy to define life.] It is thought that life is the same in humans, animals and plants – everything is mixed up, while we should be clear about the fact that we have to consider each being in relation to this question at its [own level]. The most essential thing in the world view is ignored, because Huxley has become accustomed to looking at that in man which is most indifferent to human life and nature: the material of the body. And so he quotes Hamlet's saying quite seriously - and it is fitting for Hamlet, in his melancholy mood, to make such a statement and, looking at the material of the body, to pursue this material after the great Caesar has died, and to say:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay.
Might well plug a hole from the raw north;
Oh that the earth, to which the world has trembled,
Might wall up a wall against wind and weather.

And Huxley points to an [imaginable] “Negro slave Caesar” or a “chained dog Caesar” and says: Even in this slave or in this dog could be the atoms of the great Caesar. In this way, one pursues that which is most indifferent to human life, and is not aware that one should pursue that which shapes the substance in such a way that it conforms to humanity. Physics will soon abandon these fantasies about atoms – radium research has already shown that atoms disintegrate in the hands of man.

So you see: even at the heights of knowledge, one does not form any real concepts about what life and death are. But science is at an important turning point today, and those who do not work from buzzwords, but rather approach scientific knowledge and observations, see that science is already beginning to grasp the spirit.

It cannot grasp the concept, and perhaps it cannot do so because it has no proper concept of life. The biologist Weismann says: Only the experience that death occurs can convince of the same; one cannot grasp it from life itself. There is talk of the immortality of single-celled organisms. It is said that one such organism splits into two, continues to live as two, and this goes on and on. One speaks of a multiplication in number, and these innumerable beings are the same as the first being. One cannot speak of death in this case. But the fact that Weismann sought a definition of death in this way has led to a calamity, which is characteristic of the way it is understood in the present day and which has turned out strangely. He says that the essence of death is that a corpse is present. Contemporary natural science is only able to speak of life when it is no longer there, and wants to recognize the relationship between life and death by the dead, by the corpse. Verworn, Haeckel's student, says that the individual living beings die, but that life persists. They have resorted to all sorts of things to solve the riddle of life and death, but the confusion has only grown.

Spiritual science does not have it so convenient to be able to throw everything together - [end of transcript; continued after second transcript].

First of all, it should be noted that death in plants and animals is quite different from that in humans. It is a characteristic phenomenon of many plants that they die when they produce a new being; at the moment of fertilization, they pass over into a different form of existence. Until that moment, they were permeated by the etheric body. It is not difficult to make fun of such things; however, it has been shown time and again that anyone who is deeply involved in observing life phenomena cannot get by without the assumption of the etheric or life body. The dying off and withering is based on the fact that the plant follows the physical and chemical laws. Through the etheric body, the plant is withdrawn from the effect of the physical and chemical laws. Where does what is taken from the plant go? It passes over into the new plant; it is the stream of life that passes through the ranks of plants. Even more lives in the animal than the etheric body: in order for consciousness to arise in it, it is provided with an astral body, which is the builder of the organs of consciousness. — In humans, the I is added.

The difference between animals and humans can easily be determined; one must not look for the differences where they are not. The desire to completely erase the difference, as materialistic monism is doing now, did not yet exist in the last century. But the difference in the lower jaw was emphasized with pathos - [so] Kant. Goethe did not like this approach because he was able to think spiritually. He studied anatomy and physiology in Jena and proved that it was nonsense to claim this difference. He demonstrated the small ankle bone, [the premaxillary bone], also in humans, and showed that it was only fused. These things will be dealt with in more detail in the forthcoming booklet on anthroposophy. We should look for the difference in the spiritual realm. In animals, the scope of their abilities is tied to their organs and to what they inherit through birth. In humans, various activities remain open, for which they must first develop the ability. Animals have certain abilities that humans must first acquire through intellectual effort. The monkey has a predetermined equilibrium; humans must first learn to walk and stand. Equilibrium is not innate in them; only the mind gradually works on it. Goethe says:

The ancients said that animals are taught by their organs; I would add that human beings are likewise taught by their organs, but they have the advantage of being able to teach their organs in return.

Today, efforts are being made to trace all human abilities back to heredity, and then the help of far-back ancestors is enlisted. But what interests us about the individual person, what determines his or her particular position, his or her task in the world, cannot be explained by the line of ancestors. The unbiased educator can even recognize a clear boundary between inherited traits and those inner forces of the person that arise from previous lives. The fact that animals can also be trained is not a valid objection for someone who is able to see the essential. We ascribe to animals a group, species or generic soul. It is a fact, however, that we take just as much interest in the individual human being as we do in an entire species of animal. In the case of animals, the spiritual individuality does not come into existence in the individual being, but in the whole species. One can compare the individual feelings of a human being with those of an individual animal and the whole human being with the animal species. The animal lives as long as the group soul has not lost interest in the individual specimen. Weismann cannot find the reason for the death of an animal because he overlooks this fact. In the case of man, something comes into existence through birth that is not found in animals, plants or minerals.

There are thinkers, however, who have overcome the opinion that man is only composed of inherited forces. They recognize that an individuality precedes physical existence and shapes it, but they do not find the solution by assuming repeated lives on earth; see Immanuel Hermann Fichte, “Anthropology”:

Parents are not the producers in the full sense: they provide the organic material, and not only that, but at the same time that middle, sensual-comfortable, which shows itself in temperament, in the peculiar , in a particular specification of the drives, etc., as the common source of which “imagination” has been shown to exist in the broader sense that we have demonstrated. In all these elements of personality, the mixture and peculiar combination of the parents' souls is unmistakable; to explain this as a mere product of procreation is perfectly justified, especially if, as we have to assume, procreation is understood as a real soul process. But the actual, concluding center of the personality is missing here precisely; because with deeper penetrating observation it turns out that even those cozy peculiarities are only a shell and a tool to grasp the actually spiritual, ideal facilities of the human being, suitable to promote them in their development or to take, but not capable of letting them arise from themselves. [...] Each preexists according to its basic spiritual form; for, spiritually considered, no individual resembles another, any more than one animal species resembles any of the others.

Francesco Redi was the first to claim that living things can only arise from living things. Only an inaccurate observation could lead to the belief in earlier times that hornets arise from rotten oxen, bees from horse carcasses and wasps from donkeys. Just as today's natural science protests against such superstition, so the spiritual researcher must protest against the fact that the spiritual soul can be explained by the line of inheritance. Human individuality points back to itself in earlier earthly lives.

A well-known objection to this is: If a person does not remember, then the earlier experiences have no value. But there is also a time between birth and death that is not remembered: the first years after birth – and yet one was there; the sense of self was just not yet strong enough. The point in time at which self-awareness first arises is also the limit for remembering back. Thus this being-in-it of the self forms the possibility of remembering. When a person learns to remember, he will remember. It is not easy to grasp this; only through a very specific mode of perception, absolute equanimity, and no fear of fate: with this, our self makes a leap forward. The theory of inheritance has produced strange results, for example that a genius is at the end of an inheritance line and not at the beginning. This is no more surprising than a man who has fallen into the water being wet when you pull him out. We all know Goethe's joke:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition,
and the desire to tell stories.
[...]
What then is
original about the whole creature?

Well, what is original about the “creature” is something that humanity already knows. Our body is built up from the powers that we have acquired from previous embodiments; but the soul abilities that we acquire now in this embodiment create the conditions for the next life. In this body a soul has developed that has greater abilities than in the previous life; and we feel a sense of gratitude that this body dies, because when the senses become dull, the soul is already building itself another body and can discard what is not up to the further development of the soul. Modern natural science is already very close to this assumption. It has already been found that we only tire from activities that involve our consciousness; that is something. A modern naturalist, Thomson, says: The soul is to the body as the rider is to his horse. That is the thought that ancient art expressed with the centaur. There are, of course, people who claim that the ancient peoples of the East saw the wild peoples riding through the mists as if they were one with their horses, and that this inspired their imagination to create the centaur.

The spiritual researcher does not look at the corpse, but at what the corpse leaves behind:

The smallest man on earth
A son of eternity,
Will conquer death in new life
.

I have often had the opportunity to speak to you about subjects of spiritual science, or, as one is accustomed to saying, of Theosophy. Naturally, this leads to the question: What paths must the soul take to attain knowledge of the spiritual world?

These paths differ greatly from what we are accustomed to calling scientific. It is all too easy to dismiss these methods as unscientific. Today, we understand something quite different by the word “scientific”. Therefore, it is necessary to first examine what “scientific” is.

What does the scientist of today demand of a method in order to call it “scientific”? In answer to this question, today's man has developed the attitude that what is to be scientifically provable must, firstly, be researchable by every person at every moment and, secondly, it must be completely independent of what is called “subjective”.

These requirements are met by experiment and, for the most part, by everything that is done in the laboratory. The experiment is independent of sympathy and antipathy and so on, in short, of everything that depends on what is subjectively going on in us.

The situation is different with research into the spiritual world. We must choose the path that is completely independent of the world of the senses, that is, of what today's science is based solely and exclusively on. We need precisely what is to be excluded from today's science. When we speak figuratively of spiritual science, we want to apply a word from Fichte. He says: “What I have to say to you cannot be explored with the ordinary mind, because a special, higher sense is needed for that.” It would be like someone born blind suddenly being given the ability to see colors and light, if one attained this special sense, the “spiritual eye,” as Goethe says.

If a person must first have a new sense in order to recognize a new and different world, then it is already indicated that this is not possible in every place, at every time, by every person and so on, as external science demands.

If we take the ordinary human life, this inner experience differs greatly from one person to another. But this should be excluded in the case of external science; after all, there can be no agreement in what people experience within themselves about the spiritual world. But this judgment is a very superficial one.

However, all this can be easily refuted. I have given a method of refuting Theosophy in the appendix to Seiling's 'Theosophy and Christianity'. But this easy refutation is possible only so long and only insofar as this soul life does not proceed with the strict regularity of which I will speak in a moment. As long as the soul life still flows along in an unregulated way, as long as one stops at that, one is not a spiritual researcher. If this soul life advances methodically enough, it will eventually reach a point within. If we now disregard everything that comes to life in us as pleasure and suffering through the impressions of the outside world, what actually remains in the normal soul life? One fact sheds light on this: sleep, when all external tools are tired and relaxed and no longer supply us with anything (no sensory impressions).

No one will admit that a person ceases to exist in the evening with their inner being and begins again in the morning. But this core of our being is unconscious from the moment our experiences cease, when, figuratively speaking, it dies.

Is it not conceivable that the human soul can create something out of itself [to maintain consciousness] when this soul, which is too weak in the ordinary person during sleep, is made strong? It is indeed conceivable that the soul no longer needs impressions from the outside. We would have to learn to distinguish between a person's unconsciousness during sleep and an arbitrary withdrawal of this core of being, where life is drawn from the soul itself. The impressions of external life are bound to the external sense organs. The soul must withdraw from these external sense impressions artificially. Yes, how can it do that? We are left empty-handed if we do not have external sensory impressions, since our entire soul life only receives nourishment through these impressions.

If we want to sustain our inner life only through these external impressions, we will never come to a broader experience. We must, in order to experience this, not only use the external sense impressions to gain knowledge of the world around us, but also learn to see them as symbols.

For example, we see the plant: it takes root in the soil, green sap courses through it, chaste, without drive or instinct, it stands there. And if we compare it to the human being: the human being is permeated by drives, desires, instincts; he is permeated by blood. The red blood carries the life of the instincts. Thus the green sap can emerge as a symbol for the chaste life, the red blood as a symbol for the life of instincts and drives. The human being must become like the plant, which is free of drives. Let us take a look at the rose, for example, which has transformed the chaste green sap into the color of the instinctive blood. The rose is then a symbol for the human being who has transformed the instinctual life of the blood into chastity. This is expressed in Goethe's words:

And so long as you have not
this:
Die and become,
you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

“Stirb und Werde” (die and become) – that is what matters. We should not want to achieve this in an ascetic way, but in full power. Why can we hit something with a hammer? Because we are objective towards it. So our body should become [a powerful tool] for us, [which we put at the service of the higher worlds]; the body, the life of the senses, should die for us. The “Stirb und Werde” must be taken seriously. The Rose Cross is a symbol for Goethe's “Stirb und Werde”. We have the “die” in the dead black cross of the wood, our blood that has died to instincts and lower desires, and in the roses we have the “becoming”. Yes, man can “become” something. The sprouting red roses are the symbol for this. Now one can say: Yes, these are after all images taken from the world of sense. But roses will never grow out of black wood. — The black wood and the red roses are indeed taken from the world of sense, but the combination is formed only as a symbol for the soul.

[The staff with the snake is also a supporting symbol. We can compare life with a staff; the higher life leads straight up, the snake-like lines are the external impressions through which the human being winds upwards.

No scientist would set up such a symbol. What scientists say is all true, as if you could see it everywhere in space. What the spiritual scientist sets up as such symbols, on the other hand, is arbitrarily put together.

But these symbols have a remarkable effect on our soul. We imagine that we close all our sensory organs and immerse these symbols deep, deep into our soul. These symbols will not initially convey any truths to us, but they do have an effect on our soul as a living force. When a person repeatedly allows such symbols to take effect on them, they experience something. But it is important to let them take effect on you again and again. You have to be patient. You have to do such an exercise fifty times and then fifty times again. Constant dripping wears away the stone. Not one, nor fifty raindrops on a stone are enough, but again and again we have to awaken our will, not just let external impressions get to us, but let such symbols live with our will, in us, again and again. We are inwardly invigorated by this, so that we can eventually revive them at will within us. When a person has been active in such practice, then eventually one wakes up in the morning in such a way that one sinks into the physical body, can make use of one's organs again. One experiences that one can live outside one's body, can be active outside one's physical body. Through such practice one learns to recognize that one can, as it were, leave one's body and be active, spiritually active. This is how this state differs from sleep. One can think, one can feel without one's body. One comes to this realization after undergoing such exercises. This is annoying for some people today, but it is nevertheless so.

Our physical body acts as a mirror. Our consciousness is the reflection of our soul life in our physical body. But [today's scientists] say that the brain has to be completely intact for our consciousness to be real. — Yes, that is quite true. Likewise, we also see ourselves quite differently, whether we look into a smooth mirror or into a concave mirror. Such exercises have torn our consciousness away from the ordinary external reflection of the body, and it is only as such a spiritual being that the human being perceives that he experiences, that he lives together with other spiritual beings.

This first step is “imaginative knowledge”. Here we are dependent only on these combined symbols, combined from elements taken from the world of the senses. We must let go of these, we must let go of the cross and the roses. We must let go of these external impressions, and now we think: What was your activity in this combination, when you combined the snake staff, the cross? What we then have is something that is no longer stimulated from the outside. The external world does not stimulate anyone to form symbols; man does this out of the depths of his soul. He reflects on the inner soul activity; this process is not influenced or even stimulated by the external world, it is purely spiritual and soul-based. This is called meditation. Then real inner powers arise that bring us into contact with the spiritual worlds. We call such spiritual knowledge “inspired knowledge”. We have experienced that there is a world independent of the physical. Now we get to know this world itself. It is like when you come to a coast that emerges on the distant horizon, and you gradually get to know it. This is how it is with the knowledge of the spiritual worlds.

We have to go even further after this inspired realization. We also have to let go of the activity of the soul. It can be described as a conscious sleeping – it can occur, can occur quite consciously. But it can also occur that we get to know the spiritual world in such a way that we become one with it, flow into it. This is called 'intuition'. This should not be confused with what is today called “intuition”, when something suddenly occurs to you. This is something quite different. The greatest effort of the soul is needed for intuition. All subjectivity should be eliminated from the soul, just as scientists demand, so that it is truly scientific. The soul is a place of vision in the intuitive world. All subjectivity is eliminated, even the activity that brought us here. (The soul becomes a place where things express their essence.)

The way described here seems very abstract, but in reality it is not, and those who want to go this way have to go through very, very difficult struggles. Renunciation and struggles are on this path. Our inner soul life takes hold of us as if with tentacles when we have given up external stimuli. The moral and immoral urges, as far as they are in the soul, come up there. Then what we actually are comes before our soul. Self-knowledge arises. The mystics have written about this, about the moral trials and temptations when they become aware, when they want to descend into the soul: You were a person of a certain nature, regulated by convention, custom, tradition, but now the truth of the soul comes up. People swear by the most opposing worldviews, they have morally examined everything. The monist accepts his view out of feeling, and so does the spiritualist. Only now does man recognize the reason for accepting this or that view; now we see what illusions we had when we thought we were being logical.

It can fill one with a certain irony when people come and say that the spiritual scientist is a fantasist and so on, and such people have no idea how little they themselves have looked behind the scenes of fantasy and illusion. One can only overcome what one has had within oneself. This cannot be achieved without pain. Not only with one's thoughts, but also with one's happiness one has become attached to what one sees sinking as an illusion, and not only the illusion, but the source of this illusion, both must be given up with heroic strength. If the human being also wants to overcome inspiration, it happens to him that he finds himself very 'light'. Logic doesn't help here; you can't fight impotence with logic. You can't achieve anything, even the surrender of happiness is of no use – you end up thinking like that. You enter the realm of doubt and despair, and all the doubts of the external world are nothing, they are inferior compared to the doubt at this level. The only way we can overcome this terrible region of ice is not to arrive there unprepared. Instead, we must gain strength beforehand.

It is difficult to get there, very difficult. It is only outlined, but it is not impossible, and no one should be deterred by that. There are ways to overcome the difficulties. To explore and experience the spiritual world, it is necessary to penetrate the spiritual world, but to understand it, unclouded logic is necessary.

However, it is difficult to apply unclouded logic today. What has been proven is not always believed. It is important that the evidence be believed. Everything that spiritual researchers say can be proven, but often people do not accept this evidence at all. Anyone can become a spiritual researcher, but a healthy sense of truth and unclouded logic are sufficient in advance. The most beautiful prospect for us is that spiritual nourishment is given more and more to people, and people give it more and more to physical life. And that is the mission of spiritual science: to bring down this spiritual life, this spiritual sap, and let it flow into what the senses convey, and what we can summarize in the words:

It presses to the human soul From the depths of the world, mysterious The rich abundance of matter. It flows into the depths of the soul From the heights of the world, full of content The clarifying light of the spirit. They meet in the human interior To a reality full of wisdom.

Question and Answer

Question: Isn't it pride to want to know about spiritual worlds in this life?

Rudolf Steiner: On the contrary; it is humility when one does not want to remain as one is. It is pride when one does not want to use the powers that lie within us. One surrounds oneself with the mask of complacency, which does not want to ascend into spiritual worlds.

When we discuss the questions and riddles of life in the sense of modern spiritual science, as has been the case here for several years, it is always good to remember that great man in the developmental history of humanity, namely Copernicus, and [also] many other men who, in the same sense, contributed to the revolution in intellectual life with him. In doing so, one must remember what is rarely thought of today: what it must have meant for a thinking person of that time, when the ground literally trembled under his feet, even moved , so that it seemed as if the earth was no longer at the center of the world, but rather, as a rotating body, also orbiting the sun, while he had clung to the earlier opposite assumption with all his thoughts and ideas. Copernicus now presented a world view that reversed everything that had been believed before. Just as people gradually came to accept the essence of his proclamation, so they used to believe in the constellation of the visible stars on a moon bowl, a sun bowl, on individual planetary spheres up to the seventh, the fixed star sphere. In addition to this, they believed that there was an eighth sphere, which was supposed to form the conclusion of the spatial world. This was what Giordano Bruno already considered to be erroneous, saying that what the eye perceives as the blue vault of heaven is nothing more than what appears to be caused by the limited perceptive ability of the eye; rather, instead of such limited spheres, unlimited worlds are to be thought of, that is, infinite distances and an infinite number of worlds.

But what was it that was expressed in multiple ways? Through such views, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, as well as their followers, pointed out that knowledge is not exclusively promoted by the perception of the senses, but that one must move beyond the sensual result to a view that is based on the supersensible element of thinking. But at that time these minds, which had passed over to a view beyond the tangible observation of the world, had to fight against many parties who wanted to hold on to the traditional and therefore rejected what the new science could offer them against the meaning of this (traditional).

The same applies to what is presented here as spiritual science. This also coincides with the world of external contemporary phenomena, insofar as the events of our own soul life take place in it and relate to the most important questions and riddles that are incorporated in the two words “death” and “immortality”.

We must be clear about the fact that only a serious striving can achieve knowledge about these two enigmatic words, because this is not possible in idle curiosity or with the so-called thirst for knowledge, but only if we lives within ourselves; for man can only fulfill his tasks in the world - whether they be of greater importance or merely those of the recurring everyday life - when he can consciously work and proceed with what essentially rests within him. This is why the question of death and immortality develops into a question about the nature of the human soul, so that in answering it we gain strength and certainty for our work in life, for life in general.

A German philosopher has rightly said: Immortality does not begin only after death, but must be able to be found at all times in the life of the soul, even during our lives. But to do that, it is necessary to get to know the nature of the soul. If we follow the progress of human spiritual development before and since Copernicus, we can see that its successes were slowly prepared. Something similar can be observed here in the questions about death and immortality in the past period of time, although it is only recently that the research methods by which such questions can be discussed and answered have become known in wider circles. In doing so, however, spiritual science must look at a comprehensive law, namely that of human development, which is fully in line with the developmental concept of modern natural science, and with all its consequences. The compulsion of Western intellectual life has long since led important minds in this direction. I would like to refer you, for example, to Lessing: when he was at the peak of his intellectual development, he wrote his 'Education of the Human Race'. He wanted to present a common concern of the entire human race, to show how a law runs through all developmental epochs of mankind, in which not only cause and effect follow one another in a pedantic sequence, but the course of development of humanity is at the same time the education of humanity. He indicated how humanity needed an elementary education in the past, and referred first to the Old Testament period, calling the “Old Testament” the first elementary book of humanity. To grasp the truth in a higher form, humanity was given the “New Testament” in the Christian era, in order to lift it up to further epochs of human development. Thus the education of humanity was carried out by a guiding divine being.

But now the question arises as to whether it makes sense to call the development of humanity an education when the individual souls completely disappear again to make way for souls born later; it only makes sense if the same souls come back for a new development, to be reborn on earth as human beings at a higher level. This is where Lessing's idea came from that the human soul does not live only once, but comes back again and again to take part in the education of the human race anew at a higher level; this is why he speaks of repeated earthly lives of the human soul. Lessing also raises objections to himself and anticipates the easily occurring thought that the soul, for example, does not remember previous lives, by saying, “What useful purpose could such a memory serve?” When the soul has become mature enough, then the memory of earlier earthly lives will also awaken; and he transforms these thoughts into a feeling by saying: When we are filled with the idea of repeated earthly lives, then we can look forward calmly to the future, where the souls will unfold in ever higher earthly lives.

Is not all of eternity mine?

It is clear to see that Lessing has emerged from Western development; his train of thought is different from that of Buddhism, which is related to his. Therefore, his, as a modern conception, must not be confused with that of the latter; because in Buddhism one asks oneself: How should the individual behave in order to reach Nirvana as soon as possible? In Lessing's work, the idea arises from a Christian motive; he regards the whole of humanity on earth as a single, unified family, connected by eternal bonds, destined to develop gradually and together, and to gradually perceive and consciously promote this as a common affair. When so-called enlightened minds speak of Lessing today, they do recognize most of his achievements, but as soon as they come to his thoughts on the education of the human race, they consider him an aging man who had set down these thoughts in his weak time. But one does not follow the necessity in the development of great minds, but only wants to accept what suits oneself.

Hebbel once wrote in his diary: “Let us assume that Plato were to return in a new life and attend a modern secondary school, where he would also have to read his own works again, then it is possible that the reincarnated Plato would understand these old writings the worst.” This is the best way to express the idea that great minds can contribute to the idea of development.

The idea of repeated lives on earth has resurfaced in the educational life of the nineteenth century, being brought to our attention by the psychologist Droßbach, who had taken it up again for scientific reasons. And when, in the in the fifties of the last century a prize was offered for an answer to the question of death and immortality, a paper was awarded in which this idea was developed in the sense of successive earth lives. It is indeed remarkable that around the middle of the nineteenth century a mind like Widenmann answered the question of the life of the soul in this way, from which one then later, out of the necessity of thinking, as one thought, one departed.

Research in spiritual science shows that these repeated lives must be a fact of life, so that it now stands on the standpoint that the human core of our being has been here before, that it once took on a beginning and will often be here again will be, so that his human life will proceed in an earthly life between birth and death and in a spiritual way between death and a new birth, in which part of life our innermost core of being continues its existence in supersensible worlds.

If we now want to see how life everywhere provides us with the results for the affirmation of this view, we must observe the beginning in the independent development of the human being from birth onwards, how gradually the hazy features and awkward body movements develop into more definite features and more purposeful movements, and after a few years the human being is increasingly able to make better and better use of his brain, the noblest tool. Then, on unbiased observation, one must admit that all this is not the result of a self-developing physical power, but that a supersensible entity is working on the striking development from within. But let us look further to see if and how we can also capture the supersensible existence of the soul through external observations. We can observe how the life and events of the soul impress themselves vividly on the physical exterior and the whole being of the human being. If, for example, a person has been eagerly occupied with questions of knowledge for ten years and his soul has been surging up and down in the most diverse moods in the struggle for certain results, then the effects of this cannot simply vanish into nothingness. This is particularly noticeable to anyone who meets someone who has been working hard in this way after quite some time: how the features of the face have changed, shaped by the efforts of the struggling soul. In this way, we can perceive the unique shaping of the soul in the body. Something else also presents itself to us here, which makes this observation a scientific experience; for everyone who struggles in this way can notice in himself, and without any contradiction, that from a certain point on he sees the fruits of his struggle ripening more and faster, as the answer to the questions he wants to answer comes down upon him like a grace. When his soul has arrived at the expression of its struggle in its ultimate consequences in the bodily, then his bodily nature no longer changes, and this is because these struggling forces now emerge fully into consciousness, whereas before they also poured into the bodily and transformed it. When the transformation reached its limit, the forces changed in order to be consciously utilized in accordance with the intention of the developed human being. We can therefore be convinced that everything that forces its way into consciousness and thereby blesses us has worked in the dark depths of the subconscious to develop the organs we needed so that the soul could be completely master of itself and its body.

Once we have directed our attention to the development of the human being, we must still point out something that everyone knows even without clairvoyant abilities, namely, when our life that lies beneath our daytime consciousness shines up into our consciousness during our dreams, which we cannot grasp firmly, however often we have experienced them, even if we experience them according to inner laws, not in random dream figures. The following dream experience may clarify this: a rather zealous, conscientious young person, who also enjoyed drawing in his other lessons, was given a difficult template to copy in his last year at school; he needed quite a long time for his precise, somewhat laborious work and therefore did not finish it by the end of the school year; it did not harm him in the judgment of his teachers, since he had worked diligently and efficiently. Nevertheless, during every lesson, especially towards the end of the school year, he was seized by the fear of not being able to finish his work, and this oppressive sensation haunted him even in his dreams. Even after many years, as an adult, the experience would still come up in his dreams, making him feel like a schoolboy again and, with intense fear, much more than in his daily life, he felt that he would not be able to finish his work, as this had once so often disturbed his school life. This repeated itself for weeks, temporarily ceased, only to recur later. If we want to examine this scientifically, we have to go back over the entire previous life. As a schoolboy, he developed his talent for drawing and also made progress, but this only manifested itself periodically, in leaps and bounds. Each such leap was already preceded by such a series of inner experiences in the schoolboy's life; when these then failed to materialize, he sensed that he had made progress. It remained the same in the development of other abilities in his later life. Now consider whether it is unreasonable to claim that the inner core of the human being was working to bring progress to this person. Before this progress occurred in his soul life, everything took place in the subconscious, but he kept pushing further and further into the physical, and shortly before the breakthrough, before his organs were developed for the external activity of the heightened mental ability, that is, before the last steps, it became apparent in the dream life described that the soul was almost finished with the development of the bodily organ, and then finally, without an accompanying dream experience, to emerge as a product of the spiritual core of the being, externally completely usable in its configured and transformed form.

From this point of view, we can gradually proceed to all the everyday events of life in their alternating states of waking and sleeping. From this point of view we can gradually proceed to all the everyday events of life in their alternating states of waking and sleeping. Through the sensory observation of sleep, one can come to such a realization. How does the moment of falling asleep occur? The person feels how all the senses become duller, the sharp contours of the images fade, everything becomes hazy. If someone who is trained observes this stage, then he comes to an idea about what he did the day before; he feels in a vivid feeling whether he can be satisfied or dissatisfied with himself. In the former case, this feeling is accompanied by such bliss and by the wish that this transition and these thoughts would not end, which fertilize him and flow through his limbs like a new invigoration. But then there is a jolt with which the spiritual and mental core of the being, as a reaction on the body, moves away, and sleep sets in.

It has been pointed out before that those who have to learn a lot soon realize and know from their own experience how good it is to be able to indulge in a revitalizing sleep. Physiologically, sleep and the refreshment it provides can be understood as a state or a process in which what has been worn down during the waking state of the day is rebuilt, and new strength is generated by the spiritual and soul core of the being working into the sleeping body during the state in which it is physically free, as indicated earlier.

When we look at a child as it gradually develops, it is a well-known fact that it lives into the existence of the later waking day life in a formal dream existence, in a sleep life that is only briefly interrupted, especially at the beginning. Everyone knows that it is only from a certain point in time that they can say “I” to themselves, and thus only from that point on that they have become aware of themselves. Anyone who recognizes the principles of physics and chemistry must admit that the mental and spiritual powers with which the child can say “I” to itself after the first years of development must have been there earlier, at a time when they developed the most important and noblest organ of the human being, when the human core formed the brain and worked it out in ever greater detail. The fact that the materialistic science cites that the left cerebral convolution is the speech center, that man cannot speak if these brain parts are not well developed, may be countered only briefly by the fact that a person cannot learn to speak if, for example, he lives on a deserted island, whereas other physiological processes, such as teething, would occur without further ado. Therefore, the mental capacity in the child must be developed to such an extent that the development of speech is initiated and the brain is trained for this purpose; therefore, speaking is not the consequence, but the accompanying and constantly effective cause for the development of the speech center. The soul and spirit must always first have an effect on the physical, working on it so that the organs can develop that are later to be used in the physical world in the sense of conscious thinking. If we summarize these individual thoughts, we are thereby shown everywhere that the process of development takes place in such a way that the whole human body is built up from a supersensible core of being. We can never come to understand this supersensible being if we only remain with its product, the physical body organization. We must always go back to what takes possession of this organization at the beginning of its formation; observation always teaches us this.

Now, in natural science, it is always particularly emphasized that in order to establish conclusive proof, the results of observation must also be obtained in an experiment. The possibility [to do so] is also present here, even if this test is not always necessary. But how [can this be done]? Man must prepare and use his own soul, himself in the fullest sense, as an instrument for grasping the spiritual world. You will find a more detailed account of how this is possible in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. Today, I would merely like to point out that man can also experience the onset of sleep while fully conscious if he makes himself capable of doing so by concentrating on his innermost soul life and through long continued meditation on suitable thoughts. If we hypothetically assume that at the beginning of sleep the spiritual core of the being steps out of the person falling asleep and, figuratively speaking, enters a higher world, then the sufficiently trained person can directly observe this core of the soul through real, experimental observation of the spiritual world. This core of being very easily eludes ordinary perception when falling asleep, since usually too little energy is present in the person to become aware of it when experiencing the soul's separate state. These latent energies must be strengthened, developed; the person must practice discarding all the hindering conditions and try [to achieve a state] in which, so to speak, physical hearing and seeing passes away. Of course, this is only possible gradually and must be initiated by first achieving lasting control over one's earlier emotional movements; grief, anger, and agitation of all kinds must be balanced out, and we must pour calmness over ourselves. When we have worked in this way for a while with sufficient success, we can begin to devote ourselves to certain thoughts of the good, the beautiful, and the true, thoughts that are not borrowed from the world of the senses, and to cultivate symbolized thoughts that express nothing external. If we are willing to move and experience enough within ourselves, then after long and strenuous devotion, we will achieve that our soul becomes an instrument of observation in the sense indicated, in that the powers that previously proved to be too weak to arrive at self-conscious perceptions when falling asleep, now push their way to ever-increasing clarity, instead of leading to a blurred consciousness in the indefinite depths of the soul. Organs are incorporated into the soul organism, which allow us to gain new possibilities of perception. Then the person developed in this way is able to perceive vividly what was previously unconscious and to suppress anything that disturbs him, thus making the soul empty and suitable for the finer impressions of the spiritual world; he will then perceive that the tired person can gather new strength in the spiritual world, which he enters when he falls asleep.

It is also possible for a person to experience a state equivalent to the generally known fatigue in this sense, [but] without the disturbance of the former, during concentration of thought, in such a way that the latter state allows one to remain fully awake and conscious, thus making an effort to ensure that all experiences occur in conscious forms and thus continue completely. Then the person will perceive that he cannot use his body and also his brain, but feels outside of them and cannot chisel into them what he experiences outside of the body. With continued practice of the appropriate exercises, the feeling and the possibility will gradually arise to influence the physical body with the inner soul processes, so that it becomes more and more docile and pliable to the demands and impressions of the soul, until it is generally so prepared and particularly the brain is so formed that it is able to express what is experienced outside of it, to communicate it to others.

This experiment can therefore be done to observe the hypothetical workings of the soul on the body itself; there is no difference in terms of the evidence of these processes compared to the method of natural science. Then we are faced with the possibility that we can say: When a person is born into earthly physical life, his supersensible core of being emerges completely from the supersensible world, and so the human being will also have emerged into life for the first time. As educators, we can observe that young people bring nothing unknown to our world into the earthly world that could never have been connected to our world. Rather, they come equipped with powers that they have already gathered at an earlier time in the physical world, in earlier stages of cultural development. If we look at life more broadly, we are immediately confronted with the fact that every morning, when we wake up, we feel confronted by our past life. When, as mentioned earlier, the human being struggles with his body and this struggle of the soul finds an end in the formation of wrinkles and furrows, the soul ceases the physical transformation, and the soul's powers then become consciously perceptible. Every morning, the soul meets the body at this boundary and can lead it further, as far as it allows with its inherent elasticity. We also see from this that we experience and learn more than we can utilize in our body, because it is, after all, largely fully formed; nevertheless, it continues to have an effect on our spiritual and soul core.

All this can be observed in everyday life, and if it is applied in healthy educational principles, the good effects will be maintained throughout the whole of life. It will be felt that the human being always feels like a student during his life, never loses the bliss of constantly letting new things take effect on him, while a wrong education makes one blasé. When the body has reached the peak of its development and maintained it for a while, but then slowly begins to degrade again, which occurs in the second half of life, we feel that the soul can no longer work on the body as it once did, but that our spiritual-soul core of being, in constant connection with the outer, physical body, now really grows in the emotions and sensations. With the destruction of the brain, the soul life of the person concerned will only cease in the physical, since it is not the brain itself that thinks and so on, but with the help of the brain, thought takes place in the physical. But what is not directly connected to the brain, we feel with increasing age and perceive the decline of the physical, which can no longer be further developed, as a relief.

Finally, the human being passes through the gate of death. The spiritual and soul essence has been enriched in many ways during earthly life and is now working on the preparation of those forces that bring about a repetition of life, in which a new life material is given to a person who has been reborn as a child.

The memory of the previous life is interrupted in an immediate way, especially the memory of details, because the physical body is completely given over to the physical world as a corpse; even that which has only superficially impressed itself on the soul is, as it were, thrown off like a second corpse, since the soul can no longer use it. Only that which the soul can use to achieve new abilities is retained, as formative powers for a new life, which are suitable for building a new body. Thus the idea of repeated earthly lives is justified in itself, and the idea of development that lies at its heart follows as a logical, necessary consequence of what the natural sciences have achieved. In this connection, however, the fact must be taken into account that not all courses of life are to be understood in the sense of a continuous ascent, but despite many fluctuations, whether rooted in man or not, the sum total of repeated lives is an upward climb, a gain.

Sleep can be delayed or even prevented altogether by vivid thoughts that arise in a person as soon as they relate to emotions, joy, fear, worry, or concerns of any kind; for these connect the spiritual and mental core of the being with everyday consciousness and therefore do not allow it to penetrate into supersensible worlds. The person can only fall asleep when this state is finally numbed by excessive tiredness, or when it is distracted from the earlier thoughts by returning to calmer thoughts, especially those of a more ideal direction in life. Similar conditions also apply to the building of a new life. This will be achieved in a downward sense if the forces for this have to be taken from selfishness, or if those who cling to it have to be drawn upon. This also makes the ascending and descending nature of the individual courses of life understandable, so that in this respect, too, life can provide us with evidence for the views presented. The spiritual soul essence enters the germinating body of the child and forms it as the builder of this body. And whoever encounters man uninhibitedly in his natural conditions of origin and growth will find such conditions confirmed as facts. We have been able to verify this, for example, in the case of a man who attained a particularly high level of clairvoyance, namely Michel Nostradamus (Notre-Dame), born in St. Remy in Provence in 1503 and died in Salon in 1566. He was a doctor who worked with the greatest devotion as long as he was left in peace. He was banned from practicing medicine and withdrew to a kind of spiritual observatory, where he studied nature and astronomy. Here he allowed the constellations in particular to take effect on him spiritually and in doing so became aware of some inner abilities of his soul that had previously remained hidden from him. He saw these as a divine gift bestowed upon him for his seclusion. Particularly when he devoted himself to the macrocosm in full tranquility, without being affected by the surging and surging of his soul life, his clairvoyant gift emerged, with which he also achieved great results in his prophecies for the future. We see how the spiritual-soul core of his being broke through the natural conditions of existence, after the forces he had previously used as a physician could no longer be expended; they asserted themselves in the way indicated, because it was not possible to to let them disappear without further ado, and entirely in line with the scientific view of the “conservation of energy”, those forces that had previously been channeled into external activity were transformed into clairvoyant powers, which in turn evoked further inner soul energies. This can also be achieved through meditation and concentration, under the influence of which the human being is prepared to overcome space and time with his perceptions and to see differently than is possible when seeing in physical everyday life. On this occasion, I would like to draw attention to the book “Das Mysterium des Menschen” by Ludwig Deinhard, which explains the complete harmony of external methods with those of spiritual science.

Thus we can look back from our time, in which spiritual science can once again draw new courage for further success, to those upheavals in world and life views, as they were indicated in the introductory words of our lecture, where new elements entered into the sphere of human feeling, just as humanity today, when observing the development of soul and spirit, is in a similar situation to that when Copernicus removed the ground from under our feet and applied thinking instead of observation. If we look only at the sciences, such as astronomy, biology and so on, which have grown not through observation alone, but mainly through thought, just as in Copernicus' time he and still Giordano Bruno Bruno dissolved the narrow-minded views of humanity into seemingly immeasurable atmospheres and spaces, breaking through the eighth sphere created only by the world of the senses.

From this point of view, spiritual science stands today when it sees people who, until now, limited their environment according to spatial-material perception and their own soul nature between birth and death according to temporal perception. However, since these living conditions could only be limited by misleading observation, this self-imposed limitation can also be broken through. Just as astronomical science, for example, must also have a future in the same sense, so must spiritual science expand the firmament of the limited soul life beyond the limits assumed by most people, and indeed beyond this life, beyond birth and death, into an eternity. Then spiritual science will open up to the world the infinity and immortality of the soul. Once Giordano Bruno was condemned to death by burning at the stake by his opponents and burnt in Rome. Perhaps some people would like to see the same thing happen to the representatives and followers of spiritual science. If this is no longer permissible today, then they try to ridicule and belittle spiritual science as much as possible. But those who cannot get enough of it will thereby pass judgment on themselves instead of on those on whom they believe they can carry it out. But that world view will also receive its judgment, and that through the further development of spiritual science, just as the time has come for the recognition of the scientific view of nature, in the face of retrogressive efforts. But spiritual science will also prove to be particularly capable of giving people real life and not just a theory, blessing them more than the natural sciences, not in opposition to them, but by expanding their healthy principles on new paths of development for humanity. Those who can then see that the world is advancing in this way will not condemn spiritual science, but will march with it to victory.

[Man's yearning to answer the question of eternity does not arise] only from a [fearful] desire for existence, not only from a [petty] yearning for one's own immortality, but, [as a deeper look into the human soul teaches us, it] corresponds to the soul's need for eternity, [it arises from] a deep [spiritual], moral need for human perfection. [There is no moment in the soul when it does not have to be filled with the striving for perfection.] The question about the nature of eternity corresponds to the question of all deeper reflection. It is one of the fundamental questions of all deep human research.

But there was also a certain shyness in the human soul to approach these questions.] Hence the belief in immortality: Only through religious feeling one comes [to a conception of eternity], to the feeling of the immortality of the human soul.

The task of Theosophy is to show that research, [real science], is also possible in the realm of the spirit. [For decades, it has always endeavored to awaken the consciousness in certain circles that research in spiritual spheres is possible.] This contradicts today's habits of thought, people's perceptions [yes very much; it is only too understandable that Theosophy must still be considered fantasy, wild reverie]. But the completely logical way of proceeding in spiritual research, [the basic methods] meet the strictest requirements of natural science, even if it is not admitted.

[All this comes to us in a very special way when we raise the fundamental question of the eternity and nature of the human soul, which is connected with it.

The soul and spiritual core of the human being is already manifest in ordinary life and will do so more and more in spiritual science. [Spiritual science must point to what actually governs human life [...], what the soul and spiritual core is like, how this core relates to the realm of transience.

The idea of repeated lives is a spiritual-scientific idea, as is the developmental principle of the human soul and spirit. [Most of you are familiar with these facts, which should be considered from the perspective of ordinary life.] Goethe said: “Consider the ‘what’, more consider the ‘how’.” The 'what' is known, but what can enlighten us arises from the 'how'. It is believed that the human soul is exhausted in conscious thinking, feeling and willing. [One does not sufficiently take into account the factors that are constantly taking place in the depths of the soul. How little man can say about his temperament, disposition.]

But just as the depths of the sea are unknown to him who only observes the play of the waves on the surface, so the subconscious, in which the ordinary life is rooted, is unknown. [A fleeting glance at life reminds us how unconscious factors are constantly playing into life.] An injustice, for example, experienced as a child and repeated in the student, can lead to suicide. [The student had been reproached and so on by the teacher. Now, that also happens with other children. It is only with this child that it leads to suicide. It is the experiences of the fifth year that had so stirred his soul in hidden depths that they led to the act.) The conscious part of the soul points everywhere into hidden depths of the soul. Where consciousness fades, darkness surrounds you – in sleep or in dreams. [If we eavesdrop on human consciousness, we can find many things.] There is an extensive science of dreams, even if it is not known. An example: a student was given a difficult drawing assignment. After a whole year, he still hadn't finished it. This caused the pupil to become anxious towards the end of the year when the drawing was still not finished. Later in life, the following happened: he kept having a very specific dream in which he saw himself as a pupil with the same fear; but each time it was followed by greater manual dexterity. The latter is only an expression of the abilities developing in his whole being. First it worked in the lower depths of the soul life, and as a transition comes the presence in the half-consciousness of the dream consciousness. It is not enough to say: there is a transformation of natural processes. Humanity will have to come to terms with the fact that there is also a transformation of forces in the spiritual realm. Before they become conscious, they live in hidden depths of the soul in the subconscious. Man would have destroyed these soul forces if he had consciously submerged himself before. At first the soul force works in the subconscious, in the soul core; it is not exhausted by the work on the soul, it works in the subconscious on the human body. The body thus shows the effect of the soul-spiritual shaping.

In a child, we first find untrained movements, an expressionless gaze, and so on. However, the soul-spiritual works into the physical, and gradually the physiognomy changes. Memory only comes from the third year onwards. [Jean Paul's word is true]: There - [in his first three years, of which he has no memory] - the child has learned more than in three academic years, and has also done much more intimate work in the brain. [When we come into existence through birth, our brain is in many ways not yet differentiated.] Consciousness is still dull, still asleep, dreaming. Thus we find the work of this dream-conscious soul-spiritual in the whole human being first in the lower parts of the bodily organization, then in the finer shaping of the human body. Does this activity ever stop? As long as the human being is physically present, from conception onwards, the physical is shaped by the spiritual. From the moment that the subconscious achieves its goal, it can penetrate into the consciousness of the person. It must first work in the subconscious of the organization, on the fine shaping of the human body.

In this way, we can follow the activity of the core of our being in its own physicality by methodically observing our mental life.

The first thing that spiritual research teaches is that the spirit connects with the line of inheritance. Two cases are possible here: that the spiritual soul is doing this for the first time or for the umpteenth time. [Now it will be a matter of finding out whether what is working on the person was already there, whether it provides us with evidence that it was present in previous lives.

A person would have to see himself as a mayfly if he had no memory of previous days. [How does a person recognize himself as a unified being throughout his life, since his consciousness breaks down every day? Without memory, this would not be possible.] He does not have memories of previous earthly lives, but he does have an inkling of them.

[We have to develop the ability to observe how this works in a person's physicality from year to year.] The most important educational problems are solved when we recognize how the abilities that the child brings with them can be adapted to what is already on earth. This is how temperament develops. In a person with a distinctly melancholic disposition, life shows the keynote of a certain sadness. How does this person come to this? A mourning experience looks quite different for a melancholic than for a sanguine person. This basic mood goes to the depths of the soul. [The soul lives in the aftermath of the grief it once went through, which can sometimes be seen even years later. The soul's mood is the consequence of previous grief. In the melancholic, we find grief in the most hidden depths of his being.] The mood of mourning was already imprinted in the body because it was brought from the core of the soul. This cannot come from experiences on earth, it was brought from previous lives on earth. [The spiritual core of the human being worked the mood of mourning into the structure of the human body.] For the mood of mourning could only be brought from there, not from the spiritual world, where there is no mourning. Here it is shown with all clarity what a person has acquired in previous lives. It is just as accurate as the results of science. So that is what ordinary life reveals.

Only through an instrument can a person see into the spiritual world; that is the person himself, as he stands before us in his spiritual and soul life. Through concentration and meditation, he can work his way up into the spiritual world. Another soul life is to be developed. A radical transformation of the soul life in order to gain this instrument is necessary for higher knowledge. Then the human being feels: You are something other than what you were before, when you only thought you were in the physical body [because your feeling ran parallel to certain external or physical processes]. Now he realizes: Now you experience yourself as a real being outside of the physical body; you can completely free yourself from the physical body.

In a spiritual sense, such a person carries out an experiment as in a laboratory. The first experience is a kind of idiocy. One experiences oneself as a new being. No concept can make this clear to a person. It cannot be grasped in concepts, it seems “idiotic” because the brain cannot grasp these experiences, [because there is nothing in the physical world that can provide clarity about them]. At a higher level, [when the soul powers are getting stronger and stronger, then concepts arise]; there the brain, [which appears as a rough block], must now be consciously worked on, as unconsciously in the case of a child. Then we look at what we can only grasp logically in ordinary life.

[Humanity would be paralyzed in the future if it did not receive knowledge about its spiritual and mental powers.

In the thirty-fifth year of life, the ascending line is transformed into the descending line. On the descending line, the forces from earlier lives are exhausted, but forces from new experiences are accumulated, [which we have acquired in this life]. These never attain the strength to work into the bodily organization. One will accumulate body-forming forces, but one's own physical body stands as an obstacle.

[But at the same time, the person will feel forces entering him that can shape a new life for him.

For many people, the joy of life fades by the age of thirty-five because they have not kept the sense of the richness of life open in their youth, but in the depths of the soul, forces develop, a feeling that one carries within oneself, forces for a new core of being, then no sadness of old age follows.

In the education of the child, one should never lose the sense of the school of life. An open, healthy mind will develop the human soul from an early age in such a way that the person remains open to spiritual science. The feeling is to be developed that the human being carries within himself a spiritual-soul core of being that freely builds itself a new body after death. [Through spiritual science, we gain security and confidence through the moral forces it gives us.]

In this way, we can experience the victory of the immortal, the victory of eternity over mortality. All creations are mortal, but what lives to eternity is immortal, as Giordano Bruno says. [The spirit is the creator of the mortal, and we thereby recognize its immortality.] Immortality does not begin only after death; man can already experience it now.

Ladies and Gentlemen! The subject of today's lecture must interest every human being. Not only is it interesting to ask what happens to a person after they have crossed the threshold of death, but they also have a profound moral obligation to know something about the essence of the human being. Man feels what can be called the urge for perfection in the noblest sense. This striving can never be completed. With this realization, the endeavor arises to know something about how man can succeed, what the possibility is to satisfy the striving for perfection. This raises the question of death and immortality.

Our time with its habits of thought is not favorable [for such questions]. Therefore, a new school of thought, spiritual science, is trying to approach this question. It has to be so alien to today's life that it seems strange. Therefore, some people who are here tonight will not be immediately convinced. Those who have never heard of it before will perhaps only shake their heads, be ironic, or perhaps even just scoff. I realize that I will face all kinds of resistance. I will only give one example of logical thinking, which is entirely in line with genuine scientific thinking. If one wants to penetrate to the essence of the human heart, one must be made aware of the saying of a philosopher, to the effect that the immortality of the soul, if it exists, cannot begin only with death, but must already be linked to ordinary life.

How do you come to the realization of a thing, being and the like? This is what science asks. Combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water is quite different from considering each of these two substances on its own (for example, separating the oxygen and examining it on its own).

Just as we have our soul in our daily lives, it lives in the body like oxygen in water. The soul perceives through the ear, the eye and so on. All expressions of the soul are only possible because the soul is connected to the organs – like hydrogen with oxygen in water. If there is no way to separate the soul, then one would despair of not being able to recognize the basic nature of the soul.

Is there a state in life where the spiritual-soul life separates from the physical being? It can be said that something different occurs during sleep; the bodily functions take place differently [than in the waking state]. Is it not much more likely that the soul separates and leaves the body alone? Can the content of our soul, our emotional experience – joy and suffering – be logically explained, can this soul-being have an existence separate from the body?

There is a logical thinking that cannot escape this. Let us assume that a person would indeed undergo a change in such a way that only the body is still active; all soul, on the other hand, is extinguished. When the lung activity is maintained, we cannot recognize the nature of oxygen, [that is] of what enters the lungs, but the lung life activity remains in itself - it is something other than the oxygen itself.

Thus we must seek to recognize the nature of the soul as something different from the organization of our body. The independence of oxygen from the lungs is therefore the independence of the soul from the life activity of the lungs.

In the moment when the soul leaves the body during sleep, consciousness becomes deeper and deeper, and the independent life of the soul thus begins.

Today we want to take a closer look at dream life. A boy with a talent for drawing was given a particularly difficult drawing task that he was unable to complete in time for the school exam. He therefore had a fear. Nevertheless, even though he had not completed the task, his grade was not worse for it.

Periodically, a dream now returns as a state of fear in this person's life, but much stronger than before, so that he often wakes up trembling from it. Then days go by without him dreaming like that. However, it becomes apparent that his drawing ability is improving. At the end of such an intermediate period, the fearful dream always returns. Before this greater ability flowed into the hand, it roamed in the subconscious; the states of fear appeared in dreams. And when the increased abilities showed themselves, when they were there, then the dream stopped. These abilities first work in the organism – in materialistic terms, on the nerves, the organs. Before they enter consciousness, the soul prepares the physical organization, it works on the organs.

Here we approach the soul; we catch the soul at work in the organization of the body. The soul works on the organization from conception to death – or, to put it more precisely, [still] somewhat differently. We can remember back to a certain point in our lives. In the years before our memory, the soul works in a completely different way on our organization – without our consciousness. Even before we become conscious, the soul must have been there, and consequently before it was active in the body. Down in the organism, these forces are at work preparing the organization, just as in the example mentioned earlier, the drawing skills, the soul work, presented itself in dreams. In this area, materialistic views are absolutely insufficient.

That a human being gets false teeth happens in any case; that a person can speak is not so obvious. Without other people, he will never learn to speak. So the ability to speak cannot just be due to the speech organs, but the life and weaving of language within us works out this ability.

Since the human being is a coherent being, it must be assumed that there is something spiritual about him from the very beginning, even before the physical work.

[Here is another comparison:] How can one assume that a person who has had trouble all day will be in a different frame of mind in the evening? This is how the spiritual always works. The state of mind can be compared quite well with what the person has experienced before. [So one must assume:] Not from supersensible worlds, but only from living with people can the state of mind arise with which the person enters life through birth. Such trains of thought are entirely in line with the way of thinking of today's natural science. So the idea of repeated earth lives is something that arises by itself.

Only two hundred years ago it was assumed that animals, worms for example, could develop out of inanimate mud. But Francesco Redi formulated the now irrefutable sentence: “Living things can only come from living things.” It was only with great difficulty that he was able to escape the fate of Giordano Bruno because of this sentence. However, the sentence “Spiritual-mental can only arise from spiritual-mental” will initially be ridiculed and mocked, but then gradually accepted and finally taken for granted in the future.

What happens in this life affects later lives; these are only logical conclusions - but experiments [in this field] are also important and possible. Ludwig Deinhard has written a book about this.

But everyone can only use their own soul as a tool to investigate the soul. Not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, but just as anyone can educate themselves about astronomy, chemistry and so on, the same is true here, as will be briefly explained. People make themselves a tool for exploring the spiritual world.

[Let us take another example:] Nostradamus. - In the book by Kemmerich about prophecies there is a whole chapter about Nostradamus. Nostradamus was a doctor, he was a doctor by nature and did an infinite amount of good, especially during the plague in Provence. But] it was said that he was a Calvinist, which undermined his reputation. The powers that he otherwise gave to humanity with all his soul were transformed into prophetic gifts – visionary gifts, like the power of thought into warmth, warmth into movement and so on. The visionary gifts could only take place under certain conditions. Nostradamus created a laboratory for himself, that is, a room with a glass roof where he stayed at night. When the soul had become completely calm, the stars were then observed, and this triggered sayings that Nostradamus recorded. All worries and concerns ceased. This state of mind was inherited from his fathers. The modern-day seer must artificially create this state of mind. He has to bring special impulses to the forefront of the soul. Symbols are best for this, those that stimulate our soul, shake us up inwardly. The forces slumber beneath – these slumbering forces are awakened by this. Then the person is as if asleep, but not unconscious. We then no longer perceive anything through the [sense] organs. We have the soul as we have oxygen when it is separated from water. We then say to ourselves: You are experiencing another world. At first the experience is such that one cannot put what one has experienced into words. However, spiritual science could never be taught if it remained that way. The spiritual researcher must go further and further, especially when he has experienced something that he cannot express. One knows: one experiences something, but one cannot think it. If one continues the exercise, one also learns to speak about it. One experiences what one experienced as a child when learning language. We learn to use our brain. We can only experience this in pain, so to speak.

If one has triumphed over one's organism, then one has also explored it experimentally.

Once our culture has been permeated by spiritual science, it will be possible to approach the education of young people quite differently. People can then have different, inner soul experiences than in today's spiritual culture.

In the second half of life, when the soul no longer has a constructive effect on the bodily organization, these soul-spiritual forces, which one acquires through schooling in life, accumulate and have reached their greatest tension at the moment of death. The energies to work in the [physical] organization again must be sought in the soul-spiritual life.

These spiritual-mental powers that build the body are beyond decay and becoming. These powers arise precisely because of death. This realization gives us courage and strength.