The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Distinguished attendees! When speaking of human knowledge, one initially has two things in mind. One is the knowledge that the individual human soul, the human mind, acquires for its own sake; the other is the knowledge that is a means of progress for the life of all humanity. One has only to think of knowledge that deals with the observation of natural phenomena and that is concerned with putting the forces of nature at the service of humanity to realize that what is called knowledge in this field not only gives satisfaction to the individual human soul, but that this knowledge wants to be a selfless servant to all humanity. It is easy to see that knowledge of the forces of nature serves the aims of humanity to a large extent. We see the knowledge gained through the thinking of researchers and inventors applied in practical life, and anyone who reflects on its value will easily see that the knowledge gained from the study of matter is intended to serve all of humanity.

But beyond this knowledge there is still another knowledge, which by its very nature does not allow for such practical application. This knowledge must exist for its own sake. Humanity needs it and could not live without it. But with this knowledge, too, we may ask whether it is really something that the human soul seeks only for its own satisfaction, or whether this knowledge, too, which we often say exists for its own sake, is not also in the service of human progress. If one tries to explore why the human soul thirsts and hungers, as it were, for such knowledge for its own sake, why it strives for an examination of the secrets of the world in order to recognize the significance of knowledge in the service of humanity, then one must delve into the essence and the [primordial] reasons of the human soul itself.

Now the branch of human research that is called spiritual science or theosophy seeks to recognize the essence of the human soul by pursuing this human soul into its deepest depths and trying to find the essence of the human soul on the basis of knowledge that goes beyond what the senses offer and what the mind, which is tied to the brain, can achieve. Spiritual science believes that, on the basis of its research, it can say something about the human soul that is of particular importance to this striving human soul. However, it must approach all that the intellectual culture of the last centuries has produced in an independent way. In no way does spiritual science take a position against the great achievements of human culture, especially of natural science; but in our time it must undertake exactly the same thing that natural science has undertaken many times over the last few centuries - it must test all the prejudices, all the beliefs of people today in the light of its insights. Spiritual science looks at something that is one of the most important things for knowledge in our time – at something that has only been instilled in science relatively recently.

People are very forgetful. Many truths that are generally recognized today were only conquered by the human mind in the 17th century, because until the 17th century, for example, both laymen and learned naturalists believed that earthworms, fish and other lower animals could develop from river mud. There are books from this time that discuss how living things develop from carcasses, for example. It was only in this 17th century that Francesco Redi first uttered the sentence that living beings could only come from germs of living beings of the same kind. That living beings can only come from living beings was a great heresy in the 17th century compared to the science of the time, and only with great difficulty did Francesco Redi escape the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The situation for the spiritual researcher today is similar when, for example, he focuses his attention on the properties of a human soul that comes into existence through birth. Today, when looking at the different properties of children, it is easy to say that these properties are inherited from the father and mother. Today it is believed that the structure of the human soul is composed of what comes from the physical environment, just as it was believed in the 17th century that living beings would consist only of what came from the physical environment. But the spiritual researcher must say: spiritual-soul can only come from spiritual-soul. He observes the miracle of how a human germ, which comes into existence through birth, develops in the course of its life from stage to stage, and he is clear about the fact that the human essence, which develops so mysteriously, can only come from its own kind. He knows that in order to understand what is developing, one must go back to another spiritual-soul realm. As we ascend from the animal to the human, we have to distinguish between the generic and the individual. We cannot ascribe to the human core of being the same thing that we address as generic in the animal. We have to say: what develops in the child over time does not lead back to a generic, but to an individual that comes into existence through birth. And when this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, this spiritual research into the origin of the soul and spirit leads the spiritual researcher to the idea of re-embodiment, to the idea of repeated lives on earth for human beings. For anyone who looks impartially at all the facts of life, repeated lives on earth are a reality, however much the feelings of people today may still rebel against it. Of course, it is no longer customary to burn heretics, but such things, which are heresies according to today's consciousness of people, are ridiculed. But this truth will be treated the same way as other truths and laws that humanity has acquired in the course of its development; after some time, it will no longer be possible to understand how there could have been people who could not believe that spirit comes from spirit.

Goethe pointed to what his essence had drawn from his environment. He could say:

From my father I got the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature
and the desire to tell stories.

And then, after pointing out what he had attracted from his environment through inheritance, he modestly asks:

What, then, of the whole figure
can be called original?

Anyone who, like me, has studied everything related to Goethe has certainly acquired the respect due to Goethe's parents. But try to put together all their qualities – you will try in vain to bring to light what is original about the “little fellow”. Precisely that which we cannot find in the heritage of father and mother, precisely that is the Goethe whom we know and who he will always be in our culture. It is the most appealing task for an educator to assume that in the education of a child, a mysterious core of being struggles into existence that lies beyond all laws of inheritance, and that in every young human being this riddle must be solved anew. If we really apply this truth of repeated earthly lives to a child, it will no longer be out of keeping with us to look at the child's outer form in such a way that it appears to us as shaped, formed out of a soul-spiritual core of being. We observe the indeterminate features of this human countenance in the first days of the child's life; we see that they become more and more definite and, little by little, the child's entire body shows an ever more definite form of its own. We can see how the soul, which has come over from a previous existence, transforms these vague features into ever more distinct ones. It becomes visible how the inner core of the human being works on the forming physical shell.

If we consider this carefully, we will not find it difficult to recognize an ascending and a descending line of human life. We see how indeterminate forces work their way from the inner being to the surface, and at a certain point in time we see how everything that is inherent in the human being is revealed in the skills and abilities that he acquires. Then it happens that a person makes one side of his nature the dominant one. We see a kind of confrontation with his environment through the absorption of knowledge and wisdom, and we can say: This is something that is added to what was brought from previous embodiments. Then a descending current sets in in life, where we can no longer transform anything of what we have become externally and physically in our abilities - we can no longer even absorb anything into our memory.

We will only understand this actual work of the individual core of our being on the human being if we consider the whole of human life. This work on the human being can be divided into two clearly distinguishable states. The human being alternates between two states of consciousness: waking life and sleeping life. To consider life as a whole, we must ask ourselves: What do we owe to sleeping life and what do we owe to waking life? From sleep the soul must draw the strength for new work, and it is shown that invigorating forces accrue to the soul from sleep. An example of this: people who, by reason of their occupation, are obliged to learn much by heart, can experience that they do not progress well with their memorizing if they do not have a good amount of sleep between their work. Today, scientific observation also recognizes the importance of sleep for the removal of fatigue. In scientific circles, the prevailing view is that people get tired because the muscles, nerves, etc. are worn out and need to be supplied with new strength. However, this does not take into account the fact that muscles can also work without showing signs of fatigue. The heart muscles, for example, work without tiring. Why is that?

Asking this question is of tremendous importance for a healthy view of life. On closer observation, it becomes clear that fatigue only occurs under certain conditions. The heart does not tire, but the smallest muscles in the fingers can tire to such an extent that cramp-like pains occur, as can be seen, for example, in writer's cramp. When you research these things, you come to realize that fatigue and our waking daily activity are related. We come to see that fatigue occurs when we do not leave parts of our body to themselves, but instead permeate them with the effectiveness of the external work we do. The laws of the universe are implanted in our body; they are effective in it, and under their effectiveness the body does not tire. Fatigue does not occur when - unconsciously to the person - the laws of the universe work in his body. Fatigue occurs only when the human consciousness permeates the organism with its nature.

The naturalist Thomson asserts the independence of the soul life in relation to the bodily life. He says that the soul life is as separate from the body as the rider is from his horse. It is admitted that there is something in man that stands in the same relationship to his body as the rider to his horse. We tire our body, says Thomson, just as the rider tires his horse, because we are outside the horse and use the horse. Does the old image not emerge from a distant time in human development, in which people looked into a spiritual world by natural gift? There they saw the centaur, the man connected with the horse. It is true that “wise” natural science says today that the people of that time were childlike people, that they saw wild barbarians sitting on their steeds and coming out of the fog from the north, and that in the fog they could not distinguish where man and where steed was; from this these childlike people would have formed the image of the centaur. But in fact the centaur is a reality that shows, from a clairvoyant perspective, the relationship that arises between soul and body, and that is like that between rider and horse.

Thus the fact of fatigue compels us to recognize a certain independence of soul from body. That the course of certain processes in the human body does not result in fatigue is due to the fact that a universal law is at work, but the human being is not present with his consciousness. The human being tires because he is present with his consciousness in the processes of his body. But in the state of sleep, the human being is surrendered to the universal law. The human being needs this immersion in a different element, as it happens every night during sleep, and we will ascribe the right effect to sleep if we follow the essence of the human being as he lives in the world into which he enters when he falls asleep.

Then I have to speak of the experiences of the spiritual researcher. Spiritual research does not mean that one can gain knowledge of the secrets of the existence of the world at any level, but that we awaken dormant, germinal powers of knowledge within us. When these dormant powers of knowledge awaken, they give us eyes and ears of the spirit, so that we find ourselves in a situation like that of a blind person who regains his sight through an operation. We can only recognize how many worlds are around us if we have the organs to perceive them. We can only experience the world of light and color if we have eyes to see them and the world of sounds if we have ears to hear them. The spiritual researcher becomes a spiritual researcher by awakening the powers of knowledge that lie dormant in him, by opening spiritual eyes and ears. He carries out a certain training of the soul, that is, certain exercises through which the soul acquires organs with which it can see and experience new worlds. When a person becomes a spiritual researcher in this way, the perception of the spiritual world is not speculation, but reality.

When a person begins to look into these spiritual worlds, he makes new experiences, and I would like to emphasize one such experience that can shed light on the nature of sleeping and waking. It is the task of the spiritual researcher to investigate certain tasks of ordinary life and then to illuminate them with the light of the spirit. For example, you may reflect on a certain task in life and cannot solve it; the tool of thinking proves blunt. Then the spiritual researcher really feels separated as a thinking and knowing being from his physical body. He feels his physicality as one feels a hammer or another tool or instrument outside of one's being. Just as one can feel a hammer as too heavy, one can feel the failure of the individual parts of the brain: One feels that one cannot intervene in the brain.

The separation of body and spirit can be felt by the spiritual researcher in every one of his activities. But when the spiritual researcher wakes up from a state of sleep, perhaps a very short sleep, which he can induce at will through his developed will, it is as if he woke up from a very specific world in which he has done something, so that when he wakes up, activities that he performed immediately before waking up linger, and these have a very specific configuration. When he wakes up, the activities he performed before waking up could be painted by him in very specific figures and colors. But there is a difference between this mental activity and the usual daily activities. The usual daily activities are such that you think them through beforehand, so you work as if according to a model and are bound to the lines of a template.

The [spiritual] activity, on the other hand, [that a person performs while sleeping] proceeds as if we were following a line from our spirit that arises from the inner laws of our own soul. During sleep, the spiritual researcher feels this as an intervention of his soul activity in his physical body, in his brain. And he feels this activity, to which he has devoted himself in sleep, flowing into his body like warmth, so that this body has grown to meet the demands of the day. He experiences: You have worn out your instrument, and this activity is a repair of the instrument for the daytime work of the physical body. Like an architect, we work on our own physical body during sleep, and the spiritual researcher does this consciously. During the day, the physical body is constantly worn out, and we bring with us from another world the forces we need to build up our physical body. We do this unconsciously during sleep. If we consciously consider what we do unconsciously in our sleep, then we will find it credible that during sleep our soul dwells in a world other than the physical one. From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, the soul really does enter a spiritual world, and that is the world from which man comes. Every night we have to dive into this sea of spirituality to draw from it the strength we need for our physical body and which alone makes it possible for us to survive between birth and death.

So our life goes, in that we appeal again and again to our spiritual existence, and we see this spiritual essence of man emerging anew from the spiritual world every day, as in a small re-embodiment. We find only one difference between re-embodiment and waking up: when we wake up in the morning, we always encounter the same body that we have built up since our birth. When we re-embody ourselves for a new life, however, we must first build up our corporeality anew.

When we consider the course of life, we see many, varied things approaching us that we can take in with our soul, but which we cannot implement in the life of our body. We develop by repeatedly drawing new strength from our sleep, but there is a certain limit to the incorporation of these forces into our physical being. For example, the soul can only receive musical impressions if there is a musical ear. The soul encounters a limit in the physical. Much of what is in our soul, what it wants to process, it cannot incorporate into the outer physical body. This gives rise to a certain disharmony, which is more than the usual tiredness that forces us to sleep. This gradual mismatch of the body to what our soul is becomes more and more pronounced the more a person develops a richer soul life. The soul life becomes increasingly unadapted to the life of the outer body. And here we must ask ourselves: where do we get this body from? When we see this body developing out of indeterminacy into a definite form in physiognomy and gestures, we regard the body we have in a particular life as a result of previous lives. We use this body as an instrument. We enrich our soul in the course of our life, and we find that what we have acquired in this life reaches the limits of our physical body, and that finally bursts this body.

So we have the descending line of life. We should be grateful to be separated from this body again, to be heading towards death, to have a soul with richly developed content that bursts the bounds of the body, right up to death. Those who look more deeply into these things will understand that a richly developed soul must go beyond the body and that we should not be surprised that in old age, especially in people with a richly developed soul, the brain can no longer serve the soul's life. Kant, for example, became weak-minded in old age, despite his rich mind. The outer tools of the body are no longer suitable for the soul; it withdraws with the content it has gained in this life, and it finally breaks the body. What we call death is different in humans than in animals. The ever-enriching soul of the human being breaks the corporeality and passes through death. Then this soul builds itself up according to the abilities and contents it has acquired during life, the body for a new incarnation.

Now one could say that we do not remember our past life. This objection would have the same justification as if someone wanted to say: A four-year-old child cannot calculate, so no human being can calculate at all. - We want to try to see through the following consideration that it is possible to acquire the ability to remember earlier lives. To make this clear to us, I must mention that there is also a time for the ordinary human life when the person cannot remember. These are the first years of childhood, which a person does not remember, even though he was already there at that time. The point in time up to which memory reaches is connected with another point in time. You know, of course, that in the very earliest period of his life, a person has no sense of self. At a certain point in time, the sense of self arises in the child, and the beginning of remembering coincides with this. What lies before this point in time is not remembered. Why is that? Spiritual research shows that in his normal mental life today, through the development of this self-awareness, through which man attains the highest of this life, man erects something like a boundary around himself. A person's memory goes back to the point where self-awareness occurs. That is the boundary. At this boundary, self-awareness stops and withdraws from observation what happened before.

We can learn to see beyond this boundary if we apply the exercises that the spiritual student has to do to look into the spiritual world to our soul. There comes a moment when the person succeeds in leading this I one step beyond himself. That is the moment when one comes to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness that forms the boundary for memory. Then the person enters the spiritual world. He only has to learn to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness. The sense of self is brought about by the impact with the body. When a person overcomes this, as it is otherwise overcome in sleep, and when he learns to consciously enter the world in which he unconsciously dwells in sleep, the possibility of looking back on past lives begins.

This can only be achieved if man consciously turns his gaze to this other side of life, to the side that lies beyond the gate of death. We must uproot from the soul all fear and dread of what comes to man from the future. How afraid and anxious man is today of all that lies in the future and especially of the hour of death. Man must acquire composure in relation to all feelings and sensations towards the future, look forward with absolute equanimity to all that may come, and only think that whatever may come to us through the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. This must be brought before the soul again and again. This leads us to receive the retrospective powers for past earth lives as a gift.

In this way we can educate our soul until we attain the consciousness that past earth lives are not hypotheses and dreams, but that they stand before the soul as fact, as something that the soul can learn to observe. Our contemporaries do not want to admit that there is a possibility of awakening dormant powers in the soul, so that new worlds, hitherto hidden in the infinite bosom of existence, may be added to what the soul can experience. But we are on the verge of a time when people will gradually develop more and more of a relationship with what can be explored from the dark depths of the past and the future. We are heading towards a future where more and more people will have the urge to know, to recognize what the human soul and its destiny are all about. Thus, we are looking at an expansion of the ability to know, which enters into an alliance with the spiritual world.

All higher knowledge, says Goethe, is an extension of ordinary knowledge. Such extended, such higher knowledge is not abstract reflection on things. Such higher knowledge is a connecting of what is the essence of our soul with the spiritual and soul-like around us. Plato cites as proof of the immortality of the soul the possibility of the human soul's connection with the eternal, with that which is eternal outside of space and time, while things in space and time arise and pass away. If such higher knowledge is taken seriously, it contradicts everything that otherwise occurs as fatigue. Fatigue occurs in the knowledge that strives to explore the things around us. But when man allows the knowledge he has gained about things to take effect in his soul, when he has moments in life when what he has gained through his eyes becomes ideas and he can let these ideas work in him, when he can transform the lofty realm of sounds into ideas and let them continue to resound in his soul, then he learns to be awake in a state that can be compared to the state of sleep. Knowledge is given to us in the same measure as the consciousness of our ordinary ego begins to fade. The arbitrariness of this ordinary ego consciousness shatters, and man experiences true knowledge by feeling that he must fit into the laws of the spiritual world with his true ego.

While man is limited to a small space in the outer world by his physical body, which he repeatedly tires through the work of the day, and he must always compensate for this wear and tear of the body through sleep, he feels when the soul is truly “with itself” that it can also draw forces from the spiritual world while awake. He gets the feeling that a source is opening up for the soul, through which healing potions flow to us from the spiritual world, so that he can become master of the body. He feels that we can consciously enter the spiritual world, as we unconsciously do every night while sleeping. He feels that we can then consciously enter the realm of eternity when our knowledge becomes life. Then it will become something completely new, something that it cannot be for the ordinary consciousness of today's man. Plato said that in ancient times people developed the highest knowledge out of enthusiasm. Even if this ability of enthusiasm may have been lost to today's people, what has not been lost to them is that the knowledge of the world of ideas can become a life force in them, that they can feel how they connect with the root of existence and eternity by penetrating into things with their spiritual self through knowledge.

In this way we come to know knowledge as a living thing, as a healing process that extends into the physical body. It takes a long time before we get to know this knowledge, that is, this source of life in our soul. And we also get to know the connection with a very different factor of our culture. All our knowledge must be incorporated into what we can call being imbued with the living Christ. What is this living Christ in the human soul? It is nothing other than what we can experience when knowledge and truth come to life in us, as has just been explained, when we can feel our personality as if it were being filled by a second personality, by something that is truth itself. This is the living Christ, who is truth and life in the human soul. When one grasps the Christ in this way, He is not an abstract idea, but He is the living Entity Who at a certain point in time intervened in the evolution of humanity, an Entity Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha and thereby entered into the life of human souls.

In the past of human evolution, the way people recognized each other was different than after the Mystery of Golgotha. In ancient times, people looked to the origin of man and they felt: Man is not valuable for the development of humanity as a sensual being; as spiritual beings we have descended from a spiritual world into this sensual world to live in a physical body, after we were previously in an ocean of divine spiritual life; through our soul we can in turn find our way back to this common human origin.

This is no longer appropriate for our time; something else corresponds to our time. In ancient times, the human soul sought the origin of humanity in order to become aware of what united people. Today we look at what the human being can become, at a common goal for all people. Looking towards this goal, people must be able to say to themselves: This concerns every human being; something must come alive in the innermost being of every human being – this is the living Christ. In the future, human souls will come together in him. The earth, the physical body – it will fragment in its material existence. But the human souls that have the living Christ within them will advance to other levels of existence. When the body of the entire planet has disintegrated, all mankind will be one again, not as it was before it descended to the earth, but one in which the Christ will live as a common soul-blood in this humanity.

All our knowledge must be dedicated to the great moment in the evolution of mankind when the human soul can turn to the God-man who accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha. When we look into the future of mankind, we look for the Christ-consciousness in every human being. This has a completely different sense and a completely different meaning than when the Buddhist teaching speaks of a Nirvana and means by that a detachment of the soul from all earthly things. No, the soul should not detach itself from the earthly. We look to the living Christ, who can grasp our souls with his life, and to how the soul can shape itself ever more richly through the life of Christ in it, through immersion in the source of wisdom and truth in ever new incarnations.

Thus we see that spiritual science does not stand in opposition to that without which our culture cannot be imagined - to Christianity. It does not want to fight Christianity, but to deepen it by pointing to the living Christ. We, as Westerners, look to the event of Golgotha as to the point in time that is also known from history, but which only acquires its deep value, its deep meaning for us through the fact that we gain the Christ-idea not only from the historical Christ, but deepen this Christ-idea through spiritual science. Only when we have imbued our knowledge with soul, light and spirit through the idea of Christ does this idea of Christ become for us that through which the true idea of immortality is revealed to us ever more surely. And when the Christ in us has become the light of knowledge and the life of knowledge, then we connect with the power through which we pass through many deaths and through many lives. Knowledge of Christ is the way for man to absorb within himself the forces that lead him to true immortality, that is, to victory over death.

This idea can only be gained from higher knowledge - not with ordinary knowledge, which only wants to deal with the material. Nowadays, only the external, the material, is pursued in man, and that is the most fleeting, the most transient. The words of Hamlet, for example, point this out, showing how dying and death must appear to him in his melancholy mind, in which the light of Christ does not yet shine. He speaks of the great Alexander, saying:

Alexander turned to dust;
Dust is earth;
From earth we make clay.

And he speaks of the great Caesar:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole as well as the rough north;
Oh that the earth,
Before the wind and weather, might stick a wall.

But Hamlet is only talking about where the earth that became Caesar's body may have gone. He pursues the fleeting, transient material instead of reflecting on where the great, richly developed souls of the great Alexander and the great Caesar have gone. You don't see what is important in man if you only look at the transitory, at the material, and think about what might have become of it. You should look beyond what goes through death and birth to recognize what true immortality is.

In recent centuries, when knowledge of the material world has made such great strides, we have become more and more accustomed to regarding matter, that which forces the spirit into its fetters, as the essential. But matter will perish, disintegrate; the earthly body, consisting of matter, will disintegrate. The spiritual researcher, for example, views today's radium research in such a way that he knows: here is the beginning of the disintegration of the atoms that form the earthly body. The material of the earth will perish, but the eternal, even of the earthly body, will merge into the eternal essence of things. Today's striving for knowledge pursues the material, forcing the soul into its spell. One believes that one can speak of eternity, of the indestructibility of matter. In the face of words such as those spoken by Hamlet, it must be said, based on the realization of the true nature of the human being and at the same time on the realization of the true nature of materiality: Not only the great Alexander, the great Caesar, no, all human souls are parts of eternity; they take on a physicality from the materials of the earth in ever new lives, they go through ever new lives, which are only steps towards immortality. This applies to every human being:

The humblest man on earth
is a son of eternity.
And in each new life he will
conquer the old death.

Dearly beloved! In many respects it is already extraordinarily difficult today to penetrate with a certain understanding into [the life and work of] figures of the past who are not too far behind us. But the difficulties become especially great when we are to penetrate into the depths of the soul and the workings of such human individuals who, in the very, very distant past – one might say in prehistoric times – placed themselves with their work in culture, in the development of humanity. And such a figure, such an individuality should arise before our spiritual gaze today in the often mentioned figure of the old Persian founder of religion and world view, Zarathustra, or, as it is also said, Zoroaster.

I said that it is relatively difficult for us today to really objectively understand thinking and feeling that is not so far behind us. Nowadays, one has the strong feeling that when one believes to have understood something and regards one's knowledge as the truth, it is in a sense the only true truth and that everything else is wrong, basically nonsense. The fact that truth and human knowledge itself are subject to development, that each epoch is forced to look at the riddles of the world in its own way and solve them to a certain degree, that each epoch must speak a different language, so to speak, about these riddles of the world – this is not well understood today. We can only hope that the descendants of today's human race will not behave towards it as we so easily behave towards our ancestors.

Who would not decree today from his strict, let us say scientific, throne that a mind like Paracelsus', who lived and worked so little time ago, was full of the prejudices of an era long past, with all kinds of judgments that are, of course, long outdated today. It does not occur to one, though it would be natural, that what we today consider to be seemingly irrevocable in relation to our science, will certainly be just as corrected and to a certain extent transformed when so much time has passed after us as between Paracelsus and us, as the Paracelsian views have been transformed by ours. We can only hope that future generations will be fairer than we are, that they will know that truth is in a state of development and that basically every way of expressing the truth is only a form of expression for what we would like to call original truth or original wisdom. In short, what we humans call truth is in a constant state of change, and therefore we must see the human pursuit of truth only as developing. If we imbibe this view and ask ourselves: How did our ancestors think? What about them can make a great impression on our souls today? — then we will also be able to look back without prejudice to minds as far back as the great, the shining Zarathustra.

There has never been any real agreement as to the age in which Zarathustra lived. There are even scholars today who claim that Zarathustra probably only lived six centuries before our era; other scholars point to a period of 1000 years before our era, and still others go back even further. What spiritual science has to say through its research will be mentioned here only briefly, because for us it is less a matter of establishing mere historical facts than of illuminating the soul of this great individuality. Therefore, it should only be briefly mentioned that spiritual science must go back at least five millennia before our era - even into the sixth millennium - if it wants to meet this luminous figure of Zarathustra with a backward glance.

Now, although one may argue about the age in which Zarathustra lived - one should not really argue about it, because the course of human cultural development speaks too clearly, because what is associated with the name Zarathustra and what has emerged from Zarathustra as a cultural movement has exerted the deepest, most significant, and even extraordinarily long-lasting influence on human progress. If we would fathom the soul of Zarathustra, if we would recognize the mission that this unique individuality has fulfilled in the progress of humanity, then we must attempt to understand Zarathustra's task on a larger scale. we must realize that we can only come close to what he was if we assign him a task of the very first order in the development of humanity since the great Atlantic catastrophe, as seen by spiritual science. Much is said about this catastrophe; the religious records, the religious traditions of all the peoples of the earth report about it - the Christian tradition speaks of it as the great flood.

We cannot now go into the details of the time when this catastrophe swept across our earth; but even the external, geological science is today increasingly being driven to recognize that such a great catastrophe once took place and that through this catastrophe the face of the earth was thoroughly changed. If spiritual science is forced by its research to recognize that where the Atlantic Ocean is today was once dry land, where people lived at a time when most of the present-day continents of Asia, Africa and Europe were still under water, it may be said that today, natural science is no longer far from admitting that the fauna and flora in the western regions of Europe and the eastern regions of America do indeed indicate that there was once land between the west of Europe and the east of America that became the bottom of the sea due to subsidence during that great catastrophe. And that our present continents have repeatedly risen and sunk has already become common truth even in geological circles.

For spiritual science, such great catastrophes, such changes in the face of the earth, are connected with significant processes within the development of mankind. Today I can only hint at what I have already explained in more detail to the listeners of my lectures on earlier occasions. I can only hint that the human race that lived on the Atlantic continent in that epoch had a very different state of soul from that of today's people, who are the descendants of those ancient Atlanteans. If we want to give a brief indication of what kind of culture was present in that primeval time of humanity, we can, if we do not misuse the word, call this culture a “clairvoyant culture”. However, the word “clairvoyant” must not be misused in the sense in which it is very, very often misused today. What does this tell us - “clairvoyant culture”?

Yes, if you want to speak from the point of view of spiritual science, then you have to honestly believe in human development, then you have to honestly be convinced of this human development, then you can't just be fascinated by the development that the popular Darwinists talk about today. We look back at an earlier humanity that had a very different kind of knowledge and soul capacity. We can briefly form an idea of this ancient state of mind by remembering what remains, as an inherited residue from that time, in the dream consciousness, where man sees echoes of the day's life in dream images. These dream images no longer have any reality for us today; they are echoes of what was experienced during the day – some pictorial representations of this or that that occurred. Dream consciousness, however, is like an old inheritance, a faded remnant of a prehistoric human consciousness, when people did not see and recognize their environment as directly as today's people, who only recognize everything with their senses and with the mind, which is tied to the brain. The people of that time saw what explained and solved the riddles for them in what, from today's point of view, were abnormal soul states. They saw with a kind of image consciousness, but these images were not phantasms like our dream images. Man did not speculate about the riddles of the world in terms of concepts and ideas, but experienced states – abnormal states by today's standards – in which images appeared that were not dream images, but which depicted the very foundations of existence.

And this humanity, which had such an awareness, also had guides and teachers who had led this awareness to a very special height and who - clairvoyantly - looked very deeply into the spiritual background of existence. I can only mention this today in the introduction. These teachers of old, who had clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world, related to humanity much as those who today, in their normal consciousness, come to ingenious insights, ideas and concepts. Just as these relate to humanity as a whole, so too did the great seers of old, because they had a concept of how to look into the spiritual world, because they had natural clairvoyance. The development of humanity begins with the fact that humanity really did come from spiritual origins. Today, we are no longer very aware of this; this awareness [of the spiritual origin of human beings] has actually been lost, although in the first centuries of the Christian era there was still a clear awareness of an ancient, inherited wisdom that had come from the forefathers of humanity and of which nothing else remained but traditions taken from that old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world. Plato, for example, speaks of the people of the Kronos realm, saying that they could see into the spiritual world and that they were the keepers of the original world wisdom. Plato was aware that much of that wisdom had simply been handed down from generation to generation. And Plato, the philosopher who had come a long way in what he was able to explore himself, was nevertheless aware that this primal wisdom could penetrate deeper into the very foundations of the world than anything he himself could give his students through the normal powers of human beings. We also find the greatest respect for the primal wisdom of the world in other thinkers. We must seek this primeval wisdom in its original form before the Atlantean catastrophe, which has been characterized above.

The development of humanity consists in the fact that in this post-Atlantean epoch, in which we live today, man has gradually, so to speak, seen this primeval wisdom dwindle, that he has lost the old, elementary because he should develop the sense to judge things by external, sensual perceptions and to penetrate the riddles as far as possible with the mind bound to the brain. Today's short-sighted people will naturally believe that today's knowledge is the sum of all wisdom, that there cannot be any other wisdom. But anyone who takes a broad view of human development knows that even knowledge bound to the intellect, which humanity had to gain in its present era (the previous one was the era of childhood), is only a transitory epoch, only a point of passage in human development.

They know that people will rise again to a future clairvoyance and that they will take with them what they have gained through the knowledge of the physical world. A necessary transition point is this kind of knowledge. And so we can say: What we today, as normal human beings, call our knowledge, and even more so, what we have under the influence of this knowledge in terms of moral and aesthetic ideals, in terms of moral judgments about the world, all this has only just been acquired. Everything that we have recognized as the actual characteristics of today's human being is based on the old clairvoyance that human beings lost for a while. But this present-day realization is so characteristic of our present epoch that we must say: The post-Atlantean time, the time in which the earth has the present physiognomy, is called to develop just this thinking and feeling and to close the door, so to speak, to all clairvoyance for the normal human condition, so that man is forced to fix his gaze on the sensual reality in order to also go through this epoch in his development of knowledge.

There were now two cultural currents in this post-Atlantic epoch, which really had the mission to lead humanity out of the wisdom of the forefathers into the wisdom of understanding and reason, as I have just characterized it. There were two currents. And strangely enough, the originators of these two currents are quite close to each other geographically and in terms of world history. We have to look for the one main current of the post-Atlantic period in the settlements that formed after the Atlantic catastrophe in India, the venerable cultural land. We have to look for the other main current to the north of it, in the area that was fertilized by the great, luminous spirit of Zarathustra. And although these two currents of human spiritual development are so close, although to the outside eye they look so similar that sometimes the words for this or that in the older languages of the two cultural currents are the same, we must, when we look deeper into things, see in these two currents of post-Atlantic cultures quite opposite ways of founding our present culture.

You see, when the spiritual researcher looks back to that ancient culture of time-honored India, which can only be seen with the spiritual eyes – because what is contained in the great, wonderful Vedas is only a late echo of the primeval world wisdom of the Indians . We are then led back to something that preceded all Vedic culture and that is of such sublimity that the human being, who has a sense for the transformation and development of the human spiritual life, stands with the deepest reverence before this ancient-holy culture of India. And there is some truth in what is usually taken only as legend: that this ancient Indian culture goes back to a series of great sages, to the seven Rishis of ancient India. If we examine this ancient Indian culture from a spiritual scientific point of view, how does it appear to us?

We cannot describe it more precisely than to say that it appears to us as a kind of ancient heritage that could be passed down from that wisdom that existed as the common wisdom of humanity before the Atlantic catastrophe. We must only imagine the right way of inheriting an ancient store of world wisdom. Just as it was still present in Atlantean humanity as primeval world wisdom, so this wisdom, based on clairvoyance, could not, of course, be directly transmitted to a humanity whose soul capacities were quite differently constituted. The ancient wisdom was adopted into Indian culture in the same way as a tradition that has to be adapted to a new faculty of the soul. Basically, only a few people were still able to develop something in their souls that could point to the realm that had been seen in ancient times through living clairvoyance behind the world of the senses. Whoever wanted to rise in living inwardness to the vision that was once normal for humanity in a certain way had to become what is called an initiate or an initiate. He had to develop certain abilities of the soul that are not normally present; he had to undergo certain exercises, a certain training of the soul, in order to develop an ability that otherwise slumbers in his soul. Then he was able to learn through his own observation what the great teachers of the Indians, the seven Rishis, had to proclaim. What was he led to then? He was led back, as it were, to an earlier state of development; he was able to see something that humanity in the normal state could no longer see, but which it had been able to see earlier.

This is essentially how we understand this ancient, pre-Vedic Indian culture, which then resonates in the Vedas. This is also the source of the underlying mood in which something is spread out over this ancient and sacred Indian culture, like a wistful look back that says: There was a time when people could see into the spiritual world, when the origin of people was revealed. That time is gone. The senses now have only the ability to see the external, physical reality. And only by developing a special ability can one transport oneself back to those ancient times; then one can again see the spiritual, which is hidden by the human being's sensory capacity for knowledge, by the intellect, which is bound to the brain. Thus did he feel who, in the world-view of the ancient Indian, lived with the realization that man is cut off from the contemplation of his spiritual origin, and he has a longing for this origin. Thus the ancient Indian believed that truth was only to be found beyond what humanity could see at that time. He believed that above and beyond all that humanity could see at that time, the great illusion spread out, “maha aja”, the great deception, “maja”, the great non-being. And behind that lay true being, which people had once seen.

A worldview, such as that of the pre-Vedic Indian, cannot be understood by merely looking at what appears to be dogmas, but only by putting oneself in the shoes of people felt at that time, how they felt cast out of their spiritual home into a world of maya, of illusion, and how they longed to return from this external, sensual-physical reality to that ancient, original world. And it is wonderfully moving, in the highest sense, to place oneself in this ancient Indian soul with its pessimism, which is not as frivolous as it sometimes appears today, but which is a heroic pessimism that does not complain about this great deception, but says: the sense world is simply not reality; reality is found by turning away from this sense world and going back into earlier epochs in one's soul.

What do we actually find when we go back to what the people of old in India were able to see? I have already pointed out that all spiritual science leads us to the fact that the soul that now lives in us between birth and death has often lived on earth and will live many more times. Spiritual science therefore leads us to the realization of repeated lives on earth, so that when we look back into past times, we do not find other souls, so to speak, but our own souls, that is, ourselves in earlier embodiments. And the soul of such an old Indian man could say to himself: As I now live between birth and death, I am bound to the illusion. I am now more entangled in the body of the senses than I was in earlier lives, for example when the primeval wisdom was experienced by myself. Basically, such a member of the ancient Indian culture looked back into his own earlier soul states. His soul used to live in such a way that it could look into the spiritual world itself. It descended into the world of the senses and can no longer see into the spiritual world. If a member of the ancient Indian faith wanted to regain this earlier vision, he basically ascended to his own earlier embodiment; he penetrated completely into himself. This is roughly how we can characterize the mood of ancient India.

In a sense, the exact opposite was offered by the cultural impact that occurred in the north of ancient India, in Bactria, Media, Persia, through Zarathustra. If we can call the ancient Indian wisdom a kind of heritage from ancient times, which also awakened a yearning for that ancient time, we must say that what was given to people through Zarathustra, what was imprinted on human development through him, points just as strongly to the future as the ancient Indian teaching points to primeval wisdom. There is a remarkable contrast between the teachings of Zarathustra and the ancient Indian teachings. If we allow not dogmas, not teachings, on which it actually matters little in human development, but moods, feelings to come before our soul, then we can say: the mood of the ancient Indian world view that has just been characterized is a mood of redemption: out of this body, which can no longer see the truth, into the earlier seeing! That was the mood of the ancient Indian: to be redeemed from a body that is dependent on maya. Therefore, in the best sense of the word, everything that emerged from ancient Indian culture, right up to Buddhism, is a kind of religion of redemption.

In Zarathustra's view, what appears first is not a religion of redemption, a worldview of redemption, but rather a worldview of resurrection, a worldview of awakening. And in this respect, the teaching of the doctrine in the north is the exact opposite of the teaching that arose in the south. Zarathustra was to be the first great leader of humanity to radically point out that it is a necessary point of passage for them to develop the senses for what is spreading before them, and to develop the mind for what is logical thinking, what is reasonable understanding. Only, the great Zarathustra does not stop at the materialistic level of the external sense world. As an initiate, he says in his own way: Certainly, post-Atlantean humanity has the task of sharpening the senses for what presents itself to the eyes, to the ears, to the entire sense-perceiving human being. Post-Atlantean humanity has the task of grasping the phenomena of the sensual world in accordance with reason and intellect, but as we grow together with the sensual world, we must become capable, if we develop certain slumbering powers in our soul, not of stopping at what the senses offer us, but of penetrating through the sensual cover to what lies behind this sensual world.

This is the great contrast between the Indian world-view mood and the Zarathustra world-view mood. The ancient Indian says: If I look at the world that spreads out in color, form and all its sensual qualities, it is not a true world, but Maya. I can only enter the true world by turning away from this external sense world; so I turn away my eyes and ears and the other senses, and I let the mind stand still, insofar as it combines ideas and concepts. I pay no attention to this sensual world if I want to see the truth, but I delve into the human interior, I live myself into that self that was there in previous embodiments; I climb up the ladder of embodiments to acquire the ability to see the truth. In a sense, the basic mood of the ancient Indian was to flee from the world of the senses and to ascend to the truth through strict immersion in one's own inner self, in that which can live in the soul when it disregards its surroundings. It was a mystical immersion in the inner life of the soul, distracted from the outside world, which wants to know nothing of “maha aja”, the great illusion: this is the tendency of ancient India.

Joyful acceptance of the reorganization of our soul-faculties, which shows us the world with all that it can offer to the open eye, what it can offer to all outer human possibilities, and also to the mind bound to the sense world; joyful acceptance of all that spreads out as an outer carpet of the senses before the senses: that was the mood of Zarathustra! If an Indian looked at the plant cover, at animals and clouds and air and mountains and stars, he said to himself: All this is only outer illusion. Dare to look at the one who has exhaled this great Maja, at Brahma, but who can only be found within! And Zarathustra says: Turn your gaze to that which spreads out before your external senses, use the soul capacity that is right for the present age of humanity. But don't stop there; grow together with the sensory world, penetrate it, go through it, and when you go through this sensory world and don't let yourself be held back, then you will find a spiritual world beyond it out there – beyond the stars, beyond the mineral, plant and animal world. Not only when you go into yourselves, no, also when you go out into the world of the senses, then you grow together through your new abilities with a spiritual world.

What expresses the individuality of Zarathustra most beautifully – take it as a comparison for my sake – is when it is said of him: When he was born, the first thing that happened to him as a miracle was that he smiled at the first glance at the world – the Zarathustra smile! One must be able to put oneself in the place of what is said with such a truly magically deep formula for such an individuality. It is suggested that in Zarathustra an individuality is born that looks at the whole carpet of the sensory world, but penetrates it as if clairvoyant and sees the spiritual behind it, and that in the consciousness of man's superiority to that which spreads around him, lets that exultation flow out of itself, for which the smile of Zarathustra is a symbol.

And so we see that in Zarathustrianism there is a completely different mood than in Indianism. Therefore, this Zarathustrianism could point to what the human soul is now to take up, what it is now to unite with itself. The fact that people look out onto the world of sense and normally no longer see in pictures what is not in the world of sense means that they take in something that they will carry over into the future and that will be a new component of the human soul in the future. Through this new component it will experience a resurrection: In the future, the human soul will not only be as it was in the past, but it has taken on this new element that can only be acquired in the sensory world. That is why this deep idea of resurrection lives in the Zarathustra teaching. I cannot today go into this in detail, justifying my views from this or that passage; I will merely characterize them, and everyone can see from the usual communications that what is to be given today as a characteristic of Zarathustrianism is well founded.

Zarathustra said to himself: It is basically not compatible with the right progress of humanity that only old heritage in humanity is praised as the highest. Why should people go back to earlier embodiments and the way they looked at the world then? They should take in what is offered to them as new, they should enrich and expand their world view, give it a greater scope. Thus did Zarathustra say to men: Look into the future, take in the new, look up to that spiritual world which presents itself to you when you sense the world of sense as a transparent covering. That was what he had to say to the world, and in saying it he felt a deep reverence for the spiritual world behind the whole world of sense. He felt that it was like the beginning of a new ascent [into the spiritual world] when we strive to penetrate the sensual world in order to enter the spiritual world, just as the old Indian wanted to enter a spiritual world by descending into his own inner self. He felt that humanity had actually fallen from a higher, spiritual point of view to a lower, physical one, and that it had the added awareness of wanting to longingly return to the old one by holding on to an old, inherited wisdom.

Zarathustra was deeply imbued with the fact that something had been working on the human soul that had led it down and entangled it in the world of the senses. But he was equally clear that this human soul could now be seized by something that would lead it up the path to the spiritual world. That, so to speak, was before Zarathustra's spiritual eyes: the opposition of two powers, one leading humanity down into the world of the senses and the other lifting it up into the spiritual world. This contrast is evident where we read that Zarathustra speaks of the one power that leads man upwards, of Ahura Mazdao, Auramazda, which later became Ormuzd, and opposes this to another power that leads the human soul downwards: Ahriman, Angra Mainyu.

Thus one must first perceive these two powers and how they work: the one leading the human soul down into the sensual world, the other leading it up into the spiritual world. But Zarathustra is completely consistent in the deepest sense, in that he does not accept the external, sensual world in the abstract and say that something spiritual is behind it - as the pantheists say today - but he says: the individual formations of the sensual world differ; one appears in one way and the other in another. One appears as mighty, luminous and effective for the rest of the sensual world, the other as small and insignificant. And everything that appears to our world as a great and mighty power through its external form, Zarathustra sensed, in the sense of the world view also adopted by his people, as a component of the sun - that sun which, every year anew, conjures up the plant world necessary for man, that sun without which there can be no life on earth.

But even with regard to the sun, which he felt to be the most powerful, the most powerful influence on earth, Zarathustra was clear that it too belongs to the external world of the senses, that what external science can fathom about this sun is only the external expression of what lives behind this sun. And he felt it so that he said: Just as plants are magically produced on earth in spring through the power of the sun's rays, so that which lives as the spiritual power behind the sun is that which draws man out of the world of the senses, that which can create the powers for man with which he can penetrate through the world of the senses. Behind the sun, therefore, for Zarathustra lives that mighty spiritual essence which he has just named Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd. But what is it?

We can only form an idea of the thoughts that lived in Zarathustra if we remember that in spiritual science we do not consider the physical body of the person as the only thing, just as the person stands before us, but that we say: this physical body is the outer expression of his spiritual being. And when the eye becomes clairvoyant, it sees this spiritual essence, and we call that which the clairvoyant eye sees as the content of the spirituality, the aura of the human being. We perceive the physical body as the expression of the human aura, the small aura. Now Zarathustra says: Just as man has his aura, as he has his spiritual behind the physical, so is the sun the outer body of a spiritual being, namely the great aura, the Great Ahura - the word always means the same - the solar aura. - There we have Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, in contrast to the small aura of man.

Thus, Zarathustra pointed people to what lives out there in the universe as a mighty spiritual being and has its body in the sun, just as a human being has a body that is permeated by a spiritual-soul being, the small aura. That is [also] Ormuzd, that is what can unleash all the powers of man that go towards the spiritual. For this spirit that lived in Zarathustra, this Ahura Mazdao, this great aura, was a truth, a reality, before the clairvoyant gaze. And he said to his disciples, to those he could initiate more intimately into his secrets, something like the following: Look here, if you seek that which urges and leads man to the good, then you must raise your gaze to that which stands spiritually behind the sun. Man is indeed called upon to ascend ever higher and higher in the course of his development on earth. Ahura Mazdao will help him to do so. But not always, says Zarathustra, will that which is the spirit of the sun be seen only up there behind the body of the sun, but it will become ever greater and greater, will embrace more and more of the earth and will finally expand to the earth. The spirit of the sun will one day become a spirit active on earth.

If we survey the time [of Zarathustra] and the development of humanity, we see that these are in harmony with each other. What Zarathustra saw behind the physical sun was, for his time, only to be found in the sun in outer space; today, however, it has expanded to such an extent that we find it within the earth aura itself. And the event in which Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, descended to earth, we see, if we stand on the ground of true spiritual science, in what took place through the Christ impulse, which played out on earth in the events of Palestine.

From the standpoint of spiritual science, we can understand what Zarathustra once said to his disciples: “I will speak; now come and listen to me, you who long for it from far and near - now I will speak and no longer shall he who leads men to error with evil will through his tongue be able to poison the development of mankind. I will speak of what in the world God has revealed to me, what He Himself reveals to me - He, the Great Ahura. And anyone who does not want to hear my words, as I mean them, will experience bad things when the circles of earth's development will approach their completion. - When Zarathustra spoke of the spirit of the sun, we, who stand on the ground of modern spiritual science, say: He spoke of the same spirit that in his time could only be found in the vastness of the heavens, and today we find it when we study the mystery of the origin of Christianity in its full truth, as it emerged from the Mosaic religion. Having evolved to the Christian era, Ahura Mazdao descended, as it were, from the sun, and the Christians call him Christ. And he who interferes with the development of the world in order to halt the progress of human evolution, which is brought about by the great power of Ahura Mazdao, is Ahriman.

Zarathustra did not see the development of the world and of humanity in such a one-sided way that he could have asked, as many modern people do: Yes, how can I actually believe in an all-wise, great God when there is so much evil in the world? This is generally said today; one does not want to believe in a wisdom that permeates and lives through the world when one has to notice so much evil. Zarathustra does not speak in this way, and he also guides his disciples not to speak in this way. Zarathustra was clear that what comes from Ahriman, what stands as an opponent in all life, and that it must be allowed by the wisdom of the world, so that people who are to undergo an upward development can strengthen themselves through the resistance and gradually also lead the bad to the good. In this way a higher development is attained than if man had been simply comfortably placed in all that is good and had nothing bad to overcome.

Thus, although Ahriman was felt by Zarathustra and by all those who professed him to be the enemy of Ahura Mazdao, he was felt to be a necessary part of the development of the world. If we wish to understand the inner structure of the Zarathustra teaching, we must draw attention to individual things that may indeed cause great offence among today's clever people, who believe that they are so firmly grounded in the most modern world view. But what good does it do to carefully want to conceal the truth over and over again? We must plunge into Zoroastrian clairvoyance and explain in detail the structure of the system of thought which I have just characterized in superficial terms. Here it must be clearly understood that Zarathustra was one of those thinkers who, although they turned their gaze joyfully to the sensual world, nevertheless sought the truth in the spiritual world and, in essence, saw the essence of all world content in the spiritual. Powers such as Ormuzd and Ahriman are spiritual forces; they confront us in the world as spiritual entities.

But how did such high spirits as Zarathustra think about the outer structure of the world in the face of these spiritual powers? Just as Zarathustra looks up at the sun and says, “This is the outer body of a spiritual power,” so he looked up at the starry sky and at everything that the outer, sensual gaze could grasp, and he and his disciples perceived what was spread out in space as writing, as symbols, as metaphors that expressed the weaving and essence of the spiritual powers. This is extraordinarily important. Not in the way that we are accustomed to today with our materialistic sense, did Zarathustra and his students look at the outer world of the stars and see only spheres moving through space, but they saw in this world of the stars the expression of spiritual entities and spiritual processes, and in the arrangement of the stars they saw the symbols for what the spiritual entities behind them were doing. The starry sky was a starry writing to them, expressing to them the deeds of the spiritual world that took place behind it. Neither in the direction of today's materialistic sense nor in that of today's materialistic astrology, which would like to see the cause of the fate of mankind in the stars themselves, while they are only signs - neither in one nor the other direction did Zarathustra's thinking go. For him, what he could see in the starry writing was something like the meaning of a sentence for us, which we put on paper with characters. For him, the stars were cosmic characters. And what mattered to him were the spiritual entities behind them.

Zarathustra saw the highest spiritual entities in Ormuzd and Ahriman. For him, they belonged together, even though one is the enemy of the other. They originated, so to speak, in a single, great spiritual entity. In the sense of the Persian language, this primal being can be called Zaruana Akarana or, as it is often expressed, “eternity shrouded in glory”. It is difficult for today's human sense to penetrate to the heights where the followers of Zarathustra stood and where they grasped what must be grasped if one wants to see Ormuzd and Ahriman in one. The best way to achieve this is to endeavor to gradually arrive at the idea that if I look back in time, further and further back, I come to that which existed in prehistoric times and where the causes of the present lie. I myself also come from that which has developed out of this past current. But in the opposite direction there is a future current, and if one can rise to the point of seeing that the future is something that comes towards us from the other side, that we go towards, then one gradually comes to a true understanding of what Zarathustra sees as the unity behind Ormuzd and Ahriman.

Imagine a curved line, running forward and backward in such a way that it forms a small circle. If you make the circle larger, the line is less curved; make the circle even larger, and the line approaches more and more a straight line. If you take the diameter of the circle to infinity, then the arc of the circle gradually becomes a straight line that extends to infinity. Thus, we can assume that every straight line, by tracing it backwards and forwards, is a circle of infinite size. And so we can also say: if we go back into the past, we come to a point where the past and the future join together in a circle. This is the eternal current that Zarathustra pointed out – Zaruana Akarana. Past and future have become intertwined in the eternal cycle of the world, and from this the god of the sun, of light, of all that is good - Ormuzd, Ahura Mazdao - and likewise the god, through whose resistance the good forces must develop - Ahriman - both emanate from the snake of eternity: Zaruana Akarana. One must only feel one's way into these conceptions of eternity, then one gets a sense of the mood that prevailed among those who were around Zarathustra, then one feels something of the full magnitude of the feelings that flow from the teaching of Zarathustra, who continues to work in humanity to this day.

And so, for example, Zarathustra said to his disciple: Now you have a mental picture of the closing circle of the world, of one part of the world circle as the higher power of light, Ahura Mazdao, and of the other part as the dark power, Ahriman. What we have just spoken is written in the Star-writing, and in the Star-writing you see this circle, which closes in upon itself as a symbol of Zarana Akarana: the zodiac that closes around the vault of heaven. This is the symbol of the outer circle of the world, and when you stand on the earth and turn your gaze to the zodiac, imagine the sun as the great Ormuzd, passing through this circle. And what the deeds of the circle of light are, that shows itself to you as the realm of creation of Ormuzd, and what lies in the night, what is immersed in darkness for man and stands on the other half of the earth, that is what Ahriman symbolizes. The seven signs of the zodiac in the daytime course of the sun on one side and on the other side the five signs in the nighttime course of the sun: these are the symbols of Ormuzd and Ahriman.

Thus the stars were perceived as writing in the sky for what Ormuzd and Ahriman were. Such entities, which stand behind the sensory world, were imagined to have an effect on human nature, but it was realized that they were not a unified whole, but that there were partial spirits, sub-spirits. And in the individual signs of the zodiac, the symbols for seven or six serving spirits of Ormuzd were now felt. These were sub-spirits, called Amshaspands in the old Persian language. The best translation is the one that Goethe chose in his “Faust” when he said:

But you, the real sons of the gods,
Enjoy the living, rich beauties!

Sons of the gods! Six of them – on the light side of the Zodiac – were connected with Ormuzd, while the other five spirits, opposed by Ahriman, were called Devs. This sounds strange and shows the contrast to Hinduism, to what the Indians worshiped as their highest powers, the Devas. While for Zarathustra the highest spiritual powers are found in the penetration of the sense-covering - these are the Asurian powers that work in the outer world - so for the Indians the highest powers are those that are found by penetrating into the mystical interior of man. The simplest explanation for the fact that ancient India saw the highest in the devas, while the Persian religion, on the other hand, saw something dangerous in them, and that furthermore the Indians saw something in the asuras that they did not want to know anything about, while the Persians revered them, is this: In the Zarathustra sense, one should take leave of that world which relies on the inner alone, which can become seductive for man if he does not want to grasp the outer world of the senses. Therefore, delving into the inner, into the world of the Devas, became somewhat dangerous for the Persians, while for the Indians they were something of the highest.

Thus the five spirits of Ahriman are symbolized by the five dark winter constellations of the zodiac. And so there are twelve spiritual entities: Ormuzd with his servants and Ahriman with his servants. Basically, we have to think of the realms of Ormuzd and Ahriman in such a way that these twelve [spirits] work together in the spiritual world - Zaruana Akarana! How do they work? By communicating to the human being that which, for Zarathustra, is the expression of the goal of the world, by pouring into the human being that which they allow to flow through the universe. Zarathustra felt that man, as a small world, is a confluence of what is spread out as great cosmic forces throughout the universe. Thus he felt. Therefore, it would be only natural to find that Zarathustra did not see what is found today through anatomy, physiology and so on in the dissected human being. The Zarathustra wisdom did not dissect the human being, but there was a clear-sighted insight that showed how the spiritual forces worked into human nature and composed human nature. Zarathustra says: “Through the universe, twelve forces emanate from the twelve spirits of Ormuzd and Ahriman; they compose the human body. Like a seal imprint, the human body expresses in miniature what is spread out in the great world in the Amshaspands, the sons of the gods. In there, it continues to have an effect as currents from outside.

What does the disciple of Zarathustra actually mean by what continues to have an effect in there? What I am about to say is somewhat disturbing for modern science. In its own way, more recent science has rediscovered what flows in as the twelve currents, what makes human beings a being that can strive up into the spiritual world, that can have a brain, an intellect; it has rediscovered it in the twelve main nerves of the head. But that is a nuisance for modern science, almost the height of madness, when one says that these twelve nerves are the crystallized, condensed currents that the twelve Amshaspands, according to Zarathustra, channel into the human organism. And so, in materialistic research, we see a concentrated focus on the human being of what Zarathustra – the luminous, clairvoyant personality – revealed as a spiritual secret. At that time, one saw in spirit what was important. And it is our time's task to see in the material what is, as it were, the condensed spiritual.

Zarathustra continued: Yes, you see, just as today man, through his spirituality, which is bound to the brain, strives up into a higher world, to a higher development, so in earlier times he strove for something else. Just as man is connected with Ahura Mazdao today, he was once bound to lunar development. This is also something that annoys modern science. Nevertheless, it is a spiritual truth. This lunar development expresses itself in a further stage of condensation of spirituality. Lower spirits came into play here. Just as the twelve great Amshaspands worked into man, so before that other spiritual entities had brought about a lower spiritual activity. Today we would say: When a person reflects, it is a higher spiritual activity; when he reflexively chases a mosquito away from his face without thinking, it is a lower activity. We see these lower activities as connected to the nerves, which have their center in the spinal cord. What intruded into the human organization as a lower activity, Zarathustra attributed to an earlier spiritual influx.

He said that the twelve great spirits were opposed by 28 others, whom he called Izeds. These Izeds had an effect on the human body and constituted it. He further said that this implied a certain irregularity in that the lunar government had been replaced by the solar government. In addition to the 28 Izeds, which correspond to the 28 lunar days, there are three more, which are inserted by the [longer] solar cycle - up to three irregularly inserted days. So you can count 28 to 31 Izeds. This brings us close to what newer science has as these Izeds: They are the 28 to 31 nerves in man running to the spinal cord - these are the crystallized izeds. So you see the Zarathustra wisdom crystallized in the human anatomy, so to speak. It would never have occurred to anyone to direct human thinking in such a way that it could have researched and searched in the way it does today if Zarathustra had not provided the impetus for it.

He pointed to higher spiritual powers that radiated into man. And to the extent that these were Amshaspands, they became the twelve brain nerves in the physical organization of man; to the extent that they were Izeds, they became spinal nerves. This is something that seems even more twisted than what I said yesterday about reincarnation. But it is something that people will gradually come to recognize, namely, that humanity started out from a spiritual world view and only then descended into materialism. People will gradually come to see how useful it is to raise our eyes again to those great geniuses who, so to speak, saw it as their mission to give people a spiritual gift that can in turn lead them out of this world of the senses. From what it had previously seen in the spirit, humanity descended to sensual things.

Now, today people are not inclined to find such things anything other than annoying, but only because certain things are easily forgotten. For example, everyone will say: How should we actually imagine the structure of the world after Kepler's laws, other than as a sum of purely mechanical processes? Well, one should just remember that Kepler came to his laws precisely through a spiritual worldview and made the statement: “So I carried the sacred vessels of Egyptian secrets up to the north and translated them into the language of the present.” Those who were truly great cultural mediators knew how to tie in with the time when one could still see into the spiritual world. Thus, in essence, Zarathustra stands before us as the one who, in his spiritual worldview, feels the mission to point out to the human being who has the tool in the physical body for his work in the world, but who still points to it with spiritual means. That is why Zarathustra is so tremendously significant. He is always spoken of in connection with the entire outer life of the people in whom he was incarnated.

It is deeply significant that the legend, told so wonderfully, tells how this people, in whom Zarathustra lived, migrated down from the north. The legend, which is truer than history, tells us the following: This people once lived far to the northwest of the areas they later moved into. Before Zarathustra worked there, it was once able to live in these northwestern lands because the conditions there were favorable. But then strange changes occurred – so the legend goes: Winters came that lasted ten months; the people could no longer stay there, and King Dschemschid led them away [to more southern areas]. He received [from Ahura Mazdao] a golden dagger, which he plunged into the earth at various places. As a result, grain grew in those areas, and the people settled there.

If we translate what this legend tells us into the most sober truth, we have to say: This people, into which Zarathustra was introduced, was dependent as a people on cultivating the earth; it was dependent on tackling the real work of life with its hands. Zarathustra's mission for this people is, to begin with, the dissemination of spiritual wisdom, but at the same time it is a guidance to the immediate sensual reality. Hence their turning away from that world view, which wants to know nothing of work that has to be done in the sensual world and which perceives as Maja that towards which the work of the hands should be directed. No, for those who had Zarathustra as their teacher, the soil was not Maya. It was a reality as it was.

And it was a reality that was to be led higher and higher by extracting its fruits from the soil. By working, one connected with what Ormuzd wanted. Work was service to Ormuzd. And everyone felt the Zarathustra mood in their veins when they worked the soil: “I must not abandon myself to the mood that leads me to long for another world; no, here I will be a servant of Ormuzd. By thrusting the spade into the earth, I work as a servant of Ormuzd. And man has to live here on earth in truth. Therefore, in those who were the followers of Zarathustra, there was also the most sublime and beautiful belief in truth and truthfulness, in moral purity. And that is one of the most beautiful impacts associated with the mission of Zarathustra, that the sense of truth and truthfulness developed because of this connection with the outer world, in which one needs a sense of truth.

And so we also see that among all the things that were seen as something bad, as belonging to Ahriman - deception, lies, slander - the worst vices in the teaching of Zarathustra were seen.

Thus the gaze of Zarathustra and his people was directed towards external reality, but in such a way that the spiritual world was sought behind it. In this spiritual world, man hoped to find his resurrection, his future union with Ahura Mazdao, when he had worked his way through the world of sensuality. The religion of resurrection, the first religion of resurrection, is the teaching of Zarathustra. And so it became a world view that looked with kindness, love and goodwill at what further south was regarded only as Maja. Within the Zarathustra religion, that which instincts are for reality, for working on reality and for connection with reality developed. Therefore, in this religion there was not that tendency to chastise the body so that the spirit could emerge from it as easily as possible, but rather it had that instinct that wants to shape the body so that the senses can become as fine as possible and the thinking as sharp as possible. And that had to develop into instinct. And so one sees a wonderful sum of healthy rules of life developing, from such healthy rules to eating, that later Plato stood in admiration before the Zarathustra religion precisely in this respect.

Yes, how long one appreciated the mission of Zarathustra - until the materialistic time made this impossible - we can see from the fact that it was said that Pythagoras learned geometry from the Egyptians, astronomy from the Chaldeans, other sciences from the Greeks, but that he learned the worship of the gods and the wisdom of nature from the magicians of the Zarathustra religion. So they revered those people in the followers of Zarathustra, who are called the Magi, who understood something about how to see through the world of the senses into the spiritual, who knew that one does not come to the spiritual through mere mystical immersion into one's own inner self, but how to make the outer carpet of the senses transparent. In short, those who said of Pythagoras that he had learned the worship of the gods from Zarathustra saw in the followers of the Zarathustra religion – if I may express it thus – “specialists” with the right view of the spiritual world, with the right worship of the gods. This is how people thought of what Zarathustra gave to humanity. But the time will come when people will look up to Zarathustra in veneration again, and that will be when, through spiritual science, they will gain the possibility of understanding such great spirituality as can be found in Zarathustra.

It is useful and significant to turn our gaze back to the starting points of human cultures. When we do that, then among the luminous figures to whom we look back to see how we actually have become and how our present culture has gradually emerged, there will always be the one who was there, the “Goldstar” - Zoroaster, Zarathustra, because one can with some justification translate this honorific name as “Goldstar”. Gold has always been regarded as a symbol of wisdom, and for the followers of Zarathustra, wisdom was something vividly effective, not an abstract, dead science. It is therefore a tremendous aberration for people to believe that the Amshaspands were abstract ideas for Zarathustra and his followers. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at this cultural movement must realize that living spirits were meant.

Zarathustra's followers sensed that when he spoke of the spirits within himself, for example of “Vahumano”, of the attitude that draws man up to the spiritual world that lies behind the carpet of the world of the senses, the truth of the living spirituality that permeates space lived in him like a seal impression. They understood what Zarathustra had to give to humanity from the source of his soul when they heard him say: “Everything that weaves and lives through the world as a spirit of light, as the power of light and fire, can work in and ignite an inner fire in people. What is spread out in space can gather in a center, so that man feels placed in the macrocosm. And as the disciples of Zarathustra look up to the spirit of the macrocosm, they say: Something in us resounds like an echo of what flows to us as a secret [from the macrocosm]. We feel within us what the power of light - the being clothed in glory - can become in us if we allow to resound within us what flows towards us from all sides. - The students called what they experienced within “Ahuna Vairja”, which later became “the word”, “the logos”. And this was felt like a prayer detaching itself in the soul, humbly flowing back to the secrets of the world - like a living echo that man can send out as a prayer into the universe on all sides like an image of the primal light.

Only when one is able to understand that Zarathustra, the luminous spirit, was able to evoke such sublime feelings in his disciples and through them in a large part of posterity right up to our time, only then does one feel something of the mission of Zarathustra. It cannot be felt if one only points to dogmas and names, but only if one feels the living power of the feelings that ignite in the living interaction between Ahura Mazdao and the space-filling light and the Logos, the holy word that streams out as an echo from the primal light. If one feels this interaction and understands the world-historical mission of Zarathustra, then one looks back in the right way to that being who was embodied in a human body about 5000 years before Christ and who became essential for all humanity.

What Zarathustra was for humanity and what his mission was should be indicated today with a few words. It should be pointed out that Zarathustra is one of the great leaders of humanity, who from epoch to epoch proclaim the old, the present and the future truths that give comfort and security and strength to man in all situations of life. And we can summarize this in the words:

They speak to the human sense
The things in space
They change over time.
The human soul lives
Through space
Unlimited and unharmed through time.
It finds in the spiritual realm
The deepest reason of one's own being.

Dearly beloved! The subject of today's lecture may seem a little strange, for it seeks to combine two things: supersensible knowledge, spiritual research – or, as we are accustomed to saying, theosophy – and everyday life. It might seem as if nothing is further removed from each other than what we experience in everyday life and what the soul aspires to when we speak of supersensible research - of insights into the world that lies beyond our physical-sensual world, beyond the world that our senses perceive and our mind can grasp, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. But on closer inspection, these things are not as far apart as they appear at first glance. I would like to remind you that even the philosopher of pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer, made a strange statement, which should initially only be considered in relation to his point of view on our topic. He said: “Life is an unfortunate thing, and I have tried to make it bearable for myself by trying to understand it.

We want to completely disregard the fact that this saying is based on absolute pessimism, on the conviction that life is not worth living, and instead turn our attention to the other side. Despite the fact that Schopenhauer regards life as not worth living, despite the fact that he regards existence as one of suffering and pain, and despite the fact that he cannot find anything consoling in the world according to his view, he still thinks that if he rises to enlightenment, he will be able to find something that will enable him to cope with life in the right way and thus to come to terms with it. Thus, even the pessimist speaks of the possibility that a worldview that takes us beyond the world of sense perception may lead us to something that makes this life possible in the right sense.

Theosophy does not lead us to a pessimistic world view, but to a spiritual life that shows us that what presents itself as a material exterior has emerged from spiritual origins. And it also shows that human beings, who pass through the material world when they are schooled by experiences in this material world, have to ascend to a spiritual world again. And that means: the origin and the goal of all world experience must be sought in the spiritual. This alone shows that by looking at the great spiritual goal, through which physical life first acquires its value and dignity, man cannot be absorbed in pessimism if he is able to make this world view his own.

However, Theosophy is still something that evokes not only contradiction but even ridicule in the broadest circles of our present-day humanity. Or it is understood in such a way that those who profess it are only dreamers. Theosophy also still finds hatred and contempt in wide circles. Time and again, one can observe that some people who believe that they are very much part of the people of the present day wonder, when they learn one fine day that some acquaintance whom they thought of as a reasonably reasonable person after what he has done so far has become a theosophist: How can a reasonable person turn to such foolish stuff? They think that anyone who occupies themselves with Theosophy no longer lives in the real world, is no longer capable of anything sensible, and tries to make life as unpleasant as possible for themselves. They think that such a person no longer experiences any real joy, that they pursue all kinds of idle thoughts and shut themselves off from everything that gives other people joy. Perhaps on top of that, they don't eat meat and don't drink – then the disaster is complete, and one is only surprised that they don't hang their heads and look at the world with a gloomy expression. After all, one can have such experiences every day.

But another experience has been made often enough and is by no means an anecdote. A lady hears that her friend professes Theosophy and thinks that it alienates her from life, because Theosophers do not amuse themselves in the usual way and so on, and that her friend must be protected from such a cruel fate. So she goes and says: How can you profess Theosophy? It alienates you from life, it is dangerous; the Theosophists are not only dreamers, but they become half-crazy. Before the friend even gets a chance to say anything about it, the one she warned becomes thoughtful and asks: What is Theosophy actually?

It so happens that when it comes to things like Theosophy, which in a certain sense are supposed to live their way into culture as something new, one often does not allow oneself to form an opinion about the matter and content, but rather judges on the basis of secondary circumstances. It may therefore be useful to consider how Theosophy relates to what we have to go through in ordinary life. Indeed, we shall even see how valuable it can be for life to make some observations about it. Theosophy will admittedly say nothing about how to nourish oneself “theosophically”, how to prepare food, and how the purely external life is otherwise to be provided for through Theosophy. But since it has to bring down for us the knowledge from supersensible worlds, we will see how it can affect our soul life, our mood, our joy and suffering, our desire and pain, how it can intervene in our life practice.

One of the most important truths in this field is one that is viewed with hostility by many people today and as if no rational person could possibly believe such stuff. This truth has already been touched upon in earlier lectures, but since it is one of the fundamental truths, it must be referred to again and again. It is a truth that will become just as established in intellectual life in the not too distant future as another [truth has done in the past]. As late as the seventeenth century, there was still the opinion, not only among laymen but also among natural scientists, that lower animals and even fish could develop from river mud. It was Francesco Redi who first formulated the sentence: Living things can only come from living things. And for this truth, which he dared to speak, he was almost burned. Today there is no rationally thinking person - whether he has drawn his education from Haeckel's work or from his most radical opponents - who would not recognize that a living being cannot arise from the inanimate.

Spiritual research now shows that a similar truth can be spoken of in the realm of the spiritual soul, namely that a person does not merely show us the qualities he has inherited from his parents, grandparents and so on, but that we truly grasp him only when we recognize a spiritual-soul core in him. The life that a person now leads is not the first, and it is the starting point for many lives in the future. And the living essence of a person absorbs and permeates itself with what it can absorb in the way of inherited traits, just as the living germ of a worm absorbs the matter surrounding it. We must distinguish between [a purely spiritual life] between death and new birth of life between birth and death, where we again encase the spirit in matter. Thus, the entire existence is a chain of earthly lives and purely spiritual stages of existence.

If this is asserted today, it is considered to be fanaticism. It is said that [theosophists] know nothing about science and so on. And yet it is just as much a firm result of spiritual research as Darwin's theory is from a scientific point of view. But that is how it is with all truths. What is regarded as reality today was considered heresy when it was first proposed years ago. Later, one cannot understand how one could ever have thought differently. And with regard to the truth of repeated lives on earth, one will no longer be able to understand how one could ever have thought differently.

Another truth is connected with this, the doctrine of Karma. Karma means the law of our human destiny. If we wish to characterize this law, we find it not only in the human world, where it is developed in a special way, but everywhere we look. We need only remember that, for example, edelweiss can only grow on mountains. Every creature is driven into the environment to which it belongs. Every creature strives, as if attracted by magnetic forces, into its own environment, where it belongs. One must learn to understand that man, depending on how he has developed in previous lives or how he has acquired faults, is so constituted that he is driven to where he fits in terms of environment and destiny. What he experiences is not really alien to him, but through the general laws of nature he fits in there. That law is already recognized for non-human beings. In the future, man will learn to recognize: When good or bad luck befalls me, it was necessary for me, and I sought it in a certain way because I laid the groundwork for it in previous lives, which is why I fit into this environment. This law will be self-evident in the not too distant future.

When people talk about the causes of good and bad luck, talents and abilities lying in past lives, it may be said that this is far removed from our everyday way of looking at life and takes us into distant worlds. But the question is: does this law really only apply from one life to another, or must it not also apply in narrower circles, to our ordinary life between birth and death? Through supersensible research, we come closer to understanding this law in relation to our present life as well. People usually see only the shortest periods of time and have a certain aversion to connecting longer periods of time. But one can only recognize cause and effect if one tries, for example, to connect what took place in childhood with what happens at a later age, or similarly to connect the other ages with each other. In short, if one makes an effort to explore step by step - in the way a scientist researches in his field - how [the idea of] karma becomes fruitful for life.

To gain a more thorough understanding, we can start from circumstances that are obvious to everyone and look at them from the point of view of karma. Of course, external circumstances will modify the law of karma, but if we look at life seriously and worthily, we will always come back to the underlying law. We just must not come up with all sorts of objections and cite exceptions and so on – these do not apply in science either. There is a law that a stone thrown in a certain direction falls, but a gust of wind can come and modify that direction - that is why the law applies. Life can only become true and fruitful when we recognize the law of karma and when it becomes a way of life, as the laws of physics are in physics. Theosophy can become something that intervenes in our lives as the laws of physics do in the external processes and activities of life.

Let us move on to something very specific. Suppose that a person, in his youth, say up to the age of 15 or 16, shows us that he gets angry when he sees injustice in his environment. It is easy to do so when you are young. What is stirring in the soul should not be considered worthless, because if a person in his youth can become very angry about injustice and later manages to overcome this anger, to purify himself of it and to refine it through appropriate self-education, then something quite different will come of him than, for example, of a phlegmatic person. Anger is an affect, a part of a passion, and when it is transformed, it becomes something quite different, and the later it becomes, the earlier the anger-fortitude in childhood has occurred. The true student of life will recognize this everywhere. In a phlegmatic person, this transformation will never be seen. But how does anger transform? What we have as blind anger towards injustice [in youth] we apply as helpfulness for our fellow human beings in later life: anger-fortitude in youth transforms in such a way.

Today we are taught in school that warmth is transformed into propulsive force. A similar law, which works in the same way as that of the transformation of natural forces in external life, exists for our inner life, for what can be experienced and felt in the soul. It is no coincidence that a person like Goethe said: What one wishes for in youth, one has in abundance in old age. It is not meant to say that in youth one only has to wish, but Goethe thought: a person who is angry would like to help, but cannot in youth; this wish to help is transformed, and now in old age one has abundance. Today, people still do not believe that this is the case. We have, it is thought, ample opportunity in old age to develop love and goodwill of our own accord. But if you look more closely, you will find that it is precisely those who were wrathful in their youth who are most likely to be helping their fellow human beings.

Another example shows how karma enters our lives. If you have had the opportunity as a child to look up to relatives with reverence and awe, you cannot be grateful enough if you reflect on yourself with sufficient self-examination. And if one had the opportunity not only to worship people, but to rise in devotion before the great facts of life, then this is something to look back on with deepest gratitude. It is an instinctive feeling that the sense of reverence that one can experience in youth has causes that have effects in later life. The underlying principle could be expressed by the image of folded hands and bowed knees. One might say – and life proves it to be true – that those who were able to fold their hands a lot in their youth can figuratively raise their hands a lot in old age to bless and thus become a benefactor to those around them. There are people who enter any circle, and one feels, without them saying much, their mere presence as a blessing. They bless by their mere existence, because they have acquired the appropriate soul powers. Such powers occur in later life when in youth the karmic causes have been laid by shyly looking up to something worthy of veneration. Devotion is transformed into beneficial powers.

We can go much further in such a consideration of everyday experiences to something that most people hate very much and are frightened by, not at a low level of education, but at the highest levels of education - the lie and envy. Yet we never meet these qualities interwoven in character. They can be traced back to earlier experiences, but when we see them occurring, we can say that lies and envy are the causes of something that is already being lived out between birth and death. We know how a person despises himself, as it were, when he has to say to himself, 'I am envious' or 'I have a tendency to lie'. He is convinced from the outset that these are not good qualities. Goethe, for example, says in his self-observation that he is glad that he does not have envy as one of his vices, and Cellini says that he feels particularly fortunate not to be aware of any lies. People try to get rid of these things when they find them in themselves. Let us assume that a person realizes that he is envious; he wants to get rid of it, but he is not strong enough to uproot envy. You can't just uproot something like that, but only transform it, like external forces. The person fights envy so that he no longer thinks: I don't want this or that for this person. Thus, with the intellect, he has overcome envy, but in the depths of his character he cannot, and envy reappears in a transformed form.

There is a legitimate connection between envy and its transformation product, a kind of addiction to criticism. He criticizes everything he can find fault with, and such a person is often very pleased with himself. He no longer notices the envy, and criticizing - that is right and proper, because one must point out people's faults! Of course one must, but it depends on whether one does it to improve people or just to criticize them. In the latter case, it is transformed envy. This is very common in life. Many tea and coffee klatches and morning and evening chats would not exist if envy had not been transformed into criticism. There we see how a quality is transformed under the influence of human soul striving itself. Let us now follow what occurs later in a person when he develops envy and criticism, especially when these have raged in youth. He becomes what we might call a dependent being, a person who needs the advice and help of other people for even the smallest things, who does not know how to cope with life. One can doubt such things, but if one looks into life, one will see that they apply just as much as the physical laws in natural science.

From this, good educational principles for life can be derived. We must see that envy and carping do not run rampant. We cannot eradicate them, but we can transform them in the right way. The educator must use all the means at his disposal to ensure that these qualities do not degenerate into instability, but become what could be called a certain yearning to immerse oneself in the mind, so that the person gets the feeling that there is something inside of me that I sense as a faint presentiment, something that is asleep in me. This is one of the most beautiful fruits that can arise from properly transformed bad qualities when they are guided in the appropriate way.

In general, the worst qualities, when guided in the appropriate way, can have the most beautiful effects. For example, lies and dishonesty. We should pay attention to them as they arise in youth. It is not only telling untruths that is meant here, but one should recall again and again how difficult it is to always be truthful. It is easy to set up ideals in life, but always being truthful is not that easy, and it can even lead the best intention and the noblest of minds to be untrue in some respects. A teacher who tells a young child who is tormenting a worm [and cutting it in two] not to torment this worm, because it feels pain just like you, is telling an untruth, and yet he may be inspired by lofty ideals. When a worm is cut in two, one piece can continue to live. If you tell a child something like this, which it can transfer to itself, then you are drawing its attention to something that is not right, because it could not continue to live if the same thing happened to it. You would have to tell it something completely different to keep it from killing or torturing the worm.

The child may forget such things as “The worm feels pain like you do.” But where does the forgetting take place? In his conscious mind. However, there is a deeper core to the human being, and we may have long forgotten something with our everyday consciousness – but it sits in the astral and continues to have an effect. Something like this, which does not correspond exactly to reality and is not controlled by the conscious mind, nevertheless has the same consequence as a more direct lie. [Through this untruth] the child develops what we can call a shy nature. Such a child becomes shy and does not dare to look people in the eye. Every untruth has the effect of a physical law, even one implanted under the mask of a high ideal. From this example we can see how spiritual science can be useful.

Spiritual science instructs us on how careful we must be with every word. We can see how the study of spiritual science as such affects a person's life in general. Here is a concrete example: Many people suffer from poor memory, with which they themselves are not satisfied and which they claim is getting worse and worse. It is a result of supersensible research that the more a person absorbs only materialistic ideas, that is, only what he can hear, see, or grasp with his mind, the worse his memory must become. Such ideas fill the lives of most people today, but they are the least suitable for generating the powers to truly keep memory alive. We also take certain soul powers from a person whom we only fill with materialistic ideas.

What we, on the other hand, absorb as a result of supersensible research, what enters the soul as spiritual-scientific knowledge, what forces us to grasp very clear and very interlocking thoughts, that supplies the soul with strength. It is certainly not easy to grasp such thoughts, where not one stands next to the other, but one grows out of the other, as in a plant. The consequence of such thoughts is, quite apart from the fact that they convey truths to us, that our inner life becomes more concentrated. Even if he cannot see into the higher worlds himself, a person who deals with such thoughts will repeatedly have certain main concepts before his soul, provided he does not become bored with them. This holds together what we call the ether consciousness, which is not recognized by external science. It is strengthened, and the result is that man retains his memory in a much better condition than usual.

Of course, it is not difficult to refute this. It only takes one person to come and say: Look, this theosophist has spent his whole life dealing with supersensory ideas, and now he has almost no memory at all. - One would just have to look at what he would have become without spiritual science. Such things cannot be compared with each other by statistics and so on, but only by what the person can experience in himself. When memory begins to waver and when a person begins to occupy himself with the supersensible, it becomes easier for him to retrieve it. Memory will take on a different character. From this we can conclude how much our everyday life benefits when we fertilize and permeate it with supersensible ideas.

And further: What do we need as human beings for what we are supposed to achieve? Joie de vivre and contentment, interest in our surroundings. What fate assigns us often cannot be a source of joy, but a source of displeasure, of pain. Life can easily become bleak. But for those who are truly capable of striving for the truths of the supersensible world, there can be no complete desolation in life. For even if the outer world should bring misfortune upon misfortune, supersensible knowledge conjures up joy and delight and enlightens us with the consciousness: No matter where he stands, man belongs to the whole spiritual life, he has his destiny, his task and dignity and also his source of joy of existence and love of life, which no outer fate can take away.

A materialistic age should bear this in mind, because many people only find joy in what can be grasped with their hands. Then comes oversaturation and the greed to receive ever new impressions. And when these do not come and life always brings the same, then comes desolation, because man only knows a source of happiness in what comes from outside. But if he has grasped the concepts of a supersensible world, then these work from within, and so we can create the joy of life within ourselves from what we conjure up from within, even if we have no stimulus from outside. The smallest things in life can become the source of inexpressible joy of life and great happiness. That is the difference between the two kinds of concepts: The outer concepts satisfy only our intellect and only for a short time our feelings; then it stops. The pathfinders in the materialistic field can have the joy of research, but they will soon feel desolate in their souls. But what we take from the sources of supersensible knowledge offers a never-ending source of joy and the power of being.

One would like to refer again and again to something that Fichte, who did not live in the humanities but nevertheless strove for it, said to his audience. He once said: What I have to give you speaks of the facts of the supersensible world, but for this another, a new sense is necessary. He emphasizes the connection between man and this supersensible world in the following words: We only look at what surrounds us in life, such as fate, pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, with the right understanding and in the right measure, and only get the right view of our destiny when we see the connection between man and the divine. When man becomes conscious of this connection, then, says Fichte, he can say: “Ye clouds, descend and pour down upon me in streams; ye mountains, fall upon my body and bury me; ye thunders roll, ye lightnings crush me.” I defy your power, for I have grasped my destiny, and that is eternal, as the spirit is eternal.

A presentiment of such a sense of security can come to anyone who in any way becomes acquainted with supersensible research. It is necessary for human nature that these things should enter into our everyday life. How does this show itself? Take a person who lives in the country, in an area where few newspapers and enlightening literature still reach, and compare him to a city dweller who is at the center of modern education, reads newspapers and magazines of all kinds, and so on. This country dweller cannot, by his very nature, be satisfied with the consciousness that the old traditions give him. And since he has nothing else to read, he delves into the Bible. It often happens that the words of the Bible appeal to such a person's mind, but by not only seizing the consciousness but also the subconscious, they sink into the inner being, which is connected with the need for something superhuman. This is the source of many harmful superstitions. For example, the people concerned think they are prophets, they then found sects and so on. Because the urge for the supersensible lies at the deepest source of the soul, if he cannot find the right path, he seeks something else, and that can turn out to be harmful. Such a person only proves how deeply rooted it is in human nature to find the connection with the supersensible world.

The city dweller, on the other hand, has no opportunity to let the supersensible take effect on him. But the urge for it is there, and man fills the ordinary consciousness with all kinds of things: with spiritualism, with “world riddles” and so on. Many people go to “advanced” world-view meetings and also profess such views, and they do not know that their subconscious soul is longing for something completely different. There it continues to work, and later the effect appears, not as superstitious sectarianism as in the countryside, but as uneasiness, gloom; this or that, all kinds of ideas come over them, they become nervous, lose their mental balance, and if they have money, they go from sanatorium to sanatorium. They ask themselves: What is actually wrong with me? Without knowing it, they are missing the connection with supersensible truths.

Some people today are being deprived of supersensible truths because they are considered to be a flight of fancy. They are being deprived of that which gives mental health and emotional balance. And because the physical is the consequence of the spiritual, they are also deprived of their physical health. Here we see how the results of supersensible research find their way into ordinary life. We often have occasion to see how the very gravest mistakes are made because people do not know how the supersensible works. For example, parents and educators believe that they can do no better than to impose punishment immediately after the “crime” has occurred; they do not know that punishment that occurs only after some time has passed can be much milder and, secondly, much more fruitful. The child should never get the impression that the teacher's punishment is a kind of revenge; he should never see him angry. When some time has passed, this will hardly be the case anymore, and the educator will also see many things differently when he looks at the mistake soberly, with his everyday sense. While he does not believe he can get by without corporal punishment when he punishes immediately, he will be able to apply milder means later. Besides, the consciousness of his wrongdoing has a completely different effect on the child's mind if he is not immediately punished for it.

A true light only falls on this matter when man rises above his fate, which often appears to him as something dark, to what the insights from the supersensible world can open up to him. And this is something that is not just a matter of thought and intellect, but something that, like blood, flows through our whole body. Supersensible thoughts pour into our destiny. A person who is unskillful can even become skillful through them. When what sprouts from the supersensible world passes into the physical, physical mobility is attained. That is why what comes from the supersensible is clothed in such sentences that it can be examined by logic, so that man can accept the truths of the supersensible world with his mind. Then they can flow into our lives, fertilizing it and making us secure in the life we must lead within our destiny.

The application of this truth shows us more than any speculation that man is called to carry down the spiritual forces and facts from the spiritual world into the physical. And when man endeavors to do this, he will become quite certain of his connection with the supersensible world, for he will realize that he is a spiritual being and is rooted not only in the physical but also in the supersensible world, and from this certainty he will draw an ever more secure feeling and greater hope in life. No matter how much the external life may torment him with his impenetrable destiny, no matter how incomprehensible the mighty waves of fate or the pinpricks of everyday life may be to us, we know that there are hidden forces that can open our spiritual can open our spiritual eyes and bring us light about our dark destiny, so that we can face with strong, inner energy everything that comes to us in the storm of life - for the blessing of the world, for the work on ourselves, for the development of all humanity.

Dear attendees! Spiritual science or theosophy is, through what it gives us as human beings for knowledge, at the same time a basis for life practice. The fact that we are able to see through the sensible, through what is merely comprehensible to the external mind, into the supersensible, makes this spiritual science a tool for us to feel that we are part of the supersensible world. In this way, Theosophy gives us the nourishment of knowledge that flows like spiritual blood into our entire spiritual organization, and we gain security and strength of life by absorbing knowledge of the supersensible world. But we are only in such a case when we seek to bring that which is supersensible into our knowledge. It is a different matter when we are confronted with the developing human being, as he enters into existence through birth, as he is compelled, through the normal course of life, to assert, step by step, through the material of the body, that which is rooted as a human spirit in indeterminate depths and comes more and more to the fore in the course of development. Here we are in a different situation from when we acquire knowledge, for we seek to bring the spirit out of its hiddenness into real existence, not only through our knowledge but also through our help and deeds. This prospect of passing from the external physical to the spiritual will have to arise in our soul when we consider the question that is the subject of our meditation today.

It must be emphasized at the outset that a prerequisite in the sense of spiritual science must be made for this question. Spiritual science goes beyond what presents itself to us in human life between birth or from the development before birth until death as an individual life. It penetrates to the essence of the human being, to the spiritual soul that exists before birth and that remains after death - to the core that can be traced from life to life through spiritual research, because we are indeed talking about repeated lives on earth. We make a strict distinction between these lives, which a person repeatedly spends on earth between birth and death, and the lives that lie in between in a purely spiritual world. When a human soul-spiritual comes into existence through birth, it is the case that it brings with it into this life all the effects of those causes that are to be found in previous lives. When we look at the developing human being, we see emerging like a sacred riddle what he has acquired in previous lives and brings into this life. The human being enters into the present life and lives spiritually, but he envelops himself with the qualities, characteristics and abilities that lie in the line of inheritance. Thus, the human being brings with him into his life the spiritual and soul essence, and he experiences in a certain way the strengths and abilities that the talents, characters and other qualities of his ancestors can give him. What a person brings with them from the spiritual world and what they inherit from their ancestors comes together in their development. To truly answer the question of education in a more intimate sense, we must be able to gain insight into the relationship between inherited traits and the spiritual-soul core of the person.

If we treat these repeated earthly lives and the effects of earlier lives on later ones as a spiritual scientific fact, this will provoke the opposition of many people who do not want to be informed in detail about the evidence that can be provided by spiritual science. It is not possible to convince oneself that this truth really exists in any other way than through practice. One can discuss at length whether a piece of iron, which is claimed to be a magnet, really is one. One can put forward many reasons against it; one could say that the person making the claim seems credible and so on, and so it can be argued about for an infinitely long time. But proof is there if one takes a small piece of iron and sees whether it is attracted. Through practice, evidence is provided. In a similar sense, one can be convinced of the truths of spiritual science.

The educator can now say: What I encounter in the child puzzles me; I must try to see whether what spiritual science claims is true, whether something really comes into the world as a spiritual-soul core of being. It will be shown that such a principle bears fruit for education by enabling us to enrich the child's life and to divine and coax out his or her gifts. We must focus on the way in which the gifts are formed if we want to distinguish the spiritual-soul core of the being from what the child has inherited. To do this, we must allow the human being's predisposition – everything that gradually comes to us in the way of qualities, abilities, talents and so on – to come to the fore, and we then find that it is characteristic of the human soul to allow the individual forces to interact so that they support and sustain each other in an overall organism. But still we see that the soul-forces of man, for example, thinking, feeling and willing, or other forces, appear independently of each other in their strength, yes, so independently that we find, for example, people in whom the power of thought is so highly developed that they can be good thinkers, while the power of will, on the other hand, recedes. Others are men of will and are equally ready to tackle an action, but are not always able to keep their thoughts together and follow them logically in a comprehensive way. They act, but do not think much. There are still other people who are pushed by their feelings to do this or that without thinking too long. So we see: the individual abilities can be developed to different degrees. For example, a person is very musical, and the other abilities recede. Some people, on the other hand, do not have the ability to do extensive calculations and so on.

The abilities are therefore independent of each other, but come together to form a complete organism. When we visualize the soul forces of a person, it becomes clear that he or she enters into existence with a very specific tendency and nature that brings soul forces into relationship and connection. If we turn our attention to what is inherited, that is, to the line of inheritance, and then to what enters into existence from a previous life, we can see what connects the forces and abilities. It is in fact the case that what the person brings with them as a result of previous lives has the ability to organize the abilities and shape them into a whole organism. The emotional tendencies, qualities, talents and so on point us in the direction of the line of inheritance. There is no more interesting observation to be made than to see how, on the one hand, the spiritual core of the being works to connect the soul forces and form an overall organism, and how, on the other hand, the individual forces are inherited from the ancestors.

Spiritual science is able to indicate very definite laws as to the relationship between these two elements. These can be understood in the same way as natural laws, but on a higher plane. When such laws are stated, one must not come and try to refute them with casual observation. That is child's play, even in the field of chemical physics. Let us suppose that a physicist establishes that the line traced by a stone thrown through the air is a parabola. If someone now follows the line externally, he will see that it is not exact. The line varies due to the resistance of the air and other external circumstances, but one can only arrive at the truth by going back to the law. One can only arrive at what underlies the spiritual life as a law by penetrating behind the scenes of existence.

Now, two types of forces present themselves in the soul life of man; we can describe one type more as the intellectual principle, and also as that of the imagination: everything that man has as a life of ideas, the way he conceives something, whether he goes slowly from one idea to another or can grasp rapid associations of thoughts, whether he can follow thoughts sharply and over a long distance, and the like. We have to take people who easily develop pictorial representations, who are able to clothe facts in images of the imagination, in short, who have the element of the intellectual and imaginative particularly active, who have inventiveness and the ability to think of many things, we have to take them as representatives of one side of the soul life. The other side, on the other hand, is the side of affects, passions and drives, the way someone is quickly captivated by this or that, whether they have many interests or are dull and so on. The latter is more connected with what we call the element of character, the former more with the reflective, the internalization. We must strictly distinguish these two sides, because if we are observers of life, the laws of development only reveal themselves to us when we can follow how the spiritual-soul essence of the human being, going from life to life, acquires one or the other element.

In general, we find that the child inherits the side that has to do with interest, passions, and attention more from the father; the spiritual-soul core of the human being borrows these elements from the father where it finds what passions are, what confronts events in life, what intervenes in the outer life. When a person wants to embody themselves, they are drawn to the father as if by magnet, who can transfer the qualities of interest, strength of character and so on, which are suitable for their individuality. They seek out the father who can give them this. The intellectual and imaginative qualities are more likely to come from the mother. Generally speaking, if we disregard more specific causes, we can say that the child's mental character comes about because the spiritual core of the being brings about something like a mixture of the intellectual and imaginative qualities of the mother with the temperament and drives of the father. How these qualities are mixed depends on the overall disposition of the spiritual core of the being. We can see what the elements are that belong to the nature of will and passion by looking at the father. We must look to the mother for what the core of the being has in the way of imagination and intellectuality. The children of the same parents are so different because the spiritual-soul core of their being mixes the paternal and maternal elements in different ways.

But we must go into this in more detail and distinguish between male and female offspring. Real observation of life will also confirm this law – that is, if the reservation is made in the same way as with physical laws and the secondary circumstances are not made the main thing. That which is in the soul character of the mother is more easily inherited by the sons, and in such a way that it is transformed in the son to a certain extent. If the mother is imaginative but only works in the narrowest circle, the soul of the mother works in such a way that it descends a step in the son, as it were, and gives him the outer organ predisposition so that he expresses this predisposition to a greater extent. The mother remains in the soul element in the narrow circle; the son shows what she has in her soul but imprinted in the brain as his tool. He has as a world ability what she experienced in the innermost circle. A talent for which the mother shows the disposition can come about in this way. And what descends more into the physical disposition through the mother is mixed and imbued with what is inherited from the father. This is how it is with sons.

It is different with daughters. Here it can be seen how what the father lives in his profession and so on is more expressed in the overall personality. What is the predisposition of the father's physical body is reflected in the soul of the daughter. What the father had as external qualities is realized in the soul. In the daughter, we encounter in spiritualized form what was more in the physical man in the father. It is particularly interesting, and one can almost express it as a law of nature, that the mother in the son descends in relation to her soul and appears in the physical, while the father ascends in the soul of the daughter with what he is in the physical man.

This can be demonstrated in hundreds and thousands of cases, and life will prove it right across the board. Here it will be explained only by means of one particularly characteristic example – in Goethe, in whom this general law shows itself especially clearly: What was admired in the mother's innermost circle as a spiritual quality was manifested in a “lowered” form in the son and was admired by the world. Frau Goethe had a desire to tell stories, which could have a stimulating effect in the innermost circle. In Goethe's case, it became a mental disposition, so that he became a world-affecting personality.

We also see the opposite in a wonderful way in his sister Cornelia. Councillor Goethe was extremely likeable due to his strong character and the serious way he led his life. He stood firm in the outer life as a thorough and earnest man. Let us take a look at how Goethe relates to his father. It is peculiar that the outer character traits, temperament, thoroughness and so on are inherited by the son. When people with the same disposition live next to each other, they sometimes repel each other. There was never any intimate relationship between father and son Goethe. But the sister had absorbed her father's thoroughness into her soul as depth of soul and seriousness, mixed with intimacy, as is often the case when external qualities are transformed into soul qualities and come to us. That is why the siblings were such loyal companions, because the qualities that Goethe did not like in his father had penetrated into the soul of his sister.

Can we not see this peculiar survival of maternal soul qualities in the external organ systems of the son everywhere? Throughout world history, we see the relationships of sons to mothers, for example in the poet Hebbel. He was the son of a bricklayer. If you knew him and were with him, you would know that the gnarled, pedantic character he had within was already apparent on the outside. His hands were much too long, his legs even longer, and his movements were angular. He got all that from his father, but he and his father did not get along. On the other hand, he got his mother's simple nature, which he relates so beautifully. We see how her soul, descended by one level, reappears in his poetic personality. This is how the two came to understand each other, and it was only through his mother that he escaped the fate of becoming a mason. Wherever we look, in everyday life and in history, we can see that this law applies universally.

But how should we proceed as educators when we see this complex interaction between inherited traits and the spiritual and psychological core? We must direct our attention as much as we can to the way in which certain traits that we see in children can be found in their parents at a different level. But we must not regard the child as a copy of [the parents], for then we would not consider the transformation, how the soul qualities of the mother descend into the body of the son, and how, conversely, the physical nature of the father is transformed in the soul of the daughter. Today, people are inclined to admit transformations of natural forces; natural science, for example, shows how natural substances transform into heat. But it is not admitted that these laws also apply to the spiritual. A real art of education can only come about when people become aware that spiritual science can flow into such areas of life as education.

We are always talking about individuality. But what is individuality? Today, we only refer to the word in a very abstract way. However, if we know how individuality arises, in that the spiritual-soul core of the child not only absorbs the qualities of the father and mother, but transforms them, we can grasp it in a concrete way. Then education comes from the abstract to the concrete, from materialistic abstraction to true reality. Now someone might object: You tell us that the soul-spiritual core of the being envelops itself in what is given to it in inherited powers. But we see the human being as a unified being, and how can we distinguish between what is inherited and the spiritual core of the being?

If we consider development only superficially and see only the individual, we will not make any progress. But life offers us proof, sufficient proof, to show how the spiritual-soul core of our being is enveloped and permeated by what comes from our parents and ancestors. Great minds such as Newton or Humboldt, who achieved great things, did not do particularly well at school and were considered to be poorly endowed. Many other people with great names could be named who also developed slowly, while child prodigies progressed rapidly. In the case of Newton or Humboldt or others, they brought a rich core of being into this life, with much sprouting and budding in the soul, and this working into what had been inherited from the parents had to happen slowly. The rich inner core needs more time, because it must first chisel out, transform, precisely gradate and so on, what it has inherited in powers. So rich natures, which are called to give much, must work longer on adapting the inherited material.

This will become increasingly clear, because today a person who brings strong soul forces with them has to fight against all the tough obstacles, because very rigid, sober, fixed hereditary traits are inherited that are not very flexible, so it takes a long time to adapt them precisely to the individual core of the being. Child prodigies are quickly finished, because they quickly process the abilities that lie in the line of inheritance and absorb them in a one-sided way. But it soon becomes apparent that their talents dry up and wither away. When we look at these most extreme cases, we see the slowly developing genius or the quickly developing prodigy and all the stages in between, as the spiritual and psychological core of the being works its way through the obstacles.

This slow process of working one's way through can also be found in Goethe. If, like me, you have spent three decades studying Goethe in detail and with humility, you can safely say, without running the risk of being misunderstood: If one surveys Goethe's life, one notices a slow progression in the development of his abilities and talents. We find the tendency towards what he became in him even as a child sacrificing to the great God, but what effort he had throughout his life to bring what was in him through the many obstacles of his physicality. We recognize him when he expresses his great thoughts, for example in the second part of Faust, as a mature human being, in contrast to young Goethe, who, compared to old Goethe, wrote many immature things. How does what is said here go against the judgment of our time, where the editions of the youthful works are particularly praised – there, it is thought, he achieved the greatest things. The young Goethe, it is said, brought forth great and powerful things. He is praised to the skies. And of the old Goethe, some say that he produced the second part of Faust in his old age. Few people understand that he developed and deepened slowly and gradually, that the Italian world fostered him inwardly, and that his essential core increasingly removed external obstacles. In short, they do not understand the old Goethe because he is too lofty for them. Even during his lifetime, he had to suffer from the fact that his later works were decried as products of old age. He expresses this in the following verse:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The pack of rags and tags thinks,
It would no longer be!

In Goethe's case, it is particularly evident how the spiritual and mental core of his being rose to its height in the second half of his life, and no one who believes that the whole of Goethe was already present in his youthful writings understands him. People understand the young Goethe better, but they attribute this not to the fact that they do not understand the old Goethe, but to the fact that he has declined. Thus, we can also find it true in this great spirit how the spiritual-soul core of being works its way into the outer shells.

Someone might object that we are talking here about an essential core that must be there to group and organize abilities. But we need only point out that the most important qualities nevertheless lie in the line of inheritance and can be explained from it. For example, in the last few centuries there were 25 to 28 musicians in the Bach family. So how can you say that the essential core is the main thing? Similarly, there were a whole series of important mathematicians in the Bernoulli family in Basel. In their case, it is particularly clear how seemingly mere inheritance works, because some of them were destined for something completely different, but nevertheless, in later life, it drove them to mathematics.

To understand this correctly, one must consider the relationship between the spiritual-soul core of one's being and one's inherited disposition and talents. To be a musician, one needs a musical ear; but this belongs to the physical organization, that is, to the shell. Just as one inherits the shape of one's nose, hands and so on, one also inherits the finer inner organs that lie hidden beneath the surface of the physical body. A soul-spiritual core that strives to receive physical tools for musicality will be drawn to families that can pass on musical organs. What is musical talent based on? Not on the brain, which is the organ of logic, but on the shape of the ear canals. One must look at the individual relationships very carefully. Such auditory ossicles of a certain shape are inherited from generation to generation. It is similar with the Bernoullis. Those who need a predisposition for geometry can seek out such a family. Thus, what life shows us here again coincides with what spiritual science asserts. We can understand and illuminate life better if we bring before our soul the connection between heredity and predisposition and the harmony or disharmony that arises from it.

If we distinguish between the spiritual-soul core of our being and the environment in which it is embedded, then life means an interaction between these two elements. Let us look at a child in the very first weeks of its life. His features are still undefined, his organs not yet fully functional; he cannot yet walk and so on. But if we think properly, we know that where features and abilities are still undefined, the core of the being is still dormant and is only gradually working its way to the surface to become defined. What the person will become later works its way out of the vagueness of movements, gestures and so on. It works its way up from indeterminate depths to the surface, and more and more the outer shell becomes an expression of what lives inside the person. In later life, much more is expressed on the outside, as the person really is. In the youthful child, the forces that will one day express themselves in his features, in his gestures, in his hand movements, and so on, are still dormant. In later life, the human being shows the imprint of the soul's inner character in the physical. The outer, the envelope-like, becomes more and more [a mirror] of itself; in the physical, what he is as a spiritual human being shows.

During the first period of life, the human being works more into his physical being. There is something very interesting connected with this fact, and it is connected with the same lawfulness as a physical law. With regard to inheritance, a distinction must be made between what children inherit who are born in the first years of marriage and what those who are born in later years of marriage inherit. The first children show in a remarkable way the ability to shape the inherited traits in the freest way; they can do this more with an individual style independent of their parents. The later children are more constrained to yield to the strong element of heredity; they become more of an imprint of their parents. Children born in the early years of a marriage find it easier to mix the inherited traits with each other; inheritance is less tyrannical towards them. Those born in the later years of the marriage have to apply stronger forces, because the power of inheritance is stronger in their case. Thus we see how these children become more and more like their parents. Of course, this can be broken by the most diverse circumstances, but in the sense of today's scientific research, this is a law.

When we consider these laws of inheritance, the right relationship between a person's disposition, talents and upbringing becomes apparent. Such laws can only be made useful for the soul's life if they do not remain mere theories and insights, but if they are transformed into feelings and intuitions. It is a remarkable thing how feelings kindled by knowledge give us the gift of tactfully divining what qualities are striving for expression in a human being. If we have goodwill and a sense for it, we stand face to face with the developing human being as with a sacred riddle. The secret of education lies in our approaching the child with such a feeling, for then he will solve the riddle for us. He shows us what abilities can be drawn out of him. Then there is no need for much speculation; tact will guide us so that we do not burden the child with something that cannot be developed in him. This brings the educator into the right relationship with the child. Then we stand before the human being we have to educate as before a sacred riddle and not – as many an educator often does – as before a vessel, where one can discuss what is best to be poured into it. That is a very external point of view! We must not forget that life often forces us to bring the child to something that, in our opinion, is not within his or her individuality, so that he or she can get ahead in life. But generally speaking, all the talk about education is usually less about what the child is more or less suited for and more about family relationships and education befitting one's station in life. But we must grasp the demands of life and individuality in a concrete sense, harmonize the blending of the soul-spiritual essence and the inherited predispositions, and endeavor to solve the riddle according to the circumstances of life. A riddle can be solved in different ways, but one must recognize it, then one can let the child become different, otherwise one will often not hit the right thing despite all speculation.

It is precisely in such areas [as education] that the fruitfulness of spiritual science for life becomes apparent. Spiritual science is not just theory, but something that can and will prove itself in life every day and every hour - for the progress of all humanity and of each individual. It places us in life in such a way that we acquire the security, strength and confidence we need for life. This chapter on disposition, talent and education thus proves to us that, indeed, through having gone through many lives, the human being carries an enigma at the core of his being and that life, in the broadest sense, must be a solution to this enigma.

The better we can answer the riddle within us, the happier, more secure and more fruitful a person's life will be – we must take this as our motto.

The spiritual and soul essence that goes through many births and deaths is a riddle, and life is the solution.

Dear attendees! If we seek knowledge through spiritual science, then that means that we feel the urge within us to look out into the spiritual world that lies behind our sensual world and in which the solution to the riddle of existence can be better achieved than in our sensual surroundings. If we allow the results of spiritual science to take effect on our soul, then they are not just abstract, theoretical insights, but they are nourishment for our soul and powers that sustain us, that reveal our destiny to us, give us hope and certainty in life and make us realize that we human beings need these spiritual-scientific results in our lives. Through everything that man sees around him and more or less recognizes in his being, he comes to the spirit that is to live into his knowledge.

We stand in relation to the world in a quite different way when we have the task, not only of penetrating the spirit through knowledge, but of drawing the living, real, active spirit out of its hiddenness and onto the surface, or at least of smoothing the way out of its hiddenness and towards its manifestation. In this way we stand in relation to the world and to life when we have before us the spirit of evolution in the developing human being — that indeterminate spirituality with which the human being enters into existence through birth and which at first presents itself to us as indistinct, as if emerging from an impenetrable darkness, in the still indeterminate features of the human face at the beginning of its becoming on earth. We have before us the human spirit, which, as if hidden in the depths, asserts itself from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, permeating the material existence that confronts us from the beginning in the growing child, and which gradually transforms this material existence into an image of itself.

As educators striving for knowledge, we are called upon to seek the spirit that rests in the depths, not only to satisfy our own soul, but precisely as educators we are called upon to translate everything that is still more or less intellectual in the process of knowledge into reality, to lead the spirit itself into life as a real developing force. From this point of view, spiritual science becomes the basis for an immediate practice of life in a completely different sense than if it were only to help us to understand the secrets of existence.

Now, from the lectures that I was privileged to give here earlier, it has already become clear – and this should serve as a prerequisite for us today, since we are dealing with a very specific topic – that, on the basis of spiritual science, we are dealing with an inner spiritual-soul core of the human being, which we now not only follow in his journey between birth and death, but we see him entering physical-sensory existence through birth from another world, a supersensible world, and crossing over again into another world when he passes through the gate of death to live through new stages of development in this other world. Yes, we do not just speak of ascribing to this spiritual-soul core of our being an existence before birth and an existence after death, but we also ascribe to it repeated earthly lives, so that we look back from our present life on many earthly lives that we have gone through before, and look forward to many earthly lives that we will have to go through in the future. In the entire life of a human being, we must therefore distinguish between the times spent in the physical body between birth and death, and the intermediate times, the times between death and a new birth, in which the spiritual-soul essence of the human being has its abode and conditions of existence in purely spiritual-soul worlds. When we look at things in this way, we are also clear about the fact that we must take a different attitude in the physical world towards the developing human being than if we were to see the spiritual-mental in its developmental phases between birth and death as influenced only by the physical-material. When we look at repeated lives on earth and the intermediate stages of human spiritual development, we see something of a sacred enigma in the person who comes into existence through birth. We see how the spiritual element forces its way into existence through the indeterminate nature of the gesture and the physiognomy, through the indeterminate nature of abilities and inclinations, and how it increasingly and more powerfully expresses itself in gestures, physiognomy, talents, movements, and increasingly makes himself master of all the external means of expression and tools of this person, so that we spiritually see in the person — even if we ultimately recognize the unity of his nature — a duality.

We first have what he has inherited in terms of the qualities of his body and soul from his parents and ancestors, in short, from the earlier generations from which he descended. But then we look at the actual spiritual-soul center of the human being, at his spiritual-soul core, which initially has nothing to do with the characteristics and facts that we encounter in our ancestors, but comes from a previous life of the human being and now only acquires the characteristics that are inherited, so to speak envelops itself in them in order to express itself in them. We must therefore distinguish between what a person brings with him from previous lives at the deepest level of his being and what he acquires from the line of inheritance. And we can only gain the right attitude towards the developing human being if we seek this interplay between the forces that pass from one life to another and the forces that are inherited directly from parents and ancestors. If we want to understand this properly, we must first familiarize ourselves with two fundamental characteristics of our soul life, which must come before our spiritual eye in full clarity if we want to grasp the whole essence of the human being.

First of all, we have the important fact that when a person appears before us as a personality in the world, all the powers that he has - the soul abilities, the temperament, the character traits, the will impulses, the affects and so on - interact to form a whole. But alongside this, we must also recognize the other important fact, namely that these fully developed abilities and powers that we encounter in the personality of another person, even when they interact, are nevertheless independent of each other in certain respects in terms of their disposition, so that one is not necessarily the condition of the other.

This becomes immediately clear to us when we look at life and see, for example, how a person has a very special kind of aptitude, perhaps being musical, but not having the slightest talent for mathematics or for practical life. Another person has no musical aptitude at all, but instead a certain aptitude for practical life or for mathematics. This means that people's abilities and aptitudes can arise quite independently of one another, but they can also interact. Now, even to the superficial observer, it is clear that everything a person possesses in the way of abilities, talents, gifts, skills or physical characteristics points to his or her parents and ancestors. And we will soon see the precise way in which a child's characteristics point to their parents and ancestors.

But through birth, something also comes into existence that has nothing to do with inheritance, something that is brought over from previous lives as the human being's actual spiritual-soul core. This essential core, which eludes direct observation, comes to us when we, as true educators, observe the becoming of the human being and see him, as it were, growing out of the indefinite darkness, like a basic coloration, like a fundamental tone of the whole developing personality. We cannot trace back to parents and ancestors alone what comes into existence in such a way that it combines, groups, and plays with a person's abilities, his predispositions, his impulses, and makes a whole out of them. While individual human traits, let us say a predisposition for this or that science or skill, can usually be traced back to these or those traits in the ancestors, we admit right from the start that the way in which these abilities, these various powers of the ancestors are mixed together in the personality, depends on something other than heredity – it depends on the spiritual and soul core of the human being.

We can say, for example, that someone inherits this or that temperament from their father and this or that ability, perhaps the gift of imagination, from their mother. And now they come to us as a person with a particular temperament and the gift of imagination, mixed together in a certain way. We can trace the individual temperament that he has and the gift for imagination back to either the father or the mother. But the way in which these gifts are mixed up, how they are grouped, we have to trace that back to the spiritual and soul core of his being. And now it is evident to us that this spiritual-soul core of our being feels magnetized to a particular pair of parents before birth, so to speak, to take on these qualities from one parent and those from the other, which it needs to get just the right mixture that corresponds to what it brings with it from previous lives. We can indicate very definite laws as to how the spiritual and psychological essence of the human being mixes the inherited traits with each other, how it takes one from the paternal side and the other from the maternal side, and how the mixing ratio is the individual act of the person entering into life.

If we are to point out very definite laws in this direction, then it is necessary to agree that such laws are to be understood in the same way as physical laws. If, for example, a physicist teaches us that a stone thrown through the air falls along a parabola, we can understand this from the corresponding physical conditions. If someone then comes and does not take into account that this general line of throw can change, say, through the friction of the air or other conditions, he could tell us: You have established a false law, because the stone does not fly in a parabola. But it is not important for the physicist to include the external, modifying circumstances in the law, but to find the law from the essential conditions. We must apply the same principle to laws that apply to the spiritual life. We must say to ourselves: the laws that arise in our minds have the same significance as the laws of physics; therefore, they could be refuted just as easily as the laws of physics, but nothing special is achieved by such a refutation.

If now very definite laws of inheritance are developed, then of course a thousand and one circumstances could arise to influence these laws, just as the trajectory of a stone in flight is influenced by the resistance of the air. But these modifying conditions of an incidental nature do not change the validity of the law. And we can only understand the happenings of the world if we can express the essence of things - both in the physical and in the spiritual realm - in laws. Our observation of the spiritual world can be just as faithful as it is to the physical world. You can observe in hundreds and thousands of cases that in the immediate descendants, very specific strengths and talents go back to the paternal line of inheritance and very specific characteristics to the maternal line, that is, that the spiritual-soul essence of the human being takes very specific strengths and talents from the maternal line and very specific characteristics from the paternal line, which then appear mixed in the children.

We can therefore divide the realm of our soul life into two clearly distinguishable parts. In our soul, we first have what we can call the realm of our interest, our attention, our sympathy for this or that. People differ in terms of what their interest, the sympathy of their soul, leads them to. One person is like this, another like that, depending on the basic color of their interest, depending on the basic character traits of their soul. The area of the soul that we have just characterized is clearly distinguished from what we can call the intellectual area, to which we also want to count imagination, which gives us the ability to imagine our environment and human life itself in images. The gift of imagination, the intellectual gift, is the other part.

If we break down the entire soul life of a person in this way, it becomes clear that, in general, the area of interest, the overall character of the personality, goes back to the paternal line of inheritance. This means that the spiritual and mental core of a person's being mainly draws from the paternal line of inheritance what constitutes temperament, affects, and passions. What concerns our intellectuality, namely the mobility of our perceptions, the possibility of bringing the external world into certain images, of visualizing it through ideas, is generally taken from the maternal line of inheritance. The way in which these two areas are mixed up by the spiritual and psychological core of the human being depends on the nature and peculiarity of our personality. But we must not only consider this very general character of inheritance; we must go deeper and more precisely into it. And here it becomes apparent that human traits are not only inherited in a general sense, but that they are transformed in the process of inheritance, that they undergo very specific changes, and essential ones at that. It has been shown – and you can find this proven in hundreds and thousands of cases – that what lives in the mother as intellectuality, as mobility of soul, as the soul's inclination to process ideas, images, concepts and the like, has more of a tendency to pass to the son than to the daughter and usually, in passing to the son, descends, as it were, by one level [into the physical realm]. Thus it happens, for example, that a certain mobility of ideas, a special ability to think up this or that, perhaps to develop it artistically in the field of poetry, is present in the soul of the mother, but it only moves in the narrowest circle of the closest acquaintances and the closest surroundings and does not have or develop the right means to apply these abilities to the outside world. So we can say that the mother does have these qualities, but she does not have the tools tied to the outer body to make full use of what is there and to allow it to have an effect on humanity.

If this is the case with the mother, then these predispositions can be found in the son's personal organ systems, developed to a certain extent and transferred into physical tools. The mother can have this or that psychological predisposition, but not the organ predisposition, that is, the correspondingly developed brain or other organ complexes, in order to actually live out what she is predisposed to to a greater extent and make it visible to the world. In the son, the mother's predisposition moves into the organ system, into the brain and into other organ complexes, so that certain abilities can bear fruit for larger circles of humanity. On the other hand, paternal qualities, which lie more in the outer personality and are rooted in the organ systems, tend to rise to the soul level in the daughters and meet us there in a soul-transformed, soul-transformed way. And so we can express it as a beautiful law of the progression of human generational life: the soul of the mother tends to live on in the personal abilities and skills of the sons, but the predispositions of the father, the whole configuration of the father's personality, ascends and lives on in the soul of the daughters, or at least tends to do so. Thus the father will continue to live in the soul of his daughters, even to the formation of his physical personality in the outer life. The soul life of the mother, who remains in the narrower circle and has little opportunity to live out her soul abilities, will live on in the organ systems of the sons, which come into activity in the outer world.

This law, which is tremendously enlightening for the understanding of life, cannot, of course, be substantiated here in a short hour with hundreds of examples. It can only be explained, as is also done in physics. And I would like to begin by explaining it through the well-known case of Goethe. Who would not know that everything that was present in Goethe as an organ predisposition, that he was able to live out through his brain and other tools of the organism, was traced back by himself to his mother's “desire to tell stories.” In the close circle of the old woman's lively mind, with all her desire to tell stories, she had everything, except for the organ predispositions. But what was living in the soul of the old woman, advice, flowed down and formed the son's organ systems. We can refer not only to Goethe's mother, but also to his father, to the old Frankfurt councilor Caspar Goethe. When we get to know him as an able, ambitious man, we are particularly impressed by his thoroughness, and sometimes also by his quiet resignation. But on the other hand, we must be clear about how all the qualities he had made it possible for him to move up a few rungs on the social ladder, but that they were not nearly enough to give him the influence and scope he sought in Frankfurt, so that in a sense he was condemned to an idle life.

Something of strength and stubbornness lies in the old Goethe's nature, also something of sobriety, but thoroughness in sobriety, even of a certain harmony of these qualities. If we consider these qualities of Goethe's father alongside the qualities of the son, we can easily understand that the two repelled each other in certain respects. They did so, as is well known. But let us imagine this quality of the father “spiritualized” - if we may coin the word - elevated into the soul, let us imagine a certain thoroughness of soul, in turn, with that timidity that the old Goethe had, that did not allow him to achieve anything, coming to life in the soul of his daughter Cornelia: We can easily find in the soul of Cornelia, Goethe's daughter, a certain softness of character, soulfully mixed with a certain stubbornness, a sharp mind mixed with a certain indulgence in feelings, the need to give herself, to nestle up to the world, and yet the inability to really give herself to anyone. The whole situation in the life of old Goethe – who strove to occupy a significant position and yet could not – can arise in the soul of the daughter in such a way that she had the need to nestle to a spouse and yet could not find satisfaction in marriage. We only need to transpose the character traits, which go as far as the organ structure of the old Goethe, into the soul, and we have the soul of Goethe's sister Cornelia. And everything that repelled Goethe, that pushed him back to his father, so to speak, that was what deeply attracted him to his sister, who complemented him so beautifully during their short life together, and whom he loved so much. Everything paternal in this “ensoulment” by his sister had such a beneficial effect on the young Goethe.

Try to look into the same things in Hebbel. Read his diaries. Try to understand from them, which are also a treasure of German literature in themselves, how Hebbel inherited the whole externality of character, that is, the kind of interest in the world, from his father, but that which led him from his earliest youth to strive to be understood points back to the soul of his mother, even if she was only a simple bricklayer's wife. In historical observation we can see everywhere that everything we encounter in the organ-facilities of men can be traced back to their mothers. Look at the mother of Alexander the Great, at the mother of the Maccabees, at the mother of the Gracchi – wherever you want – you see it everywhere. Anyone who has an instinct for really getting to the bottom of human characters will find this confirmed everywhere, just as it is with physical laws.

In spiritual science, we understand such a fact to mean that the spiritual and soul essence of the human being takes on paternal and maternal characteristics, not only mixing them but also transforming them, taking them to a deeper or higher level , that is to say, the qualities that are bound to the organ systems in the father are “soul-like” in the daughters, and the soul qualities that have not yet developed into organ systems in the mothers are transformed into organ systems in the sons. Thus, inheritance does not occur directly, but in such a way that we sometimes see it concealed, covered up, and we only have to discover how the spiritual and soul essence of the human being actually uses the qualities found in the paternal and maternal line in order to shape them plastically according to its individuality and assert them in the world.

Now it could easily be that if someone merely builds their conviction on a few observations of life or on prejudices, it would be very easy to refute individual statements of spiritual science. It must therefore be pointed out that only the full scope of a true observation of life can confirm what is given by spiritual science as a general law of the world for the spiritual life. And here we see in life how this spiritual-soul core of being envelops itself, as it were, with the inherited qualities, which it incorporates and blends. Someone might say: Yes, show us how this spiritual-soul core of being works, how it envelops itself with the inherited traits. The important thing is that we take the right path in such a demonstration. In the individual human being, whom we have before us as a self-contained personality from birth, we see abilities growing. We see a harmonious unity - of course, we do not need to be reminded of this - we see a unity in what gradually develops in this or that ability. And one cannot readily distinguish in the individual human being what and to what extent the spiritual-soul core of his being is at work and what he has acquired from outside as physically inherited tendencies.

But if you broaden the basis of your observations of life, if you look around at life, then you can see how differently people present themselves, depending on the spiritual and psychological core of their being, as it enters into existence through birth , is richer in content, more significant and deeper, or less deep and significant, whether it has a richer content from previous embodiments, through which it is called upon to achieve much for the world in the new embodiment. How will such a core of being fare?

He will have a long way to go before he works his way through all the obstacles that confront him from the outside in the line of inheritance; he will have to carve it out for longer, the external hereditary traits will not immediately fit the core of his being. This is wonderfully confirmed when we see how great minds of humanity, Newton or Humboldt or Leibniz, were actually poor students because their rich spiritual-soul core took a long time to work through, to develop that with which they enveloped themselves and what they incorporated. Therefore, someone who sees life only through prejudiced eyes may consider the greatest people to be dullards or incompetent individuals, because they may even appear stupid at first, for it takes them a long time to carve out the rich spiritual and soul essence. But how someone who does not know life judges it is not what matters; what matters is the truth. In his diaries, Hebbel made the beautiful observation about what it would be like if a teacher were to take on Plato with his students in a high school class, and the re-embodied Plato himself were among the students and could least understand what the high school teacher would present as his correct view and interpretation of Plato, so that the re-embodied Plato would constantly have to repeat it.

Thus we see the spiritual and psychological core of the human being moving into the externally inherited traits; and we see him, especially when he is rich, finding the greatest obstacles through which he has to work his way. Such people sometimes come quite late to properly integrate the externally inherited material. Child prodigies rarely have a rich spiritual-soul core and therefore have less difficulty integrating the externally inherited material. They develop quickly, but we also know that these abilities, which initially appear surprisingly, quickly fade and fade away. If we observe life on a broader basis, we see how what shows itself as a person's entire personality in one person is incorporated into the core of their being in a different way from the inherited traits in another. Yes, we can confirm and test this again with Goethe.

However, I must say something here that could perhaps be misunderstood. But anyone who, like me, has devoted themselves to Goethe intensively and lovingly for over thirty years is entitled to say such a heresy. Our understanding of Goethe and our devotion to Goethe's greatness need not be compromised if we admit to ourselves that Goethe's essential core only very slowly pushed its way into existence through the external physical obstacles. If we want to delve into what Goethe had to accomplish – if we are not afflicted with the prejudices of some Goethe researchers – we can see that his early works are by no means complete; and we can admit with regard to Goethe's first works: This is still the Goethe who is becoming, who has not yet overcome the external obstacles of his essential core; what Goethe was actually to become is still hidden. One does not question the greatness of the first part of the “Faust” work if one points out that this is still the Goethe who is becoming, that his rich essential core is still sitting in the depths and must first work its way out.

Indeed, today it is almost considered a hallmark of truly great minds that they have a certain tendency to favor the youthful works of poets in literature. One finds the tendency: Yes, we must go to the poets in their first period, there we have what gushes directly from the soul, there we have the essential that actually constitutes their greatness. And for Goethe, too, an audience has been found that says: Well, old Goethe has weakened a bit, he's no longer at the top of his game in the second part of Faust, you can't understand him; the first part of Faust, yes, that is of original power. Those who judge in this way certainly do not consider whether it is not perhaps due to themselves, whether they would not do better to endeavor to understand a work of this kind, such as the second part of Faust, which Goethe wrote at the height of his creative powers.

Goethe took a different view of this matter. He pointed to the first part of “Faust” as a youthful work in which his spiritual and intellectual essence had not yet come to the fore. Goethe left behind a few lines in which he expresses himself precisely on this matter, where he says - and he means the first part of “Faust”:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The pack of ragamuffins thinks,
It would no longer be!

Goethe himself was of this opinion. We see in Goethe how, for almost his entire life, the rich soul core, which we cannot deduce from hereditary traits, fights against the opposing elements of heredity and against external resistance. We can follow year after year how his rich soul core comes out harmoniously, we see how he becomes more and more mature during his Italian journey and how he becomes completely one with the qualities of his spiritual and soul core.

The [character] traits of the human being are expressed in the course of the development of his being in his shells; the abilities, on the other hand, which are mainly bound to the inner being, can indeed emerge strongly in youth. Because there is not much shell yet, the existing talent for music, for mathematics or for poetry must already show itself. But when it comes to skills for practical life, we know that these and everything else needed to cope with the external world must first be acquired in the further course of life. And only at the end comes the real [spiritual] element, mysticism, looking into the spiritual world. It is then important not only to be inflamed for spiritual facts, but to have developed the abilities and trained the organs for spiritual vision, in order to achieve harmony between the knowledge of what is shown on the outside and what the world lives through and trembles through in its innermost being.

One can be a follower of a mystic in mature youth, one can interpret him, but to achieve something in this field is only possible when we have reached middle age. So if one wants to find within oneself the possibility of harmonizing with the universal spirit of the world, one must be about forty years old, since this is not possible earlier. One must give oneself time, one must occupy oneself differently beforehand, and that with the tendency of being a follower of a spiritual world current and thereby creating harmony between one's own inner core and the organs to be developed. He who does not transgress such laws, as they could only be hinted at here, will best find his way into life and increasingly separate himself from the forces that lie in the natural line of inheritance for him, hindering him, and overcome them. On further consideration of the natural conditions of inheritance, we can see that there must be a difference between the children of young spouses and the children from a union that has existed for a longer period of time or has only been entered into at an advanced age. Because a person is in a state of ascending development until a certain point in their life, the consequences of the work that has been done by the inner core of the being become more and more apparent in the gestures, the physiognomy, and thus in the outer personality, as one matures. Around the age of twenty, some of this work has already been done, but you can see that not all of the influence of the spiritual core of being is being exercised, but that part of it is still stuck in the depths. Only gradually does the actual person fully emerge and come to the surface. Only then does he have a stronger power to transfer his inherited traits to his offspring because he has now matured so much. A spiritual-soul core that wants to live as independently as possible out of its own inner strength will therefore feel magnetically attracted to a youthful father who offers less resistance; a weaker individuality, on the other hand, will be attracted to an older father with a fully developed character. Seen from this point of view, some of life's greatest riddles are illuminated. Such relationships can, of course, be most clearly demonstrated in the typical case, although the most diverse variations often occur.

Now we will see how the individual characteristics of the soul can be independent of each other and how they are inherited, but how all the qualities are brought together to form a basic tone and processed by the spiritual-soul core. Thus, for example, arrogance can be inherited from the mother and clumsiness from the father and grouped together by the soul. Soul qualities disregard much of what the parents are able to offer and favor something else. Many a complicated theory of external science is often very illogical. For example, it is claimed that genius can be traced back to its roots in the characteristics of previous generations; what remarkable qualities were already present in the individual ancestors can be seen in the genius that emerged from this line of ancestors, as if collected and intensified in a focal point. This is used to try to demonstrate that there is no such thing as a spiritual-soul core. But it is a mistake to assume that favorable traits can only be accumulated and enhanced through the natural process of inheritance. On the contrary, if there is to be any inheritance in this respect, the circumstances are such that genius stands at the beginning, but not at the end, of a line of inheritance. In its outward personal peculiarities, genius is only colored in its penetration through the physical line of inheritance – just as someone gets wet when they fall into the water.

We can apply all that has been said in practice if we make it the basis of an educational task that confronts us and allow it to become a kind of cognitive problem of life. We have already said that we have to solve a sacred mystery in the human being who strives towards existence, and we must seek to recognize what all that is working its way up holds within itself. We must try to acquire a fine sense of tact in order to observe correctly how the spiritual and soul essence struggles to free itself from dark undercurrents; we must pay careful attention to which qualities of the developing young person relate to the father and which to the mother – in the organ systems, in the soul qualities and in their interaction under the influence of the individuality on the outer shells.

Although individuality is often called for today, all this remains mere rhetoric as long as one cannot go into details and their origin. If one does not do this and, starting from this phrase, wants to judge and state that the child to be educated must now do this or that, one will remain very theoretical. Sometimes the educator will not be equal to the individual core of being that he is to help come into existence. He does not need to be equal to the pupil, but he must be equal to the education. It is necessary to educate the human being in such a way that he can enter life independently and is able to seize everything skillfully. It is not always possible, and depends on the educator, to introduce everything to the pupil bit by bit and always in good time, based on theoretical observations and considerations; often circumstances intervene that arise from within the family itself or from outside in a hindering way. Sometimes the maturing individuality is even better served when this or that is decreed by unavoidable external circumstances, because then – even under such circumstances – the individual riddle is not solved by theoretical education, but everything that comes from the dark depths of the past, from earlier life courses, is guided into harmonious interaction with present circumstances.

In spiritual science, we can find the spiritual not only for our own satisfaction; spiritual science can also be the guide to help the spiritual, which wants to reveal itself in the growing child, to come into existence, so that it can find its way into the living interaction of people. In this way, we can, in our modest way, become saviors of people, that is, of their spiritual essence, which is behind their outer appearance. Thus, spiritual science will become more and more deeply rooted in human life with this approach because it leads to the permeation of life with practical goals. We find this in Goethe, in his steadfastness in standing on a secure, inner foundation of life, in which we perceive a spirit that never remains on what has been achieved, but which also proves to us in the future to be continually effective and creative if we allow his word to have the right effect on us:

If yesterday is clear and open to you,
If you are vigorously free today,
You can also hope for a tomorrow
That may be no less happy.

And we can hope the same for ourselves, but also for the people whose mental content and spiritual health has been entrusted to us as educators.

Dear attendees! When I had the honor of speaking here a few weeks ago about the figure of Zarathustra, the intention was to show the significance that such a leading individuality has for the general spiritual life of humanity. We may say that we can feel this significance to an increased degree in a figure whose effects still extend so strongly into the immediate present, as is the case with the figure of Moses. For who would deny that a large part of our emotional and intellectual life, and a large part of what takes hold of the institutions and conditions of our environment through our thoughts, is still deeply influenced by the after-effects of those deeds in the development of humanity that are associated with the name of Moses. Although we go back almost one and a half millennia before the founding of Christianity, we can say that the after-effects of this act can be felt right to the innermost part of our soul tissue. Therefore, it must be of the greatest interest to us to understand what this mission, this teaching of Moses, means in the evolution of humanity as a whole.

Now it is not that easy to speak about the figure of Moses. On the one hand, it is not like the figure of Zarathustra or Zoroaster, whose historical outlines are blurred for us and of whom we can hardly specify even minor character traits from external documents; rather, the personality of Moses stands sharply outlined and vividly before modern man from the biblical record of the Old Testament. On the other hand, however, it cannot be denied that in the broadest sense, especially among those who deal with so-called critical Bible research, all sorts of doubts are attached to this description of the personality of Moses – doubts that not only challenge what the Bible tells us about the figure of Moses, but doubts that even go so far as to question the existence of Moses himself.

Now, as we have already shown on a number of occasions in other descriptions here, a genuine spiritual scientific approach to the religious documents provides the proof that we cannot so easily dismiss what is written in these documents, because more precise research in particular has often shown that the statements of the old religious documents are much, much more correct than one sometimes believes. But it is precisely when one adheres to the image that is given to us from the Bible of the figure of Moses that it is difficult to work this figure out spiritually – difficult for the reason that one must have insight into the way in which it is spoken in those parts of the Bible in which Moses is mentioned. These descriptions are very peculiar; they are so peculiar that we can characterize them in a few words in the following way.

In the Old Testament portions of the Bible, external physical events, external facts that once took place historically before the eyes of men, are continually interwoven with allegorical descriptions; without our being able to immediately and easily recognize the transition, the historical external facts merge into allegorical descriptions of inner soul processes. In the Bible, for example, a character may be presented as undertaking this or that journey, doing this or that, and then as the story unfolds, it may appear that what is being described are external events, whereas in fact the descriptions of these events are being used to depict inner soul conflicts, inner soul developments, soul stages. The description of external events then serves only to illustrate inner soul processes in certain parts. As I said, in the biblical description the transition from one to the other is not always readily recognizable. Only that measure of understanding that can be gained from spiritual scientific principles enables us to recognize: Here, in a biblical account, the will stops describing purely external, physical processes and a sequence of symbolic actions begins, which suggest to us that the personality, which until then did this or that externally, is now undergoing a soul development; it ascends from stage to stage and acquires this or that in its soul life. But it is not the soul life that is described, but symbols are given.

This has even led to the fact that a great theological-philosophical writer who lived around the time of the founding of Christianity, Philo of Alexandria, based on his opinion, regarded all the events described in the oldest parts of the Old Testament as symbols of soul processes [of the Hebrew people]. Such an opinion, however, goes much too far; it does not take into account that in the biblical account, external events are mixed up with internal soul processes. Today, we will endeavor to present the image of Moses that can be gained from the Bible in such a way that the two different descriptions can actually be distinguished.

To get to know the personality of Moses, one must consider the whole culture from which the deed of Moses has grown. And so it is incumbent upon me to first characterize the ancient Egyptian culture in spiritual scientific terms with a few strokes - that culture from which, after all, in terms of external events, what we can call the mission of Moses has grown. Now, however, one can only understand this ancient Egyptian culture in its development and the outgrowth of the deed of Moses [from this culture] if one knows two important spiritual scientific laws, and these two spiritual scientific laws must be the basis of our consideration. One law has been mentioned here several times. It is the fact that the entire nature and configuration of human consciousness and the human soul's makeup has not always been as it is now, but that it has changed significantly over the millennia of human development. We already know – and here it is only briefly hinted at – that the further back we go in human development, the more we encounter a different state of mind, a different kind of consciousness in people than what is considered normal consciousness today.

Where prehistory merges into history, that is, in those times from which we have historical documents, the old state of mind is already changing into the newer one. That is why people today find it so difficult to imagine that the word 'development', which today, in terms of its outward form, exerts such a magical power on people, must above all be applied to the process of the human soul in its becoming. And the further back we go, the more we find that the way we look at things today, which we perceive through our senses and link through the ordinary mind tied to the physical brain, that this way of viewing things by merely alternating our waking consciousness with our sleeping consciousness, which is interrupted at most only by irregular dreams, was not always present, but that this form of consciousness has only developed gradually.

The further back we go, the more we come to another form of human consciousness. Although what we call our present waking and sleeping consciousness has already been prepared in the millennia we are talking about today, in those ancient times, which still reach into the oldest times of Egyptian culture and of which external history does not know much to report, there was a kind of old clairvoyant consciousness, a kind of pictorial consciousness. It was this consciousness that asserted itself as a third state of consciousness, like an intermediate state between waking and sleeping. The waking consciousness, as it is today and on which our present-day view of the world is based, was preparing itself in its beginnings, and our “sleeping unconsciousness” was also essentially already present. But people still had a third form of consciousness that was not permeated by those thoughts, concepts and ideas through which we today enlighten ourselves about our environment. It was filled with images, of which the symbols of today's dream are an atavism. But in these images, which undulated up and down, nothing was arbitrary, but these images could be clearly related to supersensible facts and entities that stand behind our sensual world, so that in this state, man actually of an ancient clairvoyance, he reached into the spiritual, into the supersensible world and, from direct experience, from the ancient, dream-like consciousness of clairvoyance, had knowledge of what takes place in the spiritual world.

The further development of humanity consists in the fact that the power of one soul develops at the expense of another. Our present-day intellectuality, the way in which we connect the external objects given by our senses through our concepts and ideas, could only develop by darkening the clairvoyant consciousness, by descending into an indefinite subconscious of man and transforming itself into the present mental state. This will later combine again with a certain kind of clairvoyant consciousness, but this will then be interspersed with our intellectuality, whereas the intellectual element was precisely lacking in the old clairvoyant consciousness.

Now we have to familiarize ourselves with the fact that this ancient consciousness had to take on the most diverse forms. And for this to be possible, each of the ancient peoples - in accordance with their national character - was called upon to develop this ancient consciousness in a very specific way. One can literally speak of the fact that each nation had the mission to develop consciousness in a very specific way. The Egyptian people, for example, whose ancient, sacred wisdom, on which the ancient Egyptian script is based and which we can still admire today, was the one that received its wisdom in ancient times from its leaders through such clairvoyant awareness, that is, through direct insight into the spiritual worlds. And from the most ancient times the tradition went right down to the later times of the Egyptian people. What we find from these later times as historical accounts is essentially the echo of what the leaders of the Egyptian people saw clairvoyantly in the spiritual worlds in times gone by.

Now, however, we must be clear about the fact - and this is the other fact that is to be presented today from the basis of spiritual science - that for every human soul disposition, for every way of looking at things in the environment, there is a specific epoch for it, and when this has passed, another soul disposition must take the place of the old one. A nation that retains this old state of mind beyond the very specific point in time when an old state of mind should be replaced by a new one must face the decline of its spiritual powers, decadence. And we also see this, because why do nations face decadence? Because, so to speak, they have been inoculated with a certain soul-disposition from their national origin, and now, out of a certain conservative element, they want to keep it. But the world's development says: Up to here [with the old soul-disposition], and now a new one must come in! The nations can keep the old one, but then they will decay, because the time for a new soul-disposition has come.

Now, while the development of Egypt was taking place, a new era was dawning. The clock of the old, clairvoyant culture had run down, and within this culture of the ancient peoples an intellectual culture was to arise, one that was directed towards understanding, towards reason in the ordinary sense, towards the intellectual combination and comprehension of the things of the outer world. This intellectual culture, this kind of state of mind, extends far into our present time. We ourselves have the peculiarity of still bearing in our souls what had to be integrated into the course of Egyptian culture at that time, namely, what we have as our intellectuality, as our way of looking at things. What had to take the place of ancient Egyptian culture in Egypt at that time extends to us. The personality of Moses was destined to bring [man] to an intellectual understanding of the world around him - in contrast to the old, clairvoyant culture. It is therefore no wonder that the deed of Moses reaches to us, sending its offshoots into our souls. Because it has made fruitful precisely that kind of human soul-condition to which we ourselves still belong, we still feel in some way akin to the deed of Moses. Moses was placed in the midst of the Egyptian people, and out of Egyptian culture he was to found the modern culture of the intellect in its very first basis. He founded the New for which the cosmic clock was attuned, and the ancient Egyptian culture was outgrown and fell into decay. He brought what he had to give to the people to whom he had come of his own accord, and led them out of their Egyptian background, in whom the germ of the rational culture of humanity was to develop.

People who are called upon to recognize the course of the world's history are always described to us in such a way that something happens in connection with their birth that has a symbolic significance for the development of their soul. The biblical story describes how Moses was found by the daughter of Pharaoh in the well-known box in which he was placed. Whether or not this is an accurate account need not be discussed further here. We are simply meant to be shown by this description that there were originally predisposed forces in this Moses that were destined to bring something quite new, a completely new kind of soul-disposition into the world. Therefore, it had to be shown symbolically that this soul, in which the germ of something new was, had to remain completely unaffected by its surroundings for a while, closed in on itself, and then placed in that environment from which the new was to be carried out. And now we are presented with facts that belong to the area I have characterized, where biblical history tells us what really happened physically in the outer world - [that area] where one can see [the events] with one's own eyes and follow them historically.

There we are made aware of how Moses, through a certain act he has committed, is led to flee. He flees to Midian to a priest, to the priest Jetro. And in this transition from the purely external events that are presented to us - from the killing of the Egyptian and the escape of Moses - we are gently led to an event that looks like a physical continuation of the facts, but which is nothing other than a symbolic representation of the events that Moses is now experiencing [internally] and that he can only experience by coming into the presence of a priest, a bearer of the most comprehensive cosmic wisdom. This is hinted at and is clear enough for those who understand the images that are used again and again in the same way.

We are told that Moses, when he fled to the priest Jetro, first came upon a well. The well always indicates the source of wisdom - the source of human culture, of spiritual educational elements that someone finds. And then we are led further in a very strange way. We are shown how Moses finds the seven daughters of Jetro, who is also called Reguel by another name. That he was a priest of the deity that was placed above all other gods in those ancient times is indicated to us by the fact that we are told – told by his name – that he belongs to this supreme deity. This is always indicated by the suffix '-el', as in Gabriel, Michael, who 'belong to the highest God'. So Jetro-Reguel was a priest of the highest God. And we are told, by means of symbolic images of the soul processes, that Moses was to come into contact with a priest who could pour the most powerful wisdom into the soul of Moses. It was a wisdom such that his soul became full of light and strength, so that he could fulfill his mission of bringing a new soul state into humanity.

Now, in the old psychology of the soul, things were thought of somewhat differently than they are today, and so we have to realize how ancient psychology actually thought. Today we speak more or less of the human soul as something unified, and for our time we are quite right to do so. We speak of thinking, feeling and willing as forces that live in our soul, and we even know that if these three forces are not in the right harmony in our soul, the health of our soul is affected. And this is based on the fact that our soul has developed from what it used to be into what it is today. In ancient times, the wise said that different areas lived in the human soul, and they listed seven such areas. Just as we list the three areas of thinking, feeling and willing today, they listed seven different areas of the soul, but they did not imagine the soul as a single unit.

We can visualize the ideas of these ancient sages something like this. Let us assume that the human soul today does not feel as a unity, but rather says to itself: Thinking, feeling and willing live in me, but a special kind of spiritual current from the cosmos penetrates into thinking, which is only connected to the thinking of the human being; another current penetrates into feeling and yet another into willing. And these forces would not be held together by the power of the present ego, but by the intervention of divine spiritual beings from without, as it were, who shape our soul life into harmony. Thus it would not be we ourselves who harmoniously unite the members of our soul life with each other, but external powers that reach in from the cosmic expanses. The ancient sages assumed seven such powers, and these seven powers reached into the soul independently, as it were. What was grasped with this wisdom was the outpouring of seven forces that flowed through the world and poured into the seven soul regions of man. And what flowed in as soul forces was imagined in the image of the seven daughters of the bearer of the total wisdom.

This is something that still resonates in all the later mystical ideas, which imagined that which flowed into the soul as wisdom or as soul light or as impulses of will, as female: This also still resonates in Goethe's “Faust”, where it says, “The eternal feminine draws us up,” which must not be interpreted frivolously. And when we are told that Moses met with the seven daughters of Jethro at the well, it means that the seven rays of wisdom emanated from Jethro and poured into the soul of Moses — separate from each other, as was thought everywhere in ancient psychology. In those ancient times, wisdom, the spiritual forces of inspiration in the world, was thought of as personal and concrete, not abstract, as it is today.

In our study of Zarathustra, we saw how that which flows into man is conceived by Zarathustra as concrete world powers, as the Amshaspands and the Izeds or Izards. And here we see the progress in the thinking of mankind: what was presented in living spirituality as having a personal character and flowing into the human soul fades in the Platonic ideas, for example. The seven different powers of inspiration of the soul are presented to us figuratively in the seven daughters of the high priest whom Moses meets at the well. And the fact that he is called to develop one of these powers in order to begin his special mission in humanity is indicated by the fact that he is married to one of Jethro's seven daughters. And we will see which of the seven basic powers falls precisely within the mission of Moses. We can trace these seven soul forces throughout the Middle Ages, for what we encounter in the so-called seven liberal arts as the animators of the human soul are the faded abstractions of the seven ancient spiritual sources.

These seven spiritual sources, which were to flow into the soul of each individual, were conceived in such a way that one was more related to the wise understanding of the world – clairvoyant wisdom, of course – another spiritual power was more related to the loving embrace of facts and entities, a third more to the impulses of the will, a fourth to memory, and so on. It was now intended that Moses should incorporate one of these seven spiritual powers into his special mission and replace what had previously ruled humanity with the wisdom that permeates the world. This spiritual power is intellectuality; it is the kind of understanding and grasp of the world that no longer relies on clairvoyance but on the powers of the external mind.

Now a transition must be created everywhere. The old cannot easily be transformed into the new. Moses was called upon to replace the old clairvoyant wisdom, which was still native to Egypt and had already begun to decline in Moses' time, with the new intellectuality, the rational overview of things. He himself, however, still had to develop the new way out of a certain clairvoyance that he still had through grace. The fact that Moses still saw things in the old way of clairvoyance, but saw them as the new intellectuality should see them, created the bridge, as it were, between the old clairvoyance and the new intellectuality of humanity, free from clairvoyance.

What is this new intellectuality bound to? It is bound to that center of our soul that we designate with the simple word “I”. By consciously ascribing existence to the center of our soul, we enclose the realm of our consciousness as the realm of intellectuality - that realm in which reason and intellect, concept and idea are at work. If one wants to enclose this area, one must be aware that it only holds together because it is held together by the unified ego.

So what was given to Moses [as a task]? Well, an infinitely important deed lay before Moses - one can express it that way if one wants to put Moses' experience into words. Moses could say to himself: The gods have worked through their various powers into the human soul, and when people of ancient times, in their clairvoyance, looked over this or that, when they felt this or that in the outer world, they always spoke of the gods who lived outside in the cosmos. But for intellectuality – for that grasping of the outer world that is bound to the deepest human center – the God must enter into the innermost center of the human being, must connect with this I. And a God must be recognized who is not merely seen in the clouds, in the stars, but of whom it must be said: He works in the clouds, that is the power of the clouds; but when He streams into the soul, He brings about what this human soul experiences in itself.

Not only could this be said of the external gods, but also this: Now such a soul power must develop in humanity, which can only develop through the power of a god who has his being in the I of man. This God, who was to enter into the innermost being of man, into his I, appeared to the clairvoyant consciousness of Moses through the inspiration of the priest. And through clairvoyance, Moses beheld God, that is, through that which could still be kindled in him of clairvoyant power — which is indicated to us by the image of the burning bush. As this is described, everyone who understands these things recognizes that an astral-clairvoyant vision of a reality is present. The new God, who was to have his being in the ego, appeared in the burning bush. And Moses asked this God: If I am now to lead my people in your name, what must I say, who has sent me? You can read it in the Bible yourself – even if the translations of the Bible are otherwise very inadequate, here they are correct. To the question: Who has sent you?, Moses is given the answer: Tell your people that 'I am' has sent you. And that means: That divine power has sent you, which kindles in the innermost human center the possibility that man can speak in this innermost center “I am”, thus attaches his existence to himself, experiences his existence himself: “I am, who I am”!

That was what Moses clairvoyantly pre-experienced: the intellectuality of humanity. With this, he stood at a point where the old culture, in relation to the human soul, was to merge into a completely new culture. This was a transition over an abyss of human culture, as if the world powers had said: In the future, intellectuality must prevail, and those who want to continue the old ways are heading for decline. We must cross over this abyss. Moses might have said this to himself. And so the followers of Moses felt that the transition over a cosmic world abyss had been won. That is why the followers of Moses celebrated the Passover, the festival of the transition over a world abyss, in memory of this act of Moses. Oh, these ancient festivals, which today we are accustomed to celebrating in such a trivial way, relate to great mysteries of the existence of the world. Now when Moses, endowed with the power for thousands of years, came to the court of Pharaoh, it is no wonder that this Pharaoh, who had grown out of the old Hellschic culture of Egypt, could not understand the signs that Moses displayed before him.

We cannot go into the details of the misunderstandings that took place between Moses and Pharaoh. These are all images that are intended to show us that Pharaoh spoke out of an ancient clairvoyant culture and out of a state of mind that also came from this clairvoyant culture. The ancient pictographic script also originated from such a culture. Everything that Egyptians could understand about the course of natural events arose from this. But Moses developed such an understanding of world phenomena, such a combination of facts, as emerged from modern intellectuality. Of course, to those who were still steeped in the old clairvoyant consciousness, this appeared as a miracle, as miraculous events, for just as people today cannot imagine that things happen other than as they imagine them, the ancient cultural people could not imagine that things happen as modern people imagine them. Thus, the concept of miracle has only been reversed.

And we know, of course, as the Bible presents it to us, that Moses really did succeed, through his great strength, which arose from an inspiration of the soul, in leading this people, who were his descendants through blood, as it were, out of Egypt, but in such a way that afterwards, separated from Egyptian culture, they were able to develop an intellectual culture. Therefore, we see that from this mission of Moses everything that we can call thinking, which can be traced back to a unity - to the unity of Yahweh - and can permeate the world with reason, with concepts and ideas, arises from this mission of Moses. That was the mission of the ancient Hebrew people: to infuse human culture with reason, intellectualism, concepts and ideas. And anyone who wants to see things as they are will understand that to this day this peculiar mission of the ancient Hebrew people has been at work and that this peculiar intellectual culture could only emerge from such a source.

How did those for whom Moses was the inspirer relate to those who still came from the old clairvoyant culture? How did the followers of Moses, whom he led out of Egypt, relate to the Egyptians? Here we have to familiarize ourselves with some peculiarities of the state of mind of people who were influenced by the old clairvoyant culture and perhaps still are today. There are always stragglers, and these are the ones whose intellectual development is retarded. To make it clear to us how certain soul powers prevail there, I would like to remind you first of certain things in animals, although I do not want to compare the human with the animal. One speaks of instinctive activity in animals. We will not criticize the word instinct further; everyone knows what is meant by it, namely this elementary, direct action and doing, as we find it in the animal kingdom, which contrasts with [purposeful] human action. In humans, we have considered action; in animals, actions come from instincts. The more we go back to the old clairvoyant state, the more instinctive action becomes for people as well. They are led, driven to their actions; they do not first give account of themselves in concepts and ideas. We also find a certain instinctive action in every old soul condition.

Now I remind you of something that is truer than one might think. You will have heard descriptions that, for example, when eruptions from volcanoes are imminent, the animals move away beforehand and thus do not fall prey to the catastrophe. There is some truth behind these descriptions: just as I follow my instinct when flying, so do animals follow a mysterious urge when volcanoes erupt. Now, people, who have already risen to the level of thinking in terms of concepts and ideas, can no longer act so instinctively; they remain [and succumb] to the disaster. Even though such reports are often exaggerated, But there is some truth in them, because where there is an instinct, there is a more intimate connection between natural events and what is felt in the human soul than there is in such actions, which are based on concepts and ideas. Thus, the state of mind of the ancient peoples also changed; it became different in those who thought intellectually.

And so the followers of Moses now faced the ancient Egyptians: the Egyptians, an ancient people, the followers of Moses, the new people. And this was due to its entire blood composition, intellectually, rationally combining natural phenomena, thinking rationally. Yes, it now comes into consideration that the time for the old instinctive in the state of mind has expired. [And when this time has expired], then the [old] powers come into decline, then they are no longer useful. They were useful in ancient times; then people instinctively sensed the course of natural events and acted accordingly. But this came into decline around the time that Moses was called upon to bring a completely new culture, and there was no longer time for the old instinctive soul powers. And now let us imagine that on the one hand Moses and on the other the ancient Egyptians are confronted with natural events. The ancient Egyptians could not intellectually combine natural phenomena. In ancient times they had felt it instinctively in their souls when the sea level rose again; there was an intimate bond between the soul life and the external natural phenomena. Never would the soul have failed to feel when the sea level receded so that one could cross the dry land. But the ancient times were over. The Egyptians no longer had these ancient, instinctive powers, because the time had come when one should intellectually survey the context of things. Moses was called to do this. He now stood before the sea, and he knew from the course of natural events when to retreat so that he and his people could cross over. Through the newly developed intellectuality, it was possible for him to read this point in time from nature. In ancient times, the Egyptians would have sensed that they could no longer cross, but they were not yet ripe for the new kind of knowledge; they fell prey to the waves because their soul forces had come into decadence, into decay. Thus we see Moses leading his followers across the receding waters by intellectual deduction, and we see the Egyptians falling prey to the floods, because they could only have sensed from their ancient, instinctive strength that the sea was rising again, but they no longer had this instinctive strength.

We are standing at the boundary between the old and the new times, we are standing at the point where the mission of Moses stands out clearly from the mission of the ancient Egyptian people. At such a point, we feel how profound and significant the descriptions of the religious documents are, but one needs spiritual science to understand the religious documents; this wants to be a servant to the understanding of these documents. Today I can only sketch out an outline, but try for yourself to compare everything you find in the Bible or in other documents with what has been said today, and you will see: the more closely you take what spiritual science has to say, the more you will find that what can only be sketched out today with a few lines of charcoal is true, because it corresponds to reality everywhere.

Let us now see further: We see how the special disposition that Moses has to convey to his people as his mission is particularly linked to protecting the purity of the blood. Especially with this people it should not mix, it should keep itself separate from the other peoples, so that the same blood runs down through generations and generations. Why is that so? We can understand that too, if we visualize the changes in the state of mind. Clairvoyance – whether it is the old, pictorial kind or the kind that is often described here, which the modern person can achieve by going through the appropriate exercises – clairvoyance is always tied to the person's spiritual part being able to become independent of their physical body, that they can, in a sense, draw their spiritual part out of their physical body. What the clairvoyant experiences, he experiences only through the tool of the soul, which frees itself, as it were, goes out of physical corporeality. The modern materialist will regard this as foolishness from the outset; he cannot believe that all the activity of his soul is bound to the physical brain. But clairvoyance is not bound to the brain, but takes place in the life of the soul without the brain. Only experience can confirm this, and anyone who does not have this experience can refute it with a thousand seemingly sufficient reasons, much like a blind person can refute the existence of colors. But that is not the point. According to the principles of today's research, one should admit that only experience can decide. So clairvoyance is dependent on the spiritual part of the human being freeing itself from the instruments of the physical body.

We have to look at all ancient cultures in such a way that they were based, in a certain way, on the paths of imagination, inspiration, and intuition, which flowed into the soul. These cultures therefore had something that was independent of the physical body and merely flowed down into the physical world. This is why the remains of ancient cultures are so difficult to interpret, because the moment you become independent of the physical body through consciousness, you can only live in more plastic forms than the physical body. In clairvoyance one does not have such sharply defined contours as in the physical; one has something pictorial that does not refer so directly to the physical world as is otherwise the case with intellectual comprehension; one has something that refers more symbolically to external things. We may say, then, that the clairvoyant cultures - and this includes the Egyptian in all its greatness - must be given to us in such a way in all their traditions that they use images instead of external, sharp conceptual contours. The myths, the old legends, in which the secrets of the world are immersed, are pictorial representations of the secrets of the world; they are echoes of the old pictorial clairvoyance. In a certain sense, the transmission of culture was still bound up with spiritual processes.

But now it was precisely the mission of Moses to give the souls such a constitution and to lay the foundation for culture that was bound to intellectuality, but thus also to the outer instrument of the body. For that is the peculiarity of [intellectual] thought: it conceptualizes things in the same way as our normal, waking consciousness, and this consciousness is entirely bound to the tools of the brain and the rest of the body. Intellectuality is bound to the tools of the physical body. It is no wonder that this special intellectual gift was bound to a special configuration, to special organ predispositions of a people, and had to be transmitted from generation to generation through the physical blood until the mission of the ancient Hebrew people was fulfilled. Thus, the physical instrument for intellectuality had to be bound to the physical peculiarity of this people through the blood flowing from generation to generation, and had to be refined more and more until it was so refined that the physical vehicle for that spiritual power, which then poured in to a much higher degree than the Divine power into the human 'I am' - to a much higher degree than had happened through the old power of Yahweh. And in this respect, the mission of Moses was indeed the preparation for the deed of Christ. But first the outer instruments had to be trained in the appropriate way. And so we also understand that this deed of Moses was bound to a very specific people, whose blood had to be kept pure because this special power, which is bound to the instrument of the outer body, was to flow into human cultural development.

Thus, the act of Moses fits entirely harmoniously and uniformly into the overall development of humanity. We perceive him as the great standard-bearer of intellectuality – in all its peculiarity, which is even expressed in mysticism, that is, in human spiritual activity, which is otherwise the most alien to understanding and reason. Even in mysticism, for example in Hebrew Kabbalah, it is clear to us that this culture has the mission of bringing understanding and reason, combinatory comprehension of external events into human culture.

And when we look back to the Hermes culture of ancient Egypt with its wonderful, old clairvoyant culture, we see how it is called upon to bear the no longer clairvoyant Moses culture in its bosom, but that it itself must perish because the clock of world development is now set to intellectuality. And that is the significance of the Christ event, that with Him and the Mystery of Golgotha, such a powerful spiritual thrust has come into intellectual development – such a powerful spiritual impulse – that little by little, as humanity, having become intellectual, more and more familiarizes itself with the Christ event, the intellectual can also be absorbed by this powerful spiritual impulse, and can be caught by that which in turn leads into the spiritual, into the clairvoyant realm, and carries intellectuality into this realm. We still feel so touched by the significance of the Moses event today because we ourselves are still immersed in the age of intellectual culture and only glimpse a new spirituality and a new mission in the distance.

So, with a few strokes, I was able to draw this picture of Moses for you, my dear audience, as it presents itself to spiritual research in the clairvoyant consciousness, which has an enlightening effect on the external, historical account. This is the only way to distinguish between what is historical and what is a symbolic representation of inner processes in Moses himself. And so Moses stands before our soul as a living being, and we feel how unjustified it is to say that such an impulse should have formed by itself. There are people today who do not understand that effects must also have causes and that effects that point back to the personal also presuppose a personality.

Nevertheless, there are people today who doubt the existence of such a personality as that of Moses. This is certainly a sign of our time. One may say that critical biblical research has a hard time with these things. Those who are familiar with it have a great deal of respect for it, above all because perhaps in no other field of science, not even in the natural sciences, has so much diligence and devotion been expended as in the field of critical biblical research. And yet, in many respects, we see that today it has reached a point where it no longer knows how to help itself in the face of the greatest figures and impulses of humanity, where it only knows how to deny them, just as the historical existence of Jesus is already being denied today. But nevertheless, one must have all respect for the tragedy of this research, which in our materialistic age, out of materialistic ideas, wants to find the inner value of the accounts in the Bible or in other documents. But if one approaches a figure like Moses from a spiritual scientific point of view and shows, based on the secrets of human development, what had to be sunk into the soul of Moses in order for humanity to reach the level we have today, then it seems the most absurd to assume an effect without a cause, that is, a personal creation without personality.

In contrast to this, we can say that it is only through the presentation of spiritual science that the details of the Bible are illuminated in a wonderful way and that the Bible takes on a new value. For now we approach the Bible as a person familiar with mathematical laws approaches a mathematical problem. Those who do not know the mathematical laws see nothing in them but incomprehensible signs, just as they see in problems. Those who do not know the language of the Bible also see only incomprehensible things in it today, perhaps childish images that prehistoric man conjured up. But anyone who gets to know the basics that spiritual science provides and, with its help, deciphers the religious documents, feels something of what has been going on so magnificently through the ages. They feel the language of the nations, of the people in whose souls the spiritual impulses for the progress of humanity are living, that choir of humanity's leading spirits that communicate across the millennia. It is a wonderful phenomenon when the spiritual researcher peers into the spiritual worlds and then looks at the Bible and realizes from the Bible that it tells us something that we can also find through spiritual research ourselves. So we cannot but say: Whoever wrote this must have known what is going on in the spiritual worlds and what is there if such human progress as we now have before us could happen at all.

And so, through spiritual research, we look to Moses as a great leader of humanity. These leaders of humanity become more and more precious to us as we penetrate into the depths of their spirit through spiritual research. And we feel more and more blessed when we look with such sharpened thinking and feeling at these leaders of humanity, of whom it can rightly be said: They illuminate our souls with their spiritual light in order to strengthen our souls with their mighty spiritual power.

Dear attendees! When spiritual science sets itself the task of penetrating into the spiritual world that lies behind our sensual world – the world that we perceive with our senses and can understand with the mind that is connected to our brain – then this spiritual science seeks to gain strength and confidence for human life from the spiritual world in which the origin of man itself lies. And in doing so, it seeks to benefit the individual through the knowledge of what lies in the very foundations of things.

We face the spiritual world in a completely different way when we do not seek the sources of spiritual life in general, not only for our knowledge, but when we are, so to speak, dealing with the redemption of the spirit, the real spirit behind material existence, and when it can become the task of this real spirit to help it, so to speak, to break through the physical-material. How often do we not stand before the developing human being, the human being whom we see as having to work the spirit out of the hidden depths of his being, so to speak, from early childhood, the spirit that takes more and more possession of the physical limbs and the spiritual-soul abilities that are bound to the outer instrument of the body. When we as educators are dealing with this real spirit, which rests in the mystery of the human being itself and which is to be brought out, we are dealing with a still higher sense of seeking the spirit than with mere knowledge, which we seek, so to speak, as a satisfaction for the longing of our soul.

Now today the spiritual researcher is in a special position when he wants to observe the developing human being – this developing human being who gradually reveals his talents and abilities and demands that we devote ourselves to him educationally. The spiritual researcher is in a special position when faced with the developing human being because he must immediately point out one of the great facts of spiritual science with regard to this real life of the spirit, which today by no means enjoys the special favor of the educated world. This fact should be apparent to the attentive observer of life when he sees how, from the first moment of human existence, the spiritual rests, as it were, in the deep layers of the human being, how it then, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, that he must literally see this working out in the ever-more-detailed physiognomy, gestures, movements of the individual limbs and abilities that lie deeper within the human being. We see what is working its way from hidden depths to the surface in the growing human being, and we must ask ourselves: where do we find the origin of these predispositions, these abilities that are slowly emerging? And in regard to this search, the man of today is by no means inclined to approach the facts to which spiritual research must point. We have referred to this fact in various ways. Today it is to be used only as a basis for our actual consideration. On a higher level, this fact is a repetition of another fact that has not been known for very long in the development of mankind.

I have often pointed out – oh, human memory is generally very short in this regard – that in the 17th century not only laymen but also learned naturalists were convinced that matter, mud for example, could develop animals, fish and the like out of itself, without a germ of life having been placed in this mud – out of itself. It was a tremendous turning point for science when in the 17th century – just think, only in the 17th century! – the great naturalist Francesco Redi first put forward the proposition that opened up new, worldwide vistas for scientific knowledge: Living things can only come from living things. If you believe, he said, that living creatures can arise from river mud, then you have not examined it closely enough, otherwise you would have found that the source of life lies in the germ and that this germ only draws matter to itself in order to emerge. It is often the case with truths, as it was with Francesco Redi. He only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he too was considered a heretic. Today we can go from the most radical Haeckelians to Haeckel's opponents: within certain limits, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” is recognized everywhere. It is taken for granted. That is the fate of great truths. First they are considered heresies, then, after some time, taken for granted. People then cannot understand how anyone could ever have believed otherwise.

The task of spiritual science today is to advocate this principle at a higher level. It is an inaccurate observation to say that what struggles into existence in the developing human being as something mysterious and expresses itself more and more distinctly in gestures and facial features comes merely from the inherited traits of the father and mother and so on. If one proceeds scientifically, this cannot be explained from these inherited traits any more than the emergence of the earthworm from the matter of the river mud can be assumed without an earthworm germ. Today, spiritual science shows that for human life, what comes into existence as the core of a human being through birth must be traced back to another, a completely soul-like existence, in which its spiritual and soul germ lies. And just as the earthworm germ draws upon external physical substance to increase in size, so too, in the human being, this spiritual-soul germ draws upon the qualities and powers of the parents and ancestors to develop with their help.

We must trace back the spiritual-soul to the spiritual-soul. We must trace the soul that exists in man back to a soul germ, just as we must trace the spiritual that develops in man back to a spiritual germ. And by accepting this, it leads us to the fact of repeated earthly lives, which today not only annoys so many people, but is felt by many people as a dream or a fantasy, as something quite abominable. The doctrine of repeated earthly lives tells us that the life we are now living, in which our abilities and qualities unfold, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives and the basis of later lives. The stages of life in which we are enveloped in the physical body are interchanged with other forms of existence, in order to bring into the spiritual life what we have taken in during the present life, what we have gone through in the school of life life, and then, after this has happened, to enter again into a new physical existence, in which a germ of life again draws from the substance what it needs in terms of qualities and abilities in order to live itself into a body.

We can therefore say: We look spiritually when we see the human being emerging from the mysterious foundations of his existence, to a spiritual-soul core of being that unfolds according to his previous life and develops in the present existence by drawing on the inherited characteristics of father and mother and their ancestors. This is another truth that will slowly become part of human education. Today, of course, they no longer burn heretics, but people still say that those who claim such things know nothing about exact science, whereas spiritual science is based on the most exact science of all. They are branded as heretics in the way that heretics are branded today. But the truth of reincarnation will become established and accepted, and will no longer be questioned by people capable of judgment, but will be taken for granted.

Thus, we must look back from what appears in a child as developing abilities to what a person has acquired in previous lives on earth and expresses in this life. If we consider present-day science, we must say that a certain lack of clarity prevails everywhere, in all fields. Science believes it need only point to what comes from the father and mother, from grandparents and so on, and is happy if it can show that the qualities that are expressed here or there were also present in this or that way in the father or grandfather.

Let us look at the whole situation of what crystallizes out of the center of the human being, brought over from a previous existence; let us look at the relationship of this core to the inherited traits. When we consider everything that the human being brings into existence in terms of qualities and talents, we can see two factually related facts in the human soul. The first is what occurs in a person in terms of both mental qualities and abilities – the majority of mental qualities and abilities are independent of each other in some respect, so that one does not depend on the other. This is shown by the simple fact that someone can be very musical and yet have no aptitude for mathematics or any other field of science. An ability can shine in our soul without our being able to say that other abilities are present with it. In this respect, the individual abilities are independent of each other. But the same is also the case with regard to the [mental] qualities. A person can have a certain pride alongside other quite pleasant qualities of the soul. And again, pride is not dependent on the other qualities. That is one thing when we want to take a look at the human soul.

The second fact is that the abilities and qualities that a person has in his soul are held together by a certain center that we call the ego and that they are either in harmony or disharmony with each other. All the abilities and qualities that work together through the ego are, to a certain extent, independent of each other and work together through the fact that each person has a special core of being. If we keep to these two facts, we can, with healthy observation of life, get a clear view of how the qualities and abilities of parents and ancestors are inherited by children and descendants. The individual qualities and abilities really do appear to come from the ancestors to the descendants. On the one hand, it shows us that if a boy is haughty, he has inherited this haughtiness from his mother; another is musical, we find the same disposition in his father or in his mother. But the way in which he processes the qualities, how he relates them, we see clearly depends on his own core of being. And the more closely we examine this human life, the more the nature of this dependence becomes apparent. We can best understand this if we say: the individual qualities – pride, humility, compassionate heart and so on – are inherited by the human being from his ancestors, including the talents, but the way in which he combines them in his soul leads back to his earlier existence, to his spiritual and soul essence with all that has been achieved by his soul in his earlier existence. We can then see much more clearly how the conditions are when we observe this peculiar way of working with the inherited traits. I should also mention that the laws of heredity are laws that cannot be investigated by spiritual science in the same way as physical and chemical laws can. Therefore, I ask you to bear in mind that it is not an objection to a law of spiritual science if it is said: Yes, if you look into life, it shows that heredity does not happen in the way it has been said here. But we must take the laws as physical laws are taken. For example, physics teaches that the path traversed by a thrown stone represents a parabola; the stone falls in a parabola. But the resistance of the air causes the path of the thrown stone not to be an exact parabola. If someone comes and says that the path of the thrown stone does not form a parabola, that is not correct. The physical law is valid, and we only have the possibility of arriving at an understanding of the stone's trajectory by accepting a general law. And if someone says, “Yes, but the stone flies to the side, a gust of wind has blown it away,” the presence of the wind does not contradict the physical law as such. In this sense, the laws of spiritual science are to be taken; they can be modified by the circumstances, but they still apply in such a way that we can only understand the processes through these laws if we know them. Let us now consider the human being in terms of his characteristics, by dividing the human soul itself into two areas, which can clearly be distinguished from one another in human life. Wherever you look in human life, you will find clear distinctions everywhere. One area can be described as the area of interests that a person has, where their attention, sympathy and antipathy, their affects, drives and passions are directed. This area of the nature of will and affect is one area. The other is the area that can be called the intellectual, the rational, that is, the way in which a person forms ideas, whether he is rich or poor in concepts and images, whether these are flexible, whether a person can form symbols or whether he is unimaginative, whether he has the intellectual elements for one area or the other. These two areas should initially be distinguished in the developing human being. With the same precision with which we gain physical laws through healthy observation of life, we can find laws for these two areas that reveal the connection between the ancestors and the descendants.

We see that everything concerning the sphere of interests, affections, sympathy and antipathy, passions, that is, the instinctive direction of man, can always be traced back only to paternal inheritance, whereas that which concerns the formation of the elements of intellect, of the rational, can be traced back to maternal inheritance. Such laws result from a faithful observation of life. Of course, it is not possible to go into the hundreds of cases that could easily be cited from a healthy observation of life. It can only be pointed out that life everywhere confirms that we get the intellectual and imaginative side from our mother's side, and the spirited element, the interest in whether we are lively or casual or apathetic, comes more from our father's side.

I cannot go into general confirmatory considerations at this point, but can only illustrate what has been said with examples. One great example needs to be mentioned: Goethe, who characterized himself so beautifully in the words:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition
and the desire to tell stories.

We can find this in hundreds of cases when we observe world history or life. And because a faithful observation of life confirms these words everywhere, they make life appear so full of light.

But we still approach the subject far too abstractly when we look at life only in general terms. I said that in general the intellectual element can be traced back to inheritance from the mother's side. But it is not that simple. Instead, the qualities that are inherited undergo a transformation by metamorphosing. Spiritual science is still not fully recognized today, otherwise people would already be able to see how much it can benefit the natural sciences. It is instructive enough to observe how one natural force is transformed into another, for example heat into electricity, but spiritual science transfers this way of observing to other areas as well, and it will say that, for example, in the field of inheritance, one can only get to the bottom of it if one considers the transformation of characteristics.

And here it can be seen how maternal and paternal qualities enter into relationships when they are passed on to the children. We see how maternal qualities, when they are passed on, tend to pass over to the sons. If we look at the soul qualities in the mother, we can say: These soul qualities tend to pass over to the sons, but they tend to change in the process. What is basic [in soul terms] in the mother, she may not be able to develop into particular abilities because she lacks the organs. After all, you need the appropriate predispositions to do so. While the mother has to remain within the narrowest circle with her soul stirrings, we see how, in the sons, the mother's predispositions, as it were, shoot into the physical realm one step further, so that the same predispositions arise again in the son. And the son then shows us in his abilities, through which he can work in the world, what was predisposed in the soul of the mother. The mother has it as a soul disposition; the son has it in such a way that he can let it flow into the physical organs in order to carry it out into the world, in order to bring it to the world in the form of achievements. We see the soul qualities of the mother transformed in the sons right down to the physical level.

So we have the sentence: the soul qualities of the mother have the tendency to move into the physical organs of the sons and to confront us in turn in the soul forces bound to these organs. It only takes a healthy look at life and at the general development of humanity to find this confirmed. We can look to Goethe again, or to other personalities, for example, Hebbel. This peculiar natural dramatist Hebbel, who was never able to communicate with his father, had a great poetic gift; he shows us this gift in such a way that he had the simple primitive ability for it from his mother, who was just a simple bricklayer's wife. We can follow this in his diary entries. And this gift is manifested in him in such a way that the spiritual nature of the mother has been transformed into an organ system, descended into the physical system of the son, where it manifests itself in this way.

The remarkable thing, however, is that faithful observation of life reveals the opposite tendency in the paternal qualities, which have become more integrated into the physical, which rest more in the whole personality, including the physical predispositions. The qualities of the father tend to ascend by one degree in the daughter and to appear in the soul of the daughter as transformed into spiritual-soul qualities. Thus, something that is sober and pedantic in the father appears lovable in the daughter's soul.

I would like to give a brief example of how this relationship manifested itself in Goethe. One can point out that in fact the old Frau Rat Goethe had the art of storytelling in her soul; she had all the mobility, the imaginative gift, and we see how this particular type of gift was expressed in her circle of friends. We see how this type of gift was highly developed in the son, to the point of becoming a basic predisposition, so that it led to world-shaking facts. On the other hand, we see the father, the old Goethe. Anyone who, like me, has spent more than thirty years studying Goethe and everything related to him will not be misunderstood in a superficial way when he characterizes him as saying: “From my father I have the stature, the serious conduct of life.” The son takes over this character foundation from his father without transformation.

The old Goethe is a thoroughly sober, alert, honest man, even great within certain limits, but a man who, I might say, by the very way he comes across as a personality, cannot get along in life, cannot achieve anything worthwhile; he cannot get a proper position in the Frankfurt Council, he stops halfway. His character affects even his physical abilities. Let us now imagine this translated into the soul: how would it confront us in the soul - this stopping halfway, this never-ending? It would be possible for it to appear in the soul in such a way that it has the need on the one hand to join others, but never wants to make up its mind and repeatedly shies away from a decision. Here we have, as soul qualities, what we encounter as intellectual sobriety in the character of Goethe. But we can also have sobriety before us in its sentimental, soul-like transformation. It is easy to find where the outer qualities of the old Goethe live on in the soul: in Goethe's sister Cornelia, who, however, died young. In her, we see the entire soul qualities as a transformation of the qualities of the old Goethe. And now we also understand why Goethe, who received the external qualities from his father but what really mattered to him, what his greatness was based on, from his mother, could not really get along with his father, how the two repelled each other. In his sister, however, these qualities – transformed into kindness, passion and slight vanity – had such an effect that she became a dear companion for him, in whom the [qualities of the father], transformed into the soul, stood beside him. The whole way in which Goethe's life in his parents' house presents itself to us shows how precisely the abilities tied to active organ systems pass from father to daughter.

One could also point out that not only the father, but the entire paternal ancestry comes into consideration, and likewise on the other side the maternal. We see how Goethe repeats the sunny imagination and mystical character of his maternal ancestors – transformed into higher gifts. And in the nature of his sister, whom Goethe esteemed so highly and of whom he had to say that she lacked faith, hope and love, for she was a problematic nature who also withered away early, we see the paternal ancestry. But here we must think of these qualities, which were active in the sister, as having been transformed from the physical into the soul. We know, of course, that one of Goethe's uncles turned out to be a good-for-nothing. He was such a person that one must say of him that he had no head for anything and therefore could achieve nothing. We see the entire dilettantishness of this ancestry, which only in Goethe's father attained a certain greatness, transposed into the soul in the problematic nature of Goethe's sister.

If one wanted to, one could find mothers throughout history who transfer what they have in their souls into the physical traits of their sons. That is why mothers are so often depicted, so that we may understand the sons. Thus, in the fourth book of Maccabees, the mother of the seven sons who were killed is depicted precisely in her peculiar state of mind, which in the sons manifests itself as a stage-lowered, physical predisposition. In order to appreciate this fact, one must proceed according to laws, just as one would when investigating the dynamic force of a gust of wind. And here it can often be shown that the aptitude of a son, with all its intimacy, can be traced back to the nature of the soul struggles of the mother. Perhaps there are few cases as interesting as the relationship that the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mother had - through her character, through her sad fate - to the whole way of her son's poetry. And when we consider how closely Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was bound to his mother's personality, we see in the wonderfully noble, unassuming religiosity, in the delicate way of facing life, and in the full comprehension of tragic situations, what remained of the mother's soul.

In this way one could cite hundreds of great minds in history and intellectual life and of people we know in our ordinary daily lives and everywhere one would find this law confirmed. One can therefore say that what one is as a father tends to appear in the soul of the daughter and what one is as a mother in the disposition of the sons. A light spreads over numerous life circumstances when we survey this law; and much becomes understandable to us about the connection and the motives of different people.

What does spiritual research tell us about inheritance? It tells us that it would be a mistake to look only for inherited traits in a person. Rather, we have to go back, alongside all inherited characteristics, to the central spiritual-soul core of the human being, which comes from previous lives and integrates and incorporates the characteristics it finds, just as the earthworm germ integrates the external substance, absorbs this substance and enlarges itself according to its own nature. Thus we see in the human core of being that which is drawn in, as if by magnetic forces, into a family where the qualities in the father and other ancestors are suitable for this soul core, so that through the appropriate blending of these qualities and their transformation, the soul can express what its own inner being is. A soul that has acquired the ability in past lives, let us say, to achieve something poetic, for which it needs the gift of imagination, is attracted to a mother who has the gift of storytelling - the gift of thinking in images and, with a slight mobility of soul, transforming these images. But when this ability is passed down from mother to son, there is a tendency to carry these qualities down into the physical, and the spiritual and soul core must blend what it finds in the way of predispositions. The father's character traits are carried up into the soul, into the souls of the daughters, where they are transformed, but when they appear directly in the sons, they are not transformed.

We have to look at more complicated relationships if we want to explain the connection between how the actual human core being is attracted to the qualities of certain persons who then become its parents, and how this core being then mixes and harmonizes these qualities so that it can live out its own essence in them. Spiritual science, however, not only sees what is mixed and transformed from the qualities and dispositions of the ancestors, but it also directs our attention to the spiritual essence that we see coming into existence and must trace back to earlier forms of existence in which it has acquired what enables it to mix the qualities and dispositions that it can receive in the line of inheritance.

Now one could say that spiritual science is extremely easy to refute; one need only apply the most trivial concepts and it can be refuted with the greatest of ease. In an afterword to the small pamphlet “Theosophy and Christianity”, I myself pointed out how easy it is to refute certain presentations of Theosophy if one is determined to start from the prejudices of the present day. The examples given there could easily be multiplied. Regarding what are regarded as hereditary traits, Theosophy must point out the human individuality. It must say: The healthy human mind has the same interest in each individual human individuality, in each spiritual-soul essence of the human being, as it has in the animal in the species, in an animal species. We show the same interest in every single human being as we do, for example, in the lion species. We are as interested in human individuality as we are in animal species. You only have to misunderstand this sentence, or, if it is written, not read it properly, to refute it with tremendous ease.

Someone may object: But what do these spiritual researchers claim? They seem to be unaware that you can just as easily write the biography of a dog or a cat with all their individual characteristics as you can of a human being; you can also list all the differences between the individual animals. It is extremely easy to cite such a thing against spiritual science. But it has never been claimed that this is not possible with spiritual science. I myself was in a school class where a teacher tried to write the biography of a steel spring. You can transfer everything. But one thing can be said: the interest we show for an individual cat and so on is not the same interest as the one we show for a fellow human being. The interest we take in an individual of a species of animal can even be greater than the interest we have for an individual human being. But it is a different interest, not the same; it arises from different psychological roots. Spiritual science requires that the concepts be clearly defined. If someone does not do this, then they can put forward the kind of refutations that can be found on the street. We are dealing with a spiritual-soul core in the human being, and spiritual science does not merely trace this back to the parents and their ancestors, but says: He draws the qualities of these parents to himself, just as the earthworm germ draws the substance it needs for its growth. Now one can ask of spiritual science: Is there something that proves, and that from the human course of life, that such a spiritual-soul core of being actually exists? From the observation of the individual human life, it will be difficult to distinguish between what is nature of the cover and what is the core of the being. Regarding the individual human being, we take the view that the interaction of the covers and the core of the being unfolds gradually. We cannot easily distinguish this in the individual human being, but if we look at a larger, broader basis, at the human being in general, we see that people are very different from one another in terms of their development. Let us assume that this information from spiritual science is correct. Then, for example, there is a core of being in a person that goes back to a life in which this person acquired a strong individuality. Such an essential core will have a lot of trouble overcoming the resistance that the inherited traits present to it. It will have a lot of trouble developing these traits in such a way that they correspond to its spiritual abilities. It takes a long time for a strong essential core to integrate and develop the abilities that come from heredity. On the other hand, a spiritual core that has not yet acquired many abilities of its own will easily blend in with the characteristics of heredity.

This means that people who are stronger individuals, who have a strong inner core and who come from a previous life with a wealth of inner substance, are only slowly able to overcome the resistance that comes from heredity. And here we recall the fact that great minds are not so-called child prodigies, but that teachers often mistake them for the opposite. We only have to think of Alexander von Humboldt, who was considered stupid in his youth. His essential core simply took a long time to bring out the abilities resting within him. A rich core of being had come over to him, and it had a long time to do before it had reworked the characteristics of heredity according to the content of his soul. But through this soul content, which has long worked on the characteristics of heredity, something is also achieved that can achieve great things in humanity. On the other hand, we see souls that, so to speak, bring little with them from previous lives. They will quickly find their way into their new shells and will easily develop the characteristics of heredity. These are the prodigies who seem to be the most talented in the first years of life, but then very soon cease to be so.

Let us assume that the spiritual core of the being has to work its way through what is offered to it from the outside. It only takes a clear, correct observation of life to recognize that physical characteristics in particular are based on heredity. We can see the form of inheritance in the fingerprints. On the other hand, that which is seated as a germ in the soul will be all the less explainable by overcoming the inherited traits through external means, the more the qualities in question have their seat in the interior of the soul. This is why that which belongs to the subjective realm of the soul, the talents for music, mathematics, and so on, appear in the earliest years, as the numerous cases of child prodigies prove. On the other hand, talents that require more inheritance to be overcome will emerge later. In short, everything that comes to us in the course of a proper observation of life proves that a core essence of the human being emerges from all that seeks to envelop us as inherited traits. If we observe people carefully, we can see how the greatest individualities very slowly overcome the resistance of the outer human will. We do not want to focus on these facts today, but they can be seen among the greatest individuals.

I would like to remind you once again of Goethe. If we really understand his greatness, we can see in him how he stands before us as an old Goethe at the full height of life, at the height of art and wisdom; we can see that he has used his whole life to carve out his individuality against the opposing forces. And only the short-sighted could say [about Goethe's late works] that Goethe has grown old. Today, when judging great personalities, we can observe the tendency to exaggerate them in relation to their youth and to belittle them in relation to old age. We can even hear it said that the works of old age are old, dull things, and that those of youth are fresh. A book is being published today in which the true poets, the true individualities, are presented to readers from their youthful works.

People do not really consider that it is perhaps only through their own peculiarity that they are able to understand youth better. They would do better to go along with the individuality in question and not assume that the individuality has become duller in old age. This has already happened to Goethe during his lifetime. People have read the first part of his “Faust” and said: There is bubbling youthfulness in it; but what Goethe wrote in his old age is such that one must be lenient with the aging. But anyone who looks at what Goethe presents with this understanding will say: There, in the first part of “Faust,” Goethe's full individuality has not yet emerged; we see how he is still working his way through, and we see how this strong individuality, which educates itself throughout its entire life, works its way through the resistance of its covers. This is why Goethe says of the critics of his “Faust”:

There they praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The scum thinks,
One would no longer be!

Anyone who is familiar with the development of human nature knows that the stronger the individuality is, the longer it takes to work through.

We can already see a difference between what is the innermost core of our being, the origin of which we have to look for somewhere else, and what is the outer shell that joins this core of our being. We see this difference particularly when we look at the relationship between parents and children. Throughout life, the human being is in a kind of development. This development is an ascending and a descending one. The former includes the time up to the thirtieth, fortieth, fiftieth year, when the core of our being works from within, so that what we go through in pain and suffering becomes life experience and expresses itself in our physicality, in our expressions and gestures. In these stages of life we always see the inner core of the being working on the outer shells and finally shaping them plastically, so that we can speak of the fact that, in an ascending line, the human being becomes more and more similar to his inner core. If we look at a person in their fortieth year and consider the physiognomy that they have been working on for forty years, we can say that the outer appearance is more similar to the inner being than it was in the twentieth year, when it was still inside, still a mere ability, and striving out from the inside out. Thus, in the physical body, a person is more similar to himself in later life than in earlier life. He is more similar to himself in the fortieth year than in the twentieth. This explains an important fact of life, which in turn appears important for many external facts. What is this fact, and why is there such a difference [between the different ages]?

For the observer of life, there is a difference between children of younger parents and those born later in marriage. Only those who are not observers of life do not notice this difference. The core of a child's being, who has moved into a young couple, will find little resistance in its shells because the parents have not yet worked much into their physicality. The individuality will be able to work more into their shells; they do not yet find such a plastic expression of the qualities in them that reproduce themselves in the line of inheritance. Therefore, we can say that children conceived by young parents are better able to shape the whole person from their own individuality. Children born later in a marriage are those whose own core of being is weaker and are therefore drawn to very specific traits that father or mother have imprinted. Thus we see that children born later generally bear more of their father and mother than those born earlier, because the qualities that go into inheritance have already become pronounced in the parents' bodies. We see how the work of the parents on themselves shows in different ways in the children. Strong individualities, which are less similar to the parents, are the children born of the dawn of a young marriage. Less strong individualities, which are more similar to the parents, are those born to older couples.

Spiritual science throws light on such facts in the same way that natural science throws light on natural facts. And if we have this law, we have the means to educate people in a way that is practical for life. Then we acquire a very specific attitude. Anyone who, as a teacher of children, acquires this attitude flowing from spiritual science always says to himself: You must look at what has come into existence through birth and is working its way out more and more like a sacred puzzle to be solved; it is something that comes from previous lives. To do this, you have to look at the ancestry, where the characteristics come from. From this there arises for the educational eye that harmony of will and ability, that sense of responsibility towards the developing human being as a sacred riddle to be solved. When we absorb such wisdom, which places us in this way with the pupil, then that seriousness is imprinted in us, which - without theorizing - finds the educational tact to really solve the riddle in each particular case. In each individual case, we have to act in accordance with this sense of tact in order to properly inspire the mind. We then take leave of the popular phrases of pedagogy.

Which phrase can be heard more often today than that: You have to educate the individuality of the human being. You must educate individually, not in a stereotyped way, and you must not do anything that would contradict the individuality. But anyone who truly observes life wonders: what exactly is individual education? This word remains a mere phrase as long as one does not know how the core of a being relates to what surrounds it. That is why what is said about individual education is just empty words. In most cases, we are unable to do much with them. We have to educate in the way that the demands of practical life arise. We have to realize that we cannot get by with these empty words, but that we have to say: we have to educate from what is assessed. Above all, we are called upon to give the human being what makes him a useful member of human society. He must be able to do what is demanded within certain circles of people, what his time and circumstances demand of him. The phrase of individuality must not shake this demand. Those who see how spiritual science understands the connection between the human being and the whole world are not at all powerless in the face of life's demands. It may be necessary, for example, that a son who has this or that quality takes this or that position in life; family circumstances demand it. Anyone who really looks into the laws of things knows that people are not so one-sided that it can be said that they are only useful for this or that. They can be made useful if not only one side is developed. People are more versatile than is usually assumed. And anyone who really looks through the combination of inherited traits to the spiritual and psychological core of the being is able to connect the various extraordinarily instructive processes with what presents itself as a real process to the spiritual researcher. If one seeks what the individuality of the pupil is, then the practical demands of life make it necessary to look at individuality differently than it is usually viewed in a stereotyped way. It must be said that anyone who allows themselves to be inspired by spiritual-scientific knowledge will, as if flowing into their entire attitude, acquire a fine sense of tact and not only a sense of responsibility, but also all the skills they need to do the right thing at the appropriate moment. It is quite remarkable that whenever you make such assumptions, you always know what to do at the right moment. To give an example: A child [was given to me to educate] who was denied all talents because he had developed in a strange way up to the age of eleven, so that one could say: “Nothing will come of this rascal; he has not even learned to read and write properly!” When this child was entrusted to me and I began to have a certain influence over him, I could say: “All this is only deceptive appearance.” The only difficulty was to break through the outer shell in order to reveal the inner core of the child's being. The core of the being had to be uncovered. Twenty years have passed since that time, and it has been shown that it was as I said. In a short time it was possible to help the spiritual core of the being to break through and to prove what has been said here.

Thus, the study of the developing human being shows how necessary it is not to remain with the outer, physical body alone, but to look through to the spiritual, which is everywhere behind the sensual and which we can see if we acquire the ability to do so. It is important for our knowledge in this direction as well if we can acquire concepts and ideas such as those found in spiritual science.

It is important for our practical lives that we believe in the spirit and seek it behind physical matter; this becomes clear to us when we stand before the developing human being and have to solve the real puzzle in education of how the spirit pours into physical matter. Spiritual science is there not only to talk about the three concepts of body, soul and spirit in a theoretical way, but to fertilize practical life in such a way that a direct result can be achieved through proper education.

When we look at the human being in this way, then, by participating in his development through education, the human soul is imbued with the high truth of the human being's mission in his earthly existence. Then we feel something of the fact that, although we human beings are fully immersed in the physical-sensual world, we are called upon to bring into this physical-sensual world that which we can draw from the spirit. From this realization, we can say: We are surrounded by physical and sensory phenomena; but behind them stands the active spirit. In the developing human being, we encounter the physical human being in indeterminate talents and indeterminate physiognomy, but at the same time we encounter the spirit, which has to struggle through physical matter and which we have to help to come into existence in the physical world from an enigmatic state. Wherever we look at our practical life's work, man is called upon to impress spirit on matter. The words in which we may summarize today's reflection are true everywhere. The spirit struggling for existence also shows us the truth that can be said with these words:

It presses to the human sense
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The material abundance.
It flows into human souls
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They meet in the human heart
To a wisdom-filled reality.

Dear attendees! This year, too, I would like to express my extreme regret that I am unable to make the remarks I have to make today in your language. However, that is not possible, and so I apologize to you for being forced to speak in a language foreign to you about the subject of today's lecture.

It is intended to speak about this subject from the point of view of spiritual science, of spiritual research. This already indicates that the whole way of treating, of presenting the reflection on the Christ in the twentieth century, belongs to a field that is still not very popular today, because spiritual science or theosophy is not only unpopular in the broadest circles of our present-day education, but also still quite unknown. Yet it is precisely spiritual science that contains the mission to speak about the most important matters, about the innermost facts of the human heart in our time and the time to come. A brief consideration of the following can make this clear to us – especially in relation to our topic today.

Since I had the honor of speaking here last year on a similar topic, a heated discussion has taken place in Germany. In recent months, the words “Did Jesus Live?” could be read on the notice boards in all of Germany's larger cities. Numerous lectures were held that referred to this question, for or against, as to whether Jesus had ever lived. It is significant that there is no [external] evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was really a historical figure – he to whom millions of people looked up as the bearer of the greatest hopes, as the source of comfort in the deepest suffering. It is a significant fact that science in our time must raise the question of whether this universally beloved and sacred figure ever lived at all, and that there is no historical evidence that he really did live.

Just as it is significant that science in the study of external facts has come to this point of view, so it is also significant that in our time, little recognized by our education, a spiritual direction is asserting itself that must say purely from the facts of spiritual research: These facts of spiritual research reveal the reality of Jesus with a certainty that no external document, no external tradition can give. Where external fact-finding loses the possibility of proving the historical Jesus, spiritual research steps in, which will be more and more able to prove with absolute certainty the reality of Christ Jesus as a historical fact.

Our time has achieved great and monumental things in terms of external, physical fact-finding, and it is justifiably proud of them. Spiritual research, however, is obliged to point out that it is possible to create other instruments, other tools, that cannot be realized with the outer hands and cannot be seen with the outer eyes, but that can be created by man if he develops the powers that already exist in his ordinary soul life - the powers of thinking, feeling and willing - beyond the normal level. Spiritual science must point out that the powers of thinking, feeling and willing, as they are initially present in the normal development of man, can be increased, and that even today, as they have always existed since primeval times, there are spiritual researchers who not only use external instruments and tools for their research, but also develop those inner powers that lie dormant in the human soul.

Those who make themselves researchers in this way acquire new organs of perception that open up something to them that would otherwise have remained closed. These organs bring about on a higher level what happens on a lower level to a person born blind when he undergoes an operation and thereby gains his sight. It is the same with the spiritual world: it is reality, but only when the human being is able to raise the forces slumbering in him to the level of clairvoyance – true, not pathological clairvoyance – does it become a fact that he can experience for himself.

The same applies to spiritual research as to any other research: just as a person in everyday life cannot always go into a laboratory and work with retorts and other tools to extract nature's secrets, so an everyday person cannot, of course, get involved in everything that a spiritual researcher does. You can find some information about this in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But it must always be emphasized that it is the same as with what the chemist researches in his laboratory: one learns what he has researched with his tools, and what has been researched can then be grasped by the natural will to truth. It is the same in spiritual science or theosophy: individuals can become researchers and develop their powers of clairvoyance, then they can report on what can be seen in the spiritual world, and this can then be understood through reason, through natural [reason-based] thinking. Today we shall be presented with the results of spiritual research in a way that is comparable to a chemist telling you the results of his laboratory research.

Today we stand at an important and prominent epoch in the development of humanity with regard to our conception of Christ and our entire position on the Christ problem. Believe me, anyone who takes the standpoint of spiritual science is not quick with the word: “We are in a transitional epoch.” He knows that this word has already been used for every epoch. He uses it only when the spiritual-factual context demands it, when a particular epoch is something very special. We live in a time that spiritual research can only compare with the even more significant age of the last centuries before the initiation of Christianity, when people's expectations were at their highest, waiting for an event that had to come and found expression in the words of John the Baptist: “Change your soul's disposition, for the Kingdoms of Heaven - the spiritual world - have drawn near.” Today the spiritual researcher lives in a similar expectation, and in a similar way we may speak to present-day humanity: We are on the threshold of a new Christ-revelation. Admittedly, it will be of a completely different nature than the one 1900 years ago.

What does spiritual science understand by the Christ when it speaks of the new Christ-Revelation in the twentieth century? For spiritual science, the Christ is the highest impulse that has entered into the development of humanity. All those who have ever been able to see through the spiritual life of humanity with a clairvoyant eye have always spoken of the Christ, only they used different names. The great teachers in ancient India, who are usually referred to as the holy Rishis, also spoke of the Christ. But how did they speak of him? They spoke in such a way that all those who understood them could know: When they spoke of “Vishvakarman” - that was the name by which they designated Christ - then they spoke of the highest spiritual power to which man can rise when he immerses himself in his own soul forces - disregarding everything that gives external, sensual perception - and looks out at the great facts of the world or looks into his own inner being. When man looks out into the world and sees through what expands in space and takes place in time as Maya, as illusion, and when he sees behind this veil of Maya what underlies the sensory world, the Vedic teaching calls this “Brahman”. If man looks into his inner being, at his true self, as a part of that which lives and weaves in the world, it calls it “Atman”. Thus the ancient Vedic teaching of Vishvakarman speaks of that which weaves through space and time as “Brahman” and that which appears as an inner revelation as “Atman”. But there was one thing that the Vedic teachers impressed upon their listeners again and again: that only when man frees himself from all sense perception, when he frees himself from everything that is visible in outer space, can he gain insight into the essence of Vishvakarman, of Brahman and Atman.

Then came the time when another great leader of human development pointed to the Christ. Those who can see beyond names and labels know that the great Zoroaster or Zarathustra spoke of the Christ-revelation. What did Zarathustra speak from his clairvoyance, which he had acquired in the same way that clairvoyance is spoken of here today, when he pointed out the sun shining in outer space to his listeners? How did he speak of the sun? [He spoke thus:] When you look up at the sun and see the physical light of the sun, this physical light is only the garment of the spiritual being. This body of the spiritual being is related to that which truly lives in the sun, as the outer human body is related to that which, spiritually, as the soul, permeates, interweaves and lives through the human body. But that, he called - the word is not important here - “aura” or “Ahura Mazdao”. For the inner eye, it is perceptible as inner light, in contrast to the outer body. For the clairvoyant eye, an aura is what a person experiences spiritually. Thus Zarathustra pointed people up to the sun: the outer light of the sun is the physical body for the spirit of the sun, which he called the “great aura” in contrast to the small inner light in man. The great solar aura was for Zarathustra that which lives and works in all human development. For him, it was also that which man reaches when he seizes the inner power of the soul, when he immerses himself in himself. Thus Zoroaster or Zarathustra spoke of the great spirit of the sun, but he spoke of it as a real, actual spirituality that permeates and animates the world.

Natural science investigates the matter that makes up the human being and also works out in the universe. In relation to the body, it sees the human being as part of the macrocosm. But the longing has never been extinguished in man to recognize his belonging to the great universe not only in a material and sensual way, but also to find the connection between the spiritual that permeates and fills him with life and the spiritual in the world. Today, the longing lives in many people for what Zoroaster proclaimed as the solar aura, as the great aura. He spoke of the spirit that flows into the human heart as sunlight flows into the earth and awakens the plants to life. He expressed it particularly impressively in the following words:

I will speak, now come and listen to me, you who come from near and far and long for it. I will speak of the one who can be revealed to the spirit. And no longer shall the deceptive mind confuse those men who bind themselves to materiality and to the lower nature. I will speak of that which is the first and greatest in the world, which He has revealed to me, the great Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazda.

Thus Zarathustra wanted to imply that it is possible to recognize spiritual facts in the same way as one recognizes material facts, which fill space and develop in time.

Today, people feel the urge and the longing to recognize that, in terms of their soul and spirit, they have emerged from the world spirit. But there is no bridge that crosses the chasm [between the sensory world and the supersensible world]. However, spiritual science wants to build this bridge by developing the higher powers in the human soul. Spiritual science shows us how humanity develops over time. The goal of this development is revealed in what the spiritual researcher, the spiritual scientist, achieves by freeing himself from everything that is bound to external nature, to the external body. Humanity achieves this in a completely different form, slowly and gradually. Spiritual science in particular makes it very clear to us that there is real progress, real development in relation to inner human nature. Let us consider what the spiritual researcher can do: he can look into the spiritual world – not with the ordinary, everyday view, but only when he lifts his higher self out of the lower self through a powerful inner act of will, when he frees himself from the ordinary, everyday view; then he can see what is the subject of such a contemplation as today's. For the spiritual scientist, it is necessary to bring about very special conditions. The intuitive perception of sight and hearing that occurs of its own accord is quite different from what the spiritual researcher evokes through a powerful act of will, enabling him to see into the spiritual world independently of all corporeality. But what he achieves at a higher level of spiritual research will gradually become an ability of natural human powers. Man develops from epoch to epoch, from age to age. Ever higher powers of knowledge are acquired. This is why the spiritual researcher can speak of a new ability to perceive slowly developing in human progress. It must be said that the spiritual researcher can also, in a certain sense, see something prophetically in advance when he looks at the nature of souls in a particular epoch, at the forces that are striving towards a certain goal. And today these forces are striving towards a certain goal.

If we look back at the way people throughout the ages, throughout the centuries and millennia, have spoken of the Christ – albeit using different names – we find an enormous difference compared to the way it must be spoken today. In all ages before the beginning of our Christian era, the truly discerning spoke of the Christ as one who will come, as one who will reveal himself to people in the future in a completely different way. The spiritual researchers of that time said: Now only those who can rise to the higher worlds can see the Christ; they see the Christ in the supersensible, in the spiritual sphere. Thus the seers of India had beheld Vishvakarman, thus Zarathustra had beheld Ahura Mazdao.

Yet they always pointed out that the Christ would one day also reveal Himself to other human faculties of perception, not only to the heightened but also to the ordinary human faculties of perception, to the natural human powers of cognition. Thus, all spiritual research speaks of the Christ not only as a spiritual power, as a spiritual might that lives in humanity, but it speaks of the Christ in such a way that it is clear that the Christ - this being that has been spoken of at all times and will continue to be spoken of in the field of spiritual science in the future - actually once took on human form, that he really once lived as the historical Jesus.

For spiritual science, Jesus of Nazareth is something very special. We can compare it to what the great mechanic Archimedes once spoke of. He said: Give me a firm point for my lever, and I will move the earth. — He demanded a fixed point to which everything can be related. Only by having a fixed point can something in space be understood. Similarly, the course of time becomes understandable for spiritual science when there is a fixed point in historical development. And all initiates, all spiritual researchers before the beginning of our era, pointed to this fixed point as something that would come in the future. But we point to this fixed point as something that was there in the past, and we relate all events that will ever happen to this fixed point, to this hypomochlion. Therefore, within spiritual science, based on the facts and the results of this spiritual science, we speak of the historical Jesus as a reality. Spiritual science is also able to understand the Gospels in a new way by shining into their depths. If you delve deeper into spiritual science, you will see that spiritual science itself sheds new light on the understanding of the Gospels. But spiritual science does not base its knowledge of the Christ Jesus on these documents. It says everything it has to say independently of all historical tradition. And only by comparing its results with the Gospels does it shed deeper light on them.

What does it mean that the Christ walked among people in the physical body of Jesus, that he accomplished what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, which can teach us that the spiritual always conquers the physical, that life always conquers death? What does this impulse mean in the further development of humanity? From the time when the Christ dwelt in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, man, when he descends into his own soul, can now experience as spiritual power within himself that which was previously merely cosmic, which he could only attain when he dwelled outside his body. Those who, because of their world-view, cannot admit that a power from the cosmos has penetrated into the individual human soul, has entered into it in order to be a power that continues to work in these souls, will never be able to comprehend the Christ-impulse.

Not before, but only from the event in Palestine onwards, was there a new impulse in human souls themselves. Since that time, there is something in human souls that was not there before. People easily understand that when a new substance is added, something new arises in the outer chemical mixtures of substances. They grasp this more easily than that something happened to all of humanity when Jesus walked the Earth, in that something new entered human souls from the supersensible realms. Like a new substance that continues to work in a mixture of substances, a completely new power is at work in human souls from that time on – a power that now takes these human souls further and further. Spiritual science shows us that, in fact, in relation to his innermost being, man has been predisposed to something completely new since the appearance of Christ on earth - something he was not predisposed to before. One would think that spiritual science must emphasize this with all sharpness, with all idealism.

Now spiritual research shows us that this impulse, which was planted in the souls of men at that time, can only develop slowly, that it has shown itself hardly perceptibly in the first time and only gradually - until the most distant future - will lead mankind to ever higher and higher things. In order to understand what is happening in man, we must consider another fact that spiritual science investigates. However, speaking of it is somewhat dangerous in our time, because few people of the present are inclined to go along with what has to be said here from spiritual science. It shows us - and now we are moving away from our actual topic - the following: It shows us the deeper aspects of human nature, it shows us something that developing humanity will surely grasp in a relatively short time, but which is still regarded by many as fantasy, as the greatest nonsense. What spiritual science shows us can be compared, on a higher level, to something that humanity has only recently come to accept as true on a deeper level – this must be emphasized again and again.

In the seventeenth century, not only laymen but also learned researchers who were firmly grounded in natural science believed that worms, insects and even fish could develop from river mud without the addition of a corresponding germ. And it was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who, in the seventeenth century, uttered the significant sentence: Living things can only come from living things. In a text from the seventh century A.D., for example, you will find an explanation of how living things develop without a germ—with a self-confidence with which things were asserted in some scientific writings at the time. You will find it stated there: If you pound a horse carcass, bees will come into being, and if you pound a donkey carcass, wasps will come into being. All this was schematized in the same way as is customary in many respects in our time. And when in the seventeenth century Redi proclaimed what was only scientifically proved in the nineteenth century – that living things can only come from living things – he was a heretic and only with great difficulty escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. In those days people who asserted such a thing were burned at the stake; today that is no longer fashionable. But today people are considered to be terrible heretics who, in a higher realm, namely in the realm of the spiritual, spread the same truth and show that what is spiritual and soul-like can only come from something spiritual and soul-like.

Today it is claimed that the spiritual soul of a human individuality – that which grows from day to day as qualities and characteristics of the soul – arises only from the qualities of the father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. Now spiritual science shows that a spiritual-soul essence from a spiritual past penetrates into what is inherited from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother and so on - just as a germ must be placed in the river and then unfolds in it – and that in what is inherited, the independent, individual, which comes from a previous existence of a spiritual-soul nature, unfolds. She shows that the soul and spiritual cannot be traced back to what lies in the physical line of inheritance, but to a soul and spiritual that has nothing to do with the physical. Fashion has changed: today, those who teach such things are punished by being branded as fools. Today, the authority is he who says: Living things can only come from living things. In the not too distant future, the other truth, that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things, will become common knowledge for all humanity. But then people will not be able to understand how humanity could once have believed otherwise.

But this view, if followed to its logical conclusion, is nothing other than what is called the doctrine of reincarnation, the doctrine of repeated lives on earth: what lives as spiritual-soul in the present life on earth has already lived in an earlier life on earth, and the present life on earth is the starting point for a future one. The spiritual soul of the past seeks a mother soil into which it can move, the mother soil of father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. One is just as necessary as the other. For those who have acquired clairvoyance and clairaudience, the view of repeated earthly lives is a matter of course.

You all know that the doctrine of repeated earthly lives is an ancient teaching and that it was spread with particular force in the East by Buddha and the religious community founded by him, and found its way into millions and millions of souls. But modern spiritual research does not take its teaching from Buddhism – this must be expressly emphasized. It is a misunderstanding of the facts to say that modern theosophy or spiritual science borrowed the doctrine of repeated earthly lives from Buddhism. There is no need to resort to an old teaching. Just as one does not need to resort to the writings of Euclid to prove that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, so one does not need to resort to Buddhism to prove reincarnation. Even today, the truth of repeated lives on earth can be investigated.

For him who really grasps the Christ Impulse, the truth of repeated earth-lives presents itself in a different way than for the follower of Buddha. Buddha emphasized the fact of repeated earth-lives over and over again. He set before humanity his so-called “Four Noble Truths”: Birth is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, not being united with what one loves, and being united with what one does not love is suffering. To be freed from the karma of having to descend again and again from the spiritual into an earthly body, to be freed as soon as possible from the urge for existence, to be freed from the urge to embody oneself: that is the impulse of the Buddha teaching. In the Buddha-doctrine, the teaching of re-embodiment presents itself to us one-sidedly. The Buddha-doctrine does not have the impulse to place into the human soul that which continues to have an effect through successive re-embodiments and awakens ever new and new powers in the individual human being. Spiritual science, however, modern theosophy, sees in the Christ impulse that which strikes the human soul, which seizes the will, educates and develops it, which works in the soul in such a way that when it is touched by the Christ impulse in one embodiment, it comes to life in a new way in the next embodiment, that the Christ impulse works into the next embodiment. And because it has an effect, this soul can develop its powers, which, through the power of the Christ impulse, are increased and developed to even higher heights.

Thus, in the Christ impulse, we see what continues to have an effect in the human soul from embodiment to embodiment, giving the following embodiments new meaning and new content. Therefore, we are not talking about freeing ourselves from the wheel of reincarnation as soon as possible, but about permeating ourselves more and more with the living Christ impulse. Through Christ's descent onto the physical plane, it has become possible for us to permeate ourselves with the Christ impulse as with a spiritual substance. The Buddhist religion is rightly called a religion of redemption. The Christian religion is not a religion of redemption, but of resurrection. What the Christ exemplified for us in the Mystery of Golgotha, with the conquest of death through the spirit, is repeated again and again when we resurrect in a new embodiment, fertilized by the Christ impulse.

Must we not say to ourselves: There will come a time when the works of art that have enchanted thousands upon thousands of human souls will crumble to dust? This is the case with both the greatest and the smallest of human achievements in our physical world: they all dissolve into dust. But if we look at the matter in terms of rebirth, of repeated lives on earth, then we say to ourselves: the artist has incorporated something of his soul into the material; but as a result, his soul has also become something else, his work has had an effect on the material, but it has also had an effect on the soul. - It is the same with every human being, but with the artist it is only most evident. In a new embodiment, we continue to work with the powers we acquired in the previous embodiment. These powers are reborn, resurrected, awakened to new life. So it is no longer absurd to say: the whole earth will one day be crushed into dust. Just as the body of the individual human being decays into dust, so the whole earth, the body of our planetary existence, will decay. But then human souls will have achieved something that will lead to new stages of existence. The earthly body will fall away, and humanity will move on to new forms. And the impulse that lives in it is the Christ impulse.

Spiritual science, with the clairvoyant eye of the spiritual researcher, looks at an epoch that is very close to us in time, when certain earlier events will bear fruit. All souls that have processed the Christ impulse throughout the Middle Ages, that have experienced the deep Christian mysteries of the Middle Ages, will then experience the Christ impulse in the sense of Paul: It is not I who live, it is not I who work, it is Christ. They will see their own inner being illuminated by the Christ-light. This is the important fact that must be pointed out. This fact can be foreseen by spiritual science as surely as an eclipse of the sun or moon can be foreseen by astronomy. Those people who have taken up the Christ impulse in their souls, who have permeated their will, feeling and thinking with it in the Pauline sense, will come again. And the fruits of their rebirth will show up in that what they have gone through at the time will revive as strength in their soul. In what way will it revive?

Spiritual science shows us that in the relatively near future, and then more and more in the coming millennium, a new spiritual power will develop in people's inner being, which cannot be described other than by pointing to the fact that it first manifested itself in Paul as a natural ability. Paul could not be convinced by everything he had heard about the Christ Jesus on the physical plane in Palestine. But it became clear to him that the Christ had lived and had risen when, through his opened supersensible organs of perception, through natural clairvoyance, he saw what we call the Event of Damascus. There, through inner experience, the Christ became a fact for him – the Christ who had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who claim that the appearance of Damascus was a mere vision claim at the same time that the most important fact of Western culture, the religion of Christ, is based on an empty vision. Paul says that he has grasped the Christ within and can therefore see something completely new that underlies the world – something he could not have seen before. At first, only a few individuals will develop the ability to see as Paul did before Damascus. We are standing in the twentieth century before a new revelation of the Christ from the spiritual world. There will arise people, at first few, then more and more, who will see the spiritual, which is also in them, living and weaving out there in space, just as they see matter, which is also in their material body, living and weaving out there in space. And for them the truth of Zarathustra's teaching will become reality when the experience of the event of Damascus dawns on them, when they look out into space and see the origin of existence from which our soul and material being comes, when they see this in spiritual light.

We are standing before the entrance gate of a new historical development, a new revelation of the Christ. The Christ impulse continues to work in such a way that, in the end, the secrets of the existence of the Christ will be experienced by the souls as an experience. Physically, the Christ was only once in the world - this is shown to us by spiritual science - and it is a misunderstanding of the whole essence of the Christ to believe that a second time a physical being would appear that could be called a Christ. This is the problem: the Christ impulse allows ever new abilities to arise in the human soul, and the Christ will reveal Himself more and more to the newly awakened abilities. The Christ did not give the impulse for this, that He must come again and again in physical form and humanity must remain at the point where it has already stood. The ability to see Him spiritually has been awakened in it. He has come so that they may grasp Him spiritually and receive Him in ever higher and higher ways.

Thus we stand before a spiritual Christ-Revelation; this will send the spiritual light to men and will give them the power to understand the Christ more and more. In particular, the Christ impulse gives us the certainty that in the future our embodiments will no longer awaken in us the need to free ourselves from existence, but to penetrate it more and more. The Christ confession is a resurrection religion – in contrast to Buddhism, which is a religion of salvation. This is the message that spiritual science or theosophy can give to humanity in our time: that we are on the threshold of a new revelation of the Christ, that new cognitive abilities are gradually coming into existence in human souls and that people can look into the spiritual and will recognize and know: He is there! New cognitive abilities will develop through which the eternal, living Christ will reveal Himself, first to a few, then to more and more people, and finally to all who follow the appropriate paths.

This is the message that spiritual science wants to bring to the West. And basically, spiritual science is nothing more than what wants to draw attention to this great fact, which we must not overlook. People should understand what is going to happen. The aim of modern theosophy, of spiritual science, is to prepare the way for this new revelation, to prepare the way in Western culture for the Christ of the twentieth century. It wants to be a servant of developing humanity. Just as the forerunner of Christ had to say: Change your state of mind, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand – namely in the human mind – so spiritual science of the present must say: Change your attitude, pay attention to what announces itself in the human soul as a newly emerging power, as the power of a new vision. Pay attention to it, change your soul's disposition. It becomes possible for the human being who permeates himself with the Christ impulse to penetrate into the realms of the eternal and the imperishable. And so we summarize our meditation:

Being follows being in the expanse of space,
being follows being in the course of time.
If you remain in the expanse of space and the course of time, then you, O man, are in the realm of impermanence. But your soul rises mightily above it,when it sees, intuitively or knowingly, the immortalbeyond the expanse of space, beyond the course of time.

Within our European spiritual culture, one may already express the name of Buddha with very different feelings today than fifty years ago; yes, one must consider that the greatest mind of our culture, Goethe, knew nothing of Buddha. It is precisely here that we can recognize how feelings change. There is widespread interest in Buddha today. Where does this interest come from, which is present in broad sections of society, and why is the name of Buddha familiar not only in research? This is connected with the development of humanity, with the penetration of spiritual elements into this development, which will become common property in later times. I would like to draw attention to the fact that the interest shown in the Buddha promises to become a matter of the heart, a matter of the soul. At first, people do not always judge soul matters correctly when they arise. Now something is happening today that happened [in a similar way] a few centuries ago in a field more remote from the great interest, when the old scholars, misled by inaccurate observation, did not want to accept Francesco Redi's sentence “Living things come only from living things”. We see a parallel to our time, which also believes it must reject the sentence “Spiritual-soul-like comes only from spiritual-soul-like” - precisely because of inaccurate observation.

It is believed that a person's inner disposition is inherited only from their father and mother. Of course, anyone who does not believe in spiritual beings cannot go further, but anyone who recognizes the realities of the spiritual world will find it self-evident that a person's spiritual soul comes from a previous spiritual soul and that this spiritual soul draws on the predispositions of the ancestors, that there is therefore an essential core. And that is the teaching of reincarnation. Just as the animal is the repetition of its species, so the human being is the repetition of his individuality. What we see growing within us here in the way of inner gifts is nothing other than what we have acquired in previous lives on earth. Just as every plant can flourish only in soil that is suitable for it, such as the edelweiss that can take root only in the high mountains, so every human being seeks out his environment, which forms the basis for his destiny, because the environment that is beneficial and appropriate for him exerts an attraction on him. So this person is born in this country and this language area, in this family, that person in that country in that family - because his or her individual character determines this. That is the law of karma: we ourselves forge our destiny. To many, this seems fantastic, and it can easily be refuted from a scientific point of view. But just as Francesco Redi was pushed by scientific facts to express his assertion that “living things come only from living things”, so we are pushed to express the sentence: “spiritual things come only from spiritual things”. Just as Francesco Redi's sentence was misunderstood, so will our sentence be misunderstood. But every new truth evokes resistance - and from the experiences of the past we may draw courage.

Now the question arises: Why does man not remember his previous lives on earth? This ability to remember can be acquired, although it is difficult, but it must be possible to trace a thread back to previous earthly lives. Now, today's human being is mostly unable to see the bigger picture; today's European human being is not even able to remember back to birth, and the first years are dark for him. We have heard that remembering begins when the idea of self emerges in the soul. We also know that the concept of self places itself like a wall in front of the past and that we therefore cannot see into the spiritual world. If we understand this, then we can also understand the work that is involved in penetrating past earthly lives. Strict soul exercises are part of this: the self must be carried out, the self must become objective; everything that could come must meet us with complete composure. It is difficult to achieve and carry this out not only theoretically, but also in our inner life, but by doing so we gain an [independent position with respect to the ego]. We are in an important time. The human brain will think differently when it has to tell itself that everything is cause and effect [of a past life]. This is something that deeply affects everyone. Man must mature to this.

We will understand how people today can be interested in the Buddha's teachings: Buddhism, this religious confession, contains the teaching of reincarnation – albeit not quite as it is understood in Theosophy. So the interest in Buddhism is connected with something that is affecting humanity today. Now we need to ask ourselves: how does this truth fit into what European culture means? How does it relate to Christianity? For our culture is completely based on Christianity, and all opponents of Christianity have taken their concepts from the Christian arsenal. For those who think this way [in terms of the doctrine of reincarnation], the question arises: How can the Christian impulse be reconciled with this concept? Even without Buddhism, the doctrine of reincarnation would have to be crystallized out of European culture.

If you read a book about Buddhism today, you will find many [special] terms: “Nirvana” [for example] is presented as the great goal for the Buddhist; “Nirvana” is a place that is associated with the extinction, the annihilation of all existence - it cannot be put into words, since there is no word for non-existence. One could hold great discussions about what Buddha meant by it. But we just want to try to determine the mood content, to contrast Buddhism and Christianity, to place the Buddhist's perception next to that of the Christian. First, there is a story among Buddhists: the wise King Milinda comes to an initiate and wants to hear something about the secrets of life. The conversation goes as follows. The initiate asks: How did you get here? — The king answers: By carriage. — The sage looks at the carriage; he sees the wheels: Are these wheels the carriage? — No, they are not. — Is this seat the carriage? — No, it is not. These are only the parts of the carriage, but all the parts are not yet the carriage. So what else is there? — Name and form. All the individual parts are really there, but together they are only name and form. But name and form are something unreal, just like the mango fruit on the tree, which only has name and form in common with the fruit from which the tree grew. What does the wise man mean by this? The concept of reincarnation was self-evident to him. So he explains how in this life, a person only has name and form in common with the previous life. The Buddhist does not recognize the continuous self that passes through the embodiments – only name and form. He sees the individual parts of the carriage, connected by name and form to form a whole. This is not quite in line with the teachings of the Buddha, but it depends on the feelings of a follower of Buddhism.

Now let us transfer this parable into the Christian realm: let us imagine a Christian sage speaking to a Christian king. Let us imagine that the conversation is the same as the one above, but in the end, the sage would have to say, based on the spirit of Christianity: You cannot come here on a mere name, on a mere form. These are words that must be backed by something real, something spiritual. That mango fruit at the top of the tree has become the same as the fruit that was the origin of the whole tree, although nothing physical connects them. There must be something that has formed them as equals: there must be something spiritual. - In the same way, the Christian feeling must assume that there is a continuous self from embodiment to embodiment in reincarnation. The Buddhist, on the other hand, sees the path from embodiment to embodiment without knowing the bond of a common ego, and thus he gets the feeling of futility.

Buddha, the king's son, who had grown up without having known suffering, was deeply moved when he saw a sick person for the first time - then the idea of suffering poured into him. When he saw a dead body for the first time, he realized: Death is suffering. And now it became clear to him: Life is suffering, being born is suffering, being sick is suffering, being separated from what we love is suffering - everything is suffering. Why is everything destined for suffering?

Now imagine a person like Buddha, how he faced this riddle of life. Many lives before, many lives after – and always, always suffering, suffering! He felt the urge to explore this, and a long quest followed. When enlightenment came to him – which we refer to as “sitting under the bodhi tree” – he realized: the passion, the thirst for existence, comes from previous incarnations, and this is connected to life. Therefore, suffering is connected with the thirst for existence, and so, if suffering is to cease, the thirst for existence must be extinguished. This is what he said in the sermon of Benares. Man can, through his own work, become indifferent to existence and thereby extinguish all previous embodiments and free himself from suffering. There is nothing in the world that cannot cause us suffering. If we free ourselves from everything, we can enter into Nirvana. We cannot describe Nirvana, because we lack the concept for the absolute nothing. We simply have to leave out everything that is in our imagination. The ideal of Buddhism is the extinguishing of existence. Buddha stands before us and says: I look back on many embodiments. In my present body I know that I must become free from all thirst for existence. The previous embodiment pushed me towards this body, towards that which now pushes me to become free from corporeality. I know quite certainly that each time spirituality has built the body for me as a temple; but my goal is no longer to return to such a temple of the body - I feel this.

Now let us compare this feeling with the Christian one. In the Gospel of John, Christ Jesus says of the temple of his body: “Destroy it, and in three days I will raise it up.” Christ Jesus has the will within himself not to leave what is earthly life. This is not suffering, but something that should be developed. Even if there are still many embodiments to come, keep improving your temple, live each life on Earth in such a way that you continue to perfect yourself. When we let the warmth of the Gospel sink in, we ask: What did Christ bring? The answer is: In the Christ impulse we find the indication that life can be purified. Buddha descends to become free of the embodiments; Christ descends to make life perfect. Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation, but Christianity is a doctrine of resurrection! Christ says: When you acquire the higher, you will become ever higher, and a new life will arise. The Christian impulse is compatible with the concept of reincarnation – it is strong enough for that. Why is that so? Because Christ is not just a teacher. It is significant that Christ did not write anything down himself, because the essential thing is his deed – his deed at Golgotha has eternal significance.

The historical event at Golgotha is a seed for something other than the liberation from suffering. Is birth suffering? No. - Is death suffering? No. - Is being separated from those you love suffering? No. — Because death leads to new birth, and every birth brings powers that are exhausted through life. But illness is purification; by conquering illness, strength comes. Not being united with those we love is not suffering, because the Christian knows the realm of the spirit, where what belongs together is together. Nor is being united with those we do not love suffering, because the Christian seeks to live in love. To make everything Christian – that is Christianity. To learn through suffering, to learn through happiness, that is what we as Christians want.

And so we see the great difference in development that extends from Buddha to Christ. One religion is a religion of salvation, the other a religion of resurrection. But then we will also understand how the Buddhist confessor cannot even approach the self. The sensations, the feelings, the ideas, the consciousness – none of this is the self. The Christian, on the other hand, says: the self is everywhere. The spiritual self is behind everything, but we do not see it because we are not able to perceive it. We may strive for the resurrection of our self through Christ – so that the spirit may shine out to meet us from every stone, from every tree. And so, Western intellectual life has nothing to gain from Buddhism, but it has much, very much to gain from accepting the doctrine of reincarnation. And just as Buddha tied the doctrine of suffering to a corpse, so several centuries later we see people looking up to a corpse. A corpse became a source of comfort and strength for them: Christ on the cross.

Dear attendees,

When the topics of theosophy or spiritual science arise today, many of our contemporaries still believe that this school of thought has its roots or starting points in some oriental ideas or spiritual experiences that are foreign to our Western culture. And this prejudice is seized upon by those who believe they see in Theosophy or spiritual science something that is opposed to Christianity, or to a deeper understanding of Christianity, in so far as it permeates our entire Occidental spiritual culture. If such an opinion is entertained, it is based, in particular, on the fact that within the theosophical world view, what may be called the doctrine of repeated earthly lives or, as it is also called, the doctrine of reincarnation, is presented as a basic fact. And it is believed that such an idea, that man has to undergo repeated lives on earth, could only have been taken from Buddhism or some other oriental world view. Now, if we make such a presupposition, then the whole position of spiritual science or theosophy in the spiritual life of our time is misunderstood, because what is this idea of repeated earthly lives for modern man, or perhaps it is better to say what can this idea be for today's conditions?

Today there is a word that is indeed usually only used in connection with scientific facts, but which has a fascinating effect on the educated of the present - on those people of the present who believe they are at the height of our intellectual life - and that is the word 'development'. Admittedly, today this word is usually only used to refer to the development of external forms, that is, the forms of subordinate living beings up to and including humans. The elaboration of this idea of development for human life, encompassing the whole of human life, including the human soul and spirit, is still rarely thought of today; for if one were to engage with the elaboration of the idea of development for the whole of human , one would gradually have to realize that the same thing that we call the development of the species or genus in the animal kingdom must present itself in humans as the development of the individual individual, of the individual individuality.

But this means nothing other than that if we see how the individual species develop apart from one another in the animal world, then we must approach the individual with the same interest as we do the species in the animal kingdom, and we must speak of the development of the individual individuality in the human being. Let us commit this to memory: if we have a healthy mind, we show the same interest in the individual human being as we do in the animal species or genus. We have the same interest in the human being as we do in each individual lion – whether it is the lion's grandfather, father, son, and so on. Therefore, we must think of the same lawfulness that we think of as a law of development in animal species, we must think of it in terms of the individual individuality in the case of human beings.

So you can see that in the field of spiritual science we speak of the development of the individual human individuality. And we must come to say: What comes into existence in the human being at birth, what gradually and mysteriously unfolds from the still indeterminate facial features, expressions and gestures of the first childlike age, that is the soul-spiritual of the human being, which confronts us with each individual as something special, as an individual. We cannot attribute this to the inherited qualities of the immediate ancestors alone, but we must imagine this relationship of human life to its causes differently than the relationship of the animal to its ancestors. There we understand everything that lives in the individual animal – the form, the physiognomy – when we understand the species. But with humans it is different.

What lives in man, we find in each person in a special, particular way. What has developed in man as a generic characteristic, we attribute to physical inheritance; but what confronts us as his special being, we must attribute to what the person, as the cause of his present life, has gone through in earlier lives, in earlier stages of existence. And what we encounter in the present framework of his personality, that in turn forms the cause, the basis for his work in a later life. Thus we have a living chain of development that goes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. And we see everything that comes to us as characteristic of a person in such a way that we see the necessity of tracing it back to earlier soul and spiritual states.

Thus Theosophy or spiritual science is able to introduce a law in the higher realm of human life, just as it was incorporated relatively recently into the realm of the natural life of human development. Yes, today's humanity has a short memory. Otherwise it would not be necessary to point out that as late as the seventeenth century not only laymen but also scholars of natural science assumed that lower animals could develop out of decaying river mud without the introduction of germs of life. And it was the great Italian naturalist Francesco Redi who first caused this tremendous upheaval in natural science thinking by stating that living things can only come from living things.

Just as this sentence applies to natural life within certain limits, so the other sentence applies to human life within certain limits: spiritual and mental things can only have their origin in spiritual and mental things. And it is only an inaccurate observation if one wants to trace back what works its way out of the vague depths of an adolescent's consciousness from day to day, from week to week, from year to year as a spiritual-soul element to the mere physical line of inheritance of the ancestors – is just as inaccurate an observation as it is inaccurate to trace what lives in animals, even in earthworms, back to the mere laws of the substances that make up river mud just because one has not considered the living germ. It is an inaccurate observation when we speak today only of the inheritance of mental and moral abilities because we do not pay attention to the soul-spiritual core, which integrates that which it can appropriate from the inherited traits in the same way that the living germ of the living being appropriates the substance in which that germ is embedded.

Such truths always fare in much the same way in the course of human development. In those days, Francesco Redi only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today everyone, from the Haeckelianer to the most radical opponents of Haeckel, will recognize this sentence as self-evident, but only within the limits of external nature, insofar as it concerns the body. At that time, however, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” was a tremendous heresy. Today, however, heretics are no longer burned. But if one stands on the firm ground of today's scientific facts - while in reality one only stands on the ground of one's preconceived ideas, of contemporary prejudices - one regards the law of repeated earth lives, which is the same for the higher areas of spiritual existence as Redi's sentence that living things can only come from living things, as heresy, as fantasy, as sheer madness. But the time is not far distant when it will be said of this law in the same way: It is really incomprehensible that any man could ever have thought differently.

Whence then comes this law of repeated earth-lives? Do we need to go back to some Eastern philosophy of life, must this law be borrowed from Buddhism? No. To understand the law of repeated earthly lives in the context of modern European culture, all that is needed is an unbiased, spirit-searching view that overlooks the facts. And what this view sees has nothing to do with any tradition. Like any other scientific law, it will be accepted by modern spiritual education because, based on the idea of development, it necessarily leads to this law.

But anyone who wanted to claim that this could add anything to our Western intellectual development that would run counter to Christianity is not aware of how this entire Western intellectual life is permeated by the living weaving and essence of Christian feeling, of Christian feeling. Indeed, if one is able to observe with an open mind, it can be seen that the way of thinking, the forms of imagination, even of those who today behave as the worst opponents of Christianity, have only been made possible by the education of Western humanity, which they have received through Christianity. Anyone who is willing and able to observe impartially will find that even the most radical opponents of Christianity fight it with arguments borrowed from Christianity itself.

But there is a radical difference between the Christian essence and what we can call the pre-Christian essence - a difference that is just not immediately apparent because everything in human development is slow and gradual and always encompasses the earlier in the later. There is something in the pre-Christian world view that is radically different from the Christian one, and this can be found and observed among the oriental world views, even in their most modern form, in Buddhism, for example. We can see this fundamental difference between the essence of Christianity and the oriental feeling and thinking that has found expression in Buddhism if we consider just a few of its aspects.

For this purpose, we need only recall a conversation that can be found in Buddhist literature and that is deeply rooted in Buddhist feeling and thinking. By studying such descriptions, we can gain a much more accurate insight into the essence of any world view than by considering its highest tenets and dogmas. After all, one can argue at length about whether this or that is to be understood in terms of Nirvana or Christian bliss. But how that which lives in the Buddhist and Christian way of thinking works its way into people's feelings, and how these feelings then relate to the whole world - the physical and the spiritual world - that is decisive for the value, the meaning and the essence of a world view and for its effect on human souls.

In Buddhist literature, we find preserved that remarkable conversation between the legendary King Milinda and the sage Nagasena. In this conversation, it is said that King Milinda came to the sage Nagasena by chariot and wanted to be instructed regarding the nature of the human soul. The sage then asked the king: “Tell me, did you come by chariot or on foot?” “By the chariot,” the king replied. ”Now tell me, when you have the chariot before you, what do you have there before you? You have the shafts, the body of the chariot, and the wheels before you. Is the shaft the chariot? Is the body the chariot? Are the wheels the chariot? No! Is that all you have in front of you? There is also the seat of the chariot! And what else do you have in front of you? Nothing! The chariot is therefore only a name or a form, because the realities that are in front of you are the box, the shaft, the wheels and the seat. What else is there is only name and form. Just as only a name or a form holds the individual parts together – wheels, shaft, body and seat – so too the individual abilities, feelings, thoughts and perceptions of the human soul are held together not by something that can be described as a particular reality, but only by a name or a form. So it can be said – felt in the right Buddhist sense: A central being in man, which holds together the individual human soul abilities, cannot be found, just as little as anything other than name and form can be found except for the drawbar, the wagon body, the seat and the wheels on the wagon.

And through yet another simile, the wise man made clear to [the king] the nature of the soul, saying: Consider the mango fruit – it comes from the mango tree. You know that the mango tree is only there because another mango fruit was there before, from which it was created. The mango plant comes from the mango fruit, which has rotted in the earth. What can you say about the mango fruit? It comes from the rotten seed. Now follow the path from the old fruit to the new mango plant. What does the new plant have in common with the old plant other than its name or shape? — But it is the same with the soul's existence, said the wise Nagasena to King Milinda. [It was also there only in name!] It was also a law of experience in Buddhism that a person undergoes repeated earthly lives. But this law did not prompt the actual central Buddhist feeling to seek and see something other than name and form in what passes from one life to another, just as with a mango fruit, where nothing passes from one to the other except name and form. Thus, according to the Buddhist view, we can see the effects of past lives in what we call our destiny in a life – our abilities, talents and so on. But no central soul-being passes over from the earlier life to the new one; only causes work out into effects, and what we have in common in one life with an earlier life – except for what we feel to be our destiny in the new life – is only name and form. You have to feel your way through what is actually at hand in Buddhism.

And now we could – in order to remain objective – translate that which appears to us in this story as the correct Buddhist feeling by transferring the whole thing into the Christian sense. What would the two stories sound like in a Christian sense? They don't exist, but let's try to translate them and thereby make the difference very clear.

A Christian sage would say something like this: Take a look at the chariot – when you look at it, you see the shafts, the body, the wheels and whatever else is on the outside. The chariot seems to you to be only name and form, but try to see if you can travel on a name or a form; you can't get anywhere in the world on that. Nevertheless, although only name and form are there for the visible, there is something else besides the body of the wagon, the shaft and the wheels and so on, which signifies a reality when a wagon stands before us and not just its parts. As I said, there is no such Christian legend, but a Christian-minded person felt this when he coined the phrase “parts”, which the scientifically minded person often has in his hand, but for which he lacks the context, when he said:

Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

Goethe, who coined the word, knew that the spiritual bond was a reality.

And now the second parable: Imagine the mango fruit hanging from the tree above and the one that has rotted below. Not only do they have the same name and form, but these also live in the same way in the old and new fruit. However, what makes this mango fruit the same as the other, rotten one is in the forces, in the elements, which are supersensible and which pass from the first mango fruit into the second.

Thus, in the psychological experiences that a person goes through from life to life, we see a central ego at work, a central soul being. And when we see a person in a later life, what he experiences as fate, what abilities and talents he possesses, and so on, is not only the effect of the causes of previous lives, but there is a central, cohesive being that passes from the previous embodiment into the new one.

Thus we see how the idea of repeated earthly lives - re-embodiment or reincarnation - must be brought to life through the fundamental Christian idea. Those who take Christianity seriously are not afraid that the foundations of Christianity could falter when new truths emerge in people's view. Christianity is so strong that it can give rise to feelings such as those just characterized, that it – like all other truths – can also tolerate the truth of repeated lives on earth, and even accept it willingly when human thinking has progressed to the point where this law can be impressed upon it. But then the fundamental impulse of Christianity will assert itself: the reality of the soul-spiritual, which passes through the various earthly lives as a central core.

Thus we have presented such a contrast that can make clear to us the fundamental difference between Buddhism and Christianity. We must grasp both worldviews in their basic sentiments [and not in their dogmas], because one could argue about dogma ideas and concepts not for days, but for months and years. Whether Nirvana is the same as Christian beatitude, for instance, is a question that could be argued about endlessly and which would lead to logical and dialectical quibbling. But the point is never to enter into discussions about the highest concepts, but rather to consider how religious or other ideological impulses fit into the soul, into the heart, into the hopes and certainties of life. In another, [even clearer] way, the same thing confronts us when we allow the basic impulse that inspired the great Buddha to take effect on us. I deliberately say “the great Buddha”, because to those who are able to penetrate what, like the last dawn of all pre-Christian thought, the Buddha produced as a worldview, this Buddha appears as a great, exalted figure.

The greatest influence on the great Buddha seems to us to be the legend that says: We are told - and the legend tells us more truly than any external history - that the Buddha initially spent his life in such a way, through the care of his parents, that he only got to know the joys of life, but not its suffering. But once he was led out of his parents' castle, and there he saw life in its reality. There he saw a sick person. Only now did he learn that life does not only reveal abundant health, now he learned that the same thing that calls illness into life also brings it into life. From this he learned the meaning of suffering for life. And he learned the meaning of suffering through further examples that came his way in life. He saw an old man and said to himself: old age is suffering - as he had first said to himself: illness is suffering. - And finally, when he was shown a corpse, he said to himself in the face of the end of life: death is suffering.

And in further developing this impulse, we see how Buddha recognized suffering in the act of coming into existence. He said: birth is suffering, illness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering. Being separated from what one loves is suffering, being united with what one does not love is suffering, not being able to achieve what one desires is suffering. And from this, the great Buddha derived the essence of his doctrine of salvation.

Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation in that it says: It is the urge for existence, the thirst for existence, that leads that which is better than this world into the world. Only through the salvation of this world can man enter into real higher states of existence. But he can only achieve this by fighting the thirst for existence that leads him into earthly embodiment. Let us not grasp things only theoretically, but also emotionally; let us see the great Buddha with the great, wide heart full of love that he had. Let us grasp him as he stands opposite a corpse that represents the end of life for him, and he says to himself: “Death is suffering.” In the twilight of the old, pre-Christian world view, a corpse becomes the symbol of suffering for the great Buddha, the symbol that this thirst for earthly life must be fought. He teaches man to turn away from this earthly life; he teaches him to rise to what beckons him as Nirvana.

And now let us go back 600 years and then forward again 600 years and then take another look at humanity's view of life. 600 years before our era, we have the work of the great Buddha in India. Then, 600 years after our era, we no longer have to do with the Buddha, but with simple, naive minds. Like Buddha, they fix their eyes on a corpse – on the corpse of Christ Jesus, who died on the cross and who represents the Mystery of Golgotha for them. What is this corpse for these simple people 600 years after the founding of Christianity? The same as was once the symbol of a religion of redemption for the Buddha is now, for these simple people who received the Christian impulse 1200 years after Buddha, not the symbol of a religion of redemption that turns away from all earthly things, but the symbol of a religion of resurrection, for at the sight of this corpse, the certainty descends into human hearts and human souls that all suffering and all death is the gateway to the victory of the spirit over all that is physical, to liberation from death.

There was no greater, no more incisive impulse than the Christ impulse, which came into the development of mankind between the two epochs: between the epoch when even the great Buddha could look at a corpse and only find the idea of deliverance from the body, and that epoch when one could again look at a corpse, but now saw in this corpse a symbol that the highest and best, the most valuable that lives within man, will always be the victor over the physical, will always rise, will rise above the physical. This is how one must characterize the impulse, because only through it can one approach the impulse of Christianity in the right way, through feeling, as it should be, and not through theoretical ideas. And if we now want to grasp this impulse of Christianity in the right sense, we can still do so through something else.

Basically, the pre-Christian religions do not know something that only through Christianity has entered fully into the world view of humanity. Here again we can look to Buddhism. If we examine and understand it, we find that it has crystallized out of one of the highest concepts of the human being, the concept of the Bodhisattva. What is that, a bodhisattva? Well, if you want to grasp this concept of the bodhisattva, in which Buddhism sees one of the highest guides in the spiritual life of humanity, you have to look back a little at the developmental history of the human mind and soul. We must be clear about the fact that just as we live today in relation to our state of mind, this state that we carry within us is also subject to development. The way we see the things around us today and how we combine our senses with our minds – that is our present state of mind – this soul nature has developed slowly and gradually. And anyone who, without the means of spiritual science but only through thinking, looks back at the cultural development of humanity will become aware of how, in earlier times, the human soul was in a very different state.

Now, I would first like to characterize how spiritual research has to understand this earlier state. We look back into ancient times, into the times of prehistoric human development - into times to which no historical documents lead back. Man did not see the world in the same way as he does today, for example in science; in those times, a kind of clairvoyant state of mind still existed. People today are annoyed when clairvoyant states of mind are spoken of, and perhaps rightly so, because the word is so often misused today, and it is often understood to mean something highly superstitious. But what is really meant by it is quite different from the state of mind we have today from waking up to falling asleep, and the state of unconsciousness during sleep. In ancient times, there was a third state of consciousness between waking and sleeping. All that remains of this third state for today's humanity is what we must call a kind of atavism, namely the dream state. The only thing that ancient clairvoyance had in common with today's dream consciousness was the pictorial, the symbolic. But while today's dream images usually appear fragmented and chaotic, the content of what was perceived clairvoyantly could be related to spiritual realities that lie behind our sensual world, so that we can say: In an intermediate state between waking and sleeping, the spiritual world was an immediate experience for people of ancient times. Man looked into spiritual reality. And therein lies the meaning of human development: that man has descended from that state to our present consciousness, where we have bought the possibility, through the surrender of ancient clairvoyance, to grasp the world with our intellectual concepts, with our ideas.

But development continues, and in the future, this present consciousness will again unite with the old clairvoyant consciousness. Just as today some individuals undergo a development of soul through which they develop a clairvoyant consciousness in addition to the external object consciousness, so later all of humanity will attain an intellect that simultaneously functions as a clairvoyant consciousness. So we can say that people who lived in ancient, very ancient cultures could still look back to a time in the development of humanity when their forefathers had knowledge that came from direct observation of the divine spiritual world. And in those most ancient times, the leaders in regard to such knowledge were those people whom, in the sense of Buddhism, we call the first Bodhisattvas. Then the clairvoyant powers of people increasingly declined. And those peoples who particularly felt the decline of these abilities, as was the case with the inhabitants of ancient India, incorporated this looking back to the origin of man out of the spiritual into their feeling, and they said: In the way we now look at the world with our ordinary day-to-day consciousness, we basically do not live in a way that corresponds to the innermost core of our being.

People in earlier times could look back into the spiritual world to which we actually belong; but today this is only possible for those who undergo a special spiritual development. The ancient Indian people saw behind the physical world the old spiritual home of man, which could well have been seen in the past, but which can no longer be seen now. They felt this so strongly that they said: Everything that today's consciousness beholds is Maya, the great illusion, the great deception; behind it is what the ancestors beheld, what our souls themselves beheld in previous bodies. And what our fathers handed down to us in the teachings of ancient times contains the truth about the spiritual home of man. And so the old Indian strove out of Maya, the great deception, up to the spiritual home, to the spirit to which man felt connected when he said to himself in his soul: The spiritual that lives in me is one with the spiritual that lives and weaves through the world as Brahman.

That was the mood in ancient India, but humanity has always retained an echo of this ancient wisdom, and that is what we are considering here. If we look only at external evidence, we see that what people in pre-Christian times had as religions goes back to what people had as ancient wisdom, which comes from [ancient] clairvoyance. And one also sees that since those times, from age to age, great leaders of humanity must always arise who have within themselves, in their soul, the content of the ancient wisdom and truth that governs them. Thus the ancient wisdom lives on in the leaders and teachers of humanity, the bodhisattvas. And in the sense of Buddhism, one would have to regard Buddha himself, Zarathustra, Hermes, Orpheus and others as such bodhisattvas. They were initiated into the primal wisdom that they had within them as truth, and that meant that their souls were connected to the spiritual worlds. Thus, Buddhism looks up to the great leaders who, from epoch to epoch, have passed on the ancient wisdom, because “wisdom” and “truth” are roughly what the word “bodhisattva” means.

The Bodhisattva dignity is achieved by the fact that man gradually develops to such an extent that his soul can absorb the wisdom that characterizes the spiritual home of man. When a person has progressed from embodiment to embodiment to the point of becoming a bodhisattva, the next step – the highest rank he can achieve, so to speak – is the Buddha level; one goes from being a bodhisattva to being a Buddha. But the Buddha is no longer called upon to descend to earth again, but after becoming a Buddha, he has arrived where the thirst for life in the body is extinguished, where salvation occurs, where he no longer remains connected to the physical world, where he no longer lives in it. Thus the last development, so to speak, of the pre-Christian world view recognizes in the Bodhisattva the human being who stands at the boundary of that which still remains connected to earthly existence. In the moment when the human being rises one step higher, he no longer needs to remain connected to the earth. However, this world view does not yet truly know the concept of the Christ. What does the concept of the Christ consist of?

The Christ concept is higher than the bodhisattva and the Buddha concepts. We arrive at the Christ concept only when we turn our spiritual gaze to an inner experience of the human soul, an experience that is hinted at in the Christian Gospels and that we can call inner resurrection or rebirth. Usually, this inner rebirth is presented as something quite abstract. However, we need only consider a few aspects of the human soul in order to realize that this inner rebirth refers to something quite concrete. We need only consider the individual elements that form the basis of human soul life. In his outer life, man presents himself to us with his perceptions, feelings, emotions and volitional impulses. We see how he draws his ideas about the world around him from this soul, which lives in drives, passions and other impulses, and how he can ascend ever higher and higher to purer and truer concepts. Who would not admit that man feels within himself the urge and drive for ever-increasing perfection? One need only imagine the demands of all noble idealists of humanity, and one must say: These demands set high ideals, and people also live them out in methodical acts of noble human compassion and so on. Therefore, one must say: Man can, as it were, rise above himself.

We are dealing here with a fact of the human soul life that, when considered in the human sense, cannot always be called abstract. This is also admitted when one says: something lives in us like a second ego, a higher self, to which one can grow beyond the lower everyday self. Sometimes one admits in the abstract that Goethe's saying is right:

From the force that binds all beings,
the human being frees himself who overcomes himself.

But this higher self is usually imagined as something bloodless, colorless, something that for most people does not have the same immediacy and reality as those expressions of the human being that are tied to the person as he or she appears to us in life. He comes to us with all his feelings, impulses, with everything he does as a natural being, with his blood, with all the forces that pulsate through his body, with everything that nature has given him as a personality. If we want to summarize all this, we can say: Just as the human being comes to us as a natural being, so is he endowed with the forces that permeate the whole world. Just as he comes to us as a personality, so has he become through the forces of the world.

How colourless and abstract, in contrast, is what people often have as the content of their higher impulses. And how concrete it is when a person flies into a rage because of his blood. If, on the other hand, you set up an ideal of the higher self, then it usually remains quite abstract - so colourless and bloodless that it seems quite consumptive to us. For example, what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” could be described as a consumptive ideal. A bloodless idealism! Now, against what so often confronts us as bloodless abstractions, we need only hold up a word from the development of Christian impulses that is effective, Paul's word:

Not I, but the Christ in me.

With this, we have mentioned that which is able to describe the essence of Christianity in the deepest sense.

We have before us the human being as a natural personality; we see how he stands with his affects, his passions, as a confluence of all the forces that permeate and interweave the whole world. He stands there, composed into a small world, like a microcosm in the big world, in the macrocosm. And now we see how this human being is inspired by the pursuit of perfection, how he wants to experience something within himself, as it is expressed in the aforementioned saying by Goethe:

From the force that binds all beings,
man frees himself who overcomes himself.

What initially presents itself to us as a natural personality, composed like a microcosm from the forces of the world, now strives beyond itself in concepts and ideas, which may initially appear in abstract ideals as man's better self. But then we can imagine that these abstract ideals, these higher wisdoms, the highest ideals, which man can only have by rising above his natural existence, now permeate this higher self in the same way ing, and becoming an expression of that which the world experiences and interweaves spiritually, as spiritual, as world-moral, just as the physical-sensual of the personality is an expression of the whole macrocosm.

When, as if by lightning, a world being, a world essence, strikes into the highest ideals of man, which is conceived just as real in the spiritual-supersensible as the external world forces are conceived as real, which, acting in from the macrocosm, have put together the human natural personality as a microcosm Then we have the human being who frees himself – the human being who in this way rises above himself, who now lives in his higher self, which otherwise remains an abstraction, consisting of unfilled, bloodless concepts that do not have an immediate effect. Now the higher impulse that has taken hold of this person is at work; something spiritual lives in him that will become his higher personality. Now he not only has abstract ideals, the highest moral ideas within him, but he also carries a second, spiritual personality within him. Now that to which he can rise as to a highest is also permeated by spiritual personality, just as the natural man was formerly permeated by abstract ideals.

When we feel that this can happen in a person, then we understand the words of St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” This Christ in me can permeate and penetrate everything that is and remains an abstraction of a higher self. Thus, through Christ, we ascend to a higher personality. While the Bodhisattvas are those teaching guides of man who lead him to impersonal higher wisdom, to abstract concepts and ideas, the Christ impulse does not merely lead man to an impersonal wisdom, but to a higher personality within himself. This concept, however, only came into the world through the establishment of Christianity. Everything that happens in the world has its causes. And when today, through a development such as that indicated in the writing “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, man rises to spiritual insight, to spiritual clairvoyance, then he has this higher personality directly before him as a reality, like a new man in man - the Christ in ourselves.

But now there comes a moment for the real clairvoyant in which a word is spiritually fulfilled that Goethe used about the external, physical facts of nature and then also applied to the highest entity in man, namely the word:

If the eye were not sun-like,
How could we behold the light?

Goethe's point, with regard to the external, is: My eye is there, and sees the sun; if it did not possess the power of perceiving light, we could not see the light. But he also says:

The eye is formed by light for light.

We could not have eyes if light did not live and weave through the world: the eye is formed by light. – The Schopenhauerian truth “The world is my idea”, that is, that the world of light and color is the idea of the eye, is only half the truth. The whole truth is only found when we add: Through the world my idea is created, so that when we use the eye formed by the sun, we look into the world in which the sun is. - And in the same way we can say: As no eye without the sun, so no divine knowledge and feeling in us without God as objective God in the outside world.

In the same way, the Christ in us can be experienced objectively as a personality. And this event, where we experience our higher self in such a way that we can say: “Not we, but the Christ in us,” becomes a concrete experience for us. Then our inner soul existence is transformed, then we have become a different person, a reborn person, and through this experience a new, spiritual eye has been opened for us. And then we also see that the Christ in us needs the Christ outside of us, the subjective spiritual Christ in us needs the objective, historical Christ. To deny the Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha is logically the same as denying the sun that the eye has formed out of an otherwise indifferent organism, as Goethe said.

The fact that we can experience the Christ in us is formed in us as an inner experience from our soul organism, just as our physical eye is formed from sunlight. So what our inner spiritual eye is, is formed by the real, objective Christ, and those who truly experience this, not just in feeling but through clairvoyant consciousness, experience this as their most direct knowledge, which could be characterized as the clairvoyant looking up from the spiritual personality of Christ in us to the real, objective, historical Christ. We need no gospel, no historical document, we need only the true, genuine gaze of the clairvoyant, and we know that the embodiment of that being from whom the impulse for the “Christ in us” came has lived in the course of human development. That is the objective, not merely the subjective mystical experience of the Christ.

But we know something else. We know: When, under the compulsion of logical thinking, the doctrine of repeated lives on earth gradually becomes implanted in the process of human development and thus in all earthly life, then we have the Christ before us clairvoyantly as the historical Christ, who triggers the inner view in us so that we can look at future embodiments. And now we do not say, as in Buddhism: the fewer earthly embodiments, the better for the person, because the sooner he will be released from existence - but we say: as long as the Earth has a mission to educate, we, by being embodied on earth, we absorb more and more of the Christ impulse, and the Christ impulse in us becomes ever stronger and more comprehensive; higher and higher we carry it in us in every new embodiment. And so we look into a future in which more and more of us can fulfill the word, “Not I, but the Christ in me.” Therefore, we look upon future embodiments, upon our future earth-lives, as upon lives more and more permeated with the Christ, and we understand why in the pre-Christian world-picture, even in Buddhism, only an idea of redemption could arise - the Christ-impulse had not yet come, which brings ever new and new fruitfulness into every earth-life. On the contrary, the point had even been reached when it was no longer possible to perfect life on earth further. The Christ Impulse gives meaning to earthly embodiments and to the lives of human beings on earth, whereas Buddhism could no longer provide any meaning for this.

And if we now look at the history of the development of Christianity, the question is answered: How did Christianity come into the world, not the Christ, but Christianity? Anyone who wants to look at history objectively will have to say: Paul contributed the most to the development of Christianity. Let us take a look at him. Was he convinced by what had happened in the world as a physical fact or by what was described to him? As a contemporary of the events that took place in the physical world, he was able to hear everything that happened to him, but what he was able to absorb into his soul from these Christian ideas was unsuitable for making these external events appear to him in such a light that he could have changed his soul to Christianity. But then the event occurred that scientific theology has not yet been able to interpret. What was that event? Externally, what Paul could not have believed through any perception or observation in the physical world became an immediate certainty for him through what he saw supernaturally, in the spirit. No message from the physical world could be decisive for him - but it was a supernatural experience, a superphysical event. And this convinced him, not merely of the existence of some Christ, but that the Christ had experienced the event that, when translated into human life, means: In every human being, the spiritual core of the being will conquer the death of the outer covering of the lower human being, because “if Christ had not risen, our faith would be vain and vain our preaching”. Paul appealed to the risen Christ because it had become clear to him that in the Mystery of Golgotha that spiritual sun had appeared which makes the inner Christ in man possible in the first place. For Paul, the starting point of Christian development was a supersensible event that gave him the impulse to work for Christianity.

Thus, in relation to its first great teacher, Christianity emerged from a supersensible impulse, and only later were the Gospels able to provide what people needed to clearly visualize the Christ event in their minds. This event can be renewed forever, even today; if man observes the laws of inner human development, he provides himself with the opportunity to relive the event of Damascus within himself. Then he can experience the objective Christ spiritually as truth; then he can begin to believe the Gospels without needing to have historical proof, because what he beholds in spirit, what clairvoyant consciousness gives him, he then finds confirmed by the Gospel writings.

Thus, the essence of Christianity is to be sought within the human soul. And the strongest impulse for the spread of Christianity is to be found in a supersensible event of knowledge. Through this event, every human being, so to speak, immediately sees the necessity for the most important impulse in the historical development of humanity to have been the appearance of the Christ Himself. And then one truly understands that in the person of Jesus, the Christ lived as an entity that cannot be compared to any other. While the bodhisattvas progress from incarnation to incarnation like all other people until they have fulfilled their task and become a Buddha, we can only record one single life on earth for this entity that lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. And [as in the successive generations the same blood passes from father to son], so from the one Christ who lived through the event of Golgotha - this is a fact that presents itself to the higher consciousness - a spiritual impulse goes out to all those who find the way to this Christ.

This idea that the Christ is connected by a spiritual bond to the one who finds the way to him – just as the descendant is connected to the ancestor by the bond of blood – this idea not only establishes a mysticism of Christianity, but a Christianity that can be described as a “mystical fact”. There is not only a Christian mysticism, an inner mystical experience in the sense of Christianity, but what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era is a fact that can only be understood through mysticism. Just as the course of blood through the succession of generations can be understood by natural science, so that which happened through Christ can only be grasped through spiritual realization, through the wisdom of mysticism. Through spiritual realization one can comprehend that “spiritual blood” flows from Christ Jesus into the souls of those who find their way to him.

I am with you all days until the end of the earth cycles.

To recognize and see how the impulse of Christ flows within the development of the earth and thus he himself flows – this in turn can be converted into sensations, and one will feel how such contradictions as the following allow us to look into the depths of the development of worldviews.

We have a passage handed down from Buddha that can be compared with the saying just quoted: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. Buddha said to his disciples: “When I look back on earlier earth lives, I know that my soul has gone through many earth lives and has undergone this or that experience. It has acquired abilities and now built my body, this outer, physical body. This has become my destiny because the soul built it and led it to such places where it could experience all this. So I see in my present physical body the results of the spiritual forces that I have gathered. And he called the body a temple built out of divine powers, by way of the human individuality. [And further said Buddha:] The temple of my body is the result of the previous lives I have gone through. But I know full well that since I became the Buddha, this temple has been standing, and it is the last time that my inner powers have built such a temple. I feel exactly how the beams are already breaking, the columns bursting; this is the last body that my soul will inhabit - the last body, because I have become a Buddha.

Deliverance from the body, that is what the Buddha teaches. Let us translate this into feeling and contrast it with another saying, namely the saying where Christ Jesus also spoke to his disciples about the temple of his body. But how did He speak? Did He also say, like Buddha, that this is the last existence and that everything that led to this body will dissolve? No, the Christ foresaw that what He had become in this body would give the impulse to continue working through all earthly existence: “Break down this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.” That is the great contrast: on the one hand, the breaking of the Temple and the desire to break in order to bid farewell to the earth, and on the other hand, the contemplation of the structure of the Temple as the starting point for all subsequent human salvation. And for this stands the expression: Break down this Temple, the impulse is already there, which continues to work.

Thus we must not see the impulses that proceed from the Christ Jesus and that form the essence of Christianity in abstract terms, but we must transform the concepts so that they become sensations and feelings. Then, precisely in the realization of repeated earthly lives, we will feel the full significance of this Christ impulse. We will look at the human lives of the future and see in Christ the starting point for an ever higher and higher fulfillment of the destiny of humanity in the future.

And so we can say: We look back to ancient, pre-Christian times, to the wisdom that stands at the starting point of humanity, but which has gradually been lost until people had only the last remnants of it. Then came a time when the greatest impulse, the Christ impulse, struck humanity, which is a new starting point and leads people into the spiritual world, bringing the soul the possibility of ever higher and higher ascent, of ever higher and higher life, until man is so far advanced in terms of his earthly existence that he can ascend in spirit to the heights of all earthly existence. Nothing fulfills us as significantly, deeply and powerfully as this, which we can understand as a characteristic of the actual mission of humanity within our earthly existence. There stands the human being; he sees himself surrounded by the physical-sensual world, he strives for perfection, he sees ideals above him, he knows that through them he reaches up into a spiritual world. And he knows that from this spiritual world, spiritual forces and entities extend into his existence. But man cannot live his way up into the spiritual worlds with mere abstract concepts and ideals, because just as he is here in the physical world as a personality, so he must also educate himself as a personality into the spiritual world. Therefore, only a model personality can lead him there - that is the Christ-personality!

Thus man looks up to Christ as the Bringer of the spiritual world and says: By raising my own self to you, by ever more fully realizing St. Paul's saying, “Christ in me,” I draw down from the spiritual worlds the most intimate and potent impulses, clothe them in my human being and transmit them into our physical world, into our sense world. I am the mediator between the spiritual world and the world of the senses. I bring spiritual things into the physical world. I permeate and structure the physical with that which comes from the spiritual world. The Christ is my helper and model in this, the true Christ, who is just as necessary for the inner man as the outer sun is necessary for the physical eye, and who, as an historical being, walked on the outer physical plane at the beginning of our era.

We then feel as human beings in the world: we can hint at our mission on earth by saying that we should thoroughly imbue with a Christian spirit those words in which I would like to summarize what today's reflection has revealed about the relationship between man and the physical world on the one hand and the spiritual world on the other:

Man's sense is overwhelmed
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The rich abundance of matter.
It flows into the depths of the soul
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They find each other in the human heart
To a reality full of wisdom.