The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear Friends,

In our lecture yesterday, we tried to relate man to the Cosmos. Our aim was to create a foundation for a deep and full understanding of the super-sensible being of man. To-day, I want to carry a little further what was said in that lecture, inasmuch as we have also to consider the super-sensible nature of man when his physical and etheric bodies have been laid aside, when, that is, he has passed through the gate of death and is traversing the path which stretches between death and a new birth.

I propose, therefore, to give to-day—dealing more externally as it were, with the super-sensible—a kind of description of what reveals itself to Imaginative perception in regard to this existence between death and rebirth. This will provide a basis for under- standing man in his soul and spirit.

We must, however, be clear from the outset that it is really quite incorrect to speak of the physical being of man apart from the soul and spirit. The physical part of man, the physical body that we perceive in the world of sense, is permeated through and through by soul and spirit. The form of the brow, the form of the features and countenance,—everything that belongs to the human form, man only has, inasmuch as it is given him by spiritual forces. We need not therefore be surprised that those who are possessed of the faculty of spiritual sight continue to speak of the “form” or “figure” of the human being even after he has passed through the gate of death. For it is indeed so; to Imaginative cognition a man who has passed through death reveals a form. In comparison with something physically observed it is, of course, no more than a kind of shadow-picture; it is, nevertheless, clear and very impressive. The first thing that strikes us about this form or figure is that it is “external”. Our idea of man in his soul and spirit must of course be moral and spiritual; we shall however find that we can unfold no genuine and sound conception of super-sensible man unless, to begin with, we speak of these Imaginations, these picture-forms, which man still “wears” as it were, even after he has passed through the gate of death.

At death the physical body is laid aside. We need not stay to consider what happens to it, for the particular way in which dissolution takes place is of far less importance than people think. The dissolution of the physical body, whether it be through burning or through decomposition, is a concern only of the other human beings. It is of no great importance for the life after death; we need, therefore, only say here that the physical body dissolves away into outer Nature, into the forces of outer Nature. The etheric body also dissolves, quite soon after death. The two outer manifestations of man's being having been thus laid aside, something releases itself from these two enveloping sheaths (the word “sheath” is not really quite accurate). Those who are sufficiently endowed with Imaginative cognition are able to perceive what it is that is thus released after death from the two sheaths. It is a figure or form—a form which, to begin with, bears some resemblance to the physical form of the human being. But this spirit-form, as I will call it, is involved in a constant process of transformation. I have spoken of the life between death and a new birth on many occasions and from many different points of view, for only so is it possible to develop an adequate idea of it. To-day I propose to speak from still another point of view. By bringing together what is given at different times, you will be able gradually to build up a complete picture.

This spirit-form of the human being is involved, as we said, in a constant process of change. More and more it approaches what can only be described by saying: The spirit-form becomes one great “physiognomy.” To the Imaginative sight possessed by the Initiate and also by one who has passed through the gate of death, a kind of physiognomy makes its appearance. But this physiognomy is the whole human being, not merely part of him. The whole human being, in his spirit-form, presents a physiognomy that is the expression of his being in its moral and spiritual inwardness. After death a bad man will not have the same appearance as a good man. A man who has made strenuous efforts during his life on Earth will not look the same as one who has lived thoughtlessly or wantonly. But we do not find this expressed merely in the “countenance.” In fact, the actual countenance loses much of the physiognomical expression that was stamped upon it in physical life, and what is retained tends to become more and more indefinite. In contrast to this, the other parts of the body become singularly expressive—particularly the region where the inner organs of breathing are situated. The physiognomical form assumed by this region reveals the permanent qualities in a man's character. The whole breast system takes on a definite physiognomical appearance within the spirit-form after death and reveals whether the man was possessed of courage or whether he was timid, whether he approached life with a certain boldness and bravery or whether he invariably shrank away from the buffets of life, and so forth.

The arms and hands also become peculiarly expressive after death. From the arms and hands one can, in effect, read the biography of the human being between birth and death—most clearly of all from the hands, which even in physical life are full of significance and divulge much to an intelligent observer. The way in which a man moves his fingers, how he holds out his hand to us, whether he only offers his finger tips or gives a warm hand-shake—all this can tell a very great deal. Much can also be learned by studying the forms assumed by the hands when a man is sitting quietly, or when he is at his work. Such things pass unnoticed, as a rule; but human beings become much more interesting, when we observe what they do with their hands and fingers, for here they divulge what they really are. After death this is true in a far higher degree; the life-history can be read from the appearance assumed by the arms and hands.

It is the same with other organs. Everything becomes expressive, everything becomes physiognomy. After death the human being wears his moral-spiritual physiognomy.

Yesterday's lecture showed us how the human being is built up and “formed” by the Cosmos and how the skin and sense-organs are an expression of the form that is inscribed into the cosmic ether. After death, the form that is given to man by the skin which encloses him becomes a physiognomical expression of his moral and spiritual being; and it remains so for a considerable time.

As human beings begin to find their way into this new kind of life, they meet there other human beings with whom, in earthly life, they have had a companionship of spirit, mind and heart. And no pretence is possible any longer between them. For what each man is, and what his feeling is toward his fellow-man, is faithfully expressed in the physiognomy I have described. During this period of the life after death—it follows the period of “trial,” of which I do not propose to speak to-day—men live together with those with whom destiny has in any way connected them in the last earthly life,—or in any other earthly life. They learn to know one another thoroughly, for they behold the physiognomical forms of which we have been speaking. Life consists, in this period, in learning to know those with whom one is connected by destiny. You must try to imagine what a close and intimate mutual scrutiny this is. The word sounds perhaps a little commonplace, but it expresses the reality. Each human being stands fully revealed before the other, with the whole meaning of their common destinies unveiled. In this way they are continually going past one another, meeting one another.

It is during this period of existence that the human being who has become such a “physiognomy” learns to know the Beings of the Third Hierarchy—the Angels, Archangels and Archai. For these Beings are themselves always, by their inherent nature, physiognomy. They have come forth from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies and let their whole nature of spirit and soul be impressed upon their spirit-form, making it thus perceptible to Imaginative vision. This contact with the Beings of the Third Hierarchy is thus an experience which is added to that of association with our fellowmen with whom we are connected by destiny. The spectacle of all the other human beings with whom we are connected by destiny is, of course, full of variety. Among them are, for example, some who on Earth would have preferred to have us at the opposite side of the globe, but are nevertheless bound to us by destiny. We know exactly what feelings they have harboured about us and what they have done to us. The spectacle is indeed one of very great variety! And among these wandering forms move the Beings of the Third Hierarchy, figures radiant and shining like the Sun. The words I use, are, of course, comparative; one has after all no other possibility than to employ earthly language. But we are speaking here of absolute reality, when we tell how during this period after death man meets the other human beings who are bound to him by destiny. Strange to say, it is only those with whom he is connected by destiny that a man can perceive and understand. Human souls to whom he is not actually bound by destiny remain to all intents invisible to him. He has no means of reading their moral-spiritual physiognomy. He does not notice them,—nor can he, for it is precisely the link of destiny which gives one the power to see. If it were the fate of human beings here on Earth to see with their physical eyes as they see in this period after death, they would not see very much; for here on Earth men like to be passive in their seeing and let the objects rise up before them. In our present epoch of civilisation people are little inclined to bestir themselves, in order to be awake to their environment. Many of those who are devoured to-day by a passion for the cinema, many of those who crave for impressions to which they can passively surrender themselves, would, if they were equipped here on Earth with the same kind of sight as after death, not see their fellowmen at all. For after death our sight of other human souls depends entirely upon our attentiveness, which has then, of course, been implanted in us by the way in which destiny binds us to them. The first period of the life after death is thus a time when we learn to know one another; and during this time we learn also to know how souls are received in the spiritual world by the Beings of the Third Hierarchy. We behold the joy with which the Angels, Archangels and Archai receive the spirit-forms of human beings,—or again, we perceive how little joy they experience in meeting them. We observe what impression human souls make upon those Beings of the Hierarchies who stand nearest to them in the invisible world.

Then comes another period. The souls who have been learning to know one another, who have been continually gazing upon one another, begin now, in a way that belongs to the life after death, to have understanding the one for the other. They begin to understand spiritually the moral-spiritual physiognomies.

The first period after death is really a life of memories pure and simple. Each single human being lives together with those to whom he belongs. It is of course an existence that is of the “present” in the sense that we live and move and act amid all that is taking place between the souls of men and the Beings of the Third Hierarchy; nevertheless we are living all the time in a kind of remembrance of earthly life. But now comes a time when we begin to have spiritual understanding, when we begin to grasp—in the manner of the spiritual world, of course—what these moral and spiritual physiognomies of our fellowmen signify. We learn to understand our fellowmen in such a way that we can say to ourselves: This physiognomy I see before me reveals such and such, it points back to certain phases of destiny which he and I shared in common—and so on. We have of course experienced this already in the first period after death, when we beheld our common destinies. But now in the second period the experience is of a kind that leads us to say: Having lived our life together in a manner that is now revealed to us through mutual understanding of our physiognomies, our future life together must take such and such a course. We begin to understand the possibility of a future for our common destiny; we begin to have a feeling for how relationships that have been begun in earthly life may develop further. We see—as it were in perspective—how the woven threads of destiny will work themselves out in the future, the threads of common destiny which are revealed in the physiognomical spirit-forms of which I have spoken. This experience becomes more and more intimate—so intimate indeed that there is a “growing together,” a veritable “growing together” in soul and spirit.

As the soul passes on further in this phase of existence, what was on Earth the most expressive part of man's being is found to be gradually disappearing. The head disappears, dissolving away in a kind of spiritual mist. In proportion as the head thus disappears from view, a change comes over the features of the physiognomical spirit-form. The features alter: something comes to view there now which points as it were from the past on to the future. At this time the human being is borne into the Spirit indwelling the planetary movements, the Spirit indwelling the forces of the planetary spheres; until the moment comes when human beings who belong together approach the spiritual Sun, The planetary forces bring them into the spiritual Sun; and now all the experiences they have undergone together in the past, and the germs too of future experience, are carried with them into the spiritual Sun. It is really childish to think of the Sun as a globe of gas out there in the universe. This is merely the aspect of the Sun that is revealed to the Earth. When we behold it with the eyes of the spirit, with the eyes of the soul, which we have after death, looking upon it from without in the great Universe, the Sun shows itself as a spiritual Being, or rather as a colony of spiritual Beings. And there, in among the spiritual Beings, move the human souls who have passed into the spiritual Sun, not merely each with his own spirit-content, but all of them carrying thither too their related destinies. And this whole “system” of human souls, together with the judgements passed upon them by the Beings of the Second and Third Hierarchies, shines out into the universe, into the Cosmos.

To form a true conception of the Sun, we must think along the following lines. If we look at the Sun from the surface of the Earth it appears to us like a shining, radiant orb. We could make a drawing of it. The usual idea is that if we were to go up in a balloon and inspect the Sun from high above the Earth, it would have exactly the same appearance as it has when we look at it from the Earth. This, however, is quite erroneous. If we wanted to make a picture, a sense-perceptible picture of how the Sun looks to spiritual vision, we should have to show spiritual radiations pouring out from the Sun into the wide spaces of the Cosmos. We see from the Earth only that aspect of the Sun which shines towards the Earth. But something now appears to spiritual sight which gradually changes until it becomes audible to spiritual hearing, becomes a note, a motif—oftentimes grand and imposing—in the Cosmic Music. It comes from what the souls of human beings have experienced on Earth and are now experiencing after death. All this is carried into the Sun existence and radiates thence into the Cosmos. When this happens, the human being—in his spirit-form, of course,—has himself already assumed the form of the Sun. The words sound strange, but facts must be described as they are, for we are telling of realities. All that was, after passage through the gate of death, physiognomy, spirit-form, is now as it were “rounded off,” and when the human being has arrived—speaking spiritually—in the Sun, he has himself become a “spirit-sphere.” Within this spirit-sphere the Cosmos is reflected. Our whole being becomes a spiritual sense-organ. But the impressions we receive are no longer impressions of Earth. We have become, as it were, all eye—eye of the spirit—and we receive in the eye of the spirit the impression of the whole Cosmos. We feel ourselves one with the whole wide Universe. And what we were before, on Earth—that we feel as something outside us. The whole Universe is reflected in us as in an eye of the spirit, and we feel ourselves one with the destinies we have experienced, both in ourselves and in connection with other human souls.

Having lived for a time in this phase of existence, we pass gradually into the sphere of the First Hierarchy—the sphere of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; and we unite ourselves with them. Thus, we are united first with the Third Hierarchy, when we move among those souls who are bound to us by destiny, going about among them in our moral and spiritual physiognomy. Then we are carried by the planetary forces into the spiritual Sun existence, where we unite with the Second Hierarchy, but are still outside the First. Finally, when our own Sun existence has made us feel one with the whole Cosmos, we unite with the First Hierarchy, with Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. And then our interest begins to awaken in souls other than those with whom destiny has already connected us, souls who only now, in the life between death and new birth, enter for the first time our sphere of destiny. We become able to perceive human souls who will in future lives be connected with us.

Meanwhile, under the influence of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, we begin to see mighty changes taking place in those with whom we were already connected by destiny. The closer the connection, the more perceptible the changes. To begin with, I will describe them more from their outer aspect.

When we look with physical eyes at someone who is walking, we see how he puts first one foot in front, then the other and so moves forward. As we watch him, we see what we might call a series of “momentary exposures.” But to those who with Imaginative perception look at a human being in this sphere of existence after death, it is as though in the form which the legs assume with every step, is contained the whole destiny of the man, the destiny he is undergoing and has himself moulded in his earthly life. Nor is destiny carried only in the legs; in the arms too we bear the content of our destiny, namely, the good and bad deeds we have done to our fellow-men. The way a human being moves reveals something that calls for a passing of judgement in the Universe, and the judgement then becomes a part of his destiny. And in the blood-stream, seen with the eye of the spirit in this sphere of existence, is revealed the inner destiny which has been created by the human being's attitude to life, by the way in which he reacted inwardly to his experiences. These revelations of destiny can be seen for a long time after one has entered upon this sphere of existence; one beholds them continually in the forms and structure of the limbs, indeed in all the forms of man with the exception of head and chest. On Earth the sight of a human being walking past one without head or chest would hardly be pleasant, but in the sphere between death and a new birth it is quite different, there everything is moral and spiritual. The spectacle is indeed infinitely grander than the spectacle of a human head on Earth can ever be. This is what human souls bound together by destiny experience during their spiritual Sun existence in the period which I have called in my Mystery Plays the “Midnight Hour of Existence.” Here, in accordance with the degree in which they belong together, souls unite in working at the transformation of what they were in the preceding earthly life. The eye of the spirit can perceive what is happening in detail. For example, what is contained in the legs is changed and worked upon, that it may form the lower jaws for the next earthly life. Arms and hands are transformed to become the upper jaws with the nerves belonging to this region. You must, of course, understand that all this is perceived spiritually. For spiritual perception, the whole of the lower man is transformed into the upper man.

This change is not brought about by the individual human being alone, but by all those human beings who belong together. The degree in which they are joined by destiny determines the extent to which they work upon each other. And through this working together, spiritual kinships are formed which later on lead human beings to find one another in earthly life, to come together in life. Thus, the spiritual kinships which bring us together with other human beings in a more or less intimate manner, originate in the life between death and birth. It is actually so that the spirit-form of the head as it will be in the next incarnation comes into being as a result of the working together of human beings who belong together by destiny. This is a work that is done in spirit-land, and it is far greater in content and in significance than any work that is done on Earth.

So you see, just as we can describe in pictures what happens to man between birth and death, just as we can draw pictures of physical earth-life, so can we describe in all definiteness and detail what happens to him between death and a new birth. The process of transformation that goes on in the limb system and in the system of metabolism of the blood is a marvellous and awe-inspiring process. You must, however, always remember that this transformation, which takes place in the phase of spiritual existence lying midway between death and a new birth, is a transformation of man's moral and spiritual qualities. Of that which emerges from the process—we must say of it now that it resounds as Cosmic Music. This form of man that is shaped in the likeness of the Sun, and is a mirror wherein the whole Universe is reflected, expresses in cosmic tone man's outer form and figure. It is not now—to use a comparison—as if one had a visual idea of man; we receive in cosmic sound the idea of the transformed being of man's lower organism.

As time goes on, man becomes a part of the Cosmic Word itself. What at first was all a blending of melodies, of harmonies, forms itself now into articulate parts of the Cosmic Word. Man “speaks forth” his own being—speaks it forth from the Cosmos. There is thus a period between death and the next birth when man's being is veritably a spiritual “word”—no paltry word consisting of few syllables, but an infinitely expressive word, comprising in its utterance the whole being of man as man, as well as the individual being of the man in question. When this point of time has been reached between death and a new birth, man is possessed of a deeply mysterious knowledge, and he sends out into the Cosmos the revelation—perceptible to divine and spiritual Beings—of what he himself is.

When one human being works in this way upon another, helping to bring it about that the lower man is transformed into what will be the upper man (for that which was formerly the upper man has by now faded right away), when there is this working together, dependent always on the degree to which, the one human being was already connected with the other and itself determining the connection there will be between them in the future, then this work of metamorphosis is verily a kind of moulding and sculpting in the spirit. Man then takes up, as it were, what is spiritually moulded in forms and works upon it, until it changes to sounding music and—finally—to speech.

Thus at the first stage after death the human being moves among the spirit-physiognomies of those who are connected with him by destiny: he beholds these physiognomies. Human beings learn to know each other in the spirit-form, they learn to know each other's moral and spiritual qualities. But at this first stage it is a beholding only, a seeing; although it means that the souls come into intimate connection, it is no more than a beholding. Then begins the period which I described as that of the growth of mutual understanding. The one begins to understand the other; he gazes deeply upon him and looks into his inner nature, knowing the while that the sure working of destiny will link the future to the past. Then the great process of transformation begins, where the one is able to work upon the other out of a profound knowledge and understanding, and the plastic moulding of the spirit is taken up and changed to music and to speech. And here we come to something more than understanding; the one human being is able to speak to the other his own warmth-filled, creative word. On Earth we speak with our organs of speech; by means of these we tell each other what we know. Our words live in the physical body as something fleeting and transient; and when we express what we want to say by means of our speech-organs, in that moment we completely shut off that which lives behind the merely material. But now imagine that what a man thus utters, what goes over into the fleeting word, were an expression of himself, were not alone a manifestation of him, but were at the same time his very being. Such is the intercourse of human beings in the middle period of the time between death and a new birth—differentiating each his own being and revealing them- selves one to another. Word meets word; articulate word meets articulate word; inwardly living word meets inwardly living word. The human souls are themselves words; their symphony is the symphony of the spoken Cosmic Word in its very being. There, men live in and with one another; there is no such thing as impenetrability. The word which is the one human being merges into the word which is the other human being. And it is there those links of destiny are formed which work on into the next incarnation and express themselves in the sympathy or antipathy which one human being feels when he encounters another. The feeling of sympathy or antipathy is a reflection of the intercourse which took place in spirit land in the middle phase of the life between death and a new birth. There we spoke with one another, we ourselves were the speech; here on Earth we have the shadowy reflection of it in the feeling we experience when we find one another again. For this is how we have to understand our life. What we experience on Earth together with other human beings—we are to hear in that an echo, in the life of feeling, of what we ourselves once were in the creative Word, when—between death and a new birth—we spoke forth our being. That is a time when in very truth men live for one another. And when we live for one another on Earth, it is, as it were, a projection from the spiritual on to the Earth of a real and true togetherness.

Having lived through this period of time, man enters upon another, when he begins gradually to depart from the Beings of the First Hierarchy—the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—and to come again into the realm of the Second Hierarchy, into the realm of the forces which the planets bring to bear on one another. Perceptions of the Universe now come to him—perceptions which were not previously there to the same degree, for before he could only follow them in the other beings around him. The Universe now begins to arise before him as an outer Universe. He learns also of his relation with beings whose destinies are not bound to his; he comes to know his connection with human souls who first appeared within his orbit of experience during the middle period of time between death and rebirth. This happens on the return journey, when man comes down again into the planetary spheres and therewith into connection with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. He has of course been with them before, but the connection is now of a different kind. The First Hierarchy has gradually faded away again from sight, until at last it is not there at all. The germs—spirit-germs, to begin with—for the new plastic forming of the human being, for the new breast-system and the new limb-system, begin to appear. Little by little, man forms and builds up anew his spiritual prototype. The utterance of his own being that he spoke forth in the Cosmic Word becomes once again the Music of the Spheres, and out of the Music of the Spheres is born the plastic image of his being. So he draws near to the moment when he is ready to enter into connection with an embryonic germ provided for him by a father and mother. For it is a spirit-form, a spiritual entity, coming down from the spiritual world into physical existence on Earth, which is the real essence and self of the human being. The physical embryo which, as it were, comes to meet him is only there for the purpose of enabling him to make a connection with earthly substances and permeate himself with them.

Full and rich in content is the life between death and a new birth! The work upon which the souls of human beings are engaged is none other than an interworking between them and Beings of the higher worlds. But the whole nature of the life between death and a new birth is different altogether from the manner and character of life here on Earth. And if we would progress in our study and attain to an ever clearer and clearer comprehension of the super-sensible being of man, we must understand the following.

We live in the physical world of Earth. We perceive the outer world through our senses. Of that which we perceive we must say: It is perceptible and it is physical,—for the physical is all we can perceive in this earthly life. Above this world lies another, to which our ether body belongs, that pervades and permeates the physical body. This second world is imperceptible to man's physical faculty of perception. It is also not physical; it is superphysical. Bordering therefore on our perceptible, physical world there is another that is imperceptible and superphysical. It is the world next our own, and it is the dwelling-place of the Beings of the Third Hierarchy—the Angels, Archangels and Archai. To a man living in physical incarnation on Earth who does not develop spiritual sight, this world is imperceptible; it is also not physical. True, it manifests its working in the physical world, but it is not physical.

Then there is a third world. This third world is also not physical; in this respect it is similar to the etheric world. It too is superphysical. But the strange thing is that this third world is perceptible. It is perceptible from our earthly world. Thus, we have come to a world which reaches into our world and is perceptible; but because it is superphysical, men are not able to explain it in its true nature. To this world that is superphysical but perceptible, belongs, for example, all that streams to us in the light of the Sun. The Spirit-Beings who people the Sun are superphysical, and yet perceptible to us on Earth. For it is nonsense to think that the light of the Sun is merely what the physicists believe it to be. The light of the Sun is the manifestation of the Sun-Beings. The Sun-Beings are perceptible, but they appear to man in a form which he cannot interpret. The light of the stars, the light of the Moon and other light beside that of the Sun and Moon and Stars is perceptible, but that which lies behind it as Being is not rightly understood by man. Here, then, we have a world that is perceptible, but superphysical, bordering on the world that is physically perceptible. It is very important to grasp the characteristics of the different worlds:

Our own world—perceptible and physical.

The second world, bordering on the first. In this world live the Angels, Archangels and Archai. It is imperceptible and superphysical—the dwelling place of the Third Hierarchy and also of human beings while they are living in community with the Third Hierarchy during the life between death and a new birth.

The third world is perceptible and superphysical. It is the dwelling-place of the Second Hierarchy.

And then there is still another:

An imperceptible, physical world.

We have then, when the fourth is added, a complete list of all possible worlds: perceptible and physical, imperceptible and superphysical, perceptible and superphysical, imperceptible and physical. For this fourth world is imperceptible and yet physical. How are we to envisage it? It is in our midst, it is present in a physical sense, but it is imperceptible. Think for a moment. If you lift your leg from the ground, it is heavy, the force of gravity is working upon it. The force of gravity works physically but is imperceptible to ordinary sense-perception. You have inner experience of this force of gravity, but it is physically imperceptible. It is the same with certain other things. You experience within you, albeit in feelings which you cannot explain, what was known to an earlier, more instinctive Spiritual Science as the “mercurial” tendency. You have continually within you this tendency to the drop-form—in the albumen constituents, that are perpetually trying to form themselves in you; once more, something physical, but imperceptible in its essential configuration. Then there is a living process of combustion, of burning, that takes place within you. It works physically, and lives in your will—but you are not aware of it. It is imperceptible and physical. Within this world, the world of the imperceptible and physical, dwell the Beings of the First Hierarchy—the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

This opens up quite a new aspect of our study. When we pass through the gate of death, we go out, first of all, into the imperceptible and superphysical. We disappear, as it were, from the world. At the second stage we enter the sphere of the Second Hierarchy; we come into the perceptible and superphysical. During this phase of existence, we learn to understand our destinies, we learn to read them in the flowing, flooding light of the Sun and the Stars. One who has learned to gaze into the essence of this light does not look up vacantly at the Sun, or out into the far distances to the spheres of the Stars; he knows that in this moving, flowing light the threads of human destiny are being woven. It is the perceptible, yet superphysical, world, and in it live the dead, the seemingly dead.

And while man is accomplishing once more this metamorphosis for the earthly, he is—on Earth. Only, the world in which he sojourns there between death and new birth is now the imperceptible and physical world; he lives in the force of gravity, in the mercurial and phosphoric tendencies. (How these forces and tendencies develop, we shall gradually learn to understand.) We are thus first withdrawn from life into the invisible, and then return again in an imperceptible manner, to be once more withdrawn, that we may prepare ourselves for the future—perceptible and physical—life on Earth. The road between death and new birth leads from the perceptible, physical life on Earth, through the other conditions, to the imperceptible, physical life on Earth. This is the Midnight Hour of Existence. Then we make our way back, and enter once again into physical existence on Earth.

So far we have been able only to give a rough sketch, but in the lectures that are to come the sketch will be amplified in all its details. You will at any rate have seen that we need not rest content with general abstract thoughts about the life of man between death and a new birth. We can show, for example, how in order to prepare for his future life in a visible world man comes to Earth between death and a new birth in an invisible manner. How much deeper will be our understanding of earthly life when we know that human spirits who are in the Midnight Hour of Existence are living within physical Earth existence; that we have around us here on Earth not only those who are incarnate in physical bodies, but also, as an integral and spiritual part of Earth existence, those who are living through the Midnight Hour—the middle, that is, of their life between death and a new birth! The reason why we are not aware of them is because they are experiencing Earth existence not at the Noontide, but at the Midnight Hour.

In the following lectures we shall go more fully into all these things.

My dear Friends,

We tried in the first lecture of this Course to form some idea of the way in which man, here on Earth, is related to Beings and forces belonging to worlds beyond the Earth. Then, in the second lecture we spoke of the life of the human being in the super-sensible world between death and a new birth. In the present lecture I want to follow this up a little further. As our study proceeds, we shall find that a complete and inwardly harmonious picture will rise up before us.

We have seen that when a human being has passed through the gate of death and come into the super-sensible world, he reveals himself there to Imaginative vision in a spirit-form. You must understand, of course, that perception of the spiritual is quite different from perception of an object in the world of sense. For instance, those who are endowed with the faculty of spiritual vision will say: “Yes, I saw the phenomenon, but I could not tell you anything about the size of it.” The phenomena of the spiritual world are not spatial in the sense that a material object presented to the eye is spatial. Nevertheless, we can only describe them in such a way that they seem to resemble a visual image seen by the physical eye—or whatever other sense-impression we make use of in our description. You must bear this in mind in connection with all the descriptions I shall now be giving of what takes place in the super-sensible.

When a human being has passed through the gate of death, the spirit-form, of his head gradually fades away. On the other hand, the whole of the rest of his form becomes “physiognomy,” a physiognomy which expresses, for instance, how far the man was, in earthly life, a good man or a bad man, a wise man or a fool. These qualities can remain hidden in the material world; an out-and-out villain can walk about with an absolutely innocent face. But when the gate of death has been passed, they can no longer be concealed. There is no doing it with the face, for the face fades right away; and the rest of the form, which grows more and more like a physiognomy, allows nothing to be hid. We have, moreover, to remember that when a human being passes into the spiritual world, his whole relation to the universe changes. The faculty of thinking, especially that abstract thinking by which men set so much store on Earth, is by no means prized yonder in the spiritual world. No value is attached in the spiritual world to the faculty of which the head is the instrument; it is quite useless there. We have to leave behind us the thinking of which we are so proud and by means of which we evolve thoughts about the phenomena of the material world. It is only on Earth that there are philosophers! The kind of philosophy that consists in abstract thinking must be left behind. The further we pass out into the spiritual, super-sensible world, the more does our life of soul become a beholding, a perceiving. The thoughts which are in the objects come to us with the very act of perception. Here on Earth we evolve the thoughts; yonder in the spiritual world the thoughts are revealed by the things themselves; the thoughts come to us. Thought is achieved by means of perception. Nor is this true only of thought. Everything man has to undergo comes to him, in the spiritual world, in perception.

We have around us in the world of sense-perception certain phenomena which help us to describe the spiritual world in which man lives between death and a new birth. We look up to the stars. What the stars and planets of our system reveal to sense-perception on Earth is merely their outward aspect. In their inner reality they are something quite different; they are hosts of Spiritual Beings who have gathered together in diverse ways at the places where the stars appear in the heavens. When we look at a star with our physical eyes—what it really means is that there, in that particular direction, is a colony of Spiritual Beings in the Cosmos. The physical star we see merely gives us the direction; it is, if you like, a kind of signpost. Descriptions of the stars as given by physical science are of quite secondary importance, for physical science is dealing with what are no more than signs to indicate direction. The fact that somewhere in the sky we see a star means that in that direction there is a colony of Spiritual Beings.

The first sphere into which the human being passes after death is the sphere of the Moon; that is to say, he enters the region of the Spiritual Beings who have their dwelling-place in the Moon. What kind of Beings are these?

From what has been said in my book Occult Science, you will know that the Moon was not always out in the heavens where it is now. As a matter of fact, there are many strange things to be observed about the Moon. It is curious, for instance, that in ordinary text-books and school-books no mention is made, as a rule, of the fact that every year the Moon is coming nearer to the Earth. Most people are not aware of this, because they do not find it in the text-books; it is true, nevertheless. The Moon was not always out there in the Cosmos; there was a time when the Moon and its substance were within the Earth. The Moon then separated from the Earth and passed out into the Cosmos. It is therefore only in the course of Earth evolution that the Moon has become a dwelling place in itself for Spiritual Beings. And for what kind of Spiritual Beings?

In my books and lectures I have often spoken of the great primeval Teachers who lived among men in very ancient times of Earth evolution. When we look back with real understanding to ancient times, we cannot but be filled with deep inner reverence for the marvellous wisdom that was given long since to men on Earth by these great, superhuman Teachers. For the first Teachers of the human race on Earth were not themselves human; they were Beings standing higher in the scale of evolution than man, and in the Mysteries they appeared not in physical but in ether bodies—which, since then, they have for the most part laid aside, for they are now in astral bodies. These primeval Teachers left the Earth and passed out into the Cosmos—to the Moon. The heavenly body we know as the Moon is therefore the colony, out in the Cosmos, of the primeval Teachers of mankind. There they have their dwelling, in the Moon. To crude perception the outer aspect of the Moon reflects merely the light of the Sun. But for a finer perception the Moon mirrors a vast number of cosmic forces. And what is reflected thence to the Earth from the forces of the Cosmos is connected with all that is sub-human in man—with what man has to-day in common with animal nature. We find, therefore, in the Moon these high Spiritual Beings who were once the primeval Teachers of mankind, and at the same time, together with them, the animal forces of man's nature.

This is the first region the human being enters when he has passed through the gate of death; here his first experiences are undergone. Try to form a living picture of how, with his moral—or immoral—physiognomy, a human being comes into the region of the physical and spiritual radiations of the Moon and how, to begin with, he sees himself and other human beings each with his physiognomy. He does not see with physical eyes; he becomes aware of the others through a kind of “feeling” perception—almost a kind of touching, but touching from a distance. Let me try to describe it to you in the following way. A human being comes into the vicinity of another being in this region. He has his physiognomy which is mobile in itself—as it were, soft and pliable. He draws near to the other being, and at once tries to give himself a physiognomy similar to that revealed by the other being. But if a man who was an out-and- out villain in earthly life and has now passed through the gate of death were to attempt to do this in the proximity of one who has been a saintly man, in order that he might perceive and feel what the saintly man is in his physiognomy, he would not find it possible. Despite all his efforts he would continue to give himself the physiognomy of a villain. He can do no otherwise. You will realise from this that for a certain period of time after death a man is only capable of seeing other human beings who in respect of their moral qualities were of like nature with himself in Earthly life. This is the first impression that is experienced by the human being, the first of many powerful impressions that are at the same time like so many judgements passed upon him. For man really feels the experience as a dispensation of strict justice. He stands there under the constant impression: As those others are, so are you yourself; you can move only among human beings who are like yourself! It is so, indeed. Man does not see those who are different from himself; to begin with, he simply cannot see them.

Now the particular forces which are contained in this Moon environment do not permit of the Angels drawing near to man. The Angels—in their lovely form—cannot, to begin with, come into the neighbourhood of the human being. For the Moon is the heavenly body of which the Earth has rid herself; she has, as it were, put it out into the Cosmos. It is true that with the Moon have gone also, as we saw, the holy Teachers and Sages; but there are present, in addition, in its vicinity Ahrimanic Beings. Ahrimanic forms are to be seen there. And so it comes about that when a man sees other human beings in physiognomies that are the reverse of good, and has the impression that he is seeing himself along with them, then he and they seem, to his despair, to resemble the Ahrimanic forms that appear in this region. The Angels are hidden from his sight because they have forms into which he cannot yet find his way again. He sees other human beings in forms that are all differing expressions of evil, and he notes the resemblance of these to the Ahrimanic forms. This, then, is the second impression which comes to man in the Moon sphere: You yourself resemble the Ahrimanic forms! Once again is a stern judgement passed upon man after death.

The third experience makes an impression which never leaves the human being. It begins with the realisation that in the first region through which he has to pass are the wise and holy primeval Teachers of early humanity. But now he cannot help feeling that a mysterious connection exists between the Ahrimanic beings with whom he comes in contact in the way described, and these primeval Teachers of mankind. From the human point of view it is of course quite understandable that men will judge such things as I am telling you in the attitude of the famous King of Spain who was once shown a map of the stars and their movements and the whole solar system and, finding it very difficult to grasp, said that if God had left him to create the Universe he would have made it much simpler, it was all far too complicated! It is not to be wondered at that numbers of people think very much the same and are for ever wanting to correct something in the Divine Plan of the Universe. Human beings have, as you know, infinite faith in their own power of insight. There was actually a philosopher who said: “Give me matter, and I will make a universe.” That philosopher was Kant. It is a good thing he was not given matter, for he would have made something perfectly horrible out of it!

So, too, when people hear about Ahrimanic beings, they cannot understand why these beings have not long ago given up all hope of gaining the victory over the Earth Spirits. Human beings know quite well that the ultimate victory will not be with the Ahrimanic beings. But Ahriman does not know it! He strives unceasingly for victory. And out of this striving for victory there arises a strange and remarkable connection between those Ahrimanic beings who belong chiefly to the Moon sphere and the wise, primeval Teachers of mankind. Let me put it in this way. The Ahrimanic beings are continually trying, in their sinister way, to flatter and cajole these primeval Teachers, they would so much like to win them over to their side! For what is it these Ahrimanic beings are trying to achieve? They would like to hold the Earth fast at a certain point in its development and not allow it to make any further progress. It is Ahriman who is constantly saying: “The evolution of human beings has reached a certain point, and now it must come to a standstill; they must not evolve any further. I have resolved that human beings shall harden at this point and continue their further journey in the Cosmos as hardened, rigidified beings—not as beings involved in a progressive evolution.” This is what is whispered every night into the ears of men by the Ahrimanic beings. And it is what the Ahrimanic beings desire in regard also to the Earth itself; they want to hold it fast at a given point in its evolution.

And now think of the great primeval Teachers of man. It was they who left behind them on Earth what we know as the ancient, primordial Wisdom. This ancient Wisdom has grown dim in the course of the ages and is no longer understood. Once upon a time, in the old Mystery-sanctuaries, it was taught to men; but that could not continue. For if human beings had gone on receiving this Wisdom, they would not have made progress. Above all, they would not have attained to freedom, to free inner spiritual activity; they would not have acquired free will. The wisdom was by its very nature able to speak only to the instincts of men, not to clear, self-conscious deliberation. It was thus for the well-being of humanity that at a certain moment these great Teachers should withdraw. If they had never lived on Earth man would have been without an initial impetus for his evolution. But when they had once given the impetus which enabled him henceforth to continue his evolution independently, they withdrew from the Earth and went to the Colony of the Moon. As long as the primeval Teachers were still upon Earth, the Ahrimanic beings did their utmost to keep them there in order that the instinctive Wisdom should remain as it was. Even to-day, when a man has passed through the gate of death and come into the Moon sphere, they think they can still do something; and so they try again and again to cajole and persuade these primeval Teachers to approach the dead. They cannot achieve their end, least of all in the case of those human beings who wear a physiognomy of evil. None the less, the Ahrimanic beings continue to draw near to the souls of human beings in the Moon sphere and goad them on by pointing to the great primeval Wisdom and saying: “That was once all there for you!” Human beings who wear features of evil have, therefore, now to pass through a third experience. The Ahrimanic beings speak to them of the primeval Teachers of mankind. But they, with their nature, cannot see these Teachers. They gaze into an empty void.

This experience makes a profound and lasting impression. Once again man feels that a judgement has been passed upon him. For the thought lies heavy on his soul: “Those who gave the human race its first impulse are hidden from me; I cannot see them, I am spurned and rejected.” Powerful and acute is the experience that comes thus to human beings who do not show a physiognomy expressive of the good.

These are the three impressions which must needs come to man when, with a physiognomy of evil, he passes over into the world that lies beyond the gate of death. And it must of course be remembered, that no human being is wholly good; in the very best of men there is, after all, a great deal that is bad. Hence it falls to the lot of a great many human beings to undergo, at any rate in part, the experiences here described. But the more a man is able to assume the physiognomy of the good after death, the more readily will he behold those whom he has through his goodness come to resemble, and the less will he respond to the Ahrimanic beings. Their influences will fall away from him; on the other hand he will have understanding for the Angel Beings who now enter the sphere in which he is living. And that will enable him to permeate his being with forces,—to begin with, forces especially of will. For it is not thought or reflection, but first and foremost the faculty of will that man possesses after death. Will becomes itself perception, becomes man's whole world of life. He has to perform an act of will whenever he wants to perceive anything. For he must form. and fashion himself in accordance with what he wants to see. That is, he must will. He must become like what he wills to perceive. It is above all the will that is developed when a man has passed through the gate of death, and upon it work, for good or ill, the impressions of which I have spoken in connection with the Moon sphere.

The next sphere into which the human being passes is that of Mercury. By this time—and often at the cost of great suffering—the human being has been able so far to adjust his physiognomy to the forces of the super-sensible world that he has laid aside the physiognomy of evil and has gradually come to resemble the forms of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. The process is in many cases slow, but eventually man enters the sphere of Mercury, the dwelling-place of the beings of the Third Hierarchy, and has to live there among them and undergo what I have already described. This is the sphere in which he gradually unfolds understanding of what, previously, was more or less blank perception—although it exercised a potent influence upon the domain of his will. In the Mercury-sphere understanding for all that has been perceived begins to dawn within man. In the present age human life is such that those who investigate these matters with Imaginative perception have tragic experiences. For the state in which the souls of the dead find themselves in this Mercury sphere depends to a great extent upon whether, here on Earth, they were materialists and rejected in thought and deed everything of a super-sensible nature, or whether they had understanding for the super-sensible. A man who in earthly life rejected all that transcends the material, confronts the Beings in the Mercury sphere with comparatively little understanding. It is the same when he comes to the next sphere, where he lives among Beings who also belong to the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai but have reached a somewhat higher stage of development. If a man was a rank materialist in earthly life, he has no understanding at all of the Beings in the Venus sphere. For here the forces of cosmic love pour down upon him. If he has not acquired on Earth the capacity of love, the region he now enters is strange and foreign to him in the highest degree. The forces of cosmic love flood his being in the Venus sphere if, on Earth, he possessed the faculty of love; but if, on Earth, he consciously or unconsciously harboured hatred in his breast, these forces of the Venus sphere are changed within him into forces of wrath. This is the mystery of man's sojourn in the Venus sphere. For those who bring with them from Earth considerable remains of forces of hatred, it is as though metamorphosed forces of love—forces, that is, of wrath and fury—were to rise up within them from out of their will. Man sees himself in a manifestation that impels him to say: It must all be subdued, it must be chastened and brought into harmony with the Cosmos. It is ultimately always the will that receives, shall I say, special care and nurture in the Venus sphere—the will, which in earthly man has its seat in the limb and metabolic system in the lower part of his organism, that is to say, in the part of man that becomes after death “physiognomy.” It is therefore the will that comes to expression in this physiognomy.

All this time man is coming, by degrees, to resemble the Beings that are present in the spiritual Cosmos, and he is gradually passing on into the sphere of the Sun. In the Sun sphere the forces work chiefly on that in man which in its earthly reflection we know as feeling. What the Sun shows us, when we look up to it with our physical eyes, is its outward aspect only. In its inner aspect the Sun is the great cosmic meeting-place of all those Spiritual Beings who guide and direct the destinies of the Earth and of the men on Earth. The Sun is, above all, the colony of the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—the Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis. Whereas before entering the Sun sphere man lives only among human beings with whom he is linked by destiny, others now approach him. His circle of acquaintances—if one may be allowed the expression—grows wider and wider. This takes place in the sphere of the Sun. Here, too, a new and particularly vivid experience befalls man.

There below him lies another world—the Earth he has left behind but which he must tread again. In the Sun sphere, as you have heard, the metamorphosis of man's being takes place; here is wrought out the great change of which I have told you, when man's lower being is transformed into the upper being in preparation for the next earthly life. The legs are wrought into the spirit-form of the lower jaw, the arms into the spirit-form of the upper jaw and cheek-bones, and so on. This is a wonderful work which proceeds in the spiritual world, and in comparison with it any work that is done on earth in whatsoever domain is utterly insignificant. Great and majestic is the work that is accomplished by man in the spiritual world in union with higher spiritual Beings! There, in the sphere of the Sun (using the word in its wider sense) the secret of man's being is worked out. But now comes another experience.

If we are healthy in soul and spirit during our life on Earth, we are bound to realise that there is another world, a spiritual world, even if we cannot pierce through to it with actual knowledge. We take the existence of the spiritual world for granted; we say that beyond the material world there is a super-sensible world. This is how it is in earthly life. But during existence in the Sun sphere between death and a new birth, it is the other way round. In his Sun existence, an experience befalls man that teaches him to speak of a world beyond—but this “world beyond” is the Earth! It is an intensely living experience, not so much now of one's own destiny, but of the whole intrinsic character of Earth existence. And there is one feature of it which you can observe and should test for yourselves. People of to-day can hardly yet succeed in this, but you must try. When you are reading history and following it back through the centuries, it may well be that you have a curious experience. You are living now in the year 1923. You go back through history—through the world war, through still earlier events, until you come at length to the period, let us say, between the years 1500 and 1550. There you begin to feel that it is all familiar to you. Consider for a moment an intimate experience of this kind. You seem to know all about events that happened several centuries ago. You say to yourself: Surely I must have had a share in these events! A superficial student will immediately conclude that this was the period of his previous incarnation on Earth. This is, however, in most cases incorrect. As a rule it is that period between death and rebirth when, in the Sun sphere, you experienced most vividly your connection with earthly existence. Earth life presented itself to you then as a “beyond,” very much as the super-sensible life presents itself to you on Earth as a “beyond.”

Let us now pause for a moment in our study of man's path of evolution after death. We have seen that when man has gone away from the Earth he completes first the Moon existence, then enters upon the Mercury existence, then Venus and then the Sun. Of what follows we shall speak later on. But now it must be clearly understood that these events and processes are not isolated events and processes in the spiritual world but are all related to what happens on the physical Earth. And the relationship is of a distinctive character. The Moon existence is permeated through and through with the Beings of whom we have been speaking to-day—the great primeval Teachers of the human race. In a remote age of antiquity they left the Earth and went out into the Cosmos to form the cosmic colony of the Moon. But in later times we may still find here and there human beings, initiated in the Mysteries, who were possessed of quick inner sight and hearing, and could apprehend the wisdom which had once been living on Earth thanks to the presence of these primeval Initiates. Thus, in the ancient Indian period of civilisation there was still present in the Mysteries a living knowledge of the Wisdom of the Moon Initiates. There must we look, to find the source of all that can so deeply stir our wonder and admiration in the echoes we still possess of ancient Indian Wisdom. Nor is this all. Influences continue to pour down from the super-earthly world in which man lives between death and a new birth,—and the influences change with each succeeding epoch. As time goes on, their power grows continuously weaker; that is to say, human beings grow gradually less and less conscious of these influences. The Mercury influences, for example, were particularly strong during the period of ancient Persian civilisation, but human beings were already becoming less conscious of them: the myth of Ahura Mazdao is the outcome of a somewhat darkened knowledge of the influence exercised upon the Earth by Mercury. During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch the Venus influences were principally at work. Then came the wonderful epoch of Greek culture, continuing on into the Latin, when the Sun influences worked upon the Earth with greatest strength. Man was, however, in this Graeco-Latin epoch still less observant of such influences. Two factors were working together. When in his existence between death and a new birth man entered the Sun sphere, he felt an urgent desire to experience the Earth from the Sun. That is one factor. The second is that everything connected with the Sun and the nature of the Sun had a very strong influence upon the Greeks. All that the forces of the Sun give to the Earth had a deep meaning for them, especially for those generally known as the Athenians, in contrast to the Spartans. Yet everywhere in Greece the Sun, in its spiritual aspect as well, exercised a remarkably deep influence on the whole form and development of civilisation. Throughout this phase of evolution there was a strong aptitude on Earth for the perception of the spiritual, the purely spiritual, in the starry heavens. Perception of the material aspect of the heavens did not really begin until the time of our fifth Post-Atlantean period, which is, as you know, only a few hundred years old. The fact that these influences are working in our time indicates that we have passed out of the region where men feel themselves related, on Earth, to the feeling they had of being in the Sun-existence between death and a new birth. We to-day are much more susceptible to what follows. After the time spent in the Sun man comes to the domain of Mars. The strongest cosmic influence working upon humanity to-day is the impulse which comes from Mars existence. We can become acquainted with these Mars influences between death and a new birth when the Noontide hour of existence has been passed and we begin once again to approach the Earth. It must not, however, be thought that the influences connected with the Sun existence cease to work upon a man when he has passed into the Mars sphere. The Sun extends the sphere of its activity over those planetary phases of existence which follow. The Sun's influences remain; but the Mars existence begins to be a significant factor in what happens on Earth. I shall speak further of the journey of the human being through the Mars existence, but I want now to connect what we have just been learning of the spiritual world with what we find at work precisely in our own, fifth Post-Atlantean age.

In our time we are learning what cosmic battle is. We can “sense” it taking place. Most of us cannot unravel its mysteries; but we know that in cosmic existence war is being waged to-day between all manner of good and evil spirits. And here the Sun existence acquires a particular significance for our age. It is exceedingly difficult to-day for the results of spiritual insight to make any headway in face of material science! People are so proud of the fact that physics has investigated the Sun! The Sun is described for us in scientific text-books; but these descriptions, instead of stimulating in us a true conception of the Sun, really serve only to put our minds off the track. What then is actually the influence of the Sun in regard to the Earth to-day? I will indicate one only of its activities. It may seem to you that I am descending here into very material realms that are in strange contrast to the spiritual events of which we have been speaking; but what I am now going to say is of importance for the further progress of the studies upon which we are engaged.

You are, of course, familiar with the phenomenon of the Sunspots which appear with a certain regularity. Dark spots are observed on the Sun. These Sun-spots and their meaning are the cause of much dispute in material science, but a more accurate research would reveal the following. A constant impulse arises from within the Sun to throw out Sun-substance into the Universe through these dark portals. And the Sun-substance thus thrown out appears within our solar system in the form of comets, meteors and shooting stars. Now it is particularly in our age that the Beings who rule over the Universe from within the Sun are casting forth these comets, meteors and shooting stars. They did so in earlier times as well, but in our time this activity of theirs has a new significance. You will remember I said how in earlier times it was the purely spiritual impulses in the starry system that were particularly at work. In our time it is the impulses contained in the iron thrown out from the Sun that have special significance for human beings. And these impulses are used by Him whom we know as the Michael Spirit, in the service of the spiritual in the Cosmos. In our age there are thus present in the Cosmos impulses which were not working with the same strength in earlier periods of civilisation. This cosmic iron, in its spiritual nature, makes it possible for the Michael Spirit to mediate between the super-sensible and the material on Earth. We find, therefore, on the one side a spirit of warfare abroad in the world man enters, when in our time he reaches to what lies behind outer sense-existence. When a man crosses the Threshold with super-sensible sight and instead of directing his gaze to matters which concern him personally turns his attention to great affairs of the Universe which underlie our whole civilisation, then he sees warfare and battle, spiritual battle. There is strife, there is war and conflict in the spiritual, behind the veils of existence. And the iron which, even to the point of physical manifestation, is thrown out by the Sun Spirits into the Cosmos—with this iron Michael arms Himself for His task in the cosmic war. For Michael has the task of helping humanity to go forward in the right way in face of these Powers of Strife behind the veils of civilisation. On the one hand—battle and warfare. On the other hand—the labours and strivings of Michael.

Moon—Ancient Indian civilisation

Mercury—Ancient Persian civilisation

Venus—Egypto-Chaldean civilisation

Sun—Greco-Latin civilisation

Mars (Iron)—

Now all this is again connected with the development of man's freedom, man's free spiritual activity. As earthly men we have iron in our blood. If we were beings with no iron in our blood, the feeling and impulse of freedom would still be able to arise in our souls, but we should not have bodies which could be used for putting this impulse into operation. That we are able not only to conceive the idea of freedom, but also to feel in our body the power to make the body itself into a bearer of the impulse of freedom, is due to the fact that in our age we can learn how Michael takes the cosmic iron, which was cast out also in former times, into His service. And we ourselves, if we understand the Michael impulse aright, can learn how to place the iron that we have within us into the service of the impulse of spiritual freedom. Matter in any case has meaning for us only when we learn to understand it as an expression of the Spiritual in the Universe. In this age what we have to learn is to make the right use of the iron in our blood. For wherever iron is, there too is the impulse for the development of freedom. This is true in the Cosmos and true also in man. It was out of a deep instinct that the Initiates of old ascribed iron to Mars—iron which has a significance for human blood, and therewith also a cosmic significance.

These things can be known to-day through Spiritual Science, It is not a question of a revival of ancient traditions but of a re-discovery by Spiritual Science itself. If Anthroposophy is found to be in agreement with ancient lore, that does not show that Anthroposophy is merely a revival of the old. Anthroposophy investigates things by studying them in their own intrinsic nature. Their significance is then brought home to one anew when one finds that men had this same knowledge long ago under the influence of the ancient Divine Wisdom possessed by those Beings who afterwards took their departure to the Moon and to-day people the cosmic colony of the Moon.

The age in which we live is, therefore, also bound up with the experiences through which man passes between death and rebirth. Perception of what is happening on Earth is strongest during the period of existence in the Sun-sphere, but it is always there after death in greater or less degree. From the super-earthly regions in which he lives between death and a new birth, man is perpetually looking down at the earthly world. If it were not so, the earthly world would become foreign to him during the long journey between death and a new birth.

The experiences of man in the super-sensible world can be described in many ways. Yesterday I described them to you in another way; now I have been describing them to you in connection with the world of stars and with what takes place on Earth in the consecutive epochs of civilisation. All these descriptions must gradually be built up together into one whole. It would be a mistake to say: Yes, but how is it that on one occasion you describe man's life between death and rebirth in one way and on another occasion in quite a different way? If a man goes to a city once or twice or three times, he will certainly describe things differently, as his knowledge of the city grows. The details of all his descriptions have then to be put together. In the same way must the descriptions of man's experiences in the super-sensible world be brought together, be considered and pondered in all their connections. Thus alone can we gain an impression of what the super-sensible world really is and what man experiences there. This was the point I wanted to reach in the present lecture. In the lecture this evening I will speak of further experiences undergone by the human being in his existence between death and a new birth.

My dear Friends,

In the lecture this afternoon the life between death and a new birth was pictured as a journey, and we considered the sense in which the positions of certain stars in the heavens can be taken as viewpoints whence we may behold this journey of man through certain spiritual regions. Before proceeding further, we will study in a little more detail how we must picture this journey through regions indicated for us by certain heavenly bodies.

It might seem that the super-sensible existence of man between two earthly lives has been adequately presented in such a book as Theosophy. For the early stages of study, that is quite true, but you will surely agree that knowledge must also progress and expand. As we go further in our study we have constantly to bear in mind the oneness of the Universe, we have to remember that there is an unbroken, harmonious interplay between the super-sensible and the sensible worlds. The conditions of existence in the different regions through which man passes between death and a new birth express themselves outwardly in the relationships of space and of time that exist between the heavenly bodies concerned. When, therefore, we speak of these spiritual regions in terms of heavenly bodies, we are using a correct picture. There is a connection between the place of a visible star in the heavens and some particular region of super-sensible life. As an objection to this it could be said that the life which stretches between death and a new birth cannot be conceived in terms of space or at most only to a very limited degree. That is perfectly true, but super-sensible existence is nevertheless reflected into space. The world that is beyond space and beyond time, plays into space and into time; and as man's thinking and ideation have necessarily to be in terms of space and time, the imagery of the stars in the heavens is an excellent one for giving a picture of the super-sensible. One thing, however, we must not omit to make clear. We are taught in physics that the processes we have in the physical world—processes that are subject to the force of gravity—undergo a change, when we go out into space. Physical science tells us the exact proportion in which the force of gravity decreases. We are taught that the force of gravity (and also the intensity of light) decreases in proportion to the square of the distance. Science will not, however, admit that the same is true in relation to all knowledge of material things which has been acquired here on Earth. Science has derived this knowledge from the Earth; and if the figures which apply to gravity and light in the immediate environment of the Earth have to be modified as we go out into space, it is not unreasonable to suppose that only so long as we remain in the actual environment of the Earth are we justified in applying the scientific knowledge of to-day. Just as the power of gravity decreases in proportion to the square of the distance, so does the truth of our conclusions decrease, the further we are away from the Earth. When the astronomer or astro-physicist tries with ordinary thinking to determine, for instance, what is happening in some nebula out in cosmic space, it is just the same as if one set out to calculate, according to the conditions prevailing on the Earth, the weight of a stone in that nebula far away in the heavens. It ought not therefore to surprise us when Spiritual Science says: Here on Earth things present such and such an aspect, but out in the cosmos they are in reality quite different. On Earth we see the Moon as it appears in the sky. In reality the Moon is a cosmic colony of many Beings—I described it to you in the last lecture. It is the same with all the stars and constellations. This fact must be borne in mind throughout our present study.

The lectures so far have brought us to the point where, during his life between death and a new birth, man passes into the Sun sphere. In this region the spirit-form of the lower part of the human being is transformed into the head of the next earthly life. It must of course be remembered that man's path between death and new birth is such that he passes through all these planetary spheres twice. After death he passes, first of all, into the Moon sphere, then he goes on into the Mercury sphere, the Venus sphere and the Sun sphere. That is as far as we came in our description. In the Sun sphere the lower man begins to be transformed into the upper man. The limb structures are transformed—spiritually, of course, at this stage—into the future head-system. This work of metamorphosis is a work of infinite grandeur and sublimity. Those who study the human head merely as a physical structure have no notion of all the manifold work that has to be performed in the Cosmos in order to bring into being the spirit-germ of the human head,—which later on will unite with the physical embryo. After this work has been begun in the Sun sphere, man passes into the Mars sphere, then into the Jupiter sphere and into the Saturn sphere. The Saturn sphere is really the last, for Uranus and Neptune do not come into consideration here. During all this time, work is proceeding upon the spirit-germ of the head. Man's path then leads him still further out into the cosmic expanse, out into the wide ocean of the cosmos, where the work of metamorphosis continues, until the time comes for him to take the path of return. Then, going back through the regions of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars to the region of the Sun, he comes again at length to the sphere of the Moon. Of the path of return we shall hear later on; at this point we will consider the experiences through which the human being passes, after his time in the region of the Sun is over.

Before he reaches the Sun sphere, man's experiences are for the most part closely connected with himself. In the last lecture I told you how man wears a physiognomy which expresses his good and bad qualities and how this enables him to see other beings similar in nature to himself. I told you how he gradually changes his spirit-form and comes to resemble the beings who belong to the super-sensible world, and how then he is able to behold the Beings of the Third Hierarchy and the Beings also of the second Hierarchy. If we want to describe the human being up to the stage of the Sun existence we must fix our attention on his spirit-form or figure, and describe that. But having entered the Sun region man undergoes an experience which I called living his way into the Cosmic Music, the Music of the Spheres. He hears, in cosmic harmony and cosmic melody, the meaning, as it were, of all the interworking of the starry worlds. For this working together of the stars, which is at the same time an expression of the working together of the Spiritual Beings that are in these regions—this it is, ultimately, that comes to revelation in cosmic harmony and cosmic melody. It is chiefly the life of feeling in its spiritual metamorphosis that is quickened and stimulated in the Sun existence. Every experience man has is like cosmic melody and cosmic harmony vibrating through his entire being. What we need at this stage of life between death and a new birth is not anything of the nature of theory, nor indeed anything that lends itself at all to expression in words. What we need is to feel—with a universal feeling that fills our being through and through—the harmonies and melodies born from the inter-workings of the different orders of Beings in the Cosmos.

Then a further experience comes to us, an experience which reveals unmistakably the connection between the physical world of sense and the super-sensible, superphysical world. When we pass into the Sun existence where the melodies and harmonies of the spheres—the whole Music of the Spheres—sound to us from every direction of the Cosmos, we are still aware of the last remnants of one of the spiritual faculties we possessed during earthly existence, we can still feel the last remnants of speech. At this stage of existence between death and a new birth, our spirit-form has already fallen away and we have come to resemble in form the cosmic sphere itself; our form has undergone metamorphosis into what will become head in the next incarnation. Everything about it that was still reminiscent of the form we bore in earthly existence has by this time fallen right away. But the faculty of soul that enabled us to speak, to make our thought articulate in words, follows us, and being present with us in memory brings a kind of discord into the Music of the Spheres. Yes, discord is introduced into the Music of the Spheres, by reason of the fact that man carries right up into Sun existence the remnants of his faculty of speech. And this discordant element that is brought by man into the Sun existence becomes the basis for the work of certain higher Spirits whose task it is to help forward Earth existence from the Cosmos. For it is when they see what comes to expression in human speech and language as it is to-day, that they take knowledge of how things have degenerated on the Earth and grown corrupt. In none of its European or American forms to-day is speech a faculty that emerges from the being of man with elemental power. It may be that what speech once was will be able to come again on Earth in the following way. Some of us are learning Eurythmy. What happens when one learns Eurythmy? To-day we lightly utter words without the faintest inkling of how the configuration of the words is connected with the inner life and experience of the soul. To speak words to-day is really nothing but an acquiescence in convention. It never occurs to people that when they say “a” (ah)—as a sound, by itself—they are expressing something which as pure sound springs from astonishment or wonder in the soul. When we utter the sound “b,” we mean that we are covering something, enveloping it, wrapping it round. Consonantal sounds invariably signify forms; vowel sounds express feelings, the inner life and being of the soul. The “b” sound is primordially connected with an act of covering. “B” is really the “house.” If I say “a” (ah), this is an expression of a wonder that is felt in the very depths of the soul. The consonantal sound of “t” expresses a settling oneself down, making a halt, staying there. “D” is the same, but has a gentler shade of meaning, less abrupt. Suppose I utter the (German) word “Bad.”* [* English “bath.”] If I were to go back to the origin of the word, to the time when it was still felt and seen, I would have to say: The water is around me like an enveloping sheath: “b.” It is comfortably warm: ah! (Now I am at the sound “a.”) I shall stay in it: “d.” The whole experience is contained in the word itself. To speak in such a way seems to us almost absurd, for nowadays no actual experience is any longer connected with words. If we wanted to experience the word “B-a-d” we should have to say: “The house in which I feel wonder, in which I sit.” In reality speech is filled through and through with soul; man's inner experience of soul streams into and permeates it.

In days of yore this was felt and known. In the original, primitive tongues, speech was born from perception of feeling and of form—feeling in the vowel, form in the consonant. To-day these elements are no longer associated with speech; it has become a mere matter of convention. In Eurythmy, however, the sounds—“b,” “a,” “d”—are changed back again into the gestures that correspond to them. In making the gestures, the Eurythmist begins again to experience speech. One may cherish the hope that if love for Eurythmy is born in ever widening circles, humanity will be able to find its way back to what was contained in primitive tongues,—to a speech that is felt and seen. So will Eurythmy in the future be something more than it is to-day; it will be man's guide and show him how the life of soul and spirit can be borne along on the surging waves of speech. To-day we have come to the point when speech is so little articulated—let alone, ensouled—that numbers of people cannot really be said to “speak” at all. They “spit” the words out! Speech as it is to-day is certainly not born from the life of soul! It is enough to make one despair, when one has to listen to words that have no longer any soul in them, any life,—nay, are not even articulated.

So it comes about that in our day a shrill discord sounds up from Earth into the Cosmic Music when man enters the Sun existence after death. And this quality that has crept into speech makes manifest to certain Spiritual Beings the degeneration that earthly existence has suffered, showing them too at the same time how the right forces and impulses can be found that will lead once again to an ascent.

Man continues his wandering and comes into the Mars existence. What do we mean when we say: Man conies into the Mars existence? It is now no longer possible, you must remember, to speak of man in his spirit-form, for by this time he is wholly changed; he has become a spiritual image of the great cosmic sphere. On and on leads the path, through the spheres of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, out into the surging waves of the Cosmos. In the Mars region the human being lives among the “population” of Mars—if I may so express myself. The inhabitants of Mars are discovered to be either discarnate human souls or Beings of the Hierarchies, but above all those of the Hierarchies from whose entire being Cosmic Speech sounds forth into universal space. For man is now in the region where Cosmic Music becomes Cosmic Speech. At first he hears it; then he is himself interwoven into the Cosmic Speech. Instead of the imitative speech of humanity, he hearkens to a speech that is creative, a speech out of which things are born and have their being. During man's passage through the sphere of Mars he acquires conscious knowledge of the Beings who people this region. The spiritual population of Mars consists of Beings who are the Knowers of the Cosmic Speech. There are other Beings too,—for example. Beings who are warlike in nature. But so far as man is concerned, the most important Beings in the Mars sphere are those who in their whole nature are Cosmic Word. They are the Guardians of the Cosmic Speech.

Man's journey then leads him into the region of Jupiter where dwell the Beings who are the guardians of the Cosmic Thoughts. These Beings radiate thought-beings into our planetary system and its environment. Through this region also man must pass, and he is involved there in a process of metamorphosis which I can only describe in a rather prosaic way.

Picture to yourselves that man becomes a kind of image of the cosmic sphere; that is to say, his whole being is really the spirit-germ of the head as it will be in his next life on Earth. In the Sun existence, having experienced the shrill discord set up by earthly speech, he learns to lay aside this earthly speech. During his passage through Mars he becomes part of the Cosmic Speech, he grows one with it, and begins also to lay the foundation for an understanding of Cosmic Speech. For it is like this. The metamorphosis of the lower man has begun—the legs into the lower jaw, the arms into the upper jaw, and so on. In community with the Beings of the Hierarchies the human being builds the spirit-germ of his future head. But, to begin with, this head is built for understanding the Cosmos—not the Earth! It learns first to understand Cosmic Speech, Cosmic Thoughts. Cosmic Thoughts and Cosmic Speech find a home in the human head; just as here on Earth man knows of minerals, plants and animals, so, during his journey through the spheres of Mars and Jupiter, he is made acquainted with the mysteries of the spiritual Universe. We shall never have a true feeling or perception of the nature of man until we realise in clear consciousness that between death and rebirth the human being has learned to know the names of the wonderful and majestic Beings of the higher Hierarchies, has learned to understand the work and creative activities of these Beings in the Cosmos, has learned to follow in his thought—not little everyday problems of personal life, such as, How am I to get back to Amsterdam?—but such a question as: How is one world-epoch born out of another through the workings of the higher Hierarchies? So much for man's experience in his passage through Jupiter.

Now comes the passage through the Saturn existence. Saturn bestows upon the human being what I will call Cosmic Memory—for in the Saturn sphere dwell those Spiritual Beings who preserve the memory of everything that has ever come to pass in our planetary system. Saturn is the mighty bearer of the memory of all the happenings of our planetary system. Just as in the Mars sphere man learns the speech of the Gods, and in the Jupiter sphere the thoughts of the Gods, so in his first passage through the Saturn existence he learns to know all that lives in the memory of the Gods of our planetary system. Hence it comes about that man's head in the spiritual spheres—which is the spirit-germ of his future earthly head—receives incorporated into it everything that enables him to be a citizen of the Cosmos and to live in the Cosmos among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, even as he lives on earth among the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms.

Then, having been so deeply enriched in his spirit-existence that he has learned to understand the speech of the great world, the speech of the Macrocosm in the widest sense of the word, man passes out of the spheres of planetary activity and enters the sphere of activity of the Fixed Stars. Here the work upon the primal germ of the human head, the pre-figuring and shaping of it, is brought to completion by influences pouring in from infinitudes of spiritual worlds.

The time has now come for man to take the path of return. He comes again, first, into the Saturn sphere. The fact that during his earlier sojourn in the Saturn sphere he received into himself the planetary memories, enables the foundation to be laid now in his head for the faculty of memory that will be necessary in his life on Earth. The cosmic memory implanted into his being is, as it were, made “earthly.” Cosmic memory is transformed again into the germ of the faculty of human memory. And in the Jupiter sphere, all that man acquired through having perceived the thoughts of the Gods, is transformed on the path of return into the faculty to conceive human thoughts which can then be reflected in ordinary consciousness when the germ of the head unites with the physical embryo.

On the return path through the Saturn sphere the detailed elaboration of the metamorphosis of the lower man into the various parts of the head-organisation can also begin. This is a wonderful work,—one human being working upon another, in accord too with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. Verily, the work that is wrought here for the forming of the human head is like the creation of a whole world. For in the sphere of existence between death and rebirth of which I am now speaking, each single human head is seen to be a wonderful world,—a world of infinite variety and detail; and the work upon it calls for the devotion of human beings who are linked together by destiny, with the co-operation also of Beings of the Hierarchies who, knowing the mysteries of the Cosmos, understand how such a human head must be built and formed.

Wonderful it is beyond all telling, to come in this way to a knowledge of what is in man. Nor can such knowledge ever lead to pride or conceit. Yonder, between death and a new birth, the world in which we live sees to it that we do not succumb to pride! It would be, my dear friends, an absurdity to fall victim to human pride and arrogance among the Beings of the Hierarchies, among Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones! The human being must remain for ever little in comparison with the Beings among whom he works. And when in this earthly existence a man comes to learn of what he is in the great Macrocosm between death and a new birth, he has good reason to say to himself: “You have not brought very much with you into earthly existence! You have no great cause to pride yourself upon your present condition; nor have you any occasion to be particularly proud of what you were among the Gods!” What can grow within us as the result of looking upon the life of man between death and a new birth is a sense of responsibility which makes us say: “We must strive with all our might to be worthy even here on earth, of being ‘man.’” For this is indeed what we feel, when we measure the significance of being “man” by the work performed upon the human being by the Gods in the period that lies between death and a new birth.

Going now further on his path of return, man comes again into the Mars existence, where the work upon his being continues. It is here that the spirit-germs for the new body are added—for the breast system and for the limb structures, as they will be in the next earthly life. For it is really so, that the foundations of the limbs of the previous earthly life come forth as the foundations of the head in the new incarnation, and so now during man's passage through the planetary world on the way to his next earthly life the germs for breast system and limb structures have to be laid anew. It must of course always be remembered that these germs are spiritual; the whole process is a spiritual process. As man passes again through Mars existence, the lofty spirituality with which he was imbued during his first passage through the Mars sphere, and which enabled him to experience the cosmic Word, is now transformed into spiritual substance of a somewhat lower order—into that spiritual substance from out of which, later on, the human Ego manifests itself. It is also during this return journey through the Mars sphere that the spirit-germ of the larynx and lung formations are added.

Man comes then again to the Sun. The second passage through the Sun sphere is significant in the highest degree. Since he completed his first sojourn in the Sun existence, man has passed through the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, to the world of the Stars, and then made the return journey through Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. All this time his whole being has been given over to the Cosmos; he has become one with the Cosmos, one with the World-All. He has been living in the Cosmos; he has learned cosmic speech, he has learned to weave cosmic thoughts into his being, he has been living, not within his own life of memory—that only dawns for him later—but within the memory of the whole planetary system. He has felt himself one with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies in his memory of the cosmic thoughts and of the cosmic speech. Now however, when he returns once again to the Sun, he begins to shut himself off more as an individual being. Very faintly the feeling dawns that he is becoming separate from the Cosmos. This is connected with the fact that the first foundations of the heart are now being laid within him. The return journey continues. For the second time man passes through the Venus sphere and the Mercury sphere, where the spirit-germs of the other organs have to be implanted within him.

At the moment of entrance for the second time into the Sun existence—all these happenings and processes take a very long time, and long before man enters upon earthly existence he experiences, as we shall see, what is for him a very significant turn of destiny—at the moment when, out in the Cosmos, the spirit-germ of the heart is laid within our being on the return journey to the earth, there is of course not yet a physical heart. True, there is already an indication of a physical heart form, but it is surrounded and inter-woven with all that constitutes the worth of the human being as the outcome of his previous earthly lives. The fact that we receive into ourselves in the Sun sphere the first germ of the physical heart is less important than the fact that in this germ of the heart is concentrated all that we are morally, all our qualities of soul and spirit. Before the spirit-germ of the heart unites with the embryonic germ of the future body, the heart in man is a spiritual being, a moral being of soul and spirit out in the Cosmos; only later does this moral being of spirit and soul—which man now feels living within him, which man has, as it were, acquired in the course of his return journey to Earth—unite with the embryo. This concentration, in the germ of the heart, of his whole soul-and-spirit being is experienced by man in communion with the sublime Sun Beings—those Sun Beings who rule over the creative forces of the planetary system and therewith of earthly existence. Let me try to describe it to you in a picture. The expressions may sound strange but they are really appropriate.

At the time when this cosmic heart is bestowed upon man, he is living among those Spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies in whose hand lies the leadership of the whole planetary system in its connection with earthly existence. The experience is one of infinite grandeur and splendour. It is difficult to find words to describe what the human being experiences in this phase of existence. In a certain respect his feeling resembles a feeling he can have in physical existence. For just as in physical existence he feels that he is bound up with his heart-beat, with the whole activity of the heart, so, out in the Macrocosm, through his macrocosmic spiritual heart, he feels himself at one with his whole being of soul and spirit. The moral being of soul and spirit which he has become at this moment of his experience is, as it were, a spiritual heart-beat within him. His whole being seems now to be in the Cosmos, in the same way as his heartbeat is in him; he becomes aware also of a kind of circulation in connection with this heart-beat. Just as on Earth we feel in the heart-beat the blood circulation and breathing which give rise to it, so, when on the return journey through the Sun existence we begin to be aware of the beating of our spiritual, macrocosmic heart, it feels to us as though streams or currents were uniting this spiritual heart-beat with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. Even as the blood flows to the heart from the veins in the physical organism, so into our being of spirit-and-soul pour the words of the Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis,—what they have to say concerning the World and the World's judgement upon man. The words and sounds of the spirit of the World-All are the circulation that now centres itself in this spiritual, macrocosmic heart, in this human being of soul and spirit. There, at the centre, beats the spiritual heart of man. And the beat of the spiritual heart of man is the heart-beat of the world in which he is living. The blood-stream of this world is the deeds of the creative Beings of the Second Hierarchy, the forces which stream out from them. And just as the blood-stream on Earth centres itself in the heart where it is unconsciously experienced by man, so at this point of time between death and a new birth it is given to man, as a grace bestowed, to hold and cherish within him a cosmic heart—one of the organs of perception, one of the cosmic hearts, created out of the pulse-beat of the Macrocosm, even the deeds of the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. For let it be remembered that the physical heart is a sense organ, which perceives the movement of the blood, not a “pump” as the physiologists imagine. The spirituality and vitality of the human being—these it is that cause the movement of the blood.

The return journey continues—through the Mercury and the Venus spheres. But before this, indeed in that cosmic moment when the human being feels himself living in very truth within the spiritual heart of the Cosmos, his gaze has already fallen upon the hue of generations, at the end of which stand the parents who will give him birth. The connection with the line of generations is, as you see, made relatively soon. We are born of father and mother, our parents again have each of them father and mother, and these too have their father and mother. This takes us back about a hundred years. But we must go further back, through many centuries; for long before a human being is born on Earth, he has united himself with the line of generations which culminates in the family into which he is born. It is quite early that the connection with the line of generations is determined, namely, when man is passing through the Sun existence for the second time. And in his passage through the cosmic colonies of Venus and Mercury he can, so to speak, arrange for his destiny to be brought as closely as possible into line with the outer experiences that must come to him through being born into a particular family and a particular nation.

After this, man comes again into the sphere of the Moon. Let me remind you how during his first passage through the Moon sphere man's thoughts were directed, for good and also for ill, to the primeval Teachers of the human race, to the starting-point of earthly existence, when superhuman Teachers imparted superhuman wisdom to the men of Earth. When he comes down into the Moon existence for the second time, there is less inducement for him to turn his attention to what was on Earth long ago. For now the period of time that man spends—above, in the Cosmos—in this Moon existence, is the same period of time as takes its course on Earth below between conception and birth. Man's embryonic life runs hand in hand with a particular cosmic development. Up there in the Moon sphere he is passing through a definite phase of evolution while below, stage by stage, the physical embryo is being prepared—the physical embryo with which he then gradually unites.

How does this macrocosmic life of the human being take its course during this second period of evolution in the Moon sphere? What does man accomplish there?

In all the experiences I have been describing, man's consciousness is far clearer and more awake than the ordinary consciousness of his life on Earth. It is most important to distinguish the various degrees of human consciousness. Consciousness during dream-life is dull, consciousness during waking life is clear, consciousness after death still clearer. As a dream is to reality, so is all our life on Earth in comparison with the clarity of our consciousness in the life after death. Moreover, at each new stage in the life after death, consciousness becomes still clearer, still more alert.

When we pass through the Moon existence on the upward journey, consciousness grows clearer owing to the fact that in the Moon sphere we come into the environment of the wise, primeval Teachers of humanity. Clearer and ever clearer grows our consciousness as we pass on through the spheres of Mercury and Venus; and its clarity continues to be intensified every time we enter a new sphere of the heavens. But when we are returning again and approaching a new life on Earth, consciousness is dimmed and darkened stage by stage. During the phase of Mercury existence on the return journey, we still have a consciousness that is clearer than any consciousness can be in ordinary earthly existence. But when we come to the Moon sphere, and are in an environment that reveals to us what man was at the beginning of earthly evolution, then our consciousness begins to be obliterated. In the same sphere where, on the upward journey, the super-sensible world first lit up for us in a clearer consciousness than was possible on Earth, consciousness is now dimmed. We are returning to the Earth and consciousness becomes ever dimmer and dimmer, until it remains in us only as growth-force—the power of growth that is present in the little child, the dreaming little child. Consciousness has dimmed into dream! This is the moment when the being of soul-and-spirit can unite with the physical embryo. In order that this momentous event may come to pass, in order that the human being at a certain point of his development make connection with the physical embryo, he must pass through a Moon evolution in communion with the primeval Teachers of humanity, while the physical embryo down below is passing through its ten lunar months in the body of the mother. And the Moon evolution that he has to undergo consists in this—that a whole host of the Teachers of mankind are engaged in the task of dimming down the cosmic consciousness which the human being still possessed during his Mercury existence, toning it down to the dream consciousness in which he lives at the beginning of his life on Earth.

Physical man, with all that we can see of him here on Earth, is, in truth, only to be understood in the light of a knowledge of super-sensible man. And super-sensible man can never be explained by the facts of Earth, but only by the facts of the great World, the Macrocosm. My object in these lectures has been to show you how earthly man is born as Spirit-man out of the Spiritual Cosmos.

It remains for us in the lecture tomorrow to study in this connection the significance of earthly life itself, in so far as the being who is spiritual and superhuman passes over into this earthly life. We shall come to understand the significance of the fact that when he passes through the gate of death the human being carries out again into the spiritual world what remains to him of all he has acquired and experienced in earthly life. Having, therefore, learned to understand, in some of its aspects, the spirit nature of man, his super-sensible being, we will return tomorrow to the study of the connection between super-sensible man and physical man.

My dear Friends,

We have tried, so far as is possible in a few short hours, to picture the journey of man through the super-sensible world. For that is the world in which man verily lives his life between death and a new birth. But in the physical world too, where man is living in his physical and etheric bodily nature,—here too his forces extend into the super-sensible world. In the physical world he feels his super-sensible existence more or less as a riddle; and unless he be able to find at least a partial solution to the riddle, his soul will not attain inner harmony, inner balance, inner security. Nay, more, his life will lack energy and vigour; and human love that is really worthy of the name will be beyond him.

A study of man as he is on Earth presents an aspect in relation to his super-sensible being which can give us insight into the reason why the Divine-Spiritual worlds have sent him down to this world of the physical senses. It is, after all, in the physical world that appeal has to be made to man to interest himself in knowledge concerning the super-sensible world. We would have to deal quite differently with the riddles of the super-sensible world if we were going to speak of them to the dead, to those who are passing through their existence between death and a new birth. It will accordingly be well, in bringing our study to a certain conclusion to-day, to take the indications that have been given in the last few days concerning the mysteries of the super-sensible world, and let them light up again in our hearts in connection with the sojourn of man on Earth.

Let us think, to begin with, of man as he is here in earthly life,—of ourselves, that is. We have in the first place our senses. Our senses give us information of all that is around us; they are the occasion of our earthly joy and happiness and also of our earthly suffering and pain. We are apt to forget how very much sense impressions and sense experiences signify in life. Studies such as we have been pursuing in this course of lectures take us beyond the life of the senses into spiritual regions, and it might well seem that the tendency of Spiritual Science would be to lead to an undervaluing of the life of the senses, making us feel that it is, after all, of secondary importance and that we should flee from it even while we are still in earthly life. Such a feeling can never be the final outcome of Spiritual Science. It can only serve to bring home to us that there is an inferior way of taking the life of the senses incompatible with the dignity and nobility of human existence, but that it is possible for man to lose the life of the senses in its less worthy aspects, and find it again in its deeper meaning from a higher, super-sensible angle of vision. We would naturally shrink from studying things in their spiritual aspect if we were obliged to tell ourselves that all the loveliness and wonder of the world of nature which makes such a deep impression on our souls, all the beauty of plants, of the blossoming flowers, of the ripening fruits, all the majesty of the starry heavens, mean so little in human life that they must be regarded as beneath our notice in comparison with spiritual-scientific knowledge. This is not so at all. If you look back to the impulses given by Initiates and Masters in different epochs for the enhancement of the dignity of human life, you will find that the words uttered by Initiates never undervalue the beauty, the splendour, the majesty of the earthly life of the senses. Wonderful, full of poetry and artistic imagination are often the words used by Initiates to express the most lofty super-sensible truths! Think only of the image of the lotus flower—to take one example among many—and you will realise that the Initiates have never considered it unworthy to speak of the development of spiritual life in imagery drawn from the world of the senses. They have invariably held that in the contemplation of the sense-world something is immediately present, or can at any rate be discovered, that leads man on to the highest.

The sense-world, however, as man perceives it in ordinary consciousness, cannot in itself afford him satisfaction. And for this reason. The impressions that come to man through his eyes, ears and other senses, are indeed connected with his Ego, with its whole life and development, but they can do nothing to promote the inner stability of the Ego. There they cannot help man. We turn our gaze outward to the beauty and splendour of the flowers; we have before us a world of infinite variety. We turn our gaze inward, to our Ego; and for ordinary consciousness it seems, to begin with, as if this Ego is vanishing away from us. It seems to be just a point within us, a spiritual point, capable of saying little more than the mere word “I.” Nor can we wonder at this. We need only consider how man's senses have to be wholly surrendered to the world if they are to mediate between him and the world. The eye, in order that it may see, must renounce itself. It must be completely transparent if the splendour and beauty of the outer world of sense is to shine through it in all the lustre and radiance of colour. It is the same with the other senses. We really know nothing of our senses. Is there, then, any way by means of which we can begin to know and understand what they are in their real nature? There is indeed, but here again we must tread the path which leads to the super-sensible world. Knowledge even of the senses has to be sought in the super-sensible world.

You are familiar with the descriptions I have given of the paths which lead to the higher worlds. Try to picture livingly the consciousness that can develop into Imaginative cognition. In a certain respect we withdraw from physical perception of the outer world when we enter into Imaginative cognition. But the most interesting thing of all that happens on this path is the following. I will describe it for you in a picture.

When, in meditation—in accordance with the exercises given in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment—you draw near to the world of Imagination, when, that is, as a result of your strivings, your etheric being begins to emerge from your physical being and this first super-sensible member begins itself to possess a kind of consciousness, you can as it were, “catch” yourself at a stage that lies between ordinary sense-perception and Imaginative vision. You have not yet advanced to a fully developed Imaginative vision, but you are on the way to it. We will now suppose that a man who is already on the way to Imaginative vision goes into some high mountainous region that is particularly rich in primeval silicious rock. Forces of soul will be readily quickened in him where there is an abundance of quartz-containing silicious rock. Certain inner faculties of soul can, as it were, suddenly spring to development as a result of a vivid impression caused by silicious rock on high mountains. Ordinarily, this kind of rock is slightly transparent, slightly translucent. But when our faculties of soul have pressed forward to the stage of which I have spoken—at that moment silicious rock becomes wholly transparent. We climb up on to a high mountain, and behold, the silicious rock appears to us with the transparency of glass. We feel moreover that something is streaming out from our own being and uniting with it. Here, at the outermost surface of the Earth, by a kind of natural surrender of our consciousness we become one with the whole Earth's surface. It is as though our eyes were sending out rays that enter right into the silicious rock; and in that moment we begin to feel ourselves one with the whole Earth. When we have this experience, beginning at the same time to feel ourselves one with the whole World, with the Cosmos, then, if we are to attain, not to a dream, nor to any abstract thought, but to a first actual realisation of oneness with the Cosmos, we must carry the experience further. An inner consciousness can light up within us which I may perhaps express in the following words. “Thou, O Earth, art not alone in the World-All! Thou, O Earth, together with me and all the other beings upon thee, art verily one with the great World-All!” Living in this experience of oneness with the silicious rock, we no longer see the Earth separated from the rest of the Universe. We see the Earth as an ether-sphere, emerging from the sphere of the cosmic ether.

This is a first feeling that can come over us. Many an ancient song, many an ancient myth, brimful of wonderful revelations, rings to us across the ages from a literature born in the time when mankind was possessed of instinctive clairvoyance. People read these songs and myths to-day, and like to persuade themselves that they are uplifted in heart and soul by what they read. But the truth contained therein eludes them. It is quite impossible to experience, or to have any insight into the real mood and feeling of the Bhagavad Gita, for example, or of other Indian and Oriental literature, without having at least begun to learn, through spiritual knowledge, in how real a sense man can become one with the Earth and thereby one with the Cosmos. Many a time the mood of such a song will have been born from a realisation of oneness with the Cosmos, a kind of “going in consciousness” with the light—even with the light that penetrates the hard silicious rock, so that now the light enfills and permeates it with the human soul itself, making this hard rocky substance into a cosmic eye through which man gazes out into the wide expanses of the Cosmos.

It is indeed so, that when out of real knowledge we begin to describe super-sensible man, we find ourselves quite naturally turning away from abstract, theoretical expressions. We cannot help speaking a language in which the whole feeling-content of the human soul is united with the ideas. In all our study of super-sensible man we must realise in the depths of our hearts that knowledge of the super-sensible cannot be clothed in words without making will and feeling one with the thoughts and ideas, without letting our whole being pour into the words. Life has, we all know well, to be endured and much that life brings is hard to bear. But for one who is conscious of the deeply human quality of super-sensible knowledge, the thing that is hardest of all is to listen to this super-sensible knowledge being expressed in theories and abstractions. The pain that is caused him by hearing people speak of the super-sensible world in a theoretical manner, is just like the physical pain caused to a finger by putting it into a flame.

When further progress has been made in super-sensible knowledge, when, through Imagination, we understand the working of the super-sensible forces in the human being during earthly life, then we can go on to attain the knowledge that belongs to Inspiration. Through Inspiration we can gaze into what man was before birth, before he descended to earthly existence, and also into what he will be when he has passed through the gate of death. We can look upon all that I have been describing to you in these lectures,—the journey through the different planetary regions, where the forming of the “physiognomy” takes place, and then the process of metamorphosis from an earlier to a later earthly life. At the stage of Inspiration we can follow the human being in his whole journey through the several starry worlds.

Now this knowledge, by means of which we can penetrate to the depths of our inner being, receives a new quality, a new colouring when we realise that what has been described in connection with the life stretching between death and a new birth lives within us even during our life on this physical Earth. It is all there within man when he is on Earth—tiny and insignificant as he appears from a spatial point of view, standing there in his physical body, enclosed by his skin. Within him live all the splendours of the Cosmos, and we must not omit to tell of these when we are describing the true and essential being of man. Man belongs to the worlds of the stars and to yet higher worlds—the worlds of the Hierarchies. And in such measure as our knowledge is able to penetrate to what is thus living within us—this earthly heritage of what we were in our true being, between death and a new birth—we can at the same time do something more. We can penetrate to the depths of our Earth planet, to the veins of the metals—lead ore, silver ore, copper ore—we can learn to perceive what lives in the rocks through the presence there of the metals and their ores. Seen with the eyes of sense, the metallic substances are little more than indications of different kinds of earth. But if we are able to gaze into the Earth with that spiritually sharpened perception which we owe to the super-sensible part of our being, the metallic substances in the Earth can give rise to wonderful experiences. The copper, silver and gold within the Earth begin to speak a language full of richness and mystery. Then something happens which brings us, men living on the Earth, into close kinship with the living soul of the Earth herself. The metallic ores tell us something; they become for us cosmic memories.

Think for a moment how it is with you when in quietude of soul—inwardly active quietude of soul—you let old memories rise up within you, memories which bear on their wings many an event of long ago. You feel as if you were living through past experiences, as if you were together again with many a one who has been dear to you in the course of your life, maybe with many a one long since gone hence. You are wafted right away from the present moment, you are living in the sorrows and joys of days gone by.

An exactly similar experience arises—but on a majestic scale—when, imbued with a spirit-knowledge that is also felt, you become one with the veins of metal in the Earth. It is not now as it was with the silicious rock which carried you out with seeing eyes, out into the cosmic spaces; in this new experience it is as though you became one with the very body of the Earth. And as you listen inwardly to the wonderful story told by the metals, you say to yourself: “Now I am one with the inmost beat of the soul and heart of the Earth herself. I have memories which are not my own personal memories; memories of the Earth herself are sounding into my being,—memories of earlier times, of ages when she was not yet the Earth we know, when there were no animals, no plants upon her surface, least of all any minerals in the bosom of the Earth. I remember, together with the Earth, those ancient days when the Earth was one with the other planets of our planetary system. I remember ages when there was no separate Earth, because the Earth was not yet dense, not yet firm in herself as she is to-day. I remember the time when the whole planetary system was a living organism of soul, and human beings indwelt this living organism, in quite a different form.” Thus do the veins of the metals in the Earth lead us to the Earth's own memories.

Now this experience leads us on to see quite clearly why it is that we have been sent down to the Earth by the Divine Beings who rule over the World-Order.

Living thus in the Earth's memories, we feel for the first time the true measure of our thinking. Having once taken hold in this way of the Earth's memories, we feel how our thinking is bound up with the Earth. And the moment we make the Earth's memories our own, we have around us the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. This, then, is the way whereby we can have around us even in earthly life those Beings who, as we have heard, are round us again during a certain period of our life between death and a new birth. We know now with full conviction that we come in contact with these Beings of the Second Hierarchy while we are incarnated on Earth between birth and death. The task of these Beings is not only that of working together with us between death and rebirth at the metamorphosis of our being; they have also their part in the whole forming and shaping of the Cosmos. We are able now to see how these Beings of the Second Hierarchy are entrusted by the spiritual World-Order with the task of bringing about in the Earth what is wrought there by virtue of the metallic ores.

Let us look back once more at the experience we had with the silicious rock. We were not then able to grasp the fact of which I am now going to speak, for at that stage it was not sufficiently clear. Only now at last does full clarity come from the marvellous experience of perceiving the Earth's memories in the veins of the metals. Having once reached this further stage, we can go back again and understand something which perhaps, to begin with, we did not understand. When our consciousness is borne out into the universe on the wings of the light that fills and pervades the silicious rock, the Beings of the Third Hierarchy—Angels, Archangels and Archai—are all around us. We know now that what the ordinary eyes of sense tell us when we go up a high mountain is not really true. Neither do our eyes tell us true when we descend into the deep places of the Earth and gaze upon the veins of the metals. On a high mountain, among the silicious rock, around and over the rocky peaks weave the Angels, Archangels and Archai; and when we go down into the Earth we find the Beings of the Second Hierarchy moving in the paths of the veins of the metals. Once again therefore we can say to ourselves that even during earthly life we are in the company of spiritual Beings who are connected with our own innermost being in the life which extends from death to a new birth.

In our life after death we pass consciously, after a time, into the world of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. In the discarnate state we unfold a consciousness in which we know that these Beings of the Third Hierarchy are around us, just as on Earth the three or four kingdoms of Nature are around us. When, in this higher state of consciousness, we behold the Angels, Archangels and Archai, all that the senses on Earth can perceive has of course vanished, for our senses have been given over, with our body, to the elements. Between death and a new birth we can see nothing that the senses perceive in earthly life. But the Angels, Archangels and Archai tell us—I can use this expression, for it exactly accords with the reality—the Angels, Archangels and Archai relate to us the story of what they are doing down below on the Earth. They tell us that they are not only active in the life which we ourselves are now sharing with them. They whisper softly into our souls: “We take our share too in the creative work of the Cosmos, we are creative Beings in the Cosmos and we look deep down in the Earth and behold in what earthly forms the silicious rock and kindred substances are fashioned.” And then man realises, when he is among the Angels, Archangels and Archai, that he must come down again to Earth. He learns to know these Beings of the Third Hierarchy between death and a new birth, and he hears them speak in wonderful manner of their deeds upon the Earth. He knows then that he can only behold these their deeds, by descending to Earth, clothing himself in a physical, human body and partaking in the world of sense-perception.

The deepest mysteries of sense-perception—not only of perceptions connected with the silicious rock on high mountains, but the deepest mysteries of all sense-perception—are revealed to us in wonderful words by the Beings among whom we live between death and a new birth. The beauties of material Nature on Earth are so full of greatness and mystery that the memories we take with us through the gate of death are only seen in their full and true light when we hear the Angels, Archangels and Archai describing to us all that our eyes have been able to see, our ears to hear and our other senses to perceive down here in earthly life.

Such is the connection between the physical and the super-physical; such too the connection of man's physical life with his superphysical life. The universe is full of splendour, and it is right that what we see in material existence should delight and uplift us. Its real mysteries we learn to know when we have passed through the gate of death. The more we have learned to rejoice in the physical world, the more deeply we have entered into all the joys which the sense-world has to bestow, the greater the measure of understanding we shall bring to the world of the Angels, who are waiting to tell us of these mysteries which here on Earth we do not yet understand and shall only learn to understand when we have passed over into the superphysical world. The same is true of our relation to the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, among whom we also live for a certain period between death and a new birth. We can, on Earth, come into a special relation to these Beings when, following the path of the light into the veins of the metals in the Earth, we awaken within us the Earth's memories. But here again, only when we have come over yonder into the region of the Beings of the Second Hierarchy are we able to understand all the experiences we have had on Earth in connection with the metals.

One of the most wonderful experiences man can have is to be able to investigate and prove the manifold connections that exist between the metals and the health of man, and I have good hope that the Anthroposophical Movement will do a great deal to open up the truly beautiful aspect of this field of knowledge. Every metal and every metal-compound has its relation to the health of man. As man goes through life, whether in health or disease, he is in connection all the time with that which gives to the Earth her memories—namely, the metals and their various compounds. We must get beyond mere theorising as to the healing influences of lead and lead compounds, of copper and copper compounds, and so forth. These substances are all extremely significant and important remedies, if we know how to prepare them in the right way, and we must not be satisfied with speaking in an abstract manner of the wonderful connections between the metals and the being of man. A feeling of holy awe does indeed even now arise within us when we contemplate the veins of metal in the depths of the Earth, but we must go a step further and develop also a deepened insight into the marvellous connection of the metals with the being of man—a connection which is revealed to us only when we have first studied the human being in health and in disease. As I indicated, it is to be hoped that the Anthroposophical Movement will be able to spread this knowledge in the hearts and minds of men, for it is of the greatest importance. In times gone by it was not so important, because men knew instinctively the connections, for example, between the lead-process or the silver-process with some process in the human head. In days of yore these connections were spoken of a great deal. Nowadays people read what was written long ago without understanding a single word. Approaching it from the point of view of modern science, they talk of it as if it were nothing but empty abstractions. When through Anthroposophical knowledge man attains to the deepened feeling and insight which can come to him in contemplation of the wonderful connection between the metals of the Earth and the sickness and health of the human being, then indeed he will carry up into the spiritual world through the gate of death something that will help him to understand the speech of the Second Hierarchy. The greatest mysteries of the world will be able to reveal themselves to him, precisely because he has prepared himself in this way on Earth and brings with him the necessary understanding. For it is really so, my dear friends. We learn what Anthroposophy has to teach us not merely for the sake of satisfying human curiosity, but in order that the knowledge may bear fruit after we have passed through the gate of death. For only what we learn and receive through spiritual science can bring us into a right relation, between death and a new birth, to those Spiritual Beings whom we must needs contact with our whole being, since it is they who are then our cosmic environment.

It is thus possible to give a detailed picture of how we come into relation with the Beings of the Hierarchies between death and a new birth. But there is still a further experience that can befall us as we pass through those regions, and it must now be described.

When we can grasp the connection between the metals in the Earth and the being of man in health and disease, secrets of Nature are revealing themselves to us. Within these secrets something more lies hid. We hear the Beings of the Second Hierarchy speaking of the nature of gold, silver, lead, copper and the other metals. But in our relation to the great spiritual world, it is with us now as it is here on Earth when we are beginning to learn to read and it dawns upon us that learning to read will enable us to fathom many a world-mystery which might otherwise remain for ever beyond our ken. I say this only by way of comparison, for the speech through which we learn to understand the Beings of the Second Hierarchy in a certain sphere of existence between death and a new birth—the speech which tells of the metals and their relation to man in health and disease—will only be true when, in the spiritual world, we can hear it, not as prose, but as cosmic poetry,—let me rather say, when we ourselves rise to the level of cosmic poetry. At first we listen in much the same way as someone with no appreciation of poetry may listen to the recitation of a poem. But just as we can, on Earth, learn—unless we are quite devoid of poetic feeling—to appreciate what is contained in the swing of the verse, in the rhythm, in the whole artistic form of the poem, so is it possible for us, after death, to rise from the prose to the poetry of that world beyond the Threshold, from the speech of the Second Hierarchy which tells us of the relation of the metals to man in health and disease, to a higher stage, where we understand the mysteries of moral existence in the Universe,—that moral life in which not only human souls but the divine souls of all the Beings of the Hierarchies are involved. We have come to a region where the mysteries of the life of soul begin to lie open before us.

Then we can go a step further. I have described the experiences that can be ours when we go up a mountain, and again when we go down a deep mine. It was all still and quiet; we contemplated the crystals at rest on the ridges of rock, and the veins of the metals at rest in the bosom of the Earth. Now we can go further and contemplate something else that is usually only regarded from the prosaic aspect of utilitarian considerations. Such considerations are not to be despised; we must always have our feet planted firmly on the Earth if we want to penetrate into the spiritual world healthy in soul and body. But suppose we are looking at a metal that is passing, under the influence of intense heat, from the solid into the liquid condition. Then, if we can get beyond the utilitarian point of view, wonderful revelations will be vouchsafed to us. If we walk through foundries and watch how the iron becomes glowing and fluid in the furnaces, above all if we can watch metallic ores such as antimony ore being led over from the solid into the liquid and by and by into other conditions, then if we can receive deep into our soul the impression of this destiny of metallic substance in fire, an entirely new element will be born in the spiritual knowledge that has awakened within us; we shall receive a strong and profound impression of the mysteries of our own existence.

Think of the human being in relation to the animal. (I have frequently spoken of this.) Anatomical comparisons, such as are made to-day, comparing the bones, muscles, and even the blood of man and animal reveal the existence of certain affinities. But the secret of what it is that places man higher than the animal cannot be discovered until we give attention to some facts that have more significance than is generally realised. The spine of the animal lies in the horizontal direction, parallel with the surface of the Earth, whereas man stands upright. The faculty of speech is denied to the animal, whereas man not only speaks, but from speech evolves thought. When we observe how the faculties of speaking and thinking begin to unfold in a little child and how its body rises into the upright position that it may have the right orientation for human life on Earth, we are then beholding the marvellous forces by means of which the child finds its bearings in the dynamics of the universe. And then we see how the forces of orientation living in the limbs of a little child express themselves also in the melody, in the articulation of speech. We see the human being building and forming himself in the sense world. We see the formative forces working calmly and quietly within him. Wonderful it is beyond all telling to watch month by month how the little child gradually leaves off crawling and begins to stand upright, how his limbs and body orientate themselves to the dynamics of the universe! Then the faculties of speaking and thinking begin to emerge, as it were, from the bodily nature. There is no more beautiful sight than to watch a little child learning to walk, to speak and to think. But now if on the one hand we can contemplate this process in all its wonder and calm majesty, beholding it with mind at rest, sensitive to its surpassing beauty, and if on the other hand we are able to look with a higher power of vision at the metals melting in the fire, then we can perceive there, in its spirit form, the force by means of which the child can learn to walk and to speak. The archetype of this power is revealed to us when the flames lay hold of the metal, melt it and make it fluid. The more fluid, the more volatile the metal becomes, the more clearly are we able to perceive the inner resemblance between this process—which really constitutes the destiny of the metal—and the process which, smelted and volatilised in the fires of the Cosmos, enables the little child to walk, to speak and to think.

We know now that the activity of the Beings of the First Hierarchy—the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—is a two-fold activity. They speak to us out of that spiritual world into which we pass during the middle period of our life between death and a new birth, they reveal to us there the mysteries of planetary life; and they work down also into the visible world. Here, in the visible world, the influences of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are active in the little child as he learns to walk, to speak and to think, and we behold also their working wherever fire has part in the process of the Earth, wherever metals melt and are fused in fire. Our Earth has been built up by the smelting and fusing of metals in the cosmic fire. In the smelting of the metals by the cosmic fires, we see the deeds of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones within the earthly world. We gaze back into remote ages of the past when the metals, all aglow and incandescent through the power of fire, played an essential part in the coming-into-being of the Earth's body. The Thrones, above all, were active in this process, though with them worked always the Seraphim and Cherubim. The Cherubim it is who play the chief part in the unfolding of the child's faculties of walking, speaking and thinking. But everywhere the Beings of the First Hierarchy work and weave together in unison.

With this kind of knowledge, death in earthly life is linked on to resurrection in the life beyond the Threshold. For when such knowledge reveals the kinship of the cosmic fires by which the metals are melted, with the powers that make man truly man, then the whole world becomes one and we realise that there is no difference between the earthly life that stretches from birth to death and life in the spiritual world beyond the Threshold. The life between death and a new birth is a metamorphosis of earthly life. By knowing how the one passes over into the other, we realise that the one is but a different form of the other. When the soul is deepened by this knowledge, then an understanding of still other mysteries can be added. This further understanding can also be reached on quite another path.

If you think about what I have told you of the connection of the melting and dissolving of metals in fire with the unfolding of the faculties of walking, speaking and thinking in the little child, if you place these pictures before your imagination, meditating upon them and deepening thereby your understanding, then a power will quicken and strengthen your soul and enable you to find the solution of a great riddle—the riddle of the working of karma, or human destiny. In between what happens when a child learns to walk, to speak and to think and what happens when metals become fluid and volatile under the influence of great heat,—amid all the sulphurous and phosphoric glow and gleam of colour in the burning metal, amid the working of the right and true transition from animal to man that takes place in the little child as he learns to walk, to speak and to think, karma stands revealed. There lies the way to a true understanding of karma. Karma is a super-sensible reality that works straight into the very deeds and actions of man's life.

Rising up therefore in this way in meditation, we learn to know the mysteries of destiny that weave through our life. On the one side we have the picture of the destiny of the metal in the fire, on the other side the picture of the essential and primordial destiny of man when he descends to Earth, expressed in the learning to walk, to speak and to think. Within these pictures man can find revealed as much of the riddle of destiny as he needs for his life.

So it is, that for the riddle also of human destiny super-sensible man speaks into the world in which “sensible” man is living. Of this too I wanted to speak to you, for it belongs essentially in our study of super-sensible man. Such a study can never be merely a matter of assimilating theories. In order to understand the being of man we must reach out on every hand to the mysteries of the universe—mysteries of Nature and mysteries of Spirit. For man is intimately and closely bound up with all the mysteries of the Natural as well as of the Spiritual Universe. Man is in truth a universe in miniature. Only it must not be imagined that what takes place out in the great expanses of the Cosmos takes place in exactly the same way in the microcosm. The majestic flames of cosmic fire that rise up from the molten metals stream out to the boundaries of cosmic space—for boundaries there are! Try, my dear friends, to picture to yourselves these cosmic fires in which the metals are being smelted and made volatile. What is thus made volatile streams out into cosmic space, to return once again in powers of light, radiations of warmth and light. And what thus returns from cosmic space enables the tiny child who cannot yet speak or walk but only crawl, to become a child who stands and walks. Upward and outward radiate the streaming forces from the molten metals, and when they have gone far enough out into the cosmos they turn and come back again and are then the forces which enable the child to stand upright. Here you have a picture of ascending and descending cosmic forces, as they work in the universe, and of their many metamorphoses and variations.

You will now also be able to understand the true meaning of something which in days of yore was connected with the science of those times, namely, the priestly sacrifice. The sacrificial flame, together with what was burning in it, was sent forth into cosmic spaces to the Gods that it might come down again thence to work in the world of men. As he stood before the fire on the altar the priest would say: “To thee, O Flame, I commit what is mine on Earth, that the Gods may receive it when the smoke rises upward. May that which is borne upwards by the Flame be changed into divine Blessing and pour down again to Earth as creative and fructifying power!”

Thus, as we listen to the words of the priest of olden time, who is speaking of super-sensible worlds, we may hear how he too gives utterance to the cosmic mysteries in the midst of which man stands.

This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to say to you about the super-sensible nature of man, anthroposophically perceived and understood.

Translated by Luise Boeddinghaus

At present there is a general opinion that there are certain limits to human knowledge, not only temporary knowledge owing to the fact that one had not achieved everything in the time that has already passed, and one would have to leave some things for the future, but in quite a general sense one speaks today of limits of perception, limits to knowledge for humanity. One thinks that man is constituted in such a way that he can only know about certain things, while other things are above his ability to know about them; and that it is mainly the facts of the so-called supersensible world which man is supposed not to be able to perceive and for which he has to be satisfied with what is called a belief, an assumption arising out of obscure feelings and such like. Particularly the endeavours of the past centuries and of the present time, which have yielded the greatest successes in the field of natural science and which have also brought about the greatest practical results, are considered proof by contemporary humanity that one has to come to a halt at that which can be observed by the senses, which can be proved by experiments and so forth, namely the sense perceptible real world. This is, when one speaks of man, only that world which man traverses between birth and death, or conception and death.

Now it cannot be denied that natural science owes its great successes to the fact that it has limited itself to the exploration of every aspect of the sense world and does not in any way draw any conclusions from the sense world to the supersensible world. But on the other hand there is connected with this, as one believes, fully proven acceptance of limits to knowledge altogether, something inwardly immeasurably tragic for the sensitive human being, something tragic which today does not yet come to the consciousness of many people, but which lives in many human souls in vague feelings, in all sorts of subconscious sensations, making them unsure in life, even unsure and unable in outward actions, in relationships to their fellow human beings and so on. For it is gradually felt more and more that the limits at which one wants to stop in this way are not only those of an outward supersensible world, but that with these limits to knowledge, if rightly perceived, there is still something quite different involved. Man gradually feels that his own true being must be of supersensible nature, that his true being which as man gives him his value and dignity must be found in the spiritual, in the not-sensible. If one calls a halt to all knowledge before the supersensible, then one calls a halt before human self-knowledge. Then one renounces insight into the most precious, the most valuable in the human being himself.

But thereby one also undermines one's real inward self-confidence. Whereby does man feel himself to be part of the natural world which today has been so successfully explored? Only because he bears this world of nature within himself in his outer physical body. Everything that exists in our surroundings as natural substances and natural laws we carry within us, at least most of it. Through this we can feel connected with physical nature. We would not feel that we existed in this physical nature if we were not part of it with our own body, or if we could not explore ourselves as physical beings. But in the same way it is with the supersensible, with the as truly felt spiritual inner being of man, even though men do not as yet bring it to full consciousness. If we cannot feel ourselves as belonging to a spiritual world, as beings who take into themselves and bear within themselves the forces and substances of the spiritual, then we cannot accept ourselves as spiritual human beings at all. But then we must lack the self-confidence towards that which after all we feel to be our most precious, our most dignified, that by which we actually are human beings, indeed want to be human beings. This has another side to it. We feel that that which we call our moral impulses, which we call the content of our moral-spiritual forces, does not flow out of natural life, certainly not out of what takes place in muscles and bones. We feel them to be coming from a spiritual world, but we experience uncertainty about this whole spiritual world if we have to call a halt before the supersensible with our perception.

And in this way present day humanity cannot really build a bridge between that which in outer nature is to it a brutal - as I would like to call it—fact, and that which flows to it out of the most intimate spiritual inner life as the content of the moral world order. One does not have the courage to bring to full clarity what it is that the human soul has to contend with here. Natural science has worked thoroughly towards being able to say something, albeit hypothetically, about the present day creatures out of which man is supposed to have developed. One describes, at least hypothetically, how once upon a time our present world is supposed to have developed out of the world mist. Hypotheses are also made about the end of our planetary system or the system altogether to which we belong. One imagines this whole system which exists in time as somehow contracting, constituting itself out of natural substances and natural forces. One imagines physical man then emerging out of a part of these forces at a certain time. Electricity, magnetism, warmth and so on, they can be outwardly observed, there the thinking human being feels safe with the content of his consciousness. But when the need arises in him to think of that which does not come from his physical nature, the moral spiritual impulses as working in the world, when he must think of as working in the world what he brings about out of a spiritual elemental force, what now must also be in the world, when he must have experiences in the world which must not pass away together with that which passes away with the physical—then man has no stand to say to himself out of that which is accepted by the limits to knowledge: these moral forces are just as valid as that which comes out of the brute forces of physical nature.

From this there come to man today not only theoretical doubts but insecurity of the whole soul life, insecurity apparent everywhere even though people deceive themselves about this. For this is the very character of present civilization that one deludes oneself about the deepest questions of civilization. But in the subconscious these questions are nevertheless active, they express themselves—albeit not in theories, but in the whole tenor of soul, in the confidence and capability of the soul life. That is the inner tragedy which can actually be noticed in the depths of every soul, even of the most superficial. And this is where then that arises which can seem paradoxical in the present time, there arises the longing in many people just for supersensible knowledge! One might say in the spiritual realm it is just the same as with hunger and thirst. One doesn't long for food and drink when one is satisfied, but one longs for them when one is hungry. And from an inmost need present humanity longs for the supersensible because it doesn't have it. While on the one hand philosophers and natural scientists today want to prove more and more that there are unsurpassable limits and borders before the supersensible, we see on the other hand an insatiable thirst of already many human souls for supersensible knowledge, and the number of these people will get ever greater.

To come to this supersensible perception there is a point of view, or I could rather say a method of investigation of which I would like to speak to you today. But I do not want to speak to you of a method of investigation of the supersensible which today one often wants to achieve in a very easy way, but I shall speak to you of a method of perception which, although it is an absolutely intimate matter of the human soul, but in this just as scientific, indeed as exact, not only as an outer scientific result, but as the mathematical or geometric results of science itself.

But while one is striving towards such knowledge and just comes to a knowledge of that which is the supersensible in man, one immediately enters something which right from the start causes all kinds of doubts, causes uncertainties right from the start.

When we look outside we soon notice that the natural scientists and philosophers who speak of limits to knowledge are right as concerns the immediate outer perception. So we must look inside. But when we look inside and we remain within the ordinary consciousness, with that which we have in ordinary life and also in the usual science, then in the beginning nothing confronts us either than a kind of thought picture of the outer world again. When one is completely honest in one's striving for self-knowledge and asks oneself: What is there, when instead of looking out into the world you look back into yourself, what is there actually inside you?—Then one will have to realize that one finds the world inside again, albeit in a picture. What one has experienced has imprinted itself onto our life of concepts, of feeling. We experience as it were a thought picture and feeling picture of that which is outside as well. We have only directed our gaze backwards. This gives us at first nothing new, but only in a dimmed down way in picture form that which is outside too. Only as a general feeling man senses that he is present in these weaving thoughts, ideas and sensations as an I, as a self. But that is so general and undefined, that initially he cannot do much with it.

That is why in the Middle Ages, in the times when one approached self-knowledge, knowledge of the human soul, in a more intensive way, one didn't initially pay much attention to that which one can gain by a merely backward directed self-observation during the ordinary consciousness, but one tried to achieve knowledge of the soul in a different way. This different way is actually interesting, and I must start from this different, often much desired way of knowledge of the soul, so that we can understand one another about the knowledge of soul which I actually mean. But I mention beforehand that I only start from this other knowledge of soul in order to explain what I want to bring, but that I don't want to attribute a special value to it. Therefore nobody should believe that because I start from the dream I already give it value for knowledge. However, this dream life is immensely meaningful.

Those who at some stage have sought knowledge of soul through the dream life, will have noticed that in a certain sense the soul life appears much more characteristically in a dream than when one merely looks into oneself and, as one often says, wants to observe oneself. You have observed the dreams and have initially found two types of dream. As you know, the dream conjures up weaving pictures of a fantastic reality which is initially not as abstract as the thoughts we have in our day consciousness.

But the dream creates initially something which appears enigmatical, on the one side by its composition, on the other side by its content.

There are two things which man experiences as pictures in a dream. Initially pictures of experiences which we went through during our life on earth, reminiscences from life. This arises and shows us the one or other thing which we experienced many years ago. But what there asserts itself rises up next to other things in a connection with was not supplied by life. Occurrences which took place ten years ago are tied together with others which took place the other day. The most removed from one another comes together. By putting together fragments of life, dreams create impossible pictures, chaotic pictures. Everything which outer life gave to us by way of occurrences which we experienced is conjured up to us in dream in a chaotic fashion. That is one kind of dream. The other kind is that in which our own bodily condition is conjured up before us in a kind of symbolic image. Who would not have dreamt of suffering from the heat of a boiling hot stove? He has seen the flickering flames; he awakes and has strong palpitations of the heart. Or we dream that we are walking past a fence. We see how one or two poles are damaged and then we wake up with toothache. In the one case, when we dreamt of the boiling hot stove with its heat, it was a picture of our heart which was palpitating strongly. In the other case, when we dreamt of the fence, it was a picture of our row of teeth which somehow gave us pain. And someone who can penetrate more deeply into these things knows that a certain area of dreams is characterised by inner organs being shown to us symbolically in the dream. However, one must be quite knowledgeable about all the facts which come into play, if one wants to recognise in the symbols what actually expresses itself of the inner being of man in them. Then one will find that there is hardly an organ or an inner process which cannot be conjured up for us inwardly by dreams.

Now former psychologists who have worked with dreams have developed a very valid view about the relationship of man to dreams. They said to themselves: that which we bear within us, we can only feel, but we do not see it, we don't have it in front of us like an outer object. But when we have our own heart beat in front of us in the picture of a boiling hot stove, then we have at least a picture in our consciousness that we make for ourselves, that looks like the picture of an outer object. We have to be separated from the outer object if a picture of it is to arise in us. That which one is oneself, even if it is one's own body, one feels, one feels it sometimes painfully when something organic is not in order, but one does not look at it. When one looks at something in picture form one must be outside of it. And so the former psychologists, which still existed in the 19th century, argued: If I am dreaming in symbols about my own body and its processes, I cannot be in my body, for then I would not experience it. Therefore I must be outside my body in such a case. The picture in any case shows me something of an independent soul-spiritual life over against the body. And furthermore they argued: When I dream in any, however hidden way, of reminiscences of life, then the outer natural existence as it is would have to present itself to me. But there something is constantly changing; there the dream conjures up for me the most fantastic relationships. There again I must be inside, for nature as it usually surrounds me would not be able to show me the occurrences which I have experienced with it, nor the occurrences of human life which I have experienced, in quite a different order.

In this way something was put together of which one could say: It was a valid conviction for these former psychologists, that there they caught something of the soul in a condition where it is separated from the physical body. For firstly man cannot be united with his body if the occurrences of the body, even though only in symbols, in the dream appear to be separated. He must then be outside his body. But again, we must also be inside the reminiscences of our experiences, be together with them, when we have the second kind of dream, for nature does not alter the connection in which experiences have occurred. That we must alter ourselves. Therefore we must be outside, outside our body, when we have the first kind of dreams, and in the same way we must be inside our experiences in the second kind. That means we must actually be outside our physical body with our experiences of soul when we dream. In so far that which former psychologists said to themselves is absolutely indisputable, one cannot say anything against it.

But something else has to be said. The dream cannot give me any sure knowledge about the self. It can lead us to the way of how one can come to such a certainty. Because what we are inside during the time between going to sleep and awakening when we are outside the body: that, which the dream is showing us there, that we certainly are not; for those are on the one hand pictures of our bodily interior, even symbols of this bodily interior, thus that again which is taken from our bodily interior. How can we, when sleeping we are outside our body, be the same which we are in the interior of our physical body? So something else must be the case. We must be something outside our body, but that does not assert itself. We are initially not able to lay hold of the actual nature of the soul in the sleeping state. That conceals itself and masks itself at first; it surrounds itself with pictures of its own bodily nature and shows itself in relationship to its own life in arbitrary compositions of its experiences. The former psychologists have rightly deduced that we are outside our body when we dream, but that the dream shows us something about this being which is outside our body, that is not the case, although they believed it. Because it doesn't show us anything except what we have formerly experienced within the body, and our own body in symbols. Therefore if we are something outside our body, then this is masked in the dream, then the dream is wearing a mask in respect of this. If we want to discover our own being, then we must be able to take this mask off the dream, that is off the soul—for the dream is this mask.—Up to here a more intimate view of the dream leads us onto a path. As former psychologists realised that the dream ultimately doesn't show anything besides what it takes out of the sense world, they of course also had their doubts. And just as one could not believe to have certainty by means of an ordinary backward looking self-observation, so one was also not satisfied with that which the observation of the dream world could give one. Over against this there now appears that which I always call the anthroposophical world view or anthroposophical way of investigation. This initially maintains: If the dream shows us that we are something outside our body, then it proves itself to be too weak by itself to show, to reveal its own being. To reveal itself it uses bits and pieces of reminiscences of life, of symbols of its own bodily nature. Therefore we have to strengthen the soul life so that we come to that which in the soul life stands masked before us in the dream. This one can do. One can do it by copying the dream in full consciousness by a systematically exact so-called meditative life as I have described it in my book “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and other writings. But not copying it by artificially creating dreams, but awakening in the soul in full consciousness that which in dream arises spontaneously from the subconscious. One comes to this by accustoming oneself to proceed in the same way as the dream proceeds spontaneously—to proceed by imagining things which one knows well symbolically in inner meditation. The dream conjures up symbolically for us our own bodily nature.

One now practices—as neither our own inner being nor outer nature give us symbols—strictly systematically to imagine symbolically. In this way concepts are by force of will brought into a symbol by us, just as the dream conjures it up or us spontaneously. It must be created by inner activity, but that means, the dream must be strengthened.

In outer life we give ourselves over to passive observations and perceptions. Then the inner activity is shadowy. Everyone really senses how shadowy the abstract concepts are, how the thoughts are given over to the outer world and then proceed in a shadowy way. Everyone speaks of the shadowy thought compared to concrete reality. But when one now rises to imagine symbolic things, one has to create these symbols.

And when one is a fully conscious human being and no fool, then one knows that one makes them oneself. Then one is by no means a dreamer but a normal waking person, nay even more than a normal waking person. To the dreamer the symbols come spontaneously, to the waking person the conceptual images come through outer stimulation. The waking person who makes alive within himself that which dreams give, who places before the soul symbols with all inner strength and imitates the dream in full consciousness, awakens himself as it were to a higher activity of thinking and imagining and with this to an altogether higher activity of soul than one has in ordinary consciousness. That however must then be really practiced quite systematically.

And likewise the other side of dream can be imitated. We take experiences from our life that can be separated from one another by years. We can combine them in such a way that the one stands next to the other, but now not chaotically as in dream but from a point of view which may perhaps be from fantasy, but which we quite consciously determine, which is not imposed on us by our inner being, but which we ourselves create inwardly. And in this way we gradually educate ourselves to remain in an inner life of soul; to remain strongly in a life of soul which proceeds totally from the inner activity.

Today one usually underestimates what actually happens there with the human being when he does such exercises, because one does not love the inner activity of thinking, because one already finds it very active when one lives in thoughts induced by outer observation. But he who in all seriousness becomes a true imitator of dream in full consciousness, experiences that he strongly intensifies his inner mobility of soul, that he definitely strengthens it. But he is, if he is no fool but a sensible human being, fully conscious that he himself is making all these pictures and life associations, that is, that he is living in illusion. With a dream one first has to wake up in order to realize the illusion of the dream from the point of view of waking life. The dream can only be unmasked from the point of view of waking; the dreamer imagines the content of the dream to be reality, although his feeling for reality is not such a fictitious one. He who becomes an imitator of dream becomes aware of how a living inner being, something active, quickening is awakened in him, but how he has a content which is absolutely self-image, illusion. Therefore he comes to the point of not bothering with that which is present in him as content, but to concentrate on that which works within him, is active within him. In short, that which we usually only have as a general feeling of ego or self becomes a strongly felt inner activity. If one wants to become a spiritual scientist and not a vague mystic, one must remain conscious and exact. But if one persists in this one will also come more and more to experience the nature of the illusionary. One knows: You imagine nothing, but you have an imagination. Through this one will also the possibility one day to develop the capacity of soul with which one truly doesn't imagine anything and is yet as active as one has learnt it in the imitation of dream.

I point you here to an activity of soul which must absolutely be cultivated by the investigator of spirit. One usually believes, and those who judge things superficially often say it: spiritual investigation is something where man gives himself up to his thoughts and fantasies—that is easy, while to do research in the laboratory, the clinic and the observatory is difficult, something where you have to renounce things.—But this is not so. Because that which one has to acquire as such an inner capacity of soul requires at least just as much time, nay sometimes much longer time of inner work than any outwardly acquired scientific ability as is common in natural science today. Those who want to gain knowledge about that which is here called spiritual investigation should not raise the objection: In natural science one must not be a dilettante if one wants to have a say, there one must really understand something.—What the spiritual investigator alleges is usually regarded as though it were gained effortlessly compared to that which in natural science is reached with much trouble. But it is only the path which is different. In natural science outer observations and facts are used to come to a conclusion, while the spiritual scientist must first develop his own inner capacity for observation. He develops it as an imitator of dreams but in such a way that in the meditative activity that which in dream is conjured up is overcome by him. In dream we do not become conscious of an activity, the images of the dream conjure it up for us; but on the first step of supersensible knowledge the illusion is totally perceived. One knows: you don't imagine anything—but one notices the inner strengthened, empowered activity and in the end learns by a lot of practicing how one can call up this activity without first needing an illusionary activity for this, without first having to imitate the dream. So it is in imitation that one develops this capacity of soul. Once the capacity is there, one knows what one can do with it. Because then one is in a state where one has an empty but very much awake consciousness, but also inner activity. After one has discarded the illusion of this activity, one has initially no content. But the state in which one lives just as one gets to the point of developing the capacity of inner activity without initially also having a content, this state demands a strong inner struggle. And actually this struggle which one needs for this is the touchstone and test whether this spiritual investigation is an honest and true one. For at that moment when one just gets ready to live with empty consciousness, with normal waking consciousness without this waking consciousness having a content, at this moment an unspeakable pain, an unlimited privation spreads itself over the whole soul life. All that one can otherwise experience as pain in the world is really insignificant compared with this spiritual soul pain which one experiences at this moment of cognition. And one has to overcome this pain. For it is this pain which is the expression of a force which has its physical counter image in all sorts of forms of deprivations: in hunger, which instructs us to eat, in thirst, which forces us to drink and so on. Now we feel something in the soul which has to come towards us and we feel it as an unspeakable pain. But when we live for a while in this pain, when we feel our inner being itself as one filled with pain, that is, when we are for a while pain, when our own human being is for our consciousness for a while nothing else but a conglomerate of pain, then this consciousness no longer remains empty, then this consciousness fills itself, and it now fills itself not with sense content which we receive through eyes, ears and so on, but it now fills itself with spiritual content. And we receive as the first thing which comes to us as spiritual content in this way our own spiritual being as a unified spiritual organisation—but living in time, not in space—as it extends from birth or conception up to the present moment to which we have lived the earthly life. Just as we can look into a spatial perspective and see objects which are far away again in perspective, so we can learn to look from the present moment of our life into our own past. We don't see the bodily at that moment, we only remember it, but we have to remember it, otherwise we are destroyed in our consciousness. But he who wants to become an investigator or spirit may not become a person inclined to fantasy nor a confused mystic, he must use his consciousness and his good sense just as a mathematician would for a mathematical problem. But just as we normally see objects of space in perspective, so we now look into a time perspective.

Everything that we have experienced in our existence now stands before us in a time tableau, but in a living time tableau. But not only that which we ourselves have experienced now stands before us thus, but also that which shows us how we have come into being, how inner spiritual soul forces have built up our body from birth or conception, how the sculptural forces are which have worked on our body. We see ourselves outwardly. But that which we see there, through which our own soul life stands before our soul, that now also differs qualitatively from the experience of this time tableau.

When one looks back on one's life in the usual way, one experiences the happenings as they come towards one: one experiences for instance how a person has come towards one, how he has approached one, lovingly or with hatred, how he did this or that as he came towards one. One experiences oneself in this memory picture in the way the outer world has come towards one.

In this other memory picture however, which now stands there in real pictures of which one knows that they reflect the own spiritual nature of the human being just as the usual memory pictures reflect the outer nature, in this other memory tableau is reflected to us how we have approached the outer world. There is shown how one was oneself when for instance one approached another personality. How in our soul forces unfolded which found their satisfaction, their delight, their happiness just through that personality. One really looks at oneself how one was as earthly human being. And then one sees how now in the reality both sides in which the dream was masked flow together.

Now the dream becomes a fully conscious reality. It even becomes more than the ordinary consciousness sees. One initially sees the spiritual entity which lives inside the body, which during sleep is independent of it, indeed which is the creator of the body. This one sees. And then one realises, this spiritual entity also contains, but in a spiritual way, metamorphosed, something like the laws of nature but—you are already protesting against it—in a spiritual existence. Into that which one here experiences the moral world is already entering. In this the moral laws are already present in such a way that one now knows: in the same way in which one's own spirituality works, the moral laws are working. There the moral laws begin to stand with equal validity next to the laws of nature.

But with this one only gets as far as the experience of man's own spiritual existence in earthly being. If one wants to go further one has to develop still other capacities in the soul.—The particulars about this you can read up in the above mentioned books, for this can only be achieved by the practicing of many details. Here only the principle shall be described.—Imagine that at a certain time of day you are remembering back to the morning when you got up, or woke up. If you try hard, the course of the day up to this moment can stand before your soul. Now if you don't place the course of the day in such a way before your soul that you start with the morning, then go on to the experiences of the forenoon and so on, but if you place the course of the day backwards before your soul, so that you start at the certain time and now trace it backwards, then you can also say that you get up to the night when you have slept. But there you then don't add anything, there something remains empty, and that which connects again with the backwards imagined happenings is the last experience before going to sleep, and then you can again place the course of the previous day before your soul.

In short, when the human being remembers in this way in ordinary life, there always remain gaps between the conscious experiencing—the gaps which we lived through unconsciously during sleep. Now in order to go further with the exercises which can link up with this backward experiencing, it is necessary to develop a very strong sense of reality. Such a sense of reality is initially not very prevalent among present day people. It is even something which is not all that easy to achieve, because in relation to remembering people usually remain with that which in some way is closely connected with their personality. In their thoughts they do not connect the threads towards the outer world so strongly, that these threads to the outer world connect with their memories. The human being usually has no inclination at all to live in the outer world, in reality in the outer world, with his memories. How much this is the case, of this one can convince oneself in daily life. I have known people who for instance have seen a lady in the morning who had interested them very much, and when one asks them: What colour was the lady's dress?—they don't know it. Therefore it is as though they had not seen the lady at all, for if they had seen her, they would surely also have seen the colour of her dress. How tenuously is one thus connected with the outer world, if in the afternoon one doesn't even know what colour the dress of a person was whom one had seen in the morning! Indeed, I have even known people who had been in a room and who didn't know afterwards whether there were pictures in the room or not.

One can have the most unbelievable experiences in this regard. Therefore he who wants to acquire a sense of reality must first train himself to live fully also in the outer sense reality, so that that which he passes by stands before him as it is out there in the real world. Truly, the investigator of spirit does not become a man of phantasy; he must acquire a sense of reality to the point that it cannot happen to him that he doesn't know in the afternoon what dress the lady was wearing to whom he was speaking in the morning. He must really be able to live with a sense of reality already in the sense world.

Only when one trains oneself to connect that which one remembers of things to the outer world of reality, then one develops the sense which can achieve a fruitful remembering back for such a spirit knowledge. Because for human beings' usual capacity of remembering the memory picture before the last going to sleep can very easily be joined to that after the last awakening. Without any difficulty people simply leave out that which lies between these two pictures as a night-abyss, they tie the picture of the first happening after waking up directly onto the last happening before going to sleep. They usually don't even notice with a lively consciousness that something lies between the two. But if one wants to acquire such a consciousness that one connects that which one has experienced inside with the picture which is there from the outer world, then one must realise that that which one experiences in the morning after waking up is connected with the whole of nature which makes an impression on us, is connected with the rising sun, with all the impressions one has through the rising sun and so on—and that which one has as the last happenings before the last going to sleep is connected with something which in nature doesn't belong together, namely with that which one experienced after the last awakening. There one will notice with the pictures that are standing next to each other: there is something missing!—But by practicing this, by awakening again capacities of soul that don't exist in ordinary life, one gains the strength that as one looks back to where one now has the first picture after the last awakening and wants to proceed to the last picture before the last going to sleep, one now does not see a stretch of darkness in between, but sees that this darkness is beginning to light up spiritually, that something places itself into this darkness.

Just as in the day waking states one only follows that which one has experienced, so there suddenly comes something in between the first experience after the last awakening and the last experience before the last going to sleep of which one now says: you remember something—only something which you haven't known before. It is just the same as in normal remembering, except that one hadn't known anything before of that which now surfaces. Now one begins to remember that which one has previously missed by sleeping through it, even while sleeping through it in dreamless sleep. The empty time which one is conscious of between the last experience before going to sleep and the first after waking up, this is now filling up. And just as our ordinary consciousness is filled with the experiences of natural existence, so our consciousness is now filled with that which surfaces like a remembrance, but of a remembrance of which one now knows that one has experienced it in the unconscious.

Our consciousness is now filled with the soul content which hasn't taken part in the outer experiences but has withdrawn from the outer experiences, has gone asleep. Now one learns to recognise how the sleeping soul is in reality when it doesn't have the strength to bring its experiences which it has during sleep in the spiritual world to consciousness in such a way as man in day waking life brings to consciousness the happenings of physical life. Now one really gets to know the inner being of man as spirit and soul, and at this moment one sees beyond the earthly life. And one will only now be able to connect that, which one sees in the described way like a great but concrete memory tableau of one's earthly life up to this point, to that which one was as a soul-spiritual human being in a purely spiritual world before one descended into this physical world through birth or conception.

And in the same way another experience joins this one. If one develops another capacity together with all this during one's practicing, a capacity which normally is not seen as a capacity of knowledge but which is one too, if one develops that which is love of soul, full devotion to that which meets one, so strongly that this love remains with one even when one now looks at one's own self, that one can love that which appears as something new in the soul with a truly devoted love—then the possibility develops to free oneself in the waking state in full consciousness in one's inner experiencing from the bodily. But at this moment when one has freed oneself from the bodily in one's inner experiencing, one knows how it is with the human being when he lives his life without his body. And in a picture the fact of the passing through the gate of death, of dying, stands before one's soul. If one has once realised what it means to experience oneself free of the body in one's spiritual forces, then one also knows what one is in the spiritual existence after one has left the body and has passed through the gate of death. And one also gets to know the environment which will then be there for man. One learns to know how together with the body when it has been laid aside that falls away which connects us to the sense world. But that remains, which formerly has fashioned us as a human being, the soul-spiritual of man.

In this way one gets to know the experiences which one has had with other people. But that which was within these sense experiences, how soul has found soul, what happened in the relationships with other people, those that were closer to one and those who were more distant, that which happened in space and time—the eternal-spiritual one gets to know, how it rids itself of the earthly form of experiencing.

And more and more the soul now experiences that which was spiritually present within it as relationships to other people. And that which otherwise is only the object of belief, certainty of knowledge. This human beings experience when they themselves have passed through the gate of death. That which the human soul usually longs for as immortality, only enters real human knowledge in this way. But only by recognising the truly eternal in man by exercising our forces to such an extent that we recognise this eternal in our existence in the pre-earthly, spiritual-soul existence, we also gain that for ourselves which gives us certainty about life after death. There is no longer a word for the pre-earthly as something eternal in the human soul in today's civilisation because we only know the one half of eternity, we speak of immortality. Older languages had the other side, the not-yet-being-born, that is, our existence before we entered earthly life. But only both sides—not-yet-being-born and immortality constitute eternity. And it is a fact that man has to pay for his longing for immortality, that it becomes a mere belief if he wants to forgo knowledge of not-yet-being-born, because he will only understand eternity when he recognises both sides of eternity, the not-yet-being-born as well as the immortality of his being in unity. With this then man has advanced to a real taking hold of that which he is, to a real self-knowledge.

I have to emphasise again and again on such occasions that such a spiritual investigation can indeed only be made by someone who has acquired the relevant capacities by exercising or in another way through destiny, but when the results of such an investigation are made known, they can be as plausible to everyone as for instance the results of astronomy. And just as one doesn't have to be a painter in order to experience the beauty of a picture—for if that would be necessary, only the painters would be able to experience it—just as little does one necessarily have to be a spiritual investigator oneself in order to take up the knowledge of spiritual investigation, although one can become one up to a certain degree, because man wants truth and not confusion and error. Just as one can stand before a painting and admire its beauties with one's healthy judgement, so one can experience that which is presented by spiritual investigation, if one does not oneself put obstacles in one's way, such as prejudices and the like. One can understand it when one dedicates oneself to it with one's sense of truthfulness, and the accusation of those who say of the adherents of spiritual science that they only believe blindly is absolutely unjustified. Especially in the present time Anthroposophy will be able to give human souls if by using their sense of truth or by investigation in the indicated way to come to a self-knowledge of the human being, that for which they pine as I have said in the introduction to today's lecture. Even though this demand of the times does not yet come to consciousness in many people, even if it only shows itself undefined or even just in unfitness in life—it is there in that which expresses itself so clearly in the civilization of the present time. Natural science and many philosophical word views speak of insurmountable borders of knowledge. With this the border which leads to man himself is insurmountable. But man cannot in perpetuity do without true self-knowledge.

In tomorrow's lecture I shall continue where I have left off today and depict the ethical-religious life, how it is enriched and made more inward within the human being. With this I shall then tomorrow give the application to the immediate practical life. In today's lecture I wanted first to show how this demand of our time, which as a demand of heart and soul appears in ever more and more people in the present civilisation with its boundaries to knowledge, can be met by a real spiritual knowledge, by a knowledge of that which man wants to know about his own immortality and that which is connected with it, nay must know, because only in this way a true self-knowledge can be achieved, and only with this true self-knowledge a getting hold of oneself and a feeling of self can be connected. Because only through this man will be able to stand before his own soul with its eternal nature, that he acquires knowledge of how he as spiritual-soul being is woven into the spiritual-soul sphere of the world, just as he has his existence in the physical world a physical being. Only when he has acquired a knowledge of himself as spirit amongst spirits, will he also be able to acquire true inner security. Only when the human being knows his worth and dignity in the world, he stands in the world with that consciousness of himself as man, which out of an undefined feeling he can acknowledge as the only right human consciousness. And only because human beings will seek again for such a light of self-knowledge and spiritual knowledge of the world, only through this the hunger of the present time for a true penetrating of the own human nature will be able to be satisfied. For humanity will not be able to manage with all the demands of the progressing civilisation unless it realises: self-knowledge of man cannot be anything else but knowledge of spirit, for man can only feel himself as true man if he recognises himself as spirit amongst spirits, just as he can feel himself in his transient earthly existence as physical being amongst physical beings.

This is the 4th of 7 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at The Hague, in November of 1923. The title of this series of lectures is: The Supersensible Human, Anthroposophically Comprehended, and published in English as: Supersensible Man, and At Home in the Universe. This lecture is also known as: Anthroposophy / Spiritual Science as a Human and Personal Way of Life. This lecture first appeared in English in The Golden Blade of 1950.

The road that leads to a knowledge and understanding of the spiritual world differs in many respects from the method of knowledge that meets with general acceptance to-day.

As I have explained on other occasions, not only is it possible in our time to travel on this road, but there is in the man of the present day a deep need—yes, a hunger—for knowledge of the super-sensible. Certain preparatory inner experiences are, as you know, required in order to awaken in man the hitherto slumbering consciousness of the spiritual world and of the eternal in his own being. Man cannot, therefore, follow this path of knowledge without its affecting him in his innermost soul. Here we have at once a radical difference from the way of cognition to which we are accustomed.

Consider for a moment the scientific knowledge we acquire to-day by the activity of the intellect—and all present-day knowledge is so acquired, whether it be based on observation or on experiment. Where, to begin with, is this knowledge? For the most part, in books, in writing. The path of knowledge is in consequence well-defined, and man has continually to accept—and is often glad to accept—the limits marked out for recognised knowledge. How readily, when entering into some question of practical life, a man will defer to books—or shall we say, for it sounds a little better, will seek the requisite knowledge along purely scientific lines! This knowledge once acquired, he is, of course, ready to be himself—to be man—again. He has no wish to remain, in life, in the mood that accepts without question, maintaining even with a certain pride: it has been scientifically proved. ... When anyone brings forward something he has discovered out of his own experience, it will frequently happen that one who is au fait in scientific matters will immediately reply: But that does not tally with what is already known and proved, with what has been established as scientific fact. Knowledge has become severed from direct personal experience, so much so indeed that it is regarded as genuine only if acquired and experienced quite apart from any relation to what springs from the heart of man.

The path of knowledge which leads to a recognition of the spiritual world and of the eternal in the human being has quite another character. It calls upon the personal in man; he cannot so much as take one step upon it without heart and soul being directly concerned. And I want to-day to speak of the results for the life of man when knowledge is in this way brought into immediate connection with the personal in the human being.

Knowledge of the spiritual world is not just a continuation or extension of the knowledge that prevails to-day; rather does it imply a change in the whole way of experiencing knowledge.

Let us look a little more closely at a distinctive feature of the knowledge that has made such advances in our day and generation. Do not think I want to criticise this method of knowledge. It has achieved a very great deal on its own ground, and has brought to humanity quite remarkable blessings of a material kind, although it must be admitted that these are, in the present age of civilisation, somewhat heavily cancelled out! Present-day knowledge has, throughout, this characteristic: it starts from the assumption that things are either “true” or “untrue”, and sets out to decide between the alternatives by the exercise of the intellect. We make a point, do we not, of being logical and of basing our conclusion on the facts of experience. Once we have come to see that some scientific statement is true or untrue, then it stands there before us in its truth or untruth and our personality has very little concern with it. We can of course—and should—be filled with enthusiasm for the truth, and turn with loathing from error and falsehood; but if we compare our personal relation to the scientific findings of our time as regards their truth and falsehood with other relations of life, we find a considerable difference.

Let me take a simple, practical example. When we satisfy our hunger, we are doing something in which we are ourselves personally involved; the satisfied hunger cannot be said to stand before us as something objective to ourselves. Whereas when we come to a conclusion between truth and untruth in the realm of science we seek rather to keep our personality out of the decision. If yesterday we were in error on a certain matter, and to-day are no longer so, the implication is, we have arrived at a conclusion, but in doing so we have not essentially changed in our personal being. If, on the other hand, we have eaten something we never tasted before, and have enjoyed it, then we are not quite the same as we were.

Now it will be found that the concepts “true” and “untrue”, “true” and “false” become changed when we begin to have immediate experience of the truths of spiritual science. As we gradually find our way on this new path of knowledge, we stop saying: This is true, that is false. The criterion holds good for the material world; there we can rightly let it be our guide. Few people, however, are aware of its origin. If we trace back the word “true” in the various languages, we make an interesting discovery. The abstract concept, it denotes to-day is comparatively new; it is a product of evolution. In earlier times, anything to which man felt he owed acknowledgement and assent was said to be “what the Gods willed.” The world was divided for man into what the Gods have willed and what the Gods have not willed. In many languages the word “true” still retains this older meaning as well. “True” meant “true to the Divine Order”; the abstract meaning came later. When the intellect took command in the field of knowledge, men forgot the origin of the word “true”. And so to-day we have this completely impersonal relation to knowledge.

The new way of knowledge, however, leads us again to associate something actual and vital with what we assent to or reject. In spiritual science we are not content to say of something that it is true or correct; we ascribe to it a quality, an effectual quality. We speak of knowledge being sound, wholesome—or unwholesome, and to be discarded. The concepts “true” or “correct”, and “untrue” or “incorrect”, which are really valid only for the physical world, are replaced by the concepts “sound” and “unsound”. We are thereby obliged to come into a nearer, more personal relation with the whole of knowledge. For we must needs regard as desirable what is sound and wholesome, we incline to it; on the other hand, we turn away from, we reject, so far as we are able, what is unsound or unhealthy. And as we begin to discern in the field of knowledge whether ideas enrich life or impoverish it, strengthen and aid life, or render it sick and feeble, we begin to realise how intimate is the connection of ideas with life. The knowledge of the present day we approach rather as we do a person to whom we are more or less indifferent, with whom we have merely a conventional relation. Not so with the Spiritual Science I am representing here. We approach it in the way we would a friend whom we love.

As we come to apprehend the truths of the pre-earthly life of man—the life he had as a being of soul and spirit in a purely spiritual world—or as we take our way into the realms of the spiritual world through which man lives between death and new birth, we begin to feel deeply connected with these worlds and with all that they contain; we feel impelled to unite our very being with what we recognise as sound and healthy knowledge, giving us a sound, healthy outlook on life, while on the other hand we naturally reject and cast behind us views that we cannot help seeing are unhealthy, unsound.

Let me illustrate my point by comparison once again with a familiar everyday experience. Normally, man takes nourishment, and this, when it has undergone change inside him, enables him to replace what he has used up in his body; and in this metamorphosis of the means of nourishment man has a feeling of well-being. Conditions, however, may arise, owing to which he is unable to take food—perhaps because his organism is not in a state to digest it, or for some other reason. When this is so, man feeds on what is in his own body; he begins, so to say, to devour himself. Certain illnesses are associated with this condition. This is not unlike what happens with us in the pursuit of knowledge. As we gradually acquire knowledge of the spiritual world, we come to feel how, through such knowledge, we are being brought together with the spiritual world, we are becoming one with it; we are finding our way to the Gods, and to our own immortal soul, finding our way to what we shall experience in the spiritual world when we have passed through the gate of death, and to what we experienced there before we came down to earth. It is almost as though we had offered up our own existence, surrendered it in devotion to the world; but that thereby our life had become richer, inwardly richer. We have become the world, and in so doing we begin to apprehend ourselves for the first time in our full human inwardness. We discover that the whole being and existence of man depends on his coming together with the world in this way. Similarly, too, we learn to understand how the lack or neglect of such truths is like having to live in the world without the organs for receiving nourishment, driven to feed on our own body.

It is different on the intellectual plane. Here we can dispute and argue about idealism and materialism, and so forth; to one we may feel kindly disposed—to another perhaps not, but we do not suffer on that account; none of them affects us deeply. But when we have learned to apprehend sound spiritual truths, then ideas that have a materialistic orientation give us pain; for we know, such truths leave man to feed upon himself.

Now we shall find that the experience I have described enables us to distinguish spiritual truths in yet another way, for it brings home to us that truth is related to love, that healthy and sound knowledge is related to selflessness in man—not the selflessness that loses the self but that leads rather to the possession of the self in the true sense. When man has learned to go out of himself and into the world, becoming in this way not empty but filled with world content, then it is that he finds his true manhood.

Devotion, loving devotion to the spiritual facts of life, becomes a characteristic of one who is able to receive spiritual knowledge. We do not, as a rule, find that the pursuit of purely intellectual knowledge has any specific effect on character; but when a man has probed to the heart of spiritual knowledge, he knows that he cannot apprehend such knowledge without its affecting his character, without its entering—to speak in a paradox—into the flesh and blood of his soul, developing in him an inclination to selflessness, to love. He comes also to understand that when man receives knowledge that lacks this health-giving impulse, it drives him—spiritually speaking—to feed on himself, and from this he can learn the true nature of egoism.

The effect upon character is one of the most important results that can accrue from spiritual knowledge. Abstract intellectual knowledge is like an artificial root; it has been constructed by the intellect—no plant can grow from it. This is true of all the scientific knowledge that men respect and revere to-day, useful though it be, and by no means to be disparaged. From a real root grows a real plant; and from a real knowledge, whereby man can unite his spirit with the Spirits of the World, grows little by little the complete man who knows what true selflessness—selfless love—is, and what egoism is, and from this understanding derives impulses to act and work in life—the impulse, where it is right, to be selfless; or again, where he perhaps has need to draw forth something from his own being in preparation for life—there, openly, without any disguise, to develop egoism.

A certain clairvoyance will be found to enter into this self-observation, and into the way it is led over into deed and action. From the root of spiritual knowledge springs the plant of the higher man, the man of soul and spirit. Spiritual knowledge leads therefore quite naturally and inevitably to morality. As regards present-day knowledge, we tend to be proud of the fact that it has no connection with morality or ethics. We assume as a matter of course that we have to examine the inorganic processes in Nature in accordance with their laws, looking in them for cause and effect and not expecting to find in them any ethical working. We boast that we can even go on to apply these methods to living processes, to our study of the plant, of the animal and of the human being, allowing ourselves to concede the presence of a moral element only when we come to consider the deeper impulses that rise up in human hearts and souls: impulses of which, however, we cannot say that they are able to demonstrate their independent existence by accomplishing the transition to objective reality.

Knowledge of the spirit, on the other hand, leading as it does to an intensive development of the experience of selflessness, of that loving devotion to the matter in hand, without which spiritual knowledge is unattainable, and on the other hand to a fine perception of the nature of egoism, brings us right into the moral world-order. The moral world-order begins to be for us an immediate reality. Let us examine a little how this comes about.

We begin to speak no longer merely in an abstract way of a pre-earthly life of man, but actually to look into the spiritual world in which we lived before we descended to Earth, even as we look out: with our physical eyes on our physical surroundings; and we find that we are surrounded there by beings who never take on a physical body, just as here in the physical world we have around us beings who have, like ourselves, a physical body. The spiritual world and its beings become actual and objective; we begin to be familiar with them.

What is the secret of our bodily existence on earth? Even as through the years of childhood, from birth onward, we are continually being impelled, unconsciously or half consciously, to find our way into our body, to grow increasingly one with it, so do we in like manner, throughout our physical life on earth, gradually approach the world, feeling our way towards it by means of our physical organs. When we are active and creative, we—so to speak—lose ourselves in our body; soul and spirit are surrendered to the body and we lose consciousness of them. The content of the world is communicated to us through our bodily nature. Materialism is quite right as far as earthly consciousness is concerned, for we are obliged to make use of the body as long as we remain in the earthly consciousness, and so have to be content with perceiving only what is bodily. If, however, man wants to comprehend the spiritual world and his own super-sensible being, he has to undergo in himself a development wherein the body acts as a hindrance. For the body would wrench us away from the spiritual world, would alienate us from it, driving us back again and again upon ourselves and our own egoity; whereas in spiritual knowledge we have to come right out of ourselves—rather as we do when we love another human being. And in so far as we become able to do this, a deeply significant truth begins to dawn upon us, namely, that man passes through repeated earthly lives.

As a matter of fact, many of the feelings and impulses that we carry in our soul are there as a result of earlier lives on earth; only we do not observe them as such because we remain in our body. Suppose we meet someone, and the meeting leads to a friendship that alters the whole course of our life. When we look back over the earlier years, we discover with the eye of the spirit what we could never find by the aid of bodily vision alone: namely, that our whole life up to the moment of meeting him was a search for that person. One who is already a little older and looks back in this way is able to see his life as the working out of a plan; he recognises how, when he was quite a little child, his life took a direction that was to bring about eventually the meeting with this friend. We can go further in this kind of observation of life and discover that all we do, though it may seem to result from the working of earthly physical forces, is in reality guided from elsewhere. We come in fact to recognise that the life we are now living is dependent on earlier lives on earth. And between these have been also lives in a spiritual world.

Now we can come to a knowledge of the other lives we have lived on earth only when we learn to imbue with love the faculty of cognition. It is by no means so easy as some people think, to discover the man we were! For he is a complete stranger to us now. Only a selfless, love-imbued faculty of cognition can grasp this other person, so that he enters into our consciousness.

This is how it is with all stages of higher, spiritual knowledge. Our knowledge has to become a loving knowledge, intimately bound up with our personality, a knowledge that simply cannot be at all without our personality taking part in it. And as we grow into this larger world, and learn to look beyond birth and beyond death, to look also beyond and behind the world of the senses—for in the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms we begin to behold beings, spiritually active beings—as we do this, we come into a kingdom of reality, where the ethical impulses that inhere in our knowledge have place. I will give you an example.

Destiny, we say, is hard to bear. So little good seems often to result from actions that spring from the highest motives, whilst others that flow from evil motives reap marvelous success! How is this? The reason is that this physical world of the senses, not-withstanding that we have taken for ourselves a fragment of it to form, as it were, a garment for our souls, has in it no moral impulses. The moral and ethical impulses that are behind our actions have no place there; they are wiped away out of whatever we do or make in the physical world; the nearest approach to moral working is a purely formal compensatory effect. But this physical world is permeated throughout with spirit; we carry our moral or immoral actions into the world of the spirit. And here, even as we found that “true” comes to mean for us sound or healthy, we recognise that when man devotes himself to moral truth, he becomes in his inner being, strong, well developed; whereas when he gives himself up to error he becomes a cripple in soul and spirit.

In the present cycle of evolution this does not find expression in the physical body (there we carry the results of what we did and achieved in our previous life on earth); but when we have laid down our physical body and gone through the gate of death, then there is no longer anything to prevent our soul and spirit from assuming the physiognomy we have acquired from the ethical quality of our experience. There in the spiritual world we, as soul and spirit, are strong and well-developed, or crippled and weak. Then, later on, comes the time for us to resume a physical body; and in forming it we build, from within, our own destiny. For we may, on the one hand, be able, having brought from an earlier life a harmonious soul-and-spirit nature, to form the new body in perfect order and proportion, so that we can employ it in good and useful activity; or, coming into incarnation, as it were, as a moral cripple, we may find ourselves able only to form and guide the new body in a clumsy and awkward fashion, from embryo up to adult age. And now this inner destiny becomes our outer destiny. For it is clear to an unprejudiced observation that whatever befalls us from without is closely connected with what we ourselves have prepared as our inner destiny. In all our intercourse with the world outside, we make use of the body as an instrument, and according as we use it skillfully and well, or badly and clumsily, we occasion, at any rate in part, the events that befall us. And then, in the further lives that follow, come new compensation and balancing-out. Thus in the spiritual world we find the formative forces that belong to our moral life. The moral world becomes for us a reality.

We see how an ethical impulse cannot in one earth-life effect a change in the physical body, but when it passes over into the next life on earth, can work there quite definitely as a health-giving influence, no less truly than heat works in the physical world, or light, or electricity. That we imagine the moral world—order to be no more than a man-made abstraction is due to the fact that we take cognisance only of the physical world, tracing everything back there from effect to cause; we can, however, equally well recognise this law at work in the spiritual world; only there we have to trace the effects, as they show themselves in one life, back to causes in an earlier life on earth. In other words, we need to know the level on which the law of cause and effect has to be applied to human destiny.

Now all that sounds very well, someone might say, but as things are, men have not this spiritual knowledge of which you speak; only a researcher in the spirit can see into the spiritual world-others must be content with the words and ideas in which he clothes his perceptions. To this I would reply: To paint a picture, one must be an artist; but to experience the beauty and inner content of the picture one need not be an artist, one has only to approach the picture with a sincere and open mind. It is the same with spiritual knowledge. In order to “paint” in ideas, one must be a researcher in the spirit; but once the picture is painted, it stands there for others to behold. And if these, who are not themselves “artists”, are free from prejudice and are sincere seekers after truth, they will receive health and healing from the descriptions of the spiritual world.

We are actually, at the present day, in a peculiar position in this respect. Spiritual Science, in the sense we understand it here, is, comparatively speaking, a new thing in our civilisation. The person who is able to represent it from immediate experience, stands alone; and all he can do is to clothe it in words and ideas, and impart these to his fellow men. It might even be thought that what he has to say concerns himself alone! In any case, that is how the position is to-day. One earnestly hopes it will soon alter, for Spiritual Science has power to quicken and awaken man inwardly. As things still are, however, mankind remains to-day a recipient only of spiritual knowledge.

For him who acquires spiritual knowledge, the case is very different. There comes a point where he has to undergo a pain with which no other pain can be compared. It is at the moment when he passes beyond his own spiritual experience between birth and death and launches out into the vast ocean of eternity in which we shall be when we have gone through the gate of death, and in which we were before we descended through birth to physical life on earth. An indescribable pain is involved in leaving, on the path of knowledge, the world of the physical senses, and entering the world of the spirit. The whole being is, as it were, steeped in pain. And now a remarkable thing happens. At first the higher knowledge seizes hold of the traveler in his entire being; but then, it wrests itself free of him with unbelievable force and certainty.

Since we have set out in this lecture to show where the personal has place in the path of knowledge, you will allow me, I think, to describe at this point what is, on the face of it, an entirely personal matter. As we shall find, however, what seems most personal in it has nevertheless an impersonal character. It is an experience that can befall anyone who comes into a similar situation.

To begin with, as I said, the knowledge of the spiritual takes hold of the entire human being. Ordinary intellectual knowledge is a concern of the head, the intellect. It is in the head alone that we have to exert ourselves. True, the acquisition of this kind of knowledge often obliges one to sit still for long hours at a stretch, so that one may be glad to break off for sheer weariness! It is nevertheless true to say that ordinary knowledge does not call upon the whole human being. But if we try to acquire, with the aid of the intellect alone, knowledge of the spiritual and super-sensible, it evades us like a dream; its great and far-reaching conceptions slip from our grasp. When we have, so to speak, pressed forward to the spiritual world, when we have passed what is spoken of as the Guardian of the Threshold, we have the greatest trouble to bring to consciousness—not the content; that one can acquire as a matter of knowledge—but the experience.

It is a fact that very many people become able, comparatively quickly, to have experiences in the spiritual world. But presence of mind is needed to grasp these experiences. With the majority of persons it happens that before they can give their attention to some experience, it is gone again. Presence of mind is altogether indispensable for the attainment of spiritual knowledge, as you will know from my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. When one succeeds in acquiring knowledge of things that are beyond space and beyond time, they seem like a dream, and only with the greatest difficulty can one lift them on to a higher level of consciousness. They vanish-away like a dream if one tries to grasp them with the head alone.

Now it is important for one who speaks about the spiritual world in ideas to have always the spiritual world before him as he speaks; and he can acquire the habit of standing in this way within the spiritual world only if his whole being participates in the knowledge. Everyone will find his own way of doing this. I, for example, find it necessary to fix the results of spiritual knowledge by jotting down either brief notes or symbolical drawings. I need hardly say, I mean by this nothing of a mediumistic nature, but a perfectly conscious and deliberate action. Putting down some note at once ensures that the activity is not confined to the head alone but is shared in by the whole human being. It is of no consequence whether later on one refers to these notes: the point is, to make them. I can assure you I have used up whole cartloads of notebooks in this way and never looked at them again. What has been seen in the spiritual world is more strongly retained when the experience is allowed to flow into an impulse of will that leads to the activity of writing; for ultimately, all depends on experiencing the truths of the spiritual world—let me say—”organically”, experiencing them with one's whole being.

Initiation-knowledge of the present day has perforce another characteristic, which need not continue indefinitely and was not present in earlier and other paths to initiation. I mean the following. Suppose one has produced some spiritual knowledge, and later on has occasion to come back to it. If one is, let us say, as old as I am, and produced some 40 years ago much of what one has to communicate, then as far as the inner spiritual activity is concerned, it is almost as though one had to deal with something one was reading for the first time in an old book. Please understand me aright. Knowledge one has oneself produced many years ago becomes as strange to one as a book one has never seen before. It is not remote in the way that we feel abstract knowledge to be remote, but spiritually it severs itself from one. A man who stands outside initiation-knowledge, may feel how this knowledge, when he receives it, becomes united with his very being; but for the one who has produced it, it separates itself from him; he feels as if he had before him another human being.

Many a book, I assure you, by one or other of our friends, strikes me as more familiar than the books I wrote myself in earlier years. In fact, I read these only when I must: for instance, to revise them for a new edition. The teaching of the spiritual researcher severs itself from him and becomes objective; he is quite unable to feel any particular pleasure or satisfaction in it—as one might naturally expect in other circumstances! This has nothing to do with the knowledge as such; it arises only from the fact that one is obliged in the present day to attain the knowledge in solitude. In earlier times, when the path of initiation knowledge was far more instinctive and less conscious, it could not rightly be pursued in solitude. There were societies for the fostering of initiation knowledge. Such societies exist even in our time, but they merely carry on a tradition. If to-day one speaks from direct personal experience in knowledge, one is compelled to stand alone.

How was it arranged in societies of this kind? And how will it be in the future, when knowledge of the spiritual will be received again into civilisation and be called upon to enter once more into all the practical spheres of life? For spiritual knowledge will be able to do this, when once man begins to take hold of it. The societies of which we have spoken were ordered in the following way. An agreement was come to, freely and willingly on the part of all, that one of their number should undertake a particular field of knowledge, another, another field, and so on. One, for example, would concentrate all his powers on inquiring into the influence exercised upon the life of man by the world of stars, another on investigating the path leading from pre-earthly existence into the sphere of the earth.

This plan made it possible for the several fields of knowledge to be investigated in detail. For if it takes ten years to get to know something of the influence of the stars on human life, it takes, not ten years, but a lifetime to explore in detail even a few steps of the way from pre-earthly into earthly life. There was accordingly good reason for distributing among different persons the several realms of knowledge. Each made a deep study of the field of knowledge upon which he set himself to concentrate, and for the rest, allowed himself to take the knowledge from his companions. He had thus the double experience; he knew what it was to produce knowledge himself inwardly, and he had also the experience of receiving knowledge he had not himself produced.

When men learn to be more open-hearted and to approach knowledge with real warmth of soul, then it will afford them the same kind of experience one may have from the painting of a great artist. Man's own natural feeling for reality will enable him to take hold of what lives in the idea he has not himself produced; he will have a direct inner experience of the idea. He will undergo also the pain and suffering of which I told you—all the phases of inner personal experience that come from meeting spiritual knowledge face to face. This can be achieved by one who receives spiritual truths; he can grasp them, take hold of them with the entire forces of his soul. Such an experience is, however, in large measure denied to the spiritual researcher of the present day; he has to forgo it in so far as he produces the knowledge.

The fruits of spiritual knowledge can accrue to those who receive the truths with warmth of heart. And within the societies of earlier times provision was always made for the receiving of knowledge. When a particular field of spiritual research was allotted to one member—or the member chose it for himself—then, as far as that field was concerned, he went without the receiving which gives so much help and enrichment to life; on the other hand he experienced the blessing of receiving, in that he received knowledge from his companions who undertook other fields of research. Something, of the kind must come again in the future.

Do not think I speak out of a desire to attach importance to my own experiences; I want rather to draw your attention to the fact that in order to reap the fruits of spiritual knowledge, one does not need to have produced the knowledge oneself. Let a man follow the exercises—in meditation, concentration, etc.—described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Then, if he succeeds in rousing himself to inner activity of soul, and takes but a few first steps towards an understanding of life, his heart will be open to receive what the spiritual researcher can give, and what he receives will unite itself with him in quite an intimate manner, for it speaks directly to the personal in him, and he will find the way, as personal man, to the deep sources of life whence the eternal in his own being is derived; he will enter into the experiences man has in the spiritual world before his life on earth, and into those also that await man when he has passed through the gate of death and come again into the spiritual world. And as he makes this knowledge his own, a second higher man will grow up within him.

On this path of knowledge we learn to feel, as it were, at home in the spiritual world in the way we feel at home in the world of nature, with its secure and stable laws. The fact that we have muscles and bones unites us with nature; our own physical nature makes us feel at home in the physical nature of the world around. And when we begin to apprehend the reality of spiritual conceptions and to see their content as part of the spiritual world, then we begin to feel at home in a divine spiritual world—even as with our body we feel at home in the world of the senses. And it is this feeling at home in the spiritual world that is so important, for thereby we attain to a knowledge of ourselves as having eternal spiritual existence in the eternal divine spiritual world.

For not only is it true that mankind in general is rooted in a spiritual world. Every single human being, just through that which is most personal in him, just through that which he, as an individual, can experience by being on earth in a particular place and at a particular time, is rooted in, and belongs to, a spiritual world which bears the stamp of eternity. As we come to realise this, we begin to feel as though a voice were calling to us: “Make not yourself a cripple in soul and spirit!” For not merely man in general, but each single human being, is relied upon to play his part.

It is also through what is most individual and personal in him that man finds his way to religion, and to all true artistic experience. Hence it is that Spiritual Science leads directly into a religious mood of life. You will find abundant evidence in our literature of how Christianity is deepened, and can stand forth in its true light and in its true being, when we try to understand the personal experiences of the Christ Who appeared in a personal form.

Attaining thus by a personal path to our own eternal being, we know how to give personality its right place and meaning in the world, conscious that each one of us is needed and reckoned upon as single personality. Knowledge of the spirit has become for us a human and personal path in life. We feel inwardly seized and quickened by the content of spiritual knowledge, in the same way that our body is seized and quickened by the power of the blood.

The meaning we have been led to discern in our personal, our individual existence, may perhaps be best conveyed in a picture. A meeting has been called, and we are summoned to attend the meeting, because it is important for just that to be said in it which we alone can contribute. Suppose we take some action which has the result of preventing our being present. We are not there; we—who are expected, who are looked for—do not appear.

Whatever we do and accomplish under the impulse of spiritual knowledge serves, we shall find, to enrich our life; we begin indeed to recognise how our path in life leads always in a direction where we are needed and expected. In the world where spiritual beings are at work, creating and fashioning our individual existence, we begin to see that we are counted upon to do our part, and we understand that the only way we can fulfill what is expected of us and join with our companions in a higher spiritual world, is by following this personal path of life into the spiritual world, and finding within us, as we tread the path, the higher eternal man, the soul and spirit of our being.

Thus does this human knowledge of the spirit bring us face to face with the challenge: Are we going to arrive in that place where it is given to human beings to unite in a common experience of the spiritual—for we are expected there, we are awaited—or, having passed through many births and deaths, shall we come at length to a point where the word of reproach rings out: You were expected, and you did not come!

[Before the lecture Rudolf Steiner spoke to the audience regarding the Founding of the Dutch National Society. See GA 259]

We will use the time that is available for lectures at the Goetheanum between now and Christmas in such a way that those who are here in anticipation of the Christmas Meeting may absorb as much as possible of what the Anthroposophical Movement can convey to the hearts of men. Those who will be here until Christmas will therefore be able to bring their thoughts to bear upon what can still be given. I shall not deal with matters concerning the international Anthroposophical Society—that will be done at the meeting to be held shortly—but I shall try to formulate our studies in a way that will help to prepare the right mood of soul for the forthcoming Christmas Gathering. I shall therefore speak from a different point of view of a subject with which I have been dealing in recent weeks and I will begin by saying something about man’s life of soul, leading on from there to a survey of cosmic secrets.

Let us start from something quite straightforward and consider what happens in man’s life of soul if he practises self-mindfulness beyond the point I actually had in mind when I was writing the articles in the Goetheanum Weekly. These four articles can serve as an introduction to what we are now to study.

If we practise self-mindfulness thoroughly and comprehensively we shall realise how the life of soul can be enhanced and intensified. What happens in the first place is that we let the external world work upon us—as we have done from childhood onwards—and then we have thoughts which are the product of our inner world. Indeed, what makes us human beings in the real sense is that we allow the effects produced in us by the external world to live on further in our thoughts and are able to experience ourselves inwardly in these thoughts. We create a world of mental pictures which in a certain way reflects the impressions made upon us from outside. It is probably not very helpful to our inner life to ponder a great deal upon how the external world is reflected in our soul. By doing that we simply acquire a shadowy picture of the world of ideas within us. A better form of self-mindfulness is to concentrate on the activity itself, endeavouring to experience ourselves in tire actual element of thought without regard to the external world, pursuing in thought what came to us as impressions of the external world.

It will depend on a man’s particular nature whether he is then led more in the direction of abstract thoughts; he may or may not devise philosophical world-systems or make schedules of everything in existence. Another man who has reflected about things that have made an impression upon him and then goes on spinning thoughts, may be following certain fantasies. We will not go further into how this inner thinking without any external impressions takes its course according to a man’s temperament, character or other traits. We will rather make ourselves conscious of the fact that it is important, as far as our senses are concerned, to withdraw from the external world and live in our thoughts and mental pictures, developing them to further stages, often perhaps merely as possibilities.

Some people, of course, consider this unnecessary. Even in difficult times like the present you will often find people who are occupied with their business the whole day in order to provide all kinds of things required by the world, afterwards getting together in little groups to play cards, dominoes or similar games, in order—as is frequently said—to ‘pass the time away’. But it will not often happen that people come together in groups in order to exchange thoughts, for example, about what might have happened in connection with the day’s business if things had gone differently in one way or another. They would not find that as entertaining as playing cards, but they would at least have been carrying their thoughts to further stages. And if on such an occasion they also retained a healthy feeling for reality there is no reason why such thinking should end in fantasy.

This living in thoughts leads finally to what you will experience if you read The Philosophy of Freedom properly. If you read that book as it is meant to be read you will understand what it means to live in thoughts. The Philosophy of Freedom is based upon experience of reality; but at the same time it was entirely the product of thinking. Hence you will find a fundamental tone in the book. I conceived it in the 1880’s and wrote it in the early 1890’s; but from men who at that time ought at least to have taken notice of the book, I was faced with misunderstanding everywhere. There is a particular reason for this: even those who are called thinkers today are unable to experience their thinking otherwise than as a picture of the outer physical world.

And then they say: perhaps something belonging to a superphysical world might arise in a man’s thinking but then this thinking which is acknowledged to be within him would have to be able to experience something supersensible outside him, in the sense that a table or chair are outside him. This was approximately Eduard von Hartmann’s conception of the function of thinking.

Then he comes across The Philosophy of Freedom. In that book the argument is that to experience thinking in the real sense means that a man can come to no other realisation than this: If you live in thinking in the real sense, you are living in the Cosmos even if, to begin with, somewhat diffusely. This connection in the most intimate experience of thinking with the secrets of the world-process is the root-nerve of The Philosophy of Freedom. Hence the statement is made in the book that in thinking we grasp one corner of the whole world-mystery.¹

This may be putting it simply, but what is meant is that when a man experiences thinking in the real sense he no longer feels outside the mystery of world-existence but within it; he no longer feels outside the Divine but within the Divine. If he comprehends the reality of thinking within himself, he comprehends the Divine within himself.

This was the point that people could not grasp. For if a man really comprehends it, if he has made efforts to achieve this kind of thinking, he finds himself no longer within the world that was previously his, but he is now within the etheric world. It is a world of which he knows that it is not conditioned by any part of the physical Earth but by the whole cosmic sphere. He is within the etheric Cosmos, and he can no longer have any doubts about the law and order of this cosmic sphere if he has grasped thinking as it is understood in The Philosophy of Freedom. Etheric experience, as it may be called, has now been achieved and a notable step forward in life has been taken.

Let me characterise this step as follows.—Our thinking in ordinary consciousness is concerned with tables, chairs, human beings, of course, and so forth; we may think of other things too in the outside world. With our thinking we comprehend these things from the centre of our being. Everyone is aware that with his thinking he wants to comprehend the things of the world. But once you achieve the experience of thinking I described just now, you are not grasping the world; nor are you riveted in your ego. Something quite different happens. You get the feeling—and quite rightly—that with your thinking which is not localised in any particular place, you grasp everything inwardly. You feel you are making contact with the inner man. Just as in ordinary thinking you stretch your spiritual ‘feelers’ outwards, so with this thinking which experiences itself in itself, you are continually stretching inwards, into your own being. You become object, object to yourself.

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It is a very significant experience to realise that whereas hitherto it was always the world that you grasped, now, having this experience of thinking it is your own self you have to grasp. In the course of this firm grasp of your own self you come to realise that you have broken through your skin. You grasp yourself inwardly and in the same way you begin to grasp the whole world-ether from within, not of course in all its details but you know with certainty that this ether spreads over the whole cosmic sphere with which you are living together with stars, sun, moon, and so forth.

There is a second way in which a man can develop his life of soul. Instead of being wholly occupied with thoughts that are prompted from outside, he gives himself up to his memories. If he does this and makes the process an inner reality he will again have a quite definite experience. The experience of thinking I have just described to you does actually lead a man to his own self; he grasps his own self and this process gives him a certain satisfaction. But when he passes on to the experiencing of memories he will find, if he is inwardly active in the real sense, that the most striking feeling is not that of approaching his own self. That is what happens in the experience of thinking; and for that reason man will find freedom in the course of this thinking, a freedom which depends entirely upon the personal element in him. That is why a ‘philosophy of freedom’ must take its start from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience that a man finds his own self, finds his bearings as a free personality. This does not happen in the case of the memory experience. If a man proceeds with real earnestness, and is able to immerse himself entirely in the experience, he will have the feeling of being liberated from himself, of getting away from himself. That is why memories which enable the present to be forgotten are the most satisfying—I do not say they are always the best, but in many cases they are the most satisfying.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world, no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get right away from it. If you can waken memories which, as you give yourselves up to them, give you an enhanced feeling of life, this will be a preparation for what memory can ultimately become.

Memory can become more real if you recall with the greatest possible intensity something you actually experienced years or even decades ago. Suppose, for instance, you turn to a collection of old papers and take out letters you wrote on some particular occasion. You put these letters in front of you and let them carry you back into the past. Or it would be preferable not to take letters which you wrote yourself or which others wrote to you, because the subjective element would be too strong there. Try, rather, to get hold of your old schoolbooks, and peep into them as you did when you first went to school. In this way you can actually call back the past into your life. The effect is remarkable. If you do what I suggest you will entirely transform your present state of mind. You must exercise a little ingenuity here although almost anything will serve. For instance, a lady might come across a dress she has not worn for twenty years; she puts it on and is transported back into the conditions prevailing at that time. You must choose something that will bring the past with the greatest possible reality into the present. In this way you can separate yourself radically from your present experience.

With ordinary-level consciousness we are too close to ourselves in our actual experience to be able to make it into anything valuable. We must be able to stand at a distance from ourselves. Now a man is farther away from himself when he is asleep than when he is awake, for during sleep his astral body and ego are outside his physical and etheric bodies. You will be able to approach this astral body, which as I have said, is outside the physical body during sleep, if you summon up some past experience as vividly as possible into the present. You will probably not believe what I am telling you because you will be reluctant to attribute such significance to something as comparatively trivial as the awakening of past experiences by looking at an old dress. But just put it to the test, and if you succeed in conjuring up some past experience into the present so vividly that you are wholly engrossed in it and can be entirely oblivious of the present, you will find that you are drawing near to your astral body as it is in sleep.

But you will be mistaken if you think that all you have to do is to look right or left, and that you will see a shadowy form that is your astral body; that is not how things work. You must pay attention to what actually happens, which may for instance be that after such experiences you see the dawn and the sunrise very differently from hitherto. On this path you will gradually begin to feel the warmth of the dawn as something prophetic, having a kind of natural prophetic power. You will begin to feel the dawn as something spiritually forceful and that there is some connection between that power and an inner sense within yourself; and although at first you may regard it as an illusion, you will eventually feel that there is some relationship between the dawn and your own being. Through the experience I have described you will gradually come to feel, as you look at the dawn: this dawn does not leave me alone. There is an inner connection between my own being and the dawn. The dawn is a quality of my own soul. At this moment I am myself the dawn—If you have been able to unite yourself with the dawn in such a way that you experience its coloured radiance out of which the sun rises, in your very heart as a living feeling—then you will also feel that you are actually travelling across the heavens with the sun, that as I put it just now, the sun will not leave you alone, that it is not a case of you being here and the sun there, but that in a sense your existence stretches right up to that of the sun—in fact that you journey through the day in company with the fight.

If you develop this feeling, not out of thinking but out of memory in the way I described, if you can develop these experiences out of the power of memory, then you will find that things which you have perceived with your physical senses begin to look different, enabling spirit-and-soul to become manifest; when you have acquired the feeling of travelling with the sun, all the flowers in the field will look different to you. The flowers do not merely display the red or yellow colours on their surface; they begin to speak spiritually to your soul. The flower becomes transparent; a spiritual element in the flower begins to stir and the blossoming becomes a sort of speaking. In this way you are actually uniting your soul with external Nature. In this way you get the impression that there is something behind this Nature, that the light with which you are connected is borne by spiritual Beings. And in those spiritual Beings you gradually recognise the characteristics described by Anthroposophy.

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Let us look at the two stages of feelings which I have just been describing. The first feeling which can be brought by thinking inwardly experienced, is one of expansion. The feeling of being in a confined space ceases altogether. Your experience widens and you have a definite feeling that within your inner being there is a kernel which extends into the Cosmos and is of the same substance as the Cosmos. You feel at one with the etheric substance of the Cosmos. But when you are standing on the Earth you feel that your feet and legs are drawn down by the Earth’s force of gravity; you feel that your whole being is bound firmly to the Earth. At the moment when you have the experience of thinking you no longer feel bound to the Earth; you feel dependent upon the wide expanse of the cosmic sphere. You feel that everything comes inwards, not from below, as it were from the centre of the Earth upwards but from the cosmic expanse, the Universe. And you feel that to understand Man, this sense that something is streaming in from the cosmic expanse must be present.

This applies even to a true understanding of the human form. If I want to give expression to the human form in sculpture or in painting, I must picture to myself that only the lower part of the head proceeds from the inner bodily and spatial nature of man. I shall not be able to get the right spirit into the work unless I am able to convey the impression that the upper part of the head has been brought from outside. The lower part of the head must seem to have come from within outwards, but the upper from outside inwards.

If you looked with artistic understanding at the paintings in the small cupola of the now destroyed Goetheanum, you will have seen that this principle was everywhere observed: the lower part of the face was always represented as having grown from within the human being and the upper part of the head as something given him from the Cosmos. This was particularly evident in times when these things were known. You will never understand the form of the head in a genuine Greek sculpture unless you associate this feeling with it, for it was out of similar feelings that the Greeks created their works of art.

And so in the Thinking experience you will feel yourself united with the surrounding Universe.

Now it might be imagined that this process would simply continue further outwards as you pass from the Thinking experience to the Memory experience. But it is not so. If you succeed in developing within yourself the Thinking experience you will finally have the impression of the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you can picture man’s bodily experience here on Earth in the working of gravity or in the process of the digestion of foodstuffs, you can picture the conditions under which the Beings of the Third Hierarchy live if, through this Thinking experience, instead of trudging around the confines of Earth you feel yourself borne by forces coming to you from the ultimate boundary of the Cosmos.

Thinking Experience: Third Hierarchy

Now if you pass from the Thinking experience to the Memory experience it is not a matter of being able to reach this ultimate boundary of the cosmic spheres. You can, it is true, reach this boundary if you know the reality of the Thinking experience. But the Memory experience leads to a different result. Suppose, for example, you have here some object—a crystal or a flower or an animal. What happens when you pass from the Thinking experience to all that the Memory experience can offer, is that you can see right into the object.

The gaze which had extended to the ultimate boundary of the cosmic expanse, supplemented by the Memory experience, penetrates into the essence of things. You do not in that case press on into indefinite abstractions but this extended gaze perceives the spiritual quality in all things. For instance, it perceives the spiritual Beings who are active in the light, or the spiritual Beings who are active in the darkness. So we can say: the Memory experience leads us to the Second Hierarchy.

Memory Experience: Second Hierarchy

Now there is something in man’s life of soul which is not subject to the limitations of memory. Let us be clear about what it is. Memory gives our soul its special colouring. Suppose we come across a man who criticises everything adversely, who diffuses his own bitterness over everything we talk about, who whenever we tell him about something really beautiful, at once speaks of something unpleasant. In such a case we may know with certainty that this characteristic is connected with his memory. Memory gives the soul its colouring.

But there is still something else. We may meet a man who faces us with an ironic sneer particularly when we say something to him, or he wrinkles his forehead or puts on a tragic expression. Or he may give us a friendly look so that we are cheered not only by what he says but by his look. When something important is said during a lecture it is interesting to give a momentary glance at the faces of the audience and see the ironic expressions on some lips, the foreheads with or without wrinkles, the blank or lively expressions on the faces. What is being expressed there is not merely memory that has persisted in the soul and gives the soul its colouring but something that has gone over from memory into a man’s physiognomy, into his different gestures, into his whole bearing. If a man takes in nothing, if his countenance betrays the fact that all the sufferings, sorrow and joy in his life have left him unimpressed, that too is characteristic. A face that has remained smooth and unlined, or one that is deeply furrowed by the tragedy or seriousness of life is as characteristic as one that expresses much happiness. In such cases, what otherwise remains part of the life of soul-and-spirit as the outcome of the power of memory has passed over into actual physical form. The effect is so strong that it is expressed outwardly in later life in a man’s gestures and physiognomy independently of his temperament which remains inward. For in old age we have not always the same temperament as we had in childhood. Our temperament in old age is often a result of what we have undergone in life and has become memory in the inner life of soul.

What enters into a man inwardly in this way, may again—though this is more difficult—become reality. It is comparatively easy to bring before the eyes of our soul something we experienced in childhood or perhaps many years ago, and so make the memory of it a fact. It is more difficult to transpose oneself into the temperament we had in childhood or in our earlier years. But the practice of such an exercise can bring results of immense significance. And even more is achieved if we can deepen this experience inwardly than if it is merely an external act.

Something can certainly be achieved in a man if, say at the age of forty or fifty—naturally within the obvious limits in such circumstances—he plays the games he played in childhood, if he jumps as he did then, or even if he tries to make the same kind of face he made when, as an eight-year-old, his aunt gave him a sweet! If he can transpose himself back into the actual gesture or posture of that moment, again he will find that something is brought into his life whereby he is led to the conviction that the outer world is the inner world and the inner world is the outer world.

We can then penetrate with our whole being into a flower, for instance, and then, in addition to the Thinking experience and the Memory experience we have what I will call, in the truest sense, a Gesture experience. In this way we acquire an idea of how the spiritual is directly at work within the physical.

You cannot, with full consciousness, inwardly apprehend the gesture you made, perhaps twenty years ago in response to some outer provocation, without realising the union of the physical and the spiritual in all things. But then you will have arrived at the experience of the First Hierarchy.

Gesture Experience: First Hierarchy

The Memory experience enables us to identify ourselves with the dawn when we confront it, and to feel and inwardly experience its glowing warmth. But with the Gesture experience, what confronts us in the dawn will unite with everything that can be experienced as colour or tone in the objective world.

When we simply look at the objects around us that are illumined by the sun, we see them as they can reveal themselves to the light. But the dawn changes when we pass gradually from the Memory experience to the Gesture experience.

The colour experience detaches itself entirely from materiality in any form; it becomes a living reality of soul-and-spirit, abandons the space in which the outer, physical dawn appears to us and the dawn begins to speak to us of the mystery of the connection of the Sun with the Earth. We experience how the Beings of the First Hierarchy work. If we still direct our gaze to the dawn and it still appears almost as it did during the Memory experience, we learn to recognise the Thrones. Then the dawn dissolves away; the colour becomes living being, becomes soul, becomes spirit, speaks to us of the relation of the Sun to the Earth as it was in the ancient Sun period, speaks to us in such a way that we experience the Cherubim. Finally, if with the enthusiasm and reverence aroused in us by this twofold revelation of the dawn, by the revelation of Thrones and Cherubim, we live onwards, there penetrates into us from the dawn, transformed now into living being, experience of the nature of the Seraphim.

Thinking Experience: Third Hierarchy
Memory Experience: Second Hierarchy
Gesture Experience: First Hierarchy

In all that I have been describing to you today, my aim has been to indicate how, by simply passing in the life of soul from Thinking to Gesture man can develop feelings in himself—to begin with no more than feelings—of the spiritual foundations of the Cosmos right up to the sphere of the Seraphim.

• 1. See Chapter III, entitled Thinking in the service of Knowledge.

If we pass from the life of soul itself to which we paid some attention yesterday, to how the soul works upon physical man, particularly in connection with the experiences then described, we are led in two different directions. Remembrance or memory points the soul back to earlier experiences; thinking leads the soul into the realm of etheric existence. That which affects a man even more strongly than his memory, so strongly indeed that the inner impulses pass over into his bodily life, I called ‘gesture’. And the study of gesture brings us to the subject of how soul-and-spirit manifest in the physical.

Man’s entry into physical life on Earth is a process in which the being of soul-and-spirit takes hold of the physical. And remembrance, memory—to keep to that for the moment—consists in something experienced previously in earthly existence being carried over into a later period of life. The question now is: Just as memory points back to earlier happenings in the course of earthly life, is it possible to look still further back to what preceded a man’s entry into this life?

Here we come to two considerations: firstly, the experiences which man as a being of soul-and-spirit has undergone in pre-earthly existence. We will leave this for later considerations. Secondly, there is something that is connected with his physical, bodily constitution which he, as an individual, carries over into that bodily constitution. It is what scientific thinking calls heredity. In the very traits of his temperament which have a considerable effect upon the life of soul, man bears within him qualities and impulses having an obvious connection with those of his physical ancestors.

Modern humanity approaches such matters superficially and with little real thought. Only this morning I was reading a book dealing with the head of a well-known, now extinct, Royal Family, and the effect of heredity on the dynasty. The author mentions qualities and characteristics which can be traced right back to the seventh century and were repeatedly inherited. Then comes a passage to the effect that some members of this Royal Family have displayed a marked tendency towards freakish behaviour, eccentricity and the like. Again, we are told that there are members of the same family who have no such tendencies. You will agree that this is a peculiar kind of thinking, for surely a writer who makes such a statement would realise that no conclusions whatever can be drawn from it. But if you examine much of what at the present time is supposed to lead to well-founded views, you will find plenty of similar examples.

However superficial prevailing views of heredity seem to be, it must be admitted that a man is indeed the bearer of inherited characteristics. That is the one aspect. He must often battle against these inherited traits and rid himself of them in order to bring to fulfilment the talents laid into him by his pre-earthly life.

The second aspect to be noted has to do with what a human being acquires by education, by intercourse with his fellows and with outer nature. Customary study of the lower kingdoms of nature leads us to speak of this as man’s adaptation to his environment. And as you know, modern natural science regards these two impulses, heredity and adaptation, as the influences of supreme importance for a living being.

But if we steep ourselves open-mindedly in these matters we feel that we cannot reach any real explanation without taking the path into the spiritual world. And so today we will consider in the light of spiritual knowledge, these questions which meet us in life at every turn.

We must here go back to something with which we have been repeatedly concerned in earlier studies, namely the separation of the Moon from the Earth. The Moon separated from the Earth at a particular time in order to influence it from a distance. But I have also spoken of the spiritual reality behind this separation of the Moon. I have told you how at one time there lived on the Earth superhuman Beings who were the first great Teachers of humanity and from whom originated what our human thinking may call the primeval wisdom; it is of deep significance and inspires reverence even in the fragmentary form in which it survives today. It was once tire content of what was taught by those superhuman Teachers at the time when the evolution of earthly humanity was beginning.

These Beings found their way to the Moon sphere and are now part of the Moon population. Now when a man has passed through the gate of death, he journeys by a series of stages through the planetary world belonging to our Earth. After his earthly existence he enters first into the sphere of the Moon’s activities, then into the spheres of the activities of Venus, Mercury, the Sun and so on. Today we are particularly concerned with how he passes into the Moon’s sphere of activities.

I have already indicated here that with Imaginative vision a man’s life can be followed beyond the gate of death and that in actual fact after his physical body has been laid aside and returned to the elements of Earth, he is to be found in the world of spirit. After Iris etheric body has been received into the etheric sphere connected with our Earth, soul-and-spirit remain, that is to say, his Ego and astral body and all that is part of them. But when we follow with Imaginative vision this being who has passed through the gate of death, he still presents himself to us in a definite form: it is the form which gives shape to the physical matter which the man bears within him. Compared with the robust physical body this form is little more than a shadow but makes a very forceful impression upon the soul. In this form, the head of the man makes only a weak impression, whereas a very powerful impression is made by what, in the course of the life between death and a new birth, is gradually transformed into the head of the next incarnation. But there is something important to say about this form that is visible to Imaginative perception after a man has passed through the gate of death: the form is a kind of physiognomical expression of his life on Earth; it is a faithful portrayal of the manifestations of good or evil for which he was responsible in his physical life on Earth. In earthly life a man can conceal whether the evil or the good is active in his soul. After death that is no longer possible. The spirit-form present after death is the physiognomical expression of what the man was on Earth.

A man who carries through the gate of death some moral evil inherent in his soul, will bear a physiognomy in which there is an outer resemblance to Ahrimanic figures. During the first period after death it is a fact that a man’s feeling and perception are dependent upon what he can reproduce in his own being. If he has a physiognomical resemblance to Ahriman because he has carried some moral evil with him through the gate of death, he can reproduce in himself— which means he can perceive—only things that resemble Ahriman and he is as it were blind to those human souls who passed through the gate of death with a sound and good moral disposition. Indeed it is one of the sternest judgments confronting a man after death that he can see only what resembles himself, in so far as he is himself evil, because he can reproduce in his own being only the physiognomy of other evil men.

After his death, man enters into the sphere of the Moon, and there, if he brings evil with him, he comes into the presence, not only of supersensible, superphysical Beings but also into that of others with a physiognomical resemblance to himself—that is to say, Ahrimanic figures. This passage of certain individuals through an Ahrimanic world has very definite significance in the whole nexus of cosmic happenings. And we shall grasp what actually happens if we bear in mind the purpose of those ancient Teachers of humanity when they departed to establish the Moon-colony in the Cosmos.

Now as well as those Beings of the higher Hierarchies whom we usually call Angels, Archangels and so forth, other beings who belong to the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic realms are also bound up with the whole process of cosmic evolution; and these beings are active in that process just as are the normally developing beings. The Luciferic beings work continuously with the aim of preventing anything that has the tendency to press on into physical materiality, from achieving that end. In the realm of man the Luciferic beings use every opportunity to lift him away from his physical corporeality. Their endeavour is to make man into a purely etheric being possessed of spirit-and-soul. The endeavour of the Ahrimanic beings is to separate from man everything that urges him towards the soul-and-spirit to be developed in the human kingdom. They want to transform into the spiritual the subhuman elements, the instincts and impulses, everything that comes to expression in the body. In their own way both the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings want to transform man into the spiritual. But while the Luciferic beings want to draw the soul-and-spirit out of man so that he would cease to concern himself with his earthly incarnations but would like to live as a being of soul-and-spirit only, the Ahrimanic beings would prefer to disregard soul-andspirit entirely and detach from man what has been given him as a sheath, a covering or an instrument in the physical and etheric realm, and bring it all into their own world.

And so on the one side man is faced by the Beings of the normally developing Hierarchies, but because he is interwoven with the whole of existence, he is also faced by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. Whenever the Luciferic beings endeavour to approach man, their purpose is to estrange him from the Earth. On the other hand when the Ahrimanic beings make efforts to dominate man, their aim is to make his nature more and more earthly although they also want to spiritualise the Earth, imbuing it with spiritual substance and with dense spiritual forces.

In speaking of spiritual matters one sometimes has to use expressions which may seem grotesque when applied to such matters, but one has, after all, to use human language. So you will allow me to use ordinary words even when I am speaking of something that takes place on the purely spiritual plane. You will understand me and yourselves raise what I say, into the spiritual.

Those Beings who at the beginning of Earth existence brought the primal wisdom to man, withdrew to the Moon in order, as far as lay in their power, to establish the right relationship of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic to the life of man. Why was that necessary? Why was it necessary for Beings as exalted as these primordial Teachers to elect to leave the Earth which for a time had been their field of action, and proceed to the extra-terrestrial Moon in order to bring the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic as far as possible into the right relationship with man?

When as a being of soul-and-spirit man descends from his pre-earthly existence into the Earth sphere he traverses the path I described in the course of lectures entitled Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy. As a being of soul-and-spirit he unites with the physical embryo provided for him in the direct line of heredity by father and mother. These two components, the physical embryo and the spiritual, interpenetrate and unite, and in that way man enters into existence on Earth. But in the line of heredity, in the inherited characteristics transmitted by ancestors to their descendants, there lie points of attack for the Ahrimanic beings. The Ahrimanic forces lie in the forces of heredity. And if a man has within him many of these inherited impulses, he will have a bodily make-up to which the Ego cannot satisfactorily gain access. Indeed the secret of many human beings is that they have within them too many inherited impulses. This is what is meant today by saying that a man is ‘burdened by heredity’. The consequence is that the Ego cannot penetrate fully into his body nor adequately fill the bodily organs. The body then develops an activity of its own, independently of the impulse of the Ego which should properly be working in the body. Thus by their efforts to lay as much as possible into heredity the Ahrimanic powers succeed in ensuring that the Ego is only very loosely connected with the human being. That is the one aspect.

But man has also to adapt himself to external conditions. This is very evident when you think of the effect of climate and other geographical conditions upon human beings. This effect of the purely natural environment is extraordinarily significant for man. There were even times when the wise leaders of humanity made use of it in particular ways.

When we consider a certain remarkable phenomenon in ancient Greek culture, namely the difference between Spartans and Athenians, we shall realise that this difference which is described very superficially in our history textbooks, is based ultimately on measures adopted in the ancient Mysteries, and the effect of these measures upon the Spartans differed from that made upon the Athenians.

In Greece as you know, great value was attached to Gymnastics. Gymnastics was regarded as the most essential part of a child’s education because through training and causing the body to be used and manipulated in a particular way, an effect was made upon the nature of spirit-and-soul by methods characteristic of the Greeks. But the method used by the Spartans was different from that used by the Athenians. The Spartans were primarily concerned to ensure that by means of their gymnastic exercises the boys’ development should depend as completely as possible upon what the body—the body by itself alone—can achieve. Hence the Spartan boy was obliged to carry out his exercises no matter what the weather might be.

Among the Athenians, it was different. They attached great importance to the gymnastic exercises being adapted to the weather conditions, and insisted that the boy doing those exercises should be exposed to the sunlight in the appropriate way. To the Spartans it was a matter of indifference whether the exercises were carried out in rain or sunshine. The Athenians considered it essential that the human being in question should receive a stimulus in some form, particularly that coming from the Sun.

The treatment given to a Spartan boy was intended to make his skin impervious, in order that whatever he might develop should originate within his body. The skin of an Athenian boy was not treated with sand and oil but he was exposed to the influences of the Sun.

The influences of the Sun penetrated into an Athenian boy from outside. He was encouraged to be eloquent, to express himself in beautiful language. A Spartan boy, on the other hand, was enclosed in himself as a result of all kinds of massage with oil; indeed the purpose of massaging the skin with sand and oil was that he should develop everything within himself, independently of outer Nature. He was trained to drive whatever forces can be developed by human nature back into his inner being, not to allow them to emerge.

Thus the Spartan boy did not, like the Athenian boy, become talkative. He was trained to be sparing with words, to say little, to remain silent. If he did say anything it must be significant, have real content. Speeches made by Spartans were rare but were renowned for their substance and content; speeches made by Athenians were renowned for the beauty of the language. All this was connected with the adaptation of human beings to their environment through the appropriate system of education.

You can perceive this elsewhere in a relationship that is established between man and his environment. Southerners who are everywhere exposed to the influences of the Sun, gesticulate a great deal and are talkative; their speech is melodious because their own warmth connects them with the warmth in the outside world.

Northerners, on the other hand, are not talkative because they must retain their bodily warmth within themselves as a stimulus. Northerners are notorious for their silence; they will sit together evening after evening without feeling any urge to speak. One of them may ask a question; then two hours later, or possibly not until the next evening, the other will answer him with a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’. The reason for this is that it is necessary for Northerners to have stronger impulses within themselves for the production of warmth, because warmth does not come to them from outside.

Here you have examples of man’s adaptation to external conditions in the natural world. Just think of the effects of all this in education, and in other spheres of the life of soul-and-spirit. Just as the Ahrimanic beings exercise their essential influence upon what lies in heredity, Luciferic beings exert their essential influence upon adaptation to environment. They can approach man when he is establishing a relationship to the external world. They entangle the human ‘I’ in the external world. But in so doing they often bring about confusion between this ‘I’ and Karma. Whereas the Ahrimanic beings bring a man’s ‘I’ into confusion in regard to his physical impulses, the Luciferic beings bring the ‘I’ into confusion in regard to his Karma. For what comes from the external world does not always lie in Karma immediately but must first be woven into Karma by means of many threads and relationships so that future Karma may contain it.

Thus the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic powers are intimately connected with human life. This state of things must be regulated in the process of man’s whole evolution. Hence it became necessary for the primeval Teachers of mankind to leave the Earth where such regulation would not have been possible. It cannot be undertaken during a man’s earthly life, and when that life is over he is obviously not on the Earth. The primeval Teachers were therefore obliged to withdraw from the Earth and continue their existence on the Moon. When they had thus withdrawn—and here I must use ordinary language for something that one would prefer to clothe in different word-pictures—these wise Teachers came to an arrangement with the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. Now the appearance of the Ahrimanic beings in man’s existence after death would have been particularly injurious if they could have exercised a real influence upon him. For when a man goes through the gate of death, bearing the after-effects of anything evil in his soul, he finds himself, as I have told you, in an entirely Ahrimanic environment; he will even hold Ahrimanic views and he himself has an Ahrimanic physiognomy. He can perceive only those human beings who have a similar appearance. All this must remain purely an experience in the soul. If Ahriman could now intervene and influence the astral body, this would become a force which Ahriman could propel into man—a force which would not only gradually find its karmic balance but would bring man into too close a connection with the Earth. That indeed is the endeavour of Ahrimanic beings. While a man after death in his spirit-form still resembles his earthly form, the Ahrimanic powers strive to gain access to him by way of the evil impulses he carries with him through the gate of death. They want to permeate this spirit-form with forces, to draw as many of such beings as possible down to earthly existence and so to establish there an Ahrimanic Earth-humanity.

It was for this reason that the primeval Teachers, now inhabiting the Moon sphere, made a contract with the Ahrimanic powers, a contract which those powers were obliged to accept for reasons which I will explain later. Under the terms of this contract the Ahrimanic powers were allowed to exercise their influence in the fullest sense of the word and within the limits of possibility, on man’s life before he descends to earthly existence. So that when he is again passing through the Moon sphere on his way to the Earth, in accordance with the agreement reached between the primeval Teachers and the Ahrimanic powers, these powers might have a definite influence upon him. This influence is made manifest in the fact that heredity has become possible. As against this, after the domain of heredity had been allotted to the Ahrimanic beings as a result of the efforts of the primeval Teachers, the Ahrimanic beings were obliged to renounce all interference with processes in man’s evolution after death.

On the other side an agreement was reached with the Luciferic beings that they might exercise their influence upon man only when he has passed through the gate of death and not before he is descending into earthly existence.

Thus the great primeval Teachers were able to regulate the extra-earthly Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences. But we have already heard and a little reflection will at once make it obvious that man is thereby brought into contact with Nature. Because Ahrimanic beings can exert their influence upon him before he descends to the Earth, he is exposed to the operations of the forces of heredity. And because the Luciferic beings can work upon him he is exposed to factors in the physical environment, such as climate and the like, also to factors in the social and mental environment, such as education, modes of behaviour and the like. Thus a relation is established between man and Nature around him, and Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings can work into this environment.

I want now to say something from a quite different side about the existence of these Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings in Nature around us. I have already referred to this subject when dealing with the Michael problem and I will now go into it in more detail. Picture to yourselves the change that occurs in Nature in the phenomenon of rising mist. We may perhaps be living in an atmosphere that is saturated with watery vapours rising up from the Earth. One who has developed spiritual vision discovers that in this phenomenon of Nature there is something that carries an earthly element upwards in the centrifugal direction. It is not without reason that people who live in misty areas easily become melancholic, for there is something in the experience of mist that weighs down the will.

Now there are exercises whereby a man can manipulate his imaginations in such a way that he can himself weigh down his will. These exercises consist in concentration upon certain bodily organs, especially the muscles, whereby a kind of inner feeling, inner awareness, of the muscles is evoked. The feeling evoked by this concentration differs from the awareness of muscles produced by walking or while standing. If such exercises are practised consistently, like others described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, the will is weighed down by a man’s own activity. And then he begins to see what it is in rising mist that can make people morose and melancholy; he also perceives with the eyes of soul-and-spirit that certain Ahrimanic beings live in the rising mists. Spiritual knowledge makes it clear that in rising mist Ahrimanic beings rise up from the Earth into cosmic space, thus expanding their sphere of action.

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It is again different—and there are excellent opportunities for this here at the Goetheanum—if you gaze at the sky in the evening or morning and see the clouds flooded with sunlight. A few days ago in the late afternoon, you could have seen a kind of red-golden sunlight becoming embodied in the clouds and producing an infinite variety of wonderful formations. And that same evening the Moon shone with special intensity. Elsewhere too, of course, you can see the clouds illuminated in a brilliant play of colours. Such a spectacle can be seen anywhere. I am merely speaking of what can be seen from this very place.

Luciferic spirits live here in the light that floods the clouds, just as Ahrimanic spirits live in the rising mist. If someone can look at all this with conscious Imagination and succeeds in so training his ordinary thinking that it accompanies the clouds with all their changing formations and colour, if he can get rid of the singularity of his thoughts and enable them to change and be metamorphosed, to expand and contract in harmony with the forms and colours of the clouds, then he will genuinely begin to see this play of colour above the clouds, especially in the evening and morning sky, as a sea of colours in which Luciferic figures are moving. And whereas moods of melancholy are produced in a man by rising mist, his thoughts and also his soul learn to breathe with almost superhuman freedom at the sight of this Luciferic sea of flowing light. This is a special relationship which man can establish with the surrounding world, for then he can have the feeling that his thinking is like an inhalation of the light. He feels his thinking to be a breathing, a breathing of the light. If this is actually experienced, the passage in the Mystery Plays about beings who breathe light will be better understood.

So we find that Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces are also part and parcel of the phenomena of external Nature. In the realm of heredity and adaptation to his environment man’s soul-and-spirit makes contact with Nature. When we contemplate the rising mists and the clouds bathed in flowing light we see how Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings unite with the phenomena of Nature. But when man’s soul-and-spirit approaches the facts of heredity and adaptation, this, as I have shown, is also simply an approach to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic. Thus in man’s own nature we shall find the Luciferic and Ahrimanic; again we find the Luciferic and Ahrimanic in certain natural phenomena containing something which need not concern the physicist. And from this point we can be led to perceive an influence of Nature upon man which transcends the phenomena of earthly existence.

To begin with let us hold firmly in our minds that Ahriman and Lucifer are present in the sphere of human heredity and adaptation. We find them in the rising mists and in the light which floods the clouds and is caught and held with them. We find in man an urge to establish adjustment, rhythm, between heredity and adaptation; but we also find in external Nature the urge to create rhythm between the two Powers working in Nature—the Ahrimanic and Luciferic Powers.

If you follow the whole process in the world of Nature, you have a wonderful drama. Follow the rising mist and observe how Ahrimanic spirits in it are striving outwards into the cosmic expanse. The moment the rising mists form themselves into a cloud, these spirits must give up their striving and return again to the Earth. In the clouds, Ahriman’s arrogant striving finds its limits. When mist becomes cloud it can no longer be a home for Ahriman. But the cloud enables the light to spread above it: Lucifer is there, above the clouds!

Try to grasp this in its full significance: picture the rising mists with greyish yellow Ahrimanic figures gathered into cloud-masses, and in the light above the clouds the Luciferic figures striving downwards. Then you will have a picture of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in Nature.

And then you will also realise that in times when men still had a feeling for what lies beyond the Threshold, for what lives and weaves in the luminous clouds and in the rolling mist, the position of painters, for example, was quite different from what it came to be later on. The spiritual power they recognised carried the colours to the right place on the canvas. The poet, conscious that divinity, that spirituality, was speaking in him, could say: ‘Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Peleus’ son, Achilles’; or: ‘Sing to me, O Muse, of the man, the much-travelled one’. These are the opening lines of Homer’s epics. Klopstock, who lived in times when feeling for the Divine-Spiritual was no longer present, substituted: ‘Sing, Immortal Soul, of the redemption of sinful man.’ I have often spoken of this. But the old painters too, even those living in the epoch of Leonardo and Raphael would still have been able to say and would moreover have felt it in their own way: ‘Paint for me, O Muse, paint for me, O Divine Power, direct my hands, carry soul into my hands so that the brush in my hands is guided by you.’ It is very important to understand this close union of man with the spiritual in all situations of life, especially in the most significant.

Let us hold the following firmly in mind: in heredity and adaptation the human is brought into relationship with the Ahrimanic and Luciferic; on the other hand, by intuitive observation of Nature the Luciferic and Ahrimanic can be brought into relationship with Nature in its external manifestations.

We will continue these studies in the lecture tomorrow.

Yesterday I was speaking to you of how man is subject to what natural science generally calls heredity, and also of how he is subject to the influences of the external world and adaptation to it. I also said that everything relating to heredity is connected with the Ahrimanic forces, and adaptation, in the widest sense, with the Luciferic forces. But I also told you how in the realm of the spiritual Beings belonging to the Cosmos, provision has been made to enable the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces to play a lawful part in human life. Something shall now be added to what has been said, recalling the content of the lecture given the day before yesterday.

We turned our minds then to how memory and everything akin to it give man his configuration as a being of soul. To a far greater extent than we imagine our configuration as beings of soul originates from our memories. Our soul has been shaped by the process whereby our experiences have become memories; we are the product of our life of memories to a greater extent than we think. Anyone who is capable of exercising even enough self-observation to enable him to penetrate into the store of memories, will realise how particularly important a part is played throughout earthly life by the impressions of childhood. The kind of life we spent in childhood—which really does not loom large in our consciousness—the period during which we learned to speak or walk, or got our first, inherited, teeth, the impressions made on us during these periods of development—all these play an important part in the fife of soul throughout our existence on Earth. All freely arising thoughts in which impressions from outside have played no part are connected with memories and are usually accompanied by faint nuances of joy or sadness—all this constitutes our memory and is carried with it by the astral body when we pass into the state of sleep. If with Imaginative vision we are able to observe man as a being of soul-and-spirit during sleep, the following picture presents itself. During sleep the etheric body and the physical body are still enclosed within the skin and the astral body is outside—I will speak of the Ego later on. This astral body is seen virtually to consist of the man’s memories. But these memories in the astral body now outside the physical body are seen to be swirling in and through one another in a kind of eddy. Experiences that were widely separated in time and space are now in juxtaposition; parts of the content of certain experiences are eliminated, so that the whole life of memory during sleep is transformed. Hence when a person dreams it is this transformed life of memory that is presented to his consciousness. And in the character and make-up of the dream he can be inwardly aware of the swirling eddy of memories which Imaginative clairvoyance can perceive from outside.

But there is another aspect as well. These memories, which from the time of going to sleep until waking form the main content of man’s astral life, unite during sleep with the forces behind the phenomena of Nature. It may therefore be said that the astral element in the memories enters into a connection with the forces which lie behind, or rather lie within, the minerals, within the plants, behind the clouds, and so on.

Those who can recognise this to be truth will be horrified to hear it said that material atoms are behind the phenomena of Nature. The fact is that our memories during sleep do not unite with material atoms but with the spiritual forces behind the phenomena of Nature. This is where our memories reside during sleep. We can therefore say with truth that during sleep our soul dips down with its memories into the inner being of Nature, and we say nothing untrue or unreal when we assert; When I go to sleep I give over my memories to the Powers that are spiritually active in the crystal, in the plants, in all the phenomena of Nature.

During a walk you may see by the wayside blue or yellow flowers, green grass, gleaming ears of corn, and say to them: When I pass by you during the day I see you only from outside. But while I sleep, I shall sink my memories into your own spiritual core of being. While I sleep you receive and harbour the memories into which I have transformed the experiences I had in life.—There is perhaps no more beautiful feeling for Nature than to have to a rose-tree not merely an external relation but to realise that you love it because a rose-tree harbours the first memories of childhood. Space plays no part at all. However far away the rose-tree may be, during sleep we find the way to it. The reason why people love roses—only they do not know it—is that roses receive and harbour the very first memories of childhood.

When we were children, the love shown us by other human beings made us happy. We may have forgotten all about it, but it remains within our soul, and during our sleep at night the rose-tree receives into and harbours within itself the memory we have ourselves forgotten. We are more closely united than we realise with the world of outer Nature, that is to say with the spirit reigning there. Memory of our earliest childhood is particularly remarkable in connection with sleep because up to the time of the change of teeth, up to about the seventh year, it is only the element of soul that is received and harboured during sleep. It is a fact in our life as human beings that the inner, spiritual core of Nature harbours the element of soul belonging to our childhood. There is, of course, another aspect: the element of soul we developed in childhood when, for example, we may have been cruel, that too remains in us; the thistles harbour it! All this is said by way of analogy but it points to a significant reality. The following will make it clear what it is that is not taken from childhood into the innermost core of Nature.

In the first seven years of life the child’s whole bodily make-up is inherited, including, therefore, the first teeth; all the material substance we have within us during this period is, in essence, inherited. But after approximately seven years all the material substance has been thrust out, has fallen away and is renewed. The human being himself remains as a spirit-form. His material components are thrown out and after seven or eight years everything that was previously there, has gone. And so when we have reached the age of nine our whole bodily make-up has been renewed. We then shape it in accordance with external impressions.

It is very important indeed that in the early epochs of life the child should be in a position to build his new body—not the inherited body, but the one developed from within himself—in accordance with good impressions from the environment and by a healthy process of adaptation. Whereas the body the child has when he comes into the world depends upon whether the forces of heredity are good or not so good, the later body he bears is very dependent indeed upon the impressions he receives from his environment. Invariably, however, after seven years the body is renewed.

Now it is the ‘I’, the Ego, that is responsible for this. Although it is true the Ego is not yet born in the seven-yearold child as far as the external world is concerned—for it is born at a later age—nevertheless it is at work, since it is naturally connected with the body and is responsible for its formation. It is the Ego that is responsible for the development of what then appears as physiognomy and gesture, as the outer, material manifestation of man’s soul-and-spirit. It is a fact that someone who takes an active share in affairs of the world, who has wide interests and assimilates their substance and content will reveal this in his gestures and his very facial expression. In the later life of such a man, every wrinkle on his face will be indicative of his inner activity and it will be possible to read a great deal here, because the Ego comes to expression in a man’s gestures and physiognomy. The countenance of someone whose attitude to the world is one of boredom and lack of interest will retain the same facial expression all through life. There have been no intimate experiences which might have imprinted themselves in his physiognomy and gestures. In many a countenance you can read a whole biography; in another there is not much more to read than that the individual was once a child—and that is of little account.

It is extremely significant that through the change of bodily substance after every seven or eight years, a man shapes his own outer appearance. And the result of this work on his outward appearance as revealed in physiognomy and gesture, is again something that is carried, while he sleeps, into the innermost being of Nature.

If, then, you look at a man with Imaginative clairvoyance, and observe the Ego as it appears while he is asleep, you will find that the Ego is fully expressed by physiognomy and gesture. Hence those human beings who are able to convey a great deal of their inner nature to their facial expression or to their gestures, have gleaming, radiant Egos. This activity in the shaping of gestures and physiognomy again unites with certain forces in Nature. If we had many opportunities in life of showing friendliness and kindness, Nature is inclined, as soon as this kindliness has been expressed in the countenance, to receive it into her own essential being. Nature takes our memories into her forces, our gestures into her very being. Man is so intimately connected with external Nature that there is immense significance for the latter in the memories he experiences in his soul and also in the way in which he expresses his inner life of soul in physiognomy and gesture.

As you know, I have often quoted words of Goethe which were really a criticism of a saying by Haller: ‘Into the inner being of Nature no created Spirit can enter. Happy he to whom she reveals only her outer shell.’ Goethe retorted: ‘O you Philistine! We are everywhere within her being: nothing is within, nothing without; what is within is without, what is without is within. Ask yourself first of all whether you are kernel or husk.’ Goethe said he had heard the remark in the sixties and had secretly cursed it. He felt—naturally he could not then know anything of Spiritual Science—that if a man whom he could only regard as a philistine, says: ‘Into the inner being of Nature no created Spirit can enter,’ he knows nothing of the fact that man, simply because he is a being of memories, a being of physiognomy and gestures, continually penetrates into the inmost essence of Nature. We are not creatures who stand at the door of Nature and knock in vain. Through our own core of being we are connected by intimate ties with the inmost essence of Nature. But because the child until his seventh year has a body that is wholly inherited, nothing of his Ego, nothing of his physiognomy and gestures, pass over into Nature. It is only at the time of the change of teeth that we begin to approach these realities. Hence it is only then—after the change of teeth— that we are mature enough gradually to begin to reflect about any phenomenon of Nature. Until that time it is only arbitrary thoughts that arise in a child, thoughts which really have not very much to do with Nature, and for that very reason are so full of charm. The best way to make contact with a child is to be poetical when we are talking to him, calling the stars the eyes of heaven and so on, when the things of which we speak are as remote as possible from the outer physical reality.

It is only after the change of teeth that the child gradually ‘grows into’ Nature in such a way that his thoughts can gradually comprehend thoughts of Nature. Fundamentally speaking, the child’s life from the seventh to the fourteenth year is a period during which he ‘grows into Nature’. During this period, in addition to his memories he also carries into the realm of Nature his gestures and physiognomy. And this then continues through the whole of life. It is not until the change of teeth that we have any relationship with the inner core of Nature as single human individuals.

For this reason the beings I have called Elementals— Gnomes and Undines—listen so eagerly when a man narrates something about childhood as it was before the age of seven. It is only at the time of the change of teeth that a man is really born as far as these elemental beings are concerned. This is an extremely interesting fact. Before that time man is to the Gnomes and Undines a being ‘on the other side’; it is for them something of an enigma that man should appear at this age almost as a completed being. It would be immensely stimulating for pedagogical imagination if, through imbibing spiritual knowledge, an individual could really participate in a dialogue with the Nature Spirits, if he could transport himself into the soul of the Nature Spirits in order to ascertain their views about what he can tell them about children. In this way the most beautiful fairy-tale imagination takes shape. And if in olden times fairy-tales were so wonderfully vivid and rich in content it was because the narrators could actually converse with Gnomes and Undines and not merely hear something from them. These Nature Spirits are sometimes very egoistic. They become silent if they are not told things about which they are curious. Their favourite stories are those which tell about the doings of babies. Then one learns from them many things that can create the atmosphere of a fairy story. What seems utterly fantastic to people today can be very important for the practical application of spiritual life. It is an actual fact that because of the circumstances of which I have told you, these dialogues with the Nature Spirits may be extremely instructive for both sides.

On the other hand, what I have said may give rise to a certain anxiety, for during sleep man is continually creating pictures of his inmost being. Behind the phenomena of Nature, behind the flowers of the field, and extending into the etheric world, there are reproductions of our memories, good and futile alike. The Earth teems with what is contained in human souls. Human life is intimately connected with these things.

First of all, then, we encounter Nature Spirits as beings into whom we can penetrate through our gestures. But we also find the world of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. We penetrate into those Beings too. Our memories carry us into the activities of the world of the Angeloi; our physiognomy and gestures—for which we ourselves are responsible—carry us into the Beings themselves of that world. This following sketch will give some indication of what happens when, during sleep, we penetrate into Nature. Let this (lowest) curve represent our skin; as we move outwards in the radial direction, we pass from the regions of the Angeloi into those of the Archangeloi and Archai. We are now in the sphere of the Third Hierarchy. And when, during sleep, we sink down with our memories and gestures into the flowing sea of Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, weaving and intertwining, then from one side there comes another stream of spiritual Beings. This is the Second Hierarchy: Exousiai, Kyriotetes and Dynamis. If we want to find something in the physical world to which this can be related, we can say that the daily course of the Sun from East to West expresses how the Second Hierarchy crosses the realm of the Third Hierarchy. The Third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, glide upwards and downwards, handing to each other the ‘golden vessels’. According to this picture we think of the Second Hierarchy following the path taken by the Sun from East to West—not the apparent but the actual daily path of the Sun, for the Copernican theory does not hold good here. Provided a man has the necessary vision, he sees how during sleep he passes into the world of the Third Hierarchy. But this world of the Third Hierarchy is permeated ceaselessly by the Second Hierarchy. The Second Hierarchy also makes its influence felt in our life of soul.

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In the lecture the day before yesterday I pointed out to you the significance of vividly re-living experiences of youth. You may be deeply impressed if you turn again to the Mystery Plays and now, perhaps with greater understanding than before, read the passages about the appearance of the Spirit of Johannes’ Youth.¹ It is an indubitable fact that a man’s own inner being can become vividly perceptible to him if with an active effort of will he relives his younger days. I told you that you may, for instance, pick up old school textbooks and steep yourself in what you either learnt or failed to learn from them. It does not matter whether you learnt anything or not; what matters is that you should re-live what happened at the time. In my own case it was vitally important for me a year or two ago, when I needed to strengthen my powers of spiritual understanding, to re-live a situation of my youth. I was eleven years old at the time and had just been given a new school-book. The first thing that happened was that through carelessness, the ink pot upset and blotted two pages of the book so badly that they were illegible. A few years ago I relived the event many times—the textbook with the ruined pages and what I had to suffer in consequence. For the book had to be replaced by a family with very little money. One suffered dreadfully on account of this book with its enormous inkblot! As I said, it is not a matter of having behaved well in circumstances recalled in later years but of experiencing them with real intensity. If you recall such happenings as vividly as you possibly can, you will experience something else as well. More clearly than in a dream, in actual perception, you will experience a situation while you rest in bed, shut off from the day’s impressions. If during the day you have vividly recalled a scene once inwardly experienced, when everything around you is dark and you are all by yourself at night you will see, as though displayed in space, a scene in which you once participated. Suppose you have recalled a scene at which you were once present, let us say at eleven o’clock. Afterwards you went somewhere else and found yourself sitting among a number of people. You have now summoned up something you experienced inwardly. What was around you outwardly at that time was entirely a spatial spectacle. If attention is paid to circumstances such as this, very significant discoveries can be made. Let us suppose that as a youngster of seventeen, you were accustomed to have your midday meal at a Pension where the guests were continually changing. Now you recall some such scene which you had inwardly experienced; you recall it vividly. Then, in the night, you have this experience: you are sitting at a table with other people whom you saw only seldom because the guests in a Pension were perpetually changing. The face of one of these people makes you realise: that is something I actually lived through all those years ago. The external spatial element is added to the inner soul-experience when you activate memories in this way.

This means that you are actually living in the stream which flows from East to West (see diagram). More and more the feeling grows in you that you are not wholly absorbed by the spiritual world into which you pass in sleep, but that in this spiritual world something is happening that is reflected outwardly in the moment when again you see the people sitting around the table in the Pension. You had forgotten about the episode long ago but it is still there. You see it as things can often be seen inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle. The moment you have this before you, you have made contact with the stream that flows from East to West: the stream of the Second Hierarchy. In this stream of the Second Hierarchy there is contained something that is reflected outwardly as the day.

Now the day varies in length throughout the year. In spring it gets longer, in autumn, shorter; it is longest in summer, shortest in winter. During the course of the year the day undergoes metamorphosis. This is caused by a stream running from West to East, countering the East-West stream (diagram). It is the stream of the First Hierarchy, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Hence if you follow how the day changes in the course of the year, if you pass from the day to the year, you come into contact with the stream which flows in the opposite direction and meets you in sleep.

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It is really the case that in sleep we grow into the spiritual world, radially from West to East and from East to West. And when we recall some experience vividly the picture before our souls must be of Winter in the world of space.

And it is the same when we become conscious of our will. It is the effect of this that passes into the gestures and physiognomy. What I am now going to say will have a certain significance for Eurythmists, although naturally it is not the purpose of Eurythmy to vindicate what I am saying. It is a fact that when a man becomes increasingly able to shape his external form too from within himself, so that his Ego is expressed with greater and greater definition in his physiognomy and gestures, he does not receive an impression only of the day. An impression of the day results from passing over from a vivid, inner experience of memory to a perception of things in the external world of space. To take the example already given. Suppose you re-experience what happened to you at the age of seventeen, and see the human beings who sat at table with you in the Pension, in pictures, as in the Akasha Chronicle—that is the Day-experience.

But the Year can also be experienced. This is possible if we pay attention to the working of the will, if we notice that it is comparatively easy to assert the will when one is warm, whereas it is difficult to let the will stream through the body when one is very cold. Those who can inwardly experience a connection between the will and being warm or cold, will gradually be able, when this faculty develops, to speak of a Winter Will and a Summer Will in themselves.

We find that the best way to define this will is to relate it to the seasons. Let us observe, for example, the kind of will which seems to carry our thoughts out into the Cosmos and makes it easy to manipulate the body so that in its whole bearing and in its gestures the thoughts seem to be borne out into the Universe; they seem to glide away through the finger-tips. We feel that it is easy to activate the will. We may be standing in front of a tree and something at the top of it gladdens our eye. If our will is warm within us, our thoughts are carried to the treetop—indeed sometimes to the very stars of heaven when in summer nights we feel endowed with this warmth of will.

On the other hand, if the will is inwardly cold, it is as if all thoughts were being carried only in our head and could not make their way into our arms or legs. Everything goes to the head. The head endures the coldness of the will, and if the cold is not so overwhelming as to give rise to a feeling of iciness, the head will become warm as a result of its own inner reaction, and then it unfolds thoughts.

Hence we can say that Summer Will leads us out into the wide expanse of the Cosmos. Summer Will, Warm Will, carries our thoughts here, there and everywhere. Winter Will carries thoughts into our head. The will can indeed be differentiated in this way. And then we shall feel that the will which carried us out into the Cosmos is related to the course of the Summer and the Will which carries thoughts into the head, to the Winter. Through the will we experience the Year.

It is possible to experience as a reality what I am now going to write on the blackboard for you. Your experience of Winter through the medium of the will can be expressed in these words:

World-All pictures!
From widths of Space
Ye are alighting,
Tending towards me,
Entering bounteously
Into my Head,
Into its thinking powers.

These words have no merely abstract meaning. If you can feel your own will united with Nature you will also feel, when Winter comes, as though your own experiences, handed over to Nature, were being brought to you from the expanse of Space. You can be aware of your own experiences which had already been taken into Nature. This is the feeling of Winter Will.

But you can also feel the Summer Will which bears your thoughts out into the Cosmos:

Ye, of my Head
The formative forces, forming in soul,
Filling my inner life!

which means that the thoughts which are at first experienced in the head, pass over into and fill the whole body, but then stream forth from it:

Now reaching outward
Into World-distances,
Weld my own being
With World-creative powers.

These words express the nature of the Summer Will, the will in us which is related to Summer. And when we feel that we have called up from within the active memory of something experienced long ago, then the day with its following night bears it back to us again, supplemented by the spatial picture. This is connected with the stream flowing from East to West. Thus we may say: Winter Will changes in us into Summer Will, Summer Will into Winter Will. We find ourselves no longer related to the Day with its alternating light and darkness, but through our will we are related to the Year, and therewith to the stream flowing from West to East, the stream of the First Hierarchy: the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

As we proceed we shall see how man may be hindered or helped through heredity or adaptation to the external world through this association with the inmost life of Nature. What I have just been telling you refers to the fact that man, when hindered as little as possible by Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces, grows by means of ideation (Vorstellung) and will into the inmost life of Nature and is received by the Time-forces, the Day-forces and the Year-forces; Third Hierarchy, Second Hierarchy, First Hierarchy. But the Ahrimanic forces as they manifest themselves in heredity, and the Luciferic forces as they manifest themselves in adaptation, exert very deep influences. These great problems will occupy our minds in the next lecture.

Winter Will
World-All pictures,
From widths of Space
Ye are alighting,
Tending towards me,
Entering bounteously
Into my Head,
Into its thinking powers.

Summer Will
Ye, of my Head
The formative forces, forming in soul,
Filling my inner life.
Now reaching outward
Into World-distances,
Weld my own being With World-creative powers.

• 1. The Soul’s Awakening. Scene 2.

Continuation of the themes introduced in the last lecture leads us today to material that will serve as preparation for the two following lectures. It leads us to study the connection of man, the whole man, with our planet Earth. As I have often said, man is under an illusion if he ascribes to himself as a physical being an existence separate from the Earth. As a being of soul-and-spirit man is independent and individual; as physical man and to some extent also in respect of his etheric body, he belongs to the organic totality of the Earth.

I will begin today by describing how this connection between man and Earth-existence appears to supersensible vision. Let us suppose that someone with Imaginative Consciousness were to take a journey through the primeval Alps where the rocks consist of quartz, of silicious minerals and similar formations. These primeval mountains are composed of the hardest rocks on Earth, but as well as being the hardest, these rocks, when they appear in their original form, have an inherent purity about them, a quality untouched by the commonplace things of Earth. We can well understand it, when in a beautiful essay which has already been read here, Goethe speaks of his experiences among these primeval mountains, of the solitude he felt as he sat there, and the impressions made upon him by these granite rocks, towering up from the Earth. Goethe speaks of granite, composed as it is of silica, mica and felspar, as the ‘enduring son of Earth’.

When with ordinary consciousness a man approaches these primeval mountains he can of course admire them from outside; he is deeply impressed by their forms, by their wonderful moulding, primitive as it is, but extraordinarily eloquent. But if he approaches this hardest rock of the Earth with Imaginative Consciousness he penetrates beneath the surface of mineral nature and is then able with his thinking to grow together, as it were, with the rock. The soul reaches into the depths of the rock, and in spirit, man enters into a holy palace of the Gods. The interior is revealed to Imaginative vision as transparent, and the outer surface as the walls of this palace of the Gods. At the same time the knowledge comes that within this rock there is a reflection of the Cosmos outside the Earth. The world of stars is mirrored once again before the soul. Finally we get the impression that all quartz rocks are like eyes through which the Earth can see into the Cosmos. We are reminded of the many-faceted eyes of insects which divide into numbers of parts whatever comes towards them from outside. We should, and indeed must, picture innumerable quartz and similar formations on the surface of the Earth as being eyes enabling the Earth inwardly to reflect and indeed inwardly perceive the cosmic environment. And gradually the knowledge dawns in us that every crystal formation present in the Earth is a sense-organ for perceiving the Cosmos.

The majesty of the Earth’s snow-covering, but even more of the falling snowflakes, lies in the fact that in each single snowflake there is a reflection of part of the Cosmos; so that with this crystallised water, reflections of part of the starry heavens fall down upon the Earth.

I need not remind you that the starry firmament is there by day as well as at night, only it cannot be seen by day because the sunlight is too strong. If you ever have an opportunity of going into a deep cellar with a high tower above it open at the top, you can see the stars even in the daytime because you are looking out of the darkness and the sunlight does not obtrude. There is, for example, such a tower in Jena through which the stars can be seen in the daytime. I mention this in passing to make it clear to you that this reflection of the stars in the snowflakes and indeed in every crystal is of course there in the daytime too. It is not a physical reflection, it is a spiritual reflection, and the impression of it must be communicated inwardly.

That is not all. This spiritual sense-impression, if I may call it so, gives rise to an impression in the soul that if you enter imaginatively into the crystal covering of the Earth you yourself are able to share in all the experiences coming from the Cosmos to the Earth through the crystals. You thereby extend your own being into the Cosmos and feel yourself one with the Cosmos. And most important of all: it now becomes a deep truth to one possessed of Imaginative vision that our Earth, with everything belonging to it, has in the course of ages been born out of the Cosmos. The kinship between the Earth and the Cosmos comes vividly before the eyes of soul. And so this inner penetration into the millions of the Earth’s crystal eyes is a preparation for feeling and experiencing in soul the inner kinship of the Earth with the Cosmos.

Through this experience, however, you again feel that as Man you are closely united with the Earth. For this birth of the Earth out of the Cosmos took place when Man himself was still a very primitive being, not a physical but a spiritual being. But in his own being Man shared in the processes undergone by the Earth after its birth out of the Cosmos. In actual fact the same inner connection once existed between the Earth and the neighbouring Cosmos as that between an unborn child with the body of the mother. Later, however, the child begins to make itself independent. Similarly, the Earth gradually developed into independence after having been more completely one with the Cosmos during the earliest Saturn epoch. Man accompanied this process towards independence until he was finally able to say: My finger is a finger only as long as it is part of my organism; the moment I sever it from my organism it is no longer a finger and it perishes. And if man as a physical being can be thought of as separated by a few miles only from the conditions of the Earth-organism he would wither and decay like the amputated finger. Because he can move freely over the face of the Earth man deceives himself into thinking that as a physical being he has an existence of his own, independent of the Earth, whereas a finger cannot move over the organism. If it could do so, it would be succumbing to the same delusion to which man succumbs if he thinks of himself as a physical being independent of the Earth. It is precisely through higher knowledge that this integration of physical man into the Earth becomes clear.

Such is the acquaintance that can be made, through Imaginative Consciousness, with the hardest component of the Earth’s surface. Further acquaintance can be made by descending a little more deeply into the Earth, to the veins or lodes of metal ores, or any metallic substance in the Earth’s interior. Here you have penetrated below the surface of the Earth. But metals have a very special character, a character deviating from that of other earthly substance. Metals have a certain independence which can be experienced, and this experience is of very great significance for man.¹

Even someone who acquires certain higher knowledge through Imaginative vision has not yet reached the goal when, through experiencing the quartz and other primeval rocks as the million eyes of the Earth, he expands his being into the Cosmos. If however he penetrates further into the interior of the Earth, the first impulses for experience can arise from the wonderful stimuli that can be received in a metal mine. Once the impulses have been set in motion, however, all that is necessary to be able to experience the nature of metallic substance without going down the shaft of a mine, is spiritual vision. But the first feeling of the experience in question can be acquired with particular intensity in metal mines themselves. It is no longer the case today but it was still true a few decades ago, that miners who are inwardly wedded to their work display something of this profound sense of the spiritual reality in metals. For the metals do not only ‘see’ the surrounding Cosmos: they speak in a spiritual way, but nevertheless they do speak and tell their story. And the language they speak is similar to the impressions of language from a different domain.

When we succeed in establishing an inner connection of soul with human beings living between death and rebirth we shall need a special language to communicate with them. What the Spiritualists say is puerile, for the simple reason that the dead do not speak the language of earthly man. Spiritualists believe that the dead speak in such a way that their words can be written down, just as though a letter were being received from a contemporary living on the Earth. True, in most cases the messages heard in seances sound high-flown and pompous, but the same sort of thing is sometimes written even by living contemporaries. The fact of the matter is that we have first to find the right approach to the language which the dead speak and which bears no resemblance whatever to any earthly language—this is so, although it also has a vocal-consonantal character. But the same language which can be apprehended only by spiritual hearing is spoken by the metals in the interior of the Earth. And the same language by means of which we come near the souls of the dead living between death and a new birth, can also recount the memories of the Earth, the experiences undergone by the Earth in its course through the periods of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The metals can tell us of the past history of the Earth. The destinies of our whole planetary system, however, are to be learnt from what Saturn has to communicate. It is of what the Earth has undergone in the evolutionary process that the metals tell.

The language spoken by the metals of the Earth can also take two forms. In its usual form it will reveal what the Earth has undergone in the course of its evolution since the Saturn period. What is said about this evolution in the book Occult Science: An Outline originated in the way I have often described—by direct spiritual perception of the process concerned. That, however, is a rather different way of learning about the Earth’s history from the one I have in mind just now. The metals—if I may put it in this way, although naturally it seems to be rather strangely expressed—the metals tell us more of the ‘personal’ experiences of the Earth, of the Earth as a specific entity in the Cosmos. So if I wanted to lay particular emphasis upon the stories told by the metals, stories learnt by spiritual penetration into the interior of the Earth, I should have to give many details of the Saturn-, Sun-, Moon-periods, and so forth.

A first example would be that the conditions on Old Saturn described in the book Occult Science as consisting of differentiations of warmth, appear as mighty, gigantic beings-of-warmth, which even during the Saturn period had reached a certain degree of density. To put it crudely: if it were possible—which of course it is not—for a man of Earth to encounter these beings he could become aware of them and even touch them. Thus about the middle of the Saturn period these beings were not purely spiritual but displayed a certain physical quality. If you had tried to touch them your fingers would have blistered. It would be wrong to assume that they had a temperature of millions of degrees of warmth but their temperature was such that any contact would have caused blisters.

Then we should have to pass to the Sun period and to relate, as I did in Occult Science, how other beings appeared, manifesting wonderful transformations, metamorphoses. Gazing at these beings in process of metamorphosis we should get the impression that the metamorphoses described by classical authors such as Ovid have something to do, though of course not directly, with experience of the communications make by the metals. Ovid was certainly not himself capable of understanding the language of the metals directly, nor indeed does his work Metamorphoses wholly convey the impression one gets, but what he says is derived from this source, and the underlying process is very definitely indicated. Paracelsus, who lived at a much later time than the personality to whom I have just referred, did not go to college to learn what he regarded as of greatest importance. I do not imply that he did not actually go to college, for as a matter of fact he did, and I have no objections whatever to such a course. But for knowledge of the greatest importance he went where more significant information could be obtained. He went, for example, to men such as metal-miners and acquired a great deal of his knowledge in this way.

Anyone familiar with the technique of acquiring knowledge is aware of how extraordinarily illuminating the simple words of a peasant engaged on the business of sowing and reaping can be. You will say that he does not understand what he is talking about, but what matters is that you who are listening should understand. Certainly it will be only very rarely that the speaker himself understands what he has said—it is a matter of instinct. And even more fundamental knowledge can be acquired from creatures such as beetles and butterflies and birds, who understand nothing at all about what they say to us.

Pythagoras on his travels studied with great intensity what could be learnt by listening to the speech of the metals in the mines of Asia Minor, and a great deal of what he learnt made its way into what then became Greco-Roman culture. In a weakened form it appears in a work such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is one form of the speech of the metals in the interior of the Earth.

The other form—grotesque as this seems, it is true—the other form is revealed when the speech of the metals becomes poetical, begins to be cosmic poetry. Cosmic phantasy comes to expression in the speech of the metals. And then this cosmic poetry tells of the most intimate relations existing between the metals and the being of man. These most intimate relations do indeed exist. The crude relations known to physiology involve only a few metals. It is known that iron plays an important role in human blood; but iron is really the only metal of this kind. A few others—potassium, calcium, sodium, magnesium—also play a certain part. But a larger number of metals that are important for the structure and functioning of the Earth, seem to crude observation to play no part in the human organism. But that is only apparently the case. If you penetrate into the Earth and there learn to know the speech of the metals, you will also learn that the metals are truly not present only in the interior of the Earth but everywhere in its environment as well, although in exceedingly fine distribution, in a hyper-homeopathic solution, if I may so express it.

In the crude, material sense we cannot have lead within us; in the finer, more ethereal sense we cannot live without it. For what would become of man if lead from the Cosmos, from the atmosphere, did not have an effect upon him, if lead in an infinitely fine state of distribution did not penetrate with the rays of the sun through his eye into his skin, if lead did not penetrate into him through the breathing-process, and again in an infinitely fine state, into the foodstuffs? In short, what would man be if lead did not work in him?

Without lead he would indeed have sense-perceptions; he would be able to perceive colours and musical tones, but with every perception he would become slightly faint, slightly out of his body. He would never be able to stand back from his perceptions and reflect in thoughts and mental concepts about what he had perceived. If we did not absorb any lead in the infinitely fine homeopathic potencies of which I spoke, into our nervous system and, above all, into our brain, we should be entirely given over to all our sense-perceptions as if they were something outside us. We should be unable to form any mental picture of our sense-perceptions or retain any picture of them in our memory. It is the finely distributed lead in our brain that makes this possible.

If a considerable quantity of lead is introduced into the human organism the result is lead-poisoning—a dreadful condition. But those who are aware of the facts can realise from this power of lead to poison, that just because it has a disastrous effect if introduced into the human organism in any considerable quantity, if administered in extremely fine hyper-homeopathic dilution, it can at any moment bring about fading, dying processes to the extent necessary to enable a man to be a conscious being, not perpetually involved in processes of growth and formation—which cause faintness and loss of consciousness. For this is what happens if the growth-forces become overpowering.

Man has definite relationships to all metals, including those of which crude physiology says nothing. Knowledge of these relationships is the foundation for a true therapy. Intimate information about the relationships of the metals to the human being can be given only by the poetic speech of the metals of the Earth. So it may be said that the ordinary speech of the metals gives information about the actual destiny of the Earth; information about the curative relationships of the metals to the human being is given by the metals when their speech becomes poetic.

It is a remarkable thought that from the cosmic aspect, medicine is a kind of poetry. But many mysteries of existence lie in the fact that what at one level causes or leads to illness, is, at another level, something lofty, most perfect, most beautiful. This is what emerges when Inspired cognition finds access to the metallic veins and metals in the Earth.

Now still another relationship can be established with metals, namely, when they are subjected to natural forces, for example, to fire. Just think of the remarkable formation of antimony orc. It is composed of single spear-shaped structures, showing by this formation that it follows certain lines of force that are active in the Cosmos. If antimony is subjected to a process of combustion it becomes the ‘antimony mirror’. When it is spread on glass it develops a special power of reflection. It has other peculiarities, too, for example it readily explodes if it is deposited on the cathode. All these characteristics of antimony indicate how a metallic substance of this kind is related to the forces of the Earth, of the Earth’s environment. The same can be said of all metals. All of them can be studied when brought into the process of combustion and if the temperature rises higher and higher they pass over into the super-homeopathic condition of which I have spoken. It is at those temperatures that they assume a quite different form. In this connection the ideas of modern physicists are rigidly schematic. As the lead is being melted the physicists picture it getting softer and softer, and so it does, to begin with. The lead gets softer and softer as the temperature rises, and it also gets hotter and hotter, increasingly fluidic, until lead-fumes are produced. What the physicists do not know is that all the time something that does not reach beyond a certain temperature is being thrown off, separated off. This they do not know. Lead in this finest, ‘super-homeopathic’ state passes over continually into the universal invisible life and in that form works upon man.

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In the Earth itself there are metals of infinite kinds, but above the Earth these metals are everywhere present in the finest possible state of distribution; they have vaporised. Down in the Earth the metals have their sharp contours and definite structures; at a still greater depth they exist in a molten condition. But in the environment of the Earth, the metals in the finest possible state of distribution continually radiate out into cosmic space. Now in cosmic space there is inner elasticity. The forces do not radiate into infinity—as the physicists imagine to be the case with light-rays—but these forces radiate to a certain boundary and then return. These backward radiating forces may be pictured as returning in all directions from the periphery of the universe. And we become aware that these backward-streaming forces are at work where we witness one of the most wonderful, most beautiful of all sights in human life: when a child is learning in the first years of earthly life to walk, to speak and to think.

It is one of the most wonderful sights in the whole of life to observe how a child stops crawling and stands up in order to orientate himself in the world; to ‘come to himself’ as a human being. It is the backward-radiating forces of the metals that work inwardly in the forces which give the child the power of orientation. As the child learns to raise himself from his horizontal position in crawling, he is permeated by the backward-radiating force of the metals. This is the force that actually raises the child into the upright position. If this connection is recognised, another experience comes simultaneously. It is that in the deeds, in the essential nature of the human being living here on Earth, one recognises the connection with his earlier incarnation. The faculties for perceiving the workings of the metals in the Cosmos and the karmic connection between the successive lives on Earth, are the same. The one recognition comes with the other and neither is possible without the other. That is why I once said in an entirely different context that in this power of orientation, in the power which enables the child to rise from crawling to standing and walking, the faculty of learning to speak and think, lie the fruits coming from earlier lives on Earth. I said then that anyone with an eye for these things perceives in the way the child takes his first steps, whether in taking steps he tends to put toes or heels down first, whether he bends his knees sharply or only slightly—in all this, karmic disposition from an earlier incarnation can be perceived. It shows itself primarily in the gait. This is because together with the faculty which enables the backward-raying forces of the metals to be perceived comes the faculty to perceive the connection of a man’s present life with his earlier lives.

The assertion that Anthroposophy is not open to proof is entirely unjustified. Those who assert this are accustomed to bring forward sense-perception as proof. But that is tantamount to saying: Are you actually telling me that the Earth moves freely in space? It is simply not possible. Either there must be something to support it or it must fall!—In point of fact it does not fall because cosmic bodies mutually support each other. Support is necessary only in the conditions prevailing on the Earth. So it is only for truths recognised by the everyday consciousness that proofs can rightly be offered, if they are demanded. Truths relating to the spirit are mutually confirmatory—but this must also be felt as an inner conviction.

I have told you that from the way a child—or an adult—walks, whether he raises toes or heel first, treads firmly or lightly, bends his knees a great deal or is more prone to stand stiffly—from all this the fulfilment of his karma from the previous earthly life can be perceived. Today I have shown you how the backward-raying forces of the metals enable us to recognise the connection between earthly lives. Here you have two mutually confirmatory truths. But what happens all the time is that we hear a truth, then after some time we hear the same truth from a different angle and perhaps we hear it a third time. In this way the truths of Anthroposophy confirm one another— just as in the Cosmos the heavenly bodies uphold each other without needing extraneous supports. It must indeed be so when we ascend from truths that are valid for everyday consciousness only, to truths that are self-sustaining realities in the Cosmos. And what anthroposophical knowledge comprises is indeed self-sustaining reality. You must hold together in your mind statements made at different times, statements which mutually support, attract, or also resist each other, revealing thereby the inner life of anthroposophical knowledge. Other forms of knowledge, customary today, live by virtue of the supports on which they are based; Anthroposophical knowledge is self-sustaining.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation, Lectures 3 to 5. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)