The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On this occasion let me once more call attention to the fact that as the German Section of the Theosophical¹ Society we find ourselves in an epoch of importance. What has been said in different lectures with regard to the cycles which run in sevens is no mere figure of speech, but is in harmony with the laws of existence. And having now completed a 7-years' cycle in the life of the German Section we may do well to pause and look into our whole work and endeavour. This work is only possible if the spiritual Movement, in its development, contains in its inner ordering something of the laws of the great cosmic system. The cosmic system runs its course in cycles which can be reckoned according to the number 7; for we reckon 7 planetary conditions and so on.

In a Movement like our own, the number 7 also has a certain part to play, and after 7 years our striving in a sense turns back again to the beginning, for it has in the meantime incorporated in itself what has been achieved; our striving turns back again to its beginning, but at a higher stage. It is only possible to arrive at this by considering how the whole rests upon an inner law.

If you look back a little at the work we have done in these 7 years, you will be able to notice one thing: there has been a certain order and regularity about this work. Of course you cannot take what I have said as being correct to a day, but if you take it in its essentials, you will see that it is true.

In the first years of our work in the German Section we so to speak laid the foundations. What we did in the first four years was to acquire some knowledge of the paths-which lead to the higher worlds, of the great cosmic connections, and of the examination and testing of what is found in the Akashic Record with regard to the secrets of the cosmos. Those members who joined later have found it necessary—and will always do so—to acquire knowledge afterwards of this foundation of our work. This is indispensable for everybody; for it is not sufficient to assimilate only what has happened in the last three years and has enabled the Movement to progress in the right way. If you look back you will see that the last three years have brought about the development of those truths and facts which have been put before you of late, perhaps in a somewhat astonishing form. If you try to establish the connection with what was done in the first four years of our work in the four-fold foundation, as it were, of the whole, you will see that even those great and all-embracing truths which have been impressing you so deeply, have a very close connection with what happened in the first four years. You will be able to convince yourselves of this if you ponder it well. The younger members must bear written upon their hearts the absolute necessity of acquiring for themselves a firm and sure foundation. Wherever the work is being carried on, we are making it more and more possible for those who join later to pick up for themselves what has been accomplished here in the early days. It is really impossible for them to co-operate without this recapitulation; and the Theosophical Movement must be taken seriously in the deepest sense. In this connection we may perhaps speak to-day on a subject that concerns the theosophical attitude of mind and the whole manner of theosophical thought; and we will relate it to the significant time through which we are passing. I mean the question: “What is the right attitude for the theosophist to take with regard to Theosophy itself?”

What is here meant will be clearer if I put the question in another way: “Why is Theosophy taught to-day at all as it is taught? Why is information given about the higher worlds, information that is the result of spiritual research and clairvoyant consciousness? Could one not perhaps proceed in quite a different way?” Let us suppose, e.g., that we were to begin by giving each person certain instructions as to how he can develop those inner faculties which at present are dormant within his soul, so that by means of these instructions it would be possible for him gradually to penetrate into the spiritual worlds himself, without having first been given any of the facts of the higher worlds, as is done to-day.

This was indeed the custom formerly, to a certain extent: it was so before the Theosophical Movement in the modern sense came into being. For a long time it had been said: It is really not of much use for anyone to stand before the world and communicate the results of spiritual investigation. Such communications were accordingly withheld as far as possible, and only certain maxims were given to people as to how they should develop the faculties dormant within their own souls; as a rule people were not told any more than they had gradually come to see for themselves in the higher worlds. The question might now arise: Why is this path not taken to-day? Why are the results of spiritual investigation communicated to men?

This step has not been taken out of any personal preference or from any personal decision: there are good reasons for it. We shall understand it better if we constantly remind ourselves of what it is that Spiritual Science really tells us. It tells us of facts and truths from the realm of the higher super-sensible worlds; it tells us of that which clairvoyant consciousness can discover in these higher worlds.

Now it is of course true that one who hears of such things and is not himself clairvoyant cannot convince himself of the facts as such through his own immediate vision; it is quite true that he receives them and cannot prove them by clairvoyant evidence. That is true; but it would be quite wrong to imagine that the man who is not clairvoyant cannot in any way prove or have insight into the facts which are now being presented. And it would be wrong to assert that one must merely take in faith and on authority what is given out of clairvoyant consciousness. These communications would be in the highest degree imperfect, would lack something essential, if they appealed only to authority and faith. What is being given out in the right way—this has often been emphasised—can be discovered only by clairvoyant consciousness but when it has once been discovered—if only by one person—when it has once been seen and communicated, everyone can understand it by means of unprejudiced reason, that is to say by those faculties which are accessible to him on the physical plane. And it may well be said: Even if no one of those here present ever has the opportunity of proving everything immediately in the most comprehensive sense, everyone could at any rate make this possible if he had the time and the necessary mental faculties (I mean, faculties of the physical plane). Let us even consider such difficult matters as were treated of here in recent lectures, with regard to the incarnations of Zarathustra, such difficulties as, e.g. that Zarathustra's etheric body passed over into Moses²—let us even imagine that such difficult, far-reaching and significant subjects are being dealt with, even then let no one assert that he who knows these things as the result of spiritual research appeals for blind credulity! That is by no means the case. But suppose someone were to come and say: “I for my part am no clairvoyant. But here is someone asserting these things about Zarathustra and his incarnations. I will now lay hold of everything that is at my disposal on the physical plane, everything that history hands down to us, everything that is contained in the stone monuments, or in ancient religious documents, and I will test all these most carefully.” And suppose he were to say further: “Assuming that what is being said is correct, does it tally with the facts that can be externally corroborated?”—Such a person would then investigate thoroughly what can be confirmed by external means, and he would see that the more closely he investigated the more he would find corroboration for what the clairvoyant has set forth. If the word “fear” had any meaning at all in this connection, then one could say that the research of Spiritual Science might perhaps really feel fear of an inexact examination; but it could never fear those who are ready to follow fully and accurately the paths of material investigation. For such people will see that the more closely they pursue their investigations the more corroboration they will find for the facts which the clairvoyant communicates. But for the things that are not so remote or difficult, things which are connected with karma and reincarnation, and the life between death and a new birth—for these one only needs to observe, in an open-minded way, what ordinary life has to offer. And the more this is done, the more will confirmation be found for the facts communicated by the clairvoyant; that is to say, there are possibilities enough of convincing oneself that what is acquired from super-sensible worlds can be confirmed by the outer physical world. This is something which should not be taken lightly, but which we should look upon as an essential fact. We must in our own lives put to the test the facts that only a few can really investigate, we should not. always be repeating the phrase: That must be taken on trust! Accept as little as possible on trust; examine, test and prove all the time! Only be sure that you do it in an open-minded, unprejudiced way. This, then, is the first thing upon which stress must be laid.

But now you will find that a testing of this kind requires great effort, it demands thought and work. It means that one must really set out to find confirmations in the physical world for what is stated out of clairvoyant research. And here we come to a matter of which we shall do well to speak, a matter that is closely connected with our main question. Is it not necessary, is it not even good, for the man of to-day, besides striving (as he certainly should strive) to penetrate into the spiritual world, also to occupy himself at the same time with an energetic cultivation of the ordinary means of knowledge and the ordinary methods of thought? In other words: Does the theosophist not do well to overcome the indolence that is certainly prevalent in the world to-day, and to develop his world of thought in all earnestness, to lay hold of the means by which man can be comprehended even only on the physical plane, and to turn these to his use? Is it not right that he should learn a great deal, and especially learn how to think?

It is indeed very difficult to make clear to the consciousness of the present day what is meant by this. It once happened that someone who wanted to make progress in theosophical knowledge and at the same time to learn how to think the thoughts with greater exactitude, came and asked me to recommend him what to read. I recommended him to study Spinoza's Ethics, so that he would be able to formulate in clear-cut outlines the thoughts that were being given him. Not many weeks afterwards he wrote to me that he could not see why he should study this book; it was rather voluminous and the whole object was simply to prove the existence of God, which he had never doubted; therefore he saw no need to wade through long trains of thought in order to prove the existence of God!

This is an example of just that kind of indolence with which men approach Theosophy or Spiritual Science to-day. They are very soon satisfied when they have come to some belief or other, and they fight shy of the trouble of building it up for themselves, bit by bit, into conceptions which are, admittedly, troublesome to acquire. But for such persons the only possible result is blind faith, whereas you will find that it ceases to be blind faith if you will really school your thinking and not simply want, out of curiosity, to develop those powers which lead to an elementary stage of clairvoyance. I do not, of course, say that this could not run parallel, but we need to train at the same time the physical powers of thought, those faculties of knowledge that have been given to us here on the physical plane; these must be trained too, even if it is irksome, in order that we may be in a position to form clearly defined ideas and clearly defined concepts of what is communicated to us from out of the higher worlds. It is very easy to imagine that it is better to have clairvoyance in the very smallest degree than it is to understand through the reasoning mind ever so many of the facts of the higher worlds. It might easily be said: “I really do not know why I am a member of this Society; we are always being told things about the higher worlds; all that is quite nice, but I would much prefer it if I could catch the merest glimpse of them myself by means of clairvoyant vision.”—I know a very learned theosophist who had an intense longing to get beyond mere learning to direct vision, and he expressed this longing as follows: “If only I could once be able to see even the tip of the tail of one of these elemental beings!” Such a remark is quite understandable. This particular theosophist would never have been ready to give up his knowledge of theosophical truth in exchange; but there might well be someone ready to do so, if he could gain only a small degree of clairvoyant vision. Such a feeling would, however be wrong from every point of view. For we must consider the age in which we live. It is the age which, in the whole evolution of man, is the epoch when conscious thought must be developed, just as in the ancient Indian period a quite different kind of consciousness was evolved, a consciousness that was reminiscent of a dim, shadowy clairvoyance; the powers of the present day have gradually been developing ever since that time. It is only we in this age, who in conjunction with the development of the Spiritual Soul have brought human thinking into the sphere of earth-evolution. For this reason Theosophy must now, at this time, be brought down out of the super-sensible world and must make its appeal to the reasoned thinking of men.

We need to distinguish clearly between two conditions. Firstly: a man may not be much of a thinker, his thinking may indeed be quite primitive and yet he may at the same time be comparatively far advanced as regards vision on the astral plane, and even, up to a certain point, on the devachanic plane; he may be quite advanced in this respect and able to see a great deal. Or again, the other case is possible: A man who knows a great deal about the theosophical truths may yet be able to see nothing at all for himself, may not be in the position, as we were saying, to see even “the tip of the tail” of an elemental being! This is also quite possible. Now let us ask ourselves: What is really the inner connection between these different faculties of the human soul?

Here it must be emphasised that to have something, and to be conscious of what we have, are two distinct things. It is extraordinarily important to grasp this point. You will understand it rightly if the question is put somewhat differently. You were all once clairvoyant, in primeval times everyone was clairvoyant, and there was a time too when men were able to look back into the far, far past. And now you may ask: But how is it that we do not remember our former incarnations if we were once able to look back through the ages? Then you may ask: If we become clairvoyant now, will that help us in the next incarnation to look back?

This fact you must have clearly before you, that the old clairvoyance is of no use for looking back to-day. You once had this clairvoyance. How is it, then, that the majority of people to-day do not remember their former incarnations? This question is of the greatest importance. People do not remember their former incarnations—although in earlier epochs they were clairvoyant to a greater or less degree—because in those times they had not developed the faculties which are the faculties of the self, of the ego. For the development of clairvoyant faculties in the general sense is not the essential point.

Let me make this clear to you by a comparison. Imagine that when you woke up in the morning you could remember nothing about your experiences of the day before.—Now however clairvoyant people may have been in former times, if they did not pay attention to the development of the faculties of the ego, namely, the faculty of thinking, the power of discrimination, which are the special faculties of the human ego on this earth, then the ego was not actively present in the former incarnations, the self-hood was not there! What, then, is there for people to remember? A self-contained ego must be there in the previous incarnation. That is the whole point! So that to-day it is only those people who in their earlier incarnations have worked through the medium of thought, of logic, of discrimination, who can remember those incarnations. Thus however advanced a man is in clairvoyance, if he has not in former incarnations worked through the power of discrimination, of logical thinking, he cannot remember a former incarnation. For he had not at that time set up the signpost as it were, to which his recollection has to go back. So you will see that when one understands Spiritual Science, one cannot too quickly set to work to acquire just these very faculties of genuine thought.

Now perhaps you will say: But when I am clairvoyant I shall already have mastered the faculty of logical thinking. That is not so! Why have the Gods allowed human beings to exist at all? Because it was only in human beings that they could cause faculties to develop which otherwise could not have been developed at all. The power to think, to picture something in thoughts in which there is the quality of discrimination—this faculty can be developed only on this our earth; formerly it did not exist, it could only come about through the fact of the existence of human beings. We might take the following comparison.—Suppose you have a grain of corn—of wheat, let us say. However long you look at it, no wheat will grow out of it. You must put it in the soil and let it grow, you must let the growth-forces work upon it. That which the divine-spiritual Beings had before the formation of man may be compared to the grain of wheat. If this “grain of wheat” was to come to life in the form of thoughts, it had first to be cultivated by human beings on the physical plane. The only possible means of cultivating thoughts on the earth from the higher world is through human incarnations. So that the thoughts of men on the physical plane have a character which is entirely their own and must lead up to what is possible in the higher worlds. It was necessary for the Gods that there should be men on the earth. The Gods allowed men to come into being in order to preserve through them in the form of thought what they had had in the higher worlds. Thus what comes down from the higher worlds would never have taken form in thought, if man had not been able to give it this form. And he who will not think, on the earth, deprives the Gods of what they have reckoned upon, and he cannot accomplish what is his real human task and destiny upon earth. For he can only attain this in an incarnation wherein he really labours at the development of his powers of thought. If this is realised, all the rest follows from it.

That which brings revelations, real facts about the spiritual world, can enter the human soul in manifold ways. It is certainly possible for men to come to clairvoyant vision without being clear thinkers, and indeed this is very frequently the case to-day. The majority of those who become clairvoyant are not clear thinkers. But those who are clear thinkers and those who are not will have very different experiences in the spiritual world. The difference might be expressed thus: What is revealed from out of the higher worlds impresses itself most clearly into those forms of mental perception which we bring to the higher worlds as thoughts. Thoughts are the best vehicle for the revelations.

But if we are not thinkers, the revelations must seek other forms, e.g. a picture. The most usual way for one who is not a thinker to receive revelations is in the form of a sense-image. And you may often hear those who are visionary clairvoyants without being thinkers, describe in sense-images what they have seen. These may have beauty; but we must at the same time be aware that a thinker has a different. subjective experience from a non-thinker. If you have revelations as a non-thinker, the sense-image is there; this or that figure stands before you. It reveals itself out of the spiritual world. Let us say, you see the figure of an angel, or some symbolic form—perhaps a cross, a monstrance, a chalice. This is present in the super-sensible realm and you see it as a finished picture. You say to yourselves that it is reality—but actually it is a picture. New experiences of the spiritual world will present themselves to the subjective consciousness of the thinker in a rather different way. It will not be the same as for the non-thinker. For the thinker, the things will not suddenly be there before him as though they had been shot out of a pistol; they will appear in a different way. Take a non-thinking, visionary clairvoyant and a thinking, visionary clairvoyant. They may both receive the same revelations. Let us take some particular case. The non-thinking clairvoyant sees this or that phenomenon of the spiritual world. The thinking clairvoyant does not see it yet, but only later; and the very moment he sees it, it is taken hold of by his own thought and he can at once discriminate and know whether it is or is not truth. He sees it somewhat later, but when he does see it, it comes to him in such a form that he has already penetrated it with his thoughts, and can tell whether it is illusion or reality; so that in a sense he possesses something before he actually sees it. The revelation comes to him at the same moment as to the non-thinking clairvoyant, but he sees it later. When he sees it, however, it is already penetrated with judgment and thought, and he knows exactly whether it is an hallucination, i.e. whether his own desires are being objectivised, or whether it is objective reality. That is the difference in the subjective experiences of the two clairvoyants. The non-thinking clairvoyant sees the phenomenon at once, the thinking clairvoyant, later. In the ease of the former the picture will remain as it was; all he can do is to describe it. But the thinking clairvoyant will be able to link it up and bring it completely into line with what is present in the ordinary physical world; for the physical world, no less than the phenomenon which he has seen, is a revelation from out of the spiritual world.

From this you will see that if you approach the spiritual world equipped with the instrument of thought, you will be able to bring reliable judgment to bear upon what is presented to you.

But now something else follows. A person might dispute the value of communications from the spiritual world if he has not seen the phenomena for himself. Let us imagine a third person as well as the two mentioned. This third person is not clairvoyant at all but is informed of the results of spiritual investigation in so far as they have been acquired by clairvoyance combined with clear thinking. He looks upon them as reasonable. Yes, they are facts from the spiritual world. The thinking clairvoyant has acquired them, and anyone who has grasped them with his reason possesses them, even if he is not conscious of it. You do not need to be at all clairvoyant, yet you have the full value in yourself of what has been communicated to you.. There is a difference between having something and being conscious that one has it. The relation of a non-clairvoyant theosophist to a clairvoyant theosophist can become clear by thinking of the following.—Imagine that you had been given a legacy, but had not yet heard about it. If this were the case, the legacy would nevertheless have its value for you. Even if you do not hear about it until later, yet you possess it all the same. So it is with whoever learns of the facts of the spiritual world through Spiritual Science. They are his, if he has grasped them in an understanding way; he possesses them and need only wait for the time when he will become conscious of them. The becoming conscious of them, however, is not of equal significance with their possession. This is particularly noticeable after death. Which is of more use—if we may put it thus trivially, to make the meaning clear—which is of more use to man after death: to see something in a visionary way, without thought, or to receive purely theosophical communications without seeing things in a visionary way?

One could easily imagine that visionary sight would be a better preparation for death than merely to hear of the facts of the spiritual world. And yet the truth is that after death, what a man has simply seen in a visionary way is of very little use to him, while on the other hand an actual reality is immediately present, as soon as he becomes conscious of what he has received in spiritual communications, if he has grasped these with his understanding. It is what has been understood that is of value after death, whether it has been seen or not.

Consider the deepest Initiate. Through his clairvoyance he can behold the whole spiritual world! But this will not enhance his significance after death, if he is not able to express these facts in human concepts. All that will help him after death is what he has possessed here on earth in the form of clear concepts of thought. There are the seeds for the life after death. Of course anyone who is a thinker as well as a visionary clairvoyant can turn his visions to good account. But two non-thinking persons, of whom one is clairvoyant and the other merely listens to the results of the clairvoyance—these two will be in exactly the same position after death. There is no difference between them, for what we take into the life after death is what we acquire for ourselves here by means of clear thinking. This springs up like a seed; but not so, what we have merely already seen on earth of the worlds we now enter. What we receive here from the higher worlds is not given to us as a free gift so as to make it easier for us when we leave the physical plane, but in order that we may translate it into the current coin of the earth. What we have thus translated, just so much helps us after death. That is the essential thing.

Thus it is in regard to the life after death. But here on the physical plane too, the case of the visionary clairvoyant is different from that of the thinking clairvoyant. It is interesting and beautiful to see into the spiritual worlds, but none the less there is a difference when the spiritual worlds are beheld merely in a visionary way. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to be secure from illusions—and the only way to avoid illusions is to apply clear thinking to what has been seen—apart from this, let us suppose that a visionary clairvoyant has perceived this or that; then the form in which he perceives it, and which you can discover from his own account of it, is penetrated by elements of the physical plane. Has anyone ever described to you an angel that was not permeated by elements of the physical plane? He had wings. So have the birds. He had a human-shaped body. So has every human being on the physical plane. The things the visionary clairvoyant describes are, it is true, put together in a fashion that is not to be found on the physical plane, but the pictures are nevertheless composed of elements of the physical plane. This is not without justification; but you will see that such a picture has within it something that belongs to the earth. The forms and pictures in your vision that are taken from the physical plane do not belong to the spiritual world, they only give a picture of the spiritual world in the domain of the senses. This I have set forth clearly in my Occult Science, which has now been completed. I have there shown that present-day clairvoyance must indeed be of a pictorial character in its early stages, but that it must not remain there, it must develop to the point where the last remnant of what is earthly in the visions is cast aside. There is of course a certain danger for the clairvoyant when he thus strips off the last remnant of earth. For example, when he sees the angel and then strips off all that is earthly, he is faced with the danger of seeing nothing at all! What is it that can prevent one from losing the vision altogether on entering actually into the spiritual world? The seed that can spring up out of thinking! Thoughts afford the substance whereby what is in the spiritual world may be comprehended. We acquire the power really to live in the spiritual world by comprehending, in our world of the senses, what is no longer permeated by sense-elements and yet is on the physical plane. Thoughts alone fulfil this condition. The only thing we may bring into the spiritual world is thoughts. With regard to a circle, for example, nothing of the chalk drawing of it, but simply and solely our thoughts about a circle. With these thoughts you can ascend into the spiritual worlds. You must bring nothing of the picture with you.

And now I can describe the above-mentioned subjective process more exactly. Let us suppose, for example, that something is seen in the field of spiritual vision, let us say, a monstrance. I will now characterise the two clairvoyants, the merely visionary and the thinking clairvoyant, by supposing that the one sees the monstrance here (a) and the other, the thinking clairvoyant, only sees it here (b)

It is only from this point onwards that he becomes conscious of it. He receives it, however, immediately with thoughts, he penetrates it with thought. But at the moment when the thinking clairvoyant fills his image with thoughts, it becomes indistinct for the visionary clairvoyant. It becomes black and indistinct here at this point (b) and reappears only after some time. Just at the point where thought can unite with the image, it becomes indistinct for the visionary clairvoyant; he is really never in a position to unite thought with it, therefore he never has the experience: ‘I was there with my ego’. This experience can never come to the merely visionary clairvoyant.

All this takes us more intimately into the whole question, and it is exceedingly important to reflect upon it. It leads us to consider the necessity of developing our thinking, and of overcoming the disinclination to acquire an understanding knowledge for ourselves. It is a thousand times better to have grasped the ideas of Spiritual Science with thought first of all, and then—sooner or later, each according to his karma—to be able oneself to ascend into the spiritual worlds; a thousand times better than to have ‘seen’ straight-away and not to have grasped with thought the knowledge that is imparted in the Movement known as the Theosophical. A thousand times better it is indeed, to know Theosophy and to see nothing as yet, than to see something and not be able to penetrate it with thought, for that is how unreliability is introduced.

You can express the matter even more exactly, as follows.—You say: There are at the present time very clear thinkers who can understand the theosophical view of the world in an intellectual way. How is it that it is sometimes just these people who have such difficulty in reaching clairvoyance?—Those who are not clear thinkers find it comparatively easy to become clairvoyant, and they are then apt to feel themselves superior to the thinkers, whilst the latter find it difficult to become clairvoyant at all. Here is the point—distant by a hair's breadth only—where a certain arrogance in disguise begins to assert itself. There is indeed hardly anything that breeds and fosters pride so much as a clairvoyance which has not been illumined with thought, and that is why it is so dangerous, because the clairvoyant does not as a rule consider himself proud at all, but very humble. He has no notion of the pride that consists in undervaluing the activity of thought and laying the chief emphasis on inspirations. It is a terrible form of pride, a masked pride.

The question is really as follows: How is it that for many a thinker—as experience teaches us—it is so exceedingly difficult to come to the point of being clairvoyant? This is connected with an important fact. What we call power of discrimination, power of judgment in man, in other words the logical thinking of the thinker, brings about a definite change in the whole structure of the human brain. Clear thinking causes a change in the physical instrument of the brain. Scientific research knows little of this, but it is a fact that a physical brain that has been used by a thinker has a different appearance from the brain which belongs to a non-thinker. The fact of being clairvoyant does not change it much. The brain of a non-thinker has very complicated convolutions, but that of a clear thinker is comparatively simple, without any special complications. Thinking actually expresses itself in the simplification of the convolutions of the brain. Present-day research knows nothing of this. Clear thinking is thinking that can survey wide vistas, not the thinking that occupies itself with analysis. Hence the greater simplicity of the brain-convolutions of a clear thinker. Whenever scientific research does condescend in any way to test clear thinking in its connection with material conditions, then it very soon appears that scientific research corroborates the statements of Spiritual Science. The examination of the brain of Mendeleeff to whom science owes the exposition of the periodic system of the elements confirms what Spiritual Science says. His brain-convolutions were simpler than usual. Within certain limits he had the power of comprehensive thinking, and physical examination bore out absolutely the truth of what I have said.—I do not mention this as being of any very special value but only by the way.—Thus, as I have said, a change comes about in the instrument, and this change must be brought about by the activity of thought itself. No one is born with all the faculties he will possess later; he may have tendencies in certain directions, but the faculties themselves he must first develop. So it is a fact that changes take place in the brain in the course of a man's life. After a life of thought the instrument of thinking is different from what it was before.

Now the fact is that our etheric body, which for clairvoyant consciousness must be loosened from the physical brain, becomes more closely bound to the brain through the activity of thought. Thinking chains the etheric body firmly to the brain. If through his karma anyone has not yet the forces necessary to loosen it again at the right time, it may be that he cannot get far in clairvoyance in this incarnation; this depends on his karma. Supposing that in a former incarnation his karma had ordained him to be a clear thinker, then at the present time his thinking will not bind his etheric body so strongly to the brain; he will be able to set free his etheric body comparatively easily, and for the very reason that the elements of thought are the best preparation for ascending into the higher worlds—for this very reason he can investigate the secrets of the higher worlds in the most intimate way. Of course he must first set free again the etheric body from the brain. But if with what one may call the fine chiseling of thought the etheric body has become so caught in the physical brain that it is exhausted, then his karma may perhaps make him wait a long time before he can set it free again. When, however, the etheric body does become free, it will mean that he has passed the point of logical thought. Then what he has acquired can never be lost; no one can take it away from him. That is an essential and important fact, because otherwise clairvoyance can often be lost again after it has been acquired. Let me remind you once again that you were all clairvoyant in earlier times. Why is it that you no longer possess the faculty of clairvoyance? It is because in former times you were not bound to the earth's existence, because you were remote, in spiritual worlds; you did not bring the spiritual world down into your faculties; your visionary clairvoyance was based upon the condition of being remote from the physical world.

This must be clear to us. We must inscribe these fine shades of thought upon our minds and souls; we must be clear that the task of a real occult science to-day is to impart those results of spiritual investigation which are permeated with a thinking content, so that one can always clothe the results of spiritual research in such a way as to be comprehensible through thinking to the man who is not clairvoyant. To this end they must first be combined with thought. This is why there is such difficulty with old books which speak of phenomena of the higher worlds. If you take up old books of this kind and approach them with the attitude of modern Spiritual Science, you will find something lacking in them all. These old books may impart wonderful knowledge, but they are not of much use to the man of to-day unless he is himself clairvoyant and knows how to place the knowledge rightly. In the case of modern Spiritual Science, however, anyone who takes pains is able to make something of what it presents, because he can permeate it with the element of thought he acquires on the physical plane. For the same concepts are used to grasp what is in the spiritual world and what is in the physical world. Present-day Natural Science speaks of evolution; so does Spiritual Science. If you have grasped the concept of evolution you can understand what is set forth in Spiritual Science. You can create a concept of karma, because you can create a picture of it in thought. Of course if you simply say, as many theosophists do: “Every spiritual cause has a spiritual effect and this is karma”, you have then no conception of karma. You can see the law of cause and effect in a billiard ball, but that would be no right comparison for karma. But now take an iron ball and throw it into a vessel of water. If the ball is cold the water will remain as it is. But if you make the ball hot and then throw it in, the water will get warm as a result of what has been done to the ball. Here we have something which may be compared with karma; here we have a later event that is the result of an earlier.

It must be quite clear to us that one who permeates the facts of the spiritual world with thought can also impart them in such a way that everyone who has thoughts acquired here on the physical plane can apply these same thoughts to what is imparted from the spiritual worlds. If he does this he can understand it. Everyone ought to keep this in mind. Everyone ought to understand that the important thing is, not the fact that we receive knowledge from the higher worlds, but how we receive it—that we receive it in a way that is suited to our present earthly conditions. We must see to it that we do not receive knowledge from the higher worlds in any other way. It is tempting just to believe what is told us but this is very wrong. If someone is willing just to believe, it is as though he wanted merely to be told that there is a light; whereas he needs the light to light up his room! He must have the light; mere belief is no use. Thus it is important first of all to understand the nature of thorough, conscientious thinking, so that the knowledge of the spiritual world may be received through this channel. The knowledge can only be discovered if one has the power of clairvoyance; but when it has been discovered and investigated, it can be understood by everyone who receives it in the right way.

If one thinks in this way, then all the dangers which are otherwise bound up with what is called the Theosophical Movement, will be, in the main, averted. These very dangers will however immediately arise if people develop clairvoyant powers and do not see to it that their thinking, and more especially their perception and discernment, are enriched at the same time through their own thinking. Many people have the desire just to seize hold of something out of the spiritual world instead of carefully bringing their perceptive thought to bear upon what has after all to be acquired on the physical plane. Even a God cannot comprehend the world in terms of thought unless he incarnates on this physical earth. He can comprehend the world in other forms and ways, but to comprehend it in this form he must incarnate upon the earth. If you reflect upon this it will be clear to you that there are certain dangers connected with the development of faculties within oneself which are then wrongly used. He who develops a certain visionary clairvoyance and uses it wrongly by cutting off all possibility of convincing the world with it, he who remains on the astral plane alone and does not bring his experiences down on to the physical plane, is laying himself open to the danger that an abyss will open between his visions and the physical plane. Let us suppose that someone has had visions of real significance which belong to the astral plane. They may be true visions of reality—for this may happen even with the non-thinking, visionary clairvoyant. But now between him and the real foundations of the physical plane there opens out an abyss. Imagine for a moment that this cloth were the physical plane. The visionary clairvoyant is standing in front of it; he sees his vision. But behind the physical plane is the real spiritual world; the physical plane is Maya. The visionary clairvoyant does not strip away the physical plane; this can be done only by one who makes use of the means of thought. Then only do you penetrate behind the physical plane; only with thinking clairvoyance can you ever understand it. The physical plane is there, but you do not see the spiritual world, the real spiritual world. The abyss opens before you, and the physical plane remains as Maya. And the impossibility of penetrating through the physical plane rests upon the fact that the brain is not capable of eliminating itself. If you have learnt to think rightly, you do not directly use your brain in thinking. Thinking works on the brain, but the activity of thinking does not directly need the brain; it is nonsense to assert that the brain itself thinks.

About 35 years ago I was once walking along the street with a young student who was then well on the way to becoming an out-and-out materialist. He said “When a man thinks, the brain atoms are vibrating; every definite thought has a definite form”—and then he continued to speak of how it is really nonsense to presuppose anything like a soul which can think, for it is the brain which does the thinking.—I said to him: “Yes, but now tell me, why do you tell such fibs? If this is true you cannot say: I think! You must say: my brain thinks, And you must also say: My brain eats, my brain sees the sun! You would then be speaking the truth.” He would soon see then what nonsense he had been carrying about in his head.

So it is not the brain that thinks. It needs no very serious consideration, to get this point clear, unless one is a thorough-going modern materialist. Unless you are a ‘Monist’ in the modern sense of the word, you can easily be clear on this point. The activity of thinking is not primarily dependent on having the brain as its instrument. When thinking becomes pure, the brain is not involved. It only plays a part when a sense-picture is made. If you have a picture of a chalk circle in your mind, then this picture has been formed by the brain, but when you think of a pure circle apart from all sense-qualities, then the circle is itself the active element that gives form to the brain. Now when a man has visionary clairvoyance he remains in his etheric body and does not reach the physical brain. But the abyss can never be bridged by this method. What is there seen clairvoyantly is connected with what is behind the physical plane. He who scorns the path of thought develops powers which, so to speak, do not attain their object, do not really penetrate into the spiritual world. And the consequence is that there is a false relationship between what is continually being developed in his etheric body, and what he really is as man. The relationship is entirely false; his brain is not developed to the level of his clairvoyant faculties. The brain is crude, for the man has made no effort to ennoble it through thinking. It is crude, it has built up a barrier which it cannot penetrate and which hinders him from reaching spiritual reality in his visions. He goes away from reality, instead of coming nearer to it. And every possibility of making a judgment about the spiritual world is taken away. Such a man may certainly be able to see a great deal; but there is never any guarantee that what he sees will correspond with the reality. He alone is capable of judging who can distinguish between mere vision and reality. It is only the power of discrimination that can discriminate, and if this is lacking, mere vision can never be distinguished from reality. But this power of discrimination can be acquired only by effort on the physical plane. Thus one will be for ever hovering about without firm foundations if one scorns the activity of thinking—hard and troublesome as it is.

This is what we must have clearly in our minds. Then it will be impossible for conditions to arise which otherwise arise so easily and may recur again and again, when by developing visionary clairvoyance men build up a dam against the world of reality and live in their dreams—which comes to the same thing as losing one's bearings in the physical world, as being not quite in one's right mind. Mere visionary clairvoyance easily leads to this. One can acquire the power of thoughtful discrimination. by working in the only sphere where this can be developed, namely in the sphere of thinking, on the physical plane. If you despise the acquisition of this thoughtful discrimination, you will stray far from the path of truth. Discrimination is what we need, otherwise we shall bring about all the ills that are necessarily connected with what is called the Theosophical Movement. He who gives himself up to blind belief, who merely accepts without reasoned thought all the communications from the higher worlds on the authority of another, will be doing something that is pleasant and easy, but in itself is fraught with danger. Instead of working the things out for himself and reflecting upon them, he accepts the knowledge of another, he assimilates the things that another person has seen, and refuses to test by means of his own thought what has been communicated. This is the cause of the ills to which the Theosophical Movement is liable—but of course this should not frighten anyone from attaching themselves to it. It may happen that a person, who has blind belief of this kind loses his bearings altogether and can no longer discriminate between what is true and what is untrue. Nothing can breed untruthfulness as effectively as a certain kind of visionary clairvoyance which is not supported and controlled by thought. And on the other hand, such clairvoyance breeds another quality, namely, a certain haughtiness and superiority which can even lead to megalomania. This is all the more dangerous because it is often not noticed. There is very serious danger of coming to think oneself superior because one sees something that another person does not see. And usually there is no idea of how deeply embedded in the soul this self-importance that borders on megalomania can be. It conceals itself in a certain way, especially when the (clairvoyant swears by his own visions with absolute certainty and suffers no one to take exception to them. So we sometimes find people believing the most ridiculous rubbish, just because it has been communicated to them “from the astral plane”. They would never dream of believing such things if they had been told them as matters belonging to the physical plane; but if they are told them “from the astral plane” they believe them with the most slavish credulity. Whoever has freed himself from this habit will not be led astray by this or that swindle or humbug. But people will fall into the trap unless they develop within themselves the impulse to prove and test, instead of accepting and believing without effort or exertion. We must not make it easy for ourselves; we must consider it one of the most sacred tasks of man to reach a right conviction. If we think of it in this light, we shall spare no effort of real work, and we shall not merely listen to sensational communications from the spiritual world. Of communications from the spiritual world we have, so to speak, enough. It is necessary that we should have them, but it is also necessary to acquire the right attitude and the right kind of thinking to receive these things worthily.

This is what I wanted to say to you to-day. I did not want to say it merely as an admonition or a sermon. I wanted to show the whole basis and for this reason it may have been rather difficult to keep pace with it in your thought; but in the methods I use I always try to adhere to what may be rightly looked for in the Theosophical Society. Many people like pious exhortations. I dislike them! I try to present things in such a way that they can clothe themselves in true forms of thought. When things of the physical plane are expounded, as has been done to-day, it does of course often entail hard thinking; for such things are neither as sensational nor as attractive as communications from the higher worlds. They are nevertheless of extraordinary importance. And you will not undervalue their importance if you say to yourselves: If that is really to come to pass which ought to come to pass, namely, that in the course of ensuing incarnations a sufficiently large number of people have a memory of this present incarnation, then provision for this must be made beforehand. Develop, therefore, your power of judgment; then you are candidates for the memory, in your next incarnation, of the present one. See to it that you are able to follow the world with your thoughts. For however much you can see m a visionary way, it will give you no help in remembering back to the present incarnation. And it is the mission of Spiritual Science to prepare the way for what must needs come—namely, that there may be a sufficiently large number of people who out of their own knowledge can look back to this present incarnation. How many come to the point in this incarnation of accompanying their knowledge of Spiritual Science with clairvoyant powers depends on the karma of each individual. There are certainly many sitting here whose karma will not allow them to see the world clairvoyantly in this incarnation. But all those who acquire what is given in true Spiritual Science, clothed as it is in the forms of thought, will reap the fruits of it in the next incarnation; for in this one they will have laid the right foundation. A man may, so to speak, be a clairvoyant without knowing it; and one who studies Spiritual Science in the right way has the insight and can wait until his karma also allows him actually to behold the things for himself.

• 1. In connection with the use of the words ‘Theosophy’, ‘theosophical’, in this text, it will be remembered that from the beginning of the century until the years 1911 or 1912, Dr. Steiner had been able to work as an independent teacher within the framework of the Theosophical Society and was the General Secretary of the German Section. His teaching of the unique nature and position of the Christ was at variance with the tendencies which had come to prevail in that Society and the statements on this subject made by its leaders, and Dr. Steiner's association with it inevitably came to an end. In 1912 the Anthroposophical Society was provisionally founded and its Headquarters established at Dornach in 1913.
• 2. cp. The Alpha and the Omega. Lecture given in Berlin, 25.V.O9; also lectures 4 and 5 of the Course on The Gospel of St. Luke.

When someone has concerned himself for a time with the conception of the world presented by Spiritual Science, and then allows the various ideas and thoughts and items of knowledge that he gains from it to work upon him, manifold questions arise, and he becomes more and more of a spiritual scientist by linking such questions—which are really questions of feeling, of the heart, of the character, in short, of life in general—with spiritual-scientific ideas. The nature of these ideas is such that they do not only satisfy our theoretical, scientific curiosity but shed light upon the riddles of life, upon the mysteries of existence, and they bear fruit in the real sense only when we no longer merely reflect about and feel their import, value and meaning, but learn under their influence to look differently at the world around us. These ideas should warm us inwardly, should become impulses, forces of heart and soul within us. And this is increasingly so when the answers received to certain questions give rise to new questions, when those answers in turn become questions followed by new answers, and so on. In this way progress is made both in spiritual knowledge and in the spiritual life.

A fairly long time will still have to pass before it will be possible to speak of the more intimate aspects of spiritual life in public lectures, but within our own Groups the time when this can be done should be coming nearer and nearer. It is therefore inevitable that new members may be taken aback or even shocked when they hear certain things; but, after all, we should make no progress in our work if we could not pass on to discuss more intimate questions of life on the basis of spiritual-scientific investigation and knowledge. Therefore—although misunderstandings may arise in those of you who have been concerned with the spiritual life for only a comparatively short time—we will consider certain of these more intimate facts of spiritual knowledge again to-day.

Without doubt an earnest question will arise in us when we think about the idea of reincarnation, of many earth-lives, not merely as an abstract theory, but when we ponder deeply on the meaning and implications of this fact of the spiritual life. The significant answer given by reincarnation will be followed by new questions and we may ask, for example: If the human being lives many times on earth, if he returns again and again in new incarnations, what is the deeper meaning of this?—The usual answer is that by passing many times through life we ascend higher and higher, experiencing the results and fruits of earlier earth-lives in later ones, and thus making progress. But that is still a rather general, abstract answer. It is only through more exact knowledge of the whole purpose of earthly life that we are able to fathom the significance of repeated incarnations.

If a man were to keep returning to an earth that did not change but remained essentially the same, there would not really be much to be learnt through successive incarnations. These incarnations are important because, as we pass through each of them, we can learn new things, have new experiences on the earth. Over short periods of time this is not so clearly perceptible, but if, as Spiritual Science enables us to do, we survey long periods, it becomes obvious that the epochs of our earth differ essentially from each other in character, and that we are continually passing through new experiences. But something else, too, must be realised—that these changes in the life of the earth itself must be taken into account. If in a particular epoch of earthly existence we neglect the opportunity of experiencing and learning what that epoch has to offer, then, although we return in a subsequent incarnation, we have missed something, we have not assimilated what we ought to have assimilated in the previous epoch. The result is that in the next epoch we are unable to make proper use of our forces and faculties.

Speaking still in a quite general sense, it can be said that in our epoch something is possible on earth, indeed over almost the whole globe, that was not possible in the earlier incarnations, for example, of men now living. Strange as it may seem, there is a certain, indeed a great significance in this. It is possible in the present incarnation for certain numbers of people to come to Spiritual Science; that is, to assimilate the findings of spiritual investigation which are available in the domain of Spiritual Science today. The fact that a few human beings come together and receive the knowledge discovered by spiritual investigation may of course be regarded as of no importance, but people who hold this view do not understand the significance of reincarnation, nor that certain things can be learnt only during one particular incarnation. If they are not learnt, something has been missed and will be lacking in the following incarnations.

This above all must be realised: What we learn to-day in Spiritual Science becomes part of our soul, and we bring it with us when we descend again into the next incarnation.

Let us now try to grasp what this means for the soul. Reference will have to be made not only to a great deal that will already be known to you from other lectures and from your own reading, but to many facts of the spiritual life that are more or less new or still quite unfamiliar to you. It is necessary first to go back, as often before, to earlier epochs in the evolution of humanity and of the earth. We are living now in the fifth epoch following the great Atlantean catastrophe. This epoch was preceded by the fourth, the Greco-Latin epoch, when ideas and experiences of paramount importance of life on earth originated among the Greek and Latin peoples. This fourth epoch was preceded by the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian period, this by the original Persian and this in turn by the ancient Indian. In a still more distant past we come to the great Atlantean catastrophe by which an ancient continent extending over the area of the present Atlantic Ocean was destroyed. This continent of ancient Atlantis was gradually swept away and the solid earth on which we are now living received its present configuration. In still earlier epochs preceding the Atlantean catastrophe, we come to the civilisations and forms of culture developed on Atlantis by the Atlantean races. And these conditions were preceded by still earlier ones.

A survey of what is told by history—it does not, after all, go very far back—may easily give rise to the belief (although this is quite unfounded even for shorter periods) that conditions of existence on our earth were always the same as they are to-day. That is by no means so, for there have been fundamental changes—most marked of all in man's life of soul. The souls of those sitting here to-day were incarnated in bodies belonging to all these epochs of earth-evolution and they absorbed what it was possible to absorb in each of them. In each successive incarnation the soul has developed different faculties. Although during the Greco-Latin epoch the difference was perhaps not quite as extreme, in the epoch of ancient Persia and even more so in that of ancient India, our souls were entirely different from what they are to-day. They were equipped with faculties of another kind altogether in those olden times and lived under entirely different conditions. And now, in order that what follows may be thoroughly understood, we will visualise as clearly as possible the nature of our souls after the Atlantean catastrophe, when they were incarnated, let us say, in the bodies that could have existed on earth only at the time of the ancient Indian civilisation-epoch. It must not be imagined that this civilisation was to be found only in India itself—it was merely that in those days the Indian peoples were of prime importance. The forms of civilisation differed all over the earth, but they bore the stamp of the instructions given for the ancient Indians by the Leaders of humanity.

When thinking of the nature of our souls in that epoch it must be realised at once that knowledge of the kind possessed by men of the modern age was then quite impossible. There was as yet no consciousness of the self, no ego-consciousness as clear and distinct as that of today. The fact that he was an ego hardly entered a man's consciousness. True, the ego, the “I”, was already within man as a power, a force, but knowledge of the ego is not the same thing as the power or activity. Human beings lacked the inwardness belonging to their nature to-day, but instead of it they possessed faculties of quite another kind—faculties we have often referred to as those of ancient, shadowy clairvoyance.

When we study the human soul during waking life in those times we find that it did not really feel itself as an ego; an individual man felt himself to be a member of his race or tribe, of his folk. In the sense that the hand is a limb or member of the body, the single “I” or ego stood for the whole community of the racial stock and the folk. Man did not feel himself to be an individual “I” as he does to-day; he experienced the ego as the folk-ego, the tribal ego. During the day he did not really know that he was a man in the real sense. But when evening came and he went to sleep, his consciousness was not completely darkened, as it is to-day; the soul was able, during sleep, to be aware of spiritual facts—for example, of spiritual facts and happenings in its environment of which the dream to-day is a mere shadow, in most cases no longer representing their full reality. Men had such perceptions at that time and they knew: There is indeed a spiritual world. The spiritual world was a reality to them, not as the result of logical reasoning, not through anything needing proof, but because every night, even if in dim, dreamlike consciousness, they were actually within the spiritual world. But that was not the essential. As well as sleeping and waking life, there were also intermediate states during which man was neither completely asleep nor completely awake. In those states, ego-consciousness was diminished even more than by day, but on the other hand the perception of spiritual happenings, the dreamlike clairvoyance, was essentially stronger than at other times during the night. Thus there were intermediate states in which men had, it is true, no ego-consciousness, but were clairvoyant. In such states a man was as if transported, entirely unaware of his separate identity. He did not know: “I am a man”. But he knew with certainty: “I am a member of a spiritual world, and I know that it is a reality for I behold it.” Such were the experiences of human souls in the days of ancient India. And in the Atlantean epoch this consciousness, this life in the spiritual world, was even clearer; indeed very, very much clearer ... We therefore look back to an age when our souls were endowed with a dim, dreamlike clairvoyance which has faded away by degrees in the course of the evolution of mankind.

If our souls had remained at the stage of this ancient clairvoyance, we could not have acquired the individual ego-consciousness that is ours today; it would not have been possible for us to realise: We are men. We were obliged so to speak, to exchange our consciousness of the spiritual world for ego-consciousness, “I”-consciousness. In the future we shall have both at the same time; we shall all attain that state in which clairvoyance functions in the fullest sense while ego-consciousness is maintained intact—as can only occur to-day in one who has trodden the path of Initiation. In the future it will again be possible for everyone to gaze into the spiritual world and yet to feel himself a man, an ego.

Picture to yourselves once more what has taken place. The soul has passed from incarnation to incarnation; once it was clairvoyant, then later on the consciousness of becoming an ego grew clearer and clearer and it was increasingly possible for the soul to form its own judgments. As long as a man still has clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world and does not feel himself to be an ego, he cannot form judgments or reason with the intellect. The latter faculty developed steadily but with every succeeding incarnation the old clairvoyance faded. The states in which man was able to gaze into the spiritual world became rarer; he penetrated more and more deeply into the physical plane, developed logical thinking and felt himself to be an ego.

We can therefore say that in very ancient times man was a spiritual being, for he lived in direct intercourse with other spiritual beings as their companion; he felt his kinship with beings to whom he can no longer look up to-day with normal senses. As well as the world immediately surrounding us there are, as we know, still other worlds, peopled by other spiritual beings. With his normal consciousness to-day man cannot see into these worlds, but in earlier times he lived in them, both during the night-consciousness of sleep and in the intermediate state of which we spoke. He lived within these worlds, in communion with these other beings. Normally, this is no longer possible for him to-day. He was, as it were, cast out of his home—the spiritual world—and with every new incarnation became more firmly established in this earthly world.

In the sanctuaries for the cultivation of the spiritual life, in domains of learning and in the sciences where such things were still known, account was taken of the fact that man had incarnated in these different epochs of earth-evolution. Men looked back to a very ancient epoch before the Atlantean catastrophe, when human beings lived in direct communion with the Gods or spiritual Beings, and when their inner life of feeling and sentient experience was naturally quite different. You can well imagine that this was so in an epoch when the soul was fully aware of being able to look up to the higher Beings, knowing itself to be a member of that higher world. In considering these facts we will remind ourselves that we can learn to speak and think today if we grow up among human beings, for such faculties can be acquired only through contact with men. If a child were to be put on some lonely island to-day and grew up without having any contact with human beings, he would not develop the faculties of thinking and speaking.

This shows that the evolution of any being is to some extent dependent upon the species of beings among whom it grows up and lives. That this has an effect upon evolution can be observed in the case of animals. It is well known that if dogs are removed from conditions where they are in contact with human beings to places where they have no such contact, they forget how to bark: as a rule the descendants of such dogs cannot bark at all. Something does, then, depend upon the kind of beings among which a being grows up. You can therefore imagine that for the same souls to live among modern men on the physical plane is a different matter from having lived at an earlier time among spiritual Beings in a spiritual world into which normal vision to-day does not penetrate. The impulses man developed when living among men and those he developed when living among Gods were quite different.

Higher knowledge has always recognised these things, has always looked back to that ancient time when men were in direct contact with divine-spiritual Beings. And the effect of this contact was that the soul felt itself a member of the divine-spiritual world. But this also engendered impulses and forces in the soul that were still of a divine-spiritual nature—divine-spiritual in quite another sense from that which applies to the forces of the soul to-day. When the soul felt itself a member of the higher world, there spoke out of this soul a will that also sprang from the divine-spiritual world—a will of which it might rightly be said that it was inspired, because the soul was living among Gods.

Higher knowledge speaks of this age when man was still united with the divine-spiritual Beings as the Golden Age, or Krita Yuga. It is an age of great antiquity, the most important period of which actually preceded the Atlantean catastrophe. Then came an age when men no longer felt their connection with the divine-spiritual world as strongly as during Krita Yuga, when :they no longer felt that their impulses were determined by their life with the Gods, when their vision of the spirit and the soul was already clouded. Nevertheless, there still remained in them a memory of their life with the spiritual Beings and the Gods.

This memory was particularly distinct in ancient India. It was very easy in those days to speak about spiritual things; one could have directed men's attention to the outer, physically perceptible world and yet regard it as maya or illusion, because men had not been having these physical perceptions for so very long. So it was in ancient India. Souls then living no longer beheld the Gods themselves, but they still beheld spiritual facts and happenings and spiritual Beings of lower ranks. Only a comparatively small number of men were still able to behold the sublime spiritual Beings, and even for these men the former living communion with the Gods was already much less intense. The will-impulses from the divine-spiritual world had already disappeared. Nevertheless, a glimpse into spiritual facts and happenings was still possible, at all events in certain states of consciousness: in sleep and in those intermediate states to which reference has been made.

The most important facts of this spiritual world, however, which in earlier times had been experienced as immediate reality, were now there in the form of a kind of knowledge of truth, as something that the soul still knew with certainty but which was now operative only in the form of knowledge, as a truth. Men still lived in the spiritual world, but in this later age the realisation of its existence was not as strong as it had formerly been. This period is called the Silver Age, or Treta Yuga.

Then came the epoch of those incarnations when man's vision was more and more shut off from the spiritual world, when his whole nature was directed to the outer sense-world and firmly consolidated in that world; inner ego-consciousness, consciousness of manhood, became more and more definite and distinct. This is the Bronze Age, or Dvapara Yuga. Man's knowledge of the spiritual world was no longer as sublime or direct as in earlier times, but something at least had remained in humanity. It was as if in men of the present day who have reached a certain age there were to remain something of the jubilance of youth ... this is past and over but it has been experienced and known and a man can speak of it as something with which he is familiar. Thus the souls of that age were still in some degree familiar with experiences leading to the spiritual worlds. That is the essential characteristic of Dvapara Yuga.

But then came another age, an age when even this degree of familiarity with the spiritual world ceased, when the doors of the spiritual world closed. Men's vision was more and more confined to the outer material world and to the intellect which elaborates the sense-impressions, so that the only remaining possibility was to reflect about the spiritual world—which is the most unsatisfactory way of acquiring knowledge of it. What men now actually knew from their own experience was the material-physical world. If they desired to know something about the spiritual world, this was possible only through reflection. It is the age when man was most lacking in spirituality and therefore established himself firmly in the material world. This was necessary in order that he might be able by degrees to develop consciousness of self to its highest point, for only through the sturdy resistance of the outer world could man learn to distinguish himself from the world and experience himself as an individual. This age is called Kali Yuga, or the Dark Age.

I emphasise that these designations—Krita Yuga, for example—can also be applied to longer epochs, for before the Golden Age man experienced and participated in still higher worlds; hence all those earlier ages could be embraced by this name. But if, so to speak, demands are kept moderate and one is satisfied with the range of spiritual experience described, the periods can be divided in the way indicated. Definite time periods can be given for all such epochs. True, evolution progresses slowly and by degrees, but there are certain boundary-lines of which it can be said that prior to them such-and-such conditions of life and of consciousness predominated, and subsequently, others.

Accordingly, in the sense first spoken of, Kali Yuga began approximately in the year 3101 B.C. Thus we realise that our souls have appeared repeatedly on the earth in new incarnations, in the course of which man's vision has been more and more shut off from the spiritual world and therefore increasingly restricted to the outer world of the senses. We realise, too, that with every incarnation our souls enter into new conditions in which there are always new things to be learnt. What we can achieve in Kali Yuga is to establish and consolidate our ego-consciousness. This was not previously possible, for we had first to be endowed with the ego.

If in some incarnation souls have failed to take in what that particular epoch has to give, it is very difficult for the loss to be made good in later epochs. Such souls must wait a long time until the loss can in some respect be counterbalanced. But no reliance should be placed upon such a possibility.

We will therefore picture to ourselves that the result of the doors being closed against the spiritual world was of fundamental and essential importance. This was also the epoch of John the Baptist, of Christ Himself on earth. In that epoch, when 3,100 years of the Dark Age had already elapsed, a fact of salient importance was that all human beings ,then living had already been incarnated several times—once or twice at the very least—in the Dark Age. Ego-consciousness had been firmly established; memory of the spiritual world had faded away, and if men did not desire to lose their connection with the spiritual world entirely, it was essential for them to learn to experience within the ego the reality of the spiritual world. The ego must have developed to the stage where it could be certain—in its inmost core at least—that there is a spiritual world, and that there are higher spiritual Beings. The ego must have made itself capable of feeling, of believing in, the spiritual world.

If in the days of Christ Jesus someone had voiced the truth in regard to the conditions then prevailing, he might have said: In earlier times men could experience the kingdom of heaven while they were outside their ego in those spiritual distances reached when out of the body. Man had then to experience the kingdoms of heaven, the kingdoms of the spiritual world, far away from the ego. This is no longer possible, for man's nature has changed so greatly that these kingdoms must be experienced within the ego itself; the kingdoms of heaven have come so near to man that they work into his very ego. And it was this that was proclaimed by John the Baptist: The kingdoms of heaven are at hand!—that is to say, they have drawn near to the ego. Previously they were outside man, but now they are near and man must grasp them in the very core of his being, in the ego. And because in this Dark Age, in Kali Yuga, man could no longer go forth from the physical into the spiritual world, it was necessary for the Divine Being, Christ, to come down into the physical world ... Christ's descent into a man of flesh, into Jesus of Nazareth, was necessary in order that through beholding the life and deeds of Christ on the physical plane it might become possible for men to be linked, in the physical body, with the kingdoms of heaven, with the spiritual world. And so Christ's sojourn on earth took place during a period in the middle of Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, when men who were not living in a state of dull insensibility but understood the nature of the times could realise: The descent of the God to men is necessary in order that a lost connection with the spiritual world may be established once again.

If at that time no human beings had been able to find a living link with Christ in their hearts and souls, the connection with the spiritual worlds would have been gradually lost; the kingdoms of heaven would not have been received into the egos of men. It might well have happened that if all human beings living at that crucial point of time had persisted in remaining in darkness, an event of such momentous significance would have passed them by unnoticed.

The souls of men would have withered, gone to waste, decayed. True, even without Christ they would have continued to incarnate for some time still, but they would not have been able to implant in the ego the power that would have enabled them to find the link with the kingdoms of heaven. The event of the Appearance of Christ on the earth might everywhere have passed unnoticed—as it did, for example, in Rome. It was alleged in Rome that a sect of sinful people were living in some out-of-the-way, sordid alley, that among them was a wicked spirit calling himself Jesus of Nazareth and inciting them by his preaching to all kinds of villainous deeds. At a certain period that was all that was known in Rome of Christ! And you may possibly also be aware that Tacitus, the great Roman historian, wrote in a similar vein about a hundred years after the events in Palestine.

Thus it was by no means universally realised that something of supreme importance had taken place: that the Divine Light had shone into the darkness of earth and that it was now possible for men to be brought safely through the Kali Yuga. The possibility of further evolution for humanity was ensured because there were certain souls who understood what was at stake at that point of time and knew what it signified that Christ had been upon earth.

If you were to transfer yourselves in thought to that time, you would realise that it was quite possible to live without knowing anything at all of the advent of Christ Jesus on the physical plane—it was quite possible to live on earth without having any consciousness of this most momentous event.

Would it not also be possible to-day for something of infinite importance to take place without men being aware of it? Might not our contemporaries fail to have the slightest inkling of the most important happening in the world at the present time? It might well be so. For something of supreme importance is taking place, although it is perceptible only to the eyes of spirit. There is a great deal of talk about periods of transition; we ourselves are actually living in a very important one. And its importance lies in the fact that the Dark Age has run its course and a new age is beginning, when slowly and by degrees the souls of men will change and new faculties will be developed.

The fact that the vast majority of men are entirely unaware of this need not be a cause of surprise, for it was the same when the Christ Event took place at the beginning of our era. Kali Yuga came to an end in the year 1899 and we have now to live on into a new age. What is beginning is slowly preparing men for new faculties of soul.

The first indications of these new faculties will be noticeable in isolated souls comparatively soon now, and they will become more clearly apparent in the middle of the thirties of this century, approximately in the period between 1930 and 1940. The years 1933, 1935 and 1937 will be particularly important. Very special faculties will then reveal themselves in human beings as natural gifts. Great changes will take place during this period and biblical prophecies will be fulfilled. Everything will change for souls who are living on earth and also for those who are no longer in physical bodies. Whatever their realm of existence, souls are on the way to possessing entirely new faculties. Everything is changing—but the happening of supreme importance in our time is a deeply incisive transformation of the faculties of the human soul.

Kali Yuga is over and the souls of men are now beginning to develop new faculties. These faculties—because this is the purpose of the epoch—will of themselves draw forth from souls certain powers of clairvoyance which during Kali Yuga had necessarily to be submerged in the realm of the unconscious. A number of souls will experience the strange condition of having ego-consciousness but at the same time the feeling of living in a world essentially different from the world known to their ordinary consciousness. The experience will be shadowy, like a divination, as though an operation had been performed on one born blind. ... Through what we call esoteric training these clairvoyant faculties will be attained in a far better form. But because human beings progress, they will appear in mankind in their very earliest beginnings, in their most elementary stages, through the natural process of evolution.

But it might very easily happen—indeed, far more easily now than at any earlier time—that men would prove incapable of grasping this event of such supreme importance for humanity, incapable of realising that this denotes an actual glimpse into a spiritual world, although still shadowy and dim. There might, for example, be so much wickedness, so much materialism on the earth that the majority of men would show not the slightest understanding, and regard those who have this clairvoyance as lunatics, shutting them up in asylums together with those whose minds are obviously deranged. This point of time might pass men by without leaving a trace, although to-day we too are letting the call of John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ, and of Christ Himself, again resound: A new epoch is at hand when the souls of men must take a step upward into the kingdoms of heaven.

The great event might very easily pass without being understood by men. ... If between the years 1930 and 1940 the materialists were to say triumphantly: True, there have been a number of fools but no sign whatever of the expected great event ... this would not in the least disprove what has been said. But if the materialists were to win the day and mankind were to overlook these happenings altogether, it would be a dire misfortune. Even if men should prove incapable of perceiving them, great things will come to pass.

One is that it will be possible for men to acquire the new faculty of perception in the etheric world—a certain number to begin with, and they will be followed by more and more others, for mankind will have 2,500 years during which to develop these faculties in greater and greater perfection. This opportunity must not be missed. If it were, this would be a tragic misfortune and mankind would then be obliged to wait until a later epoch in order to retrieve the lost opportunity and subsequently to develop the new faculty. This faculty will consist in men being able to see in their environment something of the etheric world which hitherto they have not normally been able to see. Man now sees only the human physical body, but then he will be able to see the etheric body at least as a shadowy picture and also to perceive the connection between deeper happenings in the etheric world. He will have pictures and premonitions of happenings in the spiritual world and find that in three or four days’ time such happenings take place on the physical plane. We will see certain things in etheric pictures and know that tomorrow or in a few days’ time this or that will happen.

These faculties of the human soul will be transformed. And what is associated with this? The Being we call the Christ was once on earth in the flesh at the beginning of our era. He will never come again in a physical body, for that was a unique event and will not be repeated. But He will come again in an etheric form in the period indicated. Men will learn to perceive Christ inasmuch as through this etheric sight they will grow towards Him. He does not now descend as far as the physical body but only as far as the etheric body; men must therefore grow to the stage where He can be perceived. For Christ spoke truly when He said: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the days of earth.” He is present in our spiritual world ... and those especially blessed can always see Him in this spiritual, etheric world.

A man who was convinced with particular intensity through such perception, was Paul—in the vision at Damascus. But this etheric sight will develop in individual human beings as a natural faculty. In days to come it will be more and more possible for men to experience what Paul experienced at Damascus.

We are now able to grasp quite a different aspect of Spiritual Science. We realise that it is a preparation for the actual event of the new Appearance of Christ. Christ will appear again inasmuch as with their etheric sight men will raise themselves to Him. When this is understood, Spiritual Science is disclosed as the means of preparing men to recognise the return of Christ, in order that it shall not be their misfortune to overlook this event but that they shall be mature enough to grasp the great happening of the Second Coming of Christ. Men will become capable of seeing etheric bodies and among them, too, the etheric body of Christ; that is to say, they will grow into a world where Christ will be revealed to their newly awakened faculties.

It will then no longer be necessary to amass all kinds of documentary evidence to prove the existence of Christ; there will be eye-witnesses of the presence of the Living Christ, men who will know Him in His etheric body. And from this experience they will realise that this is the same Being who at the beginning of our era fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, that He is indeed the Christ. Just as Paul at Damascus was convinced at the time: This is Christ! ... so there will be men whose experiences in the etheric world will convince them that in very truth Christ lives.

The supreme mystery of the age in which we are living is the Second Coming of Christ—that is its true nature. But the materialistic mind will in a certain sense appropriate this event. What has now been said—that all the data of genuine spiritual knowledge point to this age—will often be proclaimed in the years immediately ahead. But the materialistic mind corrupts everything to-day, and what will happen is that this kind of thinking will be quite incapable of conceiving that the souls of men must advance to the stage of etheric sight and therewith to vision of Christ in the etheric body.

Materialistic thinking will conceive of this event as a descent of Christ in the flesh, as an incarnation in the flesh. A number of persons in their boundless arrogance will turn this to their own advantage and announce themselves to men as the reincarnated Christ. The near future may therefore bring false Christs, but anthroposophists should be so fully prepared for the spiritual life that they will not confuse the return of Christ in a spiritual body, perceptible only to higher vision, with a return in a physical body of flesh. This will be one of the most terrible temptations besetting mankind and to lead men past this temptation will be the :task of those who learn through Spiritual Science to rise in the true sense to an understanding of the Spirit, who try not to drag spirit down into matter but to ascend into the spiritual world themselves. Thus we may speak of the return of Christ and of the fact that we rise to Christ in the spiritual world through acquiring the faculty of etheric vision.

Christ is ever present, but He is in the spiritual world. We can reach Him when we rise into that world. All anthroposophical teaching should be transformed within us into an indomitable will not to allow this event to pass unnoticed but in the time that remains to us gradually to educate human beings who will be capable of developing these new faculties and therewith to unite anew with Christ. Otherwise, before such an opportunity could again arise, humanity would have to wait for long, long ages ... indeed, until a new incarnation of the earth. If this event of the return of Christ were to be overlooked, the vision of Christ in the etheric body would be restricted to those who are willing to fit themselves for such an experience through esoteric training. But the really momentous fact of these faculties being acquired by humanity in general, by all men, of this great event being understood by means of faculties developing naturally in all men ... that would be impossible for long, long ages.

Obviously, therefore, there is something in our age that justifies the existence and the work of Spiritual Science in the world. Its aim is not merely to satisfy theoretical needs or scientific curiosity. To prepare men for this great event, to prepare them to take their rightful place in the epoch in which they live and with clarity of understanding and knowledge to perceive what is actually present but may pass men by without being brought to fruition—such is the aim of Spiritual Science.

It will be of the utmost importance to recognise and understand this event of Christ's Appearance, for it will be followed by other events. Just as other happenings preceded the Christ Event in Palestine, so will those who prophetically foretold His coming follow Him after the time referred to, after He Himself has become visible to mankind again in the etheric body. The preparers of His coming will be recognisable in a new form to men who have experienced the new Christ Event. Those who lived on earth as Moses, Abraham and the Prophets will be recognisable once again. And it will be known that just as Abraham preceded Christ as a preparer, he also takes over the mission, after Christ's coming, of being a helper in His work. Thus a man who does not sleep through the event of supreme importance in the immediate future gladly finds his way into fellowship with all those who, as the Patriarchs, preceded the Christ Event; he allies himself with them. The whole choir of those to whose level we shall thus be able to rise is again revealed. The one who led mankind downwards to the physical plane appears again after Christ and leads men upwards again, unites them again with the spiritual worlds. [See the following lecture.]

Looking far back into the past we come .to that point of time in the evolution of humanity of which we say: from then onwards humanity descends farther and farther away from the spiritual world into the physical world. Although the following picture also has its material aspect, it can nevertheless be used here. In earlier times man was a companion of spiritual Beings and because his spirit lived in the spiritual world he was a son of the Gods. But the soul, descending ever more deeply into bodily incarnation, participated to a constantly increasing extent in the outer world. The son of the Gods within man took delight in the daughters of the earth, that is to say in those souls who were drawn to the physical world. This in turn means: the human spirit, in earlier times charged through and through with divine spirituality, sank down into physical materiality, became the spouse of the brain-bound intellect and by it was entangled in the web of the physical world of sense. And now the human spirit must re-ascend along the path by which the descent was once made and become again a son of the Gods. The human spirit which had become the son of man would perish in the physical world ifthis son of man were not to climb upwards again to the Divine Beings, to the light of the spiritual world, finding delight in times to come in the daughters of the Gods. It was necessary for the evolution of mankind that the sons of the Gods should unite with the daughters of men, with the souls who are fettered to the earth, in order that as the son of man the human spirit should learn to master the physical plane. But it is necessary that the human being of the future, the son of man, shall take delight in the daughters of the Gods, in the divine-spiritual light of wisdom with which he must unite in order then to grow upwards again into the world of the Gods.

The will of man must be fired by the divine wisdom, and the most powerful impulse for this will be if to those who have truly prepared themselves the sublime ether-form of Christ Jesus becomes perceptible. To a man in whom natural clairvoyance has developed this will be like a Second Coming of Christ Jesus, just as the etheric Christ appeared as a spiritual Being to Paul. Christ will appear again to men when they realise that they must use to this end the faculties with which evolution itself will equip the human soul.

Let us therefore use Spiritual Science not merely to satisfy our curiosity, but in such a way that it will make us worthier to fulfil the great tasks and missions devolving upon the human race.

Answer given by Dr. Steiner to questions asked in connection with the foregoing lecture

When light has been thrown, as it has been today, upon mysteries of a more intimate kind, let us not treat them as thoughtlessly as certain subjects are wont to be treated to-day, but realise that Anthroposophy must be for us something altogether different from a theory. The teaching has, of course, to be given; for how would it be possible to rise to thoughts such as have been voiced to-day if they could not be received in the form of teaching? The essence of this teaching, however, is that it does not remain as such but is re-moulded in the soul into qualities of heart and character, into an entirely different attitude of mind, making different men of us. The teaching should guide us how to make the right use of our incarnations so that in the course of them we can develop into something quite different.

I have tried not to say a word too much or too little and have therefore given only fleeting indications of matters of great moment. But What has been said is of significance not only for the souls who will be incarnated on the physical plane in the period from 1930 to 1940 but also for those who will then be in the spiritual world between death and a new birth; souls work down from the spiritual world into the world of the living, even though the latter may know nothing of it. Through the new Christ Event, this communion between souls who are incarnated here on the physical plane and souls already in the spiritual world will become an increasingly conscious communion. Active co-operation between human beings in incarnation and spiritual beings will then be possible; this should already have been indicated when it was said that the Prophets appear again among men on the earth.

You have therefore to conceive that when these great times arrive in the future there will be a more conscious mutual co-operation between men in the physical world and in the spiritual world. This is not possible to-day because of the absence of a common language. Here in the physical world the only words men use in their languages designate physical things and physical conditions. The world in which human beings live between death and a new birth is quite different from the world immediately surrounding us, and they speak a different language. The Dead can take in only what is spoken in the sense of Spiritual Science—nothing else. Therefore in Anthroposophy we are cultivating something that will be more and more intelligible to the Dead and we are speaking also for those who are living between death and a new birth.

Humanity is passing into a new era when the strength of the influences from the spiritual world will steadily increase. The great events of the immediate future will be perceptible in all worlds. Those, too, who are living between death and a new birth will have new experiences as the result of the new Christ Event in the etheric world. But if they made no preparation in themselves while on earth, they would no more understand the event than would men incarnated on the earth, unless these had prepared themselves to respond in the right way. It is essential for all souls now incarnated—no matter whether they will then still be in physical incarnation or not—that .through the assimilation of anthroposophical truths they should prepare themselves for these important future events. If they fail to receive into their earthly consciousness what Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science has to give, they will have to wait for a new incarnation in order to have the possibility here on earth of assimilating the corresponding teachings. For there are things that can be experienced and learnt only on earth.

Hence it is said that in the spiritual world there is, for example, no possibility of knowing death—and it was necessary for a God to descend into the physical world in order that He might die. Knowledge of what the Mystery of Golgotha is can be acquired in no other world in the way that is possible in the physical world. We have been led down into the physical world in order to acquire something that can be acquired only there. And Christ came down to humanity because it was only in the physical world that He could reveal to men—could enable them to experience in the Mystery of Golgotha—something that, having let its fruits ripen in the spiritual world, carries those fruits onward. But the seeds must be laid down and spread abroad in the physical world.

Golden Age—Krita Yuga—about 20,000 years
Silver Age—Treta Yuga—about 15,000 years
Bronze Age—Dvapara Yuga—about 10,000 years
Dark Age—Kali Yuga—about 5,000 years
Our Age embraces a future 2,500 years

In the process of human evolution a certain definite connection exists between the past and the future. Study of this connection sheds a great deal of light upon questions such as: What devolves upon us as men belonging to a particular epoch?

When we were together here some little time ago, many things were said about the past evolution of humanity, and to-day I will add something about the connection between the past and the immediate future. At the end of the lecture yesterday attention was called to a significant sign, telling us as it were from the heavens that humanity needs a spiritual impetus, something like a new impulse for the age. [Mysteries of Cosmic Existence. Comets and the Moon, Stuttgart, 5th March, 1910. See also footnote near end of present lecture, p. 79.] Understanding of how this impulse must work is possible only when we study the last millennia prior to the founding of Christianity in a certain connection with the millennia after it, with the millennia, that is to say, in which we ourselves are living.

There is a law in accordance with which certain happenings are repeated in the process of man's evolution, and we spoke of them in the last lecture-course given here in Stuttgart. [Universe, Earth and Man. Eleven lectures, 4th–16th August, 1908.] Today I want only to emphasise that when reference is made in Spiritual Science to these systematic repetitions in the course of human evolution it must not he imagined that they can be worked up by the intellect; they must be investigated in detail and confirmed by spiritual research. Attempts to construct new repetitions according to the pattern of others can lead one very far astray. There is, however, one repetition which does, in fact, resemble another, the form it takes being that happenings of crucial importance before the founding of Christianity come to pass again afterwards in a certain way.

The last three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity belong to an epoch in the history of human evolution called the Dark Age, the lesser Dark Age—Kali Yuga. Kali Yuga began in the year 3101 B.C. With it is connected everything we recognise nowadays as the great achievements of humanity, as the fundamental characteristics of present-day culture. Before this Dark Age, before Kali Yuga, all human thinking, all the powers of the human soul, were in a certain respect differently organised. The year 3101 B.C. is an approximate date, for in the process of development qualities of one kind passed over gradually into others; but before that time the last vestiges of ancient clairvoyance were still present. In the course of evolution the sequence of the ages is: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, Kali Yuga. It is the last that is of particular interest to us to-day. The earlier ages take us back to old Atlantis. In very ancient times, vestiges of the ancient clairvoyance still survived and prior to the Dark Age man was directly conscious of the presence of a spiritual world because he was able to gaze into it. But this consciousness of the spiritual world withdrew more and more from man's vision and speaking generally we can say that the development then begins of those faculties of soul which on the one hand confine his power of judgment to the sense-perceptible world, while, on the other, they promote his self-consciousness; all these powers begin to operate in Kali Yuga. And whereas during this age man was not in a position to look into the spiritual worlds, the firm centre we call the knowledge of self-consciousness developed all the more strongly within him. But do not imagine that even now this knowledge of self-consciousness is already highly developed; it has yet to reach many further stages. But it could never have been experienced by man if there had not been this “Dark Age”.

Thus during the three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity man was losing his connection with the spiritual world to an increasing extent and indeed had no direct perception of that connection.

On the occasion of my last visit here we heard how, at the conclusion of the first millennium of Kali Yuga, a kind of substitute was given for vision of the spiritual worlds. This substitute was made possible through the fact that a particular individual—Abraham—was chosen out because the special organisation of his physical brain enabled him to have consciousness of the spiritual world without the old faculties. That is why in Spiritual Science we call the first millennium of Kali Yuga the Abraham-epoch; it was the epoch when man did, it is true, lose the direct vision of the spiritual worlds, but when there unfolded in him something like a consciousness of the Divine which gradually made its way more and more deeply into his ego, with the result that he came to conceive of the Deity as related to human ego-consciousness. In the first millennium of Kali Yuga—which at its conclusion we can call the Abraham-epoch—the Deity is revealed as the World-Ego.

This Abraham-epoch was followed by the Moses-epoch, when the God Jahve, the World-Ego, was no longer revealed in the form of a mysterious guidance of human destinies, as a God of a single people; in the Moses-epoch this Deity was revealed, as we know, in the burning bush, as the God of the Elements. And it was a great advance when, through the teachings of Moses, the World-Ego as the Deity was experienced in such a way that men realised: the Elements of manifested existence, all that is seen with physical eyes—lightning, thunder, and so on—are emanations, deeds of the World-Ego, ultimately of the one World-Ego. We must, however, clearly understand in what way this denoted an advance.

Before the Abraham-epoch and before Kali Yuga, we find that through the direct vision of the spiritual worlds made possible by the remains of the old clairvoyance, men beheld the spiritual, as indeed was the case in all these ancient times. We should have to go infinitely far back to find anything else. Men actually beheld the spiritual during Dvapara Yuga, Treta Yuga, Krita Yuga, beheld it as a multiplicity of Beings. You know that when we rise into the spiritual worlds we find there the Hierarchies of spiritual Beings. They, naturally, are under a unified guidance, but this was beyond the grasp of consciousness in those ancient times. Men beheld the individual members of the Hierarchies, a multiplicity of Divine Beings. To grasp them as a unity was possible only for the Initiates. But now the World-Ego, grasped for the first time by man himself with the physical instrument of the brain—a faculty that had developed in a specially marked way in Abraham—confronted him, and he conceived the World-Ego as manifesting in the different kingdoms of Nature, in the Elements.

A further advance was made in the last millennium before the founding of Christianity, in the Solomon-epoch. Thus the three millennia before the founding of Christianity can be distinguished by calling the first millennium by the name of the individuality who appears and then works on into the second: the Abraham-epoch. From the beginning of Kali Yuga until Abraham men are being prepared to recognise the One God behind the manifestations of Nature. This possibility begins with Abraham. In the Moses-epoch the One God becomes the ruler of the manifestations of Nature and is sought for behind them. All this is then intensified in the Solomon-epoch, and we are led through this last epoch to that point in evolution where the same Divine Being whom the Abraham-epoch and the Moses-epoch, too, beheld in Jahve, where the same Divine Being takes on human form.

In contemplating this subject from the spiritual-scientific point of view it must be firmly realised that in this respect the Gospels are right: Christ may not be distinguished from Jahve otherwise than that the light of the sun reflected by the moon is to be distinguished from the direct light of the sun. Where is the light that floods a bright moonlit night? It is actual sunlight, only it is reflected back to us from the moon. So we can have this sunlight directly by day or rayed back by the moon on bright moonlit nights. What manifests thus in space also manifests in the following way: what was finally to appear in Christ as a Spirit-Sun was revealed beforehand in reflection. Jahve is the reflection which precedes Christ in time. Just as the moonlight reflects the sunlight, so was the Christ Being reflected for Abraham, Moses, Solomon. It was always the same Being. Then He Himself appeared as the Christ-Sun at the time of the founding of Christianity. The preparation for this great event was made in the Abraham-epoch, in the Moses-epoch, in the Solomon-epoch.

A repetition of these three pre-Christian ages takes place in the Christian era, but now in reverse order. The essential and fundamental trend of the Solomon-epoch is repeated in the first thousand years after Christ, in that the spirit of Solomon lives and is active as an impulse in the most outstanding minds of the first Christian millennium. And fundamentally speaking it was the wisdom of Solomon through which men endeavoured to grasp the nature and essence of the Christ Event. Then, following the Solomon-epoch, came the era that can be called the revival of the Moses-epoch ... and in the second millennium after Christ the best minds of this era are permeated by the spirit of Moses. The spirit of Moses does indeed come to life again in a new form. In the pre-Christian age the spirit of Moses had been directed towards the outer world of physical Nature in order to find the Divine World-Ego as Jahve, the World-Ego manifesting in lightning and thunder, in the great revelation from the Elements of laws for men. Whereas the World-Ego streams into Moses from outside, is revealed from outside, in the second millennium after Christ the same Divine Being announces Himself within the soul. The experience which came to Moses as an outer happening when he withdrew from his people in order to receive the Decalogue this significant happening is repeated in the second Christian millennium in the form of a mighty revelation from within man.

Repetitions do not take the same form but what comes later manifests as a kind of polarity. It was from the Elements, from outer Nature, that the God revealed Himself to Moses; in the second millennium after Christ He reveals Himself from the deepest foundations of the human soul. And how could this be presented to us more impressively than in the story of a great, supremely gifted man of whose preaching it was said that he proclaimed mighty truths from the very depths of his soul! It can be taken for granted that this man was steeped through and through in what can be called Christian mysticism. Then, to the place where he is preaching comes a seemingly unimportant layman who at first listens to the sermons but then turns out to be one who need not be considered a layman but can become the instructor of the preacher—Tauler—and induces him, despite his renown, to suspend his sermons for a time because he does not feel inwardly imbued with what is living in the layman. And when Tauler, after having received the inspiration, ascends the pulpit again, the overwhelmingly powerful impression made by his sermon is described symbolically by saying that many of his listeners fell down as if dead—meaning that everything of a lower nature in them was killed.

This was a revelation of the World-Ego from within—working from within with a power as great as that of the revelation from the Elements to Moses in the second millennium before Christ. Thus we see a revival of the Moses-epoch inasmuch as the spirit of Moses illumined and imbued with life the whole of Christian mysticism, from Meister Eckhart down to the later Christian mystics. Verily the spirit of Moses was alive in the souls of the Christian mystics! This was in the second millennium after Christ when there was a revival of the whole character of the Moses-epoch. Just as in the first millennium of the Christian era the repetition of the Solomon-epoch was responsible for bringing to expression the inner content of the Christian mysteries—for example, the Christian teaching concerning the Hierarchies, the detailed wisdom concerning the higher worlds—so was the second Moses-epoch particularly responsible for the essential character of German mysticism: a deep, mystical consciousness of the One God who can be awakened and resurrected within the human soul. And the influence of this Moses-epoch has persisted in all the endeavours made since that time to fathom the nature of the World-Ego, the Undivided Godhead.

But the course of the evolution of humanity is such that from our time onwards a renaissance of the Abraham-epoch will take place as we pass slowly into the third millennium. In pre-Christian times the sequence is: Abraham-epoch, Moses-epoch, Solomon-epoch; in the Christian era the order is reversed: Solomon-epoch, Moses-epoch, Abraham-epoch. We are moving towards the Abraham-epoch, and this will inevitably bring momentous consequences in its train.

Let us recall what was of essential significance in the pre-Christian Abraham-epoch. It was the fact that the old clairvoyance had disappeared, that there had been bestowed upon man a consciousness of the Divine closely bound up with human faculties. Everything that humanity could acquire from this brain-bound consciousness of the Divine had by now been gradually exhausted and there is very little left to be gained through these faculties. But on the other hand, in the new Abraham-epoch exactly the opposite path is taken—the path Which leads humanity away from vision confined to the physical and material, away from intellectual inferences based upon material data. We are moving along the path leading into the regions where men once dwelt in times before the Abraham-epoch. It is the path that will make states of natural clairvoyance possible for man, states in which natural clairvoyant forces will be in active operation.

During Kali Yuga itself, Initiation alone could lead into the spiritual worlds in the right way. Initiation does, of course, lead to higher stages that will be accessible to men only in the very far distant future; but the first signs of a natural faculty of clairvoyance will become evident fairly soon, as the renewal of the Abraham-epoch approaches.

Thus, after men have acquired ego-consciousness, after they have come to know the ego as a firm inner centre, they are led out of themselves again in order to be able to look with an even deeper vision into the spiritual worlds. The ending of Kali Yuga has to do with this also. Having lasted for five thousand years, Kali Yuga ended in A.D. 1899. This was a year of crucial importance for the evolution of humanity. Naturally, it is again an approximate date, for things happen gradually. But just as the year 3101 B.C. can be indicated as a point of time when humanity was led down from the stage of the old clairvoyance to physical vision and intellectuality, so the year 1899 is the time when humanity received an impetus towards the first beginnings of a future clairvoyance. And it is the lot of mankind, already in this twentieth century before the next millennium—indeed for a few individuals in the first half of this century—to develop the first rudiments of a new faculty of clairvoyance that quite certainly will appear if men prove capable of understanding it. It must, however, be realised that there are two possibilities. It belongs to the very essence of the human soul that natural faculties of clairvoyance will arise in the future in a few people during the first half of the twentieth century and in more and more human beings during the next two thousand five hundred years, until finally there will be a sufficient number who, if they so desire, will have the new, natural clairvoyance. A distinction must, of course, be made between cultivated and natural clairvoyance.

But there are two possibilities. The one is that although men have indeed the aptitude for this clairvoyance, materialism may triumph in the next decades and humanity sink in its morass. True, even then there will be individuals here and there who assert that they see in the physical man something like a second man; but if materialistic consciousness gets to the point of declaring Spiritual Science to be sheer craziness and stamping out all consciousness of the spiritual world, then these incipient faculties will not be understood. It will depend upon humanity itself whether what will then take place turns out to be for the good or ill, because what ought to come about might pass unnoticed.

Or the other situation is possible, where Spiritual Science is not trampled underfoot. Then men will understand how to cultivate such faculties not only in the secret schools of Initiation but also to foster them when, towards the middle of this century, they appear like delicate buds of the life of soul in individuals here and there. They will say, as if from a power that has awakened within them: I see as a reality something that is described in Anthroposophy as the second man within the physical man. But still other faculties will appear—for example, a faculty that a man will notice in himself. After he has performed some deed, there will appear before his soul a kind of dream-picture which he will know to be connected in some way with what he has done. And from Spiritual Science he will realise: When an after-image of my deed appears in this way, although it is essentially different from the deed itself, it reveals to me what the karmic effect of my deed will be in the future.

This understanding of karma will develop in certain individuals during the middle of our century. The explanation is that Kali Yuga has run its course and that from epoch to epoch new faculties appear in men. But if no understanding is developed, if this particular faculty is stamped out, if those who speak about faculties of this kind are put away as if they were insane, disaster is inevitable and humanity will sink in the morass of materialism. Everything will depend upon whether understanding is awakened for Spiritual Science, or whether Ahriman will succeed in suppressing its intentions. Then, of course, those who are choking in materialism may say scornfully: They were fine prophets who stated that a second man will be seen beside the physical man! Nothing will be apparent if the faculties for seeing it are crushed out. But even if these faculties do not become evident in the middle of the twentieth century, this will be no proof that the rudiments of them are not within man, but only that the seed of the young buds has been crushed. The faculties that have been described to-day exist and can be developed, provided only that mankind is willing.

This stage of evolution therefore lies immediately ahead of us. We are, as it were, retracing the path of development. In Abraham, consciousness of the Divine was brought down into the brain; in passing into a new Abraham-epoch, consciousness of the Divine will in turn be brought out of the brain, and during the next two thousand five hundred years we shall find more and more human beings who possess knowledge of the great spiritual teachings of the cosmic secrets yielded by the mysteries of Initiation. Just as the spirit of Moses prevailed in the epoch that is now over, so in our time the spirit of Abraham begins to prevail, in order that after men have been led to consciousness of the Divine in the material world, they may now be led out of and beyond it. For it is an eternal cosmic law that each individuality has to perform a particular deed more than once, periodically—twice at all events, the one as the antithesis of the other. What Abraham brought down for men into the physical consciousness he will bear upwards again for them into the spiritual world.

Thus it is obvious that we are living at a vitally important time and that to disseminate Spiritual Science to-day is not a matter of preference but something that is demanded by our age. To prepare mankind for great moments in the process of evolution is among the tasks of spiritual investigation. Spiritual Science exists in order that men may know what it is they are seeing. Anyone who is true to his age cannot but be mindful of the fact that spirit-knowledge must be brought into the world to prevent what is coming from passing by humanity unnoticed.

These things are connected with others. In certain other respects everything is renewed in similar repetitions. A time is approaching when more and more of what existed in pre-Christian centuries will be renewed for humanity, but everything will now be steeped in what men have been able to acquire through the mighty Christ Event. We have heard that the great impulse experienced by Moses through the vision of the burning thorn bush and lightning on Sinai was experienced again inwardly, in its Christianised form. For men such as Tauler and Eckhart knew with all certainty that when there dawned within them the power known to Moses as Jahve, that power was the Christ, no longer the reflected Christ but the Christ Himself, arising from the depth of the heart. What had been experienced by Moses was experienced by the Christian mystics in a Christianised form, in a form changed through the Christ Impulse. And what was experienced in the pre-Christian age of Abraham—that, too, will be experienced in a new and different form. And what will this be? All things, all events that come about normally in the evolution of humanity cast their lights in advance (instead of the trivial saying, “cast their shadows”, I prefer to say, “cast their lights”). Thus in certain respects a light indicative of future happenings was cast in advance by the event of Damascus, the conversion of Saul into Paul.

Let us be clear what this signified for Paul. Up to then he had acquired a thorough knowledge of the Hebraic secret doctrines. From these teachings he knew that some day an Individuality would descend to the earth, representing to humanity the One who conquers death. He knew: an Individuality will appear in the flesh, showing through his life that the spirit triumphs over death so completely that for this Individuality in his earthly incarnation death has no more significance than any other physical happening. Paul knew this. And he knew something else as well from the ancient Hebraic teachings, namely that when the Christ, the Messiah who was to come, had lived in the flesh, when He had resurrected and had won the victory over death, the spiritual sphere of the earth would be transformed and clairvoyance would undergo a change. Whereas before then a clairvoyant would not have seen the Christ Being in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, but only when he looked upwards to the Sun Spirit, Paul knew that through the Christ Impulse there would take place in earth-existence a change signifying that, having gained the victory over death the Christ would be found by clairvoyant vision in the sphere of the earth. When, therefore, a man was clairvoyant, he would behold the Christ in the earth-sphere as the living spirit of the earth. But that of which Paul, while he was still Saul, could not be convinced was that the One who had lived in Palestine, had died on the Cross and was said by his disciples to have been resurrected, was indeed the One to whom the ancient Hebraic doctrines referred.

The salient point is that Paul had not been convinced by what he had seen physically of the things narrated in the Gospels. Conviction that the Christ was the predicted Messiah first came to him when the light cast in advance revealed itself to him, when as though by Grace from above he became clairvoyant and, finding Christ in the sphere of the earth, was compelled to say to himself: He has been here in very truth and has risen! It was because Paul himself had beheld Christ in the spiritual sphere of the earth that he knew: Now He is here! And from that moment he was convinced regarding Christ Jesus.

The essence of what happened at Damascus, therefore, was that Paul had discovered Christ Jesus clairvoyantly in the sphere of the earth. Thus, if he had not, for example, heard tell of the deeds of Christ in Palestine, if he had not himself actually heard the stories told in the Gospels but had lived somewhat later, he might have experienced the Christ Event of Damascus only later: but even so he would have arrived at the same conviction. For this event revealed to him the reality of Christ's presence! He knew: He who is now revealed in the sphere of the earth is the One of whom the ancient Hebraic secret doctrine tells.

The Christ Event is not confined to one point of time only. In the case of Paul it came very early, in order that through him Christianity might pursue its course.

Now, as long as Kali Yuga lasted—this was until the year 1899—the evolution of humanity had not reached the stage at which Paul's experience could be repeated without more ado; human faculties were not mature enough for that. Hence there was one who experienced it through Grace; and others, too, experienced similar events through Grace. But we are living now in the age when there is to be a revolutionary change: the first rudiments of natural clairvoyance are developing. We are passing into the Abraham-epoch and are being led out into the spiritual world. This means that it will be possible for a certain number of human beings, and more and more in the next two thousand five hundred years, to experience a repetition of the event of Damascus. The great and momentous feature of the coming era will be that many human beings will experience this event. The Christ, now to be found in the spiritual sphere of the earth, will be perceptible to those faculties which, as we have said, will make their appearance. When men become able to see the etheric body, they will learn to see the etheric body of Christ Jesus, as did Paul. This is what is beginning as the characteristic trait of a new age, and between the years 1930-40-45 it will already become evident in the first forerunners of human beings possessed of these faculties. If men are alert they will experience this event of Damascus through direct spiritual vision and therewith clarity and truth concerning the Christ Event. A remarkable parallelism of happenings will come about.

During the next two decades men will be more and more inclined to abandon the texts of the Gospels because they will no longer understand them. Superficial scholars are everywhere at pains to “prove” that the Gospels are not historical records, that there can be no question of any historical Christ. The historical documents will lose their value and the number of people who deny Christ Jesus will steadily increase. Men who may still believe that these events can be substantiated by history are short-sighted. Those who mean well by Christianity will not reject understanding of the spiritual proof of the existence of Christ Jesus, for this spiritual proof will be provided through the cultivation of the faculties which enable men to behold the Christ as a real Presence in His etheric body. Those who place reliance only on documents may call themselves good Christians, but in point of fact they are destroying Christianity; however vociferously they proclaim the knowledge they have gleaned about Christianity from documentary records, they are destroying it because they are rejecting a spiritual teaching through which, in actual vision, the Christ will become a reality for men in our century.

When the Christian era began, men had been descending into the Dark Age for more than three thousand years, had been thrown back upon the faculties of their outer senses. At that time Christ could not have revealed Himself to the faculties necessary for the evolution of humanity in any other way than through physical incarnation. Because man's physical faculties had then reached the peak of their development, Christ was obliged to appear in a physical body. But no progress at all would be possible unless with higher faculties men were able to discover Christ as a reality in the higher worlds. Just as Christ had once to be discovered with purely physical faculties, men will find him with the newly developed faculties in that world where etheric bodies alone are to be seen. There can be no second physical incarnation of Christ. He came once in a physical body of flesh because it was at one period only that human faculties were dependent upon His presence in such a body. But now, with the higher faculties, men will be able to perceive the etheric body of Christ as an even greater reality.

The momentous event in store for us can be called: the Reappearance of Christ Jesus ... a gradual reappearance, to begin with for a few and then for more and more human beings. It is an event that has significance not only for those who will then still be incarnated in bodies of flesh. A number of human beings living to-day will still be in incarnation at the time of the Christ Event ... they will experience it in the way that has been described. Others will have passed through the gate of death. As we once heard in a lecture here, [This reference is to a lecture given 14th November, 1909: The Tasks and Aims of Spiritual Science.] the Event of Golgotha was an event that affected not only the physical world; its influences reached into all the spiritual worlds. Christ's descent into the underworld was an actual fact and the effects of the Christ Event that is to take place in our century will also work—though not in the same form as on earth—into the world in which man lives between death and rebirth.

But there is one essential. The faculties by means of which men will be able, between death and rebirth, to behold the Christ Event, cannot be acquired in that world; they must be acquired on the physical plane and carried from there into the life between death and a new birth. There are faculties which must be acquired on the earth, for we have not been placed on the physical earth for nothing. It is an error to believe that there is no purpose in living on the earth. Faculties have to be acquired there that can be acquired in no other world—they are the faculties for understanding the Christ Event and the events that will follow it. Those human beings who now develop these faculties on the earth through the teachings of Spiritual Science will carry them through the gate of death. It is not through Initiation only, but through a clear-minded acceptance of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that the faculties are acquired which make it possible also to be aware of the Christ Event in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. But those who turn deaf ears to this knowledge must wait until a later incarnation to acquire the faculties that must be acquired here on earth in order that the Christ Event may be experienced in yonder world. Therefore let nobody imagine that the announcement of the Christ Event—an event which the teachings of Spiritual Science alone can make intelligible—will bear no fruit for him if he has already passed through the gate of death. It will indeed bear fruit.

Obviously, therefore, spiritual research prepares the way for a new Christ Event. But those who receive into themselves the essence of the teaching of the spirit as part of their whole life of soul, as a quickening, vital force, must then grow on to a spiritual understanding of these things, realising that through Spiritual Science they must learn to understand our newly dawning age thoroughly and fundamentally. We must come to realise that in the future the most important events must be sought, not on the physical plane but outside and beyond it, just as Christ must be sought in the spiritual world when He appears in His etheric form.

What has here been said will be repeated again and again in the coming decades. But there will be people who misunderstand it and who will say: So Christ is to come again! Because this view will be tinged with the belief that this is a physical return, such people will support all the false Messiahs who will appear. And in the middle of the twentieth century there will be plenty of them, making use of the materialistic beliefs, the materialistic thinking and feeling of men in order to proclaim themselves as Christ. There have always been false Messiahs. For example, in the South of France, before the Crusades, there appeared a false Messiah whom his followers regarded as a kind of Christ incarnate in a physical body. Before then a false Messiah had appeared in Spain, attracting a large number of followers. In North Africa, a man who announced himself as the Christ created a great sensation. In the seventeenth century a man who appeared in Smyrna, alleging himself to be the Christ, drew a vast crowd of followers; his name was Shabbathai Zewi. Pilgrims journeyed to him from Poland, Austria, Spain, Germany, France, from all over Europe and from wide provinces of Africa and Asia.

In past centuries this kind of happening was not so deplorable, for the demand to distinguish the true from the false had not yet been made of humanity. Only now are we living in the age when disaster might befall if men were not equal to the spiritual test. Those will be equal to it who know that human faculties develop to higher stages, that the faculties on account of which it was necessary for Christ to be seen physically were dependent upon a physical manifestation at the time of the founding of Christianity but that no progress would be made if in this present century men were not to find Him again in a higher form. Those who are striving in the sense of Spiritual Science will have to prove that they are the ones able to distinguish the false Messiahs from the One Messiah who does not appear in the flesh, but appears as a spiritual Being to the newly awakened faculties of men.

The time will come when men will again see into the spiritual world and there behold the land whence flow the streams of true spiritual nourishment for everything that happens in the physical world. Again and again we have heard that it was once possible for men to look with clairvoyant vision into the spiritual world. Oriental writings also contain the tradition of an ancient spiritual land [See note 1 at end of lecture.] into which men were once able to gaze and whence they could draw the super-sensible influences that were available for the physical world. Many descriptions of this land, that was once within reach of men's vision but has withdrawn, are full of sadness. This land was indeed once accessible to men and will be so again now that Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, is over. Initiation has always led thither, and it was always possible for those who had achieved Initiation to guide their steps into that mysterious land which is said to have disappeared from the sphere of human experience. Deeply moving are the writings which tell of this ancient land, whither the Initiates repair ever and again in order to bring from there the new streams and impulses for everything that is to be imparted to mankind from century to century. Those who are connected with the spiritual world in this way resort again and again to Shamballa—the name of this mysterious land. It is the deep fount into which clairvoyant vision once reached; it withdrew during Kali Yuga and is spoken of as an ancient fairyland that will come again into the realm of man. Shamballa will be there again when Kali Yuga has run its course. Mankind will rise through normal human faculties into the land of Shamballa, the land whence the Initiates draw strength and wisdom for the missions they are to fulfil. Shamballa is a reality, was a reality, will be a reality again for humanity. And when Shamballa reveals itself again, one of the first visions to come to men will be that of Christ in His etheric form. Into the land declared by Oriental writings to have vanished there is no Leader other than Christ. It is Christ who will lead men to Shamballa.

We must inscribe into our souls what can come to pass for humanity if the omen [See note 2 at the end of this lecture.] referred to in the lecture yesterday is rightly understood. If men realise that they dare not allow themselves to sink more deeply into matter, that their path must be reversed, that a spiritual life must begin, then, at first for a few and in the course of two thousand five hundred years for a greater and greater number of human beings, there will arise the experience of the land of Shamballa—woven of light, shone through with light, teeming with wisdom. Such is the event which for those who have the will to understand, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, must be described as denoting the most momentous turning-point in the evolution of humanity at the dawn of the Abraham-epoch in the Christian era. It is the event through which men's understanding of the Christ Impulse will be enhanced and intensified.

Strange as it may seem, wisdom will thereby lose nothing of its value. The more insight men achieve, the greater and mightier will Christ appear to them to be! When once their gaze can penetrate into Shamballa, they will be able to understand much of what is indeed contained in the Gospels but for the recognition of which they will need to experience a kind of event of Damascus. Thus at the time when men are more sceptical of the original records than they have ever been, the new form of belief in Christ Jesus will arise when we grow into the realm where He will first be encountered: the mysterious land of Shamballa.

Halley's Comet. The following passages are from the lecture to which Dr. Steiner is referring: Mysteries of Cosmic Existence. Comets and the Moon. “... Halley's Comet has a quite definite task and everything else that it brings with it is definitely related to this task. Halley's Comet—we are speaking of its spiritual aspect—has the task of impressing human nature as a whole in such a way that human nature and the human being always take a further step in respect of the development of the Ego when the Comet comes near to the Earth. It is the step in development which leads out the Ego to concepts connected with the physical plane. ... When it is said that Halley's Comet may be an omen, that its influence, working alone, might make men superficial and lead out the Ego more and more on to the physical plane, and that precisely in our days this must be resisted—it is not said for the purpose of reviving an old superstition. The resistance can come about only by a spiritual view of the world like that of Anthroposophy taking the place of the trend of evolution brought about by Halley's Comet ...”

See also, Lecture-Course 17, The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness. Lecture 5.

Early in the year 1910 Rudolf Steiner is believed to have spoken for the first time on the mystery of the true nature of the Second Coming. Throughout that year he gave a number of lectures on the subject and continued his teaching during the following year. The importance of these lectures cannot be exaggerated: their study is essential to an understanding of the meaning and purpose of the Anthroposophical Movement. In the whole body of teaching that was given out, the two lectures which are now reprinted in a new translation, under the title of The True Nature of the Second Coming, form an indispensable part. Many salient points appear, and explanations are made of the connections between past, present and future.

Rudolf Steiner's interpretation of that apocalyptic event described in the New Testament as the coming of the Son of Man “in the clouds with great power and glory” demands for its apprehension knowledge of his teaching on the evolution of man's consciousness, particularly on the development of the ego-consciousness in relation to the Christ Impulse. The incarnation of the Christ took place in an epoch when the soul-faculties of men were best adapted to receive Him manifest in the flesh. But now new faculties of perception are awakening, and men will become capable of receiving Him in a different way. From the third decade of this century onwards, Rudolf Steiner said, the Christ would be visible in etheric form to those possessing these new faculties. At first He will be seen by a few, but during the next three thousand years by greater and yet greater numbers. In a lecture given at Basle on I st October, 1911, Dr. Steiner spoke of the fact that in the future the presence of Christ would be felt amongst those who were gathered together waiting in expectation to receive Him. And for those who are alone, he said, “many a one will experience, when sitting silent in his room, his heart sad and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn, that the etheric Christ will appear and will speak comforting words to him. The Christ will become a living Comforter to men!”

To attempt to master and to expound the content of this revelation given by Rudolf Steiner becomes the particular task of those who count themselves among his followers. He believed that the Christian evangel would develop further and further in time to come, bringing ever new gifts and revelations to the souls of men in their own evolutionary progress from one incarnation to another. And, speaking two years before his death, he said: “Anthroposophy would wish its destiny to be one with the destiny of Christianity.”

When he gave his lecture-cycle on the Gospel of St. Matthew he described in detail the preparation that took place for the coming of Christ in a physical body, with an account of the special mission of Jeshu ben Pandira; in 1911, in the first of two lectures entitled Jeshu ben Pandira, he gave the explicit message that it is in order to prepare humanity for the Second Coming of Christ that Spiritual Science exists. “Everyone,” he said, “who works at the task of Spiritual Science shares in making this preparation.”

MILDRED KIRKCALDY

If a Theosophist, withdrawing for a moment from the immediate concerns of daily life, thinks about his tasks and duties in the external world and asks himself: Is there something that has to do with human happiness and human aspirations over and above the daily round of life?—then as a Theosophist he will have an ample answer. He knows that he does not study Theosophy merely in order to occupy his mind because daily life leaves his soul dissatisfied. He knows that what he gets from Theosophy in his feelings can become a real force in his soul. For he is able at all times to say to himself, “In my inmost being as man I am something else than what I am in the external world.” Together with such thoughts we should realise, deep in our inmost being, that as human beings we live all the time within two streams—one of which gives us our place in everyday life, and another which enables the soul to gaze into a world of the future, to assume its rightful place within the whole setting of cosmic life. This idea should never lead us to regard an external occupation as less important for cosmic life as a whole than some different kind of calling. We must realise that from a certain point of view the smallest and the greatest achievement of which we are capable are of equal importance for the whole. Life is a mosaic, composed of tiny pieces of stone. The man who places one little piece into the mosaic is not less important than the man who thought out the plan of the mosaic. As far as the divine spiritual world order is concerned, the smallest is just as significant as the greatest. Insight into this truth will avert any feelings of dissatisfaction which might otherwise so easily occur in life.

This is the only attitude to our tasks in life that can give us a true understanding of the inner work that must be performed within our soul. It is the only true attitude to adopt to spiritual endeavour. For the Theosophist, such ideas should never remain a mere thought, never only theory. The Theosophist does well to bring home to himself over and over again in inner contemplation how little in keeping it would be with the great world order if some position in life left him unsatisfied. World-evolution could not take its course if we did not carry out in the right way what seem to be most insignificant details in life. This attitude will give us the right feeling for the great revelations of existence and we shall understand the significance of the teaching that each one of us, over and above what we represent in the physical world, should make as much of himself as possible, in line with the wisdom of worlds. We must regard spiritual development in itself as absolutely essential. Many people say: What is the good of spiritual development if it does not make me useful in life? If we learn to recognise the beginnings of karma, our tasks in life will become clear to us. Not only is it our task to do this thing or that; it is indeed our task to make of ourselves as much as possible. We must rise to the thought that we have within us countless forces, countless faculties which we we must not let go to waste in our soul. That the divine spiritual world order will do with what we have made of our soul must be left to the divine spiritual world order. If we work at our soul development and pay heed to the beckoning of karma, we shall realise what our duties are.

We should not theorize. It might be thought that the best kind of Theosophist is one who works at his development for a time and then engages in some external, beneficent activity. But it may be that our position in external life does not enable us to put into application in the world what we elaborate in the soul. There may be no greater fallacy than to imagine that a man can be a good Theosophist only if he actually turns to account in the world what he has learnt inwardly. For decades we may not be in a position to put into application any of the Spiritual Science impulses that are now within us. Then one day we may happen to be meeting someone at a railway station and are able to say something of significance which otherwise we should have had no opportunity of saying. This single action may be more significant in life than one of much wider scope. We must realise clearly what we are capable of doing and that through a twist of karma, the opportunity for turning it to account will be given us at the right moment.

When this is felt and experienced, Spiritual Science becomes something whose purpose one doesn’t ask about at first, because it is absolutely valuable. The feeling described is the only one that can give us the right attitude to what connects us to the great and incisive happenings of life.

It is often assumed that evolution, wherever it takes place, only progresses step by step. But the course taken by life in its totality is not such that we can say: Nature makes no jumps—that would not be correct. For in fact nature is continually making jumps. A plant, as it grows, is always making jumps—from the root to the leaf, from the leaf to the calyx, from the calyx to the blossom and from the blossom to the fruit. Sudden transitions occur in the life of every individual and in the life of humanity as a whole. Everywhere we find humanity progressing steadily for a time, developing as the leaves develop on a plant. Then the moment comes when a tremendous step forward is taken by mankind, just as happens in the plant from leaf to calyx, from calyx to blossom, from blossom to fruit. In the evolutionary process of humanity such rapid transitions and jumps are constantly occurring. The greatest leap of all in the history of Earth-humanity is the one brought about through the events in Palestine. There has been quite a tremendous leap forward.

It must be remembered that the human soul has evolved slowly and by degrees. Man's life today is such that stimuli come to him from the external world through the senses. Even a person like Helen Keller needed a stimulus from outside before any development was possible. The human being lives today in such a way that the whole development of the human soul is dependent upon stimuli received through the senses.

Man is obliged to depend upon the instrument of his brain for the forming of judgments and ideas. Man was not always like this. But there was a time in the life of the soul when he was not dependent upon these impressions from outside, when he possessed an old, dim, dreamlike clairvoyance. Back then, clairvoyant pictures welled up from within him, pictures which presented and gave expression to an outer reality but not the same kind of reality as we have around us today.

Everything around us today—plants, animals, air, water, clouds, mountains—none of this was seen by man at that time with sharp outlines, but as it were through a mist. With his dreamlike consciousness man looked to the realm immediately above him, the realm of the Angeloi. With still higher consciousness he looked up to the realm of the Archangeloi and to the realm of the Spirits of Personality. We today look at the mineral kingdom but in those days man looked right up to the Hierarchies, that he perceived in his dreamlike dim consciousness. Just as today he knows that he is composed of mineral substances, so, in those olden times, he knew: My soul has come down from the realm of the Spirits of Personality and has been formed out of the substances of the realms of Archangeloi and Angeloi. He looked up to what was above him—and beheld there his spiritual home. From thence he has descended to existence in the physical world and to perception of the physical outer world. First of all he lost his vision of the Spirits of Personality, and beheld the animal kingdom. Then he lost vision of the Archangeloi and beheld the plant kingdom. Then he lost vision of the Angeloi and beheld the mineral kingdom. But for a long time still, men were able at certain times to look upwards, knowing of the reality of these higher Beings. Only slowly and by degrees did their gaze come to be directed to the purely external world. The gate to the spiritual world was closed.

But this was not the only thing. For people who still looked into the spiritual world themselves, illness and health had quite different meanings than they have for us today. There were intermediate states of consciousness between waking and sleeping and when some illness befell a man, it was possible for him to evoke a state of consciousness in which he had clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world. In such clairvoyant and clairsentient states he was permeated through and through by the spiritual and this worked as a remedy, as a healing power. The sick person had to be completely permeated with the power of the spirit; this definitely had a healing effect on his sickness. Today, when man has come down into the physical world, the physical body has become overpoweringly strong and the soul has become weak compared to the physical body. Think of soft wax and wax that has hardened. It is difficult to make any impression upon hard wax, whereas soft wax is pliable. In olden times the physical body of man was pliable material that the soul was able to shape and mould.

When the soul connected itself with the Spiritual, it was able to mould the physical. Intense devotion to the Spiritual can help the Spiritual to be a healing force. In olden times, man was able to permeate himself with the Spiritual, not for the purpose of knowledge alone but for the purpose of healing. In those olden times men lived in communion with higher Spiritual Beings. When they had descended to the physical plane but were still in connection with the spiritual worlds, they could not ward off the harmful spiritual Beings. They could be permeated with evil spiritual powers, for example by elementary beings inhabiting the astral plane. A man could lend himself to the good spiritual influences but he was also exposed to evil spiritual beings. Today he is less subject to these evil demonic beings which in olden times worked with such strength in the more pliable material that men might be possessed by them. The reason for all this was because it was man's destiny to descend to the physical plane and gain self-consciousness. Man would not have been able to obtain real self-consciousness, if he would have been forever devoted to the spiritual world. he was then outside of himself. His “I” (Ego) had long been working upon his human nature. But it was only through the Christ Impulse that man could become fully conscious of the Ego and its purpose. The Christ Impulse was revealed, first of all, in reflection, in the lightning in which Jehovah appeared to Moses, just as the light of the Moon reflects the light of the Sun. Jehovah is nothing but a reflection of Christ. The first revelation of Christ is in reflection. We cannot understand the Gospel of St. John until we realise that the Christ Impulse is the essential, all-important factor in the human development of Ego-consciousness.

Man was destined to be drawn away from influences which stream into him without consciousness on his part. This made it possible for him to unfold Ego-Consciousness and prepare for the re-attainment of the old clairvoyance. But he should become free from the influences of demonic beings. The more power there is in his Ego, the better is he able to keep the influences of demons at bay. The healing from demons, from demonic possession, can only be understood in the light of this knowledge. A number of sick people were brought to Christ at the time of the day when Christ could work most strongly as a spiritual power. It was the spiritual light which was to work—not the physical sunlight (which is only the garment of the spiritual light). It was when the sun had set that the sick were brought to Christ. We must picture to ourselves how the healing actually took place. The people who came to Christ had the firm faith and conviction that the impulse which can drive away the demons was working through Him. If the expulsion of the demons had been achieved through some external means, the Christ would not have been working through the Ego. A man can only know Christ by developing his own inner strength. And Christ can work only when this strength comes to expression in the Ego of man.

All this shows us that in that significant moment of time, mankind was standing at a great turning-point. It was the last echoing of an ancient epoch and also the moment of the coming of a mighty impulse whereby men were led into a new age. Here man could look back and see: In earlier times man had been in much closer connection with the spiritual world. In states of ecstasy he could find the way to the spiritual world. But entry into the spiritual world now was to be through the Ego. This impulse was given in the mighty call of John the Baptist and through Christ Himself: ‘Change the disposition of your souls, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The link that connected you with the kingdom of Heaven must now be sought and found within you!’

To those who understood deeply, it could be said: There was once a time when human souls, rising above the Ego, came into a world of spirit and the spiritual was bestowed upon them for their healing. They became ‘rich in spirit’, possessors of the spirit. Then came a turning-point. Those who are beggars for the spirit are now summoned to enter the kingdom of heaven. Those who are beggars in the spirit can now become ‘blessed’—God-filled in their inmost being. Beggars for the spirit, those who yearn and long for the spirit—they will receive into themselves the kingdom of heaven.

Those who suffer, who mourn, they too will be ‘blessed’ when they receive the Christ Impulse. Through searching in their own Ego for the link with the spiritual world, they will be healed.

Those whose passions made them violent, could in earlier times be calmed when in states of ecstasy, they were permeated by the Spiritual. By finding the connection with the Christ within their Ego they will calm down the raging passions and wild urges.

The mission of the earth is to be fulfilled by those who quell their passions through the power of the Ego.

Those who suffer will cease to suffer if, in the Ego, they receive Christ. Those who receive Christ in the Ego, can be calmed, can be meek; and they will rule over the Earth.

The first verse of the Sermon on the Mount has to do with the physical body. The second verse has to do with the etheric body. The third verse has to do with the astral body.The fourth verse has to do with the Sentient Soul. Man's conscience should not apply only to the physical realm. Those who in the Sentient Soul hunger and thirst after righteousness can now be blessed.

What a man can become in the Intellectual or Mind Soul is expressed in the verse: Blessed are the merciful. What needs to happens for us to ascend from the Sentient Soul to the Intellectual or Mind Soul. The Ego, the ‘I’ ascends first. Man must develop himself so that he can feel himself as an Ego and every other human being as well. What lives in the soul needs to be passed from Ego to Ego; What passed from one human to another, subject and predicate, must be equal. In the first sentences of the Beatitudes the subject is different from the predicate. Now we find that in the sentence that relates to the Sentient Soul, the subject and the predicate are equal: ‘Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy or love.’

The Sermon on the Mount is a record unequalled in statement concerning the mighty transition inaugurated by Christ.

Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, had already lasted for 3,000 years. It began in the year 3,101 BC That is the year when the spiritual world began to darken, to be shut off from men. Prior to the year 3,101, men still had direct consciousness of the spiritual worlds. After the Kali Yuga had lasted for 3,101 years there came the impulse whereby man is led once again into the spiritual world. But how did this impulse came about?

This impulse was possible only because a God descended into the physical world. This was the initial impulse for the return to the Spiritual world. The evolution of humanity took a great forward jump because men were able henceforth, out of the Ego itself, to ascend again into the spiritual world. Humanity needed the Christ because it had risen to its “I”. The descent of Christ was necessary in order that the human Ego should not waste away through inertia and fall out of the onward stream of evolution. For a very considerable time there were only a few men who knew that Christ had lived in Palestine. Tacitus, for example, knew very little of it. About 100 years later, people spoke of a sect living in a poor quarter of Rome and teaching of Jesus. This, the mightiest of all impulses, the Christ Impulse, was practically unknown. It might have remained unknown altogether but in fact it did not. The Christ Impulse was received into humanity. And when a similar impulse is given mankind must be in a position not to let such a jump happen in evolution without noticing it.

In 1899 the Dark Age, Kali Yuga, came to an end, having lasted for 5,000 years. Humanity moves in an ascending line. We are living today at the beginning of an epoch when quite new forces and faculties will develop in man. Before the first half of the century has run its course, a number of people, simply through natural development, will possess unusual faculties. From the end of Kali Yuga, from the year 1899 onwards, a certain faculty of etheric sight unfolds in mankind, and this will have developed in a number of people between 1930 and 1940. There will then be two possibilities. Mankind may sink more deeply still into the morass of materialism; everything may be flooded by materialism. This awakening of etheric sight may be ignored, just as the Christ Event was ignored. But if men do not experience this awakening, they will be submerged in the materialistic morass.

Or, in the course of 2,500 years a sufficiently large number of human beings will develop etheric sight. This is the beginning of the clairvoyance that man will again achieve and add to his Ego consciousness. Something else will also happen. When a number of human beings through Spiritual Science have developed an understanding for it, then those will be able to convince themselves of the truth of the Christ Event exactly as Paul became convinced of it at Damascus. Between 1930 and 1940 there will be a small number of people who will develop this capability, and then during a period of 2500 years, when more and more people have developed etheric sight they will be able to behold Christ in an etheric body. But they will only be able to get there through understanding and feeling obtained by way of Spiritual Science. This is Christ's new descent to the men of Earth. In reality, however, it is an ascent, for Christ will never again incarnate in the flesh. Those people who have developed up to Him, will be able to behold the Christ in the etheric body and will know from direct experience that the Christ lives.

For those who want to recognise the Christ, he will reappear in his etheric body. They will know about the Christ through beholding him. Through soul-development we will begin to understand this most important event for mankind of our time. If Spiritual Science did not develop understanding in men, this event might pass by unheeded. Spiritual Science should prepare us in such a way that we can make this greatest Event since the close of Kali Yuga bear fruit in mankind. No matter what their activities may be, those men will be of importance who have prepared themselves to see this etheric happening. But this happening will also be of importance to those who are living between death and rebirth. It has its effects in the spiritual worlds too, but only through preparation here on Earth. Here on Earth we must prepare for this event and develop the organs for perceiving it.

We ourselves now proclaim the new Christ Event of the 20th century. Later on it will be proclaimed as an Event whose effects work on for the whole of humanity. This will be announced in the near future. It will become a testing stone for Theosophy. But it may be that materialism will be introduced even into the theosophical conception of the new Christ Event. Only a materialistic consciousness could imagine that Christ could come again in the flesh. When the Event takes place it will be obvious whether or not Theosophy has understood it. In the first half of the 20th century, false Messiahs will assert themselves here and there.

In our age it would be bad, if human beings could not rise themselves up to the spiritual view, that the Christ will reappear in its etheric form. No progress for humanity would exist if the Christ would reappear in the flesh.

Mankind develops in order to be able to recognise the Messiah with higher faculties. The test will be whether Theosophy has enabled men to understand this Event aright, has led them to the Spiritual in such a way that they can understand the Return of Christ in its true form. In this century, Christ will come again for a number of men, who will be forerunners, just as he once came to Paul at Damascus.

Unbelief becomes more and more widespread as the result of literary criticism of the original records. The more the historical evidences lose importance for men, the more will the faculty ripen through which the Christ can be seen. The real Christ will be revealed to those men who through Spiritual Science can unfold the understanding, the vision of the true Return of Christ.

The purpose of these lectures is to give a survey of findings of spiritual-scientific research which enable us to grapple with the most significant riddles of human life—as far as this is possible within the limits to which understanding of the higher worlds is subject in our time. We shall start today from more familiar phenomena and then endeavour to reach higher and higher spheres of existence, to penetrate into deeply hidden riddles of man's life. We shall not start from any concepts or ideas so firmly established as to resemble dogmas, but refer, quite simply at first, to matters which everybody will feel to be connected with everyday life.

All Spiritual Science is based upon the assumption that underlying the world normally known to us, there is another—the spiritual world. It is in this spiritual world underlying the world of the senses, and in a certain respect also the world of soul, that we have to look for the actual causes and conditions of what takes place in those other worlds.

It will certainly be known to everyone here that there are definite methods which a man may apply to his life of soul and which enable him to awaken certain inner faculties slumbering in normal daily life, so that he is finally able to experience the moment of Initiation. He then has around him a new world, the world of spiritual causes and conditions underlying the world of the senses and the world of soul. It is as when, after an operation, a man hitherto blind finds around him the world of colours and light. In normal life today man is shut off from this world of spiritual realities and beings, and it is upon this world that we shall endeavour to shed light in these lectures.

On two sides—the outer and the inner sides as we may call them—man is shut off from the spiritual world. When he directs his gaze to the outer world, he perceives in the first place what is there presented to his senses. He sees colours and light, hears sounds, is aware of warmth and cold, smells, tastes, and so on. This is the world immediately around him. In contemplating this world we become aware, to begin with, of a kind of boundary. Through direct perception, direct experience, man is unable today to look behind the boundary presented to him by colours and light, sounds, scents and so forth. A trivial illustration will make this clear. Suppose we are looking at a surface painted blue. Under ordinary conditions, of course, we cannot see what is behind this surface. A shallow thinker might object that it is only a matter of looking behind the surface! But this is not so in respect of the world outspread around us, for it is precisely by what we perceive that an outer spiritual world is concealed from us and at most we can feel that colour and light, warmth, cold, and so on, are external manifestations of a world lying behind. But we cannot, at a given moment, penetrate through the colours, lights and sounds, and experience what lies behind them. We have to experience the whole outer spiritual world through these manifestations. But after a little reflection we shall be able, consistently with the most elementary logic, to say: Even if modern physics or other branches of science declare that behind the colours there is vibrating etheric substance, it soon becomes obvious that what is thus assumed to lie behind the colours is something added by thought. Nobody can actually perceive what physics declares to be vibrations, movements, of which colour is merely an effect; nor can anybody say with certainty whether there is reality in what is alleged to lie behind the sense-impressions. It is, at first, mere conjecture. The external world of the senses is spread out before us like a tapestry and we have the feeling that behind this tapestry there is something into which our faculty of perception cannot penetrate.

There, then, is the first boundary. We find the second when we look into our own being. Within ourselves we find a world of joy and sorrow, of happiness and suffering, of passions, impulses, desires, and so forth-in brief, everything that we call our life of soul. We usually sum this up by saying: ‘I feel this pleasure or that pain; I have these impulses, desires, or passions.’ But surely we also have the feeling that behind this inner life of soul something is hidden, something that is concealed by our soul-experiences just as something belonging to the outer world is concealed by our sense-perceptions. For who can fail to recognise that when we wake in the morning, joy, sorrow, happiness, suffering and other such experiences, rise up as if out of an unknown realm, and that in a certain respect man is given up to them? And is there anyone who, if he reviews his whole life of soul, could deny that there must be within him something deeper, something at first hidden from himself, out of which his joy, suffering, happiness, grief, and all his soul-experiences, stream forth—and that these, no less than the external sense-perceptions, must be manifestations of an unknown world?

And now let us ask: If two such boundaries are actually there, or may at least be presumed to be there, have we not, as human beings, certain possibilities of penetrating through them? Is there something in a man's experiences which enables him to break through this tapestry of sense-perceptions, just as he would break through a membrane covering something lying behind it? And is there something that leads into greater depths of our inner nature, behind our sufferings, behind our joys, behind our passions? Are we able to make a further move into the outer world and also into the inner world?

There are two experiences which actually enable us to break through the film covering the outer world and the resistance in the inner world. Something like a membrane is pierced and we are able to enter the world hidden behind the veil of the sense-perceptions. This world can reveal itself to us when in the course of certain normal processes of life there come entirely new experiences-experiences giving rise to the feeling that external perceptions through the senses are disappearing, that the tapestry of the outer world is being broken through; then we may say that we are penetrating a little way into the world lying behind sense-perceptions.

This experience is one that is decidedly not beneficial for human life as a whole; it is the state usually known as ecstasy—when this term is used in the original sense. It causes a man momentarily to become oblivious to the impressions of the sense-world, so that for a time he is not aware of the colours, sounds, scents, and so forth, around him and is insensitive to ordinary sense-impressions. Under certain circumstances this experience of ecstasy can lead a man to a point where he actually has new experiences, experiences by no means of everyday occurrence. Let it again be emphasised that ecstasy in this form should not be regarded as a desirable state; it is being described here simply as a condition that is possible. The not unusual state of being “out of oneself” as the saying goes, should not be called ecstasy. In one of two possible conditions a man becomes impervious to the impressions conveyed by the senses; he simply falls into a swoon in which, instead of sense-impressions, black darkness spreads around him. For a normal man that is really the safer condition of the two.

There is also a form of ecstasy in which a man is not only surrounded by dense darkness, but this darkness becomes filled with a world hitherto quite unknown to him. Do not say at once that this may be a world of illusion, of deception ... or, if you like, let it stand at that for the moment ... we will not assume that this world has any real meaning, but call it a world of apparitions, of phantasms. The actual point here is that what is seen may indeed be a world—whether of pictures or illusions—which has not previously been known. A man must then ask himself: ‘Am I able, with all my capacities, to construct such a world for myself out of my ordinary consciousness?’ If this world of pictures is such that he can say to himself: ‘I am incapable of constructing such a world of pictures out of my own experiences’—then obviously the pictures must come to him from somewhere. We will decide later whether this world has been magically conjured up before him as delusion, or whether it is reality. The point is that there are states in which a man sees worlds hitherto unknown to him.

Now this state of ecstasy is bound up with a quite special drawback for normal human beings. It is evident from the experience itself that this ecstatic condition can be induced by natural means only if what the man in question calls his Ego, his strong, inner self, through which he holds all his separate experiences together, is, as it were, extinguished. His Ego is entirely suppressed; it is as though he were outside himself, poured out into the new world which fills the darkness around him. Countless human beings have already had the experience I am describing, or at least are capable of having it.—More will be said about this in later lectures.

There are two aspects to be noted in connection with this experience of ecstasy. The one is that the actual sense-impressions vanish, also the experiences a man has when he feels and can say: ‘I see that colour, I hear these sounds,’ and so on. In the state of ecstasy he is never aware of his Ego, he does not distinguish himself from the objects around him. Fundamentally speaking, it is only the Ego that can distinguish itself from surrounding objects. Therefore in ecstasy a man cannot distinguish whether he is having to do with mirage or reality—for on that the Ego alone can decide.

In ecstasy there is a loss or at least a considerable diminution of Ego-consciousness and a fading of sense-perception; these two experiences run parallel. The tapestry of the sense-world seems to crumble, to dissolve it is as if the Ego—which otherwise seems to encounter a barrier constituted by the tapestry of the sense-world—were flowing right through the sense-perceptions and living in a world of pictures which presents something entirely new. In the state of ecstasy a man becomes aware of beings and happenings hitherto unknown to him, which he finds nowhere in the physical world, no matter what comparisons he makes. The essential point is that he experiences something entirely new.

Something happens in ecstasy that is like a breaking through of the external boundaries around man. Whether this new world is illusion or reality will become evident at a later stage.

Let us now ask ourselves whether we are also able to get behind our inner world, behind the world of our passions, impulses and desires, of our joys and sufferings, sorrows, and so on. This too is possible. Again, there are experiences which lead out beyond the realm of ordinary soul-life, if we deepen this soul-life inwardly. This is the path taken by many of those who are called mystics. In this process of mystical deepening a man first turns his attention away from the world of the senses and concentrates it upon his own inner experiences. Mystics who resolve not to enquire into the external causes of their interests, their sympathies and antipathies, their sorrows, joys, and so forth, but who are attentive only to the experiences ebbing and flowing in their souls, penetrate even more deeply into their soul-life and have quite definite experiences, differing from those ordinarily known.

Again I am describing a condition known and accessible to countless human beings. I am speaking, to begin with, of experiences that arise when normal conditions have been transcended to a very slight degree only. The essence of such experiences is that the mystic who sinks more and more deeply into himself transforms certain feelings into something quite different. If, for example, a normal man—one who is utterly alien to any kind of mystical experience—suffers a painful blow from another man, his resentment will be directed against him. That is the natural reaction. But one who practices mystical deepening will have a quite different feeling. Such a man feels: You would never have had to suffer this blow if at some time you had not brought it upon yourself. Otherwise this man would not have crossed your path. You cannot therefore justifiably turn your resentment against one who was brought into contact with you through happenings in the world in order to give you the blow you have deserved.—Such persons, if they deepen their different experiences, acquire a certain feeling about their soul-life as a whole. They say to themselves: ‘I have known much grief, much suffering, but at some time or other I was myself the cause of it. I must have done certain things, even though I cannot remember them. If I have not deserved these sufferings in my present life, then obviously there must have been another life when I did the things for which I am now making compensation.’

Through this inner deepening of experience the soul changes its former attitude, focuses more upon itself, seeks within itself what it previously sought in the outer world. This is obviously the case when someone says to himself: ‘The man who gave me the blow was led to me precisely because I myself was the cause of it.’ Such people pay more and more attention to their own inner nature, to their own inner life. In other words, just as an individual in a state of ecstasy looks through the outer veil of sense-perceptions into a world of beings and realities hitherto unknown to him, so does the mystic penetrate below his ordinary Ego. It is the ordinary Ego that rebels against the blow which comes from outside; but the mystic penetrates to what is below this Ego, to something that actually caused the blow. In this way the mystic reaches a stage where he gradually loses sight altogether of the outer world. Little by little, any concept of the outer world vanishes and his own Ego expands as it were into a whole world. But just as we will not decide at the moment whether the world revealed in ecstasy is mirage, reality or phantasy, neither will we decide whether what the mystic feels as compared with the ordinary life of soul is reality or whether it is he himself who is the cause of his sorrow and suffering. It may all be so much dreaming, but it is nevertheless an experience that may actually come to a man. The point of importance is that on two sides—outwards and inwards—he penetrates into a world hitherto unknown to him.

If we now reflect that in a condition of ecstasy a man loses grasp of his Ego, we shall realise that this is not a state to be striven for by one who is leading an ordinary life, for the possibility of achieving something in the world, our whole power of orientation in the world, depends upon the fact that in our Ego we have a firm centre of our being. If ecstasy deprives us of the possibility of experiencing the Ego, then for the time being we have lost our very selves. And on the other side, when the mystic attributes everything to the Ego, makes himself the culprit for whatever he has to experience, this has the detrimental effect of making him look within himself for the ultimate cause of everything that happens in the world. But thereby he loses the faculty of healthy orientation in life, burdens himself with guilt and is unable to establish any right relationship with the outer world.

Thus in both directions, in ordinary ecstasy and in ordinary mystical experience, the power of orientation in the world is lost. It is therefore a good thing that man encounters barriers in two directions. If he brings his Ego to expression in the outward direction, he encounters the barrier of sense-perceptions; they do not let him through to what lies behind the veil of the sense-world and that is beneficial for him because he is normally able to keep full possession of his Ego. And in the other direction the inner experiences in the life of soul do not let him through below the Ego, below those feelings which lead to the faculty of orientation. He is enclosed between two barriers in the outer world and in the inner world of soul and in normal circumstances cannot penetrate beyond the point where orientation in life is possible for him.

In what has been described a comparison has been made between the normal state of life and the abnormal states of ecstasy and uncontrolled mystical experience. Ecstasy and mystical experience are abnormal states, but in everyday life there is something which helps us to be aware of the barriers referred to very much more clearly-namely, the alternating states of waking and sleeping through which we pass within 24 hours.

What is it that we do in sleep? In sleep we do exactly the same, in a certain respect, as we do in the abnormal state of ecstasy described above. The ‘inner man’ in us spreads into the outer world. That is what actually happens. Just as in ecstasy we pour out our Ego, lose hold of our Ego, in sleep we lose not only our Ego-consciousness but we lose even more—which is beneficial. In ecstasy we lose only our Ego-consciousness, but still have around us a world of hitherto unknown pictures, a world of spiritual realities and beings. In sleep there is no such world around us, for everything in the way of perception has gone. Thus sleep differs from ecstasy in this respect: in sleep, together with the extinction of the Ego, a man's faculty of perception-whether physical or spiritual-is also extinguished. Whereas in ecstasy the Ego alone is extinguished, in sleep the faculty of perception and the consciousness too, are obliterated. Man has not only poured his Ego into the world, but he has also surrendered his consciousness to this world. What remains behind of man during sleep is what there is in him apart from the Ego and apart from consciousness. In the normal sleeping man we have before us a being in the physical world who has discarded both his consciousness and his Ego. And whither has the consciousness, whither has the Ego, gone? Having had an explanation of the state of ecstasy, we are able to answer this question too. In the state of ecstasy we have around us a world of spiritual realities and spiritual beings. But if we also relinquish consciousness, then at that same moment dense darkness surrounds us—we sleep. Thus in sleep, as in ecstasy, we have surrendered the Ego, and further—this is the characteristic of sleep—the bearer of our consciousness and its manifestations. This is our astral body; it is poured out into the world of spiritual beings and facts revealed in the state of ecstasy. We may therefore say that man's sleep is a kind of ecstasy—a condition in which he is outside his body not merely in respect of his Ego, but also in respect of his consciousness. In the state of ecstasy, the Ego, which is one member of the human being, has been abandoned; and in sleep another member too is abandoned, for the astral body goes out of the physical body as well, and with this departure of the astral body the possibility of consciousness is eliminated.

We have, then, to picture man in sleep as consisting on the one side of the members still lying in the bed—the physical body and the etheric body—and on the other side, of the members outside the sleeper which have been given over to a world that is to begin with an unknown realm; these members are the Ego, which in ecstasy is also surrendered, and a second member as well, which in ecstasy is not surrendered: the astral body.

Sleep represents a kind of division of man's being. Consciousness and Ego separate from the outer sheaths and what happens in sleep is that man passes into a state in which he no longer knows anything about the experiences of waking life, in which he has no consciousness at all of what outer impressions have brought to him. His inner self is given over to a world of which he has no consciousness, of which he knows nothing. Now for a certain reason of which we shall hear a great deal, this world to which man's inner self is given over, into which his Ego and his astral body have passed and in which he has forgotten all the impressions of waking life, is called the Macrocosm, the Great World. While he is asleep man is given over to the Macrocosm, poured out into the Macrocosm.

During ecstasy he is likewise given over to the Macrocosm, but then he knows something of it. It is characteristic of ecstasy that a man experiences something—whether pictures or realities—of what is spread around him in a vast domain of space in which he believes himself lost. He experiences something like a loss of his Ego but as though he were in a realm hitherto unknown to him. This identification with a world which differs from that of everyday life when we feel, subject only to our bodies, justifies us from the outset in speaking of a Macrocosm, a Great World—in contrast to the ‘little world’ of our ordinary waking life, when we feel ourselves enclosed within our skin. That is only the most superficial view of the matter. In the state of ecstasy we have grown into the Macrocosm, where we see fantastic forms, fantastic because there is no resemblance with anything in the physical world. We cannot distinguish ourselves from them. We feel our whole being as it were expanded into the Macrocosm. That is what happens in ecstasy. With this conception of the state of ecstasy we are able—by analogy—it least-to form an idea of why we lose hold of the Ego in that state.

Let us picture the Ego of man as a drop of coloured liquid. Assuming that we had a very tiny vessel just able to contain this drop, the drop would be visible by its colour. But if the drop were put in a large vessel, let us say in a basin of water, the drop would no longer be perceptible. Apply this analogy to the Ego which in the state of ecstasy expands over the Macrocosm, and you will be able to conceive that the Ego feels itself becoming weaker and weaker as it expands. When the Ego spreads over the Macrocosm, it loses the faculty of self-awareness, rather as a drop loses its identity in a large vessel of water. So we can understand that when man surrenders himself to the Macrocosm, the Ego is lost. It is still there, only being outpoured in the Macrocosm it knows nothing of itself.

But in sleep there is another factor of importance. As long as a man has consciousness, he acts. In the state of ecstasy he has a kind of consciousness, but not the guiding Ego. He does not control his actions; he surrenders himself entirely to impressions made upon him. It is an essential feature of ecstasy that the man concerned is actually capable of actions. Watched from outside, however, it is as though he had entirely changed. It is really not he himself who is acting; he acts as if under quite different influences. For many beings appear and exert influence upon him. There lies the danger of ecstasy. Because what man sees is a multiplicity, he comes under the control now of one being, now of another, and seems to be disintegrating. This is the danger of the state of ecstasy. Man is indeed given over to a spiritual world but it is a world which tears him asunder inwardly.

If we think of sleep, we must admit that the world we there enter has a certain reality. The existence of a world can be denied only as long as no effects of it are observed. If it is insisted that there is someone behind a wall, this can be denied as long as no knocking can be heard; if there is knocking, commonsense can no longer deny it. When effects of a world are perceived it is not possible to regard that world as pure fancy.

Are there, then, any perceptible effects of the world which we see in ecstasy but not in normal sleep? Of the effects of the world in which we are during sleep we can all convince ourselves when we wake in the morning. Our condition then is different from what it was the previous evening. In the evening we are tired, our forces are exhausted and must be replenished; but in the morning we wake with fresh forces which have been gathered during sleep. When with his Ego and astral body a man is given up to another world, he draws from that world-which in ecstasy is perceived but in normal sleep is obliterated-the forces he needs for the life of day. How this actually happens need not concern us now; what is important is that this world brings us forces which banish fatigue. The world out of which stream forces which get rid of fatigue is the same as the world we see in ecstasy. Every morning we become aware of the effects of the world we perceive in ecstasy but not in sleep. When there is a world which produces effects we can no longer speak of a non-reality.

Out of the same world into which we gaze in the state of ecstasy, and which in sleep is obliterated, we draw the forces strengthening us for the life of day. We do this under quite special circumstances. During this process of drawing forces from that spiritual world we do not perceive ourselves. The essential feature of sleep is that we achieve something but have no awareness of ourselves during this activity. If we had any such awareness the process would be carried out far less efficiently than it is when we are not conscious of it. In daily life too there are matters where we do well to say to many a man: ‘Hands off!’ Everything would go wrong if they interfered with it. If a man were to play a part in this difficult operation of restoring the forces exhausted during the previous day, he would ruin everything because he is not yet capable of being a conscious participant. It is providential that consciousness of his own existence is snatched away from man at the moment when he might do harm to his own development.

Thus through forgetting his own existence on going to sleep man passes out into the Macrocosm. Every night he passes over from his microcosmic existence into the Macrocosm and becomes one with the latter inasmuch as he pours into it his Ego and his astral body. But because in the present course of his life he is capable of working only in the world of waking life, his consciousness ceases the moment he passes into the Macrocosm. That is why it has always been said in occult science that between life in the Microcosm and in the Macrocosm lies the stream of forgetfulness. On this stream of forgetfulness man passes into the Great World, when on going to sleep he passes out of the Microcosm into the Macrocosm. So we can say that during every period of sleep, man surrenders two members of his being—the astral body and the Ego—to the Macrocosm.

And now let us think of the moment of waking. At the moment of waking a man begins again to feel pleasure, pain, and whatever urges and desires he has recently experienced. That is the first experience. The second experience is that his Ego-consciousness returns. Out of the vague darkness of sleep the soul-experiences and the Ego re-emerge. We have therefore to say that if man consisted only of those members which remained lying in bed through the night, he would not, on waking, be able to be aware of past experiences in the life of soul such as pleasure, suffering and so on, for what has been lying there is in the truest sense in the same condition as a plant. It has no soul-experiences. But neither has the ‘inner man’ during sleep, although this inner man is the bearer of such experiences. From this we can realise that in ordinary life, before suffering, pleasure, sympathy, antipathy, and so forth, can actually be experienced, the astral body must dive down into the sheaths of man which remain lying in bed; otherwise he cannot become aware of any such experiences. We can therefore say: The part of our being—consisting of astral body and Ego—which at night is poured out into the Macrocosm and gives rise to our inner experiences, becomes perceptible to us in normal life only through the fact that on waking we descend into the sheaths which have remained lying in bed.

What lies there is again twofold. One part of it is what we experience on waking as our inner life. In the Macrocosm during sleep we cannot be conscious of the play of our feelings, or, in brief, of our soul-experiences. But when on waking we penetrate once again into the members of our being which have remained lying in the bed, we can experience not only our inner feelings but also the outer world of sense-impressions. We perceive the red of the rose; delight in the rose is an inner experience; perception of the red colour is an outer experience. Therefore what is lying there in bed must be twofold: one part must mirror to us what we experience inwardly, and the other part perceives an outer world. If there were only the one without the other, we should simply experience on waking either an inner world alone or an external world alone. A panorama of outer; impressions would be before us and we should not feel pleasure or pain; or conversely, we should feel only pleasure and pain and have no perception of anything in the external world. We dive down on waking, not into a unity, but into a duality. In sleep, a duality of being has poured into the Macrocosm, and on waking we dive down into the Microcosm, another duality. What enables us to experience an outer picture of the sense-world is the physical body, and what enables us in waking life to have an inner life of soul, is the etheric body. If, on waking, we were to penetrate into the physical body only, we should confront outer pictures, but we should remain inwardly empty, cold and apathetic, having no interest in anything around us or presented in the pictures. If we were to penetrate into the etheric body only, we should have no outer world, but only a world of feelings, surging up and ebbing away. And so on waking we enter a twofold being—we enter into the etheric body which acts as a mirror of the inner world, and into the physical body, the medium for the impressions of the outer world of the senses.

Actual experiences therefore justify us in speaking of man as a fourfold being. Two of his members—Ego and astral body—belong, during sleep, to the Macrocosm. In waking life the Ego and astral body belong to the Microcosm that is enclosed within the skin. This ‘little world’ is the medium for everything we have before us in the normal waking state, for it is the physical body which enables us to have an external world before us, and the etheric body which enables us to have an inner life.

Thus man lives alternately in the Microcosm and in the Macrocosm. Every morning he enters into the Microcosm. The fact that in sleep he is poured out, like a drop in a large vessel of water, into the Macrocosm, means that at the moment of passing out of the Microcosm into the Macrocosm, he must pass through the stream of forgetfulness.

By what means, then, can man, provided he deepens himself inwardly, to a certain extent induce those conditions that were described at the beginning of the lecture? In ecstasy, the Ego is poured into the Macrocosm, while the astral body has remained in the Microcosm. In what does the mystical state consist? Our life by day in the physical and etheric bodies, in the Microcosm, is remarkable in the extreme. We do not actually descend into these bodies in such a way that we become aware of their inner nature. These two sheaths make possible our life of soul and our sense-perceptions. Why is it that on waking we become aware of our life of soul? It is because the etheric body does not allow us actually to look within it, any more than a mirror allows us to see what is behind it and for that very reason enables us to see ourselves in it. The etheric bodies mirrors our soul-life back to us; and because it does so, it appears to us as if it were the actual cause of our soul-life. The etheric body itself, however, proves to be impenetrable. We do not penetrate into it, but it throws back to us an image of our life of soul. That is its peculiarity. The mystic, however, through intensifying the life of soul, succeeds in penetrating to a certain extent into the etheric body; he sees more than the mirrored image. By working his way into this part of the Microcosm he experiences within himself what in the normal state man experiences poured over the outer world. Thus the mystic, through inner deepening, penetrates to some extent into his etheric body; he penetrates below that threshold where the soul-life is in other circumstances reflected in joy, suffering, and so on, into the interior of the etheric body. What the mystic experiences in passing the threshold are processes in his own etheric body. He then experiences something that is somewhat comparable with the loss of the Ego in the state of ecstasy. In the latter case the Ego becomes evanescent, as it were, having been poured into the Macrocosm, and in mystical experience the Ego is ‘densified.’ The mystic becomes aware of this through the fact that the principle adopted by the ordinary Ego of acting in accordance with the brain-bound intelligence and the dictates of the senses, is ignored, and the impulses for his actions arise from inner feelings issuing directly from his etheric body and not, as in the case of other people, merely reflected by it. The intensely strong inner experiences of the mystic are due to the fact that he penetrates right into his own etheric body.

Whereas in the state of ecstasy a man expands his being into the Macrocosm, the mystic compresses himself within the Microcosm. Both experiences, whether that of perceiving in ecstasy certain happenings and beings in the Macrocosm, or that of undergoing unusual inner experiences as a mystic, are related to each other, and this relation may be characterised quite simply in the following way. The world we see with our eyes and hear with our ears arouses in us certain feelings of pleasure, pain, and so on. We feel that in normal life all this is interconnected. The joy in the outer world felt by one person may be more intense than that felt by another, but these are differences of degree only. The intense sufferings and raptures of the mystic are vastly different in quality. There are also great differences in quality between what the eyes see and the ears hear and what is experienced by a person in ecstasy, when he is given over to a world that is not like the world of the senses. But if we could have from someone in ecstasy a description of his raptures and torments, we should be able to say that the person in ecstasy may derive from his vision of beings and events experiences such as those of the mystic. And if, on the other hand, we were to hear the mystic describing his emotions and feelings, we should say that something of the kind may equally well be experienced in ecstasy.

The world of the mystic is a real world. Similarly the beings encountered in the state of ecstasy are subjectively real, in the sense that they are actually seen. Whether the experiences are illusions or realities is at the moment beside the point. The person in question sees a world that is different from the sense-world; the mystic experiences joys, emotions and torments which are not comparable with anything known in everyday life. The mystic does not, however, see the world that is revealed to one in the state of ecstasy, and the latter has no experience of the world of the mystic. Both worlds are independent of each other.—It is a strange relationship, but an explanation of the world of the one may be found in the light of the experiences of the other. If a normal person were actually to experience the world described by one in the state of ecstasy, the shattering effect would be comparable with the intensity of the experiences undergone by the mystic.

We have thus pointed to a certain connection between the worlds of mystical and ecstatic experience. Both inwardly and outwardly, man encounters the world of the spirit.

What has been described today will seem to many of you to be airy hypothesis, but we shall try in the next lectures to answer the questions: To what extent are we able to penetrate into a real world by working our way through the tapestry of the outer world of sense? How far is it possible to get beyond the world experienced by a man in the state of ecstasy and penetrate into a real outer world, and to penetrate below the inner world of the mystic into a realm that lies below the human Ego but in which there is also reality? The next lectures will speak in greater and greater detail of the paths leading into the spiritual world through the Macrocosm and through the Microcosm.

The relation between man's waking and sleeping states has been broadly described, and it was said that he draws from the latter the forces he needs during waking life in order to sustain his life of soul. These things are much more complicated than is generally supposed and today, as the result of spiritual research, there will be something more detailed to say about the difference between man's waking life and the state of sleep. Let me mention in parenthesis that there is no need to speak of all the hypotheses, some more interesting than others, that are advanced by present-day physiology in order to explain the difference between the two states. It would be easy to speak of these theories but this would only divert us from genuinely spiritual-scientific study of the two states. All that need be said is that modern science concerns itself only with the part of man which, during sleep, remains behind in the physical world. The fact that the Ego and astral body emerge from the physical and etheric bodies when man goes to sleep can be reality only to spiritual investigation, to the eyes of a seer. The whole process is completely foreign to modern physical science—which need not, however, be severely criticised on that account; in a certain respect it is justified in asserting a one-sided point of view. Man's Ego and astral body are in a spiritual world while he is asleep and in the physical world when he wakes and comes down into the physical and etheric bodies.

Let us now consider the sleeping human being. Quite naturally, normal human consciousness regards sleep as an undifferentiated state that is not a subject for further investigation. The question is rarely asked whether, during the time man spends at night in a spiritual world, an influence on his body-free soul is exerted by several forces, or by a single force only which permeates the spiritual world. Are we able to distinguish various forces to which he is exposed in that world during sleep? Yes, several quite different influences can be distinguished. The influences do not, of course, primarily affect the members that remain lying in bed, but they affect man as a being of soul when his astral body and Ego have emerged from his physical and etheric bodies.

By considering certain familiar experiences and facts we will now explore the different influences which are exerted upon the sleeping human being. A man has only to be more attentive to what happens to him when he goes to sleep and he will notice how the inner activity through which, during the day, he moves his limbs and brings his body into movement with the help of his soul, begins to flag. Anyone who practises a little self-observation at the time when he is about to go to sleep will feel that he can now no longer exercise the same control over his body. A kind of lethargy begins to overpower him. First of all he will feel incapable of directing the movement of his limbs by the will; control of speech is then lost. Then he feels that the possibility of entering into any connection with the outer world is slipping away from him, and all the impressions of the day gradually disappear. What disappears first is the ability to use the limbs and especially the instruments of speech, then the faculties of taste and smell, and finally of hearing. In this gradual cessation of the inner activity of the soul, man experiences the emergence from his bodily sheaths.

In saying this we have already indicated the first influence that is exerted upon man as a preliminary to sleep; it is the influence that drives him out of his physical and etheric bodies. Anyone who practises self-observation will notice how a power seems to be overcoming him, for in normal life he does not order himself to go to sleep, to stop speaking, tasting, hearing, and so forth. A power is now asserting itself in him. This is the first of the influences to be exerted from the world into which man passes at night; it is the influence which drives him out of his physical and etheric bodies. But if this were the only influence to be exerted, the outcome would be absolutely calm, unbroken sleep. This is of course known in normal life; it is the state induced by the first influence connected with sleep. But there are other kinds of sleep.

We all know the state of dream, when chaotic or clear pictures obtrude themselves into sleep. Were only the first influence at work, the influence that draws man into a spiritual world, sleep unbroken by any dream would be the result; but another influence becomes evident when sleep is broken by dreams. Two influences can be distinguished: the one extinguishes consciousness inasmuch as it drives us out of our bodily sheaths, and the second conjures the world of dreams before the soul, thrusts this dream-world into our sleep.

But some people have yet a third kind of sleep. Although this third kind occurs only rarely, everyone knows that it does occur; it is when a man begins to talk or act in sleep without the consciousness that is his in waking life. Usually he knows nothing the next day of the impulses which have driven him to such actions during sleep. The condition can be enhanced to the point of what is usually called sleepwalking. While he is walking in his sleep a man may also have certain dreams; but it is not so in the majority of cases; in a certain sense he acts like an automaton, impelled by obscure urges of which he need not have even the consciousness of dream. Through this third influence he enters into contact with the outer world as he does by day, only now he is unconscious. Such actions in sleep are therefore subject to a third influence.

Three influences, then, to which the human being is exposed during sleep can be clearly distinguished; they are always present, and spiritual investigation confirms this. In the great majority of people, however, the first influence predominates; most of their sleep is unbroken by dreams. The second influence, giving rise to the state of dream, takes effects at intervals in nearly everybody. But in by far the greater number of people these two states are so predominant that speaking and acting during sleep rarely occur. The influence that takes effect in a sleep-walker is present in every human being but in a sleep-walker this third influence is so strong in comparison with the other two that it gets the upper hand. Nevertheless every human being is liable to be exposed to all three influences.

These three influences have always been recognised in Spiritual Science as distinct from each other. In man's soul-life there are three domains, the first being mainly subject to the first influence, the second more to the second influence and the third more to the third influence. The human soul has a threefold nature, and it can be subject to influences of three distinct kinds. The part of the soul that is subject to the first influence which drives the soul out of the bodily sheaths, is known in Spiritual Science as the Sentient Soul; the part affected by the second influence which drives the pictures of dream into man's life of soul during sleep is known as the Intellectual or Mind-Soul; the third part, which in the case of most people does not assert its unique character during sleep because the other two influences predominate, is called the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul. Thus three influences are to be distinguished during the state of sleep; the three members of the soul which are subject to these three influences, are: Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul, Consciousness-or Spiritual Soul. When man is transported by one force into dreamless sleep, an influence from the world into which he passes is being exerted on his Sentient Soul; when his sleep is pervaded by dream-pictures, an influence is being exerted on his Intellectual or Mind-Soul; when he begins to speak or to act in his sleep, an influence is being exerted upon his Consciousness-Soul.

So far, however, we have considered only one aspect of man's life of soul during sleep. We must now describe the aspect of soul-life that is the opposite of the sleeping state. Let us think of a man who is returning from sleep to waking life in the physical world. What is happening to him when he wakes? At night a certain force is able to drive him out of his physical and etheric bodies because he succumbs to it. In later stages of sleep he succumbs to the other two influences—those that are exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul. But when these influences have been exerted, the man is different; he undergoes a change during sleep. The evidence of the change is that at night he was fatigued but in the morning has become able to cope with his life in the physical world. What has happened to him during sleep has made this possible.

The same influence which makes itself felt in certain abnormal conditions in the dream-world is present through the whole of sleep, even when there are no dreams. The third influence, which takes effect in a sleep-walker but in other cases does not operate, is the one that is exerted on the Consciousness-Soul. When the influences on the Mind-Soul and Consciousness-Soul have taken effect, man is strengthened and energised; he has drawn from the spiritual world the forces he needs for his life during the next day in order to recognise and enjoy the physical world. It is primarily the influences exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul which strengthen man during sleep. But when he is thus strengthened, the same influence which drove him out of his physical and etheric bodies brings him back again into them when he wakes in the morning. The same influence is being exerted then in the opposite direction, and it is exerted on the Sentient Soul. Everything connected with the Sentient Soul has become exhausted by the previous evening. But in the morning, when we are fresh again, we take renewed interest in the impressions of the physical world—colours, lights, objects—which will become causes of interest, pain or pleasure, inspire sympathy or antipathy in us. We are given up to pleasure, to pain, in short to the external world. What is it that is kindled in us when we are thus given up to the external world? What is it that feels pleasure and pain? What is it that has interests? It is the Sentient Soul. In the evening we feel the need of sleep, we feel that our lively participation in the outer world is exhausted; but in the morning it is refreshed again. We feel that the same manifestations of the Sentient Soul which flag at night, revive and reassert themselves in the morning. From this we can recognise that the same force which bore us out of ourselves brings the waking soul back again into the body. What at night seemed to be dying away is as if reborn. The same force is operating, but now in the one, now in the opposite, direction.

If we wished to make a diagrammatic sketch of what happens, it might be done in the following way, but I emphasise that it is meant only as an indication.

I have indicated by a dot the moment of going to sleep, when man is drawn into the subconscious; and by drawing loops I have indicated his surrender to the state of sleep and his awakening from that state. The lower loop indicates the course of life during the waking state and the upper loop the sleeping state. We can therefore say of the moment of going to sleep that a force, working on the Sentient Soul from the spiritual world, is drawing us into that world. This is indicated by the first section of the upper loop in the diagram. The second section of the same loop indicates the influence that is exerted upon the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, causing dreams. And the third section of the loop indicates the influence or force that is exerted on the Consciousness-Soul. In the morning, the same force that has drawn us into the sleeping state drives us out of it and into the life of day. This is the force that works upon the Sentient Soul. The same applies to the influences exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul. During the night man moves around a kind of circle. On going to sleep he moves towards the region where the influence upon the Consciousness-Soul is strongest. From that point he moves again towards the force that works upon his Sentient Soul and brings him back into the waking state.

Thus there are three forces which work upon man during sleep. Since early times these three forces have been given definite names in spiritual science. These names are familiar to you, but I beg you now not to think of anything in connection with them except that they stand for the three forces which during sleep work upon these three parts of the human soul. It we were to go back to ancient times we should find that these designations were used originally for these three forces; and if the designations are now used in other ways, they have simply been borrowed. The force which works upon the Sentient Soul and at the times of going to sleep and waking drives man out of his bodily sheaths and eventually into them again, was designated in one of the ancient languages by a name that would correspond with the word “Mars”. The force which works upon the Mind-Soul after the man has gone to sleep and again before waking, that is to say, in two different periods, was designated by the word “Jupiter.” It is the force which drives the world of dreams into the Mind-Soul. The force which works upon the Consciousness-Soul during sleep and under special circumstances would make a man into a sleep-walker, was designated by the name “Saturn.”

We may therefore say, using the terminology of ancient spiritual science: “Mars” sends man to sleep and wakes him; “Jupiter” sends dreams into his sleep; and dark “Saturn” stirs into unconscious action during sleep a man who cannot withstand its influence. For the time being we will think of the original, spiritual significance of these names as denoting forces that work upon the human being during sleep, when he is outside his physical and etheric bodies in the spiritual world, not of their significance in astronomy.

Now what happens when man wakes in the morning? He actually enters a quite different world which he normally regards today as the only one belonging to him. Impressions from outside are made upon his senses, but he is unable to look behind these impressions. When he wakes from sleep, the whole tapestry of the sense-world lies outspread before him. But not only does he perceive this external world with his senses; together with every perception he feels something. However slight the pleasurable sensation may be on perceiving, for example, some colour, nevertheless a certain inner process is always present. All external sense-perceptions work in such a way that they give rise to certain inner states; everyone will realise that the effect of violet is different from that of green. It is the Sentient Body that enables the sense-impressions to be received; it causes men to see yellow, for example; but what we experience and feel inwardly as a result of the impressions made upon us by the red, violet or yellow colour—that is caused by the Sentient Soul. A fine distinction must be made between these functions of the Sentient Body and the Sentient Soul.

In the morning the Sentient Soul begins to be given up to the impressions of the outer world brought to it by the Sentient Body. The part of us (Sentient Soul) which during sleep was exposed to the Mars influence is given over on waking to the external world of the senses. Spiritual science again gives a special name to the whole of the external sense-world in so far as it arouses certain feelings of pleasure or pain, joy or sadness in our souls. But under that name we must think only of the influence working upon our Sentient Soul from the tapestry of the outer world of the senses; this force does not let us remain cold and impassive but fills us with certain feelings. So that just as the first influence exerted on the Sentient Soul after we go to sleep is given the name of Mars, the influence which takes effect on waking is called the force of “Venus”.

Similarly, an influence from the physical world is exerted during waking life upon the Intellectual or Mind-Soul when it is within the bodily sheaths. This is a different influence; it is the influence which enables us to withdraw from external impressions and to work upon them inwardly, to reflect upon them. Notice the difference there is between the experiences of the Sentient Soul and those of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. The Sentient Soul has experiences only as long as a man is given up to the outer world; it receives the impressions of the outer world. But if for a time in waking life he pays no attention to the actual impressions of the outer world, if he ponders over them and lets the feelings of pleasure, pain, and so forth, merely echo on within him, then he is given over to his Mind-Soul. Compared with the Sentient Soul it has rather more independence. There are influences which enable a man during waking life not merely to stand gazing at the tapestry of the sense-world but to turn his attention away from all that, to form thoughts whereby he combines external impressions in his mind and enable him to make himself independent of the influences of the outer world. These are the influences of “Mercury.”

The influence of Mercury works during the day upon man's Intellectual or Mind-Soul just as the influence of Jupiter works upon it during sleep at night. You will notice that there is a certain correspondence between the influences of “Mercury” and of “Jupiter”. [* See, Human Questions and Cosmic Answers, lecture 2.] In the case of a normal person today the Jupiter influences penetrate into his life of soul as dream-pictures. The corresponding influences during waking life, the Mercury influences, work in a man's thoughts, in his inner, reflective experiences. When the Jupiter influences are working in a man's dreams, he does not know whence his experiences come; during waking consciousness, however, when the Mercury influences are working, he knows the source of them. In both cases, inner processes are being pictured in the soul.—Such is the correspondence between the influences of Jupiter and those of Mercury.

In the waking life of day there are also influences which work upon the Consciousness-Soul. What are the differences between Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul, and Consciousness-Soul? The Sentient Soul operates when we are merely gazing at the things of the external world. If we withdraw our attention for a time from the impressions of this outer world and work over them inwardly, then we are given over to the Mind-Soul. But if we now take what has been worked over in thought, turn again to the outer world and relate ourselves to it by passing over to deeds, then we are given over to the Consciousness-Soul. For example: As long as I am simply looking at these flowers in front of me and my feelings are moved by the pure whiteness of the rose, I am given up to my Sentient Soul. If, however, I avert my gaze and no longer see the flowers but only think about them, then I am given over to my Intellectual or Mind-Soul. I am working in thought upon the impressions I have received. If now I say to myself that because the flowers have given me pleasure I will gladden someone else by presenting them to him and then pick them up in order to hand them over, I am performing a deed; I am passing out of the realm of the Mind-Soul into that of the Consciousness-Soul and relating myself again to the outer world. Here is a third force which operates in man and enables him not only to work over in thought the impressions of the outer world, but to relate himself to that world again.

You will notice that there is again a correspondence between the activity of the Consciousness Soul in the waking state and in sleep. You have heard that when this influence is being exerted in sleep a man becomes a sleep-walker; he speaks and acts in his sleep. In the waking state, however, he acts consciously. At night, in sleep-walking he is impelled by the force of dark “Saturn.” The influence which during waking life works upon man's Consciousness-Soul in such a way that independence can be achieved in conditions of ordinary life, is called in Spiritual Science the force of the “Moon”. Here again, please forget whatever mental pictures you have hitherto connected with this word. You will presently understand the reason for these designations.

Thus we have found that man's soul in waking life and in sleep has three different members, that it is subject to three different influences. During the night when man is in the spiritual world he is subject to the forces designated in Spiritual Science as those of “Mars”, “Jupiter” and “Saturn”; his threefold life of soul by day is given over to the forces designated as those of “Venus”, “Mercury” and “Moon”.

This is the course traversed by man in the 24 hours of day and night. And now we will think of a series of phenomena which belong to a quite different domain but which for certain reasons can be studied in connection with what has been said. These reasons will be made clear as the lectures proceed. Please remember that many things said at the beginning of this Course will be explained only at a later stage.

You are all familiar with the ideas held by modern astronomical science of the course of the Earth around the Sun and also of the other planets belonging to the solar system. What is said in treatises of the usual kind represents, in the view of Spiritual Science, only the most elementary beginning. What takes place in the physical world is for Spiritual Science a symbol, an external picture, of inner, spiritual processes and what we are accustomed to learn about our planetary system from elementary astronomy can be compared, as regards what really underlies it, with what is learnt by a child about the movements of a clock. We explain to him what the twelve conventional figures stand for, and what the rotation of the two hands—one slow and the other quicker—means. The child will eventually be able to tell us from the position of the hands when, let us say, the time is half-past nine. But that would not mean very much. The child must learn a great deal more, for example, to relate the movement of the hands to what is happening in the world. When the hour-hand stands at six and the minute-hand at twelve, he must know what time of the day this signifies—namely that at a certain season of the year, if it is early morning, the Sun will be rising then. He must learn to relate what is presented on the face of the clock to conditions in the world and to regard what the clock expresses as a picture of them.

We are taught as children that the Sun is at the centre of the solar system and that the planets revolve around it-first the planet now called Mercury, then the planet now called Venus, [*In former times the names of these two planets came to be reversed. See later paragraphs of this lecture.] then the Earth plus Moon, then Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Astronomical maps of the heavens show us where Saturn or Jupiter or Mars are to be found in certain months of the year. When we have learnt to know the relative positions of the planets at definite times of the year, we have learnt as much about the heavens as a child has learnt about the clock when from the position of the hands he is able to say that the time is half-past nine.

But then we can go on to learn something else. Just as a child learns to recognise what conditions are indicated by the position of the hands of a clock, we can learn to recognise macrocosmic forces penetrating invisibly into space behind a great cosmic timepiece. We realise then that our solar system, with the planets in their different positions and mutual relationships, gives expression to certain macrocosmic powers. From this timepiece of our planetary system we can pass on to contemplate the great spiritual relationships. The position of every planet will become the expression of something lying behind and we shall be able to say that there are reasons for the various relationships in which, for example, Venus stands to Jupiter, and so on. There are actual reasons for saying that these conditions are brought about by divine-spiritual Powers, just as there are reasons for saying that the cosmic timepiece is constructed according to a definite plan. The idea of the planetary movements in the solar system then becomes full of significance. Otherwise the cosmic timepiece would seem to have been constructed haphazardly. The planetary system becomes for us a kind of cosmic clock, a means of expression for what lies behind the heavenly bodies and their movements in the solar system.

Let us first of all consider this cosmic clock itself. The idea of the planetary system having formed itself is easily refuted. You will all have been taught in school about the formation of the planetary system. You will have been told, in effect, that a gigantic nebula in the universe once began to rotate and then the Sun, with the planets around it, were formed by a process of separation from the nebula itself. This will probably have been demonstrated by an experiment. It is easy to rotate a drop of oil on the surface of water in a bowl. Tiny drops separate off and rotate around a larger drop which remains at the centre. The teacher will point out that this represents, on a minute scale, the formation of a planetary system and nobody will question it. But a sharp-witted pupil might say to the teacher: “You have forgotten something that in other circumstances it might be convenient to forget, but not in this case. You have forgotten your own part in the experiment because it is you who have rotated the drop of oil!”—For the sake of logic the most important factor of all should not be forgotten. It should at least be assumed that a colossal power in cosmic space brought the whole solar system into existence through rotation. The experiment in itself points to the fact that there must be something behind what is rotating; it points to the existence of forces which cause the movement that is perceptible to the eye. In the same way there are forces and Powers behind the great cosmic edifice of our solar system.

And now we will think of the outer aspect of this solar system. (See diagram). The Earth revolves around the Sun

at the centre. I will leave out details. At a certain time of the year the Earth stands at one point and at another time somewhere else. The Moon revolves around the Earth and the planets usually called Mercury and Venus are nearer to the Sun and revolve around it. I emphasise here that in the course of time a change has taken place in the names of these two planets. [* This change of names must be kept closely in mind when references are made to the two planets.] The planet that is called Mercury today was formerly called Venus, and the planet called Venus today was formerly called Mercury. Venus, (formerly Mercury) is nearer the Sun than the planet now called Mercury (formerly Venus). Then, farther away than the Earth, the diagram indicates Mars, Jupiter and Saturn revolving around the Sun. The relative positions are not strictly correct but that does not matter here. We will leave the other planets out of consideration today.

Now let us assume that as it revolves the Earth comes to a position between Mars and the Sun. This will very seldom be the case but we will assume for the moment that it is so. Then, in the space between Earth and Sun there will be the planets Mercury and Venus, and on the other side of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Leaving aside the Earth, the sequence will be: Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, on one side; Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, on the other. A looped line (see diagram) drawn around the heavenly bodies is a lemniscate,

with the Sun at the centre of the loops-it is the same line as the one indicating the cycle of man's waking and sleeping life.

Thus it is possible—though not generally the case—for the planets to be arranged in the solar system in an order similar to that followed by man in completing the cycle of waking and sleeping. Taking the moment of going to sleep and that of waking as the centre, the same spatial order can be indicated for the planetary system as for the daily life of man.

The perspective here revealed is one of mighty forces underlying the order of our planetary system, regulating the great cosmic timepiece as our own lives are regulated through the course of 24 hours. The thought will then not seem absurd that mighty forces are operating in the Macrocosm—forces analogous to those which guide our lives during the day and night. As the outcome of such thoughts the same names came into use in ancient science for the forces of the universe as for the forces which work upon our own lives. The force which in the Macrocosm drives Mars around the Sun is similar to the one that sends us to sleep. The force in the Macrocosm which drives Venus around the Sun is similar to the one which regulates the Sentient Soul by day. Far-off Saturn, with its slight influence, seeing to resemble those weak forces that work, in special cases only, upon the Consciousness-Soul in people who are sleep-walkers. And the rotation of the Moon around the Earth is due to a force similar to that which regulates our conscious deeds in waking life. The spatial distances signify something that comes to expression in a certain respect in our own time-regulated life.—We shall go into these things more deeply and it is only a matter today of calling attention to them.—If we consider, quite superficially, that Saturn is the most remote planet and has accordingly the weakest effect upon our Earth, this can be compared with the fact that the forces of dark Saturn have only a slight effect upon the sleeping human being. And similarly, the force which drives Jupiter around the Sun can be likened to that which penetrates comparatively seldom into our lives, namely, the dream-world.

Thus we find a remarkable correlation between human life, the Microcosm, and the forces working in the great cosmic clock, driving the several planets round the Sun in the Macrocosm.

In very truth the world is infinitely more complicated than is supposed. Our human nature is comprehensible only if we take account of its kinship with the Macrocosm. Knowing this, spiritual researchers in all epochs have chosen corresponding designations for the Great World and the Little World—the latter being the seemingly insignificant bodily man enclosed within the skin.

I have only been able today to give a faint indication of correspondences between the Microcosm (man) and the Macrocosm (the solar system). But it will now be evident to you that such correspondences do indeed exist. As though from afar I have alluded to Beings whose forces work through space and regulate the movements of our planetary system just as the movements of the hands of a clock in the physical world are regulated. We have only so much as glanced at the frontier of the region where we may hope that spiritual worlds will reveal themselves to us. In the coming lectures we shall learn to recognise not only the planets as the hands of the great cosmic clock but also the actual Beings who have brought the whole solar system into movement, who guide the planets round the Sun and prove to be akin to what goes on in the human being himself. And so we shall come to understand how man is born as a Little World, a Microcosm, out of the Great World, the Macrocosm.

To obviate any possible misunderstanding, I want to emphasise that the aim of yesterday's lecture was not that of proving anything in particular but merely to point out that certain observations led spiritual investigators of bygone times to designate by similar names certain processes and objects in space and certain processes and happenings in our own daily and nightly experiences. The main purpose of the lecture was to introduce concepts that will be required in our further studies. The lectures given in this Course must be regarded as a whole, and the early lectures are in the widest sense intended to assemble the ideas and conceptions needed for the knowledge of the spiritual worlds that is to be communicated in those that come later. Today, too, we shall take our start from familiar experiences and pass on gradually to more remote realms of spirit.

We have heard in previous lectures that in respect of his inner being, in respect, that is to say, of his astral body and Ego, man lives during the sleeping state in a spiritual world and on waking returns into his physical and etheric bodies. It will be evident to anyone who observes life that when this transition from the sleeping to the waking state takes place, there is a complete change of experience. What we experience in the waking state denotes no actual perception or knowledge of the two members of our being into which we descend on waking. We come down into our etheric and physical bodies but have no experience of them from within.

What does a man know in ordinary life about the aspects presented by his physical and etheric bodies when seen from within? The essential fact of experience in the waking state is that we view our own being in the physical world from without, not from within. We view our physical body from outside with the same eyes with which we look at the rest of the world. During waking life we never contemplate our own being from within, but always from without. We really learn to know ourselves as men only from outside, regarding ourselves as beings of the sense-world.

There is, of course, an actual state of transition from sleeping to waking life. How, then, would it be if we were really able, on descending into our etheric and physical bodies, to contemplate ourselves from within? We should see something quite different from what we see in the ordinary way: we should know the intimate experiences sought by the mystic. The mystic endeavours to divert his attention entirely from the outer world, to shut out the impressions invading his eyes and other senses and to penetrate into his inmost being. But leaving aside experiences of this kind, we can say that in daily life we are protected from the sight of our inner being, for at the moment of waking our gaze is diverted to the external world around us, to the tapestry presented by the senses—the tapestry of which our physical body, when observed during waking life, is a part. Thus in the waking state the possibility of observing ourselves from within, eludes us. It is as though we had been led unknowingly across a stream: while we sleep we are on this side of the stream, when we are awake, on yonder side. If we were capable of perceiving anything from “this side”, we should be able to perceive our Ego and our astral body as we perceive outer objects in waking life; but again we are protected from perceiving our own inner being in sleep, for at the moment of going to sleep the possibility of perceiving ceases and consciousness is extinguished.

Thus between our inner and our outer world a definite boundary is drawn, a boundary which we can cross only at the moments of going to sleep and waking. But we can never cross this boundary without being deprived of something.

When we cross the boundary on going to sleep, consciousness ceases and we cannot see the spiritual world. On waking, our consciousness is at once diverted to the outer world and we are unable to perceive the spiritual reality underlying our own being. The boundary that we cross, the boundary that causes the spiritual world to be darkened at the moment of waking is something that interpolates itself between our Sentient Soul and our etheric and physical bodies. The veil that covers these two members on waking, the veil that prevents us from beholding the spiritual reality underlying them, is the Sentient Body, which enables us to see the tapestry presented by the outer world. At the moment of waking the Sentient Body is wholly concerned with the outer world of the senses and we cannot look within our own being. This body, therefore, constitutes a frontier between our life of inner experience and what spiritually underlies the world of the senses.

We shall realise that this is necessary, for what a man would see if he were to cross this stream consciously is something that must be hidden from him in the course of his normal life, because he could not endure it; he needs to be prepared for the experience. Mystical development does not really consist in penetrating by force into the inner world of the physical and etheric bodies, but in first making oneself fit for the experience and passing through it consciously.

What would happen to a man who were to descend unprepared into his own inner being? On waking, instead of seeing an external world, he would enter into his own inner world, into that which spiritually underlies his physical and etheric bodies. In his soul he would experience a feeling of tremendous intensity, known to him in ordinary life in a very faint and weakened form only. That is what would come over a man if he were able, on waking from sleep, to descend into his own inner being. An analogy—without attempting to prove anything—will help you to have an idea of this feeling.

There is in man what is called the sense of Shame, the essence of which is that in his soul he wants to divert the attention of others from the thing or quality of which he is ashamed. This sense of shame in connection with something he does not want to be revealed is a faint indication of the feeling which would be intensified to overpowering strength if he were to look consciously into his own inner being. This feeling would take possession of the soul with such power that it would seem to be diffused over everything encountered in the external world; the man would undergo an experience comparable with that of being consumed by fire. Such would be the effect produced by this feeling of shame.

Why should it have this effect? Because at that moment a man would become aware of the perfection of his physical and etheric bodies compared with what he is as a being of soul. It is also possible to form an idea of this by ordinary reasoning. Anyone who with the help of physical science makes a purely external study of the marvelous structure of the human heart or brain, or of each single part of the human skeleton, will be able to feel how infinitely wise and perfect is the arrangement and organisation of the physical body. By taking one single bone, for example the hip bone, which combines the utmost carrying capacity with the least expenditure of effort, or by contemplating the marvelous structure of the heart or brain, it is possible to have an inkling of what would be experienced if one were to behold the wisdom by which this structure was produced and were then to compare with this what man is as a being of soul in respect of passions or desires! All through his life he is engaged in ruining this wonderful physical organism by yielding to his desires, urges, passions and various forms of enjoyment. Activity destructive to the wonderful structure of the physical heart or brain can be observed everywhere in life. All this would come vividly before a man's soul if he were to descend consciously into his etheric and physical bodies. And the soul's imperfection compared with the perfect structure of the sheaths would have an overwhelmingly paralysing effect upon him if he were able to compare what is in his soul with what the wise guidance of the universe has made of his physical and etheric bodies. He is therefore protected from descending into them consciously and is deflected, on waking, by the tapestry of the sense-world outspread around him; he cannot look into his inmost being.

It is the comparison of the soul with what it would perceive if it had sight of what spiritually underlies the physical and etheric bodies that would evoke the intense feeling of shame; preparation for this is made in advance through all the experiences undergone by the mystic before he becomes capable of penetrating into his inmost being. To realise for himself the imperfection of his soul, to realise that his soul is weak, insignificant, and has still an infinitely long path to travel, is bound to arouse a feeling of humility and a yearning for perfection, and these qualities prepare him to endure the comparison with the infinitely wise structure into which he penetrates on waking. Otherwise he would be consumed by shame as if by fire.

The mystic prepares himself by concentrating on the following thoughts: “When I behold what I am and compare it with what the wise guidance of the universe has made of me, the shame I feel is like a consuming fire.” This feeling gives rise outwardly to the flush of shame. This feeling would intensify to such an extent as to become a scorching fire in the soul if the mystic has not the strength to say to himself: “Yes, I feel utterly paltry in comparison with what I may become, but I shall try to develop the strength that will make me capable of understanding what the wisdom of the universe has built into my bodily nature and to make myself spiritually worthy of it.” The mystic is made to realise by his spiritual teacher that he must have boundless humility. It may be said to him: Look at a plant. A plant is rooted in the soil. The soil makes available to the plant a kingdom lower than itself but without which it cannot exist. The plant can bow to the mineral kingdom, saying: I owe my existence to this lower kingdom out of which I have grown. The animal too owes its existence to the plant kingdom and if it were conscious of its place in the world would in humility acknowledge its indebtedness to the lower kingdom. And man, having reached a certain height, should say: I could not have attained this stage had not everything below me evolved correspondingly.

When a man cultivates such feelings in his soul, the realisation comes to him that he has reason not only to look upwards but to look downwards with thankfulness to the kingdoms below him. The soul is then filled with this feeling of humility and realises how infinitely long is the path that leads towards perfection. Such is the training for true humility.

What has been described above cannot of course be exhausted by concepts and ideas; if that were the case the mystic would soon have mastered it. It must be experienced, and only one who experiences such feelings over and over again can imbue his soul with the attitude and mood necessary for the mystic.

Then, secondly, the would-be mystic must develop another feeling which makes him capable of enduring whatever obstacles may lie in his path as he strives towards perfection. He must develop a feeling of resignation in respect of whatever ordeals he will have to endure in order to reach a certain stage of development. Only by proving himself victorious over pain and suffering for a long, long time can he develop the strong powers needed by his soul to overcome the inevitable sense of inferiority in face of what a wise World-Order has incorporated in the etheric and physical bodies. The soul must say to itself over and over again: ‘Whatever pain and suffering still await me, I will not waver; for if I were willing to experience only what brings joy, I should never develop the strength of which my soul is actually capable.’ Strength is developed only by overcoming obstacles, not by simply submitting to conditions as they are. Forces of soul can be steeled only when a man is ready to bear pain and suffering with resignation. This strength must be developed in the soul of the mystic if he is to become fit to descend into his inner being.

Let nobody imagine that Spiritual Science demands that a man living an ordinary, everyday life shall undergo such exercises for they are beyond his power. What is being described here is simply a narration of what those who voluntarily embark upon such experiences can make of the soul, that is to say, they can make the soul capable of penetrating into their own inmost being. In the course of normal life, however, the Sentient Body intervenes between what it is possible for the mystic to experience inwardly and what is actually experienced in the external world. That is what protects a man from descending into his own inner self without preparation and being consumed by a feeling of shame. In the normal course of life a man cannot experience what is thus screened from him by the Sentient Body, for there he has already reached the frontier of the spiritual world. A spiritual investigator seeking to explore the inner nature of man must cross this frontier; he must cross the stream which diverts normal human consciousness from the inner to the outer world. This normal consciousness, while insufficiently mature, is protected from penetrating into man's inner self, protected from being consumed in the fire of shame. Man cannot see the Power which protects him from this experience every morning on waking. This Power is the first spiritual Being encountered by one who is about to pass into the spiritual world. He must pass this Being who protects him from being consumed by the inner sense of shame; he must pass this Being who deflects his inward-turned gaze to the external word, to the tapestry of sense-phenomena. Normal consciousness becomes aware of the effect of this Being, but man cannot see him. He is the first Being who must be passed by one who desires to penetrate into the spiritual world. This spiritual Being who every morning stands before man and protects him while he is still immature from sight of his own inner self, is called in Spiritual Science, the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. The path into the spiritual world leads past this Being.

Our consciousness has thus been directed to the frontier where we can dimly divine the existence of the Being known to the spiritual investigator as the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. Here already is an indication that in waking life we do not see our true being at all. And if we call our own being the Microcosm, we must add that we never see the Microcosm in its pure, spiritual form, but only the part that our own being reveals in the normal state. Just as when a man looks in a mirror he sees an image, a picture, and not himself, so in waking consciousness we do not see the Microcosm itself but a reflected image of it. We see the Microcosm in its mirror image.

Do we ever see the Macrocosm in its reality? Again we can take our start from familiar experiences, leaving aside for the moment what a man undergoes in the course of the twenty-four hours of the day. We will think of the very simplest experiences that come to a man in the outer world of the senses. In that world he perceives an alternation between day and night-how the Sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening; he perceives how the sunlight illumines all the objects around him. What is it, then, that man sees from sunrise until sunset? Fundamentally speaking he does not see the objects themselves at all, but the sunlight which they reflect. In the dark we cannot see an object without illumination. Let us take the eye as representative of the other senses. What we see during the day are, in reality, the reflected rays of the Sun. This is how things are from morning until evening. But man has only a very imperfect perception of the cause which enables him to see objects in the outer world at all. If we look at the Sun directly, our eyes are dazzled. The very cause to which we owe the faculty of perceiving the outer sense-world, dazzles us. Thus during the day it is the same with the Sun outside as it is on waking with our own inner self. The forces within ourselves enable us to live and to perceive the outer world, but our attention is diverted from our own inner being to the outer world. It is the same with the Sun; it enables us to perceive objects but dazzles us when we attempt to look at it. Nor during the day can we perceive everything that is connected with the Sun. We see what the Earth reveals to us in the reflected sunlight.

Our solar system is composed not only of the Sun but also of the planets. By day the sight of them is denied us; the Sun dazzles our vision not only of itself but also of the planets. We look out into space knowing that although the planets are there, they evade our observation. Just as by day we are prevented from seeing our own inner self and by night the sight of the spiritual world is denied us in ordinary sleep, so, by day, when our gaze is directed outwards, the causes of our sense-perceptions are hidden from us. What lies behind the Sun and connects it with the other bodies belonging to the solar system, with the Beings whose outer manifestations we call Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and so on—whatever living co-operation there is between the Sun and these heavenly bodies is hidden from us by day. What we perceive is the effect of the sunlight. When we compare this state with the state in which the world around us exists by night, from sunset to dawn, we can perceive in a certain way what belongs to our solar system. We can look up to the starry heavens and among other stars behold the planets at times when they are visible; but while we can see them in the night sky, the Sun itself is invisible. We must therefore say what by day makes the sense-world visible to us, by night takes from us the possibility of seeing it. At night the whole of the sense-world is invisible.

Is it possible to discover, in connection with the nocturnal state, something analogous to the State of the mystic when he descends into his own inner world? In the modern age there is little consciousness of this analogous state, but there is something of the kind. It consists in the fact that, like the mystic, a man develops certain qualities of humility and resignation and other feelings too, the nature of which we can grasp by picturing the simplest of them. Man has these feelings in normal life-in a weak form, like the sense of shame, but nevertheless he has them. By enormously enhancing these feelings he prepares himself to have experiences by night which differ entirely from those of normal consciousness.

We all know that our feelings in spring are different from those we have in the autumn. When buds are bursting in spring and giving promise of the beauty and splendour of summer, the feelings of a healthy soul will not be the same as they are in autumn; with the approach of spring we feel the awakening of hope. The feeling is only slightly developed in an ordinary, normal man, but it is present, nevertheless. Towards autumn, the mood of hope and awakening connected with spring will be transformed into one of sadness, of melancholy; when we see the leaves falling, when we see bare, skeleton-like branches instead of the bright flowering shrubs of summer, our souls are steeped in melancholy; there is sadness in our hearts. In the course of the year, if we move in step with the phenomena of outer Nature, we can experience a cycle in our life of soul. But as these feelings are faint and feeble in normal life, man's sensibility to the transformations that take place from spring to summer and autumn and from autumn to winter is only slight.

Once upon a time—and it is still so today—a pupil of spiritual knowledge who was to take the opposite path to that of the mystic was trained in such feelings; in contrast to the mystic's descent into his own inner being, he was taught to live with the cycle of outer Nature. He learnt to feel with great intensity, no longer faintly as in ordinary life, the awakening of Nature and the sprouting of vegetation in spring; then, when he was able to surrender himself wholly to this experience, the feeling of dawning hope in spring became one of joyful exultation in summer. He was trained to have this experience of exultation. And again, when a man was so far advanced as to experience in complete self-forgetfulness the melancholy of autumn, he could pass on to experience a feeling of winter, intensified into a feeling of the death of all Nature at midwinter.

Such were the feelings awakened in the pupils who had undergone training in the old Northern Mysteries, of which only the external side is still known and that merely as tradition. The pupils were trained by special methods to accompany in their own life of feeling the cycle of Nature throughout the year. All the experiences which came to these pupils, for example on Midsummer Night, were indications of the crescendo of hope to exultation shared with Nature. The festival of Midsummer Night was intended to portray the enhancement of the feeling of awakening in spring to that of joyous exultation in the superabundant life of summer. And at the winter solstice the pupil learnt to experience—as an infinitely enhanced feeling of autumn—the decline and death of Nature.

Such feelings can hardly be felt with equal strength by a man today. As a result of the progress of his intellectual life during recent centuries, present-day man has become incapable of undergoing the intense, overpowering experiences which the best representatives of the original peoples of Middle, Northern and Western Europe were able to endure.

Having undergone such training, the pupils who had thus intensified their inner experiences found themselves possessed of a particular faculty—however strange this may sound—the faculty of seeing through matter, just as the mystic is able to penetrate into his own inner self. They were able to see not merely surfaces of objects but they were able to gee through the objects, and above all, through the Earth.

This experience was called in the ancient Mysteries: seeing the Sun at Midnight. The Sun could be seen in its greatest splendour and glory only at the time of the winter solstice, when the whole external sense-world had so to speak died away. The pupils of the Mysteries had developed the faculty of seeing the Sun no longer as the dazzling power it is by day, but with all its dazzling brilliance eliminated. They saw the Sun, not as a physical but as a spiritual reality, and they beheld the Sun Spirit. The physical effect of dazzling was extinguished by the Earth's substance, for this had become transparent and allowed only the Sun's spiritual forces to pass through. But something else of great significance was connected with this beholding of the Sun. The fact of which only an abstract indication was given yesterday, was then revealed in all its truth, namely, that there is a living interplay between the planets and the Sun inasmuch as streams flow continually to and fro—from the planets to the Sun and from the Sun to the planets. Something was revealed spiritually that may be compared with the circulation of the blood in the human body. As the blood flows in living circulation from the heart to the organs and from the organs back again to the heart, so did the Sun reveal itself as the centre of living spiritual streams flowing to and fro between the Sun and the planets. The solar system revealed itself as a spiritual system of living realities, the external manifestation of which is no more than a symbol. Everything manifested by the individual planets pointed to the great spiritual experience just described, as a clock points to the time of occurrences in external life.

All that man learns to experience by enhancing his sensibility withdraws, as the spiritual aspect of space, from the ordinary sight of day. It is also concealed by the spectacle presented at night. For what does man see at night with his ordinary Faculties when he looks up to the heavens? He sees only the external side, just as he sees only the external side of his own inner being. The starry sky we behold is the body of spiritual reality lying behind it. Wonderful as is the spectacle of the starry sky at night, it is nothing but the physical body of the cosmic spirit, manifesting through this body in its movements and in its outward effects. Once again for ordinary human consciousness a veil is drawn over everything that man would behold were he able spiritually to see through the spectacle presented to him in space. Just as we are protected in ordinary life from beholding our own inner being, we are also protected from beholding the spirit underlying the outer, material world; the veil of the sense-world is spread over the underlying spiritual reality. Why should this be so?

If a man were to have direct vision of the spiritual Macrocosm without the preparation that has been described—it is the opposite process to that undergone by the mystic—a feeling of the most terrifying bewilderment would come over him, for the phenomena are so mighty and awe-inspiring that the concepts evolved in ordinary life would be quite incapable of enabling him to endure this utterly bewildering spectacle. He would be overcome by a tremendous enhancement of the fear he otherwise knows only in a weak form. Just as a man would be consumed by shame if, without preparation, he were to penetrate into his own inner being, he would be suffocated by fear if, while still unprepared, he were to confront the phenomena of the outer world; he would feel as though he were being led into a labyrinth. Only when the soul has prepared itself through ideas and thoughts which lead beyond the realm of ordinary experience can it prepare itself to endure the bewildering spectacle.

Man's intellectual life today makes it impossible for him to undergo what could at one time be undergone by individuals belonging to an original population of Northern and Western Europe through an intensification of the feeling of spring and autumn. Intellectuality was by no means as general in those times as it is today. Men's thinking is utterly different from what it was in those olden days, when it was far less developed. But with the gradual evolution of intellectuality, the capacity for this experience of Nature was lost. It is, however, possible for man to have it indirectly, as if in reflection, when these feelings can be kindled, not by actual experience of the happenings in external Nature but by accounts and descriptions of the spiritual aspects of the Macrocosm.

At the present time, therefore, it is necessary for descriptions to be provided such as those contained, for example, in the book, Occult Science—an Outline, which has just been published. I say this without boasting, simply because circumstances make it necessary. Such descriptions are of realities which cannot be outwardly perceived, which underlie the world spiritually and can be seen by one who has undergone the requisite preparation. Let us suppose that such a book is not read in the way that books of another kind are read today, but that it is read—as it should be—in such a way that the concepts and ideas it presents in an unpretentious form induce in the reader feelings which are experienced in the very greatest intensity. Such experiences are then similar to those that were induced in the old Northern Mysteries.

The book gives, for example, an account of the earlier embodiments of the Earth, and if read with inner participation, a difference of style will be recognised in the descriptions of the Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon conditions. By letting what is there said about Old Saturn work upon us, we shall induce a feeling consonant with the mood of spring, and in the description of the Old Sun-evolution there is something analogous to the emotion of exultation once experienced on Midsummer Night. The description of the Old Moon-evolution may evoke the mood of autumn and the whole style of the description of Earth-evolution proper will induce a mood similar to that prevailing when the time of the winter solstice is approaching. At the right place in the description of Earth-evolution an indication is given of the central experience connected with the mood of Christmas. [* See pp. 216-18 in the 1962-3 edition ofOccult Science—an Outline.]

This knowledge can be given today in the place of experiences which man is no longer capable of undergoing because he has now risen from an earlier life in feeling to intellectuality, to thinking; hence it is through the mirror of thinking that feelings originally kindled by Nature herself must be influenced. This is how writings should be composed if they are to convey what it is the aim of Spiritual Science to convey, and the moods they generate must be consonant with the course of the year. Theoretical descriptions are quite senseless for they simply lead to spiritual matters being regarded just as if they were recipes in a cookery book!

The difference between books on Spiritual Science and other kinds of literature lies not so much in the fact that unusual things are described but mainly in how things are presented. From this you will realise that the contents of Spiritual Science are drawn from deep sources and that in accordance with the mission of our time, feelings must be quickened through thoughts. You will realise then that it is also possible today to find something that can lead again out of the prevailing confusion.

Now when guided by such principles, a man sets out along the path leading into the labyrinth of happenings in the spiritual Macrocosm, this is something that was prophetically foreshadowed among the original peoples of Northern Europe. The faculties enabling them to read the great script of Nature were still active in these peoples at a time when the Greeks had already reached a high stage of intellectuality. It was the mission of the Greeks to prepare what we today must bring to an even more advanced degree of development. A book such as Occult Science could not have been written in the days of ancient Greece, but Greek culture made it possible, in a different way, for one who ventured into the labyrinth of the spiritual Cosmos to find a thread that would guide him back again. This is indicated in the legend of Theseus who took the Thread of Ariadne with him into the labyrinth. Now what is the Thread of Ariadne today? The concepts and mental pictures of the super-sensible world we form in the soul! It is the spiritual knowledge that is made available to us in order that we may penetrate safely into the Macrocosm. And so Spiritual Science which, to begin with, speaks purely to the intellect, can be a Thread of Ariadne, helping us to overcome the bewilderment that might come if we were to enter unprepared into the spiritual world of the Macrocosm.

So we see that if a man wishes to find the spirit behind and pervading the outer world, he must traverse with full awareness a region of which in normal life he is unconscious; he must traverse consciously the very stream which in everyday life takes consciousness from him. If then he allows himself to be affected by feelings kindled by the cyclic course of Nature herself or by concepts and ideas such as those referred to, if, in short, he achieves real self-development, he gradually becomes capable of fearlessly approaching that spiritual Power who is at first invisible. Just as the Inner Guardian of the Threshold is imperceptible to ordinary consciousness, so too is this second Guardian, the greater guardian of the Threshold, who stands before the spiritual Macrocosm. He becomes more and more perceptible to one who has undergone due preparation and is making his way along the other path into the spiritual Macrocosm. He must fearlessly and without falling into bewilderment pass this spiritual Being who also shows us how insignificant we are and that we must develop new organs if we aspire to penetrate into the Macrocosm. If a man were to approach this Greater Guardian of the Threshold consciously, but still unprepared, he would be filled with fear and despair.

We have now heard how with his normal consciousness man is enclosed within the frontiers marked by two portals. At the one stands the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold, at the other, the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. The one portal leads into man's inner being, into the spirit of the Microcosm; the other portal leads into the spirit of the Macrocosm. But now we must realise that from this same Macrocosm come the spiritual forces which build up our own being. Whence comes the material for our physical and etheric bodies? All the forces which there converge and are so full of wisdom, are arrayed before us in the Great World when we have passed the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. We are confronted there not by knowledge only. And that is another point of importance. Until now I have been speaking only of knowledge that can be acquired by man but it does not yet become insight into the actual workings and forces of the Macrocosm. The body cannot be built out of data of knowledge; it must be built out of forces. Once past the mysterious Being who is the Greater Guardian of the Threshold, we come into a world of unknown workings and forces. To begin with, man knows nothing of this realm because the veil of the sense-world spreads in front. But these forces stream into us, have built up our physical and etheric bodies. This whole interplay, the interactions between the Great World and the Little World, between what is within and what is without, concealed by the veil of the sense-world—all this is embraced within the bewildering labyrinth. It is life itself, in full reality, into which we enter and have then to describe.

To-morrow we shall begin by taking a first glimpse into that which man cannot, it is true, perceive in its essence, but which is revealed to him as active workings when he passes through the one or the other portal, when he passes the Lesser and the Greater Guardians of the Threshold.

The lecture yesterday concluded with an allusion to the two frontiers within which man's normal consciousness is enclosed, and today we will begin by speaking of the regions lying beyond these frontiers. Man finds these regions when, as the result of inner development, he passes either the Lesser or the Greater Guardian of the Threshold.

Today we shall try to make clear what kind of experiences come to a man when, after passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold, he descends consciously into his own inner being. We know that in ordinary life this descent occurs every day and that at the moment of waking it becomes impossible for us to perceive or be aware of our own inner being. To understand this it is necessary to have clearly in mind something that is essentially and inwardly connected with the whole of man's development.

In the course of his life man develops from one stage to another. Even during his life between birth and death he undergoes development which leads him beyond the initial stages of life when his faculties and capacities are of little account, to others when they are considerably enhanced. How does this development proceed in everyday life? Sleeping and waking play an essential part. When we think of the daily experiences man has in his youth in connection with learning and picture how these experiences are transformed into faculties, we must turn our minds to the condition of sleep which alone makes this transformation possible.

Every night on going to sleep our souls take with them something from daily life; what we take with us—the fruit of our experiences—is transformed during sleep in such a way that it becomes our abilities and capacities. To take a concrete example. What efforts we were obliged to make day after day when we were young, in order to learn to write! But we are not in the least aware of those past experiences when we take up a pen today to give expression to our thoughts. All our earlier efforts to shape the letters have been transformed into the capacity to write. The power which has transformed all these daily experiences into the faculty of writing is actually present in the depths of the soul but can operate only when we ourselves are not consciously there.

From this we may conclude that in our souls there is something that is higher than all our conscious life. Forces higher than those available in our conscious life become active during sleep; experiences are transformed into faculties and the soul becomes more and more mature. A deeper being is working within us at our further development; when we go to sleep, this being receives the day's experiences and re-moulds them, so that in a later period of life they are at our disposal in the form of faculties.

But we bring out of sleep much more than we ourselves brought into it through our conscious experiences. During the day we use up forces by participating in what is going on around us. In the evening we feel fatigue because these forces are exhausted, and during sleep they are replenished; many forces flow into us during the night other than those we have acquired as the result of our daily activity. Our life during sleep is therefore the source of innumerable forces we need for waking life.

Thus we develop from stage to stage, but there is a definite limit to this development. Every time we wake in the morning we find the same physical and etheric bodies, and we know that fundamentally speaking we can do very little by means of our own forces to transform these two bodies or to develop them to a higher stage. Admittedly, anyone with knowledge of life realises that it is possible even for the physical body to be transformed to a certain extent. If we observe a person who for ten years has devoted himself to acquiring deeper knowledge which he has not allowed to remain mere theory but which had laid hold of his inner life, then after those ten years we can form an idea of the inner metamorphosis that has taken place by comparing his present with his earlier appearance and perceiving how the knowledge acquired has produced a change even in his features; the development which proceeded in his soul has also helped to shape his bodily appearance. But this outer development is very limited, for we are confronted every morning with essentially the same physical and etheric bodies, possessing the same aptitudes as at birth. Whereas, relatively speaking, we can do a great deal to develop our powers of intellect, of mind and of will, we can transform our outer sheaths, our physical and etheric bodies only to a slight extent. Nevertheless inner forces must be active through the whole of life between birth and death, and these forces must be continually re-kindled if life is to continue. We see at the moment of death what becomes of the physical body when the etheric body is no longer working in it. The physical and chemical forces inherent in the physical body as such assert themselves from the moment of death onwards and dissolve, disintegrate, it. That this cannot happen during life is due to the etheric body, which is a faithful fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. At every moment our physical body would be ready to disintegrate if fresh forces from the etheric body were not continually supplied to it. The etheric or life-body in turn receives what it needs in this respect from still deeper inner forces, from the astral body, which is the vehicle of happiness and grief, of joy and sorrow. Thus the corresponding inner body is perpetually working at the outer body. The outwardly visible part of us is sustained all the time by the inner forces. How the astral body works on the etheric body and the etheric body on the physical-that is what a man would see if he were able to descend consciously into the physical and etheric bodies on waking; but he is diverted from this perception by external objects and happenings.

However, by developing his soul to the stage enabling him to experience consciously the moment of entry into the etheric and physical bodies on waking, a man can acquire a certain knowledge of what actually works creatively on his inner being during sleep.

We become conscious of the driving forces of our manhood when we are able to descend into our inner being. What must we do if this is to be achieved with conscious awareness? We must prepare ourselves in such a way that at the moment of waking external impressions transmitted by the eyes, ears, and so forth, do not disturb us, do not immediately force themselves upon us. We must train ourselves to be able to pass out of the state of consciousness prevailing in sleep, in such a way that we are able to ward off all external impressions. When we can do that we pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold.

What is it that we see if we pass through the portal leading into our own inner being? As genuine mystics we learn to know something of which hitherto we had no notion. The descriptions given in most theosophical manuals of the astral, etheric and physical bodies are hardly more, if viewed from an inner point of view, than very approximate indications, although these can serve as pointers. Genuine knowledge of these bodies into which we descend on waking is only possible as the result of a patient and prolonged approach from every angle to the great truths of existence. We will endeavour today to penetrate into these mysteries from one particular side.

Although man does not need to see the external forces which work on him, he learns to know by instinct that what is usually called the ‘soul’ is quite different from current ideas of it. He learns to realise that the human soul is indeed little, but that it can be compared with something very great; also that the individual capacities which the soul may possess are very slight compared with the capacities of that great Being with whom, however, it may feel itself akin. The knowledge acquired on descending into the physical and etheric bodies is that on waking we emerge from another world in which there is a Being akin to our own soul, only infinitely mightier. Thus on waking the human soul feels insignificant after passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold and may say to itself: I am paltry indeed, for if I now had within me nothing more than I have imparted to myself, if I had not been outpoured in the spiritual world, and if the beings of that world had not let forces stream into me, I should be in a state of dire bewilderment. The soul realises its need of the forces which have streamed into it the whole night long; and that what has thus streamed into it is akin to its own three inherent forces. They are: firstly, the Will. Everything of the nature of Will is one of the fundamental forces of the soul, the force which guides us in this way or that; secondly, Feeling. This is the force which brings it about that the soul is attracted by one thing, repelled by another, experiences joy or pain as the case may be; thirdly, Thinking: the capacity to form ideas of things.

These three basic forces of the soul are the really valuable assets which we can develop and elaborate between birth and death. By strengthening our will we become capable of taking vigorous and effective hold of life. If we develop the force of feeling, we shall realise with ever greater certainty what is right and what is wrong; to witness justice and righteousness will give us joy and we shall feel pain at the sight of wrong-doing. If we develop our power of thinking we shall acquire wise understanding of the phenomena of the world.

Through the whole of our life we must work at these three basic forces of the soul. But when we wake in the morning in the condition that has been described, having passed the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold, we realise that whatever qualities of willing, feeling and thinking we can develop in our lives are trifling compared with the powers of Thinking, of Feeling and of Will pervading the spiritual world out of which we pass at the moment of waking. We realise too that we need what our soul has absorbed during the night, for what we ourselves are able to develop consciously during the life of day would not take us very far. As a gift from spiritual worlds, from the higher forces of Cosmic Thinking, Cosmic Feeling and Cosmic Will, there must stream into us all night long what must descend with us into our inner being. When we first become conscious of having absorbed Cosmic Will, Cosmic Feeling and Cosmic Thinking, we realise that it is not we ourselves who have acquired these three basic forces but that without our co-operation they stream into us during sleep. Furthermore, these three forces are transformed in our soul and assume different aspects.

We become aware that what we know in our souls as will is only a faint reflection of the Cosmic Will that we bring with us; we know that this, as it streams into us, is transformed into the force which enables us to move about, to have mobile limbs. There streams into us the faculty which can be observed in external manifestation when we see somebody performing his daily work. What we draw into ourselves from the Cosmic Will becomes visible in the movement of our limbs, in our mobility. It reveals itself as an inner force, streaming into us. We now know in very truth that Cosmic Will streams through the universe and through us, that we become mobile beings and have independence because this Will has streamed into us during sleep. Then throughout the day we use up this Cosmic Will. In ordinary life we do not feel the in-streaming of the macrocosmic Will but when we have passed the Guardian of the Threshold we feel it working on within us, we feel that we have become one with the Cosmic Will, that we are membered into the Will of Cosmic Worlds.

What we know in everyday life as the power of feeling has also been drawn from an infinite reservoir of Cosmic Feeling; this too streams into us and is so transformed as to become inwardly perceptible to us, provided we are sufficiently mature; it is as if this Cosmic Feeling were permeating us with something comparable only with what is called light. We become inwardly illumined; what streams into us as this working of Cosmic Feeling is inner light, although without clairvoyance it is not outwardly visible as light. But a man who has passed the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold realises that what is needed for his life of inner experience, namely light, is nothing else than a product of Cosmic Feeling absorbed by him during sleep. From this it is evident that when a man is given up to his own inner life and being, he experiences something quite new about his soul, namely what his inner self is able to be as a result of all that streams to him out of the Macrocosm. And it is only when he feels the forces of Cosmic Feeling streaming into him that the astral body is there before him as a reality.

The forces of thinking are such that they work as a regulator between what streams to us as the power of movement and the inner light. A certain equilibrium must be established between the inner light (feeling) and the will. If the right relationship between the urge to activity and the inner light were disrupted, the bodily nature of man would not be properly provided for from within. A man would be doomed to perish if either the one or the other were present in excess. Only if the true equilibrium has been established can man so unfold his faculties that the right forces serve his outer existence.

So we see that the effects of sleep work upon our inner being and through our outer sheaths from morning until evening, enabling us to cope with the demands of existence. With this in mind we can say: in truth our soul is paltry as compared with what there is in the Macrocosm into which our being pours during sleep, yet our soul is akin to it. The great universe is pervaded by Cosmic Will, Cosmic Feeling, Cosmic Thinking, and thinking, feeling and willing unfold to higher and higher stages within our own soul.

Another, immediately following, experience can be expressed by saying: Even though today my soul is paltry as compared with the great Cosmic Soul, it will eventually grow to be like it. My soul and its faculties of thinking, feeling and willing are still insignificant but will eventually grow to be comparable with this mighty Cosmic Thinking, Feeling and Will.

This experience is followed by another which gives us the certain knowledge that what confronts us as the mighty Macrocosm was once like our own soul; the Macrocosm too has developed out of small beginnings into this stupendous greatness.

A fruit of these two feelings in the soul of the true mystic is a thought that can be expressed as follows: How would it have been if those Beings who have created what is today outspread in the universe, who bestow so much upon us—how would it have been if they had done nothing in the past to promote their own development? Once, in the infinitely distant past, their forces of thinking, feeling and will were just as trivial as our own and today their power is such that they no longer need to receive strength from the Macrocosm; they give, only give. What should we ourselves have become if they had done nothing to develop to these lofty stages?—Without them we could not have existed! If we know how to value our existence, a feeling of infinite thankfulness towards these great Beings is born in our souls and streams through and through us. Every true mystic knows this experience as a reality. It cannot be compared with what is felt in everyday life as gratitude and is an experience of the very greatest significance. What the outer world now calls Mysticism really amounts to nothing more than a collection of phrases. The genuine mystic knows this experience well and asks himself: What would you be if the Beings who existed before you and were once like you had not raised themselves to such heights that at night they are able to let stream into you the forces you need in the bodily existence into which you will pass when you wake in the morning? Nobody who has not in the deepest ground of his heart this feeling of thankfulness to the Macrocosm has become a true mystic.

And another feeling follows.—If we today stand at the beginning, as those Beings themselves once stood, in order to achieve the goal of our existence must we not work at ourselves and do everything possible so to transform our paltry thinking, feeling and willing that some day we need not only take, but also give, and become able to pour out forces such as are poured into us when we are given over to the Macrocosm during sleep? This feeling is then transformed into an overwhelming obligation to promote the development of the soul. As genuine mystics we have the feeling: You are neglecting this duty unless you try with all your might to develop the lowly powers of your soul to the height revealed to you as an attainable ideal when you gaze consciously into the macrocosmic source of those powers. If you do nothing for your own development, if you resist it, then you will be helping to prevent other beings from developing as you have developed; you will be contributing to the decline of the world instead of to its progress.

From this we realise that the ordinary experiences of our soul—desires, impulses, urges, passions, and so on—are transformed in a remarkable way, that what we commonly know as gratitude becomes immeasurable thankfulness to the Macrocosm and what we commonly feel as duty becomes a feeling of infinite obligation.

These are the feelings that stream through us when we pass the Guardian of the Threshold and enable us to recognise the astral body as a reality. If these feelings are really alive in a man and he gives himself up with greater and greater intensity to the feelings of thankfulness and obligation towards the evolving world, if he lets these feelings pulsate through his soul, then the eyes of seership open in him; the true form of his own astral body, which on waking in his ordinary consciousness was hitherto hidden from him, stands before big eyes—the astral body that was born out of the Macrocosm. If we are to see all this and to realise with sufficient strength the truth that spirit lies behind all material existence, then we must pass the Guardian of the Threshold.

We must also become aware of the reverse side of what has been described as the good or light side.

We have heard that the Cosmic Will streams through us as the power of activity, of movement, that Cosmic Feeling streams through us as light. If this were not so we should not exist, nay we could not exist, as men. And now let us compare these cosmic forces with those of the thinking, feeling and will which have been developed by the soul up to the present. To the eyes of spirit the extent to which we have fallen short of achieving strength of will, intelligence in thinking, sound and healthy feeling, becomes clearly evident, especially at the moment of waking from sleep. It is found that everything we have done in the way of acquiring intelligence may be united with what streams into us as light out of the Cosmic Feeling, and that what we have neglected in the development of our own intelligence acts like a brake. The stream of Cosmic Feeling flowing into us is diminished to the extent we have neglected to work at the development of our own powers of thinking. If we are to make progress, our thinking must have the right relationship to what we absorb into ourselves from Cosmic Feeling.

Theoretical reflection might easily be tempted to believe that what our human intelligence acquires for itself corresponds to what streams into us from Cosmic Thinking. Only a theorist would speak in this way, for it is not in accordance with the reality. Many mistakes are made by combining like with like. Human intelligence actually corresponds to Cosmic Feeling as absorbed in sleep. The greater human intelligence becomes, the more is it illumined by the inner light that has its source in Cosmic Feeling. But darkness streams into this light of Cosmic Feeling if we neglect the development of our thinking, of our intelligence. If a man is too lazy to develop his thinking properly the punishment for such sins of omission will be that darkness streams into the inner light. Whatever a man neglects to do in the way of developing his intelligence brings upon him the punishment that he himself draws something from his inner light and promotes darkness in it.

Thus does the spirit work at our inner being. But someone may say: It is a cause of great uneasiness that attention is beginning to be directed to such things. Have human beings not hitherto existed quite happily between the two frontiers, in the span of life that stretches between the Lesser and the Greater Guardian of the Threshold? After all, the spiritual Powers of whose existence people have hitherto had no inkling, have taken good care of their welfare; could not this continue as it is?—Even if they do not put it into words, people think today that they would prefer to let life remain just as it has been hitherto. They say: If we were to look into ourselves we should become aware how light and darkness mingle within us. Up to now the spiritual Powers have taken care that all this proceeds as it should; if we now try to take a hand, we may do harm, so we had better leave it alone.—The attitude of many people today is that they will go on eating and drinking and leave everything else to the gods.

In point of fact there would be something in this attitude if conditions had remained as they were originally. Until their present stage of evolution men could draw adequate forces out of sleep; these were macrocosmic forces, stored up by great spiritual Beings. So it was hitherto. But in these matters we must not be content with abstractions; we must keep strictly to reality. And the reality is that the fundamental, spiritual conditions of our life change from epoch to epoch. Those Cosmic Powers to whom we are given over every night during sleep have from the beginning of human existence counted upon the expectation that light will also stream upwards from human life itself to the light that streams down from above. The Cosmic Powers have no inexhaustible reservoir of light; their reservoir is one from which the stream of forces will constantly diminish unless from human life itself, through efforts to transform thinking, feeling and willing and to rise into the higher worlds, fresh forces, new light, were to flow back into the great reservoir of Cosmic Light and Cosmic Feeling. We are now living in the epoch when it is essential for men to be conscious that they must not merely rely upon what flows into them from Cosmic Powers but must themselves co-operate in the Process of world-evolution.

It is no ordinary ideal that Spiritual Science is now setting before itself; it does not work in the same way as other movements where people enthuse about some ideal but are only capable of preaching about it to others. No such impulse is working in those who regard Spiritual Science as a world-mission; they are prompted by the knowledge that certain forces in the Macrocosm are beginning to be exhausted, that we are moving towards a future when too little would flow down from above if men did not themselves work at the development of their souls. Such is the epoch in which we are living. For that reason Spiritual Science must come into existence in order to induce men to replenish, from their side, the down-streaming forces that are becoming exhausted. This knowledge is the source from which Spiritual Science draws its impulse and if it were not for these facts, Spiritual Science would leave human evolution to take care of itself. But Spiritual Science foresees that if in the coming centuries there are not enough human beings who strive to reach the higher worlds, this would result in the human race receiving less and less forces from above. Human life would wither and dry up, just as a tree lignifies when no more living sap flows through it. Until now, forces from outside have been instilled into the human race. Those people who live on unthinkingly, recognising only the outer world of the senses, know nothing about the changes that are taking place behind this material world, one of which is that because the spiritual forces are becoming exhausted, it is necessary for such forces to be produced by men themselves. If the further evolution of mankind were left to those who cling to the outer physical world alone, universal desolation would be the result. Spiritual Science must now be promulgated in order that men may be able to decide themselves whether they wish or do not wish to co-operate in the necessary work.

We will now look back upon all our sins of omission, upon everything that acts as an impediment in our soul to the forces flowing into us from above. All sins of omission in thinking penetrate into the inner light in the form of darkness. The same applies to sins of omission in respect of feeling and of will. Force and strength derived from Cosmic Will, light derived from Cosmic Feeling, order and harmony from Cosmic Thinking—all this is impaired by our sins of omission in respect of feeling, thinking and willing.

Thus we become aware of what is working within us. Into all this there is interpolated what we ourselves are with all our impotence—which is due to our failure to do better. In this way we reach true self-knowledge. What we have become on account of our sins of omission and that for which compensation has to be made, appears like a dark shadow in a radiant picture. What we have failed to become stands before the eyes of our soul and reveals itself clearly in that it sends out its rays in three directions. The hindrances we cause to the evolutionary process through what we have neglected in respect of our will, in respect of our thinking and in respect of our feeling—all this is revealed. In these three directions our imperfections become manifest. Each has something definite to say to us.

Firstly, there is the obstacle raying from our own will into the stream of Cosmic Will flowing through us; what we have neglected to do in respect of our own will now confronts us as an obstacle. We must say to ourselves: By everything you have left undone you are fettered to the Earth's forces of decline, to all that is driving the Earth towards destruction.—Of our sins of omission in respect of thinking, we say to ourselves: Because of these sins of omission you will have no possibility of establishing harmony between your will and your feeling.—And of our sins of omission in respect of feeling, we say to ourselves: The march of world-evolution will pass you by as if you were not there. You have done nothing to help world-evolution and it will therefore take back what was once bestowed upon you.

Thus we see before us, distinct from each other, all the forces through which we are fettered to the Earth, and we see cosmic evolution pass us by because we have contributed nothing towards it through our own efforts. Then we feel how these forces which chain us to the Earth and the forces which pass us by, are tearing our true being asunder. In this moment of passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold we feel our sins of omission to be the destroyers of our soul's existence.

There is only one means of counteracting this destruction, only one means can at this crucial moment enable us to stand firm. It is that we ourselves must take a vow that nothing shall be neglected in future. After all, the indications are plain enough. They tell us, at the moment we are passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold: These forces are dragging you down; therefore you must work to develop your will, to develop your powers of thinking and of feeling.—We may even feel grateful to this terrifying vista for it makes possible the eventual fulfillment of our vow.

Having spoken of the necessity of the feeling of thankfulness and the feeling of obligation, we can now speak further of what is called the mystic vow. Before the spectacle of his own inadequacy, everyone must register the vow that in future he will work at his soul to his utmost capacity in order to make up for past negligence. This vow gives life a new content, in keeping with true and effective self-knowledge; a man no longer broods but works actively at his own self. This experience can take a twofold form. As long as we are only aware of it as a mental process, something is still lacking in us, is still fettering us, and there is still reason for cosmic evolution to pass us by. In such a case the experience has been in the astral body only. But if the feelings of thankfulness and duty are experienced over and over again, they will be transformed ultimately into definite vision which becomes an inner experience, and then a force, a power. This force arises through the astral experience being mirrored in the etheric body and reflected to us by the latter. An image of ourselves is now before us as an external reality, standing out as it were from a background. The background shows us how the forces of light and activity in which we are immersed during sleep work into our sheaths. What we have made of ourselves stands out from this background. Just as in outer reality, animals, plants, minerals, confront us, so now our own self confronts us in its true form. Our own inner being becomes as it were perceptible in the outer world. Hitherto when we descended into our own being, our attention was diverted to the outer world. The impressions from this world flowed into us, making it unnecessary for us to see what we are now obliged to see, if we resolve to take our share in working for the progress of mankind.

Our own inner self is portrayed as it were against this background. All that fetters us to the Earth, all that binds us to the perishable, appears to us in astral vision as a definite image, the image of a distorted bull, dragging us down. All the forces which otherwise produce harmony, reveal in the image of a distorted lion the disharmony consequent upon our sins of omission in feeling. Everything that passes us by as the result of our sins of omission in thinking, appears to us in the image of a distorted eagle. These three images are permeated by the distorted image of our own self, indicating what we have to correct and put right in the future in order to contribute to world-evolution what it requires of us. Three distortions of animal forms and one of ourselves—how these three separate images or pictures are related to one another reveals the measure of the work lying ahead of us.

Thus when we pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold we have true self-knowledge, for there stands before us an image of what we have become; this self-knowledge is a stimulus for our whole future life. We shall only shrink from this experience—as would otherwise be very probable—if we hold the belief that what we do not see is not there. There are people who, when a slate falls from a roof, close their eyes instead of moving out of the way. Such people—they are like those who say they would prefer to avoid the experiences described by Spiritual Science-do not want to see what is happening, but nothing is altered by the fact that they do not see it! The one and only help at this stage is self-knowledge. Hitherto the Cosmic Powers were able to check the utter distortion of the image of our manhood, but in the future these Cosmic Powers will no longer suffice. We ourselves, in our image, are the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. It is we ourselves who hinder the possibility of descent into our inner being; we ourselves must work at our own development. This knowledge alone makes it possible for the future decline of humanity into enfeeblement to be avoided, as well as the failure to fulfil its mission on the Earth.

We have now been led in thought through the region that may be called the region of our own Sentient Body into which we descend on waking from sleep. But in normal existence we are not aware of it because our consciousness is diverted. If, on waking, we refuse to admit the impressions from outside, we experience what has been described. We have spoken-but only very briefly-of our astral body. What has now been described is the inner aspect presented by part of our human nature, namely, our Sentient Body (Empfindungsleib). We have reached the boundary where the Sentient Body borders on the Etheric Body. The image or picture we behold shows us what we truly are. The form we there behold is only an image but it is all that is needed. Discussions about the non-reality of a mirror-image are worthless. If a man wants to know what he really looks like, discussion about this is futile. What we behold is of course only a reflection, a mirror-image, in the etheric body, but it helps us to acquire self-knowledge, and therein lies its value. Error would begin only if the clairvoyant were to believe the mirror-image to be another entity, another reality coming towards him, if he were unaware that it is only a picture revealing his inner self. Were the clairvoyant to take the picture to be a real bull, or some four-headed creature, he would be like a man whose nose displeases him and who, on seeing it in a mirror, tries to punch it! Things must not be taken to be what they are not. A man who does not rightly understand the mirror-image lends himself to hallucinations. Whoever regards the image as being something in space and not a mirror-image which in fact it is, has succumbed to hallucination. Before seership begins it is therefore important to have acquired the faculty of grasping the true values of things through reason. Clairvoyance should not be induced in anyone who would be liable to take for reality what is merely a reflection, or to confound spiritual realities with the realities of outer, physical space. Hence it is of great importance that nobody should embark upon genuine spiritual training without possessing the faculty of intelligent thinking which enables him always to form a correct estimate of what he is seeing. It is not vision alone that is important, but also the power to appraise what is seen. We shall encounter Beings who really do exist outside us, but to begin with we experience only our own astral world; the pictures that have been described today are only mirror-images of our own inner being which is revealed to us as an external world. To realise this is the outcome of self-knowledge. As soon as a man descends into his own inner being he is bound to see images; but it would be hallucination if what is simply a reflection of one's own inner being were taken to be something different.

Along the path to be described tomorrow we shall encounter spiritual Beings, for this path reaches down into the etheric body; the same holds good for the path that leads past the Greater Guardian of the threshold.

Today, then, we have reached the point of considering the stream which passes into the realm of our experience at the moment of waking. We have described the consciousness that deviates from the normal and is experienced by the mystic when at the moment of waking he diverts his attention from everything outside him in the world of the senses and penetrates into his inner being.

A rather difficult task confronts us today but my listeners will be willing to submit to the greater demands made upon them if it is said at the outset that this study will enable us during the next few days to feel firmer ground under our feet. In Spiritual Science, unless we are content to remain with abstractions, we must also listen from time to time to information belonging to the higher regions of spiritual knowledge. It may also be added that our study today will in no way consist of deductions or theoretical inferences, but of matters which have always been known to those who have penetrated more deeply into these subjects. We shall therefore be dealing with knowledge possessed by actual individuals.

We heard yesterday how a man would be able to find his bearings within the inner Organisation of his astral body if he could, on waking, descend consciously into this astral body; and we were able to form an idea of what it means to pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. In point of fact, what was said yesterday was rather hypothetical, for actually in normal life the moment never comes when merely through waking a man can penetrate consciously into his inner being. At most he can prepare himself by mystical deepening for conscious entry into his external bodily sheaths. What this means, and the preparation it entails, will only become clear in the course of these lectures. For normal consciousness it may happen—very occasionally—that a man has such moments of conscious awakening as a result of conditions belonging to his previous incarnations. This can and does happen to certain individuals. They wake up with a certain sense of oppression. This sense of oppression is due to the fact that the inner man, who during sleep felt outspread and free in the Macrocosm, returns again into the prison of his body. There may also be another feeling. Under these abnormal conditions a man feels a better being at the moment of waking than during the course of the day; he feels that there is something within him that he might call his better self. Again the reason for this is that on waking a feeling has remained with him that something has streamed into him during sleep from worlds higher than the world of his own sensory experiences. These are feelings that may arise under abnormal conditions even in ordinary life and what has now been said can be regarded as a confirmation of statements made in the lecture yesterday. Nevertheless it is only the genuine mystic to whom the experience can come in its full intensity.

The question now is whether it is possible to go further. What has been experienced in the way described is the inner side of the astral body, of the spiritual part of man. But it is possible to descend still more deeply, into parts of human nature which manifest in ordinary life in a form less purely spiritual. Nevertheless, their foundations are spiritual, for that is true of everything in the outer world. The question is whether it is possible to descend even further, into the physical body, and whether there is anything between the astral body and the physical body. Yes, as is made clear in anthroposophical literature, between the physical and the astral bodies there is the etheric body, so that in descending to that level we should encounter our etheric body and perhaps also traces of our physical body, which otherwise we see only from without but which we can recognise from within when we penetrate into it consciously.

Generally speaking, however, it is not good, nor is it without danger, to take a further step in mystical deepening beyond those mentioned yesterday. Everything spoken of then can be carried out cautiously by one who has acquired some knowledge of what is contained in the book>Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment or in the second part of Occult Science—an Outline.¹ Up to this point a man can progress independently. To go further along the path leading into the inner self, however, is not without danger; moreover it cannot be done at all in the way in which a man of the present day likes to acquire his spiritual knowledge. Accordingly a different path to knowledge is chosen in our time.

In modern civilisation it is no longer right to take the path leading to a deeper descent into the inner being without troubling about any other considerations. The fundamental characteristic of spiritual life today is that man subordinates himself to a certain degree only and wishes to tread his path of knowledge in the fullest possible freedom. We shall see that there is a path into the spiritual world which takes this desire into full account: it is the Rosicrucian path of knowledge. This is the true path of modern times. It did not exist in those Mysteries of antiquity where man was initiated into the deeper secrets of existence. There were Mysteries in which a man was simply led past the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold into his own inner being and there were others in which he was led out into the Macrocosm, necessarily in a kind of ecstasy. These were the two most usual paths in ancient times. The path of descent into the inner self was followed especially in those places of Initiation which are called the Mystery Sanctuaries of Osiris and Isis. And now, in order to explain what man can experience by descending into his inner being, we will speak of the experiences undergone by a pupil of the Osiris and Isis Mysteries. As we shall hear in the next lectures, it is possible today to attain the Initiation which brings knowledge of these Mysteries, but the path leading to that Initiation differs from what it once was.

In ancient Egypt something was necessary against which human nature, as it is today, would rebel. It was necessary in those times that at the point when the candidate for Initiation was to penetrate into the higher worlds—or even shortly before—he should not attempt to progress independently along his own path of knowledge but should entrust himself to an initiated teacher, to a Guru—the term used in oriental philosophy. Otherwise the path was too dangerous. As a general rule, even the steps towards mystical deepening described yesterday were undertaken under the guidance of a Guru.

What was the real purpose of this guidance by an initiated teacher? When we descend in the morning into our bodily nature, our soul is received by three Powers which have been called by names take from ancient terminology—the names of Venus, Mercury and Moon. Man can deal by himself with what is generally understood as the Venus influence when he is descending into his inner being. A certain training in humility and selflessness will enable him to hold his own in face of the Venus power. Before setting out on the path into the unknown realm of his own inner being he must suppress all impulses of egoism and self-love and cultivate selflessness. He must make himself into a being who feels love and sympathy, not for his fellow-men only but for all existence. Then, if need be, be can safely surrender himself in his conscious descent to the power known as that of Venus.

But it would be more dangerous if a man were to leave himself unaided at the mercy of the Mercury powers. In the ancient Egyptian Initiation he was therefore under the guidance of a great teacher whose own earlier experiences made him capable of being a leader because he was fully conscious of the way in which these Mercury powers could be controlled. A candidate for Initiation was therefore guided by a Hermes- or Mercury-priest. This entailed strict submission to whatever demands the teacher made upon the pupil. The pupil was compelled to make the resolve to eliminate his own Ego completely, to submit to no impulses of his own and to carry out meticulously what the Hermes-priest instructed him to do. It was essential for the pupil of the Osiris and Isis Mysteries to submit to this domination which would be repugnant to a man of today and to which, moreover, he need not subject himself. Obedience to the teacher through many years was necessary, not merely in the pupil's outer actions, but in those Mysteries he was compelled to entrust himself to the teacher's guidance even in his thoughts and feelings, in order to be able to descend without danger into a deeper level of his own inner being.

The lecture yesterday described what is meant by acquiring knowledge of the inner nature of the astral body. We will now consider what the pupil of the Osiris and Isis Mysteries was able, with the help of his teacher, to experience in connection with the etheric body. The elimination of his Ego caused him to see with the spiritual eyes of the teacher, to see himself through the teacher's eyes, to think the teacher's thoughts and to become a kind of external object to himself. In this way remarkable experiences came to him. They were experiences in which he felt as if his life were going backwards in time, as if his whole being—which he was now seeing with the spiritual eyes of the Hermes-priest—were spreading out and expanding; and simultaneously he felt as if he were going backwards in time into periods preceding his present life. Gradually he came to feel as if he were going back many, many years, a span of time very much longer than his life since birth. During this experience he saw, through the eyes of the initiated priest, first of all himself, and then, far out beyond, many generations whom he felt to be his forefathers. For a certain time the candidate for this Initiation had the feeling that he was moving backwards along the line of his ancestors—not as if he were identical with them, but as if he were hovering above them—moving backwards to a definite point, to a primeval ancestor. Then the impression faded—the impression of seeing earthly figures with whom his existence was in some way related.

The teacher had now to make clear to the candidate what it was that he had actually seen. Only in the following way can this become intelligible.—When we come into existence, having passed through the spiritual world between death and rebirth, we bear within us not only the characteristics derived from our preceding life but also our inherited traits. We are born into a family, into a people, into a race; we bear the inherited qualities of our ancestors. These qualities are not derived from the last incarnation but have been inherited from generation to generation. Now why is it that a man, with his inborn nature, incarnates in a particular family, in a particular people or race? Why, on descending to birth, does he seek out certain definite, inherited characteristics? He would never do so if he had no relation at all to them. In point of fact he was already connected with these attributes long before his birth. If we were to start from a particular individual and go back to his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on, we should find—if we were able to follow the line with inner vision—the inherited characteristics through a whole series of generations, as far back as one in particular, where all trace of heredity would vanish. The inherited characteristics are still present in their most attenuated form until finally they are lost altogether.

Just as we see the inherited characteristics finally disappearing, so by starting from an individual we can see how the qualities of the son are most similar to those of the father, rather less similar to those of the grandfather, still less similar to those of the great-grandfather, and so on. In the ancient Egyptian Mysteries of Osiris and Isis the priest led the candidate for Initiation back as far as the ancestor who still possessed characteristics which had been transmitted, through heredity, to the pupil himself. It was revealed to the pupil that man is connected in a certain way with his inherited qualities. Thus he established a relationship, spiritually, with that primeval ancestor from whom some quality in himself was derived. It was also revealed to him that the human being spends a long time preparing for himself in the spiritual world the qualities he is ultimately to inherit. Nor does he merely inherit them; in a certain sense he actually inculcates them into his ancestors. He continues to work through the whole series of generations until finally that physical body can be born towards which he feels drawn. Strange as it may seem, we ourselves have worked out of the spiritual world at the physical bodies of our own forefathers, in order gradually to shape and mould the attributes we finally receive at birth as inherited characteristics.

These things are revealed when a man descends into his own etheric body; it then becomes evident to him that the etheric body has a long history behind it. Long, long before entering existence through birth, he was himself working in the spiritual world at the preparation of the etheric body he now bears. He began to work at this etheric body when the most ancient ancestor from whom he still inherits qualities, came to the Earth. When it is said that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and so on, this is merely an indication. The only possibility of learning about it in greater precision is to acquaint ourselves with the information given by those who have themselves descended consciously into their bodily sheaths.

Thus man learns to move in the regions through which he passed before entering physical existence. He comes to know a portion of his life before birth, a portion which comprises centuries; for centuries have elapsed since the time when, between his last death and present birth, he began to form the archetype of his etheric body. It was then that there was laid into his blood the first seed of those special characteristics which were progressively elaborated, until the etheric body had reached the point of being able to absorb these characteristics at birth.-That is one side of the experience. What we inherit is a reconstruction, so to speak, of everything we ourselves have had to do previously in the spiritual world in order to be able to enter into physical existence. Therefore the qualities that are concentrated as it were in the present etheric body and were given their stamp through the foregoing centuries, have always been called the “Upper”—meaning the heavenly or spiritual man. This is the technical expression for the fact that by penetrating into his etheric body man learns to know his “upper” nature. The expression “heavenly” or “spiritual” man was also used because it was realised that these attributes had been formed and fashioned from the spiritual world through which the man had passed during the period between his last death and the present birth.

And now as to the other side of the experience.—When the pupil had been led to a certain stage by the priest of Hermes, he was confronted by something that may at first have seemed strange, but was explained by his teacher as a phenomenon that should not be altogether unknown to him. The pupil soon recognised that he was being confronted with something he himself had left behind, something intimately connected with him, though it now faced him as a foreign entity. What was this? We shall understand it best by considering the moment of death in the light of what spiritual investigation discloses. At that moment a man discards his physical body; his Ego and astral body remain—namely, those members of his being which every night pass into the state of sleep—and also, for a short time, what we are now trying to study from within, namely, the etheric body. For a few days after death man lives in these three members of his being. But then the main part of the etheric body passes away from him like a second corpse. It is always said—and I myself have constantly indicated it—that what then departs as a second corpse is dispersed in the etheric world; the man takes with him only an extract, a seed, of it into the life he is now beginning between death and his next birth. What there passes over as a second corpse into the universal ether needs a considerable time to dissolve; and it is the last traces of the dissolving etheric body of his previous life that the candidate for Initiation finds as a foreign entity when he has passed backwards spiritually to the point where he arrives at the last ancestor from whom he has inherited any quality. There he makes contact with the last remnants of his previous etheric body. And now, if he continues the process of Initiation, he must penetrate as it were into this last etheric body of his, which he has left behind. Then he lives backwards through further years—almost, but not quite as long as the period he previously lived through until he encounters his earliest ancestor. The time is in the ratio of five to seven. The man now lives through a time in which he finds, as it were in ever denser form, what confronts him as the last remnant from his past life; as it becomes more and more definitely formed, its resemblance to his last etheric body grows until he finally recognises the form his etheric body had assumed at the moment of his last death. And now, after this form has still further condensed, has more and more assumed human shape, he is face to face with his last death. At that moment, for one who is initiated, there is no longer any doubt that reincarnation is a truth, for he has actually gone back to his last death. Thus we have now come to know what man finds as a remnant of his last earthly life. In spiritual science this has at all times been called the “Lower” or the “earthly” man. The pupil now connected the “Upper” with the “Lower” man; he followed the “Lower” to the point where he reached his last life on Earth.

Thus during his Initiation the pupil passed through a cycle leading from his last earthly life to his present earthly life. He united himself in an act of spiritual vision with what he had become in his previous incarnation. In spiritual science this process has always been called a “cycle” and it was originally expressed by the symbol of the snake biting its own tail. This same symbol was used in connection with many happenings, among them for the experience just described, the experience undergone by one who was initiated in the Mysteries of Osiris and Isis.

Obviously, therefore, there is much more to be said about the etheric body than merely stating that it is one member of man's being. The essential nature of the etheric body can only become known by descending into our own inner self; we then come to know the two beings who are united in every man, and we also recognise how karma works. We are then able to explain to ourselves how it happens that we enter existence through birth in a quite definite way. We were obliged as it were to wait from the preceding death until the new birth, until the old etheric body had dissolved; only then could a beginning be made with forming the new one. This makes it evident that in fact a man has not completely got rid of the products of his dissolved etheric body. And by descending into his own inner being he may also find the other part which has actually dissolved, because he has retained an extract of it. If this were not the case it would be impossible for him to find any trace of it again.

When these things are communicated gradually, even in public lectures on Spiritual Science, you will realise how well-founded they are. You are now at the point where you can see the reason for the statement made, even in exoteric lectures, that an extract or essence of the etheric body remains. All these data are the result of spiritual investigation and are based upon the deepest imaginable foundations.

Thus a man has gone back as far as his last death, and in following the process we have heard of certain qualities which one who is entering into deeper forms of mystical experience learns to know through his Initiation. Yesterday we heard of astral qualities—the feeling of infinite gratitude on the one side and, on the other, the feeling of greatly enhanced obligation and responsibility experienced by the mystic in his astral body. Today we have beard of the “Upper” and the “Lower” man, the “Above” and the “Below”, experienced by the mystic when he descends into his etheric body.

The further steps on the path of Initiation then lead the pupil to the point where, after having arrived in his spiritual retrospect at his last death, he can go further and come to know his last earthly life. But again this is by no means an easy matter. Under his teacher's guidance the pupil is once again reminded that he must not go further until he has achieved complete forgetfulness of self; for it is impossible to make real progress as long as there remains any shred of personal self-consciousness of this present incarnation, this present life between birth and death. As long as a man still calls anything his own he cannot attain knowledge of his preceding incarnation. In the ordinary, normal life between birth and death he cannot come to know the being who in the preceding incarnation was a completely different personality. He must be capable of regarding himself as some quite different being—that is the important point—and yet not lose hold of himself when obliged to have this experience. He must be capable of transformation to the degree of being able to feel himself slipping as it were into a quite different bodily sheath. Having attained the degree of selflessness where everything to do with the present incarnation is forgotten, and having utterly given himself up to the teacher, the pupil is then able to pass back through the last incarnation from the death to the birth. Then he experiences, not the things that were seen externally during that last incarnation, but what he made of himself by his endeavours during that life. What the eyes saw, the ears heard and what confronted him in the outer world is experienced in a different way. What is now experienced are the efforts he made in the bygone incarnation with the object of advancing a step forward.

Having re-experienced these efforts the pupil is led back again by the teacher to his present incarnation. The step from the previous to the present incarnation is taken rapidly and then the pupil finds his bearings again. He now has a strange feeling of being two personalities, as if he has brought an additional one with him from the spiritual world into his present personality. This gives rise to the feeling of living in the physical body. A man cannot experience himself in the physical body except by feeling that he has entered it with the fruits of a preceding incarnation.

I have repeatedly reminded you that in normal everyday life a man sees the physical body only from outside. Now for the first time he realises what it means to see the physical body from within. To see himself within his own physical body is only possible in the light of the experiences of his preceding incarnation. But that is not enough; only little can be learned from it about the present physical body. When the teacher has brought the pupil to the point of standing consciously within his own being together with his previous personality, he must take him back once again over the path already followed. The pupil now retraces the path from the penultimate birth to the penultimate death; he undergoes again what he experienced in his “Upper” and “Lower” being, and through the penultimate death reaches back to the penultimate incarnation. A single cycle brings him back to the last incarnation only; thereupon the second cycle must be undertaken, bringing him back to the penultimate incarnation. This gives rise to the feeling of being a third personality who is included in the two preceding personalities.

The cycle can be repeated again and again, until the pupil reaches an epoch lying far, far back in the evolution of the Earth, a far distant age of civilisation. Then he finds that as an earlier personality he was incarnated in preceding epochs of culture, for example in the Greco-Latin epoch; earlier still in the Egyptian, in the ancient Persian, in the ancient Indian, and even further back in the Atlantean and the Lemurian epochs. There is then no more possibility of having such experiences as have been described. A man can follow his own course through every conceivable civilisation and race, right back to the beginning of his earthly evolution, to his very first incarnation on the Earth. Then it is found that all the earlier incarnations continue as forces in what may be called the inmost essence of the physical body. So you see, when it is said in exoteric language that man consists of physical, etheric and astral bodies, this means that he consists of something which, when viewed from within, seems like a number of consecutive incarnations superimposed one above the other. In point of fact, all our incarnations are at work in the inmost nature of our physical body. And when we speak of the etheric body we must bear in mind that, viewed from within, it appears as a cycle running backwards from the present birth to the last death. The qualities and characteristics of the sheaths into which we descend in mystical experience are revealed.

When a man has retraced his course right back to his first incarnation, he experiences a great deal more as well. At this point of his retrospective journey he discovers that in a certain epoch of the Earth's evolution he was in an entirely different environment, that the Earth itself was quite different when he was living in his first incarnation.

When we look out into the world today, three kingdoms of Nature confront us: the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. We also have these three kingdoms within us. We have within us the animal kingdom because we possess an astral body which in a certain way permeates our external, physical body with force and energy; we have within us the plant kingdom because we possess an etheric or life-body, of which something similar may be said; we have the mineral kingdom within us because we take mineral substances into ourselves and let them pass through our organism. When we ascend far enough into the spiritual world to reach our first incarnation while experiencing the physical body from within, we become aware that at that time the Earth has just reached the point of its development when the mineral kingdom in its present form first came into existence and it was therefore possible for us to pass through our first physical embodiment because we were able to take mineral substance into ourselves.

You may say: Yes, but was this mineral kingdom not in existence earlier than the plant and animal kingdoms? Anyone who thinks correctly will realise that ordinary coal is something that has come from the plant; first it was plantlike and then became mineral. Under conditions different from those of today the plant kingdom could exist before there was a mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom was a later formation. Under different conditions the plant kingdom was already in existence before there was any mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom was a product of hardening—hardening of the plant kingdom. And at the time of the formation of the mineral kingdom on our Earth, man had his first earthly incarnation. The mineral kingdom has evolved through long periods of time, during which man has been passing through his earthly incarnations. It was then that he first took the mineral kingdom into himself. Before then his bodily make-up was of a quite different consistency, without mineral substance. For this reason it was at all times said in spiritual science that in its evolution the Earth progressed to the point where the mineral kingdom was formed and at the same time man took the mineral kingdom into himself.

So we see how by descending into his own being deeply enough to have knowledge of his physical body from within, man comes to a point where he emerges, comes forth from, himself. What else could be expected? Through our astral body we are related to the animals, through our etheric body to the plants and through our physical body to the minerals. No wonder that when we descend as far as to the physical body we come upon the mineral kingdom and pass into it. Not indeed into the mineral kingdom as it is now, but as it was at the time when it came into existence in the ancient Lemurian epoch. Our present epoch followed that of Atlantis, and the Lemurian epoch preceded Atlantis. Before the great Atlantean catastrophe the face of the Earth was quite different from what it is today. We lived on a great continent stretching between Europe and Africa on the one side and America on the other. This was the Atlantean epoch. In a still earlier epoch the configuration of the Earth was again different. Human beings-we ourselves in earlier incarnations-lived on a continent stretching between Australia, Africa and Asia. This was ancient Lemuria, the name also used by modern science. That was the time when man passed through his first incarnation and when the mineral kingdom of the Earth took shape. That too was the time when the present Moon in the heavens separated from the Earth.

Thus we have seen that by descending into and acquiring knowledge of our own being through genuine mystical deepening under the guidance of a teacher, we also emerge from ourselves in a certain sense. The path leads us out of ourselves to the Mineral Earth whence we have derived our physical substance.

This is the one path that I wanted to describe to you, the path which could be followed and was indeed followed by many human beings in the ancient Mysteries of Isis and Osiris. It could only be followed under the guidance of a teacher to whom the candidate for Initiation subjected himself entirely. Unless the individual had submitted his Ego entirely to his teacher he would never have been able to tread the path that has been described, for he would have come to know only the very worst sides of his inner being, what he had made of himself through his own self-seeking Ego.

During the next few days we shall describe the other path by speaking of the Northern Mysteries, where man was led, not into himself but out of himself, into the heavens. Then, as well as these two paths which owing to the progressive development of human nature and its consequent insistence on freedom are no longer suitable, we shall study the path that is right for modern humanity: the Rosicrucian path.

It only remains to be said that certain later mystics strove to find help solely in themselves when they had no Guru or teacher to follow so strictly. They were able to find help in a different way and it is interesting that the path they trod can be explained in the light of what has here been described. Think, for example, of Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic. He was one who had no leader or teacher as did candidates in the ancient Mysteries of Isis and Osiris. The descent into his inner being would have been fraught with great dangers for him had he persisted beyond a certain point in these efforts to achieve inner deepening by his own method. At a certain moment he could scarcely have escaped the claims of his Ego. For the danger on this descent into a man's inner being is that his Ego may assert itself for its own selfish aims. Long speeches may be made about finding the God within. But people who talk in this vein have usually not made much real progress. If they had, they would inevitably discover that the self-seeking Ego asserts itself with terrific force. It may often be found that such people, when following the ordinary conventions of life, are good and decent characters, but directly they practise mystical deepening and ignore influences from outside, their inner self asserts itself. If education has hitherto made them desire to speak the truth it may happen that as soon as their self-seeking Ego asserts its claims, they begin to lie profusely; they become underhand, more intensely selfish than others. Such traits may often be observed in mystics who have been badly guided, who like to speak constantly of the need to find the “higher man” within themselves. In such cases, however, it is not a “higher man” but a being inferior even by conventional standards. It behoves everyone to protect himself from claims made by his own self-seeking Ego. And mystics with good and healthy propensities, such as Meister Eckhart, tried to do so. In the Egyptian Mysteries the candidate for Initiation was guarded in this respect by the priest of Hermes who had taken charge of him. Meister Eckhart had no leader or teacher in that sense of the word; Tauler had one from a certain time in his life onwards. [* See Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, by Rudolf Steiner. The teacher who came to Tauler was known as the ‘Friend of God from the Oberland.’] By what means did Meister Eckhart protect himself against the claims of his own Ego? Like nearly all medieval Christian mystics who had no actual Guru because the time was approaching when human nature would rebel against it, Eckhart protected himself by inducing a feeling of the greatest intensity: Now you are no longer yourself; you have become a different being; a being other than yourself is thinking, feeling and willing within you. Let your whole self be filled with Christ!—Eckhart made the saying of Paul a reality: ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ He was one who had experienced this transformation; he had laid aside his own self. He eliminated his Ego and felt himself filled with a different Ego. The word Entwerdung (as the opposite of “becoming”) was a beautiful expression used by medieval mystics. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart, or the writer of the work known as Theologica Deutsch, let a higher man, a being able to quicken and inspire, speak in them. Hence their constant insistence that their aim was to surrender the self entirely to the being they experienced within them.

From this we see how with the approach of the modern age the medieval Christian mystics put in the place of an external Guru, an inner leader: the Christ.

We shall hear in the next lecture what has now to be done in order that a man rooted in the spiritual life of today may find the path enabling him to maintain intact the character and constitution of his soul. We have spoken of the path taken in the Northern Mysteries in order to experience the Macrocosm into which man enters on going to sleep. We shall begin tomorrow by describing the process of going to sleep and then pass on to speak of the macrocosmic spheres into which man finds his way through methods belonging to the modern path of knowledge leading into the higher worlds.

• 1. Notably Chapter V. Knowledge of Higher Worlds. Concerning Initiation, p. 222 in the 1962-3 edition.