The Significance of Spiritual Research For Moral Action

The Significance of Spiritual Research For Moral Action

A Lecture By Rudolf Steiner Bielefeld, March 6, 1911 GA 127
The lecture presented here was given in Bielefeld, March 6, 1911, with the title Die Mission der neuen Geistesoffenbarung fr das sittliche Handeln . It is included in Die Mission der neuen Geistesoffenbarung (#127 in the Bibliographic Survey, 1961). The translation was made from the original German by Alan P. Cottrell, Ph.D.
Copyright 1981 This e.Text edition is provided with the cooperation of:

The objection is frequently made that theosophy does not really work its way into the realm of morality. In fact it is said that through certain of its teachings it in some respects not only does not counter egotism but furthers it. Those who are of this opinion share the following thoughts. They say that theosophy demonstrates how the human being develops his existence from life to life and that the main point is that even if he suffers defeats he has the possibility of striving ever higher, employing in a subsequent life the results of what he has learned in a given life as in a kind of school. He who immerses himself completely in this belief in human perfectibility will strive to render his I ever more pure, to make it as rich as possible, so that he may ascend ever higher and higher. This, so these people say, is after all really an egotistic striving. For we theosophists, they say, seek to attract teachings and forces from the spiritual world in order to elevate our I to ever greater heights. This is therefore an egotistic basis for human action. These people maintain further that we theosophists are convinced that we prepare a bad karma for ourselves through imperfect actions. Thus in order not to do so the theosophist will avoid doing this or that which he would otherwise have done. He therefore refrains from the action for fear of karma. For the same reason he would probably also do this or that which he otherwise would not have done, and this too would be but one more quite egotistic motivation for an action. There are a number of people who say that the teachings of karma and reincarnation as well as the rest of the striving for perfection which originates in theosophy leads people to work spiritually for a refined form of higher egotism. It would actually be a severe reproach if one were able to maintain that theosophy prompts people to develop moral action not out of sympathy and compassion but out of fear of punishment. Let us now ask ourselves whether such a reproach is really justified. We must reach very deeply into occult research if we wish to refute such a reproach to theosophy in a really fundamental way. Let us assume that someone were to say that if a person does not already possess this striving for perfection, theosophy will certainly never prompt him to moral actions. A deeper understanding of what theosophy has to say can teach us that the individual is related to the whole of humanity in such a way that by acting immorally he not only does something that may earn him a punishment. It is rather the case that through an immoral thought, an immoral action or attitude he brings about something really absurd, something that cannot be reconciled with truly healthy thinking. The statement has many implications. An immoral action not only implies a subsequent karmic punishment; it is rather in the most fundamental respect an action that one definitely ought not to do. Let us assume that a person commits a theft. In so doing the person incurs a karmic punishment. If one wishes to avoid this punishment one simply does not steal. But the matter is still more complicated. Let us ask ourselves what really motivates the person who lies or steals. The liar or thief seeks personal advantage the liar perhaps wishing to wiggle out of an unpleasant situation. Such an action is only meaningful if one actually does gain an advantage through lying or stealing. If the person were now to realize that he simply cannot have that advantage, that he is wrong, that on the contrary he will bring about a disadvantage, he would then say to himself that it is nonsense even to think about such an action. As theosophy penetrates ever deeper into human civilization, people will know that it is absurd, indeed that it is ridiculous, to believe that through lying or stealing one can acquire what one seeks to acquire. For one thing will become increasingly clear for all people as theosophy enters their consciousness: that in the sense of higher causes we have to do not at all with totally separate human individualities, but that along with the separate individualities the whole of humanity forms a unity. One will realize more and more that in the sense of a true view of the world the finger is more intelligent than the whole man, for it does not presume to be something on its own, independent of the entire human organism to which it belongs. In its dull consciousness it knows that it cannot exist without the whole organism. But people continually embrace illusions. They fancy themselves separate by virtue of what is enclosed within their skins. This they are, however, just as little as is the finger without the whole organism. The source of the illusion is the fact that the human being can wander about and the finger cannot. We are in the same situation on earth as is the finger on our organism. The science that believes our earth is a glowing hot, fluid sphere surrounded by a hard shell upon which we humans walk about, and that this explains the earth, stands at the same level as a science that would believe that in all essential respects the human being consists of nothing more, nothing else than his skeleton, for what one perceives of the earth is the same as the skeleton in man. The rest of what belongs to the earth is of a supersensible nature. The earth is a real organism, a real living being. When one pictures to oneself the human being as a living creature, one can think of his blood with its red and white corpuscles. These can only develop in the entire human organism and thereby be what they are. What these red and white blood corpuscles are for the human being we human beings are for the organism of the earth. We definitely belong to this earth organism. We form a part of the whole living being that is the earth, and only then do we view
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ourselves correctly when we say, As single individuals we are nothing. We are only complete when we think our way into the body of the earth, the body of which we perceive only the skeleton, the mineral shell, as long as we do not acknowledge the spiritual members of this earth organism. When a process of infection arises in the human organism, the entire organism is seized by fever, by illness. If we translate this into terms applicable to the earth organism we can say that what occultism maintains is true: When something immoral is done anywhere on earth it amounts to the same thing for the whole earth organism as a little festering boil on the human body, which makes the whole organism sick. So that if a theft is committed on the earth the result is that the entire earth develops a kind of fever. This is not meant merely in a metaphorical sense. It is well-founded. The whole organism of the earth suffers from everything immoral and as individuals we can do nothing immoral without affecting the whole earth. It is really a simple thought, yet people have a difficult time grasping it. But let those people who do not want to believe it just wait. Let one try to impress such thoughts upon our culture; let one try with these thoughts to appeal to the human heart, the human conscience. Whenever people anywhere act immorally their actions are a kind of infected boil for the whole earth and make the earth organism ill, and experience would show that tremendous moral impulses inhere in such knowledge. One can preach morality as much as one likes; it will not help people one bit. But knowledge such as we have developed here would not seize hold of people merely as knowledge. If it found its way into the developing culture, if it streamed into the soul already in childhood, it would provide a tremendous moral impulse, for in the end no moral preachments have any real power to overwhelm, to convince the human soul. Schopenhauer is quite right when he says that to preach morality is easy but to establish it is difficult. People have a certain antipathy toward moral preachments. They say, What is being preached to me is the will of someone else and I am supposed simply to acquiesce to it. This belief will become more and more dominant to the degree that materialistic consciousness becomes dominant. One says today that there is a morality of class, of social standing, and what such a class morality considers to be right is then applied to the other class. Such an attitude has found its way into human souls and in the future it will become worse and worse. People will come increasingly to feel that they themselves want to find everything that is to be acknowledged as correct in this sphere. They will feel that it should originate in their own inclination toward objective knowledge. The human individuality wants to be taken ever more seriously. But at the moment in which the heart, for instance, were to realize that it too would be sick if the whole organism became sick, man would do what is necessary in order not to fall ill. At the moment in which man realizes that he is embedded within the total organism of the earth and has no business being a festering boil on the earth's body at that moment there exists an objective basis for morality. And man will say, If I steal I am seeking my own personal advantage. I refrain from stealing because if I do steal I shall make sick the entire organism without which I cannot live. I do the opposite and thereby bring about something advantageous not only for the organism but also for myself. In the future the moral awareness of human beings will form itself in this general way. He who, through theosophy, finds an impetus to moral action will say to himself that it is an illusion to seek personal advantage through an immoral action. If you do that, you are like an octopus that ejects a dark fluid: you eject a dark aura of immoral impulses. Lying and stealing are the seeds of an aura into which you place yourself and through which you make the whole world unhappy. People say, All that surrounds us is maya. But such truths must become truths for life itself. Let us suppose that one can demonstrate that through theosophy humanity's moral development in the future will enable man to see how he wraps himself in an aura of illusions when he seeks his own advantage. If one can demonstrate this, it will become a practical truth to say that the world is a maya or illusion. The finger believes this in its dull, half sleeping, half dreaming consciousness. It is bright enough to know that without the hand and the rest of the body it is no longer a finger. The human being today is not yet bright enough to know that without the body of the earth he is actually nothing. But he must become bright enough to know this. The finger therefore enjoys a certain advantage over man. It does not cut itself off. It does not say, I want to keep my blood for myself or cut off a portion of myself. It is in harmony with the whole organism. Man must, to be sure, develop a higher consciousness in order to come into harmony with the whole organism of the earth. In his present moral consciousness man does not yet know this. He could say to himself, I inhale the air. It was just outside, and now it is inside the human body. Something external becomes something internal. And when I exhale, something internal again becomes something external. And so it is with the whole man. The human being is not even aware of the simple fact that separated from the surrounding air he is nothing. He must undertake to develop an awareness of how he is locked into the entire organism of the earth. How can the human being know: You are a member of the whole organism of the earth? Theosophy enables him to know this. It shows man that first there existed a Saturn condition, then a Sun condition, then a Moon condition. Man was present through all these conditions, although in a quite different way from today. Then the earth proceeded from the old Moon condition. Gradually the human being arose as earthly man. He has a long development behind him and in the future he is to advance to other stages of development. Man in his present form has arisen with the earth in its present form. When through the study of theosophy one traces how man and the earth have arisen it becomes clear in what way man is a part of the whole organism of the earth. Then it becomes clear how earth and man gradually have emerged from a spiritual life, how the beings of the hierarchies have fashioned earth and man, how man belongs to the hierarchies, even though he stands at the lowest stage. Then theosophy points to the central Being of the entire earthly evolution, to the Christ as the great archetype of the human being. And from all these teachings of theosophy the awareness shall spring forth for man, Thus ought you to act.
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The science of the spirit shows us how we can feel ourselves to be a part of the whole life of the earth. The science of the spirit shows us that Christ is the Spirit of the earth. Our fingers, our toes, our nose, all our members dream that the heart provides them with blood. They dream that without a central organ they would be nothing, for without a heart they are not possible. Theosophy shows man that in the future of earthly evolution it would be folly not to take up the idea of Christ, for what the heart is for the organism Christ is for the body of the earth. Just as through the heart the blood provides the whole organism with life and strength, so must the Being of Christ have moved through all single souls on earth, and the words of St. Paul must become truth for them: Not I, but the Christ in me. The Christ must have flowed into all human hearts. Whoever wanted to say, One can continue to exist without Christ, would be as foolish as eyes and ears if they wanted to say that they could continue to exist without the heart. In the case of the single human body the heart must of course be present from the beginning, whereas the heart entered the organism of the earth only with the Christ. For the following ages, however, this heart's blood of Christ must have entered all human hearts. He who does not unite himself with it in his soul, will wither away. The earth will not wait with its development; it will come to the point to which it must come. Human beings alone can remain behind, that is, they would balk at receiving Christ in their souls. A number of human beings would stand there in their last incarnation on earth and not have reached the goal: they have not recognized Christ, have not received Christ-feeling, Christknowing into their souls. They are not mature. They do not take their places in the development to higher stages. They separate themselves off. Such people do not immediately have the opportunity to collapse completely as would the nose and ears if they detached themselves from the whole human organism. But occult research shows that the following would happen to those who do not want to permeate themselves with the Christ element, the life of Christ, as this can be attained only through theosophy. Instead of living on upwards with the earth to new levels of existence they would have assimilated substances of decay, of disintegration, and would first have to enter upon other paths. If in the sequence of incarnations human souls take up the Christ into their knowledge, their feelings, their whole soul, the earth will fall away from these human souls just as a corpse falls away at a person's death. The corpse of the earth will fall away and that which, permeated with Christ, is present in a state of spirit and soul will proceed to form itself into new existence and will reincarnate itself on Jupiter. What will happen now with those people who have not taken the Christ into themselves? Through theosophy they will have abundant opportunities to be able to recognize the Christ, to be able to take the Christ into themselves. Today people still resist doing so. They will resist less and less. But let us assume that at the end of the development there were those who even then continued to resist. There would then exist a number of people who could not join the rest in advancing to the next planet. They would not have reached the actual goal of the earth. These people would constitute a veritable cross on that planet upon which human beings will then develop further. For while this group will be incapable of sharing in the experience of the actual and proper Jupiter condition and what develops there, they will nevertheless be present on Jupiter. Everything that is subsequently material is first present in a spiritual state. Thus everything that people now, during the period of the earth develop spiritually in the way of immorality, of a refusal to take the Christ into themselves, is first present in a soul-spiritual state. But this will become material. It will surround and penetrate Jupiter as a neighboring element. This will be made up of the successors of those persons who did not take the Christ into themselves during the earth condition. What the soul develops in the nature of immorality, of resistance to the Christ will then be present materially, in an actually physical state. While the physical part of those people who have taken the Christ into themselves will exist in a finer form on Jupiter, the physical part of these other people will be fundamentally coarser. Occult research paints before the eye of the soul an image of what will be the future of the people who will not have reached earthly maturity. We now breathe air. On Jupiter there will in essence be no air. Instead, Jupiter will be surrounded by a substance that, in comparison to our air, will be something refined, something etheric. In this substance those human beings will live who have reached the goal of the earth. Those others who have remained behind, however, will have to breathe something like a repulsively warm, boiling, fiery air infused with a dank stuffiness full of fetid odors. Thus the people who did not attain the maturity appropriate to the earth will be a cross for the other Jupiter people, for they will have a pestilent effect in the environment, in the swamps and other land masses of Jupiter. The fluid-physical components of the bodies of these people will be comparable to a liquid which constantly seeks to solidify, freezes up, coagulates. Consequently these beings will not only have this horrendous air to breathe but also a bodily state in which the blood would seem continually to congeal, to cease to remain fluid. The actual physical body of these beings will consist of a kind of slimy substance more revolting than the bodily substance of our present snails and fully equipped to secrete something like a kind of crust surrounding them. This crust will be softer than the skin of our present snakes, like a kind of soft scaly armor. Thus will these beings live in a rather less than appealing manner in the elements of Jupiter. Such a picture as that contemplated in advance by the occult researcher is ghastly to behold. But woe to those who, like the ostrich, do not want to look at the danger and wish to shut their eyes before the truth. For it is just this that lulls us into error and illusion, while a bold look at the truth imparts the greatest moral impulses. If human beings listen to what truth says to them they will feel, You are lying. Then there will arise in them an image of the effect of this lie upon human nature in the Jupiter condition, the image that shows that the lie creates a slimy, pestilent breath for the future. This image, arising again and again, will be a reason to direct the impulses of the soul to what is healthy, for no one who really knows the consequences of immorality can in truth be immoral, for one is called upon to teach the true consequences that result from the causes. One should in fact direct people's attention to them while they are still children. Immorality exists only because people have no knowledge. Only the darkness of untruth makes immoral actions possible. To be sure, what can thus be said concerning the connection between immorality and ignorance should not be intellectual knowledge but wisdom. Knowledge by itself participates in immorality and if it turns into sophisticated cleverness it can even be roguery, while wisdom will affect the human soul in such a way that the soul rays forth truth, innermost morality.

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My dear friends, it is true that to establish morality is difficult; to preach morality is easy. To establish morality means to establish it out of wisdom, and one must first have this wisdom. Here we see that it was after all a rather intelligent utterance on the part of Schopenhauer when he said that to establish morality is difficult. Thus we see how unfounded it is when people who do not really know theosophy come and say that it contains no moral incentives. Theosophy shows us what we accomplish in the world when we do not act morally. It provides wisdom, and from this very wisdom morality streams forth. There is no greater arrogance than to say that one need only be a good person and all will be in order. The trouble is that one must first know how one goes about really being a good person. Our contemporary consciousness is very arrogant when it wishes to reject all wisdom. True knowledge of the good requires that we penetrate deeply into the mysteries of wisdom, and this is inconvenient, for it requires that we learn a great deal. So when people come and tell us that reincarnation and karma lay the foundation for an egotistical morality we can thus reply, No! True theosophy shows man that when he does something immoral it is roughly the same as if he were to say, I'm taking a sheet of paper to write a letter, and then takes a match and sets fire to the sheet of paper. That would be grotesque nonsense. A person finds himself in the same situation with respect to a wrong action or an immoral attitude. To steal means the same thing for the real, deeper human essence as when one lies. If one steals, one plants into the essential human being the seed that will cause one to develop a slimy, repulsive substance and to surround oneself with pestilent odors in the future. Only if one lives in the illusion that the truth is in the present moment can one do such a deed. In stealing, man places into himself something that amounts to the same thing as a flaying of the human being. If man knows this he will no longer be able to do an immoral deed; he will not be able to steal. Just as the plant seed sends forth blossoms in the future so too will theosophy, if it is planted in the human soul, send forth human blossoms, human morality. Theosophy is the seed, the soul is the nourishing ground and morality is the blossom and fruit on the plant of the developing human being.

Supersensible Knowledge: Anthroposophy as a Demand of the Age

Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life
By Rudolf Steiner Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker GA 84
Two lectures, given at Vienna in late September of 1923, they are lectures 9 and 10 of 11 in the lecture series entitled, A Challenge for the Goetheanum and for Anthroposophy, published in German as, Was Wollte das Goetheanum und Was Soll die Anthroposophie? The first lecture is also in the volumes, Self Transformation and Esoteric Development. This volume is presented here with the kind permission of Frau Marie Steiner, and the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.
Copyright 1943 This e.Text edition is provided with the cooperation of: The Anthroposophic Press

CONTENTS
Cover Sheet Prefatory Remarks Lecture I: Supersensible Knowledge: Anthroposophy as a Demand of the Age September 26, 1923

(See also this lecture as Lecture III in the lecture series, Esoteric Development. Lecture II: Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life September 29, 1923

Supersensible Knowledge: Anthroposophy as a Demand of the Age

Any one who speaks today about supersensible worlds lays himself open at once to the quite understandable criticism that he is violating one of the most important demands of the age. This is the demand that the most important questions of existence shall be seriously discussed from a scientific point of view only in such a way that science recognizes its own limitations, has a clear insight into the fact that it must restrict itself to the sensible world of the earthly existence and would become the victim of a certain fantastic blunder if it should attempt to go beyond these limits. Now, precisely that type of spiritual-scientific conception in accordance with which I spoke at the last Vienna Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement, [West and East: Contrasting Worlds.] and shall speak again today, affirms with regard to itself not only that it is free from hostility toward scientific thinking and the scientific sense of responsibility of our times, but also that it does its work in complete harmony with what may be proposed as objectives by the most
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conscientious scientific demands of those very persons who take their stand on the platform of the most rigid scientific research. It is possible, however, to speak from various points of view in regard to the scientific demands of the times, imposed upon us by the splendid theoretical and practical results in the evolution of humanity which have come about in the course of the last three or four centuries, but especially during the nineteenth century. I shall speak, therefore, today in regard to supersensible knowledge to the extent that this tends to fulfill precisely this demand, and I wish to speak in the next lecture about the supersensible knowledge of the human being as a demand of the human heart, of human feeling, during the present age. We can observe the magnificent contribution which has been bestowed upon us even up to the most recent time through scientific research the magnificent contribution in the findings about interrelationships throughout the external world. But it is possible to speak also in a different sense regarding the achievements which have come about precisely in connection with this current of human evolution. For instance, we may call attention to the fact that, in connection with the conscientious earnest observation of the laws and facts of the external world of the senses, as this is afforded by natural science, very special human capacities have been developed, and that just such observation and experimentation have thrown a light also upon human capacities themselves. But I should like to say that many persons holding positions deserving of the greatest respect in the sphere of scientific research are willing to give very little attention to this light which has been reflected upon man himself through his own researches. If we only give a little thought to what this light has illuminated, we see that human thinking, through the very fact that it has been able to investigate in accordance with basic principles both narrowly restricted and also broadly expanded interrelationships the microscopic and the telescopic has gained immeasurably in itself, has gained in the capacity of discrimination, in power of penetration, the ability so to associate the things in the world that their secrets are unveiled, the capacity to determine the laws underlying cosmic relationships, and so forth. As this thinking is developed, we see it confronted with a demand with which it is faced, indeed, by the most earnest research scientists: the demand that this thinking must develop as selflessly as possible in the observation of external nature and in experimentation in the laboratory, in the clinic, etc. And the human being has achieved tremendous power in this respect. He has succeeded in setting up more and more rules of such a character as to prevent anything of the nature of inner wishes of the heart, of opinions, perhaps even of fantasies regarding one's own being, such as arise in the course of thinking, from being carried over into what he is to establish by means of the microscope and the telescope, the measuring rule and the scales, regarding the interrelationships of life and existence. Under these influences a type of thinking has gradually developed of which one must say that it has worked out its passive role with a certain inner diligence. Thinking in connection with observation, with experiment, has nowadays become completely abstract so abstract that it does not trust itself to call forth anything of the nature of knowledge or of truth out of its own inner being. It is this gradually developed characteristic of thinking which demands before everything else so it appears at first the rejection of all that the human being is in himself by reason of his inner nature. For what he himself thus is must be set forth in activity; this can really never exist wholly apart from the impulse of his will. Thus we have arrived at the point and we have rightly reached this point in the field of external research of actually rejecting the activity of thinking, although we became aware in this activity of what we ourselves signify as human beings in the universe, in the totality of cosmic relationships. In a certain sense, the human being has eliminated himself in connection with his research; he prohibits his own inner activity. We shall see immediately that what is rightly prohibited in connection with this external research must be especially cultivated in relationship to man's own self if he wishes to gain enlightenment regarding the spiritual, regarding the supersensible, element of his own being. But a second element in the nature of man has been obliged to manifest its special aspect, which is alien to humanity even though friendly to the world, in modern research: that is, the human life of sentiment, the human life of feeling. In this modern research, human feeling is not permitted to participate; the human being must remain cold and matter-of-fact. Yet one might ask whether it may not be possible to acquire within this human feeling forces useful in gaining knowledge of the world. If it must be said, on the one hand, that inner human willfulness plays a role in feelings, human subjectivity, and that feeling is the source of fantasy, it must be answered on the other hand that, although human feeling can certainly play no important role as it exists at first in every-day life or in science, yet, if we recall as science itself has to present the matter to us that the human senses have not always in the course of human evolution been such as they are today, but have developed from a relatively imperfect stage up to their contemporary state, that they certainly did not express themselves in earlier periods so objectively about things as they do today, an inkling may then come to birth within us that there may exist even within the life of subjective feeling something that might be evolved there-from, just like the human senses themselves, and which might be led over from an experience of man's own being to a grasp upon cosmic interrelationships in a higher sense. Precisely as we observe the withdrawal of human feeling in connection with contemporary research must the question be put as to whether some sort of higher sense might unfold within feeling itself if this were specially developed. But very obviously do we find in connection with a third element of the being of man how we are driven by the altogether praiseworthy scientific view to something different. This is the will aspect of the life of the soul. Whoever is at home in scientific thinking knows how impossible it is for such thinking to proceed otherwise in grasping the inter-relationships of the world than in accordance with causal necessity. We connect in the most rigid manner phenomena existing side by side in space; we associate in the strictest sense phenomena occurring in succession in time. That is, we relate cause and effect according to their inflexible laws. Whoever speaks, not as a dilettante, but as one thoroughly at home in science knows what a tremendous power is exerted by the mere consideration of the realms of scientific fact in this manner. He knows how he is captivated by this idea of a universal causality and how he cannot then do otherwise than to subject everything that he confronts in his thinking to this idea of causality. But there is human will, this human will which says to us in every moment of our waking life of day: What you undertake in a certain sense by reason of yourself, by reason of your will, is not causally determined in the same sense applying to any sort of external phenomena of nature. For this reason, even a person who simply feels in a natural way about himself, who looks into himself in observation free from preconception, can scarcely do otherwise than also to ascribe to himself, on the basis of immediate experience,
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freedom of will. But when he directs his glance to scientific thinking, he cannot admit this freedom of will. This is one of the conflicts into which we are brought by the condition of the present age. In the course of these two lectures we shall learn much more about these conflicts. But for one who is able to feel this conflict in its full intensity, who can feel it through and through because he must be honest on the one side as regards scientific research, and on the other side as regards his self-observation the conflict is something utterly confounding, so confounding that it may drive him to doubt whether life affords anywhere a firm basis from which one may search for truth. We must deal with such conflicts in their right human aspect. We must be able to say to ourselves that research drives us to the point where we are actually unable to admit what we are every day aware of; that something else must somehow exist which offers other means of access to the world than what is offered to us in irrefutable manner in the order of external nature. Through the very fact that we are so forcibly driven by the order of nature itself into such conflicts, it becomes for us human beings of the present time a necessity to admit that it is impossible to speak about the supersensible worlds as they have been spoken about up to a relatively recent time. We need to go back only to the first half of the nineteenth century to discover that personalities who, by reason of a consciousness in harmony with the period, were thoroughly serious in their scientific work called attention, nevertheless, to the supersensible aspect of human life, to that aspect which opens up to the human being a view of the divine, of his own immortality; and that in this connection they always called attention to what we may at present designate as the night aspects of human life. Men deserving of the highest regard have called attention to that wonderful but very problematical world into which the human being is transferred every night: to the dream world. They called attention to many mysterious relationships which exist between this chaotic picture world of dreams, nevertheless, and the world of actuality. They called attention to the fact that the inner nature of the human organization, especially in illness, reflects itself, nevertheless, in the fantastic pictures of dreams, and how healthy human life enters into the chaotic experiences of dreams in the forms of signs and symbols. They pointed out that much which cannot be surveyed by the human being with his waking senses finds its place in the half-awake state of the soul, and out of such things conclusions were drawn. These things border upon what is the subject of study also today for many persons, the subconscious states of the life of the human soul, which manifest themselves in a similar way. But everything which appears before the human being in this form, which could still give a certain satisfaction to an earlier humanity, is no longer valid for us. It is no longer valid for us for the reason that our way of looking into external nature has become something different. Here we have to look back to the times when there still existed only a mystically colored astrology. Man then looked into the world of the senses in such a way that his perception was far removed from the exactness which we demand of science today. For this reason, because he did not demand of himself in his sense life that complete clarity which we possess today, he could discover in a mystical, half-conscious state something from which he could draw inferences. This we cannot do today. Just as little as we are able to derive today from what science gives us anything else than questions in regard to the true nature of man, just so little can we afford to remain at a standstill at the point reached by science and expect to satisfy our supersensible needs in a manner similar to that of earlier times. That form of supersensible knowledge of which I shall speak here has an insight into this demand of our times. It observes the form that has been taken on by thinking, feeling, and willing in man precisely by reason of natural science, and it asks on the other side whether it may be possible by reason of the very thing which has been achieved by contemporary humanity in thinking, feeling, and willing to penetrate further into the supersensible realm with the same clarity which holds sway in the scientific realm. This cannot be achieved by means of inferential reasoning, by means of logic; for natural science justly points out its limitations with reference to its own nature. But something else can occur: that the inner human capacities may evolve further, beyond the point at which they stand when we are in the realm of ordinary scientific research, so that we now apply to the development of our own spiritual capacities the same exactness to which we are accustomed in connection with research in the laboratory and the clinic. I shall discuss this first in connection with thinking itself. Thinking, which has become more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply this term to measuring and weighing in external research, it is exact in relationship to its own development in the sense in which the external scientist, the mathematician for example, is accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his research. But this occurs when that mode of supersensible cognition of which I am here speaking substitutes a truly exact development of this thinking in place of the ancient vague meditation, the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking. It is possible here to indicate only in general principles what I have said in regard to such an exact development of thinking in my books Occult Science: An Outline and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and other books. The human being should really compel himself, for the length of time which is necessary for him and this is determined by the varying innate capacities of people to exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day, even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought the content of which is not the important matter and, while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought. By means of this process something comes about in the development of those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which follow when any particular muscles of the human body for instance, the muscles of the arms are to be developed. The muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite thought. This exercise must be so directed that we proceed in a really exact way, that we survey every step taken in our thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem. This can be done in the greatest variety of ways. It may seem trivial when I say that something should be selected for this content of concentration that one finds in any sort of book even some worthless old volume that we know quite certainly we have never previously seen. The important point is, not what the content of truth in the thing is, but the fact that we
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survey such a thought content completely. This cannot be done if we take a thought content out of our own memory; for very much is associated with such a thought in the most indeterminate way, very much that plays a role in the subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul. The matter of importance is the concentration of the forces of the soul and the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to provide one with such a thought content, it is not well to entertain any prejudice against this. The content is in that case entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it. Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon some one else who provides them with such a content. But this is not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they take such a thought content out of their own memories and experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is well for a person who has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be, indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose. If this is continued for a relatively long time, even for years perhaps and this must be accompanied by patience and endurance, since it requires a few weeks or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases years it is possible to arrive at a point where this method for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the further development of one's own thinking. At a certain point of time, the person then has a significant inner experience. This consists in the fact that he feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the process of breathing or the activity of a muscle, this inner active something now enters into thinking. And, since one has investigated precisely every step upon this way, so does one experience oneself in full clarity and sober-mindedness of consciousness in this strengthened, active thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real objection; for what is now experienced we experience with complete inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at the same time a kind of touching with the soul. In the process of forming a thought, it is as if we were stretching out a feeler not, in this case, as when the snail stretches a feeler into the physical world, but as if a feeler were stretched out into a spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings if we have succeeded to this stage, but which we are justified in expecting. For one has the feeling: Your thinking has been transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is physically real. Only when one has lived for a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul element has become by means of this concentration an experiential reality. It is possible then for the person concerned to go forward in his exercises and to arrive at the point where he can, in turn, eliminate this soul content, put it away, in a certain sense render his consciousness void of what he himself has brought into this consciousness, this thought content upon which he has concentrated, and which has enabled him to possess a real thinking constituting a sense of touch for the soul. It is rather easy in ordinary life to acquire an empty consciousness; we need only to fall asleep. But it requires an intense application of force, after we have become accustomed to concentrating upon a definite thought content, to put away such a content of thought in connection with this very strengthened thinking, thinking which has become a reality. But we succeed in putting aside this content of thinking in exactly the same way in which we acquired at first the powerful force needed for concentration. But, when we have succeeded in this, something appears before the soul which has been possible previously only in the form of pictures of episodes in one's memory: the whole inner life of the person appears in a new way before the eyes of his soul, as he has passed through this life in his earthly existence since birth, or since the earliest point of time to which one's memory can return, at which one entered consciously into this earthly existence. Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If some one carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a time-path all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. A precise picture of the life of the person is now created out of that which appears in an episodic manner, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock, at the moment of drowning, for instance, when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation. It is quite possible to differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which constitutes a mere memory picture. It is clear in the mere memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world comes into contact with us. But in the supersensible memory tableau which appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which has proceeded from himself. If, for instance,
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at a certain definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows him how this person came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to the person, etc. But, in this life tableau what confronts him is the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he took every step at last in such a way that he was inevitably led to that being regarding whom he had the knowledge that this being was suited to himself. That which has taken place through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this precise clarity, because it brings them enlightenment in regard to much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from preconceptions, even though this being of oneself confronts the searching eye with reproach. This stage of cognition I have called imaginative knowledge, or imagination. But one can progress beyond this stage. In that which we come to know through this memory tableau, we are confronted by those forces which have really formed us as human beings. While confronting this tableau of life, we know: Within you those forces evolve which mold the substances of your physical body. Within you, especially during childhood, those forces have evolved which have plastically modeled approximately up to the seventh year the nerve masses of the brain, which did not yet exist in well ordered form after your birth. We then cease at last to ascribe what works formatively upon the human being within to those forces which inhere in material substances. We cease to do this when we have this memory tableau before us, when we see how there stream into all the forces of nutrition and of breathing and into the whole circulation of the blood the contents of this memory tableau which are forces in themselves, forces without which no single wave of the blood circulates and no single process of breathing occurs. We now learn to understand that man himself in his inner being consists of spirit and soul. What now dawns upon one can best be described by a comparison. Imagine that you have walked for a certain distance over ground which has been softened by rain, and that you have noticed all the way tracks or ruts made by human feet or wagon wheels. Now suppose that a being should come from the moon and see this condition of the ground, but should see no human being. He would probably come to the conclusion that there must be all sorts of forces underneath the earth which have thrust up these traces and given this form to the surface of the ground. Such a being might seek within the earth for the forces which have produced the tracks. But one who sees into the thing knows that the condition was not caused by the earth but by human feet or wagon wheels. Now, any one who possesses a view of things such as I have just described does not by any means for this reason look with less reverence, for example, upon the convolutions of the human brain. But, just as he knows that those tracks on the surface of the earth do not derive from forces within the earth, he now knows that these convolutions of the brain do not derive from forces within the substance of the brain, but that the spiritual-psychic entity of man is there, which he himself has now beheld, and that this works in such a way as to cause our brain to have these convolutions. This is the essential thing to be driven to this view, so that we arrive at a conception of our own spirit-soul nature, that the eye of the soul is really directed to the spirit-soul element and to its manifestation in the external life. But it is possible to progress still further. After having first strengthened our inner being through concentrating upon a definite content of thought, and then having emptied our consciousness, so that, instead of the images we ourselves have formed, the content of our life now appears before us, we can now put this memory tableau out of our consciousness, in turn, just as we previously eliminated a single concept, so that our consciousness was void of this. We can now learn to apply the powerful force so as to blot out from our consciousness that which we have come to know through a heightened self-observation as a spirit-soul being. In doing this, we blot out nothing less than the inner being of our own soul life. We learned first in concentration to blot out what is external, and we then learned to direct the look of our soul to our own spirit-soul entity, and this completely occupied the whole tableau of memory. If we now succeed in blotting out this memory tableau itself, there comes about what I wish to designate as the truly empty consciousness. We have previously lived in the memory tableau or in what we ourselves have set up before our minds, but now something entirely different appears. That which lived within us we have now suppressed, and we confront the world with an empty consciousness. This signifies something extraordinary in the experience of the soul. Fundamentally speaking, I can describe at first only by means of a comparison what now appears to the soul, when the content of our own soul is blotted out by means of the powerful inner force we apply. We need only to think of the fact that, when the impressions of the external senses gradually die away, when there is a cessation of seeing, hearing, perhaps even of a distinct sense of touch, we sink into a state closely resembling the state of sleep. In the present case, however, when we blot out the content of our own souls, although we do come to an empty state of consciousness, this is not a state of sleep. We reach what I might call the state of being merely awake that is, being awake with an empty consciousness. We may, perhaps, be enabled to conceive this empty consciousness in the following way. Imagine a modern city with all its noise and din. We may withdraw from the city, and everything becomes more and more quiet around us, but we finally enter, perhaps, a forest. Here we find the absolute opposite of the noises of the city. We live in complete inner stillness, in soundless quiet. If, now, I undertake to describe what follows, I must resort to a trivial comparison. We must raise the question whether this quiet, this stillness, can be changed still further into something else. We may designate this stillness as the zero point in our perception of the external world. But, if we possess a certain amount of property and we subtract from this property, it is diminished; as we take away still more, it is further diminished, and we finally arrive at zero and have nothing left. Can we then proceed still further? It may, perhaps, be undesirable to most persons, but the fact is that many do this: they still decrease their possessions by incurring debt. One then has less than zero, and one can still diminish what one has. In precisely the same way, we may at least imagine that the stillness, which is like the zero point of being awake, may be pushed beyond this zero into a sort of negative state. A super-stillness, a super-quietness may augment the quietness. This is what is experienced by one who blots out his own soul content: he enters into a state of quietness of soul which lies below the zero point. An inner stillness of soul in the most intensified degree comes about, during the state of wakefulness.
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But this cannot be attained unless it is accompanied by something else. This can be obtained only when we feel that a certain state associated with the picture concepts of our own self passes over into another state. One who senses the first stage of the supersensible within himself, who views this, is in a certain state of well-being, that well-being and inner blissfulness to which the various religious creeds refer when they call attention to the supersensible and at the same time remind the human being that the supersensible brings to him the experience of a certain blissfulness in his inner being. Indeed, up to the point where we exclude our own inner self, there was a certain sense of well-being, an intensified feeling of blissfulness. At that moment, however, where the stillness of soul comes about, this inner well-being is replaced completely by inner pain, inner deprivation, such as we have never previously known the sense that one is separated from all to which one is united in the earthly life, far removed not only from the feeling of one's own body but from the feeling of one's own experiences since birth. And this signifies a deprivation which reaches the degree of tremendous pain of soul. Many shrink back from this stage, lacking the courage to make the transition from a certain lower clairvoyance and, after eliminating their own content of soul, to enter into that state of consciousness where resides that inner stillness. But, if we pass into this stage in full consciousness, there begins to enter, in place of imagination, that which I have called in the books previously mentioned inspiration I trust you will not take offense at these terms the experience of a real spiritual world. After one has previously eliminated the world of the senses and has substituted an empty consciousness, accompanied by inexpressible pain of soul, then does the external spiritual world come to meet us. In the state of inspiration we become aware of the fact that the human being is surrounded by a spiritual world just as the sense world exists for his external senses. And the first thing, in turn, that we behold in this spiritual world is our own pre-earthly existence. Just as we are otherwise conscious of earthly experiences by means of our ordinary memory, so does a cosmic memory now dawn for us: we look back into preearthly experiences, beholding what we were as spirit-soul beings in a purely spiritual world before we descended through birth to this earthly existence, when as spiritual beings we participated in the molding of our own bodies. So do we look back upon the spiritual, the eternal, in the nature of man, to that which reveals itself to us as the pre-earthly existence, regarding which we now know that it is not dependent upon the birth and death of the physical body, for it is that which existed before birth and before conception, which made of this physical body derived from matter and heredity a human being. Now for the first time does one reach a true concept also of physical heredity, since one sees what supersensible forces play into this forces which we acquire out of a purely spiritual world, with which we now feel united just as we feel united with the physical world in the earthly life. Moreover, we now become aware that, in spite of the great advances registered in the evolution of humanity, much has been lost which belonged inherently to more ancient instinctive conceptions such as we can no longer use. The instinctive supersensible vision of the humanity of earlier ages was confronted by this pre-earthly life as well as human immortality, regarding which we shall speak a little later. For eternity was conceived in ancient times in such a way that one grasped both its aspects. We speak nowadays of the deathlessness of the human soul indeed, our language itself possesses only this word but people once spoke, and the more ancient languages still continue to show such words, of birthlessness as the other aspect of the eternity of the human soul. Now, however, the times have somewhat changed. People are interested in the question what becomes of the human soul after death, because this is something still to come; but as to the other question, what existed before birth, before conception, there is less interest because that has passed, and yet we are here. But a true knowledge of human immortality can arise only when we consider eternity in both its aspects: that of deathlessness and that of birthlessness. But, for the very purpose of maintaining a connection with the latter, and especially in an exact clairvoyance, still a third thing is necessary. We sense ourselves truly as human beings when we no longer permit our feelings to be completely absorbed within the earthly life. For that which we now come to know as our pre-earthly life penetrates into us in pictures and is added to what we previously sensed as our humanity, making us for the first time completely human. Our feelings are then, as it were, shot through with inner light, and we know that we have now developed our feeling into a sense organ for the spiritual. But we must go further and must be able to make our will element into an organ of knowledge for the spiritual. For this purpose, something must begin to play a role in human knowledge which, very rightly, is not otherwise considered as a means of knowledge by those who desire to be taken seriously in the realm of cognition. We first become aware that this is a means of knowledge when we enter the supersensible realms. This is the force of love. Only, we must begin to develop this force of love in a higher sense than that in which nature has bestowed love upon us, with all its significance for the life of nature and of man. What I shall have to describe as the first steps in the unfolding of a higher love in the life of man may seem paradoxical. When you undertake, with complete sober-mindedness as to each step, to sense the world otherwise than is customary, you then come upon this higher form of love. Suppose you undertake in the evening, before you go to sleep, to bring your day's life so into your consciousness that you begin with the last occurrence of the evening, visualizing it as precisely as possible, then visualizing the next preceding in the same way, then the third from the last, thus moving backward to the morning in this survey of the life of the day, this is a process in which much more importance attaches to the inner energy expended than to the question whether one visualizes each individual occurrence more or less precisely. What is important is this reversal of the order of visualization. Ordinarily we view events in such a way that we first consider the earlier and then the subsequent in a progressive chain. Through such an exercise as I have just given you, we reverse the whole life: we think and feel in a direction opposite to the course of the day. We can practice this on the experiences of our day, as I have suggested, and this requires only a few minutes. But we can do this also in a different way. Undertake to visualize the course of a drama in such a way that you begin with the fifth act and picture it successively through the fourth, third, toward the beginning. Or we may represent a melody to ourselves in the reverse succession of tones. If we pass through more and more such inner experiences of the soul in this way, we shall discover that the inner experience is freed from the external course of nature, and that we actually become more and more self-directing. But, even though we become in this way more and more individualized and achieve an ever increasing power of self-direction, yet we learn also to give attention to the external life in more complete consciousness. For only now do we become aware that, the more powerfully we develop through practice this fully conscious absorption in another being, the higher becomes the degree of our selflessness, and the greater must our love become in compensation.
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In this way we feel how this experience of not living in oneself but living in another being, this passing over from one's own being to another, becomes more and more powerful. We then reach the stage where, to Imagination and Inspiration, which we have already developed, we can now unite the true intuitive entrance into the other being: we arrive at Intuition, so that we no longer experience only our self, but also learn in complete individualization yet also in complete selflessness to experience the other being. Here love becomes something which gradually makes it possible for us to look back even further than into the pre-earthly spiritual life. As we learn in our present life to look back upon contemporary events, we learn through such an elevation of love to look back upon former earth lives, and to recognize the entire life of a human being as a succession of earthly lives. The fact that these lives once had a beginning and must likewise have an end will be touched upon in the next lecture. But we learn to know the human life as a succession of lives on earth, between which there always intervene purely spiritual lives, coming between a death and the next birth. For this elevated form of love, lifted to the spiritual sphere and transformed into a force of knowledge, teaches us also the true significance of death. When we have advanced so far, as I have explained in connection with Imagination and Inspiration, as to render these intensified inner forces capable of spiritual love, we actually learn in immediate exact clairvoyance to know that inner experience which we describe by saying that one experiences oneself spiritually, without a body, outside the body. This passing outside the body becomes in this way, if I may thus express it, actually a matter of objective experience for the soul. If we have once experienced in actual knowledge outside the body clairvoyantly, I mean this spiritual element in existence, we know the significance of the event of laying aside the physical body in death, of passing through the portal of death to a new, spiritual life. We thus learn, at the third stage of an exact clairvoyance, the significance of death, and thus also the significance of immortality, for man. I have desired to make it transparently clear through the manner of my explanation that the mode of supersensible cognition about which I am speaking seeks to bring into the very cognitional capacities of the human being something which works effectually, step by step, as it is thus introduced. The natural scientist applies his exactness to the external experiment, to the external observation; he wishes to see the objects in such juxtaposition that they reveal their secrets with exactitude in the process of measuring, enumerating, weighing. The spiritual-scientist, about whom I am here speaking, applies his exactness to the evolution of the forces of his own soul. That which he makes out of himself for the purpose of causing a spiritual world and, with this, the eternal being of man, the nature of human immortality, to appear before his soul, he makes with precision, if I may use an expression of Goethe. At every step which the spiritual-scientist thus takes, in order that the spiritual world may at last lie outspread before the eyes of the soul, he feels obligated to be just as conscientious in regard to his knowledge as a mathematician must be at every step he takes. For just as the mathematician must see clearly into everything that he writes on the paper, so must the spiritual-scientist see with complete exactitude into everything that he makes out of his powers of cognition. He then knows that he has formed an eye of the soul out of the soul itself with the same inner necessity with which nature has formed the corporeal eye out of bodily substance. And he knows that he can speak of spiritual worlds with the same justification with which he speaks of a physical-sensible world in relationship to the physical eye. In this sense the spiritual research with which we are here concerned satisfies the demands of our age imposed upon us by the magnificent achievements of natural science which spiritual science in no wise opposes but, rather, seeks further to supplement. I am well aware that every one who undertakes to represent anything before the world, no matter what his motive may be, attributes a certain importance to himself by describing this as a demand of the times. I have no such purpose, neither shall I have such a purpose in my next lecture; [The second lecture in this brochure.] on the contrary, I should like to show that the demands of the times already exist, and the very endeavor of spiritual science at every step it takes is to satisfy these demands of the times. We may say, then, that the spiritual-scientist whom it is our purpose to discuss here does not propose to be a person who views nature in a dilettante or amateur fashion. On the contrary, he proposes to advance further in true harmony with natural science and with the same genuine conscientiousness. He desires truly exact clairvoyance for the description of a spiritual world. But it is clear to him at the same time that, when we undertake to investigate a human corpse in a laboratory for the purpose of explaining the life which has disappeared from it, or, when we look out into cosmic space with a telescope, we then develop capacities which tend to adapt themselves at first solely to the microscope or telescope, but which possess an inner life and which misrepresent themselves in their existent form. When we dissect a human corpse, we know that it was not nature that made the human being into this bodily form, but that the human soul, which has now vanished, made it. [That is, nature did not create the wonderful human body; it was created by the soul.] We interpret the human soul from what we have here as its physical product, and any one would be irrational who should assume that this molding of the human physical forces and forms had not arisen out of that which preceded the present state of this human being. But everything that we hold in the background while we investigate dead nature with those forces in connection with which we rightly deny our inner activity creates the potentiality, through this very act of holding in reserve, for a further development of the soul forces of the human being. Just as the seed of the plant lies out of sight under the earth when we have laid it in the soil, and yet will become a plant, so do we plant a seed in the soul in the very action of conscientious scientific research. He who is a serious scientist in this sense has within himself the germ of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. He needs only to develop the germ. He will then know that, just as natural science is a demand of the times, so is supersensible research likewise. What I mean to say is that every one who speaks in the spirit of natural science speaks also in the spirit of supersensible research, only he does not know this. And that which constitutes an unconscious longing in the innermost depths of many persons today as will be manifest in the next public lecture is the impulse of supersensible research to unfold out of its germ. To those very persons, therefore, who oppose this spiritual research from a supposedly scientific standpoint, one would like to say, though not with any bad intention, that this brings to mind an utterance in Goethe's Faust all too well known, but which would be applied in a different sense: The little man would not sense the Devil Even if he held him by the throat.
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Now, I do not care to go into that. But what is contained in this expression confronts us in a different application in that which exists today as a demand of the times: that those who speak rightly today about nature are really giving expression, though unconsciously, to the spirit. One would like to say that there are many who do not wish to notice the spirit when it speaks, although they are constantly giving expression to the spirit in their own words! The seed of supersensible perception is really far more widespread today than is supposed, but it must be developed. The fact that it must be developed is really a lesson we may learn from the seriousness of the times as regards external experiences. As I have already said, I should like to go into the details next time; but we may still add in conclusion that the elements of a fearful catastrophe really speak to the whole of humanity today through various indications in the outside world, and that it is possible to realize that tasks at which humanity in the immediate future will have to work with the greatest intensity will struggle to birth out of this great seriousness of the times. This external seriousness with which the world confronts us today, especially the world of humanity, indicates the necessity of an inner seriousness. And it is about this inner seriousness in the guidance of the human heart and mind toward man's own spiritual powers, which constitute the powers of his essential being, that I have wished to speak to you today. For, if it is true that man must apply his most powerful external forces in meeting the serious events awaiting him over the whole world, he will need likewise a powerful inner courage. But such forces and such courage can come into existence only if the human being is able to feel and also to will himself in full consciousness in his innermost being, not merely theoretically conceiving himself but practically knowing himself. This is possible for him only when he comes to know this being of his as coming out of that source from which it does truly come, from the source of the spirit, only when in ever increasing measure, not only theoretically but practically, he learns to know in actual experience that man is spirit, and can find his true satisfaction only in the spirit; that his highest powers and his highest courage can come to him only out of the spirit, out of the supersensible.

Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life

On last Wednesday I had the opportunity to explain to you how a supersensible knowledge may come into existence out of the further development of those capacities of the human soul which belong to our every-day life, and which are recognized also in science when methodically applied. I undertook to show how a systematic further development of these capacities of the soul actually brings about for the human being a form of perception whereby he can become aware of a supersensible world just as he becomes aware of the physical sensible world environing him by means of his physical senses. Through such vision we penetrate upward not only to an abstract sort of conviction that, in addition to the world of the senses, there exists also a world of the spirit, but to acquisition of real knowledge, to a real experience, of spiritual beings, which constitute the environment of man himself to the extent that he lifts himself up into a condition of spirituality, just as plants and animals constitute his environment in the physical world. Such a supersensible knowledge is something different in its entire nature from that which we designate as knowledge in ordinary life and for our every-day consciousness, as well as in ordinary science. In this ordinary knowledge we come into possession, in a certain sense, of ideas for example such ideas as embrace the laws of nature. But this possession of ideas does not really penetrate into the soul in such a way as to become an immediate power of the soul, comparable as a spiritual power to muscular force as this passes over into activity. Thoughts remain rather shadowy, and every one knows through immediate experiences how indifferent, in a certain sense, is the reaction of the human heart to thoughts when we are dealing with matters which affect the human heart in the profoundest degree. Now, I think I have shown already in the first lecture that, when a human being actually penetrates into the spiritual world by means of such a perception as we have in mind here, he then becomes aware of his supersensible being as it was before it descended to the earthly existence. And the fact that he achieves for himself something of this kind as regards his own self in its relationship to the spiritual world, does not leave his heart, the needs of his profoundest sensibilities, to the same extent unaffected, as in the case of abstract forms of knowledge. It is certainly true that one who has himself led a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge does not undervalue all the inner drama of the soul associated with the struggle for knowledge even in the ordinarily recognized sense, yet the knowledge that we thus acquire remains, nevertheless, mere pictures of the external world. Indeed, if we are scientifically educated at the present time, we are generally proud of the fact that these pictures merely reflect, in a certain sense, quite objectively the external world and do not dart with such inner force through the life of the soul as, in the case of the physical body, the circulating blood drives its pulsing waves through man's being. The fact is that what is here meant by supersensible knowledge is something which acts upon the human being in a manner entirely unlike that of ordinary knowledge. And, in order that I may make myself perfectly clear precisely in reference to this point, I should like to begin with a comparison which is, however, something more than a comparison, something that fits the matter completely in its reality. I should like to begin with the fact that the human being, even in ordinary life, lives in two states of consciousness we might say three states, but let us consider sleeping and dreaming as constituting a single state of consciousness that he is separated completely from the external world during sleep, and that a world existent only within him, reveals its effects in dreams in a grotesque and often chaotic manner. Even though we are in the same space with many other persons, our dream world belongs to us alone; we do not share it with the other persons. And a profounder reflection upon the world of dreams is the very thing that may show us that what we have to consider as our own inner human nature is connected with this dream world. Even the corporeal nature of man is reflected in a remarkable way in dreams: it is mirrored in fantastic pictures. One condition or another affecting an organ, a condition of illness or of excitation, may emerge in a special symbol during a dream; or some noise occurring near us may appear in a dream in a very dramatic symbolism. The dream creates pictures out of our own inner nature and out of the external world. But all of this is intimately
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connected, in turn, with the whole course of our life upon earth. From the most remote epochs of this life the dream draws the shadows of experiences into its chaotic but always dramatic course. And, the more deeply we penetrate into all this, the more are we led to the conclusion that the innermost being of man is connected, even though in an instinctive and unconscious manner, with that which flows and weaves in dreams. One who has the capacity, for example, for observing the moment of waking and, from this point on, fixing the eye of the mind upon the ordinary daily life, not in the superficial way in which this usually occurs, but in a deeper fashion, will come to see that this waking life of day is characterized by the fact that what we experience in a wholly isolated manner during sleep and during dreams, in a manner that we can share with other persons at most only in special instances, that this soul-spiritual element sinks down into our corporeal being, inserts itself in a way into the will, and thereby also into the forces of thought and the sense forces permeated by the will, and thus enters indirectly, through the body, into a relationship with the external world. Thus does the act of waking constitute a transition to an entirely different state of consciousness from that which we have in dreams. We are inserted into the external course of events through the fact that we participate, with our soul element, in the occurrences of our own organisms, which are connected, in turn, with external occurrences. Evidences of the fact that I am really describing the process in a wholly objective way can, naturally, not be obtained by the manner of abstract calculation, nor in an experimental way; but they are revealed to one who is able to observe in this field particularly one who is able to observe how there is something like a dreaming while awake, a subconscious imagining, a living in pictures, which is always in process at the bottom of the dry, matter-of-fact life of the soul, of the intellect. The situation is such that, just as we may dive down from the surface of a stream of water into its profounder depths, so may we penetrate from our intellectual life into the deeper regions of the soul. There we enter into something which concerns us more intimately than the intellectual life, even though its connection with the external world is less exact. There we come also upon everything which stimulates the intellectual life to its independent, inventive power, which stimulates this life of the intellect when it passes over into artistic creation, which stimulates this intellectual life even as I shall have to show later when the human heart turns away from the ordinary reflections about the universe and surrenders itself to a reverent and religious veneration for the spiritual essence of the world. In the act of waking in the ordinary life the situation is really such that, through the insertion of our soul being into the organs of our body, we enter into such a connection with the external world that we can entrust, not to the dream, but only to the waking life of day, responsibility for the judgment which is to be passed upon the nature of the dream, upon its Tightness and wrongness, its truth and untruth. It would be psychopathic for any one to suppose that, in the chaotic, though dramatic, processes of the dream something higher is to be seen than that which his waking experience defines as the significance of this life of dreams. In this waking experience do we remain also at about the same level of experience when we devote ourselves to the intellectual life, to the ordinary life of science, to every-day knowledge. By means of that absorption, immersion, and I might say strengthening of the soul about which I spoke on the previous occasion, the human being exercises consciously at a higher level for the life of his soul something similar to what he exercises unconsciously through his bodily organization for the ordinary act of waking. And the immersion in a supersensible form of knowledge is a higher awaking. Just as we relate any sort of dream picture to our waking life of day, through the help of our memory and other forces of our soul, in order to connect this dream picture, let us say, with some bodily excitation or external experience, and thus to fit it into the course of reality, so do we arrive by means of such a supersensible cognition as I have described at the point where we may rightly fit what we have in our ordinary sensible environment, what we fix by means of observation and experiment, into a higher world, into a spiritual world in which we ourselves are made participants by means of those exercises of which I spoke, just as we have been made participants in the corporeal world in the ordinary waking by means of our own organism. Thus supersensible knowledge really constitutes the dawn of a new world, a real awaking to a new world, an awaking at a higher level. And this awaking compels him who has awaked to judge the whole sensible-physical world, in turn, from the point of view of this experience, just as he judges the dream life from the point of view of the waking life. What I do here during my earthly life, what appears to me by means of my physical knowledge, I then learn to relate to the processes through which I have passed as a spirit-soul being in a purely spiritual world before my descent into the earthly world, just as I connect the dream with the waking life. I learn to relate everything that exists in physical nature, not in general to a fantastic world of spirit, but to a concrete spiritual world, to a spiritual world which is complete in its content, which becomes a visible environment of the human being by reason of the powers of knowledge I have described as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. But, just as a person feels himself in ordinary life to be in different states of soul when awake and when dreaming, so does the whole state of soul become different when one arrives at this higher awaking. For this reason, in describing supersensible knowledge in the manner that I have employed here, we do not describe merely the formal taking of pictures of the supersensible world, but the transition of a person from one state of consciousness into another, from one condition of soul into another. In this process, however, even those contents of the soul in which one is absorbed in ordinary life become something entirely different. Just as one becomes a different person in ordinary life through awaking, so does one become, in a certain sense, a different human being through this supersensible knowledge. The concepts and ideas that we have had in ordinary consciousness are transformed. There occurs not only a conceptual revolution in a person consisting in the fact that he understands more, but also a revolution in his life. This penetrates into the profoundest human conceptions. It is precisely in the profoundest human conceptions, I wish to say, in the very roots of the soul being, that a person is transformed through the fact that he is able to enter into the sphere of this supersensible knowledge something which happens, of course, only for momentary periods in one's life. Here I must call your attention to two conceptions that play the greatest imaginable role in every-day life. These are conceptions completely and profoundly valid in ordinary life which take on an utterly different form the moment one ascends into the supersensible world. These are the two concepts on the basis of which we form our judgments in the world: the concepts true and false, right and wrong. I beg you not to imagine that in this explanation I intend, through a frivolous handling of the problem of knowledge, to undermine the validity of the concepts true and false, right and wrong. To undermine something which is wholesome in ordinary life is
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by no means in keeping with a genuine supersensible knowledge. This higher knowledge enables us to acquire something in addition for ordinary life, but never subtracts from it. Those persons who whether really or in sentimentality become untrue in their ordinary lives, unpractically mystical for this aspect of life, are also unsuited for a genuine supersensible knowledge. A genuine supersensible knowledge is not born out of fantastic persons, dreamers, but out of those very persons who are able to take their places in their full humanity in the earthly existence, as persons capable in real life. In other words, it is not our purpose to undermine what we experience in our every-day lives, and what is bound up in its very depths with the concepts true and false, right and wrong; on the contrary, truthfulness in this sphere, I should like to emphasize, is strengthened in one's feelings by that very thing which now comes about in connection with a higher knowledge by reason of a metamorphosis, a transformation of the concepts true and false, right and wrong. When we have really entered into this higher, supersensible world, we do not any longer say in such an abstract way that a thing is true or false, that it is right or wrong, but the concept of the true and the right passes over into a concept with which we are familiar in ordinary life, though in a more instinctive way; only, this concept belonging to the ordinary life is transmuted into a spiritual form. True and right pass over into the concept healthy; false and wrong pass over into the concept diseased. In other words, when we reflect about something in ordinary life feel, sense, or will something we say: This is right, that is wrong. But, when we are in the realm of supersensible knowledge, we do not arrive at this impression of right or wrong but we actually reach the impression that something is healthy, something else is diseased. You will say that healthy and ill are concepts to which a certain indefiniteness is attached. But this is attached to them only in the ordinary life or the ordinary state of consciousness. The indefiniteness ceases when the higher knowledge is sought for in so exact a manner as I have explained in the first lecture. Precision then enters also into what we experience in this realm of higher knowledge. Healthy and ill, these are the terms we apply to what we experience in association with the beings of the supersensible world of whom we become aware through such a form of knowledge. Just think how deeply that which becomes an object of supersensible knowledge may affect us: it affects us as intimately as health and illness of the body. In regard to one thing that is experienced in the supersensible, we may say: I enter livingly into it. It benefits and stimulates my life; it elevates my life. I become through it in a certain way more real. It is healthful. In regard to something else I say: It paralyzes indeed, it kills my own life. Thereby do I recognize that it is something diseased. And just as we help ourselves onward in the ordinary world through right and wrong, just as we place our own human nature in the moral and the social life, so do we place ourselves rightly in the supersensible world through healthy and ill. But we are thus fitted into this supersensible world with our whole being in a manner far more real than that in which we are fitted into the sense world. In the sense world we separate ourselves from things in this element of the right or the wrong. I mean to say that right does not benefit us very intensely and wrong does not cause us much distress especially in the case of many persons. In the supersensible world it is by no means possible that experiences shall touch us in this way. There our whole existence, our whole reality, enters into the manner in which we experience this supersensible world. For this realm, therefore, all conflict of opinion ceases as to whether things are reality or mere phenomena; whether they manifest to us merely the effects produced upon our own sense organs; and the like questions about which I do not wish to speak here because the time would not suffice. But everything about which people can argue in this way in relation to the physical reality, to carry on such discussion with reference to the spiritual world really has no significance whatever for the spiritual, supersensible world. For we test its reality or unreality through the fact that we can say: One thing affects me wholesomely, another thing in an ill way causing injury, I mean to say, taking the word in its full meaning and weight. The moment a person ascends to the supersensible world, he observes at once that what was previously knowledge void of power becomes an inner power of the human soul itself. We permeate the soul with this supersensible knowledge as we permeate our bodies with blood. Thus we learn also in such knowledge the whole relationship of the soul and the spirit to the human body; we learn to see how the spirit-soul being of man descends out of a supersensible prenatal existence and unites with the inherited body. In order to see into this, it is necessary first to learn to know the spirit-soul element so truly that through this reality, as healthy or diseased, we experience the actuality in our own I cannot say body here, but in our own soul. Supersensible knowledge, therefore although we make such a statement reluctantly, because one seems at once to fall into sentimentality is really not a mere understanding but an ensouling of the human being. It is soul itself, soul content, which enters into us when we penetrate to this supersensible knowledge. We become aware of our eternity, our immortality, by no means through the solution of a philosophical problem; we become aware of them through immediate experience, just as we become aware of external things in immediate experience through our senses. What I have thus described is exposed, of course, to the objection: To be sure, one may speak in this way, perhaps, who participates in such supersensible knowledge; but what shall any one say to these things who is himself not as yet a participant in this supersensible knowledge? Now, one of the most beautiful ways in which human beings can live together is that in which one person develops through contact with the other, when one goes through the process of becoming, in his soul nature, through the help of the other. This is precisely the way in which the human community is most wonderfully established. Thus we may say that, just as it is not possible for all persons to become astronomers or botanists and yet the results of astronomy and botany may possess importance and significance for all persons at least, their primary results and can be taken in by means of the insight possessed by a sound human intellect, it is likewise possible that a sound human mind and heart can directly grasp and assimilate what is presented by a spiritualscientist who is able to penetrate into the supersensible world. For the human being is born, not for untruth, but for truth! And what the spiritual-scientist has to say will always be clothed, of course, in such words and combinations of words that it diverges, even in its formulation, from what we are accustomed to receive as pictures out of the sensible-physical world. Therefore, as the spiritual-scientist
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lays open what he has beheld, this may work in such a way upon the whole human being, upon the simple, wholesome human mind, that this wholesome human mind is awakened so awakened that it actually discovers itself to be in that state of waking of which I have spoken today. I must repeat again and again, therefore, that, although I have certainly undertaken to explain in such books as Occult Science an Outline, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and in other volumes, how it is possible to arrive through systematic exercises at what I must designate as looking into the spiritual world, so that every one possesses the possibility today, up to a certain degree, of becoming a spiritual-scientist, yet it is not necessary to do this. For a sound human constitution of soul is such that what the spiritual-scientist has to say can be received when it comes into contact with the human soul provided only that the soul is sufficiently unprejudiced as something long known. For this is precisely the peculiar characteristic of this spiritual research, this supersensible knowledge to which we are referring: that it brings nothing which is not subconsciously present already in every human being. Thus every one can feel: I already knew that; it is within me. If only I had not permitted myself to be rendered unreceptive through the authoritarian and other preconceptions of natural science, I should already have grasped, through one experience or another, some part of what this spiritual research is able to present as a connected whole. But the fact of such a thing as this transformation of the concepts true and false into the healthy and the diseased renders the inner experience of the soul more and more intense. At a higher level man places himself more intensely within a reality than he places himself in the physical reality through the ordinary waking of the daily life. In this way, feelings, sentiments, experiences of the soul are generated in relationship to these items of knowledge, which are altogether exact, just as they are generated through our being confronted by external things. That which the supersensible knowledge can bestow lays hold upon the whole human being whereas it is really only the head that is laid hold of by what the knowledge of the senses can bestow. I trust you will permit me to visualize this relationship of supersensible knowledge to the complete human being by referring to something personal, although the personal in this realm is also factual, for the facts are intensely bound up with the personal. In order to render it clear that supersensible knowledge cannot really be a mere head-knowledge, but lays hold upon the human being in a vastly more living and intense way than head-knowledge, I should like to mention the following. Whoever is accustomed to a living participation in ordinary knowledge as every true supersensible knower should really be knows that the head participates in this ordinary knowledge. If he then ascends, especially if he has been active through his entire life in the ordinary knowledge, to supersensible knowledge, the situation becomes such that he must exert all his powers in order to keep firm hold upon this supersensible knowledge which comes upon him, which manifests itself to him. He observes that the power by means of which one holds fast to an idea about nature, to a law of nature, to the course of an experiment or of a clinical observation, is very slight in comparison with the inner force of soul which must be unfolded in order to hold fast to the perception of a supersensible being. And here I have always found it necessary not only, so to speak, to employ the head in order to hold firmly to these items of supersensible knowledge, but to support the force which the head can employ by means of other organs for example by means of the hand. If we sketch in a few strokes something that we have reached through supersensible research, if we fix it in brief characteristic sentences or even in mere words, then this thing which we have brought into existence not merely by means of a force evoked through the nerve system applied in ordinary cognition, but have brought into existence by means of a force drawing upon a wide expanse of the organism as a support for our cognition, this thing becomes something which produces the result that we possess these items of supersensible knowledge not as something momentary, that they do not fall away from us like dreams, but that we are able to retain them. I may disclose to you, therefore, that I really find it necessary to work in general always in this way, and that I have thus produced wagon-loads of notebooks in my lifetime which I have never again looked into. For the necessary thing here lies in the activity; and the result of the activity is that one retains in spirit what has sought to manifest itself, not that one must read these notes again. Obviously, this writing or sketching is nothing automatic, mediumistic, but just as conscious as that which one employs in connection with scientific work or any other kind of work. And its only reason for existence lies in the fact that what presses upon us in the form of supersensible knowledge must be grasped with one's whole being. But the result of this is that it affects, in turn, the whole human being, grasps the whole person, is not limited to an impression upon the head, goes further to produce impressions upon the whole human life in heart and mind. What we experience otherwise while the earthly life passes by us, the joy we have experienced in connection with one thing or another, joy in all its inner living quality, the pain we have experienced in lesser or deeper measure, what we have experienced through the external world of the senses, through association with other persons, in connection with the falling and rising tides of life, all this appears again at a higher level, at a soul-spiritual level, when we ascend into those regions of the supersensible where we can no longer speak of the true and the false but must speak of the healthy and the diseased. Especially when we have passed through all that I described the last time, especially that feeling of intense pain at a certain level on the way to the supersensible, do we then progress to a level of experience where we pass through this inner living dramatic crisis as supersensible experiences and items of knowledge confront us: where knowledge can bestow upon us joy and pleasure as these are possible otherwise only in the physical life; or where knowledge may cause the profoundest pain; where we have the whole life of the soul renewed, as it were, at a higher level with all the inner coloring, with all the inner nuances of color, with all the intimate inwardness of the life of the soul and the mind that one enjoys through being rooted together with the corporeal organization in everyday existence. And it is here that the higher knowledge, the supersensible experience comes into contact with that which plays its role in the ordinary life as the moral existence of the human being; this moral existence of the human being with everything connected with it, with the religious sentiment, with the consciousness of freedom. At the moment when we ascend to a direct experience of the health-giving or the disease-bringing spiritual life, we come into contact with the very roots of the moral life of man, the roots of the whole moral existence. We come into contact with these roots of the moral existence only when we have reached the perception that the physical life of the senses and that which flows out of the human being is really, from the point of view of a higher life, a kind of dream, related to this higher life as the dream is related to the ordinary life. And that which we sense out of the indefinite depths of our human nature as conscience, which enables us to conduct our ordinary life, which determines whether we are helpful or harmful for our fellow men, that which shines upward from the very bottom
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of our human nature, stimulating us morally or immorally, becomes luminous; it is linked up in a reality just as the dream is linked up in a reality when we wake. We learn to recognize the conscience as something existing in man as a dimly mirrored gleam of the sense and significance of the spiritual world of that supersensible world to which we human beings belong, after all, in the depths of our nature. We now understand why it is necessary to take what the knowledge of the sense world can offer us as a point of departure and to proceed from this to a supersensible knowledge, when we are considering the moral order of the world and desire to arrive at the reality of this moral world order. This is what I endeavored to set forth thirty years ago as an ethical problem, merely as a moral world riddle, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Without taking into account supersensible knowledge, I sought by simply following out the moral impulses of the human being to establish the fact that the ethical arises in every instance, not out of the kind of thinking which simply absorbs external things, external occurrences or the occurrences of one's own body, but out of that thinking life of the soul which lays hold upon the heart and the will and yet in its very foundation is, none the less, a thinking soul life, resting upon its own foundations, rooted in the spiritual nature of the world. I was compelled to seek at that time in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for a life of the soul independent of the corporeal being of man, a life that seems, indeed, a shadowy unreality in comparison with the solid reality of the external world of the senses, but which is rooted in its true nature in the very spiritual foundations of the universe. And the fact that the ethical impulses proceed from this kind of thinking, purified from the external world of the senses but wholly alive within man, gives to the human being his ethical character. When we learn to see now through supersensible knowledge that what is rooted in us as our conscience is, in its essence, the mirroring within our inner being of the real spiritual world which weaves and breathes throughout the world of the senses, we then learn to recognize the moral nature of man as that which forever unites us without our knowing this, even when we sense it only as a still small voice within us, with that spiritual world which can be laid open to us through supersensible knowledge. But let no one say that this supersensible knowledge is meaningless, therefore, for our moral life for the very reason that we have the voice of conscience, for the reason that we possess the practical intentions of life for its individual situations. Especially will one who sees that the ancient spiritual traditions, supersensible knowledge handed down from primeval times and continuing until now, have faded away and continue their existence today as pale religious creeds, will be able to see that man stands in need of a new stimulus in this very sphere. Indeed, many persons are the victims of a great delusion in this field. We can see that scientific knowledge, which is considered by many today as the only valid knowledge that the form which this scientific knowledge has taken on, with its Ignorabimus, We cannot know has caused many persons to doubt all knowledge, in that they say that moral impulses, religious intentions, cannot be gained out of any knowledge whatever, but that these ethical-religious impulses in the conduct of life must be developed out of special endowments belonging to man, independent of all knowledge. This has gone so far, indeed, that knowledge is declared not to possess any capacity for setting in motion in the human being such impulses as to enrich him in his moralreligious existence through the fact that he takes in his own spiritual being for this is really what he does take in with supersensible knowledge. It has gone so far that people doubt this possibility! On the other hand, however, especially if one is not such a practical person as the so-called practical persons of our present-day life, who merely follow a routine, if one takes the whole world into account, on the contrary, as a genuinely practical person the world consisting of body, soul, and spirit one will certainly see that, in the individual life situations for which we may be permeated in actual existence with moral-religious content, more is needed than the faded traditions, which cannot really any longer inspire the human being in a completely moral sense. One recognizes something of this sort. Permit me to introduce here a special example. Out of everything that fails to satisfy us in that which confronts us today also in the educational life, what concerned us when the Waldorf School was to be founded in Stuttgart on the initiative of Emil Molt was to answer the question how a human being ought really to be educated. In approaching this task, we addressed this question to the supersensible world of which I am here speaking. I will mention only briefly what sort of purposes had then to be made basic. First of all, the question had to be raised: How is a child educated so that he becomes a real human being, bearing his whole being within himself but also manifesting his whole being in the ethical-religious conduct of life? A genuine knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit was necessary for this. But such a knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit is entirely impossible today on the basis of what is considered valid most of all such a knowledge as may become actually practical so that it enables one to lay hold upon the manifold duties of life. In connection with this let me discuss the question by pointing out to you very briefly that what we so generally feel today to be a just ground for our pride external science, dealing through observation and experimentation with material substance is not qualified to penetrate into the secrets of the material itself. What I shall introduce here now will be stated very briefly, but we can find it set forth with all necessary proofs in my writings, especially in the volume Riddles of the Soul [Von Seelenratseln not yet translated.] When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the heart pumping machine, but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart again, in an unconscious way that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an
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intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance as an inner sense organ. In the heart the effects of the circulation of human blood, with its life impulses, are manifest; the heart is not the instrument causing this pulsation. This is an example of the tragic fact that the very science bearing a materialistic coloring is not able to penetrate into the secrets of the material life; an example of the fact that we do not penetrate into the secrets of the material life until we do this by observing the spirit in its true work, in its creative work upon matter. When we become aware through such supersensible knowledge, on the one hand, of the creative spirit in the very course of material occurrences, we become aware on the other hand of the power-filled spirit not merely of the abstractly thinking spirit of the real spirit in its essence. Then only does there result a genuine knowledge of man, such a knowledge as is needed if we wish to develop in the growing child that which can live and breathe in the human being until death, full of power, suited to life, corresponding with reality. Such an intensive vitalizing of the knowledge of man causes the educator to see the child as something fundamentally different from what he is to the merely external observer. In a fundamental sense, from the very first moment of the earthly life, the growing child is the most wonderful earthly phenomenon. The emergence out of the profoundest inner nature, at first mysteriously indeterminate, of something that renders the indeterminate features more and more determinate, changing the countenance, at first so expressionless, into an expressive physiognomy, the manner in which the vague, unskillful movements of the limbs come to correspond to purpose and objective, all this is something wonderful to behold. And a great sense of responsibility is necessary in bringing this to development. If we stand in the presence of the developing human being in such a way that we say, with all the inner fervor associated with supersensible knowledge: In this child there is manifest that which lived as spirit and soul in the pre-earthly existence in supersensible beauty, that which has left behind, in a certain sense, its supersensible beauty, has submerged itself in the particular body that could be given to it in the course of physical heredity; but you, as a teacher, must release that which rests in the human body as a gift of the gods, in order that it may lay hold year by year, month by month, week by week upon the physical body, may permeate this, may be able to mold it plastically into a likeness of the soul, you have to awaken still further in the human being that which is manifest in him, if we stand thus before the child, we then confront the task of educating the child, not with intellectual principles, but with our whole human nature, with the fullness of our human heart and mind, with a comprehensive sense of human responsibility in confronting the problem of education. We then gradually come to know that we do not have to observe only the child if we wish to know what we must do with him at any particular time, but that we must survey the whole human being. This observation is not convenient. But it is true that what is manifest in a person under certain circumstances in the period of tenderest childhood, let us say, first becomes manifest in a special form as either health-giving or disease-bringing only in high old age after it has long remained hidden in the inner being. As educators, we hold in our hands not only the immediate age of childhood but the whole earthly life of the human being. Persons who frequently say from a superficial pedagogical point of view that we must present to the child only what it can already understand make a very serious mistake. Such persons live in the moment, and not in the observation of the whole human life. For there is a period of childhood, from the change of teeth until adolescence, when it is exceedingly beneficial to a child to receive something that it does not yet understand, something that cannot yet be made clear to it, on the authority of a beloved teacher to the greatest blessing for this human life, because, when the child sees in the self-evident authority of a teacher and educator the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness, in a certain sense, when it sees the world embodied in the teacher, the effect of this is the awaking of the forces of life. This is not something which contradicts human freedom; it is something which appeals to self-evident authority, which in its further development becomes a fountainhead of strength for the whole life. If, at the age of 35 years, we bring something into our heart and mind which is suited by its nature only now to be understood by us as mature persons, but which we took into our hearts upon the authority of a beloved teacher personality even in our eighth year, if we bring that up into consciousness which we have already possessed, which lived in us because of love and now for the first time at a mature age is understood by us, this understanding of what was present in us in germ is the fountain for an inner enrichment of life. This inner enrichment of life is taken away from the human being when, in a manner reducing things to trivialities, only that is introduced to the child which it can already understand. We view the mode of a child's experience in the right way only when we are able to enter into the whole human being and, most of all, into that which enters as yet primarily into the human heart. For example, we become acquainted with persons who radiate a blessing when they enter the company of other persons. Their influence is quieting, bestowing peace even upon excited persons whose tempers clash with one another. When we are really able to look back as I said, this is not convenient and see how such persons, apart from their innate qualities, have developed such a quality also through education, we often go back into a very tender age of the life where certain teacher personalities have stood very close to these children in their inner heart life, so that they learned to look up with reverence to these personalities. This looking up, this capacity for reverence, is like a mountain brook which flows into a crevice in the rock and only later appears again on the surface. What the soul acquired then in childhood exerts its influence below in its depths, manifesting itself only in high old age, when it becomes a power that radiates blessing. What I have just introduced to you might be indicated in a picture if we say that, in relationship to the universe as well, the human being may be so educated that he may transmute into forces of blessing in high old age the forces of reverence of his tender childhood. Permit me to indicate in a picture what I mean. No one will be able to open his hands in blessing in old age who has not learned in tender childhood to fold his hands in reverent prayer. This may indicate to us that in such a special case a life task, education, may lead to an ethical-religious attitude of mind; may indicate how that which our hearts and minds, and our wills, become as a result of entering livingly into spirit-knowledge may enter with vital reality into our conduct of life, so that what we develop otherwise, perhaps, only in an external and technical way shall become a component part of our moral-religious conduct of life. The fact, however, that instruction and education in the Stuttgart Waldorf School, and in the other schools which have arisen as its offshoots, have been brought into such an atmosphere does not by
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any means result in a lack of attention to the factual, the purely pedagogical; on the contrary, these are given full consideration. But the task of education has really become something here which, together with all its technique of teaching, its practice of instruction and everything methodical, at the same time radiates an ethical-religious atmosphere over the child. Educational acts become ethicalreligious acts, because what is done springs from the profoundest moral impulses. Since the practice of teaching flows from a teacherconscience, since the God-given soul nature is seen in the developing human being, educational action becomes religious in its nature. And this does not necessarily have any sentimental meaning but the meaning may be precisely what is especially necessary for our life, which has become so prosaic: that life may become in a wholly unsentimental sense a form of divine service to the world, as in the single example we have given of education, by reason of the fact that spiritual science becomes a light illuminating the actions of our life, the whole conduct of life. Since supersensible knowledge leads us, not to abstractions, but to human powers, when these forms of knowledge gained through supersensible cognition simply become immediate forces of life, they can flow over, therefore, into our whole conduct of life, permeating this with that which lifts the human being above his own level out of the sensible into the supersensible elevating him to the level of a moral being. They may bring him to the stage where he becomes in consecrated love one with the Spirit of the World, thus arriving at truly religious piety. Indeed, this is especially manifest also in education. If we observe the child up to his seventh year, we see that he is wholly given over, in a physical sense, to his environment. He is an imitator, an imitative being even in his speech. And when we observe this physical devotion, when we observe what constitutes a natural environment of the child, and remains such a natural environment because the soul is not yet awake, then we feel inclined to say that what confronts us in a natural way in the child is the natural form of the state of religious consecration to the world. The reason why the child learns so much is that it is consecrated to the world in a natural-religious way. Then the human being separates himself from the world; and, from the seventh year on, it is his educational environment which gives a different, dimly sensed guidance to his soul. At the period of adolescence he arrives at the stage of independent judgment; then does he become a being who determines his own direction and goal from within himself. Blessed is he if now, when freed from his sensuous organism, he can follow the guidance of thought, of the spirit, and grow into the spiritual just as he lived in a natural way while a child in the world, if he can return as an adult in relationship to the spirit to the naturalness of the child's feeling for the world! If our spirit can live in the spirit of the world at the period of adolescence as the body of a child lives in the world of nature, then do we enter into the spirit of the world in true religious devotion to the innermost depths of our human nature: we become religious human beings. We must willingly accept the necessity of transforming ordinary concepts into living forces if we wish to grasp the real nature, the central nerve, of supersensible knowledge. So is it, likewise, when we view the human being by means of what I described the last time as supersensible knowledge in Imagination. When we become aware that what lives in him is not only this physical body which we study in physiology, which we dissect in the medical laboratory and thereby develop the science of physiology, when we see that a supersensible being lives in him which is beheld in the manner I have described, we then come to know that this supersensible being is a sculptor that works upon the physical body itself. But it is necessary then to possess the capacity of going over from the ordinary abstract concepts which afford us only the laws of nature to an artistic conception of the human being. The system of laws under which we ordinarily conceive the human physical form must be changed into molded contents; science must pass over into art. The supersensible human being can not be grasped by means of abstract science. We gain a knowledge of the supersensible being only by means of a perception which leads scientific knowledge wholly over into an artistic experience. It must not be said that science must remain something logical, experimental. Of course, such a demand can be set up; but what does the world care about what we set up as demands! If we wish to gain a grasp of the world, our process must be determined in accordance with the world, not in accordance with our demands or even with our logical thoughts; for the world might itself pass over from mere logical thoughts into that which is artistic. And it actually does this. For this reason, only he arrives at a true conception of life who by means of perceptive power of thought to use the expression so beautifully coined by Goethe can guide that which confronts us in the form of logically conceived laws of nature into plastically molded laws of nature. We then ascend through art in Schiller's expression through the morning glow of the beautiful upwards into the land of knowledge, but also the land of reverent devotion, the land of the religious. We then learn to know permit me to say this in conclusion what a state of things we really have with all the doubts that come over a human being when he says that knowledge can never bestow upon us religious and ethical impulses, but that these require special forces far removed from those of knowledge. I, likewise, shall never maintain, on the basis of supersensible knowledge, that any kind of knowledge as such can guide a human being into a moral and religious conduct of life. But that which really brings the human being into a moral and religious conduct of life does not belong in the realm of the senses: it can be investigated only in the realm of the supersensible. For this reason a true knowledge of human freedom can be gained only when we penetrate into the supersensible. So likewise do we gain real knowledge of the human conscience only when we advance to the sphere of the supersensible. For we arrive in this way at that spiritual element which does not compel the human being as he is compelled by natural laws, but permits him to work as a free being, and yet at the same time permeates him and streams through him with those impulses which are manifest in the conscience. Thus, however, is manifested to man that which he vaguely senses as the divine element in the world, in his innocent faith as a naive human being imbued with religious piety. It is certainly true that one does not stand in immediate need of knowledge such as I have described in order to be a religious and pious person; it is possible to be such a person in complete naivet. But that is not the state of the case, as history proves. One who asserts that the religious and ethical life of man must come to flower out of a different root from that of knowledge does not realize on the basis of historical evolution that all religious movements of liberation naturally, the religious aptitudes always exist in the human being have had their source in the sphere of knowledge as supersensible sources of knowledge existed in the prehistorical epochs. There is no such thing as a content of morality or religion that has not grown out of the roots of knowledge. At the present time the roots of knowledge have given birth to scientific thinking, which is incapable, however, of reaching to the spirit. As regards the religious conduct of life, many people cling instead to traditions, believing that what exists in traditions is a revelation coming out of
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something like a religious genius. As a matter of fact, these are the atavistic, inherited traditions. But they are at the present time so faded out that we need a new impulse of knowledge, not working abstractly, but constituting a force for knowledge, in order that what exists in knowledge may give to the human being the impulse to enter even into the conduct of the practical life with ethical-religious motives in all their primal quality. This we need. And, if it is maintained on the one hand assuredly, with a certain measure of justification that the human being does not need knowledge as such in order to develop an ethical-religious conduct of life, yet it must be maintained, on the other hand, as history teaches in this respect also, that knowledge need not confuse the human being in his religious and his ethical thinking. It must be possible for him to gain the loftiest stages of knowledge, and with this knowledge such, naturally, as it is possible for him to attain, for there will always remain very much beyond this to arrive at the home in which he dwelt by the will of God and under the guidance of God before he had attained to knowledge. That which existed as a dim premonition, and which had its justification as premonition, must be found again even when our striving is toward the loftiest light of knowledge. It will be possible then for knowledge to be something whose influence does not work destructively upon the moral conduct of life; it may be only the influence which kindles and permeates the whole moral-religious conduct of life. Through such knowledge, however, the human being will become aware of the profounder meaning of life about which it is permissible, after all, to speak: he will become aware that, through the dispensation of the mysteries of the universe, of the whole cosmic guidance, he is a being willed by the Spirit, as he deeply senses; that he can develop further as a being willed by the Spirit; that, whereas external knowledge brings him only to what is indefinite, where he is led into doubt and where the unity which lived within him while he possessed only naive intimations is torn apart, he returns to what is God-given and permeated of spirit within himself if he awakens out of the ordinary knowledge to supersensible knowledge. Only thus can that which is so greatly needed by our sorely tested time really be furthered a new impulse in the ethical-religious conduct of life: in that, just as knowledge has advanced up to the present time from the knowledge of vague premonition and dream to the wakeful clarity of our times, we shall advance from this wakeful clarity to a higher form of waking, to a state of union with the supersensible world. Thus, likewise, will that impulse be bestowed upon the human being which he so imperatively requires especially for the renewal of his social existence at this time of bitter testing for humanity in all parts of the world indeed, we may say, for all social thinking of the present time. As the very root of an ethical-religious conduct of life understanding must awaken for the fact that the human being must pass from the ordinary knowledge to an artistic and supersensible awaking and enter into a religious-ethical conduct of life, into a true piety, free from all sentimentality, in which service to life becomes, so to speak, service to the spirit. He must enter there in that his knowledge strives for the light of the supersensible, so that this light of the supersensible causes him to awaken in a supersensible world wherein alone he may feel himself to be a free soul in relationship to the laws of nature, wherein alone he may dwell in a true piety and a genuine inwardness and true religiousness as a spirit man in the spirit world.

The Sun Mystery, Death and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection, GA#211 12 Lectures in Berne, Dornach, Hague, London, Vienna in 1922, Mar 21-July 11, 1922 by Rudolf Steiner Translated by Catherine E. Creeger Published by SteinerBooks in 2006
Book Review by Bobby Matherne 2007

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While reading this book my wife and I took a trip to Salzburg and I found a direct application of Steiner's words about the nature of the physical body and etheric bodies. He said in one of the lectures in this book that our physical body strives ever to return to the Earth and our etheric body strives ever to spread out into the cosmos. How do we hold onto our physical body and etheric body? The answer may surprise you as it did me. Fear causes our Ego (our "I am") to hold tightly on to our physical body and compassion causes our astral body to hold tightly onto our etheric body. Fear and compassion play an integral role in keeping us whole by activating the processes of the Ego and astral body to stay the physical body from its eventual goal of returning to the ground and to keep the etheric body from straying outside our body into the cosmos. On the eve of St. Nicholas Day is the traditional Krampus Laufen and we stumbled onto it because we ate dinner at the Caf Mozart downtown and heard an announcement over the loudspeaker in the square about Krampus and found this scheduled item on a poster there. Loosely translated, it says the Traditional Krampus Run for Large and Small: It's Gonna be Wild! We had seen the Krampus the night before because three of them preceded St. Nicholas into our tour's dining room in the Stiftkeller. They were hideous horned creatures with ape-like hairy costumes and two large noisy bells tied across their lower backs. They were scary enough walking among our tables in a lit-up dining hall, but imagine what it would be like on the dark streets of Old Salzburg with two dozen of these running wild! The square was jam-packed with people, large and small, to listen to St. Nicholas's proclamation and to be scared by the Krampus. Fathers had small boys on their shoulders who begged their dads to get closer to the Krampus.
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We walked off the main square to a side street and witnessed three Krampus coming towards us. One came up to a young woman only a few feet away from us, threw his arms around her, and as she struggled to escape, they both fell onto the ground, the Krampus on top of her. She pulled away, got to her feet, and escaped unharmed, but she had received the scare of her lifetime. With scenes of scaring like this all through the square for a couple of hours, the people of Salzburg could return home with their physical bodies secured from descent into the ground by their Ego bodies for another year. The compassion we felt for the frightened young woman no doubt helped our astral bodies to secure our etheric bodies. This book and the Krampuslaufen seemed to converge as if orchestrated in a movie to illustrate one of Steiner's themes in this book. I walked away with a new appreciation for the movies that people watch. Especially the ultra-scary horror movies which our teenagers seem so fond of. In America, we may lack a Krampuslaufen, but we have Halloween and Hollywood to provide us with ample doses of fear to secure our physical bodies and of compassion to secure our etheric bodies. In this quotation from Chris Bamford's Introduction, Gnther Wachsmuth explains how important the processes of expansion and contraction are to living human beings: [page xvi] As with all living things, expansion must be followed by concentration, openness of heart toward the outside must be supported by constant strengthening of the center of life. Anyone who skips over Introductions when reading a book must be urged to read any that are written by Chris Bamford. One might miss this insight into the three states of consciousness as they are described in the Mandukya Upanisad and embodied in the trinity of sounds in the one-syllable word, AUM. [page xviii] The three states of consciousness waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep with which he [Steiner] begins, hark back to early theosophical teaching. No explicit reference, however, is made to it. Nor is any reference made to its origin in the Mandukya Upanisad, which describes the mystic syllable aum in terms of its three elements a, u, and m explicitly identified with the waking, dream, and dreamless states. What is the "mystery of death" that is in the subtitle? One can only unravel the mystery of a process by undergoing the mystery. Watch a child the first time he sees a roller coaster. He wants to experience it. Or as he encounters a maze or a puzzle. His attention is riveted on the mystery of new adventures until he has experienced it. Steiner directs our attention in these lectures to a salient fact about the Mystery of Golgotha(1), namely, that the gods being immortal had never undergone the human process of death before then and thus death had remained a mystery to them. Anyone who communicated directly with the spiritual world before the Mystery of Golgotha could unravel the mystery of birth, but could not unravel the mystery of death because death to the spiritual beings themselves remained a mystery. Steiner unravels the mystery of death for us in the course of these lectures, as we shall see later in this review. What is the nature of dreaming? The conclusions drawn from the sleep experiments of materialistic scientists will be of little help because the scientists presuppose there are no spiritual bodies such as the etheric, astral, and Ego ("I") bodies of the human being. As a result you can only expect them to produce descriptions of sensory data (e. g., REM or Rapid Eye Movement) they observed from a person's sleeping and to create abstract intellectual rationalizations about what the sensory data meant (e.g. that REM periods are periods of dreaming). It is true that if you awaken someone during REM periods, they will experience a dream, but exactly what happens during dreaming is left to the sleep scientist's imagination which is circumscribed by the sensory data observed. On the other hand, Steiner as a spiritual scientist gives us a clear image of how and when dreams occur and how the four bodies of the full human being are involved in dreaming and waking processes. [page 2, 3] What is actually going on when we dream as we are waking up? We know that as far as the soul-spiritual part of our being we call it the astral body and the "I" is concerned the time between falling asleep and reawakening is spent outside of our physical and etheric bodies. We are then in a world that we cannot perceive with our everyday consciousness, because the astral body and "I" have not yet developed the organs needed to perceive it. Nonetheless, time spent outside of the physical body during sleep is full of activity. Although we cannot perceive it, the life of the astral body and "I" is actually richer during sleep than it is by day, when we are awake. Everything that plays into our dreams for example, in the form of mounting and discharging tension, fear, anger, rage, and so on, which can be clothed in a variety of images is with us from the time we fall asleep to the time we wake up. In these out-of-body states, we inhabit a different world and participate in its action, just as we take part in events of the outer, physical world through our senses while we are awake. When we wake up, our soul-spiritual components, the astral body and the "I," reenter the physical body and immerse themselves in its organs. In this instant, we again become able to perceive the outer world of the kingdoms of nature minerals, plants, animals, human physical bodies. We relate to this outer world through the physical body's soul-pervaded organs. But what happens if we immerse ourselves in the etheric body and remain at that level for a moment before taking hold of the physical body completely? When that happens, forces arising from the etheric body shape the images of a dream. These images take the form of reflections or recollections of our life. We saw above the three states of consciousness expressed in the syllable aum, waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. Inside of waking consciousness we experience the three soul conditions of thinking, feeling, and willing, and these have correlates in our sleeping experience corresponding to light sleep (with dreams), dreamless sleep, and deep sleep. Steiner elaborates:

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[page 6] There are also three such states in sleep, but we usually distinguish only two of them, light sleep (in which dreaming can occur) and dreamless sleep. The first can be compared to thinking in the waking state, the second to feeling. Very few people realize that there is also a third state of even deeper sleep. We remain unaware of the difference between the middle sleep (dreamless sleep) and deep sleep, which is comparable to willing in the waking state. Nonetheless, this third state exists. I am certain that some people notice the difference between these two levels of deep sleep, at least when they wake up. On some nights we experience only the two states of dreaming and dreamless sleep and we never enter the second level of deep sleep, which is clearly different from mere dreamless sleep. Some people , however, will sometimes notice that they feel totally renewed on awakening. This is an indication that they are emerging from an unusually deep sleep, from deeper levels of being. In our three states of sleep, we enter the three realms which exist around us: the animal realm, the plant realm, and the mineral realm. Steiner describes below the two deepest states of dreaming: [page 7] In deeper, dreamless sleep, we are submerged in a realm that also exists all around us, but inside plants. In dreamless sleep we become like spirits that can creep inside plants. In the third stage of deepest sleep, however, we are completely submerged in the mineral kingdom. During this stage, mineral processes -- the alchemists of earlier times called them salt processes are at their most intense in the human body, and we abandon the body not simply to plantlike level of existence but also to the mineral state. The third and deepest realm is that of karma, a realm in which if we were conscious we would experience our own karma, how our previous lives flow into our present one. But one must first develop an organ of perception in order to perceive one's karma. It is a spiritual organ that humans at the present time, for the most part, are not born with, but can develop on one's own. And it must be a spiritual organ of perception because the use of any physical organ of internal perception would be fatal to the user. [page 8] Developing physical organs of perception would kill us, because the human body cannot survive when the forces that produce sense organs are turned inward. If we could turn these forces inward, we would be able to view our own karma physical organs. In reality, we can do this only with spiritual organs, through Intuitive cognition. Where do the four bodies of the human being go during sleep? They go into the four elements as humans have known them for thousands of years: fire, air, water, and earth. We know earth as the ground under our feet, water as the comprising the rivers, oceans, and water vapor, air as filling the atmosphere surrounding us and filling our lungs every second, and fire or warmth as the lifesustaining rays of the Sun in its various forms. [page 11] Another phenomenon evident to spiritual perception is the following. If you observe a person falling asleep, the astral body remains in air-filled space when it moves out on the rhythms of the breath, but the "I" "disappears" into the warmth of the outer world. The soul lives in air and in the warmth ether during the time between falling asleep and waking up. Thus, the human constitution includes the physical human body, which actually belongs entirely to the Earth; the etheric body, which has a special connection to the Earth's watery or fluid element; the astral body, which belongs to the element of air; and the "I", which belongs to the element of warmth, or fire. When the cosmic Word moves into the human body, we can see it draw together the forces of air and warmth and combine them with the forces of water and earth. This whole interplay of forces is then developed by the internalized soul when the human being descends from the world of spirit and soul to begin an earthly existence. Why is such spiritual knowledge not better known today? It was once, to peoples of earlier times and that's why they talked about the four elements: they knew the spiritual realities of the four human bodies and how they filled the four elements because they could perceive them directly. No one discussed whether this was true because everyone knew it as a circadian fact in their lives. No one even bothered to describe it because it was obvious to everyone anyway. No one wrote an essay on it because an essay requires a stretching of the mind to put forth a thesis not already obvious to others. And yet all these things were apparent to Steiner with his inner vision and he found a need to essay, to describe, and discuss because these things are no longer apparent to every human being, especially the many with a materialistic world view. Which view has shaped our way of talking and made it hard for us to express these things. Luckily we do not need inner vision to understand them. Steiner even says that "the actual practical value of the contents of spiritual truths derives not from doing the research but simply from understanding them, from taking them in." (Page 11) [page 11] Although these things are apparent only to inner vision, they exist nonetheless. It is difficult to express them in the words of any of our modern languages, which are totally adapted to materialism and a materialistic worldview. But attempts to express them are important and must become increasingly successful. What the science of initiation allows us to say about higher worlds can be clothed in words that anyone can understand in straightforward thoughts that can make themselves at home in any human soul. While it is true that these things can be discovered only through supersensible research, understanding them does not require the ability to conduct such research oneself. We have a plant in our gardener which is purple, produces tiny blue flowers, and spreads very easily it is called Wandering Jew. It never occurred to me that there could be an historical person called by that name. His name is Ahasuerus and he is a polar opposite of Christ. "At the same time that a god became mortal human (Christ), a mortal human (Ahasuerus) became an immortal god," destined to wander the Earth forever, and is called the "Wandering Jew".

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[page 15] He is the guardian of Judaism in the time after the Mystery of Golgotha. Initiates know that Ahasuerus walks the Earth to this day. Because he has become a god, we cannot see him in human form, of course. Nevertheless he continues to wander through earthly existence. . . . As a spiritual being active in cosmic evolution, Ahasuerus attempts to prevent the normal next step for human beings, namely, the possibility of returning, through the Christ, to the spiritual world we left when we lost the faculty of atavistic clairvoyance. [page 28] It is undeniably true that the Christ has dwelled in us since the Mystery of Golgotha. When clairvoyant vision is directed inward, we can find the Christ within ourselves. When it is directed outwards, toward human life around us, Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, appears to us. Everyone has heard of Out-of-Body-Experiences, but few have experienced them, it seems. Actually everyone has these OOBE's every night while they are asleep, but we will only become aware of them if we somehow achieve full consciousness while we are asleep. If we were to do so, we would also be able to view the entire evolution of our cosmos as Steiner portrays in his Outline of Occult Science. We would see our human evolution as it progressed with the evolution of our Sun, Moon, planets, and Earth. Normally we retrieve only glimpses we call dreams which happen as we re-enter our body from the stage of light sleep. We usually enter our etheric body slightly before entering our physical body, and during that brief transition time, images flow into us from the etheric body and form themselves into what we call dreams. To perceive the evolution of the cosmos we would have to become conscious during our periods of deepest sleep, something which is rare for humans today, but which Steiner was able to do naturally from birth. He explains how humans today can train themselves to achieve this in his book, Knowledge of Higher Worlds. [page 21] Normally, we bring something back into our waking life (through dreams) only from this lightest stage of sleep. But as I described earlier, the images in these dreams are in no way definitive, because the same dream can be veiled in very different images. Nonetheless, the lightest stage of sleep can produce dreams; that is, we can bring something back out of this state of consciousness, or we can at least sense that we experienced something while sleep. This is true of the lightest stage of sleep. In several other places Steiner talks against the use of yoga breathing exercises, hinting that it is ill-advised for modern usage. In the next passage he explains that the ancient Indians were different from us. They could perceive naturally the spiritual world, and only by holding of their breath could they begin to perceive the material world of sensory data which is our natural ability today. The natural world to us today was un-natural to them because to them perceiving the spiritual world was a natural ability along with their ability to see the spiritual and soul aspects of reality at the same time. For them to see only what we call the "natural world" required special yoga breathing exercises. Once again Steiner shows us how we can rightly understand the full human being only if we understand the evolution of humanity and consciousness over historical and near-historical times. [page 30] Instead of doing experiments in laboratories, the people of these ancient times experimented on themselves, so to speak, by regulating their breathing. After inhaling, for examples, they held their breath and attempted to experience what happened inside the body as a consequence of this change. The character of these exercises is preserved, although in weakened form, in yoga. We should not attempt to imitate such yogic breathing exercises today. At that time, however, people experienced them as a way of achieving insights on a higher level than their ordinary perceptions of nature, which included not only what we now see in the natural world, but also the spiritual and soul aspects of natural objects. When the people of ancient India deliberately altered their breathing, these spiritual and soul elements disappeared, and the natural world appeared to them as we see it today. [page 31] The "I am" experience, which we take for granted, was possible for the people of ancient India only when they made an inner effort to alter their breathing. The ancient Indians felt like babies whenever they said, "I am." They did not feel in the present moment as we do when we say "I am". By this act of transporting themselves back to earliest childhood, they could experience that their soul and "I am" flowed into them from the world of spirit and soul. In my essay, The Childhood of Humanity, I discuss the issues of how we grow through the state of consciousness held by these ancient peoples during our pre-five-year-old childhood, and how we promptly forget most of those early memories as a result of the development of our cognitive memory capability. By the time the Greeks came long in the Greco-Roman Epoch, humans had developed strong sense of self or "I am." Unfortunately that led them to see a dead world around them which consumed people in the course of a lifetime. They needed something to help them feel healthy again and they turned to tragedies for their healing. [page 34] In the early days of Greek culture, people experienced quite vividly that daily life made them ill and that they needed something to make them healthy again. that something was tragedy. People felt they were being consumed and making themselves sick, so they went to see tragedies performed in order to be healed, to become whole again. In Aeschylus' time, people still experienced the tragedian as a physician who made exhausted people well again. The feelings stirred up by the tragedies fear, sympathy for the hero, and so on worked like medicine. The spectators were filled with these feeling, which provoked a crisis in them, similar to the crisis in pneumonia, for example. Overcoming the crisis then led back to health. The people of ancient Greece approached the tragedies expecting to be healed, knowing that awareness of the "I" had driven the gods out of the world around them. In essence, Greek plays depicted the gods, the divine world, and the destiny that even the
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gods must suffer. In short, these plays presented the spiritual forces at work behind the "dead" world of nature. For the Greeks, therefore, art still involved healing. When Steiner drew diagrams during his lectures, his associates recognized how important these diagrams would be to later generations and began to provide him large sheets of black paper to draw on with his colored chalk. As a result it is possible for us in the twentyfirst century to view diagrams drawn by his own hands, in full color. The paragraph beginning "In later times" at the top of page 38 has been re-translated to point out the portions of the diagram which he was drawing at the time. This diagram is printed in the invaluable book, Blackboard Drawings 1919-1924, on page 60 with the explanatory text below it. The heading over the text is titled: "Not I, but Christ in me:

[page 60] In times long past the human being felt nature all around him (green), and that nature was everywhere filled with soul and spirit (red). In somewhat later times the human being still felt nature, but he also felt the possibility of perceiving his own 'I am' (yellow) in contrast to a nature that was now devoid of soul. But for this he needed the image of the god present in man, and in the god he sensed Dionysus shown to him in Greek drama. In still later times the human being again felt soulless nature (green) and in himself the 'I am' (yellow). But now the drama becomes fact. The Cross rises up on Golgotha. But, at the same moment, that which the human being had originally lost rises up within him and shines (red) out of his own inner being: Not I, but Christ in me. Few people consider today the ebb and flow of observing and activity. A lumberjack when chopping a tree typically inhales as he observes where his next stroke will fall and then on the exhale speeds his axe forward. This combination of inhale-observe followed by exhale-action can be found in all of our human activities, but is rarely noticed today. In his Lecture on Historical Changes in the Experience of Breathing (Ch. 4), Steiner explains how this evolved over historical times from the ancient Indian yogis until now. We know that we can feel a little intoxicated by the inrush of pure oxygen, and that CO2 (carbon dioxide), a dead air, replaces the oxygen when we exhale. Note how Steiner shows with these simple facts of life how wisdom and faith flowed together in the human beings of times preceding ours. First, the breathing: [page 42] This awareness of breathing, however, was intimately related to everyday life. Consider this very simple example: Here is a piece of chalk. Today, as we look at a piece of chalk, we develop the intention to pick it up, and then we do so. That is not how it worked for the people of ancient times. They looked, inhaled the spiritual aspect of the chalk, then picked it up only as they exhaled. For them, inhalation was bound up with observation and exhalation with activity. This rhythmic interaction with the environment survived into later times but without the vital, perceptive consciousness of ancient times. For example, think back to how threshing was done by hand in the countryside not so very long ago: Look, strike with the flail; look, strike; look, strike. The rhythm of the activity corresponded to a specific breathing pattern. inhaling = observing exhaling = doing The name sophia was given to the process of observing and those ancient Greeks who loved the process of observing were given the title, philo-sophers. It might surprise some of you, especially the scientifically inclined, to find that those Greeks if exposed to modern science would feel like their brains were being stuck with tiny needles. It would not surprise my wife, Del, who often reacts to my spontaneous lectures on a scientific fact that way. [page 43] This mingling of ancient and modern modes of perception was especially characteristic of ancient Greek culture. The Greeks had no concept of science as we know it today. If they had been told about the type of science that is taught in modern universities, they would have felt as if their brains were being stuck full of tiny needles. It would have been incomprehensible to them that anyone could derive satisfaction from such a science. They would have experienced it as damaging to the brain, because they still attempted to perceive remnants of the comforting expansion of the intoxicating breath that streamed into
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them mingled with sense perception. The Greeks perceived activity in the head as I have just described it, and they called it sophia. Those with a special fondness for developing sophia in themselves called themselves philosophers. Originally, the word "philosophy" pointed to an inner experience. Our horribly pedantic "cramming" of philosophy as a way of learning about this body of knowledge was unknown to the Greeks. To them, the word "philosophy" expressed the inner experience of loving sophia. The cosmic spirit once entered us through our breathing, but this knowledge has been progressively deadened or as Steiner called it, "paralyzed" by our sense perception. (Page 43) This happened to the inhalation process, sophia, and to the exhalation process, pistis. Pistis or faith was felt as a strength inside the human body when we exhaled. [page 44, 45] When the Greeks were active, they felt spirit and soul moving out and away from them. As a result, whenever they did anything or worked on anything, they felt as if they were allowing spirit and soul to flow into what they were doing. They experienced it like this: "I take in spirit and soul, which intoxicate my head and unite with what I see and hear. When I am active, I breathe out, and this element of spirit and soul leaves me. It goes into my work, into whatever I am hammering or grasping. I release spirit and soul from myself and allow them to stream into whatever I am doing." This is how the early Greeks felt, but then the perception of exhalation as a sobering process faded until only a trace of it remained in Greek culture. In early Greek times, people still felt that their activity transmitted spirit to the things they handled. In the end, however, this perception of exhalation was paralyzed by internal bodily sensations, such as work-related strength, warmth, and exertion or fatigue, just as the flow of inhalation toward the head had been paralyzed. People no longer experienced exhalation as tiring. Instead, when they exhaled, they felt strength or energy pervading their bodies. This strength inside the human body was pistis, or faith, the feeling of divine strength that allowed one to work. sophia = the spiritual content of inhalation, paralyzed by sense perception pistis = the spiritual exhalation process, paralyzed by bodily sensations Thus, wisdom and faith flowed together in the human being. Wisdom streamed toward the head, and faith lived in the entire body. Wisdom was the content, or ideas; faith was the power of this content. The two belonged together. That is why the only Gnostic work that has come down to us from antiquity is entitled Pistis Sophia. Sophia or wisdom is diluted inhalation; pistis or faith is condensed exhalation. Now we can begin to discern what has happened to the philosophy of the ancient Greeks as it turned into what we call modern science. Sophia became diluted and pistis was lost to our awareness. As a result, we exist in a time when science has become a mere phantom of abstract thoughts and mathematical concepts, i.e., the "ghost of wisdom." What we call "faith" today, on the other hand, has become divorced from the objectivized divine element in us. It has been so subjectivized that it "rises like smoke from the body." [page 45] In later times, wisdom continued to be diluted until it became science. Similarly, inner strength continued to condense until people felt only their bodies and lost the awareness of what faith, or pistis, actually is. Because they no longer sensed the connection between sophia and pistis, people began to separate understanding based on outer sense perceptions from subjective, internal belief. First there was sophia, then scientia, or ordinary science, a diluted form of sophia. We might also say that sophia was originally an actual spiritual being that humans experienced as inhabiting their heads. Today, only the ghost of this spiritual being remains, because science has become the ghost of wisdom. Actually, we should fill our souls with this statement as if with a meditation: Science is the ghost of wisdom. And, on the other hand, what we call "faith" today is not pistis, the inwardly experienced faith of antiquity. "Faith" has become a subjective element closely bound up with egoism. It is a condensation of the faith of ancient times. Before faith became condensed, human beings had an objective sense of the divine element in themselves. Today faith rises up only subjectively, so to speak, like smoke from the body. Just as science is the ghost of wisdom, so to speak, modern faith is a condensed, heavier version of the faith people once experienced. In another preemptive strike against those who would criticize his Spiritual Science without taking the trouble to understand it, Steiner criticizes those who are oblivious to the evolution of sophia and pistis, what we call today faith and wisdom. It is amazing to me that scientists who are otherwise wary of showing their ignorance in their own fields would do so blatantly in fields they know little about. [page 45] If we succeed in seeing the relationship between faith and wisdom, we will not make superficial judgments such as "Anthroposophy is a system of beliefs, not a science." People who say this do not know what they are talking about. They are unaware of the connection between faith and wisdom, ignorant of the historical fact that they were once experienced inwardly as one. In our circles, we must present history as it is presented nowhere else. Where else do we hear history talked about in this way? Where else do we hear what breathing once meant to human beings when it was a totally different experience from what it has become today? A formerly very real element of spirit and soul has become very abstract; conversely, the ensouled body has become robustly material. Steiner wished to immerse the entire Earth in the waters of his spiritual science and thereby baptize its humans as new Christians all. From an endnote for page 37, the editor writes, "One of Rudolf Steiner's chief themes is that human beings must cease to be 'cosmic hermits' and become 'cosmic citizens'." This can only happen if we humans raise ourselves during Earth evolution to becoming spiritual beings before the planet on which we live dissolves together with all left behind cosmic hermits upon it. This, rightly understood, is the true meaning of the Last Judgment.
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In Chapter 5 "The Human Being As Portrayed in Greek Art" we find Steiner sharing with us the insights about the salubrious effects of fear and compassion on the human being. First we must understand that when a human spirit is ready to incarnate into a body on Earth, it is near death in the spiritual world. It desperately needs the influx of energy it will receive upon Earth incarnation. If that were not so, as it was with the human we called Buddha, there would be no need for one to reincarnate. One would have escaped the wheel of reincarnation forever. When we reincarnate the forces of the Earth provides us with an etheric body, a body of formative forces, forces brought into us from entire cosmos. We are truly, newly born as a child of the universe! [page 51] The physical body is the result of earthly forces working for the human being, so to speak. In the time between death and rebirth, we have no physical body to deal with. In last week's lectures, I noted that when the human spirit and soul descend from supersensible realms into physical incarnation, they are near death (spiritually speaking), and must restore their inner forces by experiencing life in a physical body. But the body that unites with what is descending from the world of spirit and soul is born out of the forces of the Earth. Until shortly before achieving physical incarnation, the descending human being also has no etheric body, or body of formative forces. Like the physical body, the etheric body unites with the soul-spiritual members of the human constitution, but its relationship to the cosmos is different from that of the physical body. What happens as we fall asleep? Our physical body attempts to reunite with the Earth and our etheric body attempts to spread back out into the universe. How do we overcome these tendencies? [page 52] In the morning, when we wake up and rediscover our physical and etheric bodies, it is as if our physical bodies were saying to us: "All night long, the Earth tried to absorb me. The Earth wanted to turn me into dust. I remained a physical human body only because the forces of your 'I', and your astral body had held me together yesterday and on previous days, and these forces persisted through the night." Similarly, the etheric body says: "I kept my human form only because resembling you has become a habit. Actually, the forces of the cosmos wanted to throw me to the four winds during the night while you were sleeping and outside of me." Each time we wake up, we must make an effort through the "I" to take possession of the physical body again in the right way, because it actually attempts to escape from us during the time we spend asleep. With appropriate training, the "I" can learn to sense its own efforts to repossess the physical body each morning, and the astral body can sense how it has to reshape the etheric body in its own image, forcing it back into human form to counteract the nonhuman form it attempted to assume during the night. We might say that during sleep the physical body loses the inclination to be possessed by the "I" and the etheric body loses the inclination to assume human form and starts to disperse. As human beings in the modern materialistic age, we have little sense of the efforts of the physical and etheric bodies to escape. But in ancient times, people knew about this reality and some of the traditions that we follow yet today were originally designed to allow our "I" to stave off the physical body's attempts to return to Earth and allow our astral body a way to keep its grip on the etheric body to hold it from escaping into the cosmos. [page 53] In ancient times, people realized that in such a case, the physical body would not be able to disintegrate automatically. The physical body's tendency to disintegrate develops only through illness or old age or the like. If the astral body and the "I" were unexpectedly forced to leave a completely healthy human physical body and the body of formative forces within it, the physical body would retain its humanlike form, because the tendency to be possessed by the "I" and astral body would still be inherent in it. The human form of the physical body would persist, immobilized like a sculpted column. Because the separation was so sudden, the physical body would not be able to disintegrate, and the etheric body would not be able to lose its resemblance to the astral body. The Greeks knew that our etheric body tends to separate into four separate figures each night which had to be re-combined into one human form in the morning before rising. Amazingly, these four figures are the same symbols for the four Evangelists: Matthew (angel), Mark (lion), Luke (ox), and John(eagle)(2). Somehow the four Gospels they wrote have the nature of each of these four figures and by the reading of these Gospels allow each of us to pull our four natures into one whole human being. [page 55] If we could be fully conscious of the process of awaking each morning, we would experience anxiety about being able to reenter the physical body in the right way. We would be afraid of not being able to get back into the physical body properly. In ancient times, the Greeks were very familiar with this fear. They also knew that the etheric body tends to dissolve into four separate figures each night one like an angel, one like a lion, one like an eagle, and one like an ox. Each morning, the astral body has to exert itself to synthesize these four parts of the etheric body into something truly human. The Greeks loved their life in the physical and etheric body. I have often quoted a saying that comes down to us from ancient Greece: "Better a beggar on Earth than a king in the realm of shades," that is, in the underworld. Because they loved physical existence, they longed to be able to take possession of their physical body and shape their etheric body more effectively. Greek tragedy developed as a result of this longing. Aristotle's definition of tragedy, though formulated at a much later time, still clearly indicates that the Greeks did not think of their tragedies in the way that we do. Your experiences may be different, but in my experience modern people think that dramas are created so that when we are finished dealing with everything the day brings, we can sit down for a few hours and watch a more or less exciting presentation of events that are not real but just dramatic images. And yet, do not the movies we watch each night, in the theater or at home on television, bring us various combinations of fear and compassion, which create in us passions similar to what the tragedies of Greece created in the population? Attending the yearly tragedies were a rite of Spring for the Greek people and every one was expected to be in attendance. This annual rite helped them to
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hold onto their physical and etheric bodies for another year. In every culture, yet today, one can find annual celebrations which arouse fear and compassion such as the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Halloween all across the USA, and the Krampus Run in Salzburg. Add to these the many Hollywood movies made to frighten us all year long or the documentary movies of those who overcame great odds to succeed which arouse compassion in us. We do best when we recognize, like the early Greeks did, that all parts of our life contribute to maintaining the wholeness of our human existence. [page 55] To the early Greeks, all life was one, and all of their contributions were intended to be living parts of the wholeness of life. In their view, the purpose of tragedy was to help people take hold of their physical body and shape their etheric body properly. Tragedy evolved in a way that allowed the audience to feel fear and compassion. Experiencing fear gave them the strength to take hold of their physical body properly each morning, and feeling compassion made their astral body stronger and more able to shape their etheric body properly. Show us tragedies, said the Greeks, so we can take hold of our physical body and build up our etheric body suitably, so we can be human in the fullest sense of the word. The function of tragedy in Greek culture was to help people become as fully human as possible in earthly existence. How is any of this practical to us as human beings today? Do you know anyone who has been sick? If so, it would help you and them to know that pain means that their "I" and their astral body have lost their strong connection to the physical body and the etheric body. When one stubs one's toe, e. g., the pain indicates that the etheric body has temporarily left the hurt toe. The pain eases when the etheric body returns. The healing by laying on of hands can be understood in a new way when one sees that the healer has a strong etheric body which soothes the pain by entering slightly into the hurt place until one's own etheric body can return. The compassion shown by a mother who kisses a skint knee of her son helps the boy's astral body to grab hold of his etheric body and fill back in the place it had vacated, thus relieving the pain instantly in many cases. [page 56] When the interior of the body becomes sick or diseased, pain appears. This pain would not be present otherwise. People who are ill begin to sense their bodies in a way that does not happen in a body that is normal or healthy. When nothing hurts, we think we are healthy. When we are ill, something begins to hurt, to cause us pain. This pain simply means that the "I" and astral body are not hooked into the physical and etheric bodies in the right way. When healing sets in, the "I" and the astral body again gain the strength to hook themselves in the right way. They have more power over the physical body than they did before healing began. Suppose someone has a respiratory disease. That person's "I" and astral body are not properly engaged in the etheric and physical parts of the lungs. When the illness is cured, they are again properly engaged. During the "crisis," the "I" and the astral body, though not properly engaged, acquire the strength they need to shift into position properly when the crisis is past. What the Greeks saw in tragedy was the inner counterpart of this outward sequence of events. In Greek art we have two sculptures which represent the extremes to which humans can go: Niobe turns to stone and Laocon struggles against death. We can only truly understand the meaning of these sculptures or even see them as two extremes if we understand the spiritual reality that underlies them. In the case of Niobe, she has torn her soul out of her body because of the loss of her children due to her own hubris, but the forces of the "I" and astral remain to hold together the form of her body which is thence turned into stone. With Laocon, his physical and etheric bodies are being destroyed from without and he struggles to hold onto his "I" and astral body. One look at each sculpture speaks volumes as to the two extremes of human suffering. [page 58, Niobe] Through Anthroposophy, contributions to civilization that emerged from a feeling for the human being as a whole (such as Greek tragedy or a work of art such as the Niobe group) become increasingly transparent to us. We understand that Niobe's soul that is, her "I" and astral body is completely outside her body, in the sphere that is the source of her pain. Her soul has been torn out of her body by pain, but the body remains imbued with the forces of her "I" and astral body. Its form persists, held together by these forces, and Niobe is turned into a pillar of stone. [page 59, Laocon] We find this situation depicted in another Greek sculpture, the death struggle of Laocon. We can understand this sculpture if we fill ourselves with the understanding that it depicts a situation that is the opposite of what happened to Niobe. The physical and etheric bodies are being destroyed from outside and are struggling with the "I" and astral body, which are being forced out. We can see this phenomenon in the very shape of Laocon's mouth and face and the position of his arms and fingers.

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Everyone remembers the passage from Hamlet where he says in his famous soliloquy, "death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns." Steiner points out the curious situation that Hamlet had just finished talking to someone who had returned from that "undiscovered country". [page 60] No doubt Faust would have felt very uncomfortable when Hamlet, who has just spoken to the ghost of old Hamlet himself, mentions the land from which no traveler returns! Hamlet's memory must have been exceedingly poor if he could not remember just having talked to his father, who had indeed returned from that unknown land. In some of my earlier Eastern studies, I had come across the idea that the word aum contained all the sounds of the universe in its one syllable. In this next passage Steiner begins by drawing on the blackboard and once more we are able to see the diagram he drew in full color. He explains how the word aum brings to life the cosmic mysteries within us.

[page 64] Last week, I mentioned that when the original ancient Eastern yoga was in full flower, its devotees were able to attain higher knowledge by manipulating their breathing. They knew that the configuration of nerves inside the head reflected cosmic mysteries and that they could grasp these mysteries if they managed their breathing appropriately. (I am talking about the original yoga, not the decadent secondary developments we know as yoga today.) As the devotees of the original yoga inhaled, they sent their breath up inside the dome of the head, which is an image of the entire cosmos. They shaped this stream of air into a sound somewhere between a and o, or a and u. Like hands whose shape we adapt to the outer objects we touch, the sound a-u was adapted to touching and sensing cosmic mysteries. The resulting perception then became conscious as the air was allowed to flow out again in a mood of absolute devotion. What was accomplished by inhaling, by touching with air imprinted with the sound a-u, was then offered to the world in a mood of devotion, allowing exhaled air to flow out in the sound m. The breath, shaped inside the body into the sound aum, received cosmic mysteries as reflected or reproduced in the nerves inside the head. Cosmic mysteries were brought to life (or to consciousness) as the air was exhaled in the sound m. This was the basis of the original yoga training. A yoga student of ancient times experienced something like this: "The mysteries of the entire universe are in my head. I sense them when I inhale. When I inhale, I perceive cosmic mysteries. But I can hold on to them only as long as I maintain an attitude of absolute devotion to the cosmos. Otherwise, they remain in the unconscious." In other words, inhalation was shaped into the Cosmic Word, which weaves and surges as the force that creates the universe. When they grasped the Cosmic Word and then breathed out in absolute devotion to the cosmos, yoga students recognized inhalation as the revelation of the Cosmic Word and exhalation as its condensation and affirmation. Aum unites revelation and affirmation, bringing cosmic mysteries to life within the human being. During other studies I came across the phenomenon of blindsight as discovered by Lawrence Weisenkrantz and Nicholas Humphrey. In his book, Seeing Red, Humphrey describes how he developed a relationship with a blind monkey and over months of experiments came to understand that there was a form of sight possessed by the monkey which was totally unconscious. Later his predictions were confirmed when his mentor Weisenkrantz tested the hypothesis on blind human beings. In this amazing passage from a lecture given in 1922, we find Steiner predicting the existence of blindsight some forty-five years before these two scientists discovered it and gave it a name. [page 65] We cannot say that blind people are totally cut off from light. It works within them; they simply do not perceive it consciously. Ancient peoples were unaware of death; birth and death had no meaning in their lives. They looked back to before their birth into their previous incarnations and when they looked forward they saw their life continuing past death. At the point where Christ came to Earth in human form, people were beginning to be aware of death, and that awareness was a key to the development of the human intellect. (Page 73)
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[page 74] People had to become outwardly familiar with death. If human beings had remained as unaware of death as they had been in ancient times, they would never have been able to develop their intellect, because intellect is possible only in a world ruled by death. Along came Ahriman who acted as an agent to the gods. Because he knows the wisdom of death, he can be thought of as the "Lord of the Intellect." Then along came the Christ who entered the human being named Jesus of Nazareth and died on the cross. This deed that Steiner calls the Mystery of Golgotha changed things for all of us so that we humans would not forever fall into the dead intellect and remained locked into Earth existence, but could continue our ascent back into the spiritual world. [page 75] Thus the gods were confronted with the dilemma of whether to relinquish the Earth to Ahriman in a certain respect. There was only one possible solution. The gods themselves had to become familiar with an element that was nonexistent in the divine worlds not controlled by Ahriman. Their representative, the Christ, had to experience death on Earth death caused not by divine wisdom but by the human error that would gain ground on Earth under Ahriman's sole dominion. A god had to undergo death and overcome it. For the gods, therefore, the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha was that it enriched their wisdom with the knowledge of death. If no god ever experienced death, the Earth would have become completely intellectualized and incapable of evolving in ways determined beforehand by the gods. Christ, Steiner tells us, taught his disciples to "see death from the perspective of the divine world." We humans are also in need of learning to do this. From this perspective we can see Ahriman as a Sales Agent that a large corporation sent to a foreign country and who was headed towards taking over the entire country, so the corporation had to send a representative to fully experience the foreign country and make them aware that Ahriman was only an agent, not the corporation himself. [page 76] To understand the depth of this esoteric teaching, we must realize that the gods have defeated Ahriman by making his forces useful to the Earth and have blunted his power by learning about death through the being of the Christ. While it is true that the gods have included Ahriman in earthly evolution, they are simply using him and will not allow him to fully implement his rulership. [page 77] Without Ahriman, the gods would have been unable to bring intellectuality to humankind. And if they had not broken Ahriman's dominion through the Christ event, Ahriman would have made the entire Earth inwardly intellectual and outwardly material. We must see the Mystery of Golgotha as more than just an inner, mystical event. It is also an outer event, although not in the sense of superficial, materialistic historical research. The significance of this outer event is that the forces of Ahriman have been incorporated into earthly evolution but have also been overcome. A struggle between gods is played out in the Mystery of Golgotha. After the resurrection, the Christ imparted knowledge of this struggle to his initiated disciples through esoteric teachings. The Mystery of Golgotha is an event which affects every human being and has a decided effect on the entire cosmos within which we were created and are evolving. Here is a bit of what Christ taught his disciples: [page 78] He told them that events on Golgotha reflected super-earthly events and a relationship between Ahriman and the divine worlds responsible for the evolution of Saturn, Sun, and Moon and Earth as it was before the Mystery of Golgotha. He told them that the cross on Golgotha cannot be seen simply as a manifestation of earthly factors; in fact, it has significance for the entire cosmos. How might a disciple of Christ speak about his master's task? Steiner gives us some insight in this imagined conversation between two disciples. [page 78, 79] "The Christ, our teacher, came down to Earth from the spiritual worlds that people knew in ancient times. These people knew about the gods, but only the gods who could not tell them anything about death. If these gods were the only ones we ever knew, we would never have experienced the essence of death. The gods first had to send a being down to Earth so that they could learn about death through one of their own. Since his resurrection, the Christ seems to be teaching us about what the gods had to do to guide earthly evolution toward its appropriate conclusion. He is teaching us something that earlier human beings could not know. We are learning what the gods were doing behind the scenes in cosmic existence in order to further the Earth's evolution in the right way. For the benefit of humankind, they introduced Ahriman's forces into earthly evolution but prevented these forces from corrupting human beings." Steiner reveals to us how St. Paul understood the reality of Ahriman who introduced error into the world. In a curious irony, as it occurs to me, Abraham as the great progenitor of the Jews, had his hand stayed by an Angel when he raised it to sacrifice his son, Isaac, an innocent victim. And yet, generations later, Abraham's descendants would raise their hands to sacrifice an innocent victim upon the Cross, Christ Jesus. [page 80, 81] Of course, Saul was able to convince himself of this [that the most innocent of individuals was sacrificed on the cross] only by experiencing the reality of the Resurrection. Outside Damascus, Saul experienced the Christ himself and was convinced. But what did this experience mean to Saul? It meant that ancient wisdom no longer existed in its original form but had absorbed an Ahrimanic element. This is how Paul arrived at the insight that humankind's evolution had been appropriated by a foe who is the source of error on Earth. By introducing the intellect to human beings, this foe also introduces the possibility
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of error, and in the greatest manifestation of this error an innocent being was nailed to the cross. . . . The balancing of the divine and Ahrimanic worlds occurred behind the veil of sense perception but was played out in Christ Jesus' death on the cross. This next passage inspired me to write a poem which follows immediately thereafter. I did not understand the lifeless nature of the intellect consciously while I was studying physics in college and for some time afterward. But I do recall the difficulty I had with expressing what I was studying and learning to some non-scientific persons who seemed to form the question Why? in a balloon over their head as I explained it to them. [page 82] Our intellect paralyzes us. When we develop the intellect we are not actually living. We must learn to sense that when we think we pour our life out into dead, rational images. We need to be intensely alive to sense creative life in the cultivation of dead rationality and to enter the domain where moral impulses derive from the power of pure thinking where we learn to understand human freedom on the basis of impulses of pure thinking. In Physics I experienced the intellect As I learned to build lifeless rational images of Atoms, Quarks, and Mesons. In Computers I experienced the intellect As I learned to build lifeless rational images of Logic Gates, CPUs, Subroutines, and Operating Systems. In Psychotherapy I experienced the intellect As I learned how I had built lifeless rational images of Feelings, Relationships, and Love. In Anthroposophy I learned to resurrect my lifeless rational images, my dead thoughts with Christ's help, And shape them into moral impulses. What about those people on Earth today who have never heard about Christ or choose not to believe in the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha? Those who ask such a question presuppose that the Mystery of Golgotha is a belief and they miss the essential point: it is an actual event which took place in the divine worlds and on Earth. It is not a matter of belief, but rather one of understanding. [page 96] Perhaps it will occur to some of you to wonder, what about those who cannot believe in the Christ? Let me conclude with a few reassuring words: The Christ died for all, including those who cannot yet unite with him. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective, accomplished fact that is not affected by what people know or do not know about it. Nonetheless, knowing about it strengthens the inner forces of the human soul. We must apply all means available to us our human cognition, feeling, and willing to ensure that as the Earth's evolution continues, human beings will also know subjectively, through direct experience, of the Christ's presence within them. We mentioned earlier about how healing can be understand best if one grasps the spiritual realities underlying the processes of the human being in sickness and in health. To Steiner's view, our modern medicine is one of blind experimentation because of its lack of comprehension of the spiritual realities underlying the medical conditions of their patients. One need only listen to someone who spends a lot of time in a doctor's office to realize they often operate as pill-pushers doing experiments with human lives. Anthroposophy can influence practical activities such as medicine(3). [page 106] Medical knowledge of this sort can be cultivated by investigating how cosmos spirit influences human illness and health. I can say only a few words today about anthroposophical medical science as it already exists, but unless we move toward spiritual perception of the cosmos, all medicine, all psychology, and all therapy remain nothing more than the result of blind experimentation. We experience freedom as human beings only because we experience death. Without death we would have remained in thrall to the higher beings of the spiritual hierarchies, an angel of the tenth hierarchy as humans are sometimes called. But we are able to receive thoughts from the spiritual world, experiences which filled us before we incarnated upon Earth in this lifetime. Those thoughts are like
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soul corpses of our previous existence which we have received just as the Earth will one day receive this body we inhabit during this lifetime. [page 115] Whether through cremation or decomposition, the corpse returns to its native element, the Earth. After death, the body ceases to follow the laws that the human soul imposed on it, beginning at birth. Because it no longer incorporates any aspect of the human soul and spirit, it obeys the same natural laws that prevail among minerals. This is the physical fate of the human physical body after death. We must also acknowledge that a similar death occurs when the soul descends from existence in the world of spirit and soul to incarnate into a physical body at birth. This soul enters the physical human body in the same way that the physical human body enters the earthly element at death. As far as consciousness is concerned, our thoughts are the first thing we become aware of bringing with us from the spiritual world. The mental energy of thinking is the corpse of soul and spirit. Before our earthly existence began, our thinking led a life of its own in the world of soul and spirit, but only the corpse of this spiritual force is incorporated into our earthly existence. The physical body carries our thoughts, which are the soul corpse of our former existence, just as the Earth receives the corpse of the physical body after death. This is why modern perception is so unsatisfying. As long as we carry around this soul corpse, we grasp only the lifeless aspect of nature. It is an illusion to believe that we can discover anything other than lifeless nature through our modern experiments. Of course, we will encounter organized, living bodies as well as mere lifeless matter, but with the undeveloped thinking of personal consciousness, we will not be able to understand them. Even if we were able to create life in a laboratory, we would not understand it. As a soul corpse of its former self, our thinking is spiritually dead. It understands only dead things. We must accept this truth with open minds, because it is important to know that human beings absorbed this dead, abstract thinking only at a specific stage in evolution. Because abstract thinking has no inherent life and imposes no constraints on the inner human being, it allows us to become free. This is why human freedom developed only once we began to experience death. The Gospels as we know are only possible because of the direct knowledge, the gnosis, of early Christian times. This gnosis persisted with its ancient vitality far enough into the three centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha for the writers of the Gospels to interpret this great mystery properly. But for this gnosis, there would have been no Gospels today. If you have sought the mysterious Quelle or source of the Gospels, look no further. The source was not in a document, but in the ancient vitality or gnosis which was not a content in some document set, but rather a process, a living vitality of knowing in a set of individuals who lived in the centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha. Rightly understood, the Gospels are the Quelle, the primordial source of written documents of this ancient process of knowing! Look no further. [page 120] Behind our ordinary reading of Gospel contents rises an Intuitive vision, the actual source of the Gospels. Through Inspiration and Intuition, initiates develop an inner strength that leads not only to an awareness of life after death but also to objective Imaginations and truths about the outer world. Thus, initiates are not dependent on what the Gospels tell them. If the Gospels had not already been written, initiates could write them themselves. In fact, initiates take the correct view of the Gospel writers, realizing that enough of thinkings' ancient vitality persisted in the first three or four centuries A. D. to allow some individuals, even noninitiates, to behold the Mystery of Golgotha and interpret it correctly. If initiates of the early Christian era had not interpreted the Mystery of Golgotha through the gnosis of the time (which is similar but not identical to modern Anthroposophy), there would be no Gospels, because the Gospels were written out of the initiation science of old. "What does all this mean to us?" you may be thinking if you have read down this far. Does Steiner wish to kill religion and substitute some antiquated gnosis in its place? Only a shallow reading of Rudolf Steiner would allow one to reach such a conclusion. In this next passage he states clearly that his goal is to deepen religion, not deaden it, and he earnestly wishes to be a bearer of a love that will nurture the religious sense of all humanity. [page 124] The purpose of modern Anthroposophy is to encourage these realizations and to deepen, rather than deaden, our religious life by allowing us to break with old traditions consciously. Spiritual scientific knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha allows us to transcend all the grave doubts we experience in modern religious life, which result primarily from our scientific education. Although exoteric science has made us free and achieved great outer triumphs, it has also instilled very understandable doubts in our hearts with regard to religious feeling and knowledge of our own supersensible nature. Anthroposophy, which works out of the spirit of science, has taken up the task of eliminating these doubts and implanting truly religious life in the human soul. Far from contributing to the death of religion, Anthroposophy will foster a revival of religious feeling and a new understanding of Christianity, which can be correctly understood and accepted only by turning to the Mystery of Golgotha. Because anthroposophically-derived spiritual knowledge will not only revive old religious feelings but also enkindle new ones, it is safe to say that Anthroposophy harbors no sectarian aspirations. This is as true of Anthroposophy as it is of any other science. Anthroposophy's purpose is not to found sects. Its intent is to serve preexisting religions and to revitalize Christianity in this sense. But Anthroposophy feels called upon to do more than simply preserve old religious feelings and allow traditional religious activity to continue. Its aim is to contribute not only to reviving but also to resurrecting the religious life that has suffered so severely under modern civilization. Anthroposophy hopes to be a messenger of love that will not only revitalize old religious feelings but also foster an esoteric resurrection of humanity's inner religious sense. If you change with the times during your life, liking a food you never liked before, a type of music you didn't like before, writers you never liked before, is it your fault you never liked them before or was it simply your destiny? Engineers walk into a building and find faults with it immediately they are trained to do that kind of analytic thinking about their environment -- they get paid for thinking
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that way. It is their destiny as an engineer to think that way. It is not a fault. Steiner recognizes this and wants us to know that any scientific-minded aspects of his spiritual science is not to deemed a fault but rather its destiny. [page 139] Scientists compare ideas introduced by Anthroposophy to the rigorous science they are accustomed to. No wonder we need to give serious thought to how we relate to science! No wonder quite a few scientifically trained friends of Anthroposophy see it as their particular task to demonstrate that Anthroposophy can indeed be presented for all the world to see on scientifically justifiable grounds in any area of knowledge. This is what the reality of our situation demands. When you hear scientific overtones today in contents that we formerly communicated in quite different terms, this is not the fault of the anthroposophical movement, it is its destiny. This is what the world demands. We have had to present Anthroposophy to the broader public, and we have been able to do so only by entering into discussion with leading personalities. For us, however, the point is not to make Anthroposophy more closely resemble science. The point is to imbue science with Anthroposophy. What is evil? Steiner tells us evil is a good out of its time. It is good for us to have an intellect, but not to exclusion of our spirituality. Unless all humans recognize this, they stand on the verge of a great tragedy. What makes it difficult to recognize is that materialistic science is forever plumping its great achievements and progress for humanity while blithely ignoring the materialistic sinkhole which such progress is placing in the middle of the road of spiritual progress. It is a sinkhole into which the bus of progress upon which we are all passengers will have to negotiate some day and unless the bus driver is Christ instead of Ahriman we will all perish down that sinkhole. [page 141] This new accessibility of the spiritual world means that humankind now faces an important decision that cuts to the heart of every individual. For centuries, human beings have been developing their intellect, which has gradually led us away from spirituality. Although intellect is spirit in fact, the very purest spirit it no longer has a spiritual content. Instead, it has chosen the world of outer nature as its contents. In other words, the intellect is spirit but fills itself with something that cannot manifest as spirit. This is the great modern tragedy of the cosmos: In moments of introspection, we human beings must acknowledge that although intellectual activity is spiritual activity, our intellect is powerless to receive spirit directly. Instead, we fill our spirit with natural, material existence. This state of affairs is fragmenting modern human souls and turning them into a wasteland. Although we may not want to admit it, the spiritual regions of the human soul are becoming fragmented and desolate. This is the fundamental evil and the underlying tragedy of our time.

---------------------------- Footnotes ----------------------------------------Footnote 1. "The Mystery of Golgotha" is Rudolf Steiner's phrase for the salient events in the life of Christ Jesus during which he dies on the Cross and is resurrected. Return to text directly before Footnote 1. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Footnote 2. Click on each of the symbols to see a stained glass window portraying the Evangelist with his symbol. The window appears at the top of a review of a Steiner lecture series on the Evangelist. Return to text directly before Footnote 2. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Footnote 3. See my review of this book Steiner co-authored with Dr. Ita Wegner called Extending Practical Medicine.

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