The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear Friends,

IT will perhaps surprise you that in the course of these lectures we should devote so much time to considering the nature of what is after all the external part of man, his form and figure. If, however, you want to penetrate further into the knowledge which true occultism can give, you cannot omit from your study of man the aspects with which we are now dealing. Call to mind how often in the course of your studies you have met with the thought that in his outer form and figure man is a temple of the Godhead. So he is, and this is what we have all the time in mind while we study as it were the building stones of the temple, as we began to do yesterday and shall still continue doing for a little while. We shall see that when we take the trouble to search in the human figure for the hidden secrets of the spiritual world, we arrive in this way at knowledge that is of the utmost importance for the human heart and soul.

Yesterday we studied man in his twelve members. Now these twelve members appear at first sight to form a unity. They are, however, in reality not a unity, and it is important to recognise this. For, the moment we are awake to the fact that the external unity of the human form is only apparent, the moment we realise that the whole form and figure of the body, as we see it and can have knowledge of it here in earthly life, is but a semblance—in that moment we can also begin to understand how it is with the I, the centre point of man's consciousness.

We saw yesterday how this ego of ours is snatched away from us every night, and how it can therefore only be for man a picture; for no reality could be torn from him in this way in the night. Every night something of man's ego (which otherwise goes with him through the whole of earth life) is withdrawn; and the Divine Powers have so ordered things that precisely what man loses in this way is given to him in the external body; it is attached instead to the body. This is how it comes about that man is able to look upon his body as a unity. In reality it is no unity. In reality it is composed of members that are built up together in a most complicated manner.

We are here approaching one of the most important mysteries of man's being, that will lead us to delve deep into the primal secrets of existence.

One of there mysteries we touch already in the external world; and it will be important for us also to take the road from without inwards in order to receive out of this consciousness the idea that has no object. Man as we see him in the world consists of three parts, and we are dealing all the time with an appearance if we simply treat these three parts of man as a unity. For man's form, which yesterday we saw to be composed of twelve members, is really divided into three, and we must learn to understand how man has in him as it were, three men. Let us now place before us these three men in succession.

Yesterday, when we recounted in order the members of man's form, we began with what we called his upright posture; and then we went on to speak of how man is orientated in a forward direction,—to express it better, for the act of speaking. We have, therefore, as second member the forward direction, the direction for speaking. The third, you will remember, was symmetry. Taking for the moment just these three members of man's nature, we have there one part of the human form as we behold it externally in space.

Let us now see whether we cannot, by following a purely external perception, find something else to which we can apply the word symmetry,—and which in its external appearance offers to a careful observation many interesting problems. By symmetry we mean, of course, that man's form shows a two-sided development. This quality of symmetry is present in all the organs of the head, but as we go downwards from the head we come to a part of the human figure where it is even more particularly in evidence. You will remember that we gave to “upright posture” the name of Aries and the Sign ♈, and to “orientation to the formation of sound” the name Bull (Taurus) and the Sign ♉, and to “symmetry” the name Twins (Gemini) and the Sign ♊. These are the names given to the first three members of man's organism. Then we come to something which seems to follow as a kind of continuation of the head and manifests in quite a special way the property of symmetry. I mean the arms and hands. It is to these that I will ask you now to give your consideration.

Man's arms and hands attach themselves to the head part of man in such a way as to prefigure in a striking manner what we have in the lower man as thigh, leg and foot. If you consider the animal kingdom you will at once be struck with the similarity of these last organs with those which in man, as arms and hands, are different. You will be able to make very important observations by devoting careful study and thought to the difference there is in man between arms and legs, and between hands and feet, in contradistinction to those animals that stand nearest to him.

Let us now take the names we employed yesterday for the legs and feet and apply them in a corresponding manner to the arms and hands which are joined on to the head and which—as quite a superficial observation will enable you to see—have spiritual connection with the whole thought world of the head. You will not find it unreasonable or inappropriate if we now apply to these arms and hands that are connected with the head, the same terms that we used yesterday for legs and feet, and name this symmetrically extended continuation of the head in the following way. First we have, as fourth member, the upper arm, and to this we give the same designation as we gave to the thigh,—Archer (Sagittarius) ♐. We note a difference between the elbow and the knee, there being no development in the elbow to correspond to the knee-cap, but in spite of this the similarity is sufficiently obvious. And so we give to the elbow the Sign and the name we gave to the knee,—Goat (Capricorn) and ♑. We allot to the lower arm the same Sign as we took for the leg, the Sign of Waterman (Aquarius) ♒, and the hands are denoted with the same Sign as we gave to the feet,—the Sign of Fishes (Pisces) ♓. And now if we take these members of man's nature all together, by themselves, comprising as they do the whole head and arms, we have a seven-membered man. That is an important perception. When you reflect on how this complete sevenfold man receives nourishment—the nourishment is of course brought up to it from the rest of man—then the idea will not be utterly grotesque if we imagine for a moment that this sevenfold man might receive its nourishment from without, like a plant which finds nourishment prepared for it in the world outside, and merely receives it and works upon it. We could quite well imagine that the same thing happened for this sevenfold man, and that it did not get whatever it needs for the maintenance of the brain and so forth from the other parts of man's nature, but instead directly from the external world. This sevenfold man would then be directly and immediately linked with the external world.

It is essential for the occultist to come to an understanding of this sevenfold man if he is to raise himself in a right way to the level of a higher consciousness. What we have just been describing must at some time find place in his mind,—this possibility of a sevenfold man, from which one thinks away all the remaining parts and members of the present-day human being.

Let us now go on to consider the second man. We shall best understand the second man if we pursue the following train of thought. The essential organ of the head is, as you will easily see, the brain. Now man has something else in his form that is similar to the brain. It differs from the brain of the head in what is apparently a detail, but really a point of great significance. Man has actually something like a second brain; it is the brain of the spinal cord, which is enclosed in the spinal column.

I will ask you to dwell for a little on this thought. Try to imagine that the spinal cord is nothing else than a strange and peculiar brain. It is quite possible to feel it as a brain that has been elongated and has become like a slender staff,—just as we can also see the brain as an inflated spinal cord. It will help us here if we picture man assuming for the moment the same posture in the world as the animals still have today,—that is to say, with his spine not vertically upright but parallel with the surface of the earth. Then you would have a brain that has simply been pulled out into the form of a staff. And now observe the human being as you would then have him before you, parallel with the surface of the earth, his back lying horizontal in space. In this position the spinal cord can very well pass for a kind of brain. And now we note something very strange and remarkable,—namely, that we have again appendages right and left, though of course exceedingly different from the arm appendages we had before. But imagine a condition where man had not developed symmetry as far as he has today (when the two arms are very nearly alike) but here one arm had experienced a peculiar development of its own which distinguished it very clearly from the other. In the present day there is even a tendency—and it is a foolish one!—to discard righthandedness and cultivate an equal left and righthandedness. But imagine now that the left arm were on the contrary to grow into a completely different organ; then it will not seem to you impossible or absurd to refer in the way we shall now do to two other appendages.

Consider the human being in this position, with his spinal column above, lying horizontal, and joined on to it on one side the head and on the other side the feet. You have there before you two appendages, as you had previously in the arms. You can regard the head as one arm and the two feet together as the other arm. At first hearing, it sounds very strange: but when you reflect that in the lower animal kingdom forms occur which are not very different from what I have described, the idea will perhaps not strike you as so grotesque, after all.

As a matter of fact, this idea must find place in our mind, if we are to have understanding of the whole being who is in truth a three-membered being. Then we can actually say that we have here appendages,—only unsymmetrically formed; twins, shall we say, that are not alike. In effect, we come to perceive that we have before us something like a repetition of the first sevenfold man.

Let us begin then by assigning to this horizontal man the two dissimilar Twins. For we can again call the two side appendages Twins (Gemini). In the horizontal man, head on the one side and feet on the other belong together; they are arranged in a mutual relationship, and we denote them in this connection with the name Twins (Gemini).

And now we must go back to what we have seen to be a brain. Remember what we said before. We only get the picture of man at which were now looking by turning him. We have before us the middle part of man, the body as such. This we must regard as a world enclosed in itself, and moreover as a world which we are thinking of as containing within it the second man. Thus we have the covering-in or the enclosing of this second man, and within, above, a kind of brain. The enclosure—the shroud or encasement, as it were—we designate as Crab (Cancer). The whole enclosure of the breast takes on quite a new character through the fact that we have turned man in order to obtain a correct picture of it.

Now let us see what members we can find within this enclosure of the breast. We have only to follow the members as we took them in their sequence yesterday, as far as the place where it ceases to be possible still to reckon them as part of the breast or middle man. There is no question about the whole interior to which we gave the name of Lion (Leo) ♌ and which is concentrated in the heart. This is the third member. Then you will remember we saw how man is really divided within into two members, an inner content that is enclosed by Crab (Cancer) ♋ and an inner content that is enclosed by the wall of the abdomen. Anatomically man's body is quite exactly divided off by the diaphragm into an upper and a lower cavity; what is below the diaphragm has also to be reckoned in with the middle man. We call it by the name Virgin (Virgo) with the Sign ♍.

We come then to the place of balance, where man begins to be no longer shut away within his own form but to open himself to the world outside. When he uses his legs he is making contact with what is outside him. The place of balance is the boundary where the entirely “within” comes to an end. This fifth member is called Scales (Libra) and is given the Sign ♎.

From the whole way in which the organs of reproduction are placed in man, you will see they must obviously be counted in with the middle man; and so we have, as sixth member, the reproductive organs, Scorpion (Scorpio) with the Sign ♏.

And now nothing remains to be done but to define the appendage that forms the second of the Twins. If you consider what the thigh is for man, and observe how its movement is conditioned by the nature of the middle man (for the thigh is closely connected with the whole muscular system of the middle man), you will see that we must reckon it also as a member. As far as the knee, man is middle man; the forces of middle man enter into the thigh and extend to the knee. Moreover, we have already included the thigh as one of the Twins. The head on one side and the thigh on the other constitute the pair of Twins. The thigh, then, we denote with the Sign ♐ and we call it Archer (Sagittarius).

When you go further and consider the feet, you find that whereas the thigh still preserves an intimate connection with the middle man, knee and leg and foot require the support of the earth. The thigh, it is true, uses this support, but the leg and the foot are only there at all because man has to stand firm and upright on the earth. In the thigh we have still to do with a continuation of the middle man. If it were not adapted to the other members of leg and foot, the thigh would, in fact, be able to assume a different form and enable man to be a creature of the air. Quite different organs might then be developed beyond it, appropriate for swimming or flying. These would be set in motion by means of the thigh, but everything else about them would have to be adapted to their purpose.

You see, therefore, that the remaining parts of man's form do not require to be reckoned in with the middle man, so that we have now again a sevenfold man. It is the second. If you look at the difference between the two, you will find it is quite astounding. In the first seven-membered man we have, to begin with, all the important sense organs, situated in the head. And when we count in with this first sevenfold man, as indeed we must, the arms and hands, then we have included in it organs that have a distinctive quality which none but a purely external and materialistic observation could fail to recognise. For the organs we call arms and hands would, if we studied them seriously, reveal in a high degree the sublime significance of the nature of man.

If we wanted to speak of art in Nature—and the whole of what man rightly regards as the Temple of God is wonderfully imbued with Nature's art!—we could find no better expression of it than in the marvellous construction of man's hands and arms. Take the corresponding organs in other creatures that are related to man. Look, for instance, at the wings of a bird,—an animal far removed from man. The wings are the fore limbs of the bird, they are comparable with what we have in man as hands. The bird could not fly without wings. Wings are organs that are useful and necessary for its existence—in the fullest sense, organs of utility. The human hand is not in the same sense an organ of utility at all. True, we can develop it to become so, but it requires development. We cannot fly with it, nor swim with it, and it is even clumsy at climbing, at which the fore limbs of the ape—the animal that is most nearly related to man—are very clever. We might almost say that, looked at purely from the standpoint of utility, there is very little meaning or purpose in the form of the hands. If, however, we observe all that man has to do in the course of evolution with his hands, we find them to be most precious possessions. When it is a matter of bringing to outward expression what the mind and spirit are able to achieve, then the hands show their value.

Think of the most simple and elementary movements of the hand. Does not the hand, when it accompanies the word with gesture, turn into a most expressive organ? In all the different movements and positions of the hand do we not often see revealed something of the inner character of the human being? Suppose for a moment that the hands were adapted for purposes of climbing or swimming; or suppose man needed his hands to help him move about on the earth. The world might be so ordered that we did not have to learn to walk, but made use of our hands to help us. For note, we have to learn to walk by making movements that are quite unsuited for the purpose—pendulum-like movements with both legs. We do not generally remark how ill-adapted for the end in view are the movements of the leg; there is no single animal that does not have its legs much more usefully placed and adjusted than man has! And as for our hands, they have nothing whatever to do with this realm of our existence. But now suppose it were not so, suppose man found it easier, more natural, to move about with the help of his hands. In that case you would have to think away the whole of human culture! What does an artist not do with his hand? All art would be simply non-existent, had the hands been organs of utility.

This is a fact that has to be brought home to the aspirant after occultism,—that in arms and hands we have wonderful organs deeply and strongly connected with the spiritual life that is lived by man on earth. When we consider how man has a sense contact with the external world in his head where the sense organs are chiefly localised, and then works with the external world by means of his hands, when we consider how he can prepare in his head what he then shows to the external world with his hands and bequeaths to it as art and culture,—then we begin to see the true character of this first sevenfold man It is the essentially spiritual man, it is man in his connection with the external world. If we look at these seven members and see how they form a self-contained whole then we behold how in this sevenfold man the earth process becomes conscious for man. This first seven-membered man is thus to be regarded as the spiritual nature of the human being; it is the spiritual being of man, in so far as he is earth man.

Let us now look at the second man. The fact that the middle man has Twins which show such totally different developments on the two sides, gives it a double relation with the outside world It is connected with the outside world on the one hand through the head,—for it has knowledge in the head; and on the other hand, through the fact that man is a creature that moves about on earth and can direct his motion from within. Finally it is also connected with the outside world by means of the reproductive organs which make possible the physical continuity of man. Were it not for these three members,—the Twins on the two sides, with the reproductive organs—there would be no connection with the outside world. These three members in the middle organism enable man to have connection on the one hand with the earth process and on the other hand with the continued evolution of earth man, with the sequence of the generations and the reciprocity of sex.

When, however, we turn to those middle members that we denote with the words Cancer, Leo, Virgo and Libra, we find that they are only there for the inner man himself—I mean of course “inner” in the bodily sense. This bodily inner nature of man has, it is true, continuations in two outward directions in what are for it the Gemini; but for the rest it is entirely occupied with the inner organism For man's inner organism it is of the very greatest significance that he has a heart, but it is of very little interest for external nature, and of just as little interest that he has an abdomen.

We have, therefore, three members that are of importance for external earth nature and four others that serve especially man's own inner organism. Whilst the head man lives essentially in the outside world, by virtue of the senses as well as by virtue of the mechanism of arm and hand, here we have paramountly a life inside the organism. Far-reaching differences thus exist between these two men, the middle man and the head man.

We must now pass on to consider a third man. To enable us more easily to form a mental picture of this third man, we will take it in the reverse order, beginning from the other end. We shall find that this third man separates itself off from the other two in a perfectly natural and obvious manner.

Let us begin with the seventh member, the feet. We know from yesterday's lecture that we confer upon the feet the name of Fishes (Pisces) and the Sign ♓. The human form is here wholly adapted to the outside world. If you think it over a little you will find there is no question about it. For it is essentially the form of the foot that makes it possible for man to be a creature who moves about on the earth. Everything else required for walking man has to learn. It is in right accordance with nature that man has to place upon the earth the broad sole of his foot, so that the extended surface of the foot is not directed inwards but to the earth. And now since what we call the leg belongs to and corresponds to this foot nature, we must reckon as sixth member the leg, to which we give the name Waterman (Aquarius) and the Sign ♒.

We come then to the fifth member, the knee, which is here to be regarded in no other way than as forming a necessary mechanical resting place for the thigh. Because man has to bring his whole middle man into connection with the lower man—the foot and leg—therefore must there be this partition at the knee. Think how difficult it would be to walk if the lower leg and foot were not separated off in this way. Walking would be a still more difficult matter than it is, if leg and thigh were made of one single piece! If we did not need to walk, the middle man would not concern us. As it is, however, we need the middle man and consequently also require the knee as connecting member. We call it Goat (Capricorn) with the Sign ♑. This is the fifth member.

The fourth, the thigh, we have already considered and we have seen that it belongs to the middle man. The thigh would have to be there even if man had another kind of movement. If, for instance, he were to fly or swim, he would still need the thigh, though it might have to assume another form. If man is to be able to walk on the earth, not only must the foot and leg and knee be adapted to the ground but also the thigh must be in right relation and proportion to these members. It must be so formed as to correspond in the right way to the three lower members, You will recognise this when you observe that in so far as the thigh is in correspondence with the middle organs it is of the same kind in birds, in four-footed animals and in man; in man it is only differently developed. Thus, the thigh belongs to man in so far as he has an animal nature. We give it the name of Archer (Sagittarius) and the Sign ♐.

It can easily be seen that the organs of reproduction are on the one hand formed from within, and on the other hand in their functions are adapted to the work outside. Let me say in passing, we must speak of these things quite objectively, and consider aspects of them that can only be considered when the subject is treated with scientific seriousness. The reproductive organs are adapted to external nature in the sense that they relate one sex to the other. The organ of the male is not only formed from out of the middle man, but it is also given an outward direction and its form adapted to the reproductive organ of the female. We have, therefore, to speak of the reproductive organs as the third member, which we name Scorpion (Scorpio) and denote by the Sign ♏.

We come next to what is called the Scales (Libra), the place of balance in man. The external form of the region of balance is sufficient evidence that we have here a member of the middle nature of man. Bear in mind that it is because man has become upright that he had to have here this organ of balance. It must be developed in such a way as to enable him to become an upright being. Compare the region of balance in a four-footed animal with the same in man, and you will recognise that this member of balance is different according as the upper part of the body has an upward direction or rests horizontally on the legs and feet. Thus, the place where the balance is situated and which we designate as Libra has to be reckoned as the second member of the lower man.

And now we come to something that cannot but meet with misunderstanding on the part of present-day science. We have so far considered a sixfold man; we have studied the third man beginning from below upwards and found in him these six members. When we considered the other two, the first and the second sevenfold man, we took as our starting-point in each case a brain. In considering the head, we began with the brain and that led us to the arms and hands. Then we learned to see a second brain, a brain that is like an elongated staff but yet is truly brain,—the spinal cord. As you will know, the difference between the spinal cord and the brain of the head, though apparently only small, is really very great. The spinal cord is the instrument for all movements that man is obliged to perform; the movements that we call involuntary movements are controlled by the spinal cord. When, on the other hand, we employ the instrument of the brain, thought inserts itself between perception and movement. In the spinal cord all connection with thought is lacking. There movement follows directly on perception. In the case of the animal the spinal cord plays a greater part than it does in the case of man, and the brain a lesser part. Most animals perform their actions quite involuntarily. Man, however, by virtue of his superior brain, wedges in thinking between perception and movement; consequently his deeds show a voluntary character.

Let us now try to picture the third man in such a way that in it too we discover a kind of brain. As you know, there is in man a third system of nerves, distinct from those of the brain and of the spinal cord. It is the sympathetic nervous system, the so-called solar plexus, situated in the lower part of man and sending its fibres upwards, parallel with the spinal cord. It is a nervous system that is separate from the other two and, in relation to the brain proper, may be regarded as a peculiar, undeveloped brain, When we follow the human form upwards beyond Libra we find this remarkable sympathetic nervous system, the solar plexus, extended like a brain of the third man. With the special organs we have already enumerated there is thus connected also what we have to regard as a kind of third brain,—the solar plexus.

Now, a vital connection exists—and this is what external science cannot but find difficult to accept—between the solar plexus and the kidneys. As the substance of the brain in the head and the fibres of the nerve tracks belong together, so do the kidneys belong to the brain of the abdomen, the solar plexus. In fact, the solar plexus and the kidneys form, together, a peculiar kind of subordinate brain. Reckoning this brain as part of the lower man, we can designate it with the term Virgin (Virgo) ♍. We have therefore now our seventh, or rather our first, member, made up of the connection of solar plexus with kidneys; and at this point we reach the termination above of the third sevenfold man.

Man is thus found to be threefold in his composition. These three men work into and with one another, and no understanding of the nature of the human being is possible until one knows that in him three human beings are in reality active. Three sevenfold men work together in man.

The last-named brain takes extraordinarily little interest in the external world. Its sole purpose is to maintain man's inner parts in an upright position. All the rest of the organs in the lower man are adapted to the external world—although in quite a different manner from the head man. Man's relation in his head to the external world is expressed in the fact that he re-forms the earth world to a world of human culture. On the other hand, in the outer as well as the inner organs of the lower man we have to do with something that belongs to and serves the human being himself. It is only because we do not take the trouble to think accurately on these matters that we fail to observe the enormous difference there is between these three men within the whole human being

Occultism has always given the name of Mysterium Magnum, the Great Mystery, to the wonderful secret of man's nature, the outer aspect of which we have here been considering. This aspect of the Mysterium Magnum is visible in the external world; only, we are not as a rule in a position to understand it, because we do not from the outset distinguish, in what appears to be a unity, a three times sevenfold being.

We may now pass on to consider the other aspect of this mystery. We spoke earlier of the ego nature of man, and we said how it has the appearance of being a unity. We saw also how this unity is continually being broken, continually being interrupted by sleep. If you will read Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment you will find a remarkable fact described, how when the disciple of occultism takes the step that leads him out of his ordinary consciousness a strange thing happens with his ego, with his consciousness. He is divided into three members, and so effectually that he is overpowered by these self-dependent members within him—the thinking soul, the feeling soul and the willing soul. In ordinary life these three things—thinking, feeling and willing—are united in the ego-nature, in the ego-consciousness. In our ordinary everyday consciousness they play into one another. As soon, however, as we take one step towards a higher consciousness, thinking, feeling, and willing fall apart. This is a fact to which the aspirant after occultism must give heed. When he passes out beyond his consciousness, he finds himself divided into three, he finds his ego unity split up into a thinking man, a feeling man and a willing man.

There you have the other aspect of the Mysterium Magnum. When man takes the plunge, as it were, when he really steps right over the bounds of his consciousness, then his ego unity divides into three, just as the apparent unity of the external human figure, as soon as we come to study the body more closely, divides into three,—into three seven-membered men.

Thus our inner ego-nature, no less than our external form, is a unity that is divisible into three. Outer man divides into the seven-membered head man, the seven-membered middle man and the seven-membered foot man. Correspondingly, the inner ego of the human being divides, as soon as it takes the first step into the occult realm, into three parts or members,—the thinking man, the feeling man and the willing man, who stand each over against the other in complete independence. That is the second aspect of the mystery.

Both of these facts must be recognised by the disciple of occultism, when he takes the first step into a higher consciousness. (We shall speak further tomorrow about the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold.) For as consciousness is then divided into three parts, so too if we go forward in the right way, we learn to perceive in the manifest external form of man a three times sevenfold being We have here two aspects of a many-sided and many-membered mystery,—the Mysterium Magnum. Of other aspects we shall have to speak later. For the moment we have indicated the very first and most elementary beginnings of this great and wonderful mystery. This is why, when you come to a particular stage in occult development, you are met on all sides with the formula (expressed in many different ways): The great secret is—“Three are one and one are three.” For the occultist this formula signifies what I have here described to you; herein it has its full and true meaning. Only when people misunderstand it and make it into a materialistic dogma, is its true meaning lost. If, however, you will take it in the sense I have explained, it can be a right symbol for the truths with which we have been dealing today. The formula becomes then an expression of the Mysterium Magnum. If we want to find our way aright into the realm of occultism—and this is what we are attempting here, in many connections—then we must learn to understand this mysterious and apparently contradictory formula: Three are one and one are three. To the mediaeval disciple of occultism again and again were the words spoken: “Give heed to what is said to thee; so mayst thou understand the mystery of how the Three can be at the same time One, and the One at the same time Three.”

My dear Friends,

Yesterday we touched upon one part or aspect of the Mysterium Magnum, and some of you will perhaps have felt a certain difficulty in approaching it from the standpoint that we were obliged to take in order to make the matter clear in detail. But the world is complicated,—let us admit that, once for all! And if we really have the desire to rise to the knowledge of higher truths, there is nothing for it but we must be ready to put up with some difficulties on the way.

Let us once more gather up for our consideration what we have to understand by the Mysterium Magnum. We saw on the one hand how it reveals man in his three members—or rather, reveals him as composed of three men each having seven members—so that we can distinguish an upper man, a middle man and a lower man. As we go through the world and have our experiences, these three men seem to be closely and intimately united; everyday consciousness does not distinguish one from another. That was one aspect of the Mystery. The other consists in this,—that the moment man lifts himself out of his ordinary Earth consciousness and attains a consciousness of a higher kind, he is at once faced with the event that I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, where I said how man must then expect his consciousness to be torn into three, his whole being to be rent asunder, so that he is divided into a thinking man, a feeling man and a willing man. Split up, as it were, into these three soul beings,—that is how man feels when he sets out on the path to a higher consciousness. We have thus on the one hand the three times seven-membered man, and on the other hand, as soon as we take a step beyond ordinary consciousness, we have at once a division of this consciousness into three, which means that every aspirant after occultism who becomes clairvoyant must, as you will know from the book; already quoted, strive with all his might to hold together the three members of his consciousness, that he may not fall to pieces in his inner life of soul. It were indeed a tragic destiny for his inner being if that were to happen. Whilst in ordinary life we are continually tempted to bring together the whole nature of man—which is threefold—into a unity and see it as a single and whole human form, for our inner life of soul on the other hand, the moment we step beyond ordinary consciousness, we are immediately made aware that we are in reality a threefold being, and are in imminent danger of being torn into three in our inner life of soul.

We shall best understand how matters really are in this connection if we take our start once again in quite an elementary way from certain facts of everyday life which manifest themselves in full clarity to the occult pupil, but are not at all generally observed. For it is indeed so that already in ordinary life the three soul powers of man—or rather, the several qualities of consciousness that correspond to them and that we are quite accustomed to distinguish one from another—do themselves direct our attention to what we learned to understand yesterday as the three-membered human being.

Look at man as he stands before you in everyday life! What has to take place in him for everyday consciousness to come about? For everyday consciousness to be there—the consciousness that you carry round with you as thinking Earth man—impressions from without must work upon your senses. The senses, in so far as they give us information of Earth life, are principally situated in the head, and the content of consciousness is in the main derived from these senses. Of the three men whom we learned to recognise yesterday in the human being, it is especially the head man, the upper man, that receives the daytime impressions,—the impressions of ordinary consciousness. They make themselves felt inasmuch as man is able to bring to meet them the instrument of his brain, indeed of his whole head.

A little reflection will quickly show you that man as Earth man cannot possibly be a head man alone. We saw yesterday that for occult consideration man falls into three parts, quite distinct from one another; and for man to stand before us as Earth man, the head must obviously be maintained in life by substances and forces which are continually being sent up into it from the second (middle) man. By means of the circulation of the blood, nourishment must flow for the sustenance of the brain. Then the brain is able to meet the external sense impressions in such a way that by means of the instrument of the brain thoughts and ideas arise in man as a result of these sense impressions. Man experiences in ordinary consciousness what arises in this way through the instrumentality of the brain. You know also that this ordinary consciousness ceases when man is asleep; the external sense impressions are not there any more, they have no longer any influence upon him. When man is asleep and the external sense impressions no longer work upon the brain that is sustained by the middle man, naturally the influences that work from the middle man upon the upper man, from the second man upon the first—influences, that is, upon the brain—still go on. For in this middle man breathing is maintained, even during sleep, and the other activities of the middle man continue. Blood is carried up into the brain when man is asleep as well as when he is awake,—though with a difference; for the way in which the instrument of everyday consciousness is sustained by the middle man is not quite the same in waking and in sleep. The difference finds expression in the fact that during sleep the number of breaths we take is considerably less in proportion than when we are awake, and the quantity of carbonic acid gas in our breath is reduced by about one fourth; the manner and method of nourishment also changes during sleep. When, under certain circumstances, the process of nourishment does continue to work in the same way during sleep, it can have very bad results. This is well known from the fact that after an excellent meal one does not generally sleep well; the brain is disturbed in its rest if a heavy meal is taken immediately before going to sleep. There is, therefore, a difference between the conditions of sleep and waking even in the way the middle man works up into the upper man.

Can we see, in ordinary Earth man, any result of this difference? The fact that man shuts himself off from the external world, and that only inside his body—wholly within what we have described as the form or figure of man—an influence is exerted by the forces of the middle man in the direction of the upper man, has the result that ordinary daytime consciousness is extinguished; so that, although during sleep man still has his brain, he does not perceive the influences that are at work from the middle man upon this brain. The influences go on just the same, but they are only present to what we generally term dream consciousness.

This dream consciousness is very complicated. You will, however, have no difficulty in recognising that a particular class of dreams is wholly connected with what takes place in the middle man, and owes its origin to the fact that the brain is able not only to perceive the external world when the sense impressions work upon it, but able also in some way to perceive influences proceeding from the middle man, beholding them in the form of dream pictures that make use of all kinds of symbols. If something is wrong with the heart, it can easily happen that one dreams of it in the symbol of a burning hot fire. If all is not in order in the intestines it may happen that one dreams of snakes. The character and condition of man's inside will often determine the dream, which can then be an indication of what is going on there. Whoever will take the trouble to observe this remarkable connection and study it with the help of external science, will come to the conclusion that irregularities in the middle man are perceived symbolically in dream pictures.

There are also, as you will know, people who have much more far-reaching experiences with dreams of this kind, people who are able to perceive in definite symbolic pictures the oncoming of certain illnesses. A clear connection can frequently be traced in such cases between dream pictures of a symbolic character recurring with absolute regularity and a disease of the lungs or heart or stomach which makes its appearance later.

As it is possible very often to establish, by means of accurate examination on awaking, that when one has dreamed of a burning stove one's heart is beating more quickly than usual, similarly it is possible for diseases of the lung or disorders of the stomach—in fact, for all manner of illnesses that have not yet shown themselves outwardly—to announce their approach symbolically in dream pictures. The human brain, or rather the human soul, is not sensitive only to external impressions that are communicated through the senses but also to the bodily inside,—with this difference, that in the latter case it does not receive correct and true ideas but builds up for itself imaginary and symbolical ideas of what is going forward in the middle man.

The explanation that has been given enables us to recognise the fact that in dreaming man perceives himself. We can truly say: In my dreams I behold myself. We are not, however, aware of this during the dream. We perceive our heart, but we do not know that it is our heart we perceive. We perceive instead a burning hot fire,—that is to say, an object outside ourselves. Something that is inside us is projected outwards and stands there, outside, for our perception. In dream consciousness, therefore, man has to do with the interior of his own body; this means that in dream consciousness he is divided, he is rent asunder. As you know, in the ordinary run of everyday life, we concern ourselves as a rule only with waking and sleeping.

Now, it is not only conditions of the middle man that are perceived in dreams, but also conditions of the upper man, the head man. There are, to begin with, the dreams that owe their origin to some disorder in the head itself. Through what is perceived as a disorder in the head, the brain—or I, should rather say the soul—perceives itself by means of the instrument of the brain. The upper man perceives himself. Such dreams are always extraordinarily characteristic. You have a dream and wake up with a pain in your head; the dream is in this case a symbolical and fanciful reflection of the headache. As a rule such dreams will take the form that they lead you out into vast distances, or you find yourself in a great vault or cave. Especially characteristic of these headache dreams is the experience of an immense vault above one. Something is creeping or crawling in the roof of the cave, or perhaps spiders' webs or some dirt or dust is clinging to it. Or you may dream you are in a great arched palace! In such cases you perceive yourself as upper man,—but again you transpose what you perceive into the world outside you. You go out of yourself and place outside you what is in you, in your head. So here once more we have a kind of division of the human being; he is, as it were, split asunder, he loses himself, extinguishes himself.

The conditions I have been describing are dream conditions, and they show us quite clearly that in dream consciousness man falls asunder; his ego consciousness, his unity of consciousness, does not remain intact, and his dream is in reality always a reflection, a symbolical reflection of what is going on inside his bodily nature.

For the disciple of occultism it is by no means merely a question of passing from ordinary waking consciousness to dream consciousness—there would be nothing unusual in that, No, he must make the transition to a totally different condition of consciousness. By practising the exercises outlined in earlier lectures of this course—through suppression, that is, of the intellect, the will and the memory—he has to get free of himself and attain to a completely new consciousness.

Although, as I have said, this new consciousness is not a dream consciousness, yet if one has no knowledge of clairvoyant consciousness, dream consciousness can help one to come to a fairly good understanding of it. For we can approach it in the following manner. Suppose we ask ourselves: What is it within him that man perceives in dream? then we must answer: Whatever is painful or out of order. A moment's reflection will show us that ordinary normal conditions are not perceived by dream consciousness, If a man is perfectly healthy in his upper and middle man, if everything is in order there, then he sleeps a normal healthy sleep; one cannot in ordinary circumstances—observe, I say advisedly, in ordinary circumstances—expect that his peaceful sleep will be forcibly interrupted with dreams. Now the path that has to be taken by clairvoyant consciousness is one that leads through stages and conditions that are similar to those of dream consciousness. Only, these stages are attained instead by occult training, and it is actually the case that in clairvoyance man does not merely come to a knowledge of the ordinary external painful conditions of his inside, but succeeds in perceiving also its normal conditions, which usually disappear from our consciousness in peaceful sleep. The pupil in clairvoyance comes to a knowledge of these conditions. In other words, he learns to know his brain, his head man, by learning to perceive it inwardly. Similarly, he comes to know his middle man. In the same way as in certain dreams man perceives when asleep his head and middle man, so has the pupil in clairvoyance to attain in the course of his training to a knowledge of his middle and upper man.

Let us now give our special attention to this middle man. If you consider a little, you will have to acknowledge that you find nothing in the middle man that can be immediately and specifically referred to the external world. In the head we have the eyes and the other sense organs that are in direct connection with the external world. Through the sense of touch the middle man has of course the possibility of coming into connection with the external world, for the sense of touch is, as we know, extended over the whole skin. The perception of the external world by the middle man is nevertheless slight and insignificant in comparison with the knowledge of the external world that we acquire through the head man. Even the perception the middle man receives of warmth affects in the main only his own inner experience, his inner sense of well-being. The middle man seems therefore to be a self-enclosed entity, with inner processes that are of very great importance for himself but have little bearing on his relationship to the outside world.

If, however, we go on to enquire whether this inner man has not perhaps some connection with the outside world that is not so obvious to ordinary consciousness, we shall discover that this inner, middle man has, after all, a connection of no little importance with the outside world. Everything depends on the fact that the middle man is adapted to Earth conditions. He has to breathe the air of the Earth, he needs for his nourishment the substances that are produced on the Earth. From this point of view the middle man and the Earth belong together. Were the substances that are necessary to maintain his life not present in his Earthly surroundings, then this middle man could not be as he is. So you see, we are obliged to look upon the middle man as part and parcel of what Earth existence gives to us, we must reckon him as belonging definitely to our existence here on Earth.

Nor is this all. For it is not a question only of what the Earth can give to man. The Earth could be there for a long time, and yet no middle man come into being! If the Sun did not come to the help of the Earth and cause to flourish and ripen upon it what the middle man needs, then the middle man could not exist. This middle man takes the substances he requires for nourishment, and these substances—apart from the air which is of course essential for his sustenance in life, all these substances that nourish him are dependent on the working of the Sun upon the Earth. Whatever man receives into himself as nourishment is produced by the Sun in man's Earthly environment. This means, in effect, that when we study the middle man we have to take account not only of a direct influence of the Earth upon man but also of an indirect influence of the Sun. Were it not for the physical sunlight that illumines the Earth, the middle man would not exist. All that is to be found in the middle man has come into him through the influence of the light of the Sun upon the Earth.

This remarkable fact—that the middle man is a product of the light of the Sun—comes to expression in the following way. When the pupil in occultism becomes clairvoyant, when he develops, that is, a clairvoyant consciousness, then, whereas in dreams pictures arise which are the expression of some disorder in man's inner organs, in the case of clairvoyant consciousness the pictures the pupil receives express what the Sun is doing in the middle man, they show the regular normal activity of the Sun in the middle man. When the pupil becomes clairvoyant and a perception arises in him of his own inner being in its healthy normal state, then he has before him the flowing light; all around him he sees the flowing light. As the dreamer is surrounded by pictures of disorders in his inner man, so is the aspirant after occultism surrounded by phenomena of flowing light. He has, to begin with, this perception of the activity of the Sun in his own inner being.

Compare for a moment ordinary external consciousness with this special consciousness that arises in the clairvoyant. When man, as upper man, directs his gaze to some object of Earth, he looks at it—it is, as you know, generally speaking, the sense of sight that predominates in perception—by means of the sunlight that is thrown back from the external Earth. External, everyday consciousness perceives what the external sunlight does to the things of the Earth; But now it is what the sunlight does to him, what it does in making possible his own middle man, how it penetrates the middle man with its activity,—this it is that reveals itself to man as flowing light when he becomes a pupil of occultism. He beholds the Sun in himself, in the very same way that he sees the Sun outside him from the time when the day begins for as long as it lasts And as he sees objects around him through the fact that sunlight is thrown back from them, so now he sees, when he has reached a certain stage of clairvoyance, something that is of the nature of Sun reflected back from his own inner being. It is the form of the middle man that shows itself thus illuminated. That is, then, one experience.

If you were to go back into olden times and study what was done and experienced in the ancient Mystery Schools, you would find that the aspirant after occultism learned to perceive the Sun in its reflection in his own middle man,—learned, that is, to perceive the workings of the Sun that continue even when man is asleep, and that escape him during waking consciousness because his attention is entirely claimed by the external consciousness. Man as a Sun being,—that was what the pupil came to perceive at a particular stage of initiation in the Mysteries. He learned to recognise the Sun being in himself, in his very own being, he learned how the Sun works not only outwardly in the objects, in the reflected light, but works also within the bodily form of man.

But now the pupil, who is beginning to be clairvoyant, has to learn something else. He has to discover something that is comparable with the dreams of the brain, those dreams that reflect back disordered conditions of the brain, where, as I told you, in typical cases man always perceives symbols, imagining, for example, that he is in a cave or a palace, having over him a great vaulted roof into which he is gazing. When the pupil in occultism is led on to perceive not only the conditions of his middle man but also the conditions of his upper man (in so far as the latter has form and figure), the conditions of the interior of the head man, then he never has the same experience as he has in his perception of the middle man. Instead he has now before him—I am simply relating the facts—what appears like a perfectly well-ordered and regular extension of the dream that is connected with excitement or irritation of the brain. Only, it is experienced in full consciousness. What man perceives when he has closed all his sense organs and has no external perception, when he directs all his attention in clairvoyant consciousness upon himself inwardly—upon the upper man, the brain man—is in very fact the starry heavens. He beholds the great vault of heaven with the stars.

It was a great moment in the life of the pupil, especially in the more ancient Mysteries—we shall hear later to what extent it underwent change in the later Mysteries—it was a great moment when the pupil perceived his own inner being, in so far as this inner being comes to expression in the human form. When he saw the upper man, it was as though he saw the heavens with all the shining stars; he looked out into the wide world—in spite of the fact that he had no physical senses open. The picture of the starry heavens stood before him. And then came the greatest moment of all when this pupil of occultism observed not what is, so to speak, on the upper surface of his head, but when he looked down from the upper man, from the head, to the middle man, when he perceived, without opening any of his senses, the lower surface of his brain and from it saw the middle man irradiated with light. Himself in total darkness (for his senses were closed, and to outward appearance he was like a man who is asleep), he perceived, looking downwards inwardly, the Sun in the night, in the midst of the dark surface of the heavens. This is what was called in the ancient Mysteries “Seeing the Sun at Midnight,”—seeing, that is, the flowing sunlight within the stars, whose influence in relation to the Sun seems so small. These experiences were important milestones in the life of every aspirant after occultism.

Having come so far, the pupil was then able to apprehend a truth of great significance, He could say: “In the same way as I perceive through the medium of myself, by beholding my middle man, the flowing sunlight, the true and real working of the Sun, so now can I perceive through the medium of the upper man the heavenly spaces with their stars. That I can see the stars, that all is not wrapped in darkness, is due to the fact that the brain is adapted to the stars, as the middle man is adapted to the Sun.” Thus did the pupil come to the knowledge that even as the middle man is sustained by the Sun, even as its whole being depends on the Sun and belongs to the Sun, so does the upper man, the brain man, belong to the whole world and its stars.

When the pupil had had this experience, then he could go to those who possessed only a day consciousness but who, nevertheless, felt an impulse—springing from a deep inner need, from a longing of their soul—to find relationship with a consciousness that should reach out beyond Earth man. In other words, the pupil in occultism could go to men who were religiously inclined, who were able in some way to feel their connection with the great world, and say to them: “Man as he stands on Earth, is not merely a being belonging to this Earth, he is a being that belongs in part, namely in breast and trunk, to the Sun,—and belongs also, as head man, to the whole of cosmic space.” This was what the pupil could tell the religious man, imparting it to him as information; and in the religious man it turned into prayer, into worship.

The disciples of occultism came in this way among men as founders of religion, and according as was the relation of the people to whom they came to the one or other part of man's nature, so they were able to speak more of the one or the other. To people who were more particularly disposed to experience a certain happiness in the sense of well-being in the inner man—people, that is, who were inclined to make their whole mood in life depend on the bodily well-being of the middle man—to such the pupils in occultism could come as founders of religion and say: “Your sense of well-being depends on the Sun.” These people then became, through the influence of the pupils in occultism, followers of a Sun religion. You may be quite sure that all over the Earth, wherever lived people of the kind I have described, for whom it mattered above all that they should have their attention drawn to the source of their sense of well-being, there a Sun worship arose.

To think that men just happened to become Sun worshippers without any deeper reason for it is a mere flight of imagination on the part of all obstinately materialistic science. When the scholar:, of our time speak of how this or that section of mankind came to be Sun worshippers, they are really only demonstrating their own powers of imagination and fantasy. The materialists of today are quite mistaken when they accuse theosophists of an inclination to be fantastic, implying that they themselves are the true realists. Taken as a whole, materialism is certainly not lacking in a tendency to be fantastic, as we can see in this case when it sets out to explain how certain peoples became Sun worshippers. For it builds up an imaginary picture and comes to the conclusion that through the working of certain external conditions or circumstances the people, moved by some unaccountable impulse, hit upon the idea of worshipping the Sun; whereas the truth of the matter is that the initiates, the aspirants after occultism, knew in the case of certain peoples:—We have here a people who manifest especially the virtue of courage, a people in whom one can see a striking development of the middle man; we must teach this people how in the super-sensible one can behold the fact that this middle-man is a product of the working of the Sun. And the initiates in occultism then led such people, in whom the middle man was of greatest importance, away from the mere sense of well-being, the mere living within themselves, to prayer and worship, teaching them to look up in religious devotion to the Being who was the source of this middle man. Thus did they guide these people to a worship of the Sun.

This one example can serve to show the tendency there is in materialism to build up fantastic theories. Other striking examples could be brought forward. We have, for instance, had perforce to read—for they have been thrust under our very eyes—all manner of descriptions of our Munich Building.¹ Through an indiscretion it came about that the project found its way into the newspapers, and the materialistic man of today has formed his own idea of what the Building is and what its purpose. A profusion of fantastic information has been spread abroad, quite enough to demonstrate that fantasy is a quality of present-day thinking. When it is a matter of speaking or writing about things of which he knows absolutely nothing, the man of today does not hesitate to have recourse to the wildest fancies in order to construct an explanation. This is so in ordinary everyday life, and it is so too in the realm of science. The majority of the explanations put forward by the scholars of today are sheer fantasy; and the attempt to describe or account for Sun worship is certainly no exception.

Other peoples on the Earth had less inclination to develop the middle man and were more disposed to think, to have ideas,—that is, to develop the upper man; and to them another kind of appeal had to be made. The occultists who went forth into the world as founders of religion turned the attention of these peoples to seek the source of the instrument whereby they were able to produce thoughts, to live in thoughts and in ideas. The occultists said to them: “If you want to have knowledge of the source of your life of thought, then—since you are not able to gaze into the super-sensible worlds of the heavens (of course the initiates did not say this, I am adding it)—you will have an external reflection of this source if you remain awake during the night and look up in prayer to the star-strewn heavens.”

A genuine Star worship—a worship, one can also say, of the Night, for the truth was often clothed in such a way that instead of speaking of the starry heavens the night was substituted—such a Star or Night Worship prevailed among peoples who were more given to thought. Peoples of ancient times who were fond of thinking and pondering and delving deep into things,—for them religions were founded that pointed them to the source of the instrument of their thinking, the source, that is, of their upper man. And many of the names borne by the most ancient Gods of certain peoples have to be rendered in modern languages by the word “Night.” The Night was the object of worship, the Night in all the mystery of her appearance as the Mother of the Stars, who brings them forth that they may shine in the heavens. For the initiates in occultism knew that the instrument of the brain is really and truly a product of the Star-strewn Night.

Similarly, we will often find that the people who were Sun worshippers were not only guided to look to the Sun; but as man was led from the Stars to the Mother Night and many old-time words for the ancient Gods are to be interpreted as meaning Night, so in the case of the Sun man's attention was drawn to the fact that the Sun gave rise to the Day, that the Sun made Day. In consequence, many words used for Sun worship among peoples who specifically worshipped the Sun as the highest divine Power, are to be translated with the word “Day.”

Speaking generally, we can say that where peoples felt themselves strong and courageous and ready for war, we find them to be in the main Sun worshippers or Day worshippers, because their initiates directed them to the Sun, to the Day, for their object of worship. The more thoughtful and enquiring peoples on the other hand are Night or Star worshippers, because they have been guided that way by their initiates.

We come, finally, to still another kind of people. For there are peoples who do not experience in so characteristic a manner the sharp division between Day consciousness and Night consciousness. When we go back into olden times, we find many peoples who had preserved middle or in-between conditions of consciousness, who did not merely alternate in their life between Day and Night, between consciousness and unconsciousness, but who had an old clairvoyant consciousness which came about through the merging of Day with Night consciousness into a kind of semi-consciousness. We find therefore this third condition of consciousness.

These people also divined through their condition of consciousness a connection between man and something outside the Earth. How was it they came to have such a feeling? To answer this question we must realise that they were possessed of a peculiar faculty or quality in the very form of their bodily nature. They were, as we have said, endowed,—as in olden times almost all men were endowed, the world over—with an ancient clairvoyance, and they had the peculiar faculty of being able to perceive in certain conditions of consciousness their “symmetry” man,—not, however, as symmetry man, but they could perceive this middle man in its working upon the upper man.

If you want to form a picture of what took place in such a person, then you must imagine a picture of the middle man in the brain. In ordinary normal life on Earth, the sense impressions from without work upon the brain and the brain throws back pictures; it places, that is, its own being in the way and holds up the pictures that come from outside. Our idea of the world comes about in this way as a reflected picture thrown back by the brain. For that is what all ideas of the outside world really are,—pictures thrown back, reflected by the brain. When you look at the world, then the outer impressions pass through the eye up to a certain place in the brain and are there caught. That an idea can come into being is due to the fact that the impressions are caught up at a certain point, not allowed to pass through—not, at all events, in their entirety—but reflected back. And when a man becomes clairvoyant, it is no longer external objects alone that make impressions on the brain, impressions are made from the middle man, which can then be reflected back by the brain.

What I have just now described—the impressions made by the middle man upon the brain and the reflection by the latter of these impressions—is still very far from the process I described as taking place in the true aspirant after occultism. The latter has direct and immediate perception of his middle man, he does not merely perceive it through the brain. He looks into himself and sees there what belongs to the Sun, sees too in his brain what belongs to the Stars. The clairvoyant state, on the other hand, of which we are now speaking, where the processes inside man, the Sun nature in the middle man, are reflected by the brain—even as the outer impressions that come through the senses are reflected by the brain,—is characteristic of the old clairvoyance of men in ancient time. For them, perception took place by way of the middle man. They did not, to begin with, perceive external things at all. They perceived only the Sun-like that was present in themselves and they perceived it in reflection, for it was held up by the brain and they perceived it as an idea of the Sun nature within them.

There have been peoples of this character, who in certain naturally clairvoyant states caught hold, as it were, with their brain of the Sun nature within them and made of the perception an idea. How did it then appear to them? It was projected outwards, but was not perceived like the ideas to which we are accustomed, and which have their source in the world outside; it appeared like inner Sunlight,—yet as coming from without. And when investigation was made into the source of the appearance, when the aspirants after occultism set out to learn how it was that they found themselves in such conditions, then they were made clearly aware of the Sun nature that is in the middle man. Man has this Sun-like element in him, because he is himself a Sun being. That which manifests in the instrument of the brain is connected with the fact that man is a Star being, that he is in very truth formed and shaped from out of the whole of Cosmic space. What he now perceives, however, has relation to the fact that the Earth has revolving around it the Moon, and that the Moon in her revolution round the Earth has a powerful influence on the being of man.

In those olden times man was so constituted that the Moon had a particularly strong influence on his brain. The consequence was that the ancient clairvoyance was very dependent on the phases of the Moon, and showed itself for the most part in connections that found expression in the phases of the Moon. For a space of fourteen days clairvoyance increased, and then for fourteen days it decreased again. Its influence was thus greatest in the middle of such a Moon period. There were times when men knew: We are Sun beings. They knew it because they could perceive the Sun through the inner idea formed in the brain. But this came about through the influence of the Moon. The old clairvoyance often worked in the way I indicated. Man gave himself up throughout the whole twenty-eight days to the waxing and waning of the Moon. There were days when the influence of the Moon was particularly strong and when in consequence clairvoyance was present in everyone; inner clairvoyant consciousness made itself felt in all men. When initiates in occultism came to people of this kind with the mission of determining for them the character of their religion, then for the same reason that other peoples were made Sun (or Day) worshippers and Star (or Night) worshippers, the initiates made this third kind of people Moon worshippers. Hence the worship of the Moon, that is to be found among many ancient peoples.

Moses learned to know this Moon worship in its original form from the Egyptian initiates, and was himself one of the greatest of those who made Moon worship into the religion of a people. For Moses made it the religion of the ancient Hebrew people. The Jahve worship of the ancient Hebrew people is a highly spiritualised Moon worship. And it enabled the Hebrew people to retain into later times the consciousness that man is connected with what is outside and beyond the Earth, that his being is not confined to the Earth.

Now it was so with the Moon worshippers of very olden times, as it was also with the Sun and Star worshippers, that there was very little knowledge among the people themselves of how Stars, Sun and Moon appeared to the clairvoyant—spiritualised, that is, and not at all as objects that are seen with external organs. The people of olden times would not have understood if they had been told: “Pray to what is the source and origin of your middle man, but do not imagine it like the picture of the Sun that can be perceived with the senses; think of it as something super-sensible that is behind the Sun.” Just as little would the Star worshippers have understood if they had been told that the organ of their thinking had its origin in the far Cosmic spaces, but that they were not to imagine that this meant, in the picture of the starry heavens as it can be perceived with the outer eye, they were to think rather of the invisible that is behind the starry heavens, the multitude of spiritual Beings that are in the Stars. This was known to the initiates, but it could not be said to the Sun and Star worshippers. Similarly it would have been of no use at all to say to the Moon peoples: “Imagine to yourselves an invisible Being who has as it were his outer body in the Moon.” It was, however, possible to say something else, and this is what Moses did say to the Hebrew people. It could not have been said to the more ancient Moon worshippers but only to the ancient Hebrew people. For Moses did not direct his people to the visible Moon, but to the Being in whom lay the origin of the ancient clairvoyance of all peoples. This clairvoyance had been given to man,—as a kind of compensation, when he was placed into the condition of having to alternate with his consciousness between day and night; and it brought him a knowledge of the world, that resembled what comes to expression in the reflected rays of the Sun. The reflection of the Sun could only be something external for man, could only give him an Earth consciousness—a day consciousness, and a night consciousness that at most was aware only of the external visible world of stars—and so a clairvoyance was given to the man of ancient times as a compensation; it was given him through the possibility of alternation in this day and night consciousness,—an old clairvoyance that is derived from the spiritual Being of the Moon and has also relation, locally, with the Moon.

When in the course of evolution the time came for this clairvoyant consciousness gradually to grow dim and fade away, a more spiritual substitute was created for the ancient Hebrew folk in the invisible Moon Being Jahve or Jehovah of whom Moses taught, and who, he said, must never be confused with anything that can be seen outwardly nor with any picture that is made of Him for outward vision. Therefore did Moses categorically forbid the Hebrew people to regard any picture in the outside world as a picture of Jahve; he forbade them any picture or image whatsoever that might represent something which is not a product of the outside world, forbade them also to make any picture taken from the outside world, of the invisible, super-sensible God.

The Jahve religion is thus seen to stand in a remarkable relation to a Moon religion that was given by the old clairvoyance in the very earliest days of mankind. For the sake of those to whom it is of interest, we may here mention that it was H. P. Blavatsky who, on absolutely authentic grounds, pointed out that the Jahve religion was in a certain respect a kind of revival of the old Moon religion. H. P. Blavatsky, however, did not come so far in her research as we are able to do today, consequently the connection that has here been set forth was not fully clear to her. The knowledge that the Jahve religion is a Moon religion rather suggested to H. P. Blavatsky that this old Jahve religion was a little less worthy on that account. This is, however, not the case at all. When one knows that the Jahve religion of the ancient Hebrew people has its origin in the old clairvoyance and preserves, so to speak, the memory of the old clairvoyance, then one is able to perceive and appreciate the sacredness and depth of this Jahve religion.

Our study has brought us to an understanding of certain important experiences of the aspirants after occultism, who in a higher consciousness are able to learn by real experience that man belongs in his being to the entire world, perceiving how the middle man is in reality a Sun man, and the upper man a Star man. And we have also seen what occultism is able to recognise in the external religions, namely, that they were in great measure given to mankind as very ancient religions and even as ancient theosophies. For when the man of olden times developed a need for worship and prayer, in that moment something of the old clairvoyance began to stir within him, so that he had no need merely to believe what the old initiates told him but was able to comprehend it even though he could not actually see it. The ancient religions are thus to a great extent theosophies. And the theosophical teachings that were given by the occultists were determined according to the section of the earth which that particular people was destined to inhabit.

As you will have seen, we have for the moment had to leave out the lower man,—the third seven-membered man. We shall return to it, and we shall find in what a remarkable manner the “Great Mystery” was brought before the pupil, and how the pupil undergoes still further development by means of the initiation which alone can lead to an understanding of the true nature of man.

• 1. It was at first intended to erect a Building for Anthroposophy in Munich. The project had, however, to be abandoned in 1914. (Note by Translator.)

My dear Friends,

The attainment of occult knowledge—it is necessary we should remind ourselves of the fact now and again—is no child's play; and if anyone approaches it with the idea that it will offer him theories to which he can either remain indifferent or, if they are not so remote as all that, still theories that require no more than the intellect to grasp them, he will find he is very much mistaken.

We have been considering the human form—to all appearances something quite external. And yet I have told you that it is this human form, as we have described it in its three members, which the student in occultism must take for his starting-point. He must—in most cases—begin with the feelings and impressions that come to him from a study of the human form, because in so doing he takes his start from something that is as independent as possible of the inner life.

There is as a matter of fact another possibility, and it is sometimes even desirable, not only for the theosophist, but also for the occultist,—namely, to start from the inner life of soul. We are, however, then brought face to face with an almost insurmountable obstacle. As you know, we have in our inner man not only what was already present there when Earth evolution began, but throughout our incarnations upon Earth spiritual beings and forces have contributed all the time to its upbuilding and development. Ever since primeval times, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces have had their part in all the work that has been done upon our inner man. If you take this into consideration—and you must do so, for it is true—then you will see that were we to take our start from the inner man, there would be some uncertainty as to whether we should get free of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, or whether we should not rather remain entangled in their influences and these then find their way into our occult vision. Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces can easily penetrate into the soul without man's being aware of it. Many things that go to make up the content of our life of soul,—we may think them to be exceedingly good, and yet they may not be so at all, so mixed up are they with the influences exerted upon us by Lucifer and Ahriman.

The surest and safest way for the pupil is therefore to take his start from the human form or figure. Upon the human form Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces have had least influence. Please note, I say “least” influence. They have had influence on the human form, but there least of all; a far greater influence has been exerted on the inner life of soul. The human form always remains, therefore, the most healthy starting-point if the pupil will hold firmly to the ancient occult saying that man in respect of his form is an image of the Godhead. The pupil does well to follow this course; for he links himself on to the Divine, choosing for his point of departure the picture or image of the Godhead,—and that is good and important.

Nevertheless this path has its difficulties. If you start from inner soul experiences and by means of occult development succeed in looking out from these inner soul experiences into the spiritual world, then the impressions of the spiritual world last for a comparatively long time. The consequence is that when by means of inner soul experiences alone someone succeeds in crossing the Threshold and entering the spiritual world, then he experiences spiritual vision and can as it were take time to look at the things before him; they do not pass quickly, they continue for a considerable length of time. Herein lies, we might say, the advantage, the convenience of starting from inner soul experiences. It has, however, the drawback already indicated, that one is quite unprotected and cannot recognise or estimate rightly Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. It is, in fact, true to say that at no time are people less aware of Lucifer and the devil than when they set out on the occult path from the inner life of soul. The other starting-point has the drawback that the vision to which we attain, the Imaginations that present themselves, last only a very little while, they do not stay; so that we require to develop a certain presence of mind, if we want to catch them.

Let me now give you a picture of what happens when a pupil in occultism, taking his start from the human form, penetrates into the super-sensible world. I do not know whether any of you will have observed in himself a remarkable experience that happens every day but has to be quite consciously observed if one wants to gain knowledge from it. I mean the experience that when you have directed your gaze upon a bright object, the impression remains in the eye long after the eye has ceased to gaze upon the object. Goethe made a very special study, as he tells us repeatedly in his Theory of Colours, of these after-images that remain behind in the organism,—that is, inside the human form. When, for example, you lie down in bed and put out the light and shut your eyes, then you can have before you for a long time a picture or image of the light—as it were, echoing on. As a rule, the impression from without is exhausted when we have had this “echoing” experience. The vibration, the movement caused by the external impression has finished, and for most persons that is the end of the matter. This is, however, where the pupil must take his start, proceeding, as we said, from the human form,—that is to say, from what we know the human form to be on the physical plane in ordinary life. So long as he continues to observe only the after-images, nothing of any importance will happen. The interest begins when something is still left after the image of the object has disappeared. For what then remains does not come from the eye at all, it is a process, an experience that is given us by the ether body. Anyone who has himself carried out this experiment will not bring forward the otherwise perfectly reasonable suggestion that what we have here can still only be an after-image of the physical body. People say this who have not had the experience. Once they have had the experience, they say it no more. For what remains afterwards is something totally different from anything that has relation to an external impression.

Generally speaking, what remains, for example, after an impression of colour or of light is by no means an appearance of colour or light. Indeed, we can say that if it is colour or light, then it is illusion! It is a tone, of which one is quite certain that it has not been heard with the ear, that the ear has had no part in its reaching us. What remains can also be some other impression, but it is always different from the external impression. The occultist has to learn completely to overcome external impressions, for occultism is there for the blind, for example, who have never in their life seen an external object, never once had any external impression of light by means of the eye. Most of the ghostlike figures that people see are merely memory pictures of sense impressions that have been changed by the play of fancy. Occult experience is not dependent on whether a person can use some particular sense organ or not, it occurs quite independently of the sense organs.

Having now made himself an accurate picture of the complete human figure, the pupil must hold it firmly before him. It must live before him as an Imagination. With which of the senses or in what manner he fixes the human form is of no account. What is important is that in some way or other he fixes this human form—that is to say, through the human form a picture, an Imagination, is evoked in him, a living picture. The pupil may now take for his starting-point the external picture of the human form. It is, however, also possible for him to start from the inner feeling of the body, the feeling he has of being within the form.

When the occultist succeeds in experiencing in this way something like an after-image in respect of the human form—when, that is to say, having first comprehended this human form as he finds it in the physical world, he allows it then to “echo on” in him in the way that an after-image echoes on—when he is able to have this experience and afterwards to wait until the image of the human form is past and gone, he will obtain a picture of the human form which is no longer an image of the physical form but is experienced in the ether body.

You see, for the pupil in occultism it is a question of experiencing himself in the ether body. And when the pupil has come to the point of experiencing himself in this way in the ether body, then this experience is indeed a profound one! It falls at once into two distinct experiences. It does not remain whole and single. And these two experiences have to be expressed by two words. We have to say that the pupil experiences first, death and second, Lucifer.

Since the experiences of which we are now speaking are not of the senses, but are in their very essence and nature higher experiences, it is naturally not altogether easy to describe them. Words are for the most part taken from the world of the senses and they remind us always, in their application, of the world of the senses. But these are experiences that we feel to be inward rather than outward; and if we make use of words to describe them, it is rather for the purpose of evoking some conception, some picture only of what is in very truth experienced.

The experience of death is somewhat as follows. The pupil knows that the human form, which he has first perceived and then taken as his starting-point, has no continuance outside Earth existence. It is bound up with Earth existence. Whoever wants to go beyond Earth existence, whoever wants to reckon at all with a super-sensible life, must realise that this human figure can be experienced as such only on Earth; it must go to pieces—it does so before his eyes—the moment he passes beyond Earth existence, and show itself as death. In the ether body the human form can show itself in no other way than as given over to death.

This, then, must be the first impression, and here the pupil may easily founder; for the impression made by the shattered and destroyed human form is one that sinks very deeply into the soul. It is a fact that many who have aspired to be occultists have not been able to surmount this first impression and have said to themselves: “Fear of what may be still to come stops me from going any further.” It is necessary for the pupil to behold death, for the simple reason that only so can he know in all certainty that in the Earth body it is impossible to experience the higher world; one must come right out of the body, one must leave it.

That is actually the next impression the pupil receives. I do not mean to imply that the higher world can never be experienced while in the Earth body. But the pupil in occultism must inevitably come at this point to the experience and knowledge that I have described. It may be expressed in the words: He experiences Lucifer.

Lucifer is there before him, and directs his attention to a fact which carries with it for the pupil a very great temptation, If we had to put into words what is experienced in making the acquaintance of Lucifer, we might express it in the following way. Lucifer makes the pupil attentive to the frailty and destructibility of the human form He says: “Look at this human form. See how destructible it is; a destructible form have the Gods given you—the Gods who are my enemies.” That is what Lucifer tells him, and he points out to him that the Higher Gods were placed under the necessity of making man destructible in his form; he shows the pupil that They could not do otherwise, owing to certain conditions of which we shall speak later. And then he shows him what he, Lucifer, wanted to make of man, what man would have become if he had been given the handling of him,—alone, unhindered by his opponents.

There is something extraordinarily seductive in the picture Lucifer gives of what man would have become if he, Lucifer, alone had had the making of him. For Lucifer says, “Look around you and see what remains of you when your human form has gone to pieces.” When the human form has been destroyed, when man turns round, as it were, and sees himself flayed—spiritually speaking—, when his form has been taken from him, then he beholds two things. In the first place, he sees that what remains is in fact conformable to the super-sensible world, is in a certain respect immortal, whilst the body is mortal. This fact puts a powerful argument in the hands of Lucifer, wherewith he may tempt man. Man's attention has first been directed to the image of God which he has, which, however, is destructible and bound to the Earth. Then Lucifer directs him to something else in him that is immortal, not subject to death. Therein lies the temptation. But when man comes to consider and observe that which is immortal in him, when he contemplates that which shakes off the external form after it has broken up into the three parts of which we have discovered it to be composed, then man sees himself and sees at what cost Lucifer has made him immortal. For man, when he looks back upon himself, discovers he is no longer man. Threefold man, as we have described him, has always been expressed in occult symbolism in certain pictures. These pictures, these Imaginations, have throughout the ages had something to say to man. Very few, however, have understood their wonderful significance. The upper man, as man sees him when he turns back to look upon himself, is different in different people. The picture that presents itself here is also more or less transient. It gives nevertheless an approximate idea of the impression man experiences. There is no longer a human countenance; the countenance is suggestive of a bull, or else of a lion. Experiences in the super-sensible world have often a quite grotesque appearance; and it transpires that, although not always, yet generally speaking, a woman who looks back in this way perceives herself more like a lion, a man more like a bull. There is no getting away from it, it is really so! And connected with these two pictures—which are intermingled, for the man is not entirely devoid of lion, nor the woman entirely devoid of bull, the two merge into one another—blended in at the same time with these is the picture of a bird, which has always been called the eagle and which belongs in the whole picture.

Nor has the worst yet been told! Many a man might be ready to make up his mind to be a bull, a lion or an eagle as a price for immortality. That is, however, only the upper man. The continuation down below is a wild, savage dragon. Here you have the source of all the numerous sagas and stories of the dragon. Traditional religious symbolism has always given man the four pictures,—Man, Lion, Bull, Eagle; but it has given no more than indications, as, e.g., in the account of the Fall, that a wild Dragon also belongs to man. The dragon, however, has its place in the totality of man, it is to be found there; and man has to say to himself: Lucifer is indeed able to promise you immortality—it is a sure and well-founded promise—but only at the cost of your form and figure, so that you go on living in the form you have become under the influence of Lucifer. And now we can see how it has come about that we have received such an inner form; it is because of the influence of Lucifer in Earth evolution. We perceive also that this Earth evolution has under the influence of Lucifer given to man super-sensible gifts one after another. Wisdom and everything connected with wisdom comes to man by many and manifold paths from Lucifer. Lucifer can show man, when he meets him, how much man really owes to him. But what I described just now has also to be reckoned among the things man owes to Lucifer.

The question is bound to arise: “Is there then no ray of comfort in this self-knowledge?” For, when all is said, it is not exactly comforting if this new insight only leads to a description of how man is degraded to the rank of an animal. The animal is, moreover, tripartite and does not belong to the “higher” animals; rather is man debased to the animal stage that exists on the Earth in the picture of an amphibian. No, such a conception can hardly be called comforting!

This is the experience which I described to you before as being so extraordinarily fleeting and transient. One needs great presence of mind to grasp the impression at all, to get a view of it, as it were. It goes past one so swiftly. That is the disadvantage of starting from the human form. People do not as a rule have sufficient presence of mind to grasp death and Lucifer and then turn round, spiritually, and survey themselves. Nothing we see brings any comfort, for ultimately we have only two courses to choose from. We can hold to what is mortal and destructible in us and comes from the Gods, the opponents of Lucifer; or we can choose immortality and along with it the degradation of the human form.

The presence of all these things, the impression made by them, is in the first moment terrible and paralysing. For this reason a great part of the task of the occult teacher consists in warning people not to pay too much heed to such impressions, or indeed to any first super-sensible impressions, because these impressions, whether they are of a kind to occasion joy or pain, can never be trusted as guides. The right course is to wait patiently, very patiently. It may well be that when one has carried out the experiment described, a feeling of absolute hopelessness comes over one; to persevere then in calling forth the impression again and again requires courage. But this is what we must do if we would make practical progress in occultism, and a time will come when we find, as it were, ground for our feet.

What the present moment affords—on that can man most assuredly not rely. Everything he achieves in life is seen now to be destructible, impermanent. Lucifer promises something eternal. But not to that either can man hold. A moment comes, however, when there is one thing of which he can take firm hold; it is not anything of the present, but a memory that can remain with him from ordinary life on Earth. This memory must stay with him like a thought out of Earth life, and intermingle in the meeting with death and Lucifer It streams over from Earth life, and is suddenly there, this memory, this thought, which alone can give man support and stay. But it is singularly feeble, and great energy is required to hold it. This one and only thing in life which man can recall as something sure and certain is the thought of Self, of “ I.” It is the thought: Over there I have been a Self. There is, as we said, extreme difficulty in holding this thought. Many of you will know how difficult it is to bring over a dream from the other state of consciousness into the present moment. And it can happen all too easily that when man has entered the super-sensible world, this “ I” thought is like a dream that he has had in the Earth world and does not remember. Like a forgotten dream is this “ I ” thought, when he has come into the other consciousness; and the difficulty of holding it has even increased for man in the course of evolution. In ancient times, in times that lie far back in the remote past, it was comparatively easy to carry over the “ I ” picture from here on Earth to the Beyond, but in the course of the evolution of mankind it has become more and more difficult.

When I say, “The thought of the I comes,” you must think of it in the following way. For the present-day pupil in occultism, the thought often does indeed come. It does not merely remain with man as a dream picture,—no, it can flash up in him beyond as a sudden memory. For this to happen, however, help is needed. It can happen, but not without help,—an important point. When the pupil enters the super-sensible world, then under present day conditions of evolution the I would almost certainly remain behind like a forgotten dream, if help were not forthcoming.

If I am to give a name to the help that the pupil in occultism needs today in order that he may not forget the thought of the I when he ascends into the super-sensible world, there is but one expression I can use, and that is being together with the Christ Impulse on Earth. That is what helps! In present-day conditions of Earth evolution everything depends at this point on what sort of a relation man has had with the Christ Impulse during his life on Earth, and in what measure he has let It become alive in him. On this depends whether the thought of the I is lost in forgetfulness when man ascends into the super-sensible world, or whether it remains with him as the one and only sure support that he can take over with him from Earth into the super-sensible world.

The Christian of today has many remarkable and beautiful things to say about the Christ Impulse. But one who consciously in the Christian sense enters the higher worlds knows still more of the Christ Impulse. And this more that he knows is exceedingly important and significant. He knows that the Christ Impulse is the one and only thing that can come to our help when we are in danger of forgetting the I of Earth evolution. How is it that in addition to all that the Christ Impulse has already been able to be for man on Earth, in addition to the untold blessings that man has received and is still receiving from It, for his comfort, for his goodness of heart and mind, for his education and culture, there is also this,—that the Christ Impulse in the measure in which It works in man, can bring it about that the I of Earth does not need to be forgotten? Where can we look for the explanation of this?

If I am to give you an answer to this question, I must draw your attention to facts which, although you may not know them from occultism, you can yet acquaint yourselves with by an intelligent study of the Gospels. For there are two ways of coming to a knowledge of the reasons why the Christ Impulse can give this help. The first is the path of occultism,—an occultism such as rightly belongs to the stage of evolution reached by man in our times. And the second is the path of a thoroughly intelligent and deep study of the Gospels. The Gospels have one remarkable and unique feature, as compared with other religious records. People do not always notice it, but it is there, none the less. Take all that you can find in the external history of religions, take the whole content of the religions founded even in Post-Christian times, and compare with this what you read in the Christian records, the Gospels. If you look into the history of the founder of any religion and take pains to understand him, you will find you can only do so by learning to know and understand the super-sensible inspirations or intuitions which he received. Enquire of the Pre-Christian founders of religion whence came their wisdom and you will be told,—in the case of Buddha, for example, how he acquired under the Bodhi tree that great and high enlightenment which enabled him to proclaim what he called the “holy doctrine.” You are directed, that is to say, if you want to know the ground and source of Buddha's teaching, to a super-sensible enlightenment.

Nor is it any different in Post-Christian times. Take Mohammed. You must look to the visions, the revelations Mohammed received from super-sensible worlds, in order to explain why this or that was spoken in such and such a way. It is the same with all founders of religions; and not only with founders of religions, but with all who have given authentic revelations. We are directed to their divine inspiration, to the super-sensible that shone into them. We have quite exact knowledge of this in the case of Pythagoras. And in Plato's writings we can find everywhere indications that while he did not give all he knew, for what he did communicate he received inspiration through the Mysteries,—that is to say, he underwent evolution into higher worlds. Even in the case of Socrates we read of a “Daimon,” and indeed it would be absurd to leave out the Daimon in speaking of Socrates. What Socrates developed for man on the foundation of pure intelligence, he received through his Daimon. Look where you will, everywhere you will find the same.

Now let me ask; you to turn from these examples to the Gospels. Go through them carefully and you will find but one single occasion in the whole three years of His sojourn on Earth when, in the sense of initiation-experience, Christ Jesus looked into, or had to look into, the super-sensible world. The only time that you will find anything of this kind is in the scene of the Temptation, and even there you are not told that Christ had to learn to hold fast to a super-sensible good God, but only that He had a meeting with that which was for Him the “evil,”—with Satan, with Lucifer.

We are told that this Temptation was for Him from its very beginning no temptation. Read the passages through for yourselves and you will see how unique is the picture given us in the Gospels. Christ passed through what the initiators have always had to pass through, but from the beginning He holds steadfastly to His God, withstands the attacks and utters the word: “Get thee hence, Satan! For it is written, Thou shalt worship God, thy Lord, and Him only shalt thou serve.” Lucifer cannot tempt Him any further and leaves Him. In all the other scenes and events that follow the Temptation, in everything else the Gospels have to tell, we can discover nothing at all to be compared with the accounts that have to be given of the life of initiates, where we read a description of how and in what manner they learned in the course of their life to penetrate into the spiritual worlds.

We can speak of the Christ, right from the very beginning, as of an “initiate”—that is, one who has direct and immediate connection with the super-sensible world. I have done this in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact and continually in lectures. But one cannot in the case of the Christ speak of His “initiation,” one cannot speak in His case of progress through initiations. We can say that He is an “initiated” one, but we can say nothing at all about how He became “initiated.” That is a profound distinction.

Compare all that is told of the life of the “initiated” with the account you have in the Gospels. Perhaps you will observe—I have shown it in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact—that the writers of the Gospels needed only to take the ancient ritual in accordance with which initiation was carried out, in order to describe the life of Christ. In relating the ritual they were relating the events of the life of Christ Jesus. But they could never say that He actually underwent what they were describing. Take such a scene—pregnant with deep meaning—as the Transfiguration, or the Prayer on the Mount of Olives. These are events which if you had set out to relate them of some other initiated person you would have had to describe in quite a different way. You could not merely say that he went up to the Mount of Olives and that there drops of sweat fell from him like blood; in the case of another initiated person you would have to tell what he experienced there, how he was changed on the Mount of Olives. Christ was not changed. The meeting with His God on the Mount of Olives was not of such a character that we can feel He has anything to learn there. Similarly, what He passed through at the Transfiguration was not for Himself an enlightenment. For the others, for His companions, it was an enlightenment, but not for Him. For Him it was perfectly natural and comprehensible; He could not learn anything new from it.

What on the other hand should we expect to be told concerning any other initiated person? We must be shown how he advanced step by step on the path of knowledge. In the case of higher initiates we may expect to be told of how they brought a great deal with them from earlier incarnations and perhaps only needed still to pass through the very last stage. We find nothing of all this with the Christ. We have the story of the Temptation, and that is all. What we find in the Christ is that He was permeated through and through in the very highest degree with Divine Self-consciousness. This marks the opening scene of the three-year life of Christ. And then we have before us this wonderful picture,—the picture of highly exalted divine revelations proceeding directly and immediately from One who is Earth Man. In the case of any other initiated person we have to tell how he first attained to this or that stage of initiation and was then able to make this or that revelation. With Christ Jesus on the other hand it all wells up freely in Him from the very beginning, and we are not told that in the course of the three years of His life this or that stage of initiation was passed. If anyone were to treat the description of the Death and Resurrection of Christ Jesus as though they were such stages, it would only demonstrate his failure to perceive the fact that the Resurrection took place by virtue of the power that was already there in the living Christ. The Resurrection is not an act of initiation. Christ Jesus was not awakened to life by some other initiate but by the Divine Power that comes from beyond the Earth, the Power that was communicated to Him through the Baptism. The Resurrection was given at the time of the Baptism, it was already there in that moment; whereas the act which in the case of other initiated persons is called “Resurrection” has to be brought about by the deeds and instructions of an elder initiate.

This is the reason why I had to describe the Christ Event as I did in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact,—which was written more than ten years ago and appeared shortly after. We have to see it somewhat in the following way Christ lived His life on Earth. In this life many events and processes took place. How do we describe these events and processes? We describe them best by relating what an initiated one of olden time had to pass through. What the initiated in olden time passed through in his Mystery School, that unfolded itself in the case of Christ as historical fact. Therefore, the Evangelists could use the ancient books of initiation, not in order to describe an initiation of Christ but to write a biography of Him. That is the gist of the argument in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact.

It is evidence of the very deepest misunderstanding of the life of Christ if we speak of Him not as one already initiated but as one who had during Earth evolution to undergo initiation. Anyone who wants to explain the life of Christ as an initiation is making a very great mistake in regard to the Spirit of Christianity. He would understand Christianity as though its Founder were not already an Initiated One, but had first to be initiated, as though in describing the life of Christ one were describing processes of His initiation.

It is accordingly necessary, in speaking of the life of Christ, to make it perfectly clear that the expressions which are used cannot be applied in the same sense as they are applied to the ancient—or any other—initiation, but that they are used in an absolutely physical earthly sense, that they refer to a history, to an event in history that lies outside initiation.

The importance of this cannot be over-emphasised. No graver mistake could be made than to overlook what has just been explained and speak of an “initiation of Christ,”—not in the sense that it is spoken of in my lectures “At the Gates of Theosophy” or in those on “The St. John Gospel,” but clothing the life of Christ in the garb of an account of an initiation. In doing so, one would from the very outset be placing oneself in contradiction to every reasonable interpretation of the Gospels. It would be impossible to find the way to the heart and kernel of these, or to understand what occultism has to say concerning Christ Jesus. Let us never forget that when we speak of other founders of religion, we have to speak of them as men who have become initiated and we are justified and right in understanding their life as comprising within it an initiation, but that the life of Christ has to be described differently. Although this life of Christ, as it takes its course on Earth, had indeed to make divine revelations, we are not to conceive of any process of initiation shining as it were into this life of Christ and enlightening it. No, Christ was Himself an initiator. Read in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact the passage concerning the true meaning of the miracle of the Raising of Lazarus. You will find it was an initiation that Christ then performed. He Himself was able to initiate; but we can by no means say that Christ was initiated on Earth in the same sense as we have to say Lazarus was initiated by Christ.

In the place of initiation we have the Baptism by John in Jordan. If, however, the Baptism had been the corresponding act of initiation, it would have been described differently. We would have been told how Christ stood there as one awaiting initiation while a far more exalted initiator performed the act of initiation. The other, however, who stands at His side as the instrument for the act is no higher initiator, but is John the Baptist who cannot, in accordance with the facts, be placed higher than Christ Jesus Himself.

It has frequently happened that men have made this mistake. But for a right relation to Christianity, for a true understanding of Christianity, such a mistake is always fatal. We must, therefore, beware of speaking as though Christ had passed through various stages—Birth, Childhood, or again, Baptism or Transfiguration or Resurrection—in the sense in which some initiated person may be said to pass through such stages. The moment we apply to the Christ in the same manner the expressions: Birth, Baptism, Transfiguration, Ascension, we show a complete misunderstanding of Christianity.

All this needs to be clearly understood if we would answer the question: How has it come about that the Christ Impulse is what enables man to carry the memory of his I from ordinary life on Earth into the life of the super-sensible worlds?

Let me ask you to call up a picture before you of what I have tried to show you today, how man meets with death and with Lucifer and how the pupil in occultism comes into a hopeless and desolate situation from which he can only be released if he is able to retain a memory of the thought of the I. And remember then what I said further that the greatest help for the retention of the I thought consists, for a man of the present day, in having placed himself during life on Earth in a relation to the Christ Impulse. Recall too, how in order to establish this fact I set out to explain wherein the life of Christ is different from the life of any other initiated person. Christ comes before us from the outset as One of Whom we are certainly told that He performed deeds on Earth, but of Whom we are not told that He was influenced by a Daimon—like Socrates, or that He sat under a Bodhi tree—like Buddha, or that He had visions—like Mohammed. To imagine any of these would make it impossible to understand the Christ. How the Christ Impulse becomes the means for the pupil to let the I thought live on over into the spiritual world, so that he does not instead have only thoughts that have died, and how the super-sensible world then appears to him,—of this we will speak tomorrow.

My dear Friends,

We spoke yesterday of how the pupil in occultism meets with Lucifer and with death, and we pointed out that if the situation is to be rightly experienced, the pupil must still have left to him from ordinary life on Earth the memory of the I or of the thought of the I. We saw also that the man of the present day finds help at this point if within the Earth world he has been able to receive the Christ Impulse. And we went on to show how the Being we call the Christ Being is to be distinguished from other founders of religion in that we cannot speak of Him as of a person who underwent initiation on Earth, but that the Christ Being brought with Him all the forces with which He worked during the three years of His sojourn on Earth. This means that when the Christ Being became man, He was already in a position to make that great sacrifice—for it was for the Christ Being a great sacrifice—whereby He made use in a human body of specifically human forces alone. He manifested and expressed His connection with the divine entirely through human forces.

It is this feature of the life of Christ that marks it as absolutely without parallel. If you want to understand with the ordinary powers of the human soul—I do not say, to believe in, but to understand—the founder of any other religion, you will find it necessary first of all to learn about the stages of his initiation, for you will want to raise yourself to an understanding of the particular enlightenment that streamed forth from a higher world into this human personality. This is what you will have to do, for example, in the case of Buddha. You must study his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, and learn to have some understanding of how such a thing can come about that in a man's 29th year an inspiration enters into his life,—as it did into Buddha under the Bodhi tree. When you have made the effort to achieve this understanding, then, if you think it over, you will be able also to recognise something else that follows from it,—strange though it may at first appear. You will come to see that not only the great founders of religion are to be understood by becoming acquainted with the methods and stages of initiation, but also even the Evangelists and St. Paul.

If you want to understand the Evangelists, who wrote their Gospels out of inspiration, then you must first come to see how the great individualities hidden behind the names of Matthew, Mark or John were able to arrive at the things that stand written in the Gospels. With this end in view we have undertaken, as you know, a thoroughgoing study of the Gospels, and it has enabled us to perceive what had in reality long been lost,—namely, that the Evangelists spoke truth.

If, however, we want to understand the Christ, we do not need all this. The Christ can be understood by every single human being, He can be understood with the most ordinary human powers of understanding. It can never be that a man has too little culture or too little education to understand the Christ. And this is because the Christ brought into forces that are purely human and into all their working, what He was; whereas the communications of other founders of religions rest on what they have seen in the higher worlds. It can, therefore, be truly said, provided only the statement be not taken in a trivial spirit, that the Christ founded a religion for the simplest of human beings, a religion that is accessible to every intellect and every understanding.

The relationship of Christ to the higher worlds,—that can of course only be learned through initiation. And there is no need to learn it until one enters upon initiation. I endeavoured yesterday to make clear to you the immense service done by the Christ to the pupil in occultism. Christ gives him the means whereby he can remember his I when he is in the higher worlds. Without the Christ Impulse this cannot be done. Christ thus becomes a helper in the initiations of modern time and will be increasingly so for pupils in occultism. As man advances in wisdom, he will realise how deep is his need of the Christ. Christ is there for the simplest of men; on the other hand He is also there for those who need wisdom and again more wisdom, and yet again still more wisdom. That is the nature of the Christ, and it is connected with all those things of which we were speaking yesterday.

It follows from this that the further man's evolution goes, the more understanding will there be for the Christ. The understanding will grow and spread. There will be an increasing number of people who recognise that while there is complete justification for saying that Christ is there for everyone, even the simplest and humblest, and that everyone can find Him, He is at the same time also there for those who are under the necessity to seek wisdom, those who feel a deep inward obligation to follow after wisdom.

We will now leave this thought for a little and return to the meeting of which we spoke yesterday. First, man meets Lucifer. Lucifer, as we saw, shows us what we have become as we have gone from incarnation to incarnation, and we found yesterday that the form or figure that Lucifer shows us is positively ugly. We learn from Lucifer what we have become through him during Earth evolution It is important that the pupil learns this in the right way and does not remain at the point where Lucifer shows him what he has acquired through the Gods, saying to him: “There is your destructible form! What you have acquired through me is immortality! ”—and then this immortal form shows itself as unsightly! The pupil must not stop there. As one contemplates the path of initiation we have here in mind, the feeling comes over one that Christ can not only help in the way we described yesterday but can also help man to change the form. This requires, however, that man shall resolve to remain true to the Christ Impulse, never to lose it but strive always to understand it more and more. Hence it is that nothing can dissuade the followers of the modern Mysteries from their adherence to the Christ Impulse.

Let us now return to our study of threefold man and remind ourselves how we had to connect the upper man with the heaven of the stars. We went on to show that the figure known to the Old Testament under the name of Jahve or Jehovah gives something to the upper man as a kind of compensation for what man has lost on the Earth, and this gift of Jahve's can be reckoned as belonging to the Moon. Summing up our study of these connections, we may therefore say: The upper man is in a certain sense co-ordinated to the Moon, while the middle man, the breast man, that carries the heart in him, is in a sense co-ordinated, as we saw, to the Sun. We can accordingly form some idea of what occult Schools and Mysteries have always understood by the co-ordination of the middle man, the man that bears the heart in him, to the Sun, and of the man that carries the head, either to the whole starry heavens or to the Moon.

But now Lucifer has also had his influence on man. Even as we carry in our middle man the influence of the Sun, and in our head man the influence of the Moon—as I described it for ancient clairvoyance—so do we carry in us the influence of another star, and we have to think in a corresponding way of the forces that ray out from this other star.

You will readily imagine that the influence must needs be of a different kind from the influence of Sun or Moon. The Moon influences still worked in olden times with such effect that human clairvoyance took its course in a 28-day period. In the course of 28 days man felt himself now in a more, and now again in a less, clairvoyant condition. This was an influence that could be directly perceived. The Sun influences are of course obvious. We shall not need to waste many words over the fact that the whole of the middle man depends on the Sun; what was said in the last lecture should suffice. The influence of the third—which is to be found in the region that appears to us in initiation as the region of Lucifer—works on the other hand in a spiritual manner. Here we can no longer speak of an influence that is easily evident. Many an influence even of the Moon can be disbelieved on this account; nevertheless there are still people who speak of an influence of the moon on the nature of man. As for the Sun's influence, no one will deny that. It goes without saying, however, that influences of other stars are not admitted by the materialist. He must of necessity repudiate them, for they are spiritual and he cannot admit the influence of spiritual forces. None the less it is a fact that just as there is in the upper man the connection with the Moon, and in the middle man the connection with the Sun, so are the influences of Venus connected with the form of man that meets us when we cross the threshold of initiation. Note that we are speaking now of the star which the astronomers of today call “Venus.”

Venus is thus the kingdom of Lucifer. At first we learn through initiation that the lower man, the man we called the third seven-membered man, is that part of the whole nature of man which has been apportioned by the higher Gods to the kingdom of Lucifer. But Lucifer has, by a method of which we shall speak further, acquired mastery over the whole human being,—even as Jahve or Jehovah also took possession of the whole human being.

If you want to have a complete picture of the working of Jahve or Jehovah, then you will have to see it in the following way. Take first the head man, as you have learned to know it from the earlier lectures. Into the head man works the power of Jehovah which corresponds to New Moon, the Moon that is bereft of light, the Moon that does not ray back sunlight on to the Earth. The physical sunlight that is reflected from the Moon—that, on the other hand, is to be thought of as the influence of the Jehovah forces which proceeds from the Moon on to the lower man, the third man. So that, leaving out the breast man in the middle, we find, working upon the lower man, the Jehovah forces that correspond to Full Moon. The middle or breast man receives, as we know, the Sun forces; as we shall see, however, Moon forces work there, too. Jehovah forces have in this way obtained a kind of mastery of the entire human being. They work in alternating periods upon the head man and the lower man, the influence on the head man corresponding to New Moon, and the influence on the lower man to Full Moon.

I do not think anyone will doubt what I have just said, if he sets himself to consider the significance attached in the ancient Hebrew faith, in the ancient Hebrew ritual, to the festival of New Moon. Study the festivals of New Moon and investigate the feelings men had about them in Old Testament times; and you will be ready to meet what has been said with intelligence and understanding. The corresponding influences of the intermediate phases of the Moon—the waxing and the waning Moon—work upon the breast man. And now you must consider in addition that just as the Moon—that is to say, the Spirit of the Moon, Jahve or Jehovah—works upon the entire man in all his three members, so too does the Sun, but especially on the middle man; thence the Sun's influences ray out into the whole human being. We have accordingly two cosmic forces both working actively in the human being in an orderly and regular manner.

Of Lucifer we learn that his kingdom is Venus. The forces which find their physical symbol in the light of Venus shining down upon us as Morning or Evening Star, the physical rays of Venus that are sent out into cosmic space,—are the symbol of the influence of Lucifer upon man Lucifer has not confined himself to working upon the lower man. If he had, he would only have influence when Venus is shining with her full orb of light, as in Full Moon. For you know that Venus has phases like the Moon,—waxing Venus, full Venus and waning Venus. The “quarters” work on the breast man like the “quarters” of the Moon. The Venus that works spiritually, works on the head man. We can, therefore, behold in the working together in the heavens of Sun, Moon and Venus, an expression for what in respect of man are spiritual workings. Please note, an expression for what is in the spirit of man.

As the great Sun Spirit works in relation to the Moon Spirit, in relation, that is, to Jahve or Jehovah, so also Lucifer, who is always active in human nature, works in relation to these two. If we wanted to describe by means of a drawing the law of their co-operation we could not do better than look up at the constellations in the heavens of Sun, Moon and Venus. As is the relationship of these three to one another,—whether they are in opposition, or whether they strengthen or weaken one another, as when one stands in front of another and eclipses it—so is the relation between these three spiritual powers in man. The influence of the Sun can be more particularly developed in man when it is not impaired either by the Moon or by the Venus forces. It may, however, also happen that the Sun forces—the forces that are in the middle man, in the heart—are eclipsed by the Moon, the head forces, and eclipses can occur also by the action of Lucifer, that is, of Venus. As you know. there are times when Venus passes in front of the Sun in cosmic space. Thus the connection of the inner trinity in man—the Sun Spirit, the Moon Spirit and the Venus Spirit or Lucifer—is symbolised in cosmic space and expressed in the constellation of Sun, Moon and Venus.

Seeing that we were able to divide up the whole human form and connect its parts and members with certain fixed stars, certain Signs of the Zodiac, it will not now be difficult for you to understand that a relationship can exist between these three Stars in man—that is, the three great spiritual Powers in man—and the several members of the human form. We have to recognise, for instance, a particularly significant phase of this relationship when the heart in the middle man, or rather when the powers of the heart, the powers of the Sun Spirit in the middle man, exert their utmost influence. In the middle man, you will remember, we saw inscribed the Sign of Leo. We can, therefore, say that when the Sun exerts his forces especially on that member of the human form to which we give symbolically the Sign of Leo, then a remarkable constellation is present in man. Another remarkable constellation is present when the Jehovah forces are especially strongly developed in their spiritual character,—let us say, in the Sign of Aries, which signifies the upright posture, or in the Sign of Taurus which denotes, as you know, the forward direction of the organs for the purpose of producing speech. For these are the parts of the human form which necessarily have an original and peculiarly deep relationship to the Moon forces. When these members of man's form are very highly developed, then it denotes a particularly favourable constellation for the human being.

You will be able now to discern wherein the fundamental principle, the real essence of astrology consists. I have certainly not the intention of going fully into the subject of astrology in these lectures—there would not be time—but I want at this point to call your attention to its true nature. We can put it in a very few words. You see, man, as he stands before us with his threefold seven-membered form, is in connection and harmony with the spiritual Powers corresponding to the cosmic realms. For as the forces of the Sun Spirit that work in man correspond to the Spirit of the Sun, as the forces of the Moon correspond to the head man, and as we have corresponding to the third man the forces that are distributed over the whole human being, similarly is there a correspondence between the several members of the human form and the fixed stars, so that their Signs can be ascribed severally to these various members of man's form. And we have before us—man, complete in his physical form. But now the influence proceeding from the Powers that work from these directions was not active only when the human form first came into being, it has continued so right through time and is active still. And we see the working of this influence in the fact that man's external destiny can be brought into connection with the constellations of the Stars, just as we had to connect with the constellations of the Stars what man has already become. If it was auspicious for man's organisation that his Sun forces co-operated with those members of his form to which we ascribed the Sign of Leo, then it will also be auspicious today for certain qualities and characteristics in him if some important moment of his life, notably the moment of birth, falls when the Sun is in the Sign of Leo,—that is to say, when the Sun covers Leo, so that these two forces mutually strengthen one another or in some way influence one another. For as what man is today stands written in the heavenly spaces in the writing of the constellations of the Stars, so stands written there too what is yet to happen with him. This is the ground of true astrology. You will see at once from what we have been considering that you really only need to know occultism and you have at the same time the root principle of astrology. This will show itself all the more clearly as we now go on to describe the second stage of initiation.

We have seen that in order to attain to the first stage of initiation it is important for the pupil to take his start from the human form, from man as he presents himself to physical sight. For the next stage he has to choose something else as his starting-point,—namely, the inner movement of man. Note carefully the distinction:

First stage: Starting from the human form.
Second stage: Starting best from the inner movement of the human being.

Let us now consider for a little, as before we considered the form or figure of man, the movements that take place within him. We have first of all a movement which, although in later life man scarcely performs it any more has once been carried out by him with all his might, otherwise he would remain a fourfooted creature, obliged to crawl on the ground for the rest of his life. Man has to perform the movement which changes him from a crawling to an upright child. For man is not merely an upright being in his form, he is a being who during his life lifts himself upright. So that the first inner movement man performs—for it is an inner movement—is the movement of lifting himself into the upright position.

The second movement of an inner kind is again one that man must acquire for himself as a child, although this movement he continues to use throughout life. It is the movement of speaking, the movement of the inner life that has to be performed for the “word” to arise. You must realise that a whole sum of inner movements is necessary in order that the word may be brought to expression. There is, however, still another movement, a more hidden one, that has also to be learned in early childhood. We may say, man learns both movements together. As a matter of fact, he learns the “speaking” movement earlier than the other. (You will find a more exact and detailed account of all this in my little book The Education of the Child from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.) We have, then, these two inner movements that man learns and has to perform all his life long. Of the speech movement we are quite conscious. Everyone knows that he makes it. But not everyone knows that when he thinks, a delicate movement is taking place all the time in his brain. To discover this requires a rather fine and subtle power of observation. Do not infer that I am talking materialism when I talk about a “movement.” Movement there is, without a doubt; only, it is effect, not cause. We have therefore here two inner movements, the movements of thinking and of speaking.

If now we go further, we discover as the next important movement the movement of the blood. This is one of the movements which must necessarily take place for man to be man. (The sequence is apparently rather arbitrary, but that need not disturb you.) The fifth movement, which must already be there in order for the blood movement to take place, is the movement of the breath. This is a specific movement with an independent existence of its own,—distinct from the blood movement. As I said, the sequence is somewhat arbitrary. We could, for instance, as was hinted, interchange the second and the third—but that is beside the point; here again we could put the breath before the blood movement, and if we were considering more especially the lungs we would certainly have to do so. If, however, we are looking rather to the origin of the movements, then we must take them in the sequence I have given; because, especially in the case of the male human being, the real centre and origin of the breath movement is in the diaphragm, and that is underneath the heart. When, therefore, our object is to build up a sequence from the point of view of origin, we have no choice but to take the movements in the sequence I have given.

The sixth movement—we are still speaking of movements inside the body that are necessary to life—is one that certain inner organs have to perform; we may summarise it in a general term and call it glandular movement or movement of ducts or canals. The ducts in man's body must be in perpetual activity, perpetual inner movement, for man to be maintained in life. For certain reasons which it would take too long to explain, I prefer to call it simply movement of the glands.

For the seventh movement to come about, it is no longer a question merely of particular ducts or glands moving in order to secrete something the human being requires within himself. The seventh is a movement performed by the whole body as such, and it is carried out when Nature has set all in train for a new human being to be born. What we have here is really a sum-total of all the movements of the body. Whilst in other duct or gland movements we have the movement of a part only of the body, in the case of the movement of reproduction we have a kind of act of secretion performed by the whole human being. And the same is true whether we are speaking of male or female body. It is always a secretion performed by the whole human being. This movement then we call the movement of reproduction.

If the seven movements we have described are correctly understood, then with them are exhausted the inner movements of man. The others are outer movements. When man moves his feet or his hands, that is an external movement. The inner movements man brought with him when he came to Earth, though Earth has, it is true, changed them very much. And just as we had to refer the whole complete form of man to the fixed stars of the Zodiac, and connect the Signs of the Zodiac with the several members of the human form, so now we find that these several movements have their source in the entire planetary system. From our planetary system we have to derive these seven members of what we may call the man of inner movement. And since the relationship of these movements to one another corresponds to the relationship of the planets of our planetary system, we can also designate these several movements with the Signs that belong to the planets, thus:

• Movement into upright posture ♄
• Movement of thinking ♃
• Movement of speaking ♂
• Movement of the blood ☉
• Movement of the breath ☿
• Movement of the glands ♀
• Movement of reproduction ☽

A word must be said about the movement of the blood. This movement comes into contact with what we have earlier learned to recognise as the centre of the organs belonging to the middle man, the “plane of operations” as it were for the Sun Spirit. Thus the movement of the blood, which has its centre in the middle man, is to be brought into relation with the most important force in the middle man, and we have to designate this movement of the blood with the Sign of the Sun. In doing so we are thinking of the power and force of the Sun Spirit in so far as it is a force in movement. It is, we could say, as a fixed star that the Sun works upon the middle man as a whole on the other hand, it exerts its influences on the movements that depend on the middle man, on the movements of the blood, as one of the planets.

If I make use of the Sign which is also used by the astronomers of today employing therefore in this case not the old terminology which was altered by Kepler, but the names that are customary in the astronomy of today—then the movement of the breathing can be denoted by Mercury, the movement of the glands by Venus and the movement of reproduction by Moon. For this last movement, localised as it is in the lower man, is again a movement that comes into contact with the influence of the Spirit of the Moon. This influence here meets and combines with the inner moving of the human being.

We have, therefore, in the human being, as well as a threefold seven-membered man, another seven-membered man in the connections of the movements that take place within him. The pupil must take pains to distinguish the various movements within him, before he is able to take the next step on the path. He will not find it easy.

The human form we have as it were standing before our eyes,—not so the inner movements. A special effort has to be made to feel them. We must learn to discern each one for itself. We must be able to feel inwardly, first the movement of raising oneself upright, then the movement of thought, the movement of speech—this is easiest of all—then again the movement of the blood, and—which is also not difficult—the movement of the breath. We have to come to the point of sensing the various movements which as a rule we only sense in their result, as, for instance, when we experience ourselves first as lying down and then as standing up. We must learn to sense also in this way the movements of secretion.

The faculty of discrimination for the several movements that take place within him is an absolute necessity for the pupil if he would progress further on his path. And if he is to do with these movements what I said he had to do with the human form, then instead of looking at the human form from without, fixing it before him and awaiting the after-image, he must endeavour to feel himself inwardly, feel the movement and activity that goes on within him, and then, after he has, as it were, fixed himself inwardly in the bodily sense, hold fast this impression,—even as yesterday we tried to hold fast, purely in memory, the impression of the human form. The pupil will then actually come to the point of recognising seven forms, where yesterday we met with two. We encountered, as you will remember, the form of death and the form of Lucifer, and we learned that when we call to remembrance the thought of Christ, we have then something we can carry across into the other—the super-sensible—world. And now, when the pupil, as it were, steps forth out of his man of inner movement, he meets with seven forms. He makes the acquaintance of seven spiritual Beings, and he knows that these seven spiritual Beings correspond to his own inner movements in the very same way that Sun, Moon and Venus correspond to what we spoke of yesterday. He comes to understand that he himself has grown out of our planetary system, and that since the physical stars of the planets are directed by the Spirits of the planets, man is only able, for example, to lift himself upright through the fact that the Spirit of Saturn prevails in him, the Spirit who has his scene of action on Saturn as Lucifer has his on Venus. He knows too that his movement of thought has connection with the Regent or directing Spirit of Jupiter, the movement of speech with the directing Spirit of Mars, the movement of the blood with the directing Spirit of the Sun, the whole movement of the breath with the directing Spirit of Mercury, all the glandular movements with the directing Spirit of Venus, and finally the whole movement of reproduction with the directing Spirit of the Moon. He knows furthermore, that all these Spirits work with and through one another. They have their seat, their base of operations, in man, and one kind of movement works upon another. The Spirit of Saturn, for instance, while it works chiefly through the movement made by man in lifting himself upright, takes part indirectly in all other movements. A significant situation occurs when the guiding Spirit of Saturn manifests his forces with peculiar strength in the Sign of Aries or in the Sign of Taurus. This creates a very important situation.

Having thus come to the recognition of how the guiding Spirits of the planets are connected with the several members of the man of inner movement, you will be able to follow me when I say that in the allocation of the Signs to the several members we are already touching the fundamental principle of all genuine astrology. Recall the connections we have been considering, and you will recognise that there lies inherent within them the principle of true and genuine astrology, which has its source in nothing else than in the great and significant fact that man is born out of the World-AII, that man is in very truth an epitome, an extract of the whole World-All.

In order to understand the form of man we had, you will remember, to ascend to the fixed stars; and we found also how the form of man is influenced by the forces proceeding from Sun, Moon and Venus. How we have seen how the inner mobility in man is due to the working of the seven Spirits of the Planets. Seven spiritual Beings are thus brought to our knowledge. And here we discover something that is of peculiar importance. Among these seven Spirits is the Spirit of Venus, whom we have already come to know as Lucifer. And the pupil is now confronted with a strange and remarkable experience. When he takes the first step into initiation he encounters Lucifer; for it is Lucifer who shows man the “form” of which we spoke yesterday, the form or figure that man himself wears. The pupil encounters Lucifer as the Being who has made him look his ugliest; and now, when he meets the Spirit of Venus, he meets Lucifer again. But this time Lucifer looks entirely different. It is not the same figure as the pupil met before. He knows it is the same being, but Lucifer shows himself in two distinct forms. Thus the pupil acquires the knowledge that Lucifer can manifest in two forms. The first time he manifests is at the crossing of the Threshold (we spoke of it yesterday), when he calls man's attention to the fact that he owes to Lucifer his immortality, saying to him: “The Gods gave you a destructible body, but I have given you immortality.” And when the pupil turns to look,—lo, it is the dragon, of which we spoke yesterday. Therefore is this form also called the first form of the Guardian of the Threshold. But now at the second stage of initiation a new revelation comes to us. We are shown how Lucifer can unfold quite different forces from those we recognised in him before. If we were not able to develop in us the forces of secretion and excretion, the forces that proceed from the various canals and ducts in the body, we could not be human beings at all; it would be out of the question. The blood and breath movements alone could never maintain us as human beings. The movements of the juices in the body, the movements, that is, of the ducts and glands, must also be present. This can make plain to us the difference between all exoteric traditions—wheresoever they be found—and the understanding that is given here. The exoteric traditions do indeed speak of Lucifer and of the several Spirits of the Planets, but they can give no actual and genuine knowledge of the facts. The real knowledge is in very truth a knowledge that has to be received under a serious sense of responsibility. It reveals Lucifer to us in the first place as the one who distorts and makes unsightly the form of man, and on the other hand is the Spirit who is essential to man's being, who alone makes him man.

As we proceed further on the path of initiation we come to another striking and significant experience. If we succeeded in holding fast to the Christ, in linking ourselves inwardly with Him, so that He enabled us to carry over the thought of the I—the idea of the I, the self-consciousness of Earth—into the super-sensible world that we are entering, then a feeling took possession of us that this Christ Power has to do with the power of the Sun. We had as it were a presentiment of the connection. Now at the second stage something more is added. The Christ Power reveals itself to us as a form,—I may even, as a form or figure that we can grasp and perceive, that we can gradually learn to know more intimately, that grows clearer and clearer to us in the super-sensible world. At this second stage of initiation we are brought into a nearer knowledge of the super-sensible Christ. And then this Christ shows us that He calls the directing Spirit of Venus—who, as we have learned, is Lucifer—His brother, calls him His brother, accounting him a Planetary Spirit like the other Planetary Spirits. So that when Lucifer shows himself in the second stage of initiation, he at once reveals himself as a planetary Spirit taking his place among the seven Regents of the planets among his brothers. We enter thus into a world where we find what we might call a highly exalted College of seven planetary Spirits, who are in completely brotherly relation one with another. But here lurks a danger, and the pupil must needs possess himself of a great deal more knowledge if he is not to go under at this point. For he must on no account simply receive easily what here shows itself to him; he must earnestly endeavour to acquire an exact knowledge of what lies behind it.

When we come to enter into occult knowledge in detail, we can look in many directions for help to find our way. Although we have learned to recognise the seven brothers who are the seven Planetary Spirits, we are still a long way from any full knowledge of them. Seven brothers may be quite different one from another, and the difference does not perhaps show itself at first sight. We have to look a little nearer, we have to study them in detail, if we would gain a more intimate knowledge. At this point I want to bring forward something which, if you examine it carefully and test it by the side of what you know from exoteric myth, you will find to be well founded and reasonable even though it appear strange at first. It will prove to be authentic, for it is a direct outcome of occult research. Compare it with the religious and historical records from olden times, and the demands of your intelligence will be completely satisfied. The farther you look into it with your ordinary understanding, the more will you find yourself able to say “Yes” to what I am now going to tell you; for it is a result of occult investigation that is comparatively easy of approach to the man of the present day.

We must first of all find something to take as our starting-point; we must begin from some known fact. For the moment, let it be the fact that we have come to a kingdoms. We have, however, only learned to know the ruling Spirits with their kingdoms, the corresponding Planets. We must go further. We must investigate these kingdoms more closely, as far as occult research will allow. And the following is one among many ways that offer themselves to the pupil of our times who sets to work conscientiously with the means afforded in modern practical occultism. He can take his start, always under the guidance and counsel of an experienced occultist, from the study of the life of Gautama Buddha.

I have frequently emphasised and must here emphasise again that the life of Buddha is to be understood as the Buddhists understand it and not as it is interpreted by materialistic historians. We must first come ourselves to the recognition that Buddha became Buddha by passing through a great many incarnations; that he became first a Bodhisattva. And then having been born as the son of King Suddhodana, ascended in the 29th year of his life to the dignity of a Buddha. We must know that the ascension of the Bodhisattva to the stage of Buddha means in actual fact that such an individual has his very last incarnation on Earth in the life he lives as Buddha. When he has become a Buddha, he never returns again into an earthly body, but works in other than earthly worlds. This must be quite clear to us from the beginning. We must know for an absolute fact that the Buddha by his exaltation from Bodhisattva to Buddha rose to a cosmic dignity and does not require in the course of his further evolution ever to descend again into a physical earthly human being. Those of you who have followed my lectures will remember that I have alluded to one single occasion when the Buddha, so to speak, allows us to have a glimpse of his further evolution. When I was explaining how two Jesus children were born, the Matthew Jesus Child and the Luke Jesus Child, I said that at the birth of the Luke Jesus Child the Buddha sent down from the spiritual world astral forces that were incorporated into the astral body of Jesus. Mention was thus made of the Buddha sending down forces to Earth. In Norrköping¹ I told further how the initiates were able to meet with the Buddha in still another way. Nevertheless it is still true to say that since his life as Buddha he has lived no more on Earth. An occultist, however, who goes far on the occult path can follow also further the path of Buddha. It is, of course, now no Earth life that he follows. In the field of practical occultism the question arises: What has become of the Buddha, since he incarnates no longer in a physical human body? We can, as it were, go in search of the Buddha, we can look for him in the wide world. It may seem strange to you, but the initiated find the Buddha engaged on a great and mighty task, a task of deep significance. When the eye of the occultist has been opened and he looks out into the vast spaces of the world, he beholds a remarkable sight. He discovers that the Buddha has now for his scene of action that planet which in physical astronomy we call Mars; and he can do no other than relate in all seriousness how, since the time when the Buddha acquired the faculty which made it no longer necessary for him to appear again in Earth life, he has been given a new mission. This new mission of the Buddha we can discover by making occult observation of Mars.

As we enter upon this study, the true and original mission of the Buddha becomes clear to us. We find by occult investigation that the beings on Mars who correspond to men on Earth—they are of course of quite a different nature, but for the moment let us call them “Mars men”—at a certain time in their evolution were in a similar condition of need as were the Earth men in the Fourth Post-Atlantean period when the Christ had to come to them. And as Christ became a Saviour and an Awakener to Life, as that was a mission for the Christ in regard to Earth humanity, so is it a further mission for that Bodhisattva after he became the Buddha, to be a Saviour and Redeemer of Mars men. He has to accomplish on Mars an event similar to the event that the Christ had to bring to fulfilment on Earth.

When therefore we study the life of the Buddha, we find it falls into two parts. There is first the time when Buddha worked for the Earth men and brought them all that they were due to receive from him, including what he had already brought them during the time when he was a Bodhisattva. Then there is the later part of Buddha's life when he worked outside and beyond the Earth, when he rose to a higher power and strength for which his course on Earth was but a necessary preparation. For Buddha grew upwards into the power of one who is a Saviour and Redeemer. If it were possible for us to compare the influence of Buddha on Mars with the—not same, but similar influence of Christ Jesus on Earth and with the Mystery of Golgotha, then we would be bound to find a difference, because of the difference between Earth men and Mars men. If possible, I will tell you more another time about the feelings and response called forth in the Mars men by the working of Buddha.

As you see, tasks are set for the Beings who evolve in the Cosmos. The moment a Being rises from one state or rank to another, a new task is placed before him. And man, who has to fulfil his life's course on Earth, comes into touch during his time on Earth with Beings who, like the Christ, have from the beginning a cosmic task, and also with Beings who in their evolution upward leave the Earth and rise then to a cosmic task, as was the case with Buddha.

• 1. See Anthroposophical Ethics

My dear Friends,

It was by no mere chance that after I had given you a description of the meeting with death and with Lucifer that takes place for man when he crosses the Threshold to the super-sensible worlds, I passed on to deal with another matter that you may perhaps have found hard to understand. I began by endeavouring to explain to you the true significance of the Christ Being; and in the course of the explanation—which had found its way quite naturally into the subject we were considering—I had to speak of how Christ vanquished Lucifer, as you can find it related in the Gospels in the story of the Temptation in the wilderness. And then, after we had carried our study a little further, we passed on to a communication concerning the Buddha.

Let us briefly call to mind once more this meeting with death and Lucifer. Lucifer appears to the pupil of occultism as in very fact the archetype of human greatness—yes, and even of superhuman, divine greatness—when, at this point, separated as it were from his deeds and actions, he draws near to man. He appears as a Being who tempts man. And it is only when the pupil looks back at what he himself has become through the influence of Lucifer, only when he beholds the frightful animal-like picture of what man has become in the course of his incarnations through the enticements and temptations of Lucifer, that he is as it were healed a little from the seductive power of the figure before him. I then told you of the help that can come to the pupil of the present day from Christ. Christ brings a kind of deep consolation and hope, to counteract the terrible impression made upon the pupil by the meeting with death and Lucifer, and moreover the meeting with the picture of himself,—which is in a certain sense the Guardian of the Threshold. In place of death, in place of the destroyed human body, something else appears.

That of which I am now speaking can be actually experienced, and when it is experienced, it is exactly as I describe it. In the place of death appears Christ Himself, giving us to understand that this I of ours can after all be retained. In other words, we have in our consciousness an inner picture that is entirely independent of the memory that remains with us from our life in the senses. To suggest that we have here to do with an illusion or hallucination would be nonsense; for one could be blind, deaf, without sense of smell or any other sense, and yet have the experience when one came to this point on the path of initiation,—the experience of Christ appearing in the place of death. What is it man then has before him? Try to picture it! You have before you Christ, Who appears in the place of death, and Lucifer. That is to say, you have the very picture described by the Evangelists in the scene of the Temptation in the wilderness. There would be no need to remember the accounts of the Temptation given in the Gospels; you would have it there before you, through having received into your soul the impulse of the whole Christ Event,—that He walked the Earth, was crucified and overcame death. It would suffice for you that you had the Christianity of St. Paul; you would not need to have come under the influence of the Christianity of the Gospels. It is quite possible to experience, independently of the Gospels, independently of any external impression, something that is described in the Gospels. Such a thing is perfectly possible. Think of what happens in ordinary life. In ordinary life you have conscious experience when impressions are made on your consciousness from without and concepts and ideas are called forth in your consciousness by these impressions. Now, however, you have before you a picture that no impression from without can possibly evoke. For you cannot find Lucifer anywhere in the world of the senses; it is utterly impossible for Lucifer to be an external impression in the physical world of the senses. Neither is the picture of death to be found in the world of the senses. And when finally death changes into the Christ, you have before you a picture which you could certainly in the last resort discover as a remembered fact in the external world, but which nevertheless shows itself to you now, at your entry into the super-sensible world, as a picture that is attainable without any help from the external world. For no external impression is needed to call forth the picture of the Temptation of Christ and the conquest of death, the overcoming of all that Lucifer began to make of man. To what kind of a consciousness then have we come? To a consciousness without external object. I have endeavoured to lead you to the Unmanifest Light and to the Unspoken Word. And now you have acquired a conception of a Consciousness without external object, a consciousness that receives its content from its own being.

Our considerations then led us to an astonishing, yet none the less true, communication concerning the Buddha. This again was no mere chance. I had to begin the lecture yesterday by telling you about the man of inner movement, in order to explain to you how man can take a still further step in initiation into the higher worlds; and in that connection I gave expression to a truth which was perhaps at first hearing difficult to grasp (we shall return to it again presently)—the truth, namely, that Lucifer shows himself in a completely changed form when we advance to this second stage of initiation, appearing before us as the ruler in the realm of Venus. I told you also how the Sun, which hitherto we have thought of as being supreme in power and might, now appears as a planet among the seven planets, and Christ as the Spirit of the planet of the Sun. Christ himself manifests in this connection as a planetary Spirit, brother to the Spirit of Venus. In other words, Christ appears as a brother of Lucifer. This opened the way for a consideration of the post-Earthly destiny of the Buddha. For the later destiny of the Buddha cannot be livingly experienced in its pure and original truth, without attaining to this second stage of initiation; it is impossible to arrive at the truth which we expounded yesterday concerning the Buddha, unless one goes beyond the first meeting with death and with Lucifer where one beholds the scene of the Temptation, and passes on to the next stage of initiation where the seven Spirits of the Planets become manifest. This had, therefore, first to be described. Should you still ask whether the truth concerning the life of the Buddha after he left the Earth is not in some way attainable by external consciousness—the consciousness, that is, which is directed to impressions from without—then the reply must be that it is not possible for the consciousness of Earth to make such research into the conditions of life and culture on Mars as could reveal what the Buddha accomplishes there. The moment, however, initiation penetrates as far as to the stage we described yesterday, it becomes possible for the consciousness without external object to have this experience by virtue of its own nature. Therefore in relation also to this truth about Buddha it is a question of acquiring the consciousness without external object, The conditions and circumstances of the facts here revealed to us are of course external. For the Buddha lives—quite really—on Mars. Nevertheless the consciousness does not go out of itself; in the recognition of such a truth it is not yielding to the influence of an external impression, it is still a consciousness without external object. I have thus led you to the third of the three things we placed before us at the beginning of these lectures,—the consciousness without external object.

Looking back over our study, we see that we have found three stages or conditions of human consciousness. We have first the ordinary physical consciousness. Then we have the consciousness that is attained at the first stage of initiation,—and I gave you as an example of what is experienced in this consciousness the picture “Death and Lucifer” or “Christ and Lucifer, in the Story of the Temptation.” Finally, the third stage of consciousness is the one where the seven planetary Spirits manifest themselves to man. And we illustrated this third stage by reference to Buddha. At the third stage you experience the destiny of Buddha after he has become Buddha and returns no more to physical existence on Earth. We have thus considered three conditions of human consciousness: physical consciousness; consciousness of higher worlds at the first stage as we described it yesterday, illustrating it by the story of the Temptation; finally a still higher consciousness, the second consciousness of a super-sensible nature. Many of you would perhaps like it very much if we could go further and describe still higher stages of consciousness, but time does not allow. I will, however, just hint at one other stage.

What is it we are able to experience by means of physical consciousness? Everything in our surroundings that is present to our senses, all the objects of Earth existence. What can we experience by means of the second consciousness? Leaving on one side for the moment the example we brought forward, the story of the Temptation, we find that by means of the first stage of a higher kind of consciousness, something further than the objects of the senses can be discovered. You will find it described in outline in my Occult Science in the part where the Moon is spoken of, that condition of Earth which preceded our present Earth. This old Moon condition is no longer in existence, it has to be described by means of a consciousness that can function without an object present to hand. The Moon condition of our Earth is in the higher worlds. It is present in the higher worlds, preserved, as you have often heard me tell, in the Akashic Record. So that for the first consciousness of a higher kind we have, besides the Story of the Temptation, all the processes that can be said to have relation to the old Moon. Everything connected with the old Moon is capable of being described by this consciousness. And now I want to draw your attention to something else. There is deep significance in the fact that from among the many kinds of experience man acquires through the first higher consciousness, I chose the story of the Temptation. For when we direct the same consciousness to the ancient Moon, we find there a repetition of the story of the Temptation. (I say a repetition, but naturally it took place long before!) It is really so. We learn how Christ already on the old Moon overcame Lucifer, and in the scene that is given us in the Gospels we have to see, as it were, a recurrence of the fact that Christ attained to victory over Lucifer. On Earth Christ repels Lucifer from the outset. This is because on the Moon, when He was Himself less highly evolved—for Christ also undergoes evolution—He had repelled, through the uttermost devotion of His Being to Highest Powers, all the attacks of Lucifer which at that time still meant something to Him. Already on old Moon Lucifer approached Christ. On Earth he was no longer dangerous to Him: on Earth Christ repels Lucifer at once. On the Moon, however, Christ had to exert all the forces at His disposal in order to repel Lucifer. This is then the added experience that comes to us when we cast back the gaze of higher consciousness into the remote time of Moon. If we go still further and attain to the second consciousness of a higher kind, then as well as learning about facts that have meaning for Earth, such as the history of Buddha, we learn also what has again been described in outline in my Occult Science, we learn of the still earlier incarnation of our Earth,—the Sun. In that far-off time the conditions were quite essentially different, and the difficulty you have in understanding this particular section in Occult Science can itself be an indication of how difficult it was to describe the state of old Sun. I took pains to describe more especially scenes that are less remote from man and can even remind us of the scenery of Nature. One would have found little understanding, in the time when Occult Science was written, for the things of a more moral nature which are experienced in a study of the Sun incarnation.

When we go back to the time of the old Sun, we do not find there any story of the Temptation! We find the Sun still as a planet among the seven planets, we find Venus with Lucifer as her ruler; and these two, the Sun Spirit and the Venus Spirit—in other words, Christ and Lucifer—appear at first sight like brothers. Only by straining to the utmost our powers of perception are we able to remark the difference between them. For the difference between Lucifer and Christ, in the time of old Sun is not apparent to an observation of their external being, it requires a more inward observation and study. It is indeed extraordinarily difficult to find outward means of demonstrating wherein the difference lies. Please, therefore, take what I am now going to say as no more than an attempt to characterise, as well as may be, the difference that clairvoyant consciousness can perceive between Christ and Lucifer in the time of the ancient Sun.

When we direct our gaze now to Christ, now again to Lucifer, a new perception begins to dawn upon us. Lucifer, the ruler of Venus, appears in a form that is extraordinarily full of light,—I mean, of course, spiritual light. We have the feeling that all the glow and brilliance we can ever experience on Earth in looking upon a manifestation of light is weak and dim in comparison with the majesty of Lucifer in the old Sun time. But then we notice, when we begin to perceive his intentions—and we are able to see through these—, that Lucifer is a Spirit endowed in his very nature with infinite pride, so great a pride that it can prove a temptation to man. For, as is well-known, there are things which up to a point are not temptations for man but become so when they grow majestic in their proportions, and pride is one of them. When pride is majestically great it tempts man. Lucifer's proud greatness, Lucifer's pride in his majestic figure of light—these contain a seductive element. “Unmanifest light,” light that does not shine outwardly but has immense, strong power in itself—that Lucifer has in full measure. And how does the Christ figure look beside Lucifer? The Christ figure in the time of old Sun—the Lord and Ruler of the Sun planet—is a picture of utmost devotion, entire devotion to all that is around Him in the world. Whereas Lucifer looks like one who thinks only of himself—we are obliged to clothe it all in human words, notwithstanding the fact that these are quite inadequate—Christ appears as wholly given up, in devotion, to all that is around Him in the great wide world.

The great wide world was not then as it is now. If we were to transport ourselves in these days to the present Sun, then, looking outwards in all directions as from the centre of a circle, we should perceive in the first place the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. These were not then externally visible; but instead, twelve great Forms, twelve Beings were present who let their words ring forth from the depths of the darkness,—outer space being of course not then filled with light. What kind of words were these? They were words—the word “word” is again only a makeshift, to indicate what is here meant—they were words that told of primeval times, of times that even then were in a remote and ancient past. The twelve were twelve World-Initiators. Today we behold standing in the directions of these twelve World-Initiators the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, but from them resounds, for the soul that is open to the whole world, the original being of the Unspoken Word of Worlds, that could take form in the twelve Voices. And whilst Lucifer alone—I must now begin to speak more in pictures; human words do not in the least suffice—whilst Lucifer had the impulse to let stream out upon all things the light that was present in him and therewith come to a knowledge of all things, the Christ on the other hand, gave Himself up to the Impression of this Word of the Worlds, received It in its fulness and entirety into Himself, so that this Christ Soul was now the Being that united in Himself all the great Secrets of the World that sounded into Him through the inexpressible Word. Such is the contrast that presents itself,—the Christ Who receives the Word of the Worlds, and the proud Lucifer, the Spirit of Venus, who rejects the Word of the Worlds and wants to found and establish everything with his own light.

All subsequent evolution is a direct outcome of what Lucifer and Christ were at that time. The Christ Being, as we saw, received into Himself the great and all-embracing secrets of the Worlds. The Lucifer Being, having what I can only describe as a “proud figure of Light,” lost thereby his kingdom, lost his Venus kingdom. On other grounds, to enter into which would take us too far afield, the other Spirits of the Planets lost also their kingdoms, or rather changed their natures. But they need not concern us here. What is important for us here is the contrast between Christ and Lucifer. It came about that Lucifer lost more and more of his rulership; the kingdom of Venus gradually fell away from him. Lucifer with his light became a dethroned ruler, and the planet Venus had thenceforward to do without a proper ruler and was consequently obliged to undergo a backward evolution. The Christ, however, had during the old Sun time received the Word of the Worlds, and this Word of the Worlds has the quality of kindling itself to new light in the soul by which It is received; so that from that time forward the Word of the Worlds became in the Christ Light, and the planet of which the Christ was ruler, the Sun, became the centre of the whole planetary system, the other planets being brought into subjection to It. The same is true also of their spiritual Rulers.

We must let these scenes live before us, we must learn to see the divergence that came about during the old Sun time between the path of Lucifer and the path of Christ. Lucifer went downward, he had to remain behind in his evolution, and he remained behind also during the Moon time. Christ went forward. The Christ Spirit, the Sun Spirit, became a Spirit evolving ever forward until at length He was able to appear on Earth in the Form we have often described. Through His devotion to the World All, through His having received and identified Himself with the Divinely Creative, Inexpressible Word, through His having rejected every sort of pride and put always in its place devotion to the Word of the Worlds,—Christ, from being Ruler of a single planet, as He was in the ancient Sun time, became Ruler from the Sun over all the planets, the other planets being reckoned as part of the realm of the Sun. When you know this—I am speaking here more particularly to those who heard my lectures in Helsingfors¹—knowing this, you will not feel it as a contradiction that Christ is spoken of in those lectures as a Sun Spirit of a higher kind than the Spirits of the planets. For there of course we were speaking of the present day. Christ is far above the other planetary Spirits. He is the Spirit of the Sun. Here, however, where we are not merely describing how the individual planetary bodies are quickened to life by their Spirits, but where our task is above all to describe the several states of consciousness, we have to show how Christ through His own special character and nature has, during the course of the evolution that has taken place between old Sun and the present time, passed through an upward evolution, and from having been a Spirit who was of like nature with the planetary Spirits has become the Ruler or Regent of the whole solar system.

As I have said, time will not allow us to enter on a description of the third consciousness of a higher kind. I will only mention that the condition of ancient Saturn, the first that can ordinarily be described of the successive incarnations of our Earth, can be experienced with this third higher consciousness. As you see, it is therefore possible to speak of a higher, a third consciousness of a super-sensible character. If we really wanted to follow initiation in its completeness, we would have to lead on to giddy heights of consciousness. To do so would from the outset seem a kind of presumption, and as a matter of fact we should be taken into regions where it becomes well-nigh impossible to employ human words. Therefore, in my Occult Science I have forborne to describe anything that belongs to still higher states of consciousness, for it is really out of the question to describe the higher things in human words. In the Mysteries it was done by forming special symbolic signs and then speaking in a language of symbol. By this means it was possible to lead man up to higher states of consciousness. Such higher states do indeed exist; we can speak of a fourth and a fifth consciousness of super-sensible nature. It goes on, indeed, without limit. All that we can do is to say that for super-sensible consciousness evolution takes its course in a certain direction.

Bearing all this in mind, you will at any rate be able to conceive the possibility that by means of the various super-sensible consciousnesses man beholds other worlds than the physical; and when you remember that the first rudiments of physical man began, as is shown in Occult Science, during the condition of ancient Saturn, you will also see that there is in man himself a certain connection with the world of the third super-sensible consciousness. But besides this, man is, as you know, guided and led by Beings higher than himself. He can come to a knowledge of these higher Beings, they have their influence upon him. It will therefore not be difficult to see that not only has man, as he stands before us, been created out of worlds that go as far as the third super-sensible consciousness, but he has connection also with yet higher worlds. The knowledge and experience that we have described as attainable by means of the various states of consciousness can be described to the ordinary human being. He can comprehend that such states of consciousness exist. He does not have direct experience as man on Earth of these further states of consciousness, but he does experience their external manifestations. The physical consciousness,—that, of course, he experiences directly. The first super-sensible consciousness,—of this he experiences an indication in the heightened dream consciousness that does not merely afford arbitrary dream pictures but leads on to a perception of realities belonging to a higher world. A systematic higher development of the dream consciousness is all that is required for man to come to the first consciousness of a super-sensible nature. This first super-sensible consciousness can give information concerning the conditions that prevailed on the old Moon, the past incarnation of our Earth. Hence you will find that in occult communications most of the descriptions, apart from those concerned with the Earth itself, refer to the old Moon; very often they stop there and do not go back to the old Sun. This will be the case, whenever such communications are based on the first super-sensible consciousness, which is the one that occurs most frequently and is the easiest to attain. It is in this consciousness that by far the greater part of what H. P. Blavatsky gave in the Secret Doctrine has its source. Occultists who have real knowledge are quite aware of this fact. Consequently if you read through the whole of the Secret Doctrine, then in all the great and comprehensive communications given there in reference to primeval times you will find but scanty reference to a past farther back than old Moon.

The condition of dream consciousness may thus be regarded as a first beginning—so to say, a substitute man has on Earth—for the first super-sensible consciousness. When man is in deep sleep, his consciousness is darkened; but we cannot say that no consciousness exists. If the deep sleep consciousness awakens, that is to say, if it is awake outside the body, then it is the second super-sensible consciousness. It goes higher than the first, and leads one who can experience it to the old Sun condition.

A little reflection will make plain to you the following. In your day consciousness you go about making external movements. Such movements are connected with your day consciousness, your Earth consciousness. The movements that take place inside you on the other hand—the movements, I mean, of the middle man that continue even when you are asleep—are regulated by the consciousness we may call the consciousness of deep sleep. The movements of the heart and of the breathing are movements connected with this second consciousness and can only be understood in their whole connection with the higher worlds when man awakens outside his body, that is, in the deep sleep condition of the body.

You see, therefore, it is quite possible to perceive with ordinary intelligence that there are these three styles of consciousness. It would take us too far now to investigate the indications that undoubtedly exist in man of still higher consciousnesses. We have, however, shown that whenever man sets out to reflect on his life as Earth man, he discovers manifestations of higher consciousnesses. It is, therefore, possible to speak to Earth man of these higher states of consciousness. One can point out first how man experiences the ordinary processes of life on Earth by means of his everyday consciousness. One can then go on to show how, if his dream consciousness were to undergo a tremendous enhancement, he would experience all that belongs to the laws that have been brought over to Earth, so to speak, as a legacy from old Moon; and finally how, were he to become awake in deep sleep, independently of the body, he would experience the old Sun conditions in that form in which they too extend over into the conditions of Earth. It is therefore possible to communicate these things to man at the present time, and to describe to him how they manifest; we are justified in doing so, since an understanding can be awakened for what the occultist investigates. The occultist speaks of different states of consciousness. In reality they are different worlds: and it has become customary, as you know, to call these different states of consciousness different planes. That which can be surveyed with the physical consciousness is called the physical plane; that which is perceptible to the first consciousness of a super-sensible nature, the astral plane; to the second, the lower Devachan or mental plane; and to the third, the higher mental, or higher Devachan plane. Still farther on, we have the Budhi plane and the Nirvana plane. All we are doing here is simply to give other names to the results reached on the occult path. Both roads lead to a picture of man. For it is always man who in his varying conditions or states is active as member of the different planes or worlds. What we have done is to lead over the knowledge of man from the standpoint of occultism, where we speak of different conditions of consciousness and different conditions of evolution, to the knowledge of man from the standpoint of theosophy. For where the occultist speaks of conditions of consciousness, the theosophist speaks of successive planes. Occultism can in this manner be communicated openly as theosophy.

We must now go back a little. In the course of our considerations some new points of view have emerged, and it behoves us to go into these a little more fully. Take for example the perception we arrived at that man is, in his external form, a three times seven-membered human being. We have not time in these lectures to explain the matter in detail, but I will ask you to call to mind what stands written in Occult Science, namely, that before this Earth condition of existence man passed through three other conditions, Moon, Sun, Saturn, and that the very first foundation for the external physical human form was already present during ancient Saturn and subsequently underwent continual development and change. So that the marvellous and wonderful body of man we have before us today is the result of a long evolution. Its evolution has continued throughout three great phases of existence,—Saturn, Sun, Moon. Each one of these can be divided into seven, and each single sub-division of these great phases of existence has left its mark on the human form. Three times seven formative forces have worked upon the form and figure of man. What man has added during Earth time,—that alone is not to be found! It is, as we have seen, just the part of man that is subject to destruction. It is the completion of the human form, the gathering up of all the parts into a complete whole; and this has been destroyed by Lucifer. So that when we divide the human being into three times seven members, we have the expression of physical man on the Earth as he comes before us with all the changes wrought upon him by each successive previous condition of existence. It is the physical human being with which we are here concerned. The occultist must consider him in the way we have done in this lecture, in such measure as time has allowed. The theosophist, on the other hand, can only have his attention directed to what is present there before him. We can say to him: In man, there is the physical body. When we set out to study the human being, we come first of all to his physical body, that highly complicated form which has passed through so many conditions of existence and is today perpetually unfolding and manifesting the traces left behind from these earlier conditions. Then, as you will remember, we went on to consider something else. We made a study of man in his inner movements; and let me remind you of the conclusion to which we were led yesterday. The form of man we can see, but the movements as such we do not see, and I pointed out yesterday how difficult it is to discriminate between the movements and arrive at a conclusion as to which are the essential movements in man. One fact, however, emerged quite naturally from our study, namely, that this faculty of movement takes us back to the old Sun. It will accordingly not surprise you when I go on to say that all the inner movements in man are connected with the experiences he underwent during the time of old Sun. Whereas man as physical man bears in him the impress of Saturn, Sun and Moon, man as the man of inner movement has carried in him the forces for this inner movement since the time of Sun. The man of inner movement has passed through Sun and Moon, and also Earth as far as it has gone today. Thus we distinguished in the human being something that is not form but is the inner ground of movement, and this we must designate as the first invisible man. We do not see this man, we can, however, see the external results of his activity—the movements; and we call him the etheric body, the ether body. The ether body can only be perceived by means of a higher consciousness. The workings of the ether body in the physical world are the inner movements that the human being performs. In so far, therefore, as man has had to undergo all three conditions of existence that preceded our own, he has become physical man; in so far as he has had to undergo Sun and Moon time only, he has become etheric man. And we can ascend a stage further and say that in so far as man has undergone Moon time alone, he has become astral man,—that is to say, there has flowed into his movements all that leads to thinking, feeling and willing. When we pass beyond the external and bodily, beyond also that which is within man (in inner movement), we come then to astral man, which is also not to be seen as such, but manifests and comes to expression in thinking, feeling and willing. Finally, we come to that element in man which Earth has begun to prepare in him and which it will be her task in the future to complete. For Earth is called upon to bring to perfect development and form the I of man, which has already shown itself in the course of the evolution of the Earth and will in the future develop to higher stages,—Spirit Self, Life Spirit, Spirit Man (Manas, Budhi, Atman). And now we have before us—Man in his several members.

It transpires therefore that in seeking to understand man in his relation to the whole world, not only do we come upon different conditions of consciousness that we then identify with different worlds, but we are also led to a division of the human being into his several members,—physical body, ether body, and so on. Moreover by means of an intelligent external observation of man we can come to perceive that, while the ether body is not visible to us, we can yet discern manifestations of it here in the physical world. The manifestations of the ether body are the movements within man. The manifestations of the astral body are thinking; feeling and willing. The “ I ” manifests itself,—is its own manifestation. When once man is intelligent enough to comprehend that the movements he makes within him do not proceed from his form, cannot indeed proceed from anything physical, when once he can rise to the only intelligent way of regarding them, namely, as having their source in the super-sensible, then the possibility is opened for him—not simply of believing in, but of grasping with his understanding, the existence of an ether body. To clothe occult knowledge in forms that appeal to ordinary consciousness,—this is to bring occultism into theosophy, to clothe it, as it were, in the garment of theosophy. Just as we found that in theosophy we speak of planes, so again are we clothing the truth in the garb of theosophy when we speak of the various members of man's nature. Everything that can be said concerning man has first to be found on an occult path. We must traverse the whole wide world, we must attain, as students in occultism, to the various conditions of consciousness; and we shall discover that these various conditions of consciousness can afford us an explanation of man, can indeed show us what he really is. Through occultism alone can man be understood in his true nature and being. Theosophy is no more than an attempt to clothe the occult knowledge in intelligently stated truths, so that men may have insight into occult knowledge. The facts of which I have been telling you—if you will test them intelligently, you will find them to harmonise one with another in countless ways, harmonise too with the whole world. Intelligent testing is the one and only way to find confirmation of the results obtained in occultism.

A second point emerged that also requires to be explained a little further,—for we must make it clear that although theosophy and occultism seem at first to lead to contradictions (we heard in the first lecture of this course what is to be our attitude to such contradictions), further study will always lead to the solution of these. You will have seen this happen already in many instances in these lectures. Perhaps, however, new contradictions will now present themselves when what we have just been saying is taken in connection with what was said in earlier lectures of the course. It is out of the question to deal today with all the possible contradictions, but there is one that I would like to endeavour to solve with the aid of the occult knowledge attainable in the second consciousness of a super-sensible kind. Many of you will remember that I—and others too—have repeatedly pointed to the cosmic character of the Christ, and have shown how He surpasses in His very nature all other founders of religions. It is only to be expected that this unique character of the Christ Being should more readily meet with recognition in the West, since it is in the West that the historical sense is specially developed. In order for the evolution of the Earth to take place in such a manner as to allow of men going through many different incarnations, the West will naturally look for a “centre of gravity” for this evolution. It can, therefore, only astonish one that Westerners are still to be found who are not prepared to admit this centre of gravity of evolution,—which is, in effect, the Christ Impulse. To speak of re-incarnation of the Christ would be to make the same mistake as to imagine that a pair of scales could be held in balance at more than one point. Seen from this aspect, the matter is really exceedingly simple.

There is, however, another, a moral ground of which we must take account in its effect on the relationship of the human being to the Christ, who is to be regarded as being Himself the Impulse of Earth evolution. It is as follows. Christ entered the evolution of the Earth at a particular moment. The men who are living at the present day were incarnated before the coming of Christ and are now incarnated again. Thus they have lived not only during the time of Earth evolution when Christ was not yet present, but they live also now when Christ has been present; and the objection frequently made from a materialistic standpoint, that if Christ were so important, then a one and only appearance on Earth would signify an injustice to mankind, falls to the ground. Nevertheless one still hears people ask; “How could such an injustice be allowed to happen, that all the men who lived before Christ have not had the benefit of His deed, while those who live after Him have this benefit?” But they are the very same human beings! Such an objection should most assuredly not be raised in theosophical quarters! And yet, this objection opens up a matter of very great significance. For there are a few instances, where the objection is in a certain sense justified; and one of these instances, as you will see if you stop to reflect, is the case of the Buddha.

Whilst human beings all over the Earth are born again and again and can thus always come to an experience of the Christ Impulse in their incarnations after the time of Christ, the Buddha attained in pre-Christian times the stage of evolution which removed from him the necessity of returning any more into an Earthly body. This means that the Buddha belongs therefore to the very small number of human beings who lived on the Earth and then left it, before Christ came. And you may want to know, what is the relation of the Christ to Buddha? Apart from what I mentioned yesterday, that Buddha shone down from higher worlds into the astral body of the Luke Jesus Child, how do the Christ and Buddha stand to one another? Is it actually so, that Buddha left the Earth before Christ was on the Earth? that he took his way to Mars, so that the Buddha and Christ so to speak passed one another? Only with the help of deep occult knowledge can we hope to solve this problem. Recall in thought all that I have been telling you. I explained to you how the Christ was united with the Sun. In point of fact it was only through the baptism by John, or rather through the Mystery of Golgotha itself, that the Christ came into union with the Earth. The Christ is therefore a Sun Spirit and we have to look for Him, before the Mystery of Golgotha took place on Earth, in close connection with His Kingdom, the Sun. Zarathustra sought Him there. And it is during the time when Christ is working as Ruler in the kingdom of the Sun, when He has not yet extended His rulership to the Earth—at all events, not yet by means of His Impulse—that the life of Buddha takes its course on Earth. And now we must turn back to the earlier incarnations of Buddha, if we would arrive at the truth in this matter. We know that Buddha was before a Bodhisattva; he worked on Earth through long periods of time as Bodhisattva. These Bodhisattvas had in them no ordinary human soul. Their case was quite a special one. You must here call to mind the description in Occult Science of the beginning of Earth evolution,—how, after the interval between Moon and Earth, the Sun was re-united with Earth and the other planets, and how they all then separated again, being shed, as it were, like a husk or shell one after the other. (See also my lecture cycle on the Spiritual Hierarchies.) There was, therefore, at one time the condition in which the Earth was united with the Sun. Then Earth and Sun separated, and you know that after that came the separation also of the Moon, and the strengthening of the Earth through souls coming from other planets. Let us now fix our attention on the point of time when the Sun has just separated from the Earth. When this separation took place, the two planets Venus and Mercury—I am giving them their astronomical names—were still within the Sun. The Earth alone separated off, Venus and Mercury remaining within the Sun. We have therefore now Sun and Earth. On Earth, evolution continues. Only a small number of human beings remain behind; others go up to the planets, to return again later on. With the Sun went also Beings; for the world does not consist just of external matter, but of Beings. Beings went with the Sun when it separated from the Earth. And their Leader is the Christ. For at the time in Earth evolution when the Sun separated from the Earth, What one may call the taking precedence by the Christ over Lucifer and the other planetary Spirits had already come to fulfilment. Then later on, Venus separated, and Mercury. Let us consider for a moment the exit of Venus from the Sun. Together with Venus are Beings who had also at first gone with the Sun but were not able to remain there. These break away and inhabit Venus. Among them is the Being who stands behind the later Buddha. He went as a messenger from the Christ to the dwellers on Venus. The Christ sent him to Venus, and here on Venus Buddha passed through all manner of stages of evolution. Later on, souls came back from Venus to Earth. The ordinary human souls were of course but little developed. Buddha, however, who also descended to Earth with the Venus souls, was a highly evolved Being,—so highly evolved that he could at once become a Bodhisattva and afterwards early a Buddha. Thus we have in Buddha one who had long ago been sent out by Christ and had the task of preparing the work of Christ on Earth. For his mission to the Venus men had this meaning,—that he should go to Earth beforehand, as a forerunner of the Sun. And now you will be able to understand that Buddha, having been with Christ for a longer time than the other Earth men—for the Earth separated off earlier—needed only that portion of the Christ Impulse which he still had in him from the Sun, to enable him to follow the Christ Event from the spiritual world. For Buddha that sufficed. Other human beings had to await the Christ Event on Earth. But because Buddha had this special relationship to the Christ, because he had been sent out by the Christ as a forerunner, he did not need to await on Earth the Christ Event. He took with him from Earth the capacity of remembering—even without the help of the Christ, which other men need—what the I means on Earth. Hence he was able also to look down and behold the Christ Event from higher worlds. Thus was preparation made long beforehand in the World All for the remarkable mission that Buddha had undertaken at the behest of Christ. For he was first sent to the Venus men—and compare what I am now telling you with the lectures I gave at Helsingfors¹—and afterwards to the Earth; then he made his way back to the Mars men, and there has to continue working, carrying out on Mars the mission for which he had so long been preparing. On Mars it is so, that the men who have remained there stand in great peril, even as the Earth men were in peril, from which Christ set them free. The danger for the Mars men is, that their astral body—they have, as you know, not an I to develop as we—their astral body, and thereby indirectly also their ether body, may suffer a very serious diminution of force and become dried up. The whole nature of the Mars men has proved to be of a kind that leads to terrible wars. The men of Mars tend to settle permanently on a certain spot. Men on the Earth are cosmopolitanly inclined; Mars men are wedded to the soil, there are very few cosmopolitans among them. And there is, or rather was, on Mars constant war and strife, due to the astral bodies that are very strong and not tempered and made gentle by an I. If you will think it over you will understand that among men who develop in this way there must inevitably be a terrible amount of strife and conflict. Mars is nothing else than a kind of re-incarnated Moon; what the astral body holds is not tempered with the softening influence of the I, with the result that the men of Mars have quite an exceptional lust for war. The Greeks acted on a true knowledge when they made Mars the God of War. One is indeed filled with wonder and amazement when one finds in the world of legend these echoes of the truth. Unforgettable is the impression one receives when, having discovered that terrible wars took place there, one finds that this occult knowledge is present in the names that were given out of the knowledge contained in the ancient Mysteries.

Think of the continuation of the life of Buddha, this Master of Compassion and Love, this Master in the overcoming of caste-distinctions, and you will understand the mission that Buddha had on Mars,—to introduce something to which the Mars men could never come unaided, something which would seem to them like an exaggerated piety, a kind of monastic attitude to life. For it was the mission of Buddha by means of a conspicuous example of exceeding humility and poverty to quicken the Mars men to life in this direction. I can only just begin to draw for you the picture of Buddha's influence upon Mars. The meaning of his work there for the Mars men who live without the I, is in point of fact entirely similar to the influence of a redeemer and a saviour, one who liberates men to a higher world-conception. And whilst upon Earth universal brotherhood and love of one's neighbour are connected in their deepest impulse with the Christ, cosmopolitanism in its essential character is connected with the Deed of Salvation which Buddha has to fulfil on Mars.

There is yet another point in our study that might present a difficulty, and I would like to dispose of it before we separate. It is the fact that the various religions on Earth, which as every theosophist knows have a common single source, are differently related to occult communications. Every religion has to be referred back to a founder who through this religion made known to a group of people, in a manner suited to their capacity, some experience belonging to a particular stage of initiation. You have for instance the religion which is not able to rise to the Christ, the Spirit of the Sun, but is peculiarly adapted to rise to the great and far-reaching soul that lived in the being who was many times incarnated as a Bodhisattva—a religion that looks up in worship to him who is the great Initiator, the great Inspirer, of the Buddha. This religion is not able to ascend to a vision of how the Christ is the Sun Spirit and has descended to Earth. It sees only as far as to the one who is sent as a messenger; it gathers together, as it were, for its content that which goes forth from the Sun and becomes a planetary spirit. And we can well understand that Buddha is regarded as a planetary spirit.

Such a religion, that lifts men's thoughts to the Spirit who guides the evolution of the Buddha, could only grasp a figure like the figure of Vishnu in the Indian Trimurti. Moreover, since a religion of this kind has not yet come through to the knowledge of the universal victory of Christ over Lucifer, neither is it able to place the figure of Lucifer in such relation to the Christ as we can today. To the followers of such a religion Lucifer seems to be standing beside the Christ as an independent figure,—His equal, unsubdued. We have seen how Lucifer is given the place of a kind of brother. This is what you have when Shiva confronts Vishnu. Look into the religion of Shiva, study it carefully; and you will follow me when I say that the Shiva religion of India can be understood when one has knowledge of the Lucifer Being. For Shiva is in reality Lucifer in the form in which he is not yet overcome. All its cult and ritual, the whole of the religion of Shiva with its 60 million adherents—viewed from this standpoint, it shows itself to be an eminently Luciferic kind of religion. From these examples, you will readily understand how all forms of occult knowledge have been able to impress their influence on different religions at different stages, according to the character and disposition of the peoples concerned.

And now I want to ask you to follow me in a further consideration. We have spoken of the Unmanifest Light, and of the Inexpressible Word; and we have succeeded also in arriving by many detours at the Consciousness, without Object. Let us now pause a moment at this trinity, and ask: Do these three things come to expression at all in our world, do they reveal themselves there?

The answer is, that by taking together all that has been given in the course of these lectures, we can without difficulty arrive at a knowledge of how these three things express themselves in our world. Take Light! When we gave a description of the proud Lucifer, it was all Light! Light is essentially an attribute of the spiritual; and when he is on the physical plane, man only has light—and then in its very weakest expression—in his thoughts. And where has man the Inexpressible Word, when he is here on the physical plane? That which in the great world is Inexpressible Word is expressible word here on the physical plane, and you will not take long to discover what must be the origin and source of the word. It is what we call the soul in man. Whilst therefore the Light gradually becomes what is spiritual in man, the Word becomes gradually revealed in man in his soul nature. And Consciousness—how does it manifest in physical man? Through the fact that external matter impinges upon him. For physical consciousness needs an external object, it must, as it were, have something to bite! Up above, we found: Consciousness without Object, Inexpressible Word, Unmanifest Light. Down below, we find as their last manifestation on the physical plane: human consciousness that chews at matter; the soul that reveals, although in obscured form, the word; and finally the light that is present in exceedingly feeble manner in man's thinking. In the human aura alone can the clairvoyant see thinking as light. All that comes from light he can see only as aura. Nevertheless in thinking—in that which on the physical plane is already spiritual—we may recognise the last reflection of the Unmanifest Light. So, you see, man can after all bring to expression these three highest things that we found. We discover them when we regard man as spirit, soul and matter. And in spirit and soul together man finds the picture of his I as a unity. Yes, even this triad which we find on the physical plane—matter, soul, spirit,—is a revelation of the highest trinity. Men lost these primal revelations of the occultism of olden times, and occultism gradually took on a new form that met with but little outward understanding. In our time occultism must again find understanding, in our time it must become theosophy. There has been an intervening time when men did not look up to the occult truths that had been communicated to them earlier, when they did not understand what we today clothe in the words of theosophy. And in this intervening time they held by the last manifestation, the latest product as it were of the working of the higher trinity,—they held to matter, soul and spirit. This stage gave birth to what we may call philosophy, which in reality first made its appearance about six centuries before Christ and has continued on into our own time. You will always find that philosophy starts from the last external manifestation of the great trinity which remains ever deeply hidden. Philosophy sees spread out before her the material life, and the material life alone,—the food as it were for human consciousness. Philosophy does not comprehend the Inexpressible Word, but it can nevertheless still have a feeling for the soul element in the world when it reveals itself in the soul of man as the expressed word. Philosophy does not find the Unmanifest Light, but can sense it from afar, inasmuch as it appears, in its last activity, in human thinking,—that is to say, in that portion of the human spirit which is turned, to begin with, to the external world. Body, soul and spirit—the mind of the Greek sees them as threefold man, and they play their part right through the age of philosophy. Mankind has been passing through an epoch in his evolution when the occultisms were hidden. Hidden too, were the theosophies. All that was left for man to hold on to was the most external of all revelations, was what we call body, soul and spirit. And this epoch has lasted until now. But the time of philosophy is fulfilled. The philosophers have had their day. The one thing that remains for philosophy to do is to save for man that which the clairvoyant must remember at the first stage of his evolution,—the I, the self-consciousness. And it is important that philosophy should not fail of this task. Try to understand my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity from this point of view. The book is written in such a way as to lead over the philosophical consciousness into the new age that is coming, when that which can give a more exact and accurate picture of the higher trinity must enter once again into the evolution of mankind,—when theosophy must find its way into human evolution.

The age of philosophy has come to an end. Older than philosophy is theosophy, and theosophy will take the place of philosophy, notwithstanding all opposition. It has, so to speak, the longer life, it exceeds in duration the age of philosophy. Only for a certain limited time can the human being be studied from the philosophical standpoint. Further into the past, and further too into the future, extends the age when man can be considered from the standpoint of theosophy. Transcending both, and probing man's being to the uttermost, is occultism. For behind all human knowledge whatsoever stands occultism. Occultism is the oldest of all; it has the longest age of time. Before theosophy was, was occultism; after theosophy, occultism will still be. Before philosophy was, was theosophy; after philosophy, theosophy will still be.

And now, my dear friends, try among other ideals to apprehend this one,—that you are called upon to understand how in our time the philosophical ideal (which has necessarily only been held by a few) has to flow into a new ideal, the theosophical ideal, which will be comprehensible to many, because theosophy is able to speak to man from far greater depths than philosophy, which can never be anything but abstract, since it is only a last feeble copy of the original being of man in his threefoldedness. If we study the matter in the way we have done, then we are seeing it all on the background of world-history as historic necessity; we feel what theosophy must be for modern man, and we recognise how the three points of view—philosophy, theosophy, occultism—are in very truth ways of understanding man that must unfold one after the other. Let this thought not remain just a thought in the head, but let it sink deep into your hearts, and you will learn to appreciate how important, as well as how holy theosophy must be for us.

• 1. Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies an in the Kingdoms of Nature
• 1. Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies an in the Kingdoms of Nature

As in recent years at the beginning of our Munich lecture course, may I be allowed to use this first lecture as a kind of introduction to what we are going to deal with in the coming days.

It may well be that the first thought that occurs to you at the beginning of this cycle should refer to what for several years has been the introduction to these Munich lectures, that is, our artistic dramatic productions. If I may be allowed to give expression to the thought that comes before my own soul on this occasion, it is that it gives me the deepest satisfaction to see how, this year as well as last, we have been able to open these productions with a reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis. Seeing that this year we have the pleasure of a still larger audience than before, perhaps it will not be superfluous to repeat a few words I have already spoken here in Munich.

All that is bound up with the Eleusinian Mystery is intimately connected with what we call our anthroposophical striving. We began with quite a small circle of which only a few have remained faithful to the movement. We began years ago in Berlin, actually connecting the representation of initiation and initiation principles of the various epochs and races to all that has been accomplished for the Anthroposophical Movement by our revered friend Edouard Schuré with regard to the reconstruction of the Eleusinian Mystery. It was with all this that we made a kind of introduction to this movement of ours. Now that for some years past we have been able to give dramatic productions of what has issued from Edouard Schuré's soul, we have been able to stamp a kind of impression of the feelings, sentiments and thoughts that, for rather a smaller circle of us, have formed themselves around this starting point of our movement. If I am to define all this, I should say that an inner confidence, an inner faith, flowed out of the spiritual purity and chastity of the way in which these things entered our souls. So that we might say that if we allow these sentiments and feelings to flow into us, together with all that we feel in our souls with regard to our anthroposophical striving, we can at least hope for some measure of success. This is what the things themselves told us in the beginning, what they told us by the deep and serious way they penetrated into the spiritual, and what the years that have since passed have also told us.

What belief were we able to hold at the beginning, and later in the course of the recent years? It was the importance of the moment in the evolution of humanity—I mean the moment in relation to world history—that was able to arise before the soul. The idea could arise that it was quite in accordance with the laws of human evolution that in our present age new forces, and particularly forces of spiritual life, should wish to enter the souls of men if they were to hold their own in face of what the present and immediate future may demand of their inmost being. In giving voice to this thought, may I be allowed to refer to something personal, which is, nevertheless, by no means personal to me.

Years ago, before we started our movement, I often had occasion to speak about all kinds of spiritual matters with the German art historian, Herman Grimm, who, as you know, has since passed into higher worlds. In our walks together from Weimar to Tiefurt, or around Berlin, a good deal was said about the demands of the spiritual life in our time relative to nature; how humanity has sought its goal during the course of European evolution and has tried to find harmony in its soul life. There was one thought that kept coming to the fore in conversation with Herman Grimm, who was so deeply interested in all the spiritual life of the West. When we go to the root of the matter, this one thought was how the European man can look back over a number of centuries, or over the last 2000 years, how the European can look back in such a way that when he probes into his own soul and examines its needs and asks himself, “What can I understand, what is comprehensible to me in human affairs that transpired then that I need for my own life of soul?” He can then answer, “However many of the details of life at that time may be incomprehensible, somewhere there is a link with what I myself experience, if I let the new age pass historically before my soul.” Even the complications that arose in the Roman Empire at the time of Caesar, or in the still more remote time of Republican Rome, appear comprehensible to European consciousness today. We find our bearings when we try to understand the souls of those times, even though in many respects they may be far removed from what present day man can feel or think. But when the soul looks back into ancient Greece it becomes quite a different matter. It is only if we do not go sufficiently deep into things with what we call our human understanding that we, as modern men, can say that the days of ancient Greece may be as easily understood as Roman times or as the times that followed. When in going back we come to ancient Greece and let the historical records of it work on our souls, we begin to meet with what is incomprehensible. I should like to repeat, as something clear and easily understood, what Herman Grimm often used to say, “A man like Alcibiades is a mere prince in a fairy story compared with Caesar or with those who lived in Caesar's day.” Greek life appears in quite a different light, and human and divine bear a different relation to each other. Everyday life and all that might be called the divine enlightenment of everyday life seems quite different. The whole life of soul existing on the soil of ancient Greece seems entirely different. These things become particularly striking when we let those personalities work on our souls who can in truth become far more living in the modern soul than the people of whom history relates—those personalities we find in the works of Homer, Aeschylus or Sophocles.

Starting from such a thought, the results of our modern culture will certainly enable us to say that the further back we go in human evolution, the more does man appear to be directly connected with the super-sensible and all that radiates into and works within his soul. For we can already perceive the beginning of a quite new humanity when, not superficially but fundamentally, we get near the soul of the Greek. Something quite special appears, too, when we allow the historical works of literature that have arisen in the course of European civilization to work upon us. The historians write about the various ages back into Roman times as of something they have grasped and mastered. When you open a history book, you will find that the writer, when desiring to give life and form to the personalities he is representing, is able to apply the feelings and sentiments of his own age as far back as ancient Rome. In purely historical writings, even among the best historians, Greek figures, even those of the later Greek period, are like silhouettes, shadow-pictures that cannot come to life. How could anyone with genuine feeling for what it means for a man to have his feet firmly on the ground, maintain that any historian has really succeeded in thus planting Lycurgus or Alcibiades on their feet, as can be done in the case of Caesar. The Greek soul appears full of mystery when we look back into Grecian times, or so it appears to the man who merely tries to grasp it with his ordinary consciousness. Those who feel this mystery have the right feeling.

In this connection we may well ask how a Greek soul would have felt with respect to many things that are fully comprehensible to the modern soul. Let us consider an early Greek soul. Let us try by means of much that spiritual science gives us to feel our way into this soul. What would the Greek souls have said to the image, the old traditional story, that is so easily comprehended by the later European soul the story of the Fall, the old story of Paradise, and all that later ages received as the Old Testament. This would have been absolutely foreign to the Greek soul, as foreign as the Greek soul itself is to modern man. You cannot think the story of the temptation in Paradise, the story of Adam and Eve, into the Greek soul, so that it would be fully understood there as it lived for instance in the Middle Ages and on even into modern times. Therefore, it is first necessary even for us to prepare our own souls before we can understand that age, so different from our own.

It is when we cherish thoughts like these that we first begin to have a real sense of what it is that our present moment has brought us. Last Sunday when the curtain went down after the last scene of the Eleusinian Mystery, I could not help thinking how thankful we may be that we are able today to turn our eyes and minds to the course of events that show us the Greek soul in its life of feeling and experience. Moreover, that we are able to fill the auditorium with those who can imagine how, in the course of man's evolution on earth from epoch to epoch, the human soul has assumed different forms, and how it has learned to experience in different ways its environment and its own life. For many years we have been striving to understand the life that human souls had to live in the beginning of earthly evolution when the external body, and with it the inner soul life, were quite different from what they afterward became. We have been striving to understand how the human soul lived in Atlantean times, how it lived in post-Atlantean times, and we have grown to realise in what manifold ways the soul has lived and experienced itself within us. The soul that is in each one of us, the soul that has passed through one incarnation after another, not in order to experience the same things over again but to keep on having fresh experiences—in what various ways its life has been lived! So it is possible for us to sit in this auditorium, and to forget the things directly affecting us in this age in order to absorb objectively and dispassionately what was peculiar to souls of a different age. We need not set our understanding to work; we need only give ourselves up to immediate feeling to see that the events enacted in the reconstructed Eleusinian Mystery contain within them all that man's soul lived through from the darkest depths of life up to the light of the spirit, from deep sorrow to heights of bliss, experienced, however, in various ways in the course of time. Then we may get a simple and unprejudiced, but perhaps all the more certain, feeling of what the Greeks felt when such names were spoken, such images awakened, as those of Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysos. It may be possible for whole worlds to arise before us from within the soul when these images are awakened.

As human beings we find ourselves in the external physical world. We learn to know it through our physical senses, through the experiences of our soul, and through what we experience with our understanding and with our reason. We feel today, in quite a distinct way, that our soul is in a measure independent of the external life of surrounding nature, and of all that is concealed in it. The Greeks could never have felt this in the way man feels it today. At that time they never could have understood this estrangement from nature, this emphasis on the need of forsaking the world of the senses in order to press on into spiritual worlds. But in his own way the Greek felt a significant difference, a significant cleft, between what may be called the spirit in man and what may be called the soul. For the things of the soul and the things of the spirit are the expressions we use for human experience, and are two spheres closely impinging on one another.

Let us turn to the scene at the very beginning. Demeter stands in her proud spiritual chastity before Persephone, warning her not to taste the fruits that Eros can give. We turn our gaze to Demeter and see in her all that man calls spiritual, everything as he says in which “he as spirit has part.” But man also sees that in the realm of the earth all that is spiritual is bound up with all that has most to do with the senses and is the most material. Demeter, the Goddess, who brings forth the fruits of the earth and presides over the external and moral ordering of mankind—Demeter, human spirit, chaste and proud in face of much that generally lives in men, but inwardly bound up with and permeating the external world of the senses—it is thus that Demeter stands before us. Persephone appears before our inward vision as something that awakens an image of the human soul principle in our soul. It is connected with all that concerns man's individual existence as he stands there with his soul in the midst of earthly joys and sorrows. If it would picture what lives in Persephone, the soul must feel its connection with all that pulsates through earthly joys and sorrows. Persephone is all soul, Demeter all human spirit. If we then allow the course of the Eleusinian Mystery to work upon us, if the basic tones struck in the very first dialogue between Demeter and Persephone go on resounding in us, become intermingled and then clear, finally leading up to the figure of Dionysos—then, how the whole human being is to be found in Dionysos! How all that becomes living in us when we confront Demeter and Persephone lives again in Dionysos! Then, in the last scene, we see man's soul striving toward harmony of soul and spirit. The whole Dionysian play becomes a striving out of the darkness of life into the light of the spirit.

I have no wish to be a commentator nor to pull to pieces a work of art. I only wish to put into words the feelings that can arise in man with regard to the most intimate secrets of his soul when confronted with the Eleusinian Mystery. I should never think of saying that Demeter was the personification or symbol of a primal form of the human spirit, or that Persephone symbolised the human soul. That would be an insult to the plastic, living nature of a work of art. That would mean applying rigid concepts of the intellect to all that lives in a work of art that is just as living as man or any other living being. But what we may and can feel about the secrets of the soul—of that we may speak.

Now let us set two pictures before ourselves. Let us picture the later European consciousness that is now beginning to free itself and that henceforth will thirst after the forms revealed by the truths of spiritual science. Let us picture this European consciousness as it has been working through the centuries, this European soul that felt the riddle of life on being told how the first human being was there (man and woman), so far removed from the God he had come to fear, and upon hearing the alluring voice of a being strange to him, to his own human soul. Whence did this being come? What is it? How is it related to man's own soul being? The European soul, the European consciousness, hardly attempts any explanation. It accepts the strangeness of Lucifer, and it suffices it to know that from Lucifer came knowledge, but also the voice of temptation. And the words decreeing the divine judgement after the temptation—how they resound as from infinite cosmic space! How little they are suited by their very setting to draw this question from the soul: “Where can I find in the most intimate life of my own soul what is resounding through the wide spaces of the macrocosm?” Try to imagine the drama of Paradise as a living picture. Try to feel inwardly how unnatural it would be to represent the figures in the drama in purely human form. On the other hand, now try to imagine how, in speaking of the deepest and most intimate concerns of the Greek soul, it is a foregone conclusion that you should have before you the human figure of Demeter, the human figure of Persephone, even that of Dionysos or of Zeus! Try from this to experience how infinitely near to the Greek soul came all that permeated the macrocosm! We can characterise this in a few words. All that we need say is that before the Eleusinian Mystery was reconstructed by Edouard Schuré it simply did not exist in the form in which we can now see it. But now we have it! We need only feel what is contained in these two statements to grasp the whole significance of the matter. This to my mind transcends all mere trivial expressions of gratitude because we have also pointed to the whole significance that this reconstruction of the Eleusinian Mystery has for modern spiritual life. All that is connected with the Mystery of Eleusis, and all that has been achieved by the author in the historical re-awakening of the principles of initiation in the various epochs, corresponds to what is deepest and most intimate in the European soul. Everyone who takes spiritual life in a sincere and earnest way is under an obligation of a sacred, serious kind to carry precisely this kind of attitude into the present life of the soul.

My dear friends, you may talk a great deal with people outside in the world about all manner of things concerning anthroposophy, and some may even seem to find satisfaction in such conversation. But when one is able to look into the depths of the soul, one knows that the soul needs to be given, though perhaps unconsciously, what it truly desires in the innermost recesses of the heart.

It was feelings such as these that filled my soul last Sunday when we saw the curtain fall on the last scene of the Mystery of Eleusis, and the weeks preceding our Munich performance showed me that I was not alone in these feelings. All of us sitting here may feel the warmest gratitude toward those who for weeks past have been sacrificing themselves to the work of studying and entering into the personalities they had to represent. The consciousness lives in all those whom you have actually seen on the stage that they are servants of the spiritual world, and that it is necessary in our age that every effort be made to introduce spiritual values into the general culture of mankind. Reverence for spiritual things enabled the players gladly to bear much that preparations for the performances demands. We must also remember with special thanks those who have for years been working behind the scenes, though perhaps even more visibly than the individual players. They have devoted their efforts, and especially their ability, which is more than their efforts, to the service of this particular task. We may regard it as a kind of inner karma of our movement that we are able to have among us one who provides all that the scenes require in the way of drapery and clothing for the players, and who does it all in such a manner that it is not only in keeping with the intentions that I have at heart but is also accompanied by true spirituality. We may take it as a favourable karma of our movement in Central Europe that we have such a personality among us. That this karma has a yet deeper foundation, we can see from the fact that the same person was able to co-operate so successfully in all that has been done, for instance, for our Calendar during the past months. Like all our undertakings it is to serve the great purpose. So that first among those who were able to collaborate in such an outstanding manner, not only as players but in the whole of our work, we may mention Fraulein von Eckardstein. Then I think with deepest gratitude, and I should like to evoke this gratitude in your hearts, too, of our self-sacrificing painters, Volkert, Linde, Hass and this year Steglich of Copenhagen, as well. And many must remain unnamed for they are too numerous.

My dear friends, anthroposophy does not consist merely in theories and prophecies. It consists in the will to sacrifice oneself for the demands of the present age. A feeling for this ought to be awakened so that by real human work the seed may be planted for the spiritual life that is so necessary for the future of mankind. If such is our feeling, we shall understand better and better how those who would call themselves anthroposophists must grow together in the concrete and immediate working together toward worthy and serious aims. First in value is what the individual does, what the individual creates and all that he is prepared to bring as his own offering. Here, perhaps, I may speak of the following.

There were free days between our performances when many of our friends were busy rehearsing from morning to night, and on those days Dr. Unger gave lectures here in Munich. It was a source of deep satisfaction to me when our good managing director, Sellin, came to me behind the scenes yesterday morning full of enthusiasm for Dr. Unger's two lectures with the remark, “A movement with such inspired representatives does not come to naught.” What is it that gives me such great pleasure in such an occurrence? Allow me to say this quite honestly and sincerely. It is the independent force, the absolutely independent way in which a human personality is here presenting the matter out of himself, quite freely, by means of his own faculties, without limiting himself to what I myself would say. To one who himself wishes to work independently, nothing can give truer joy than to find someone else who is independent, shoulder to shoulder with him, giving out according to his own ability once he has recognised that it fits into the whole.

A short while ago I received a letter practically saying that much needed to be done within the German anthroposophical movement if anyone was ever to do anything but repeat quite literally what has been said by me. The way truth is represented out in the world is often like that. I do not want to criticise this remark that objectively contains what is untrue in the strictest sense of the word. I do not mention it in order to blame or condemn. But the other side, which is for us the positive side, must be repeatedly emphasised. Let us feel bound to truthfulness, to the testing of what is. Let us feel that we must never speak of any matter until we have learned about it, until we have gone into it. Otherwise, there can be no blessing in occult development, in occult striving. Truth and truthfulness! That is the first and foremost law. What is the good of any prophet, of any description of super-sensible facts, if they are not permeated by honest and sincere truthfulness. From the place from which I speak to you, it may be that you will accept many things that I have to say, but it will please me best if you accept them out of the conviction that it will always be my own deepest endeavour toward you to make no statements except those that can be made with the most candid truthfulness, since I can see no blessing for any occult movement unless one is dedicated to the truth! It may be contrary to what we desire, contrary to the demands of our ambition or our vanity, contrary to many other things in our soul; it may be against the grain to submit ourselves to any kind of authority, but all the same it may be right. For there is one authority to which we should submit ourselves willingly and of our own free will, and that is the authority of truth, so that all we can achieve, not only in what we say but also in what we do, in all our individual deeds, may be permeated by truthfulness. You must also look for that truthfulness in what is put before you in our anthroposophical artistic and dramatic efforts. Try to find it, and although you may realise that there are some things we have failed to attain, you will see that we have striven to permeate all that we do by an atmosphere of truthfulness. We have tried never to let ourselves speak of “tolerance” if tolerance is not really there and if we do not really practice it. Calling others intolerant does not constitute tolerance; to relate something of someone that is not what he represents does not constitute tolerance; to stress continually that one should “be tolerant” does not constitute tolerance. But if one is truthful one knows one's own value and how far one may go. If we are servants of the truth, it will follow as a matter of course that we shall be tolerant.

We may well speak of these things by way of introduction, although it is not generally my custom to enter into all manner of warnings and admonitions. But, on such an occasion as this, how could these words not flow forth from the heart, these words that would point out how, from an inwardly associated impulse, we were able gradually to make this reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis in a certain respect into something from which we may start. We wished to be open and honest with European souls, we wished to be truthful, seeking with a sense of truthfulness for what the European soul is thirsting. The deepest thoughts are often revealed in the simplest words, formulated in the simplest language. Let us learn, with an honest and sincere conviction of the needs of our age, to recognise what a deed it was to recreate the Eleusinian Mystery out of the dark spiritual depths, which begin just at the point where we go back from ancient Rome to ancient Greece. We may then leave it to each individual soul here present to rejoice in the thought as I am sure many will, very deeply—that the creator of this reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis is with us during our time in Munich.

In these lectures we shall have to discuss important questions intimately related to spiritual life. We shall have to speak of what lies at the basis of so-called initiation and, after having indicated some of its secrets and laws, we must go on to speak of the significance of all that radiates out for life from initiation and initiates in the course of human evolution. We shall have to speak of all this in relation to what may be summed up in such contrasting ideas as eternity and the passing moment, the light of the spirit and the darkness of life. Then, having considered the life of man from the point of view these ideas give, we shall return again to the power of initiation and the power of initiates. It is the principle of initiation, then, that on this occasion will be the limit of our studies.

Eternity; we need only touch on this idea to feel resounding in us something connected with the deepest longings of man's soul and with the highest aims of his endeavour. The passing moment always brings before us all that surrounds us in life, that reminds us of the necessity to search in this passing moment of our lives for what is able to give us a view into the land of our desire, into eternity. We only have to call to mind how Goethe introduced into his Faust the deepest secret of this his greatest poem, by making Faust say to the passing moment. “Tarry yet, thou art so fair!” and making him then confess that if such can become the soul's attitude, if it can so identify itself with this confession as to say to the passing moment, “Tarry yet, thou art so fair,” it must necessarily follow that Faust should own that he deserves to fall victim to Mephistopheles, the enemy of mankind on earth. Thus, Goethe makes everything connected with the feeling that flows from the passing moment the basic mystery of his greatest poem. It seems then that what we live in—the passing moment—is in opposition to what we call eternity, for which man's soul must constantly long.

The light of the spirit! In all the anthroposophical studies we have pursued over the years, we have recognised that the striving after spirit light has the fundamental aim of leading man out of the darkness of life. Once more we feel how in Faust, one of the greatest poems in human evolution, a poet, wishing to portray a great and all-embracing soul, cannot but make it come forth out of the darkness of life. What is it that entangles Faust at the beginning of the poem? What envelops him? It is the darkness of life. How often have we to emphasise that so great is the force and power of this darkness over man, that the spirit light, finding him immature, may so work upon him as not to illuminate but to dazzle and stun him. So that the question may not only be, “What is the way to the light of the spirit, where can it be found?” but rather and above all, “How must man tread the path of the soul that is able to lead him to the spirit light in the right way?”

These are only the guiding lines that should occupy us in these lectures. We have reached such a stage in our anthroposophical work that we need not develop our subject from the very start, but may connect it to some of the things already familiar to us.

When we meet the word, initiation, which is for us so intimately connected with the words eternity and spirit light, all the great men of whom we have heard in the successive epochs of humanity as initiates, become living in our souls. With them our souls call to life, too, the several epochs themselves, how they ran their courses, how men lived in them, and how the light streamed into humanity from both initiates and initiation temples in order to make possible what the impulses, the essential driving forces of human evolution, have in all ages become. It would take us too far afield today to refer in detail to all that happened in earth evolution before the Atlantean catastrophe broke upon the face of the earth, completely changing it. We can gain an adequate idea of what we are considering if we turn our gaze to post-Atlantean times, remembering the particular configuration of the human being and his various aspects throughout the ages.

We will let our gaze sweep back over the characteristic civilisation that followed immediately after the face of the earth had been re-formed by the Atlantean catastrophe. We have often spoken reverently of all that in the first post-Atlantean epoch the great and holy teachers of mankind brought to that part of the earth where later the Indian civilisation was developed. We have remarked how the soul cannot but look up from below to the lofty spiritual teachings that came into the world at that time, through certain human individualities who still bore within them all the inward greatness of those men who in Atlantean times had direct communion, which was no longer possible in later epochs of mankind, with the divine spiritual worlds. We have pointed out how the heritage of Atlantean wisdom, now accessible to the occultist alone, lived on in post-Atlantean form in the ancient holy teachers of the first post-Atlantean period of culture. We have also pointed out how great and significant man finds all that then lived, to which, now, it is only the Akashic Records that bear witness, when he receives reflections of it in Indian, or any other oriental literature. The moral and spiritual sublimity contained in these writings as an echo of primeval spiritual teachings cannot be fully realised by present-day humanity insofar as external culture is concerned. Least of all can it be realised in the countries that have been prepared for their present external culture by what the various forms of Christianity have accomplished during the last centuries. Thus the soul felt directed upwards when it turned its gaze to all the greatness that, so dimly sensed today, has only come down to us as a faint echo of primeval spirituality. So, if man looks up to the old wisdom and remembers above all what has often been mentioned here, namely, that only in the seventh and last epochs of the post-Atlantean age will mankind again reach the point of drawing up out of the darkness of life the understanding of what once lived at the beginning of post-Atlantean times and gave the impulse for human evolution—if we consider that mankind must mature to the last epoch before it can feel and experience in itself what at that time was felt and experienced, then only shall we get a sense of how exalted must have been the initiation principle that gave the impulse to the ancient, holy, spiritual culture of mankind.

Then we see how, in the course of successive epochs, mankind, struggling for other spiritual treasures, other treasures of earthly life, seems to descend ever lower, how it takes other forms, but how, according to the needs of the age, great initiates give to men from the spiritual worlds what they require at any particular epoch as impulse for their culture. Then, before our vision, arises the Zarathustra culture that, if seen in its true light, entirely differs from that of the holy Rishis.

We then see the Egyptian-Chaldean culture arise, and the ancient holy mysteries of Greece, to which we referred from a quite different aspect in our last lecture. Everywhere we see the light of the spirit shining down, according to the needs of the different epochs, into the darkness of life. If at the outset of our considerations we ask what are our ideas of an initiate—it is obvious that at the beginning of these lectures only approximate ideas can be given of so vast a concept—we must first gather up much of all we have already heard in the anthroposophical field. We must be clear that for complete initiation it is necessary that man should not look out on the world from within his physical body in the usual way, by perceiving the world around him through his eyes and other sense organs, nor must he gain knowledge of this world or any other world around him through the intellect bound to the brain, nor through what he may call his sense of orientation. He must not form concepts about these worlds in the ordinary way. He must arrive at a stage in which, by means of what we may term “the perceiving of worlds outside his physical body,” he develops something in his life of soul that may be called a super-sensible spiritual body, having within it organs of perception, though of a higher kind, just as the physical body has eyes and cars and other organs of perception and understanding. “One who can see worlds without using the organs of his physical body” can be given as an entirely explicit definition of an initiate. The great initiates, who gave man the important cultural impulses in the course of successive ages, had attained in the highest measure independence of the sensory body, and use of another quite different in character.

I do not wish to say much that is abstract. Wherever possible I shall bring forward concrete examples, and today therefore I should like to illustrate this life outside the sensory body in a higher organisation belonging to the soul and to illustrate it by means of the following example.

If one who has only gone a few steps on the way to initiation, realises through self-observation what it is that he experiences in and of himself, he may say something like, “One of the first things I experienced of myself is that I have within me, besides my physical body of flesh, a finer one that may be called an etheric body, which in earth life is carried about with me just like the physical body.” Anyone making his first steps toward initiation realises this at first in such a way that he feels within this body and experiences it just as, on another level, he feels what lives in his blood or nervous system, or in what arises from his muscular system. Such an inner feeling and experience is present, and it can exist also for the etheric body. It is then particularly useful for a student in the first stages of initiation to get to know the difference, or one might say the relationship, between the realisation of himself, the experience of himself in his physical body, on the one hand, and on the other, in his etheric body. Man experiences himself in the etheric body in the same way as one is conscious of the blood or the beating of one's heart and pulse in the physical body.

To gain a clear idea of this we may consider the etheric body in connection with the physical body, in which one is more at home than in the body that one only succeeds in reaching by means of a journey into the spiritual. One may say to oneself, “In my etheric body I have a part corresponding to my physical brain and to all that constitutes my head. The head, the brain, is as though crystallised out of the etheric body, and so rests within it that it might be compared to a piece of ice floating in water—the water representing the etheric body and the ice, the physical body crystallised from the etheric body. An intimate connection is felt and experienced between what may be called the etheric part of the head or brain, and the physical brain itself. We then realise how we create our thoughts, how we form memory images within the etheric body, and how the physical brain is only a kind of reflector, but we also realise how intimate is the connection of the brain with the etheric body. This can be experienced with especial force when one has to work hard at tasks connected with the physical plane in the physical life, when prolonged thought about things is necessary, and when one must exert the physical body to bring up memory images from the depths of life and to hold them together. In such a process, the etheric body always takes a direct part, whether one knows it or not. But inwardly connected with it is the physical brain, and if this brain is tired out, fatigue is markedly felt in the corresponding etheric part. We then notice something like a block in what is experienced as the etheric part of the brain, something like a foreign body, so that one can no longer get at what one must know since mobility in the physical brain must run parallel with mobility in the etheric body. You may then have the distinct feeling that your etheric body never grows tired. It would be able to gather up thought images to all eternity, and bring to the surface all that you know. But before all this can be expressed in the physical world, it must be reflected back, and this the brain refuses to do. The etheric body never tires. Just because it can be continuously active, it notices the fatigue of the brain all the more. One notices as it were the forces of exhaustion produced by the brain, and when the brain goes to sleep and falls into the torpor of fatigue, one might say, “Now you must stop or you will be ill.” The etheric body cannot be used up, but by giving the brain too much to do it is possible indirectly to over tire it more and more, thus bringing about a lifeless, deathlike condition. A living organism will not suffer anything normally connected with it to be partially deadened and brought into an abnormal state. Hence, out of a free resolve, one must say, “So that I may not kill part of my brain and leave it to go on consuming itself, I must stop when I begin to feel it like something foreign inside me.”

That is what we experience when we try to find the relation between that part of the human or etheric body, which corresponds to the brain or head, and the physical brain or physical head itself. There is an intimate connection between them. In effect, the external life of the senses runs its course in such a way that it is impossible to break down what is parallel between the two. Therefore, if we want to express the relation, we may also say that in our head, especially in our brain, we have a faithful expression of the etheric forces, something that, in the external phenomena and external functions, gives us a really faithful image of the functions and processes in the corresponding etheric part.

It is different in the case of other organs of the human etheric body and the corresponding physical sense organs. These things are quite different. I will give you an example. Consider the hands. Just as there exists in the etheric body an etheric part corresponding to the head or brain, so there are etheric processes in the human etheric body corresponding to the hands. But the difference between the external physical hands and their tasks, and what lies at the basis of the corresponding etheric part is far greater than the difference between the physical head and its corresponding part in the human etheric body. What the hands perform has far more to do with the world of the senses and is much more a purely sensory function, while what is done by the corresponding etheric organs is only manifest in a small degree in what finds physical expression in the hands.

In order to describe the corresponding facts, I must, as is often the case, say things that appear grotesque and strange for physical experience, and for grasping physical observations in words. But what I say is fully in accordance with basic facts, and everyone who knows anything about these things will at once feel that they really are as I am obliged to describe them. They are the etheric parts corresponding to the physical hands. But apart from the fact that what corresponds to these etheric parts finds its expression in the hands and their movements, these etheric organs in the etheric body are true spiritual organs. The etheric organs expressed in the hands and their functions, work far more intuitively, more spiritually, and perform a far higher task than is accomplished by the etheric brain. Whoever has made progress in these matters will say that the brain with its etheric basis is in effect by far the least skilful of the spiritual organs man bears within him because as soon as he begins to bestir himself in the etheric part of the brain, he soon becomes aware of this foreign part of it.

The spiritual activities connected with the organs underlying the hands, but incompletely expressed in the hands and their functions, serve for a far higher, more spiritual kind of knowledge and observation. These organs can lead into the super-sensible world and can occupy themselves with our perception and orientation there. A spiritual seer may express this, somewhat surprisingly but accurately, by saying that the human brain is a most clumsy organ for research in the spiritual world, and that the hands, or the spiritual basis of the hands, are far more interesting and significant organs for gaining knowledge of the world, and are certainly far more skilful organs than the brain.

Not much is gained on the way to initiation by advancing from the use of the physical brain to a free use of the etheric brain. The difference is not great between what may be achieved through a purified, intuitive brain-thinking, and regulated spiritual working in the etheric spiritual counterpart of the brain. The difference becomes much greater between what our hands accomplish in the world, and what can be done by the etheric part that is the spiritual basis of the hands, in the same way as the etheric brain is the spiritual basis of the physical brain. On the path of initiation not much development of the etheric brain is necessary, since it is not a particularly important organ. But the etheric basis of the hands is connected with the activity of the lotus flower in the region of the heart, as you will learn in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

This lotus flower pours out its rays of force in such a way as to build up the organism that, at the stage at which physical man now stands, exists in an incomplete form in the hands and their functions. When we learn this fact, and think of the great difference between the mere use of physical hands and all that we can acquire as regards the super-sensible world through the etheric organs underlying the hands—such far more skilful organs than those of the etheric brain—we gain a vivid conception of learning to experience initiation and all the enrichment that it means for man. We do not acquire much enrichment through the feeling that our brain radiates out to feel its etheric counterpart. This is the case, but it is not a really permeating and significant experience. The significant experience begins when one feels that other parts are also expanding and making contact with the universe. Though it may sound strange, yet it is true that the least skilful organ for spiritual investigation is the brain, since it is the least capable of development. On the other hand, entirely new perspectives are opened out when we consider other apparently subordinate organs.

Thus there takes place a complete transformation of what man experiences in himself when he starts on the first steps toward the heights of initiation. It is necessary that one should bring this to consciousness, that one should grasp it as an inner transformation of the human personality, like the principle of development elsewhere in the universe; one thing passes over into another, the later being called, though perhaps not always appropriately, the more perfect as compared with the earlier. If we are clear how in the course of evolution one thing is transformed into another, how the seed of the plant is transformed and becomes leaves, flower and fruit, we can say that the human personality, too, experiences something of this kind; namely, what it is and what it can become through the methods given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, which are the first beginnings of what may lead us right up to the highest regions of initiation. It is good—and you will see why—to arouse within us a living conception of how the men who are destined to become spiritual leaders in the course of time develop themselves inwardly, how all becomes transformed that is at first only germinal and appears so imperfect in man, like the hands in comparison with other organs. Outwardly, this transformation is not noticeable, but the inward change is all the more significant. Just as the outer world exists even for one who is blind and cannot see what is visible to others but only appears if the eye is there, so the world that is spiritual is present around us. But we have to bring to it what we can in order that the spiritual content of the world should approach us.

Now, in the various epochs of humanity there must stream into the course of evolution as impulse all that can be given through living oneself into the spiritual world. This is what was always behind everything proceeding from the mysteries, the initiation centres. A true idea of the course of human evolution may be gained by thinking of the great initiates as the real driving force, the real individualities, behind what is to be perceived externally. The connection between what these great initiates have to do and what happens externally in the World, often only becomes perceptible through anthroposophy or some other form of occultism. The external, purely historical knowledge of the learned only sees that human history, human evolution, is running its course; it does not see the driving forces behind it. In external history we follow what seems like a chain of phenomena, one link following another in a succession of external events. But that at certain points of the chain impulses are entering from quite another world by way of initiation, this we only learn to accept through anthroposophical development. Thus, anthroposophically we see the inmost centre in the course of time and all that, fundamentally, gives to evolution its whole stamp and character. We perceive the various developments of religion as an out-streaming from the initiates. We perceive how the impulses flowing from the mysteries and initiation centres pass over into the general life of mankind.

Whoever regards the evolution of mankind in this way becomes, as a matter of course, free from any kind of a priori preference for a particular religion. This has always been the case with genuine occultism. It is one of the first requirements of initiation to divest oneself of all prejudices and preconceived feelings that grow up in a human soul when it incarnates into a particular religious system or community. In self-education one has to watch carefully that nothing remains in the soul that might give preference to any one religion. We must meet with absolute impartiality all that is contained in the various religions that, through initiation as impulse of development, has entered human evolution. As soon as there is any preference for a particular religion, something like an astral mist is formed through which no free vision is possible. Anyone who, by reason of an inclination that is a matter of course in ordinary life, harbours a preference in his soul for any religion, will never be able to understand other religions. Though he may not know it, he will perceive the predominance of one part of the contents of initiation and will never attain impartial knowledge of the other. Thus, for an occult view, it is obvious that one should confront without prejudice the various streams and impulses flowing from initiation. No one in studying a plant would give the flower preference over the root because he then would not be able to form an objective judgement of its whole structure. Just as little can a correct judgement of the inner content of one religious principle be gained if one is unable to observe other religions with complete impartiality.

In these lectures we shall be speaking of the demands the soul must make upon itself when taking the first steps toward initiation. I should like first to arouse a feeling of how initiation is related to life, and of how the various initiation centre's and initiation impulses stand in regard to human evolution, particularly in post-Atlantean times.

Now occult investigation, in following up this course of human evolution, has a peculiar experience that can only be properly appreciated when such words as have just been spoken about the equal value of all religions are genuinely understood. When these ideas become a matter of course, something remarkable is experienced that will be increasingly better understood during the course of these lectures.

Let us turn our gaze to the initiates who give light to mankind as the ages go by. A man living primarily in the physical world, looking back on the initiates as historical and traditional figures, may say, “Those are the great figures of world history.” When necessary, history has taken good care that as little as possible should be known of them. Although this may sound paradoxical, it is a good thing that humanity should know so little of Homer, for example, since it has not been possible for his image to be distorted by the learned as has been done in the case of other personalities. So will it be—we may well long for this—with Goethe when once he has become as unknown a personality as Homer is today. Man's soul then can look out into the external world at these personalities, and see what they did there. Then he may himself take the first steps in initiation and become able to turn his gaze on the great figures of initiation such as Buddha or Zarathustra. He may be able to remember what Buddha or Zarathustra was to him in the world of the senses, what sort of impression he there received of these human individualities. Then, when some degree of spiritual light has dawned for him through initiation, he may ask, “How does Buddha now appear to me, and how Zarathustra?” And he will say, “I now have more knowledge of Buddha and Zarathustra. I know something I was not able to know in the world of the senses.” Such a man may then develop even further, until he comes to the stage when he will see better what these beings are as spiritual entities. One learns to know a Buddha, a Zarathustra, better the more one lives oneself into spiritual light until, when at last a certain limit is reached, it stops. That is one secret phenomenon, however, that has no need to be discussed further here. Suffice it to say that, as higher worlds are approached, further knowledge may come to a stop. This is the case as regards all initiates whom we meet in world evolution.

Now the spiritual student, who has not advanced too far, can easily be mistaken in these matters. That, however, is not of much consequence. It may happen that some human individuality, who in bygone ages stood high as a spiritual seer, on being reincarnated later, seems to have descended from his former spiritual heights. But the truth is simply that there are certain connections in human evolution where those who have already been initiates, are reincarnated as non-initiates because time conditions call for them to accomplish certain deeds for which their initiation, latent during one or more incarnations, may work in some special way. Mistakes may easily arise about such individualities as they appear to us here or there making their way in external life, and quite wrong ideas may be formed about them. But in the course of progress these mistakes have gradually to be corrected. On the whole, therefore, it is a fact that man's relation to the initiates is such that he learns to know them better as he himself ascends toward the light of the spirit.

In the successive epochs of human evolution we find one remarkable phenomenon. I could give examples of what I have just told you of the confusing way in which initiates on reincarnating sometimes appear to have come down from their heights. You would probably be much surprised if I told you, for instance, in what way Dante was reincarnated in the nineteenth century. But it is not my task here to discuss further this result of my own investigation and what was established for me. Rather have I to bring forward with strong proof the things known to everyone conversant with occultism, letting everything else recede into the background and stating nothing that is not generally recognised where bona fide occultism is upheld.

Now another remarkable phenomenon appears to us that can best be expressed by saying that we meet with a Being regarding Whom it would be senseless to say that He was initiated like other initiates. While through Him the principle of initiation stands before us in the world objectively and is there, yet it would be meaningless to speak of this Individuality as having been initiated on earth like other initiates in the course of human evolution. I have often touched on this fact. A certain degree of misconception has arisen by understanding this fact as originating in specifically Christian prejudice. In reality it is not any kind of Christian prejudice, but should be stated as the objective result of occult research. This Individuality Who was not initiated like other initiates, of Whom it would be quite meaningless to speak as having gone through initiation like others, is Christ Jesus Himself. Let us again emphasise that, just as it is impossible to understand a scale if it is said that it should be suspended from two points instead of one since the one point constitutes its very nature—just as it would be impossible for a competent mechanic to maintain that a scale should be suspended from two or more points, it would be equally impossible for any genuine occultist to maintain that our earth evolution could have more than one fulcrum, more than one centre of stability. I have said that this is an objective result of occult research that may be recognised by anyone, be he Buddhist or Moslem.

Anyone who has made certain progress in occult development learns to know the initiates insofar as they are great personalities or have done great deeds. He learns to know them in the spiritual worlds as he ascends toward initiation, and the higher he rises the better he learns to know them. Let us take the example of a man who possibly had no opportunity in his earthly life to learn to know the Buddha and had never concerned himself about him. I know people who have entered deeply into the whole life of the occident without having any idea of the Buddha. It might be said of them that in their bodily life in the physical world they never had anything to do with him. Or take someone who in his earthly life has never interested himself in the great leaders of the Chinese religion. Imagine men of this kind entering the super-physical worlds through initiation or, as in some of the cases I know, entering these worlds for the first time after physical death. They can then become acquainted with Buddha, Moses and Zarathustra because they can meet them as spiritual beings and gain a real knowledge of them. If they want to gain knowledge of these personalities, the fact that they had no opportunity to do so on earth is no hindrance. But it is quite different in the case of Christ. I beg you to receive this as an occult fact. Suppose a man had never in any of his incarnations established a relation with the Christ Being. That is a hindrance to him when, in order to find Christ in higher worlds, he is using his perceptive faculties in an ultra-physical world, for Christ cannot then appear to him in His true form. It is on earth that it is essential to prepare for the vision and recognition of the Christ Being in higher worlds. This is the occult difference in the relation of man to other initiates. The Christ event is such that something specific becomes related to the actual physical evolution of the earth in its most important phase, radiates down into the earth's physical evolution and forms its centre of gravity.

Now let us assume that the beings who live out their lives as human souls did not at first pay any attention to the earth. It might be that something happened in the course of the world to make these souls say, “We will take no notice of the earth; why should we incarnate down there?” This is, of course, impossible but let us assume it for a moment.

Then, insofar as what belongs to the earth is spiritual, these human souls would be able to experience it in the spiritual worlds, and all the great, sublime principles that were active in the initiates would there be visible to them. Were such a soul in the higher worlds to put the question to cosmic evolution, “Of all the beings in the higher worlds I want to know the Christ, to learn to understand His world mission and His essential task,” then the answer would have to be, “If you would know the Being Who is for us the Christ, then you must incarnate on earth. You must in some way participate in the Mystery of Golgotha in order to enter into relation with the Christ Being.”

The Christ Mystery had to take place on earth in accordance with cosmic law. The earth is the stage where, in accordance with cosmic law, the Mystery of Golgotha has had to be enacted, and where the essential foundation has had to be laid for an understanding of the Christ. The understanding of the Christ that man gains on earth is a preparation, on a different scale to any other preparation that takes place on earth, for any vision and knowledge of this Being in the higher worlds. Therefore, in the Christ Being the principle of initiation was lived out in quite a different way from that of other initiates. They experienced a super-sensible world, indeed, sometimes profoundly, and gave the various impulses out of that world into the course of human evolution. But when they had experience of the higher worlds, when they were within them, they were out of their physical bodies. Though it did not require much effort on the part of high initiates to leave the physical body, though but a small step was necessary to issue from it into the fullness of spiritual facts, yet it is true that this transition from the physical body to the higher bodies has to be made. In the Christ Jesus we have the distinctive phenomenon that, in reality, in accordance with the principle of initiation—in accordance, that is, with what man needs in order to bring about initiation—He never, during the whole three years He was living on earth, deliberately left the physical body as is done in initiation. He always remained within it. All that He brought into life and gave to the world during those three years He gave through His physical body. The other initiates gave what they had to give to mankind through their super-physical bodies. In Christ we have the one and only individuality Who has given all that He gave, all that He said, all that went out from Him into human evolution, through His physical body and never indirectly through the higher bodies.

In ordinary consciousness this is experienced in such a way that the sense of it can be summed up by saying that in Christ we have a phenomenon that can be understood by the most primitive consciousness that anyone possesses through the body by means of which we speak in everyday life. Hence, the intimate, brotherly union with the Christ Individuality, the possibility of understanding the Christ Individuality without the aid of education, simply by means of original primitive human feeling; hence, the necessity for working up to a higher form of comprehension, if one wishes to understand the other initiates. Thus what I have often emphasised in these last ten years is true. In Christ we have a Being Whom the simplest mind can understand, although anyone who has raised himself to this higher comprehension will understand Him better. In Christ Jesus all that can be connected with a human body was present, spiritualising the human body to the greatest possible extent, and working in the human body through Christ Jesus. The other initiates were not able to be so fully active while giving forth what was spiritual because they had always to go out of their physical body and return to it later in order to reveal what they had retained of the super-sensible world. Christ, however, always had to live everything out in the physical world through the physical body.

Such things must be taken into consideration if we would go into the true connections. Everything else is empty talk, as for instance, when it is discussed whether Christ or the other initiates stand the higher. Nothing is gained by such classification; that is quite beside the mark. The essential thing is to look into the connection between the beings. It is a matter of personal preference whether the founder of one religion is deemed “higher” than another. That will not do much harm; men are always subject to such little weaknesses. The important thing is to realise wherein consists the actual distinction between the position of Christ and that of the other initiates in the world. We may then calmly allow people to say, “I consider this or that individuality the higher on account of what he did.” When the difference I have described is understood, the distinction will also be understood between the impulses that have come into the world through the various initiates.

If we would speak of initiation and its significance for human life and evolution, we must try to probe into the essential nature of all this with the concepts and modes of thought that are indispensable to any true description of super-sensible worlds. It is comprehensible that at every stage of its development the human soul should experience the deepest longing to discover the nature of the worlds more or less justifiably described as eternal. Surely it is also comprehensible that, at first, human souls should try to probe into higher worlds without much preparation and with the ordinary ideas and concepts of the life of the senses. I expressly say that this is comprehensible, and this may, to a certain extent, apply where the longing after eternity is satisfied by one or other of the religious faiths. But when it is a question of gaining a deeper insight into the course of all spiritual things, particularly into the course of all life of the soul in the real anthroposophical sense, we must gradually accustom ourselves to the necessity of submitting our ideas, concepts and modes of thought to a certain change before we are able to form correct ideas of the higher, super-sensible worlds. Because this is particularly necessary for an actual description of the Christ event, as we shall see in the next lectures, I may perhaps be allowed to say a few words today about the transformation and re-molding of man's conceptual life that is necessary if he would arrive at ideas about the super-sensible worlds.

For this, we must become familiar with the idea that everything is different in the super-sensible world from what it is in the world of the senses because an exact repetition of any world existence is nowhere to be found in the universe. If everything is different, why should it be assumed that human conceptions and representations hold good in the higher worlds as they do in the life of the senses? They certainly do not. Anyone really pursuing the practical path into the worlds opened to him by initiation, anyone having actual experience of super-sensible life, well knows that not only must he transform many things in himself—I might equally say, leave them behind with the Guardian of the Threshold—but he must also lay aside many of his habits, representations and concepts before he can enter the higher worlds.

We will proceed first of all from certain ideas to which we must all undoubtedly be subject in physical life. Here two concepts, or systems of concepts, have a decisive effect. In our life of the senses they stand side by side; they run parallel. The one consists of all the ideas we form about the natural world, about the forces and laws of nature. Side by side with all these ideas of ours, there exists in ordinary sensory life what we call the moral world order, the sum of our moral conceptions, thoughts and ideas. If a man takes accurate stock of himself, he must soon come to the conclusion that in the life of the senses these two systems of concepts natural order and moral world order—must be kept distinct. If we are describing a plant, we analyse it according to natural forces and natural laws. Let us suppose it is a poisonous plant. We do not confuse our description with the issue of whether or not it is morally responsible for being poisonous. We maintain that it is part of sound thinking in the life of the senses, when describing the world of nature, to rid ourselves of what we call moral concepts and ideas. We know that we must do the same, too, when we want to gain a clear and objective idea of the animal world. We feel, for instance, that it would be senseless to hold a lion responsible for its cruelty in the same way as we should a man. But if many modern naturalists are finding something like moral conceptions in the animal kingdom, I might say more as a matter of preference than from any real necessity, to a certain extent this may be justified. At the same time, we can at most speak of an echo, of a suggestion, of moral concepts in what animals do and in what happens in the animal kingdom. A simple development of the interpretation of nature requires that we should free ourselves from moral concepts so long as these interpretations are confined to the world of the senses. Then, however, as unprejudiced and thoughtful observation of oneself must affirm, the moral world order enters with authority into our life, making unconditional and absolute demands. We know it is his moral ideas that decide the world of a man, and indeed not only his worth in human social life. It also makes one able to say that even a man who is not moral, if he be granted grace at some special moment to reflect quietly about himself, will determine his own value as a human being according to the moral ideas that light up in his consciousness. It must repeatedly be emphasised that these two systems of concepts must be kept properly distinct.

All this becomes quite different the moment the higher, super-sensible worlds are entered, and one gains the power of perceiving, observing, experiencing and living outside the physical body. When such observation is really attained, it takes place at first in the etheric body of which I spoke yesterday. Then, later, the world, or rather a second super-sensible world, is observed with the astral body. The further we rise into higher worlds, the more do the concepts and ideas that we have worked upon and acquired in the ordinary physical world lose their significance. They must be transformed if we are rightly to describe and understand what comes to meet us in the super-sensible worlds. In the ordinary world of sense existence, we have only one thing to remind us of a fundamental fact familiar to every clairvoyant, and that is when we speak in symbols and metaphors so that our words re-echo what in actual reality is only experienced in higher worlds. When the expression is used that greed or jealousy or hate “burns,” there is something in such an expression that belongs to the many wonderful mysteries of the creative activity of speech, where there shines down into primitive, elementary human consciousness what, in its reality, is only present in the higher worlds. Everyone knows that when he speaks of a “burning hate” he does not mean a burning like the burning of a fire in the external world. He knows that he is speaking figuratively, but that it would avail him nothing to try to explain the objects and processes of nature by calling moral ideas to his aid. In speaking, however, of processes in the higher worlds, it is not in the same metaphorical, figurative sense that we use such expressions. I may perhaps remind you that in my mystery play, The Guardian of the Threshold, certain processes of the soul, feelings and desires, are twice spoken of as “burning” in the higher world. This expression is not to be taken as a metaphor; it stands for something quite real and actual, a spiritual reality. Lucifer, for instance, would never say that something burned him in the same sense as a man in the physical world would speak of hate burning him. Lucifer would say it in a real and literal sense. For what in super-sensible worlds might be compared to the natural order, to the natural processes of the sense world, is far more intimately connected with what may be called the moral world within the super-sensible world, than is the case with these two ideas in the world of the senses.

We can gain some idea of all this at once if we turn to man's etheric body. When speaking of the physical body, we can talk of raising a hand to perform a moral action. We can see the hand with our physical eyes and, to explain its functions, we can investigate it through knowledge belonging to the material world. This description of the hand in physical existence is not essentially different whether we have to do with a hand performing a moral or an immoral action. So far as we can give a description of the hand in physical life at all, we have no business to mix with the question of how the hand is formed and all that we bring to its explanation, the other question of whether it is the habit of performing moral actions or not.

The matter is different where a man's etheric body is concerned. Suppose that to clairvoyant vision a man's etheric body, or some particular part of it, appears incompletely developed. On enquiring into the true cause of such being the case with some particular organ, we find that the reason for the imperfect development lies in a moral fault, in some moral deficiency in the man. Thus, man's moral qualities are actually expressed to some extent in his etheric body. They are still more distinctly and more intensively expressed in his astral body. While, therefore, in the case of a man, we should be doing him a great injustice by assuming that some physical deformity were the expression of something in his moral nature, in what concerns the moral world it is certainly true that if we think of the expressions natural order, natural processes and moral causes as merging into one another in the higher worlds, moral qualities are actual natural causes and are there expressed in forms and processes. To avoid any misunderstanding, I should like expressly to state that the perfect or imperfect development of man's higher organism—his etheric and astral bodies, his higher bodies if we may so call them—need have nothing to do with the perfect or imperfect development of his physical body. A man may even have some physical organ crippled from birth, while the corresponding etheric organ may not only show a perfectly normal development but, in certain circumstances, a more perfect development more complete in itself, when the corresponding physical organ is thus crippled or deformed. The idea, therefore, that moral qualities are faithfully expressed in the form of the body cannot be applied to physical existence, but it is nevertheless absolutely true of the part of man that belongs to super-sensible worlds.

Thus we see that the natural order and the moral order, which apparently run side by side in the ordinary life of the senses, are interwoven in the super-sensible worlds, and in speaking of some part of the etheric body, we can well say that such and such a form is due to hate. Hate shows itself in this member of the etheric body in quite a different way from how love is expressed. We may speak thus where the super-sensible worlds are concerned, but it would have no meaning were we confined to a description of nature in the world of the senses. This necessity to change our concepts when the higher worlds are in question is a particularly distinctive feature as regards what, in ordinary sensory life are reckoned as cravings or desires. We may ask how cravings, desires and emotions appear to us in the life of the senses. They appear in such a way that we seem to see them arise from the very recesses of man's soul being. If we see any particular craving aroused in a man, we are then able to recognise something of his inner condition and how it causes this craving to arise. We can see that it is above all the inner nature of the soul that determines the character of the man's desires. We know quite well, for instance, that a piece of veal will call up quite different cravings in two different men. It does not depend on the veal, but on all that a physical man has in his soul. A Raphael Madonna may leave one man completely cold, while another may experience a whole world of feeling. We may thus say that man's world of desire is kindled within his inmost nature.

All this is changed when we enter the super-sensible world. It is foolish to say that one cannot speak of desires and so forth in super-sensible worlds. They do actually exist, and they are determined in the great majority of cases by external things—by what a being sees and perceives. Hence, a clairvoyant in these worlds cannot get such a near view of the inner conditions of the being he meets when wanting to discover his desires and cravings, but he has to observe the super-sensible surroundings of the being in question. When, therefore, in the super-sensible world, he perceives a being having desires, longings, emotions, he does not look at the being himself, as we should do in the physical world, but he looks at the surroundings. He looks to see what other beings are present in the neighbourhood. He will always find that the nature of the being's desires and emotions vary according to the kind of beings who surround him because there, desires and emotions can always be explained by external things.

A case in point may make all this clearer for you. Suppose a man enters the super-sensible worlds either through the first stages of initiation or by passing through the gate of death. A clairvoyant then observes him in the super-sensible worlds. Let us assume that the man had taken some imperfection belonging to his character with him out of physical existence—some kind of incapacity, a moral imperfection, perhaps some crime committed in the physical world that stays with him in the super-sensible worlds as a torturing memory. To make a search for this, it is not so much a question of the clairvoyant looking into the inner soul of the man, as it is of observing his surroundings. Why should this be? It is because this content of soul, this quality of soul that the man carries over with him as an imperfection or moral flaw performs something real, something actual. It guides the man and brings him to a particular place in the super-sensible world, to the very place where there is some being who possesses in perfection what is imperfect in the man who is newly arrived. Thus, this moral flaw, this consciousness of a faculty lacking, has an actual effect. It guides a man along a certain path and confronts him with a being possessing in perfection the very quality lacking in himself, and he is condemned to continual contemplation of this being.

Thus, in the super-sensible worlds we come into the presence of beings who possess all that we ourselves do not possess, and they show us what we lack. We are not drawn to them by what in physical life are called desires, but by means of a real process. If the clairvoyant sees what kinds of beings surround a man there, he can, by objective observation tell what the man lacks and what are his failings. The being into whose presence the man comes, at whom he is condemned to go on gazing, stands there as a continual reproach, one might say. This reproach, standing outside him, has the effect of rousing within him what in super-sensible worlds might be called a craving, a desire, to become different. It arouses in him the activity and strength to work his own transformation, so that he may rid himself of his fault, of his imperfection. You need not exclaim that the super-sensible worlds must, therefore, always be able to show forth beings having in perfection all that we lack! The super-sensible worlds are indeed rich enough to be able to confront us with beings perfect in everything where we are in fault. They are far richer than we in physical life can imagine. Yes, indeed, the super-sensible world is always able to confront man with a being having in perfection everything in which he himself is imperfect!

This gives some idea of how desires and cravings are real forces, determining our path in the super-sensible world. It is not as though our desires represented something objective in which we could remain stationary. But according to what we are, we are led on our way and placed where all that we lack appears before us as something real, or as an effective reproach. It might easily be said that if this is so man would be completely without freedom in super-sensible worlds because he would be confronted with an external world that would determine how he was to work upon himself. On further observation, however, in super-sensible worlds it turns out that while one being may feel the reproach and begin to work toward perfection, another may resist and fight against imitating what is thus placed as a reproach before him. But this resistance works quite differently in the super-sensible worlds from how it does in the world of the senses. When a being refuses thus to work on himself, he is driven back into other worlds that are strange to him, where he does not know the way, and where the necessary conditions of life are lacking. In other words, this being condemns himself to a kind of inward process of destruction. One may always either choose the fruitful, helpful process shown to one and behave oneself accordingly, or inoculate oneself with destructive forces by resisting it. One has this amount of freedom. But reciprocal action definitely takes place between what is moral and all that is going on in super-sensible space.

A further example of this is that our conceptions of beauty and ugliness, quite in place in the world of the senses, can really no longer be applied when we ascend into super-sensible worlds. Indeed, there are manifold reasons why these conceptions can no longer be used there in the way in which they are used in the world of the senses. When we perceive in super-sensible worlds, we see above all a significant difference in the various beings that meet us. By virtue of the intuitive knowledge that will then be ours, we will be able to say that the being we are looking at is able, and has the will, actually to reveal in his external appearance all that is within him.

Let us assume that such a being has an etheric light-body, that it is one of the beings who do not incarnate into the world of the senses but who only in higher worlds take on a light-body or something of that nature. This light-body may be the expression of what such a being is within. It is not like a man in the sense world who confronts us in a definite form and yet may be hiding within him the most manifold feelings and sentiments, so that he is able to say, “My feelings are for myself alone. What is seen of me externally is my natural form, and I am well able to conceal what appears in my soul.” That is not the case with certain beings in the super-sensible worlds; their external form is the most direct expression of what they bear within them. In their component parts, what they are lies fully open to view. But there are other beings unable directly to express, to manifest, their real nature in their external super-sensible appearance. Confronted by beings of this kind, clairvoyant consciousness has the feeling of something repellent, something from which it wants to get away, something oppressive that may even be offensive.

Thus, we can distinguish two kinds of beings, those who are perfectly willing to expose their inner nature, to reveal what is within them, and beings who give one the feeling that what they expose is definitely distorted and what is within them is concealed and does not issue forth. In man's life of the senses, one cannot say to the same extent, when one person is capable of being secretive and another is perfectly frank, that the difference lies in their natures. Their features may be different, but they belong to the same world as far as their natures are concerned. In the super-sensible worlds, however, those who reveal all that they have within them, and those who do not, are two radically different kinds of beings. If we would use the words beautiful and ugly with approximately the meaning we have in the world of the senses, we must apply them to these two kinds of beings. In the super-sensible world we only come to the point by calling the beings who reveal everything, beautiful, for in front of them we feel just as we do before a beautiful picture. But the beings who do not reveal their natures in their external form are felt to be ugly. Thus, if we can put it so, beauty or ugliness depends upon the fundamental natures of the beings.

What is the consequence of this? When clairvoyant consciousness enters a world where it must have these feelings about beauty and ugliness, much in its whole mode of feeling must undergo a change. It is quite natural for the clairvoyant to say that a being revealing all that he has within him is beautiful, and the other idea immediately arises that to be beautiful is to be upright and honest. A being is beautiful because he hides nothing, because he bears in his very countenance what is within him. True and beautiful are one and the same when we enter the super-sensible world. A being who does not reveal what is within him is ugly. That is immediately felt by clairvoyant consciousness. But there is the further feeling that he lies and does not show what he ought. What is ugly is at the same time untruthful! What is true, upright and honest is at the same time beautiful; what is ugly is untruthful. In the super-sensible worlds a point is reached when a separation between the concepts beautiful and true, in the one case, and between ugly and untrue in the other, loses all meaning. So the expression beautiful must be used of a being who is felt to be honest and upright, while the opposite feeling must be called ugly.

We see here how moral and aesthetic concepts merge when the higher worlds are reached. It is a peculiar feature of this ascent into super-sensible worlds that concepts do thus merge into one another, that things to which we refer separately in the world of the physical senses become linked and fused together. Hence, other modes of feeling must be acquired if expressions of the sense world are to be used of super-sensible beings. One is almost always obliged to represent these things more simply, and still more in accordance with physical consciousness than really coincides with a strictly correct representation because they become so complicated.

To my explanation of how the concepts true, upright and beautiful, in the one case, and ugly and untruthful in the other, become linked together, I must add something further. On making one's way into super-sensible worlds one may meet a being who, according to all ideas acquired in the life of the senses, must be called beautiful, perhaps even exquisite—beautiful, radiant and exquisite. There is the picture! But simply because this being appears in such a form, is no proof that it is also a good being; it may even be quite an evil being and yet stand before one in this sublime, angelic form. According to the idea of beauty that we have in the sense world, we should call such a being beautiful in its super-sensible appearance. How could we help it? Seeing it thus in the world of the senses we should be quite right in calling it beautiful. It may really be the ugliest being in existence, and yet, if one uses the expressions of the sense world, the word beautiful must be used. It may be an utterly evil being, containing hidden wickedness and untruthfulness, a very devil in the form of an angel; this is quite possible in super-sensible worlds. Still, in diverse ways of which we still have to speak, one may gradually get to the truth of the matter by approaching it in clairvoyant consciousness. One is confronted by this angelic form and if, during super-sensible vision, one has become capable of coherent thought, it is possible for one to say, “I must not let myself be deceived by the fact that I am looking at something angelic or a wonderful form of some kind; anything is possible; it may be an angel but also it could be a devil.” One may now begin with what must so often be undertaken on entering higher worlds, that is, a good examination of oneself.

We may seek counsel with ourselves to find out how many bad points such as selfishness or egoism we possess. Then our soul becomes permeated with bitterness and remorse. But this bitterness, this pain, may be the very thing to lead us to purify and cleanse ourselves from our selfishness and egoism. When, through this, one comes to see how little one is free from self, and how necessary it is to struggle to be free, then the whole process in the soul lights up. Now, if we have got so far as not to lose our vision while taking stock of ourselves as usually happens at first, the angel in certain cases may be revealed as no angel at all, but may assume an ugly form. Then one can gradually reach the point of saying to oneself, “I myself gave this wicked being the power to express its wickedness by masquerading before me in a quite different form, but, by permeating myself with purer feelings, I have forced it to show me its true form.”

Consequently, a process of the soul has a compelling force in the super-sensible world. We ourselves either make it possible for these beings to lie to us, or we compel them to show themselves in their true form. The appearance of the super-sensible world to us depends on how and with what qualities we enter it. What is called the source of illusion must be dealt with in quite a different way from what is customary.

Someone may enter the super-sensible world and describe all sorts of glorious things. If you told him he had been deceived he would not believe it, for did he not see it all? But he did not see what he would have seen had he done what I have just described. Had he acted in this way he would at once have seen the truth: It is beautiful when a devil shows himself as a devil but it is ugly for him to appear in the form of an angel.

When we enter the super-sensible world, we must above all rid ourselves of the habit of speaking of things according to the ideas we gained of them in the world of the senses. If we keep to these ideas we shall first say to the form appearing to us that it is a beautiful angel and afterwards that it is a hideous devil. But clairvoyant consciousness, if it is to give a correct description, cannot express it thus. On the contrary, it must say of the ugly devil that it is a beautiful devil, even though, according to material conceptions, it is quite hideous. We do not arrive at this point simply by turning upside down all the ideas gained from the life of the senses. That would certainly be an easy way. Anyone could then describe the devachanic plane, for instance, by putting beautiful for all that was ugly in the sense world, ugly for beautiful, red for green, white for black, and so forth. But that cannot be done; the concepts of the super-sensible worlds must be acquired by experience. We must acquire them gradually, as a growing child acquires sense conceptions, not by theory but by experience. When we become conscious that we are speaking in the language of the super-sensible world, it will no longer seem natural to call a devil ugly if he appears as a devil. Feelings of this kind must be acquired if we are to find our bearings in the super-sensible world and to know our way about there. From this it will be easy to form some idea of what is meant when, for the sake of simplicity, we say, “On the one side stands the world of the senses, on the other, the super-sensible worlds”. Super-sensible existence is entered by crossing the boundary of sensory life, but if it be entered with all that is gained from this life, if the conceptions and ideas acquired in the sense world are applied there, they are of no use and the wrong construction is put upon things. One must learn to transform one's knowledge at the boundary, not just theoretically but in a living way. Ideas acquired in the life of the senses cannot be used at all on crossing over; they must be left behind. So you see how at the boundary much must be left behind of all that is so intimately woven into us in the world of sense existence.

I should like now to describe the matter not theoretically but from the point of view of concrete perception. Let us suppose that someone, having acquired the capacity for crossing the boundary of which we have been speaking, enters the super-sensible world from the world of the senses. At the boundary he asks himself, “What must I leave behind now, so as to feel at home in the super-sensible world?” After due reflection he will say, “I must really leave behind everything I have experienced, learned or acquired in my various earthly incarnations from primeval times up to the present. I must lay everything aside here because I am entering a world in which all that can be learned during incarnation has no further meaning.” It is quite easy to say such a thing, easy to hear and easy to grasp it in the abstraction of a concept. But it is an entirely new inner world really to experience such a thing, to feel it livingly, to lay aside like a garment all that one has appropriated during incarnations in sensory existence in order to enter a world where it no longer has any meaning. If this becomes a living feeling, then one has a living experience that really has nothing to do with theory. It is a living experience such as we have in the world of reality when we actually meet a man and make his acquaintance, and when he speaks and behaves in a certain manner toward us, so that we learn to know him in a way we should were we living with him, not just by making concepts about him.

Here we stand at the boundary between the life of the senses and spiritual life, confronted not by a system of concepts but by a reality that only works super-sensibly, and as concretely and livingly as a human being. This is the Guardian of the Threshold. He is there as a concrete and real being. When we learn to know him, we know he belongs to those beings who, to a certain extent, have taken part in life since primeval times on earth, but who have not gone through what one experiences as a being of soul. This is the being who, in the mystery play, The Guardian of the Threshold, is meant to be expressed dramatically in the words:

Thou knowest well, who has been guardian
Of this realm's threshold since the world began,
What beings need to cross the threshold o'er
Who to thy time and to thy kind belong ...

This “to thy time and to thy kind” is something that proceeds indeed, from the very essence of the matter. Of other times and other kinds are the men, the beings, who since primeval times have in a certain sense separated themselves from the path of humanity on earth, and in each of these we meet a being of whom we may say, “I have a being before me who experiences and lives through a great deal in the world, but he does not concern himself with all the love and grief and pain that can be experienced on earth, nor yet with the failings and immorality there. He neither knows nor wishes to know anything of what has taken place up to now in the depths of man's nature.” Christian tradition expresses this in the words: “When confronted by the mystery of man's becoming, such beings veiled their faces.” A whole world is expressed in this contrast between such beings and human beings.

Now a feeling arises as immediately as does the feeling we have on meeting a fair-haired man, that “he has fair hair.” There comes this feeling: In passing through various earthly cultures. I have naturally acquired faults, but I must get back again to my original state; I must retrace my steps on earth, and this being can show me the way just because he does not possess my faults. One has before one a being who stands there majestically as an actual reproach, but at the same time spurring one on toward all that one is not. The being shows one this most vividly, and one can feel one's own being completely filled with the knowledge of what he is and what he is not. There one stands before this living reproach. This being belongs to the rank of archangels. The meeting actually takes place, and has the effect of suddenly revealing to us what we have become as earthly man in sensory existence. This is direct self-knowledge in the truest and broadest sense. You see yourself as you are; you also see yourself as you ought to become!

But it is not always fit for man to see himself thus. Today I have only spoken of the world of concept and idea that has to be discarded. But much else must be laid aside. When we reach the Guardian of the Threshold, we must really lay aside all that we know of ourselves, but we must still retain something to carry on with us. That is the chief thing. This knowledge that we have to leave everything behind at the threshold is an inner experience in itself to which one must have attained, and the preparation for this stage of clairvoyance must consist in schooling ourselves to bear what would otherwise be full of terror and fear. With proper schooling we need not speak of danger because such a schooling does away with danger. Powers of endurance must be attained through due preparation; they are the fundamental force necessary for all further experience. In ordinary life man is not capable of enduring all that he must endure when standing before the Guardian of the Threshold.

The Guardian of the Threshold is there for a strange purpose. If it is not to be misunderstood, it has to be judged from the standpoint of the super-sensible world. In man, the activities of the super-sensible world are always at work, though he knows nothing of this. Whenever we think and feel and will, it always necessitates a certain activity of the, astral body and connection with the astral world. But man knows nothing of this; if he knew what his bodies really were he would not be able to bear it and would be stunned by it. So that when man meets this being without sufficient preparation, everything must be veiled from him, including the being. The being must draw a veil over the super-sensible world. He must do this for the protection of man who, while within the world of the senses, could not endure the sight. In this we really see a concept that, in the world of the senses, can only be judged morally, as the most direct ordering of nature. The protection of man from sight of the super-sensible world is the function of the Guardian of the Threshold. He must hold man back until he has completed the necessary preparation.

We have here tried to gather up a few ideas that may help us to form a concept of the Guardian of the Threshold. I have tried to collect ideas, concepts and experiences of this kind in a little book, A Road to Self Knowledge, that will be in your hands in the course of the next few days. It may be helpful to you in conjunction with these lectures. The book will consist of a series of eight meditations, and is so conceived that should the reader carry them out, he will gain something definite for his life of soul. Today I have tried to deal with a few of the ideas that can lead us to the Guardian of the Threshold. Starting from this point we shall pass beyond the Guardian of the Threshold, and try to gain some degree of insight and perspective from which we can reach a yet deeper understanding of the Christ Being and of the Christ Initiation.

In order to fulfil the aims of this short course, we shall need the ideas gained in our last lecture along with others if we are to characterise what was alluded to in the lecture of the day before yesterday.

In literature you will find everywhere where mention is made of initiation that the riddle of death, so closely concerning all mankind, is, in some way or another, touched upon. In anything of the nature of records you will find allusions to how at a certain stage the initiate has to experience, in a somewhat different form, how the passing is made through the gate of death. To the occultist these records are actually founded on truth. The experiences that have to be passed through during the ascent into spiritual worlds are akin to the experiences man must undergo in the natural crossing from life in the physical body to the entirely different sheath found between death and a new birth. If we would come to the essence of this matter in the right way, we must first ask what man knows about himself in ordinary life. Such an abstract question may not be of much interest, but for an understanding of what takes place in initiates, it is necessary to focus one's attention on the question, “What does the soul consider itself to be?”

During sleep the soul does not know what it is because sleep runs its course either in a state of unconsciousness, or dreams play into it, which, to be rightly understood must be interpreted by the occultist. So, in considering the questions, “What is man? What is his soul in ordinary sense existence?” we have to do only with waking life. Now we know that in the first place there are the gateways we call our sense organs, through which the world of light and colour, sound and smell, the world of heat and cold, and so forth, stream into our souls. In the life of the senses what we call “our world” is really only a gathering up of all that streams in through these sensory gateways. Then we have the instruments of our understanding, our feeling and willing, with which to work on what meets us in the outer world. Within our soul cravings and desires arise, strivings, states of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, joy, disillusion, and so on. Were we to envisage the whole compass of what man recognises as himself, it is all this. If we want to know what the “inner world” is in ordinary life, we can in reality put forward nothing more than the whole of what has just been described. Moreover, man can also look at himself from outside. He can observe his own body. Through countless facts that need not here be dealt with in detail, he becomes aware that he must regard his body as the instrument for his waking life between birth and death. We have already touched upon the longings that play into this life. Among them is a longing to know what man really is within the limits of birth and death, the longing to issue forth from what may be called the darkness of life. But man has no direct experience in his ordinary life of the senses of how to do this. His experiences are such that the ebb and flow of impulses, cravings, sense impressions, ideas, intellectual connections, and so forth, completely fill his waking life. We can now link this to what was occupying us at the end of our last lecture.

Attention was then drawn to the way in which man, on reaching the boundary between sense existence and spirit existence, has to alter his conceptions, how he must leave behind all his thoughts about the ugly and beautiful, true and false, good and bad, as these concepts take on quite another significance and a different kind of value within the spiritual worlds. From this we can get some idea of how we must change ourselves if we would enter these worlds. Now, having considered what man knows of himself in waking life between birth and death, we can ask in relation to what was said in our last lecture, how much of all this that he knows can he take with him across the boundary where the Guardian of the Threshold stands? How much of all that he lives through and experiences in sense existence, in his impulses, desires and passions, in his feelings, ideas, and the concepts of his understanding and his judgements can he take with him across the boundary where stands the Guardian of the Threshold? It is in the first stages of initiation that man discovers that, of all that constitutes man, nothing at all can be carried over! It is neither exaggeration nor paradox but the literal truth to say that, of all that can be mentioned as belonging to man's sensory existence, he can carry over nothing at all into the spiritual world; everything must be left behind at the boundary where stands the Guardian of the Threshold.

Let us be clear on one point, however. Of all that man knows as himself in sensory existence, one thing of the greatest importance clings; that is, what actually has to do with the stages of initiation. It clings in man's love of and delight in it all, to which it is quite inappropriate to apply the usual rather unsympathetic concept of egoism. We cannot meet the case simply by saying that a man must lay aside his egoism in order to pass over selflessly into the region of the spiritual world. That is easy to say. This egoism, in the finer and more hidden parts of its nature, is intimately connected with what we may not only egoistically hold to be of value in life, but must hold to be of value because through it we are men in the world in which we have to maintain ourselves. We are men through our ability to hold together what we experience, to reflect upon it in a certain way, and to live it through. All this makes us the men we are. Whatever we can do worthily in the ordinary life of the senses, we carry through because we foster this faculty of holding together what we experience in our personality, in our individuality. If we did not value our experience, we should become idle, dull, and achieve nothing for the ordinary world. It would therefore be superficial to say that egoism should always be looked upon as harmful because in its finer composition it represents the force that drives man on in the world in which he has incarnated. Nevertheless, all this must be laid aside; it must remain behind and be discarded for the simple reason that it is not suited to the world we have to enter. As our physical body is hardly adapted for a bath in molten iron at 900 degrees centigrade, what we call “our self,” with all that we love in ordinary life, is ill-adapted for the spiritual world. It must be left behind; if it were not we should experience something resembling the effect a bath of molten iron would have on a physical body. We should not be able to stand it but would be completely destroyed!

A thought may now occur to you that is quite natural but nevertheless has to be grasped and felt in all its depth. This thought is, “If I am now to lay aside all that I am, all that I can talk of in the life of my senses, what at long last, actually remains of me? Is there anything left of myself to enter the spiritual world if I have to cast myself aside?” It is a fact that man can take nothing with him into the super-sensible worlds of all that he recognises as himself; all that he can take is something of which in the ordinary world he knows nothing, something that is in him without his knowledge, that is lying in the depths of his soul as the hidden elements of his being. These must be so strong that out of them he can take into spiritual worlds all of which he will be in need when he has to lay aside what he knows. Thoroughly to grasp this thought, or rather this feeling, you must connect what has just been said with the customary thoughts about death. In ordinary sensory life it is only natural for a man to love what he recognises as himself. Because he knows nothing further of himself over and above his longing for immortality, he has a longing to keep hold of what he has loved in sense existence. His dread of the spiritual world can be so great that it becomes the acme of fear because of the thought, “You are going where all is unsubstantial and unknown; you do not even know whether you can preserve yourself there because all that you know must be lost to you!”

Now it is part of initiation that the elements of being that lie in the hidden depths of the soul should be drawn up while still in sensory life and brought to consciousness. This is partly achieved by the means described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, by raising into consciousness from the depths of the soul experiences that come forth like a condensed and strengthened soul life. This condensed and strengthened life of soul, of which we otherwise know nothing, can pass over into the spiritual world. We thereby prepare ourselves by meditation and concentration, by what is called in The Guardian of the Threshold the “attitude of soul that is strengthened by thought,” so that we are able to take something with us into the spiritual world, and to be something there.

But what happens then to all we have laid aside? Now this is something extraordinarily important. To begin with, if we would put it pictorially, it may really be said that what one talks about in sensory life, all that we know, is laid aside and left with the Guardian of the Threshold at the boundary, just as if it were the soul's clothing that was cast off before the crossing into the spiritual world. Pictorially speaking, that is quite correct. Initiation, however, necessitates that not only should this happen, but something else as well. One's self and all that one has must, indeed, be laid aside, yet something of it must be carried on. Were it not so we should lose all connection with the one and only being of which we were previously conscious. So, after all, something must be carried over! We should leave everything behind and yet take something of it with us. Here we have a contradiction, but really it is not difficult to explain.

You will easily understand what it is to the soul to go through this process if I compare it with a phenomenon of ordinary life. In life we have a similar process, a process to be compared with this, although the latter is far more intense and far more powerfully felt. It is the process of remembering some experience we have had in life. What you experienced yesterday is left behind, but you take it with you in your memory. The important thing is to have sufficiently prepared ourselves, by previous meditation, concentration and so on, so that on crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, we have the power to hold fast in super-sensible memory what we have left behind. If we are not prepared in the proper way we shall not have the power of recollection. We are then a mere nothing for our own consciousness; we know nothing of ourselves. On entering spiritual worlds the point is to remember through super-sensible memory what one has left behind. These memories are all that can be taken with one. That they are so taken, ensures the so-called continuity, the preservation, of the self. Even in ordinary life, we can be bereft of the continuity of consciousness, and with it lose all our real self. This happens when things that should be remembered—many things indeed in our life—have to be effaced from consciousness and forgotten through ill health. Much in ordinary life depends on the continuity of memory. All that is made possible by the first steps of initiation hangs on the memory in super-sensible life, on preserving the memory of ordinary life. Such a memory is indeed possible, and it is brought about through initiation. All this can be linked to the riddle of death.

When a man passes through death, he has not the identical forces he acquired by initiation because, when he lays aside the body, he acquires certain forces through the help of beings of the super-sensible world. He gains the power to preserve in memory what in laying aside the body he has forgotten. Here you have the real answer to the question, “What remains of the experiences of my soul when I have passed through the gate of death? How does my soul live on?” That is a question of the greatest importance, and through the experience of the initiates you have the answer, “The soul lives on because in its hidden depths there are forces able to hold fast in memory what has been experienced.” To be immortal means having the power to preserve in memory the renounced past existence. That is the real definition of human immortality. Through initiation we have proof, experienced proof, that forces live in man that can remind him, after he has laid aside his physical body, of all that he has experienced in sensory life, and of anything at all that has happened. In this way the human self is preserved into the future; thus man experiences his former existence as memories in his future life. We should feel the whole power of the thought that is called forth by initiation, that could be expressed in the words, “The human being is of such a nature that he bears his own being through future ages by the force of super-sensible memory.” If you feel this thought pouring with feeling into the void of the universe, picturing the soul as it carries its own being through eternity, then you have a far better definition of what is called a monad than can be given through any philosophical concepts. Then you will feel what a monad is, that is, a self-enclosed being, a being carrying itself. It is only through the experiences of initiation that one can arrive at such conceptions.

That is only one side of what I have been describing to you. We must consider its first steps more precisely if we want to approach with feeling what can give us ideas about initiation. Let us assume that a man has, through an attitude of soul strengthened by thought and meditation, come to the point of being able to perceive in his etheric body. This perception is experienced in the body that, in its several parts, is more closely bound up with the brain, and less closely, for example, with the hands. The feeling oneself into the etheric body is experienced in the sensation, “You are being spread out. You are becoming wider, fleeing out into the boundless spaces of the universe.” Such is the subjective feeling. This is not, however, that one rushes headlong into the unreal and the vague; everything there is concrete life. One lives oneself into the purely concrete, and in this widening out one comes at the same time to definite experiences. Except in special circumstances, hardly anyone accomplishing the first steps of initiation will be spared the experience of a particular impression or feeling of dread and anxiety, an experience of being in the vast universe with no firm ground beneath one's feet, an oppression of the soul. This is the kind of inner experience one lives through.

But there is something of still greater importance. In ordinary life we think, we have an idea, one thought suggests another, and we connect the one thought with the other, combining these perhaps with feelings, wishes, willing and so forth. In a sound life of the soul, one will always find it possible to say, “I think this, I feel that.” Were we unable to speak thus, it would mean a break, a disturbance, in sound soul life. We widen out, we expand when growing into the etheric body, but at the same time our thoughts also expand. When thinking, we lose the sensation of being within ourselves, and we get the feeling that we are growing into the etheric world that is permeated with thoughts that think themselves. That arises as an actual experience. It is as if we ourselves were blotted out and our thoughts were thinking themselves, as if the feelings we ourselves have, or that things have, felt themselves, as if we could not do our willing for ourselves but that all this was awakened and willed in us. The feeling one has is one of being given up to the objective, to the world. But, as a rule, another feeling is added. This is another of the experiences during the first steps of initiation. We have the feeling that, as we expand and widen out, and our thoughts think themselves, feelings feel themselves, in the same measure our consciousness becomes weaker and weaker, more and more toned down, and our capacity for knowing is deadened.

Now for the soul to go through such experiences, one must allow something quite definite to enter it. It is necessary for these things to be grasped by the soul as accurately as possible. For this reason I have collected a few things—if not the same, of a similar nature and tending in the same direction—in the book A Road to Self Knowledge. If you take it in connection with these lectures, you may gain a good deal. A quite definite state of soul, produced by oneself, must come about similar to what I described yesterday. One must practice self-observation and try to bring home to oneself, without either mercy or consideration, the really grievous faults one knows oneself to possess, so that there comes before the soul a feeling, into which one must live deeply, of how little one corresponds to the great ideal of humanity. With real force of thought and meditation, one's moral weakness, all one's weaknesses, must be called up before the soul. So doing, one will become stronger. What has already begun to be deadened, what has been described as a kind of fading out of the soul, brightens up again. It once more begins to be visible.

At this point something can be experienced that finds easy expression in words, but is oppressive and even disturbing during the first stages of initiation. These words all apply to the life of soul and not to life in the body. For anyone who has been led aright into spiritual worlds, will already have received intimation that there is no question of external bodily danger. Such a man, if he faithfully observes the good advice offered him, can remain externally the same man in life, in spite of the ebb and flow within him of every sort of pain, torment and disillusion, among which may also be premonitions of bliss. Such things must be gone into because in them lie the seeds of a higher vision, of a higher insight. In this way one gradually comes to recognise that by learning to observe, to perceive and to experience independently of the physical body—in other words, learning to live in the etheric body—one grows into the etheric world in the way described. But in so doing one learns the reason why this etheric world fades into a kind of unconsciousness. In simple words we might say, “It does not like me; it does not think me suited for it.” This deadening, this vanishing away, is merely the expression for, “They will not let me in!” But in dwelling on one's faults one grows stronger, and what had begun to disappear lights up again. This produces, however, the significant feeling that a super-sensible world of an etheric nature is around one, but that it may only be entered to a certain degree. It will only allow one to enter to the degree that one makes oneself increasingly strong, morally and intellectually. Otherwise, no. And it shows you this by fading away before you.

That is what is such a strain—so oppressive and sometimes even grotesque and distorted—this battling for the spiritual world and the consciousness of how unworthy one is for entrance there. By continuing to work hard at our self-contemplation and the strengthening of our attitude of soul through thinking, by meditation, concentration and permeating oneself with moral impulses, one can enter ever more and more into the etheric world. This is, after all, only the first stage of initiation. If we would review the next stage, we must call attention to a most remarkable phenomenon that really has no parallel in ordinary sensory existence.

The body that man lives in when once he can perceive the etheric world is his etheric body. But this he already possessed before. The difference between his etheric body before and after super-sensible observation is only that through initiation the etheric body is as it were awakened. While before it was as though asleep, afterward it is awakened. That is really the most apt expression one can use. But one thing will be noticed, that, when by means of any particular measure that has taken effect in the life of the souls the faculty has been acquired of seeing some fact or being of the etheric world—well, you then see just this being. Assume that you are so far prepared that you see this one being, or perhaps also a second being. Then, if you maintain the same power, you will probably see the two beings—or one of them—again and again. This is not difficult. But you will not easily see anything more. If you let the matter rest for awhile and then come back to it, you will still only see the same. In short, the etheric world is not like the physical world. Once the eyes are prepared for the physical world, they see all that it is possible to see; if the ears are prepared, they hear everything equally well. It is not so, however, in the etheric world. There you must keep preparing anew, from one kind of being to another kind of being and, bit by bit, the parts of the etheric body. There you must look for the whole world again, and you must awaken your etheric body for every single human being over and over again. You set up a connection, a relation, with what you have once seen, for which you have once awakened your etheric body, and must always go on awakening new relations. The etheric body alone cannot do this. It cannot control itself and can only keep on returning to the same being, or it can wait until it is prepared for seeing other beings.

A man who has taken the first steps toward initiation and has reached the point of seeing some being or process cannot at once find his bearings in the spiritual world; he cannot freely compare one being with another because he has no free access to the beings. If you are to find your bearings, if you are not merely to look at things but are to say with decision, “This is a being or that is a process,” then you must be able to compare whichever it is with other beings and processes of the super-sensible world. You must be able to make your way from one to the other; you must be able to find your bearings. This orientation has to be learned, and we learn it through regular meditation and by permeating ourselves with moral impulses. Then we feel growing within us forces the activity of which we experience as something strange. If we would describe this, we must return to what was said before. The etheric body, though present in ordinary life, is asleep, and for super-sensible perception must be awakened. But the forces with which to awaken it must be there in the soul. What is done here is experienced in a special way. I can only make this clear by means of a comparison.

Imagine that you go to sleep and that you know, “My body is lying in bed; I cannot move it but I know it is there! I am going into the spiritual world, but I shall come back soon to wake this body up again.” This can happen consciously, but in the case of a man in ordinary life it happens unconsciously. He really goes through what I have just been describing. In his physical condition he is both a waking and a sleeping being and it is he himself who wakes his physical body, although he is not conscious that this is so. But a man who has taken the first steps toward initiation becomes conscious of this, and thereafter actually knows, “There is my etheric body.” His attitude toward it is such that he feels, “That is the more narrowly confined part that corresponds to the brain; this is the more mobile part corresponding to the hands; this, the completely mobile part corresponding to the feet.” This, however, may sound strange. We know all this but the knowledge sleeps in us.

By further development, by preparing our inner life of soul in the necessary way and reaching up to the spiritual world, we are continually awakened. First we awaken this bit, then that. Now we set this movement going, then another. In short, it is a conscious awakening of the etheric body, so that we may speak of the sleeping state as being the ordinary state of the etheric body, and of a waking state into which it is brought by initiation. That is the difference between sleeping and waking in the physical body and in the etheric body. In the physical body sleeping and waking are alternating conditions, they occur in turn; while in the etheric body there is no such alternation; in it sleeping and waking are simultaneous. Thus, a man on the way to initiation may, by his first efforts, reach the point of awakening many of the etheric parts of his head, while all that corresponds to his hands and feet is still deep asleep. Whereas the physical body is asleep at one time, awake at another, in the etheric body some parts are awake and others asleep at the same time. Progress consists in making the sleeping parts more and more into waking ones, and that is what we actually are doing.

If man were not a spiritual being, all that I have here put forward as a comparison could not take place; then, as he lay in bed, he could not observe the awakening of his physical body. But what belongs to the soul is something that is independent of what is awakened. What awakens it bit by bit is not the etheric body, it is something else. If we grasp the concept, “There is something in my soul that holds active sway over my etheric body, and bit by bit awakens it,” we then have a concrete and correct idea of the so-called astral body. To live in the astral body, to experience oneself in the astral body, means in the first place that one feels oneself to be a kind of inner forceful being, gradually able bit by bit to awaken conscious life in the sleeping etheric body. So there is a condition that may be described as one in which we experience ourselves outside the physical body, not only in the etheric body but also in the astral body.

In order to be clear about this step in initiation, it is necessary to acquire the power of differentiating between the various merely inward experiences in coming down into the etheric body. I have described what is experienced on entering the etheric body, how you expand, flow out. That is the concrete feeling. But the chief feeling generally experienced is that you are also pressing further and further out of your physical body and pouring yourself out into the wide spaces of the universe—the living oneself into the astral body, the conscious living into what is bit by bit awakening the etheric body. This is all linked up, too, with a springing out of oneself to seize something outside; this is not a mere expansion of something already there One realises when in the etheric body that the physical body still belongs to it. But when one makes one's way into the astral body, one realises, “It is as if I had first lived in myself, and had then come out of myself to penetrate into something else; now my physical body, and perhaps my etheric body, too, is something outside me. I am now in something where I was not wont to be; my physical body has now become objective and no longer subjective. I am looking at it from outside.”

This springing beyond oneself, this looking at and understanding oneself, is the crossing over to life in the astral body. When this is attained, when this leap over has been made and you know this is now you and that you are looking at yourself, just as you used to look at a plant or a stone, you will then have the feeling that, indeed, no one will fail to have in the first stages of initiation, “Now you are in the super-sensible world, and you are spreading yourself out, away into infinity.” One cannot use the expression on all sides because the super-sensible world has many more sides and quite different dimensions from those of the ordinary world. But you are alone there. You are with your life in the astral body and everywhere around is the universe, an infinite expansion, not any being anywhere but yourself alone! You are overcome by a feeling of what may be called loneliness of soul raised to its supreme degree.

It is a matter of enduring such feelings and of being able to go through them because it is by surmounting them that the forces arise that lead one on; they become the forces of the seer. What I have tried to put in a few lines in the drama The Guardian of the Threshold becomes intensely real. I refer to the scene in which Maria leads Johannes into the infinite tracts of the fields of ice where the human soul is alone—in absolute loneliness. In this loneliness one has to wait—patiently wait. Much depends on whether one is able to wait, whether one has acquired sufficient moral force to wait. Then comes something of which it may be said, “Yes, you are absolutely alone in infinity, but in you there arises something like pure memories that yet are no memories.” I say, “Like memories that are no memories” because all our memories in ordinary life are such that we can recall anything with which we once came into contact, anything we once experienced. But imagine that you stand there with all that is innermost in your soul, while images keep rising up within you that need to be related to something. But you have never previously experienced them! You know that these images are related to beings, but you have never met these beings. This surging up within you of an unknown world, which you realise you bear within you as pure image—this is the next experience on the path of initiation.

After that comes a strange experience in which it is possible to get into relation with all the images that arise, that you can love and hate them, that you can feel reverence in face of one, pride in face of another. Not only a number of inner images are awakened, but also something like a surging hither and thither of super-sensible feelings and sensations. You are utterly alone with yourself, alone with your own inner world rising up within you. At first you are aware of nothing except an indefinite gloom, but your connection with everything is complete.

Let us take a characteristic example. Something that rises there as a picture calls forth your love. This is a severe temptation; a terrible temptation now arises because you love something in yourself. You are exposed to the temptation of loving the thing because it is yours, and you must now put forth all your strength not to love this being just because it is yours, but, in spite of the fact that it is yours, to love it for some quality it possesses. It becomes your task to make selfless what is in yourself. That is a hard task, a task with which nothing can be compared that has to do with the soul in the ordinary physical world. In the ordinary sensory existence it is quite impossible for a man to love what is within him absolutely selflessly. But that is what he must do on rising to this world. By irradiating the being with the force of love, it radiates force itself, and this makes you feel that “it is trying to get out of you.”

You also notice that the more love you yourself can apply, the more strength it has to break through something that is like a veil, and to make its way out into the universe. If you hate it, it also gains force, but then it strains you apart, presses against you and makes its way through, as though heart or lungs would force themselves through the skin of your body. This runs through everything with which you bring yourself into relation through love and hate. The difference between the two experiences is that what you love selflessly goes away, but you feel that you, too, go with it, that it takes you away, and that you, too, take the same path. What you hate, or anything toward which you show pride, tears through the veil and disappears leaving you alone, and you remain in your loneliness. At a certain stage this difference is strongly marked. You are either taken away or left behind. If you are taken, you are able to reach the being whose image you have experienced. You learn to know it.

By this surging up within you of the images of unknown beings with whom you are nevertheless in relation, you come out of yourself and meet all these beings whom you learn to know in a second spiritual world. You live yourself into a world generally called the devachanic world, the true spiritual world, not the astral world. It is nonsense to say that through his astral body, which I have described as the awakener of the etheric body, man enters the astral world. Rather does he rise into the true spiritual world, into what is called the spirit-land in my book Theosophy. There he meets pure spiritual beings.

Now to know more of these beings in their different orders, and how they become what is described as the world of the Higher Hierarchies, whom we have learned to know as rising from the Angels to the Seraphim, of all this we shall hear more in the next lecture.

Yesterday, in such words as are possible for these matters, I tried to characterise how the withdrawal from the physical body, and feeling and experiencing oneself in the etheric and astral bodies take place. I pointed out that this experience takes place in such a way that living oneself into the etheric body seems like a flowing out, as it were, into cosmic space, during which one is continually conscious of streaming out into infinity in all directions from one's own body as a central point. Experience in the astral body, however, appears as a springing out of oneself into the astral body. It is at this moment that one begins to feel outside one's physical body in such a way that everything in the physical body that was called oneself is now experienced as something external to one, something existing outside. One is inside something else. I pointed out to you yesterday that the world then confronting us must be called, in conformity with my book, Theosophy, for instance, the spirit-land. It might also be called the lower mental plane. It would be wrong if something derogatory is implied by imagining that when one selflessly and in the right way reaches the point of living in the astral body, one is then in the astral world.

Now there is a great difference between life, observation and experience in sensory existence, and experience in the astral body in face of the spirit-land. In the life of the senses we are confronted with substances, forces, objects, processes and so on. We are also confronted with beings, and besides the beings of the other kingdoms of nature, insofar as we are justified in calling them so, we are confronted in particular with our own fellow beings. In sensory existence we confront these other beings in such a way that we know how they take up into themselves the substances and forces of the world of the senses, permeate themselves with these, and thereby live the life that runs its course by means of external natural forces within the laws of nature. In short, in the life of the senses we must distinguish between the course of nature, and the beings who live out their lives within this natural course and permeate themselves with the substances and forces there. We have, then, the course of nature and also the beings. But when in the astral body we are seeing into the spiritual world, we can no longer make this distinction. In the spiritual world we are confronted with beings alone, but over against these beings there is no such thing as the so-called course of nature. Everything to which you are guided in the way indicated in our last lecture, everything you meet, is being. Wherever there is anything, it is being, and you cannot say as you do in sensory life that there is an animal and here the external substances it is going to cat. There is not this duality there, for whatever is, is being.

I have already told you how you stand with regard to these beings, that this is mainly the world of the hierarchies, and we have often described it from other points of view. You learn to know the world of the hierarchies in their order of succession, from those beings whom you learn to know first as angels, and archangels, up to those who seem to be almost vanishing, so indistinct do they become—the Cherubim and Seraphim. But one thing is possible when you find yourself in these worlds; you can succeed in entering into relation with these beings. Whatever you are in sensory existence you must have left behind you, in the sense of the way we described this before, but, as I have already said, you still bear it in memory. Into these worlds you carry the memory of what you have left behind and, as in physical life we look back into our memories, so you look back from the higher worlds on to what you have been in sensory existence. You still possess it in memory pictures.

Now as you ascend the first steps of initiation into higher worlds, it is good to learn to distinguish between the first step and those that follow. It is not good to neglect this. It really amounts to this, that you will best learn to find your way in higher worlds if, among the first memory pictures you carry across there, which remind you of your sensory existence, you do not have the image of your own physical body and of its form. It is indeed a matter of experience that this is so. Anyone who has to give advice as to the exercises to be undertaken in order to bring about the first steps of initiation will see to it that, after crossing the threshold, after passing the Guardian of the Threshold, the first memory images have nothing to do with the perception of the physical bodily form. They are essentially such as can be included under the heading of a morally intellectual perception of the self. What you should first experience is how to estimate your own moral qualities. You should perceive what moral or immoral tendencies you have, what sense of truthfulness, or superficial feeling, and also realise how to assess your value as a man of soul.

This is what must first be felt. This does not arise in such a way that it can best be expressed in the words we use in physical life. When you enter the spiritual world, experience is far more intimately bound up with you than anything of the kind in sensory existence. When you have done something that does not satisfy you morally, your entire inner life feels that there is something bitter, that there is something as it were poured out into the world to which you have now accustomed yourself, that fills it with an aroma of bitterness—but aroma should not here be understood in the physical sense. You feel yourself soaked through with this aroma of bitterness. What can be morally justified is filled with a pleasant aroma. One might say that the sphere you enter when you are not satisfied with what you have done, is dark and gloomy, but light and clear is the part of the universe into which you come when you can be at peace with yourself. Therefore, if you are to find your way about, this should be the kind of moral or intellectual valuation to which you should submit yourself, that, like the atmosphere, fills for you the world into which you are entering. So it is best to feel this world with your soul, and after having made yourself familiar with this feeling of the soul for spiritual space, only then should the memory arise that may have the very form and shape of your physical bodily form in sensory life, as long as this form comes before you like an interpenetration into your newly acquired moral atmosphere.

What I have here been describing may not, however, only arise out of the midst of daily life, coming like an entrance into the spiritual world when the appropriate steps toward initiation have been taken. It may also occur in another way. However it arises, it depends fundamentally on the karma of the individual human being and on the way he is constituted. It cannot be said that one way of arising is better or worse than the other; it is simply that either one or the other may occur. In the midst of his daily life man may feel himself drawn into the spiritual world, but it may also happen that his experience during sleep becomes different. In the ordinary experience as soon as a man falls asleep he becomes unconscious, regaining his consciousness on re-awaking, and in his life during the day, except for remembrance of his dreams, he has no memory of his sleeping life. He lives through sleep in a state of unconsciousness. Now in the first stage of initiation it may also happen that something else is extended over man's sleeping life so that he begins to experience another way of falling asleep. With the approach of sleeping life another kind of consciousness is then experienced. This lasts, interrupted more or less by periods of unconsciousness, for various lengths of time according to the progress the man has made. Then, as morning approaches it dies away. During this experience, in the first period after falling asleep, there arises what can be called a memory of one's moral attitude, of one's qualities of soul. This is particularly vivid just after going to sleep and it gradually dies away toward the time of waking.

Therefore, as a result of the exercises for the first stages of initiation, the usual unconsciousness of sleep can become lit up and transfused with consciousness. Then one rises into the actual worlds of the hierarchies and feels oneself to belong there. But this living within the world in which all is being, must, as compared with ordinary life in the world of the senses, be described somewhat as follows. Suppose that someone in the sensory world is standing before a pot of flowers and looking at it. The plant is outside, external to him; he observes it as he stands there looking at it. Now the experience in the higher world of which we have just been speaking, can in no way be compared with this kind of observation. It would be quite wrong to imagine that there one went about looking at the beings thus, from outside, placing oneself before them, as one would observe a flowerpot in the world of the senses. It is not so. If you would compare anything in sensory existence with the way in which you stand as regards the world of the hierarchies, it could only be in the following manner. This, of course, will be only a comparison, but it may help you to have a clear idea.

Let us assume that you sit down somewhere and instead of thinking laboriously of some special thing, you set yourself to think about nothing in particular. Some uncalled-for thought may then arise within you, of which, to start with, you were not thinking at all. It may occupy your soul so completely that it altogether fills it; you feel you can no longer distinguish the thought from yourself and that you are entirely one with the thought that thus suddenly arises. If you have the feeling that this is a living thought, it draws your soul with it, your soul is bound up with the thought, and it might just as well be said that the thought is in your soul as that your soul is in the thought, then you have something in sense life similar to the way in which you get to know the beings of the higher hierarchies and the way you behave toward them. The words, “I am beside them, I am outside them,” lose all meaning. You are with them, just as your thoughts live with you. Not that you might say, “The thoughts live in me.” You have rather to say, “A thought thinks itself in me.” The beings experience themselves, and you experience the experience of the beings. You are within them; you are one with them, so that your whole being is poured out into the sphere in which they live. You share their life, all the time knowing quite well that they, too, are experiencing themselves in this. No one must imagine that after the first steps on the path of initiation he will immediately have the feeling of experiencing all that these beings experience. Throughout he need know nothing beyond his being in their presence, as in sensory existence he might be confronted by somebody he was meeting for the first time. The expression, “The beings live and experience themselves within you,” is justified, yet you need know nothing more of them to begin with than you would know of a man on first acquaintance. In this way, therefore, it is a co-experience. This gradually grows in intensity, and you penetrate ever further into the nature of these beings.

Now, something else is bound up with what has just been described as a spiritual experience. It is a certain fundamental feeling that rests in the soul like the actual result of all its separate experiences. It is a feeling that perhaps I can picture to you by means of a contrast. What you experience in the world of the senses when standing at some particular spot looking at what is around you is the exact opposite of this fundamental feeling. Imagine someone standing here in the middle of the hall, seeing everything that is here. He would say that here is this man, there that man, and so on. That would be his relation to the surrounding world. But it is, however, the opposite of the prevailing mood in the world we have just been describing. There, you cannot say, “I am here, there is this being, there that one,” but you must say, “I am this being.” In reality that is the true feeling. What I have just said as regards all the separate beings is felt in face of the world as a whole. You are really everything in yourself. This being within the beings is extended over your whole mood of soul. It is in this mood of soul that you experience consciously the time between falling asleep and waking. When you live through this consciously, you cannot but have a poured out feeling toward all that you experience. You feel yourself within everything to the very limit of the world that you are at all able to perceive.

I once made the following experiment, and I should like to cite it here as an episode—not as anything remarkable, but in order to make myself clear. Some years ago it suddenly struck me that certain more or less super-sensible states come before us in the great poetic works of the world as a reflection, an echo. What I mean is that if a clairvoyant becomes clear about the fundamental mood of his soul in certain super-sensible experiences and he then turns to world literature, he will find that such moods of soul run through certain chapters, or sections, of the really great poetic works. These moods are not necessarily the poet's occult experiences, but the clairvoyant can say to himself that, if he wishes to live over again as an echo in the sensory world what he experienced in this mood of his soul, he can turn to some great poem and find there something like its shadow picture. When in the light of his experience the clairvoyant reads Dante, for instance, he sometimes has the feeling that there in the poem is a reflection, or shadow, that in its original state can only be experienced clairvoyantly.

Now I once made a search for certain states capable of description in poetic works, in order to set up some sort of concordance between experiences in higher worlds and what is present as a reflection of these in the physical world, and I asked myself, “Is it not possible that this particular mood poured out over the soul during fully conscious sleep (that I have described as a being in the higher worlds, but a being to be apprehended in the mood), might not this be found echoed in some mood of soul in the literature of the world?” But nothing came from this direct approach.

When the question was put differently, however, something was forthcoming. Experience shows that it is also permissible to ask, “How would a being who was not a human being—for instance, some other being of the higher hierarchies—feel this mood of soul, this living within the higher worlds?” Or, to put it more exactly, man feels himself within the higher worlds and sees beings of the other hierarchies. Now just as in the world of the senses you can ask, “What does another person feel about something that you yourself feel?” so this same question can be put to a being of the higher hierarchies, and it will then be possible to gain an idea of the experience of some other being. Just as it would be possible for us in fully conscious sleep, we can form an idea, as in the case of man himself, of a definite kind of higher experience in face of life in the higher worlds, but of experience that plays a large part in the soul of man.

One can imagine, therefore, a being belonging to a higher hierarchical rank than man on earth, who is able to feel what human beings feel but in a higher way. If the question is put in this way, if you reflect not on an ordinary but on a typical man, and then picture the mood of soul, it becomes possible to find something in world literature from which one can form this concept, that such a mood is poured out as an echo of what can really only be represented in its original state correctly by translating oneself into the world we have just been describing. But there is certainly nothing to be found in European literature of which it might be said, “One can here trace the mood of what pours itself out over a soul when it feels itself within the spiritual world and all that belongs there.” It is wonderful how you begin to understand in a new way and to feel fresh delight and admiration when you let this mood work on you like an echo coming from the words of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Quite a new light floods these lines of the Gita when you realise that all I have just been describing is contained, not in the words, but in the echo of the mood that fills the soul. I wanted to give this merely as an illustration of clairvoyance; to picture it in such a way that you can now take up this poem and try to discover the mood flowing into it. Starting from that you may get a feeling of the clairvoyant's corresponding experience, when from his daytime existence he is transposed into these worlds in full consciousness, or when his consciousness is extended during sleep.

Something else, however, is mixed with this mood, this basic feeling; something else accompanies it. It is only by means of a concept that I can try to picture what is here experienced in words because one must always have recourse to words in physical life. What is experienced is something of this nature. So far as you feel anything at all of a world, you feel yourself poured out into it. At first you do not really feel anything external anywhere, you only feel the one point in the world in which you were beforehand. That is the only external thing you feel. You find whatever harm you have done and whatever good you have done crowded into that one point. That is external. For the rest, you feel yourself with all that you have achieved in the world poured out over the whole world. You have indeed the feeling that it would be nonsense to apply certain words natural in sensory existence to this experience of your connection with the world. For instance, the words before and after cease to have meaning because as you go to sleep you do not feel that it is before, and that waking comes after. You only feel certain experiences that begin as you go to sleep, and continue to happen. After living through a number of experiences, in a certain respect you are at the same point again, but not in the same way as before going to sleep.

You have rather the feeling, “I have been to sleep,” and the feeling that the word “then” can no longer justifiably be used. There have taken place a number of experiences during which before and after have ceased to have meaning. If I now use the expression after a certain time (though it is not correct)—“after a certain time one again stands where one stood before”—it must be imagined that you are standing opposite yourself, as it were, as though you were out of your body, walking around and looking at yourself. So you stand at about the same point where you stood on leaving the body, but you are now standing opposite yourself; you have changed your direction. Then (again using “then” in a merely comparative sense) events continue to take place, and it is as if you had returned to your body and were inside it once more. You do not experience any before or after, but what you can only describe as a revolving, about which the words “beginning,” “middle” and “end” can only be used together.

In this kind of experience, it is just the same as when you say about any point of the whole circumference of a circle, “Here it begins,” and, having made the whole round, “Here it ends.” You have no feeling of having lived through a period of time, but rather the feeling of making a round, of describing a circle, and in this experience you completely lose the feeling of time that you normally have in sensory existence. You only feel that you are in the world that has the fundamental characteristic of being round, of being circular. A being who has never walked the earth, who has never lived in the world of the senses but has always lived in the world of which we are speaking, would never be struck by the idea that the world once had a beginning and could be coming to an end. He would always think of it as a self-enclosed, round world. Such a being would have no inducement to say that he strove for eternity for the simple reason that everything around him is eternal, that nowhere is there anything beyond which he could look from the temporal into the eternal.

This feeling of timelessness, this feeling of the circle, appears at a certain stage of clairvoyance, or in the conscious experience of sleep. With it is intermingled a certain yearning, a yearning that arises because in this experience in the higher world you are never really at rest. Everywhere you feel yourself in this revolving movement, always moving, never staying still. The longing you have is, “If only a halt could be made, if only somewhere one could enter time!” This is just the opposite, one might say, of what is experienced in sensory existence, in which we always feel ourselves in time while yearning after eternity. In the world of which I have been speaking, we feel ourselves in eternity with this one desire, “If only at some point the world would stand still and enter time existence!” This is what you realise to be the very fundamental feeling—the everlasting movement of the universe, and the longing for time; this experience of eternal becoming, this becoming that is its own surety, and the longing, “Ah, if only one could but somewhere, somehow, come to an end!”

Yes, when the conceptions of the life of the senses are applied to these things one is fully justified in thinking them strange. But we must not let this impede us. That would imply that we do not wish to accept a real description of the higher worlds. If that is really what we want on setting foot in them, all ordinary descriptions of the world of the senses, and everything else besides, must be abandoned. I beg you to look upon this feeling I have just pictured as an experience that one has in oneself and for oneself, and it is important that one should experience this in oneself and for oneself, because that belongs to the first stages on the path to initiation. This feeling may arise in two ways. In one way it may be expressed by saying, “I have a longing for what is transitory, for existence concentrated in time; I do not wish to be poured out into eternity.” If you have this feeling in the spiritual world (I ask you to consider this well) you do not necessarily bring it back with you into the world of the senses. On the contrary, it need not be present there at all when you return; it may only be in the spiritual world. You may say you have this feeling in the spiritual world—chat you would like to experience yourself right within time, you would like to be concentrated in independence at some point of world existence. You would like to do this so completely that you could say, “Why should I bother about eternity that extends itself out in the rest of the universe! I want to make this something independent for myself, and to live in that.”

Just imagine this wish, this feeling, experienced in the spiritual world. We have not yet expressed this exactly, but have still to describe it in another way to make it precise, and then to combine it with something else. If we want to bring this down into human sensory existence, we have to describe it—if we still wish to do so at all—by what is reminiscent of the world of the senses. You will remember that I have just said, “Up above, everything is being and we cannot speak of it in any other way.” But that is not the whole truth. When in the world of the senses some desire takes possession of us we may say, “You feel yourself driven on by some being who works in you and causes you to express this wish to make sure of some particular point.” If one has understood the wish to make sure of one point, the wish to be concentrated in temporal things, as an impulse given by a being of the spiritual world—it can only be such a being—then one has to grasp what influence Luciferic beings have in that world.

Having reached this conception, we may now ask, “How can one speak about being confronted with a Luciferic being?” When, in the world of the higher hierarchies, we feel thus influenced to draw away from eternity to a state of independent concentration in the world, then it is that we feel the working of Lucifer. When we have experienced that, then we know how the forces that are Luciferic can be described. They may be described in the way I have just shown, and only then does it become possible to speak with reality of a contrast that even finds an echo in our world of the senses. This contrast simply arises from the realisation that in sensory existence it is quite natural for us to be placed into the temporal, whereas in the spiritual world that lies—to speak from a transitory point of view—above the astral world, it is natural for us no longer to perceive what is temporal, but only what is eternal. This devachanic experience that appears there as a longing for temporal life is echoed in the longing for eternity. The interplay of actually experienced time—time experienced in the passing moment—with the longing for eternity, arises because of the penetration of our world of the senses by the devachanic world, the world of spirit-land. Just as for ordinary sense perception, the spirit-land is hidden behind our physical world, so the eternal is hidden behind the passing moment. Just as there is no point where we can say, “Here ends the world of the senses, and here begins the spiritual world,” but everywhere the spiritual world permeates sensory existence, so each passing moment, in accordance with its quality, is permeated by eternity. We do not experience eternity by coming out of time, but by being able to experience it clairvoyantly in the moment itself. We are guaranteed eternity in the passing moment; in every moment it is there.

Wherever you go in the world, when speaking from the standpoint of clairvoyant consciousness, you can never say of beings that one is temporal and another eternal. To say that here is a temporal being or there an eternal being has no meaning for spiritual consciousness. Real meaning lies in something quite different. What underlies existence—the passing moment and eternity—is everywhere and forever, and the only way to put the question is, “How comes it that eternity sometimes appears as the passing moment, that the eternal sometimes appears temporal, and that a being in the world assumes a form that is temporal?” It simply comes from this, that sensory existence, wherever it occurs, is interspersed with Luciferic beings, and to the extent that these beings play into sensory existence, eternity is rendered temporal. It must therefore be said, “A being appearing anywhere in time is eternal insofar as it has power to liberate itself from the Luciferic existence, but insofar as it is subject to it, it remains temporal.”

When we begin to describe things in a spiritual way, we leave off using expressions of ordinary life. In ordinary life, if we apply the teaching of religion and of anthroposophy, we should say, “Man has his body as an outer sheath, and within he has his soul and spirit being; his body is mortal, but his being of soul and spirit is immortal and eternal.” This is how it should be expressed, insofar as we are in the world of the senses and want to describe what is there. It is no longer correct if we wish to apply the standpoint of the spiritual world; then it must be put in this way, “Man is a being in whose nature as a whole, progressive, divine beings must work together with Luciferic beings; to the extent that progressive, divine beings are in him, part of his being wrests itself away from all that is Luciferic, and so comes to participate in the eternal. Insofar as divine beings work in man, he shares in the eternal; insofar as the Luciferic world works in him, all that is bound up with the temporal and transitory becomes part of his very being.”

The temporal and eternal thus appear as the working together of diverse beings. In the higher worlds there is no longer any sense in speaking of abstract opposites such as the temporal and the eternal because there they cease to have any meaning. There we have to speak of beings. We speak, therefore, of progressive, divine beings and of Luciferic beings. Because these beings are present in the higher worlds, their relation to one another is reflected in the antithesis of time and eternity.

I have said that it is good if a man, on rising to the world to which we are referring, should at first experience memories of a more moral kind rather than his external physical form. Persevering with the exercises for the first steps in initiation, he should gradually become so clairvoyant that there will then appear the memory picture, too, of his physical form. There is something else, however, connected with the arising of this memory picture of one's physical form, and that is that actually from this time on (and it is right) he feels as a memory not only his life of soul in general, not only in general his good and bad deeds and his moral and his foolish ones, but his entire ego. It is his whole self that he feels as a memory in the moment when he can look back on his body as form. He then feels his being as if split in two. He beholds the part he left behind with the Guardian of the Threshold, and he beholds what, in the sense world, he called his ego. Now, on looking back on his ego, he feels that there also is a cleavage, and quite calmly says to himself: “Only now are you able to remember what you formerly called your ego. You now live in a more highly organised ego that bears the same relation to the former ego that you as thinker bear to memories of life in the world of the senses.” At this stage one sees for the first time what man, earthly man, actually is; one looks down on one's ego-man.

At the same time, however, one is raised to a still higher world that may be called the higher spirit-land or, if you will, the higher mental world; a world that differs somewhat from the others. We are in this higher spirit-land when experiencing the splitting of the ego, and the ordinary ego in memory only. It is here that one is first able to form a true estimate of man on earth. As one looks back one begins to know what man is in his inmost being. There, too, it is first possible to come to an experienced judgement concerning the course of history. Human evolution that has been experienced becomes for us the progress of the soul as an ego being. Standing out from the general progress are the beings who are leaders in the advancement of humanity. Here one actually experiences what I described in the second lecture, that is, the impulses that are continually flowing into human evolution through the initiates, those initiates who, wherever they may be, have to leave the life of the senses and go to spiritual worlds so that they can give out these impulses. When you reach the point of experiencing man as an ego being, you also experience for the first time a true insight into the human being as such. To this there is only one exception.

Let us recapitulate all that has been said. When a man goes through the first stages of initiation, he can raise himself clairvoyantly to the world of the lower spirit-land; he experiences conceptions of what has to do with the soul, of what is moral and what is intellectual. He looks down on all that is going on in souls, even if they do not comprehend themselves as ego beings. This comprehension of one's being as an ego being, together with all the blossoming of spiritual life in the initiates, is experienced in the higher spirit-land with one single exception that is right and good if it can happen as an exception that breaks through the general rule. From the lower spirit-land one sees the whole being of Christ Jesus! So that, looking back in a purely human way, and holding fast to what is present in remembrance, you have a memory of Christ Jesus and of all the events that have taken place in connection with Him, that is, if the other condition of which I spoke in the second lecture has already been fulfilled. The truth about the other initiates, however, you experience for the first time in the higher spirit-land.

There we have a vastly important distinction. When a man rises into the spiritual world, on looking back he perceives what is of the earth. But he sees it first with its soul quality unless he can remember in such a way that, looking back on earthly existence, he remembers physical man and the shape and form in which he goes about. That is a thing he should only experience at the higher point described. It is only Christ Jesus that he may and should see at the first steps on the path of initiation. This he can do when on going forward he sees himself surrounded by nothing but what is of a soul nature, that at first has nothing in it of the ego. But then, within, as a kind of central point, is the Christ Being, fulfilling the Mystery of Golgotha and permeated by the ego.

What I have just told you cannot, of course, be understood as coming from any of the world conceptions of existing Christian religions. I hardly imagine that you would find it described anywhere. You can, indeed, find what may be called the reverse of what I have said in a certain special way that one first lights upon when looking occultly and precisely into the matter, because up to the present, Christianity has not reached the goal it has finally to attain. Perhaps some of you will know that there are many among the official representatives of Christianity who have a mortal dread of what is known as occultism, and look on it simply as the work of the devil that can only do man harm. Why is this so? Why do we repeatedly find, when we speak to the representatives of any particular priesthood and the conversation turns to occultism or anthroposophy that they shy away from it? If you point out to them that the Christian saints have always experienced the higher worlds, and that their biographies tell us so, you get the reply, “Oh yes, that may be so but these things should not be striven after. There is no harm in reading the lives of the saints, but you shouldn't copy them if you want to keep away from the wiles of the devil.”

Now why does this occur? If you take all that I have told you into consideration, you will understand that what here finds expression is a kind of fear, a strong feeling of fear. Ordinary people do not recognise its origin, but the occultist can do so.

As I have said in the second lecture, in the higher worlds there can only be this memory of the Christ when a man has rightly understood Him on earth, in the physical world of the senses. It is important to have this memory of the Christ in the very next world you enter, where you still keep a memory image of the rest of humanity. On the one hand, it is necessary to have the memory image; on the other, you can only have it down here if it has already permeated you. Hence it happens that those who know something of occultism, but have not thoroughly assimilated certain important and outstanding facts, think it is all one whether man, when today he presses on into spiritual worlds, has become acquainted or not with this image of the Christ. They do not consider that what is above depends to any great extent on what has been experienced below, although in other respects they are continually emphasising it.

But the kind of position in which you find yourself with regard to the Christ in the higher worlds does indeed depend on how you relate yourself to Him in the physical world. If in the physical world you do not try to call up the right conception of Him, you are not in a certain respect sufficiently developed for the higher worlds, and in spite of the fact that you should find Him there, you cannot do so. So that if you have not concerned yourself about this matter that is full of splendour and so significant, on rising to higher worlds you may completely miss this image of the Christ. If, then, anyone when still in sensory existence, were to reject the idea of forming a relationship to Christ, he might even become a great occultist and yet, through his perceptions in the higher worlds, have no knowledge of the Christ; he would not find Him there, nor be able to learn anything from Him. There would always be something wanting in his conception of the Christ. That is the significant thing.

I am not here giving out anything that is merely a subjective opinion, but what is the common objective result of those who have made the relevant investigations. Among occultists it can be said objectively that it is so, but in anyone who does not feel impelled to become an occultist, and who is simply a faithful follower of his particular religious creed, the same thing is expressed in that unconsciousness that I have just described as a state of fear. Then if anyone would embark upon the path into higher worlds, this is said to be devil's work; it is thought that perhaps he cannot have found the right relation to Christ, and therefore ought not to be led beyond the ordinary world. In a certain sense this fear is well-grounded. These men do not know the way to Christ, and if they then enter higher worlds, Christ is lost to them. This feeling among certain priestly orders can be understood as a kind of fear, but there is no way of meeting it. I beg you to give this little digression your serious attention, and to go on thinking about it in life. It is interesting as a piece of historical culture, and will help you to understand much that plays itself out in life.

I have shown you different aspects of the Christ from two different points of view, and have tried to throw light on His being. But all that I have previously said would be just as valid and comprehensible without these two points of view. It is necessary, however, to meet the facts objectively and, without the bias of any religious tendency, to grasp them objectively as cosmic facts.

Thus we have tried to throw a certain light on the concepts of the temporal, the transitory, the passing moment and eternity on the one hand, and on the other of mortality and immortality. We have seen how the concepts ‘transitory’ and ‘temporal’ are bound up with the Luciferic principle, and how, bound up with the Christ principle we shall find such concepts as ‘eternity’ and ‘immortality.’ Anyone might believe—at least to a small extent—that this constituted a kind of undervaluing of the Luciferic principle and its rejection in all circumstances because by it we are directed to the temporal, the more transitory, and to the concentration upon one point. For today, I should like just to say this, that in all circumstances it is not right to look upon the ‘Light-bearer’ as one of whom we should be afraid, nor is it right to think that we must turn our back on Lucifer as from one whom we must always escape. If one does that it is to forget the teaching of true occultism, namely, that here in the world of the senses there is a feeling analogous to that in the super-sensible world. In sensory life man feels, “I live in the temporal and yearn after the eternal; I live in the passing moment and crave for eternity.” In spiritual life there is the feeling: “I live in the eternal and long for the passing moment.” If you now turn to the book, Cosmic Memory: Atlantis and Lemuria, was man's development in old Lemurian times a kind of transition from such a state as we have in sleep into a waking state? Follow attentively what happened in Lemurian times, and you can say that since man passed through a transition out of a state of spiritual sleep into the waking state that we have on earth, the whole of evolution passed over at that time from the spiritual into the physical. There is the transition. Since Lemurian times our sensory existence has acquired meaning. Do you think it unnatural that when he gradually slipped away from higher worlds to be seized upon by Luciferic powers, man should have taken with him something like a longing for eternity? Again, in respect to what is Luciferic, you have a kind of memory of a pre-earthly state, a memory of something that man had before he came into sensory existence that should not have been preserved, namely, a longing for the passing moment and for all that has to do with time. How far this takes part in the evolution of man we shall speak of tomorrow.