Modern and Ancient Spiritual Exercises

Advice on Meditation
A lecture by Rudolf Steiner Dornach, May 27, 1922 GA 212
The lecture presented here was given in Dornach on May 27, 1922, and is the 7th of 9 lectures in the series entitled: The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution. It appears in the original German in Menschliches Seelenleben und Geistesstreben im Zusammenhange mit der Welt- und Erdentwicklung , Bibliographic Nr.212, Dornach 1978. It is also known as: The Change in the Path to Supersensible Knowledge, or Ancient Yoga and Modern Initiation. The translator is Rita Stebbing. This English edition is published in agreement with, and the kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.
Copyright 1984 This e.Text edition is provided with the cooperation of: The Anthroposophic Press

Modern and Ancient Spiritual Exercises

Advice on Meditation
[Abridged from The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution, published by Anthroposophic Press, 1984.]

Dornach, 27 May 1922 The paths by which in very remote times men acquired supersensible knowledge were very different from those appropriate today. I have often drawn attention to the fact that in ancient times man possessed a faculty of instinctive clairvoyance. This clairvoyance went through many different phases to become what may be described as modern man's consciousness of the world, a consciousness out of which a higher one can be developed. In my books Occult Science: An Outline and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved? and other writings is described how man at present, when he understands his own times, can attain higher knowledge. When we look back to the spiritual strivings of man in a very distant past we find among others the one practised in the Orient within the culture known later as the Ancient Indian civilization. Many people nowadays are returning to what was practised then because they cannot rouse themselves to the realization that, in order to penetrate in to supersensible worlds, every epoch must follow its own appropriate path. On previous occasions I have mentioned that, from the masses of human beings who lived during the period described in my Occult Science as the Ancient Indian epoch, certain individuals developed, in a manner suited to that age, inner forces which led them upwards into supersensible worlds. One of the methods followed is known as the path of yoga; I have spoken about this path on other occasions. The path of yoga can best be understood if we first consider the people in general from among whom the yogi emerged that is to say, the one who sets out to attain higher knowledge by this path. In those remote ages of mankind's evolution, human consciousness in general was very different from what it is today. In the present age we look out into the world and through our senses perceive colours, sounds and so on. We seek for laws of nature prevailing in the physical world and we are conscious that if we attempt to experience a spirit-soul content in the external world then we add something to it in our imagination. It was different in the remote past for then, as we know, man saw more in the external world than ordinary man sees today. In lightning and thunder, in every star, in the beings of the different kingdoms of nature, the men of those times beheld spirit and soul. They perceived spiritual beings even if of a lower kind, in all solid matter, in everything fluid or aeriform. Today's intellectual outlook declares that these men of old, through their fantasy, dreamed all kinds of spiritual and psychical qualities into the world around them. This is known as animism. We little understand the nature of man, especially that of man in ancient times, if we believe that the spiritual beings manifesting in lightning and thunder, in springs and rivers, in wind and weather, were dream-creations woven into nature by fantasy. This was by no means the case. Just as we perceive red or blue and hear C sharp or G, so those men of old beheld realities of spirit and soul in external objects. For them it was as natural to see spirit-soul entities as it is for us to see colours and so on.

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However, there was another aspect to this way of experiencing the world, namely, that man in those days had no clear consciousness of self. The clear self-consciousness which permeates the normal human being today did not yet exist. Though he did not express it, man did not, as it were, distinguish himself from the external world. He felt as my hand would feel were it conscious: that it is not independent, but an integral part of the organism. Men felt themselves to be members of the whole universe. They had no definite consciousness of their own being as separate from the surrounding world. Suppose a man of that time was walking along a river bank. If someone today walks along a river bank downstream he, as modern, clever man, feels his legs stepping out in that direction and this has nothing whatever to do with the river. In general, the man of old did not feel like that. When he walked along a river downstream, as was natural for him to do, he was conscious of the spiritual beings connected with the water of the river flowing in that direction. Just as a swimmer today feels himself carried along by the water that is, by something material so the man of old felt himself guided downstream by something spiritual. That is only an example chosen at random. In all his experiences of the external world man felt himself to be supported and impelled by gods of wind, river and all surrounding nature. He felt the elements of nature within himself. Today this feeling of being at one with nature is lost. In its place man has acquired a strong feeling of his independence, of his individual I. The yogi rose above the level of the masses whose experiences were as described. He carried out certain exercises of which I shall speak. These exercises were good and suitable for the nature of humanity in ancient times; they have later fallen into decadence and have mainly been used for harmful ends. I have often referred to these yoga breathing exercises. Therefore, what I am now describing was a method for the attainment of higher worlds that was suitable and right only for man in a very ancient oriental civilization.In ordinary life breathing functions unconsciously. We breathe in, hold the breath and exhale; this becomes a conscious process only if in some way we are not in good health. In ordinary life, breathing remains for the most part an unconscious process. But during certain periods of his exercises the yogi transformed his breathing into a conscious inner experience. This he did by timing the inhaling, holding and exhaling of the breath differently, and so altered the whole rhythm of the normal breathing. In this way the breathing process became conscious. The yogi projected himself, as it were, into his breathing. He felt himself one with the indrawn breath, with the spreading of the breath through the body and with the exhaled I breath. In this way he was drawn with his whole soul into the breath. In order to understand what is achieved by this let us look at what happens when we breathe. When we inhale, the breath is driven into the organism, up through the spinal cord, into the brain; from there it spreads out into the system of nerves and senses. Therefore, when we think, we by no means depend only on our senses and nervous system as instruments of thinking. The breathing process pulsates and beats through them with its perpetual rhythm. We never think without this whole process taking place, of which we are normally unaware because the breathing remains unconscious. The yogi, by altering the rhythm of the breath, drew it consciously into the process of nerves and senses. Because the altered breathing caused the air to billow and whirl through the brain and nerve-sense system, the result was an inner experience of their function when combined with the air. As a consequence, he also experienced a soul element in his thinking within the rhythm of breathing. Something extraordinary happened to the yogi by this means. The process of thinking, which he had hardly felt as a function of the head at all, streamed into his whole organism. He did not merely think, but felt the thought as a little live creature that ran through the whole process of breathing, which he had artificially induced. Thus, the yogi did not feel thinking to be merely a shadowy, logical process; he rather felt how thinking followed the breath. When he inhaled he felt he was taking something from the external world into himself which he then let flow with the breath into his thinking. With his thoughts he took hold, as it were, of that which he had inhaled with the air and spread through his whole organism. The result of this was that there arose in the yogi an enhanced feeling of his own I, an intensified feeling of self. He felt his thinking pervading his whole being. This made him aware of his thinking particularly in the rhythmic air-current within him. This had a very definite effect upon the yogi. When man today is aware of himself within the physical world he quite rightly does not pay attention to his thinking as such. His senses inform him about the external world and when he looks back upon himself he perceives at least a portion of his own being. This gives him a picture of how man is placed within the world between birth and death. The yogi radiated the ensouled thoughts into the breath. This soul-filled thinking pulsated through his inner being with the result that there arose in him an enhanced feeling of selfhood. But in this experience he did not feel himself living between birth and death in the physical world surrounded by nature. He felt carried back in memory to the time before he descended to the earth, that is, to the time when he was a spiritual-soul being in a spiritual-soul world. In normal consciousness today man can reawaken experiences of the past. He may, for instance, have a vivid recollection of some event that took place ten years ago in a wood perhaps; he distinctly remembers all the details, the whole mood and setting. In just the same way did the yogi, through his changed breathing, feel himself drawn back into the wood and atmosphere, into the whole setting of a spiritual-soul world in which he had been as a spiritual-soul being. There he felt quite differently about the world than he felt in his normal consciousness. The result of the changed relationship of the now awakened selfhood to the whole universe gave rise to the wonderful poems of which the Bhagavadgita is a beautiful example.

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In the Bhagavadgita we read wonderful descriptions of how the human soul, immersed in the phenomena of nature, partakes of every secret, steeping itself in the mysteries of the world. These descriptions are all reproductions of memories, called up by means of yoga breathing, of the soul when it was as yet only soul and lived within a spiritual universe. In order to read the ancient writings such as the Bhagavadgita with understanding one must be conscious of what speaks through them. The soul, with enhanced feeling of selfhood, is transported into its past in the spiritual world and is relating what Krishna and other ancient initiates had experienced there through their heightened self-consciousness. Thus, it can be said that those sages of old rose to a higher level of consciousness than that of the masses of people. The initiates strictly isolated the self from the external world. This came about, not for any egotistical reason, but as a result of the changed process of breathing in which the soul, as it were, dived down into the rhythm of the inner air current. By this method a path into the spiritual world was sought in ancient times. Later this path underwent modifications. In very ancient times the yogi felt how in the transformed breathing his thoughts were submerged in the currents of breath, running through them like little snakes. He felt himself to be part of a weaving cosmic life and this feeling expressed itself in certain words and sayings. It was noticeable that one spoke differently when these experiences were revealed through speech. What I have described was gradually felt less intensely within the breath; it no longer remained within the breathing process itself. Rather were the words breathed out, and formed of themselves rhythmic speech. Thus the changed breathing led, through the words carried by the breath, to the creation of mantras; whereas, formerly, the process and experience of breathing was the most essential, now these poetic sayings assumed primary importance. They passed over into tradition, into the historical consciousness of man and subsequently gave birth later to rhythm, metre, and so on, in poetry. The basic laws of speech, which are to be seen, for instance, in the pentameter and hexameter as used in ancient Greece, point back to what had once long before been an experience of the breathing process an experience which transported man from the world in which he was living between birth and death into a world of spirit and soul. This is not the path modern man should seek into the spiritual world. He must rise into higher worlds, not by the detour of the breath, but along the more inward path of thinking itself. The right path for man today is to transform, in meditation and concentration, the otherwise merely logical connection between thoughts into something of a musical nature. Meditation today is to begin always with an experience in thought, an experience of the transition from one thought into another, from one mental picture into another. While the yogi in ancient India passed from one kind of breathing into another, man today must attempt to project himself into a living experience of, for example, the colour red. Thus he remains within the realm of thought. He must then do the same with blue and experience the rhythm: red-blue, blue-red, red-blue and so on, which is a thought-rhythm. But it is not a rhythm that can be found in a logical thought sequence; it is a thinking that is much more alive. If one perseveres for a sufficiently long time with exercises of this kind (the yogi, too, was obliged to carry out his exercises for a very long time) and really experience the inner qualitative change, and the swing and rhythm of red-blue, blue-red, light-dark, dark-light in short, if indications such as those given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds are followed the exact opposite is achieved to that of the yogi in ancient times. He blended thinking with breathing, thus turning the two processes into one. The aim today is to dissolve the last connection between the two, which, in any case, is unconscious. The process by which, in ordinary consciousness, we think and form concepts of our natural environment is not only connected with nerves and senses; a stream of breath is always flowing through this process. While we think, the breath continually pulsates through the nerves and senses. All modern exercises in meditation aim at entirely separating thinking from breathing. Thinking is not on this account torn out of rhythm, because as thinking becomes separated from the inner rhythm of breath it is gradually linked to an external rhythm. By setting thinking free from the breath we let it stream, as it were, into the rhythm of the external world. The yogi turned back into his own rhythm. Today man must return to the rhythm of the external world. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find that one of the first exercises shows how to contemplate the germination and growth of a plant. This meditation works towards separating thinking from the breath and letting it dive down into the growth forces of the plant itself. Thinking must pass over into the rhythm pervading the external world. The moment thinking really becomes free of the bodily functions, the moment it has torn itself away from breathing and gradually united with the external rhythm, it dives down not into the physical qualities of things but into the spiritual within individual objects. We look at a plant: it is green and its blossoms are red. This our eyes tell us and our intellect confirms the fact. This is the reaction of ordinary consciousness. We develop a different consciousness when we separate thinking from breathing and connect it with what exists outside. This thinking yearns to vibrate with the plant as it grows and unfolds its blossoms. This thinking follows how in a rose, for example, green passes over into red. Thinking vibrates within the spiritual, which lies at the foundation of each single object in the external world. This is how modern meditation differs from the yoga exercises practised in very ancient times. There are naturally many intermediate stages; I chose these two extremes. The yogi sank down, as it were, into his own breathing process; he sank into his own self. This caused him to experience this self as if in memory; he remembered what he had been before he came down to earth. We, on the other hand, pass out of the physical body with our soul and unite ourselves with what lives spiritually in the rhythms of

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the external world. In this way we behold directly what we were before we descended to the earth. This is the consequence of gradually entering into the external rhythm. To illustrate the difference I will draw it schematically. Let this be the yogi (first drawing, white lines). He developed a strong feeling of his I (red). This enabled him to remember what he was, within a soul-spiritual environment, before he descended to earth (blue). He went back on the stream of memory. Let this be the modern man who has attained supersensible knowledge (second drawing, white lines). He develops a process that enables him to go out of his body (blue) and live within the rhythm of the external world and behold directly, as an external object (red), what he was before he descended to earth.

Thus, knowledge of one's existence before birth was in ancient times in the nature of memory, whereas at the present time a rightly developed cognition of pre-birth existence is a direct beholding of what one was (red). That is the difference. That was one of the methods by which the yogi attained insight into the spiritual world. Another was by adopting certain positions of the body. One exercise was to hold the arms outstretched for a long time; or he took up a certain position by crossing his legs and sitting on them and so on. What was attained by this? He attained the possibility to perceive what can be perceived with those senses, which today are not even recognized as senses. We know that man has not just five senses but twelve. I have often spoken about this for example, apart from the usual five he has a sense of balance through which he perceives the equilibrium of his body so that he does not fall to the right or left, or backwards or forwards. Just as we perceive colours, so we must perceive our own balance or we should slip and fall in all directions. Someone who is intoxicated or feels faint loses his balance just because he fails to perceive his equilibrium. In order to make himself conscious of this sense of balance, the yogi adopted certain bodily postures. This developed in him a strong, subtle sense of direction. We speak of above and below, of right and left, of back and front as if they were all the same. The yogi became intensely conscious of their differences by keeping his body for lengthy periods in certain postures. In this way he developed a subtle awareness of the other senses of which I have spoken. When these are experienced they are found to have a much more spiritual character than the five familiar senses. Through them the yogi attained perception of the directions of space. This faculty must be regained but along a different path. For reasons, which I will explain more fully on another occasion, the old yoga exercises are unsuitable today. However, we can attain an experience of the qualitative differences within the directions of space by undertaking such exercises in thinking as I have described. They separate thinking from breathing and bring it into the rhythm of the external world. We then experience, for instance, what it signifies that the spine of animals lies in the horizontal direction whereas in man it is vertical. It is well known that the magnetic needle always points north-south. Therefore, on earth the north-south direction means something special, for the manifestation of magnetic forces, since the magnetic needle, which is otherwise neutral, reacts to it. Thus, the north-south direction has a special quality. By penetrating into the external rhythm with our thoughts we learn to recognize what it means when the spine is horizontal or vertical. We remain in the realm of thought and learn through thinking itself. The Indian yogi learned it, too, but by crossing his legs and sitting on them and by keeping his arms raised for a long time. Thus, he learned from the bodily postures the significance of the invisible directions of space. Space is not haphazard, but organized in such a way that the various directions have different values.

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The exercises that have been described, which lead man into higher worlds are mainly exercises in the realm of thought. There are exercises of an opposite kind; among them are the various methods employed in asceticism. One such method is the suppression of the normal function of the physical body through inflicting pain and all kinds of deprivations. It is practically impossible for modern man to form an adequate idea of the extremes to which such exercises were carried by ascetics in former times. Modern man prefers to be as firmly as possible within his physical body. But whenever the ascetic suppressed some function of the body by means of physical pain, his spirit-soul nature drew out of his organism. In normal life the soul and spirit of man are connected with the physical organism between birth and death in accordance with the human organization as a whole. When the bodily functions are suppressed, through ascetic practices, something occurs which is similar to when someone today sustains an injury. When one knows how modern man generally reacts to some slight hurt, then it is clear that there is a great difference between that and what the ascetic endured just to make his soul organism free. The ascetic experienced the spiritual world with the soul organism that had been driven out through such practices. Nearly all of the earlier great religious revelations originated in this way. Those concerned with modern religious life make light of these things. They declare the great religious revelations to be poetic fiction, maintaining that whatever insight man acquires should not cause pain. The seekers of religious truths in former times did not take this view. They were quite clear about the fact that when man is completely bound up with his organism, as of necessity he must be for his earthly tasks the aim was not to portray unworldliness as an ideal then he cannot have spiritual experiences. The ascetics in former times sought spiritual experiences by suppressing bodily life and even inflicting pain. Whenever pain drove out spirit and soul from a bodily member, that part which was driven out experienced the spiritual world. The great religions have not been attained without pain but rather through great suffering. These fruits of human strivings are today accepted through faith. Faith and knowledge are neatly separated. Knowledge of the external world, in the form of natural science, is acquired through the head. As the head has a thick skull, this causes no pain, especially as this knowledge consists of extremely abstract concepts. On the other hand, those concepts handed down as venerable traditions are accepted simply through faith. It must be said though, that basically, knowledge and faith have in common the fact that today one is willing to accept only knowledge that can be acquired painlessly, and faith does not hurt any more than science, though its knowledge was originally attained through great pain and suffering. Despite all that has been said, the way of the ascetic cannot be the way for present-day man. In our time it is perfectly possible, through inner self-discipline and training of the will, to take in hand one's development which is otherwise left to education and the experiences of life. One's personality can be strengthened by training the will. One can, for example, say to oneself: Within five years I shall acquire a new habit and during that time I shall concentrate my whole will-power upon achieving it. When the will is trained in this way, for the sake of inner perfection, then one loosens, without ascetic practices, the soul-spiritual from the bodily nature. The first discovery, when such training of the will is undertaken for the sake of self-improvement, is that a continuous effort is needed. Every day something must be achieved inwardly. Often it is only a slight accomplishment but it must be pursued with iron determination and unwavering will. It is often the case that if, for example, such an exercise as concentration each morning upon a certain thought is recommended, people will embark upon it with burning enthusiasm. But it does not last, the will slackens and the exercise becomes mechanical because the strong energy, which is increasingly required, is not forthcoming. The first resistance to be overcome is one's own lethargy; then comes the other resistance, which is of an objective nature, and it is as if one had to fight one's way through a dense thicket. After that, one reaches the experience that hurts because thinking, which has gradually become strong and alive, has found its way into the rhythm of the external world and begins to perceive the direction of space in fact, perceive what is alive. One discovers that higher knowledge is attainable only through pain. I can well picture people today who want to embark upon the path leading to higher worlds. They make a start and the first delicate spiritual cognition appears. This causes pain so they say they are ill; when something causes pain one must be ill. However, the attainment of higher knowledge will often be accompanied by great pain, yet one is not ill. No doubt it is more comfortable to seek a cure than continue the path. Attempts must be made to overcome this pain of the soul, which becomes ever greater as one advances. While it is easier to have something prescribed than continue the exercises, no higher knowledge is attained that way. Provided the body is robust and fit for dealing with external life, as is normally the case at the present time, this immersion in pain and suffering becomes purely an inner soul path in which the body does not participate. When man allows knowledge to approach him in this way, then the pain he endures signifies that he is attaining those regions of spiritual life out of which the great religions were born. The great religious truths which fill our soul with awe, conveying as they do those lofty regions in which, for example, our immortality is rooted, cannot be reached without painful inner experiences. The great truths do indeed demand an inner courage of soul which enables it to say to itself: If you could experience these things you must be prepared to attain knowledge of them through deprivation and suffering. I am not saying this to discourage anyone, but because it is the truth. It may be discouraging for many, but what good would it do to tell people that they can enter higher worlds in perfect comfort when it is not the case. The attainment of higher worlds demands the overcoming of suffering. I have tried today, my dear friends, to describe to you how it is possible to advance to man's true being. The human soul and spirit lie deeply hidden within him and must be attained. Even if someone does not set out himself on that conquest he must know about what lies hidden within him. He must know about such things as those described yesterday [Lecture of 26 May, 1922 in The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution] and how they run their course. This knowledge is a demand of our age. These things can be discovered only along such paths as those I have indicated again today by describing how they were trodden in former times and how they must be trodden now.

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Meditation and Concentration

Three Kinds of Clairvoyance
Schmidt Number: S-3045

By Rudolf Steiner GA 161

On-line since: 23rd January, 2013

This lecture is the sixth of thirteen lectures in the lecture series entitled, Ways of Spiritual Cognition and the Rejuvenation of the Artistic Lifestyle, published in German as, Wege der Geistigen Erkenntnis und der Erneurung Kuenstlerischer Weltanschauung. This lecture was translated from shorthand reports, unrevised by the lecturer, by an unknown translator. And, it was transcribed by an unknown typist! It is presented here with the kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland. From GA 161.

The Path of Spiritual Knowledge

Meditation and Concentration Three Kinds of Clairvoyance
Dornach 27th March, 1915 As the last time we were able to meet together here, we put forward certain considerations connected mainly with special experiences, (footnote The Problem of Death in Connection with the Artistic grasp of Life February 57, 1915) we will turn our attention today to a more general outlook of spiritual science. I should like to start from something which you have all known fundamentally for a long time: that all spiritual-scientific observation is won by acquiring knowledge, not with the help of the instrument of the Physical body, but by liberating the soul and spirit from the physical instrument, so that, as soul and spirit they enter into direct union with the spiritual worlds. Direct union with the spiritual worlds is broken in ordinary life and knowledge, because we must always employ the instrument of our physical body in the waking state whenever we wish to enter into relationship with the world, and in the sleeping state all our will is concentrated on our connection with the body, so that desire for the body spreads like a cloud in our soul and spirit during sleep, and hinders us in this state, and in ordinary life - from experiencing anything in the spiritual worlds, in which we indeed are. Now it is essential that anyone occupying himself with spiritual science should recognise exactly the value of spiritual scientific activity as such, and its relation to the personal strivings, which through meditation and concentration of thought, feeling, and will-impulses, or in any other manner, lead man into the spiritual world. We must be clear about this above all for it is a deep and significant truth: that the unity which surrounds us in the ordinary world, does not exist in the same way in the spiritual world. I have already pointed out that this unity is founded within the whole structure of the psycho-spiritual human being. How most people strive again and again after this, asking: What is the unity of the world? How they only find satisfaction when they can lead everything back to one Principle! As a matter of fact, the external world meets us most eminently as a whole, as a unified formation; and those people who to a certain degree are dominated by the craze for unity, arrive at all possible abstractions in thought, while seeking the unitary principle of the world. Such personalities are typical, they are like an old gentleman who met me one evening, and told me with the intense pleasure of a discoverer: At last he had found a unitary principle by which he could explain all the phenomena in the world. He was of the opinion, in his pleasure, that this unitary principle could be uttered in ten to twelve words, and he was so joyful over the matter, that he said: Now I can explain the whole cosmos. He would explain heaven, earth, and hell out of this unitary principle. A little while ago, I was forced to recall this episode which occurred many years ago, when someone wrote to me urgently requesting a talk with me, because he had made the acquaintance of a man who was able to bring forward another such completely satisfactory view of the world in five minutes. I need hardly mention that a really earnest spiritual movement can have no time for such talks. But people who are thus possessed by this Unity-Demon, which is at the same time a kind of Easy-going Demon, are especially numerous in our day.

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Because of this, we must put first, and take in the deepest sense, what is expressed in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: that as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world, we are really led into a threefold experience. I have especially emphasised in this book, that the soul is as if split into three, and when the soul crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, nothing is left which makes it possible for one to believe in this Unity-demon, this comfort-loving Unity-demon. Indeed, we feel, as soon as the threshold of the spiritual world is crossed, that we really enter with the whole of our being into three worlds. And we must not lose sight of the fact that after crossing this threshold, we have distinctly the experience of three worlds. In reality, we already belong to three worlds through the whole formation of our physical body. I might say that the co-

(Perhaps Etheric Head was meant?)

operation of three worlds, which are relatively strongly independent of one another, is necessary for this wonderful structure man which we encounter in the physical world. And if we consider the formation of our head, the formation of everything that belongs to the head, we must, even if we are merely speaking of the physical head, be clear that the formative forces of our head, and also the beings active and creative in these formative forces, belong to suite another world from that of the formative forces of our breast, for instance, and the formative forces of everything belonging to our heart, inclusive of the arms and hands. It is to a certain extent as if the formative forces of these material parts of man belonged to quite another world than the formative forces of his head. And again, the organs of the lower body and the legs belong to quite another world than the two other members we have named. Now you can ask: What significance has all this? It has a great significance, for fundamentally speaking, in our present cycle of humanity, one only gets the pure, true and real results from spiritual science if the soul and spirit-nature is raised out of the head. So that this (c.f. diagram) is to some extent the clairvoyant aspect of a man, which, seen from the spiritual-scientific point of view has to be so regarded, that the spirit-soul part is here seen to be especially lifted out, and is at the same time, joined to the forces of the cosmos, as if by a spiritual electric attraction. Thus all the parts a man the ego and astral body down to the etheric body, must be drawn out. This withdrawal is of course connected with the evolution of the so-called Lotus-flowers. But the forces which set the lotus-flowers in motion lie in this part of the spirit-soul nature of man which is, or can be withdrawn. The clairvoyance thus attained is a HEAD-CLAIRVOYANCE, and this can be a result of spiritual science in our time, for the revelations of head-clairvoyance are of service to humanity. Of a quite other kind is the clairvoyant results attained by raising the spirit-soul nature of the organ of the heart, arms and hands. This raising or up-lifting of these organs distinguishes itself inwardly and significantly from what takes place through what I might call HEAD-CLAIRVOYANCE. The up-lifting of the material heart-organ is brought about more through meditation which is related to the life of will; it is effected through humble surrender to the march of events. Whereas head-clairvoyance is effected more through thoughts, but also through ideas having an imaginative character, tinged with feeling. It is generally the case that with reference to these two kinds of clairvoyance, the heart or breast-clairvoyance develops along with head-clairvoyance in the degree to which it should. Breast-clairvoyance leads more to the development of the will, to a connection with the actions of spiritual beings of the lower hierarchies, such as those incorporated in the various kingdoms of the earth; whereas head-clairvoyance leads more to vision, knowledge, perception in those higher worlds, in the sense that knowledge of these higher powers is necessary for the satisfaction of certain needs of knowledge, which must appear ever more and more in present humanity. The more we approach the future of our evolution on earth, the less will humanity be able to live, without their soul-life drying up, if they do not receive into their cognition the results of this clairvoyance.

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Again a third kind of clairvoyance is that which arises, when what we call the spiritual-psychic part of man is loosened, and thus raised out of the rest of his being. Here in the lower part of the diagram I indicate the outward thrusting tendency. Even if the expression is not altogether aesthetic, yet I may perhaps venture to call this kind of clairvoyance, Stomach clairvoyance. Whereas head-clairvoyance, for our cycle of humanity, leads in the most eminent sense to the attainment of results independent of man, stomach-clairvoyance leads to results connected especially with What transpires in man himself. That which takes place in man himself must naturally also be an object of investigation. In the sphere of physical investigation, there are also men who occupy themselves with anatomy and physiology. We should not think that this stomach-clairvoyance has not a certain value, in the highest sense of the word. It naturally has a value. But one must realize, that stomach clairvoyance can inform man but little of that which occurs impersonally in cosmic events; but that it informs him essentially about what man is, of what goes on I might say inside his skin. With reference to what is moral and ethical, head-clairvoyance is relatively the most important. Hence I must ever speak of its opposites. Between the two stands breast-clairvoyance; between that of the head and of the stomach. As regards what is ethical, these two can be inwardly quite well distinguished. People who strive to come to a perception of higher worlds, in an impersonal way, as indicated in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, those who are not daunted at traveling this uncomfortable but secure path, will develop something impersonal in themselves, with reference to their clairvoyance, above all they will develop a high interest for objective world-knowledge, for what occurs in the world of cosmic and of historical events. This head-clairvoyance speaks preferably of man himself, especially in that it draws attention to how he is placed within the process of cosmic and historical development, it notes what man himself is in the entirety of this cosmic process: What arises as head-clairvoyance will always have what I must call a universal scientific character; it will contain information which has importance I beg you to note this word for all mankind, not merely for one man or another. Stomach-clairvoyance will be permeated especially with all kinds of human egoism, and will very easily mislead the clairvoyant in question to occupy himself much with the occult bases of his own destiny, of his personal worth and character. This results as a self-understood tendency from what is called stomach-clairvoyance. Now a clear distinction has to be made between these two kinds of clairvoyance with reference to their intuitive nature. Whoever strives in the sense of what is given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds to become free in soul and spirit from the perceptive-apparatus of the head, who can thus to a certain extent loosen the spiritual-psychic part of the head from the physical instrument, and is able to place himself with this spiritual-psychic head-part in the spiritual world, will have extreme difficulty in getting beyond shadowy-clairvoyant experiences. Such a passing out from the head is at first bound up with experiences which really have not even the colour, the substantiality of vivid memories, therefore they seem inwardly to be very colourless, and only after one goes ever further and further in the efforts which lie on this path, does the shadowy character of these experiences disappear, and their colourless, shadowy experiences become tinged with colour and sound, for the process carried out is this, that we first move out of our head, and are then really in a world which we have difficulty in perceiving. For while we gradually and slowly acquire the possibility of living outside our head, these inner forces of life grow stronger, and the consequence is, that the forces streaming in from the whole orbit of the cosmos are drawn together. Picture to yourselves that forces must be drawn together from out the whole orbit of the cosmos and when we draw together all the forces from the entirety of the orbit of the cosmos, we get that tinging with colour and sound I have mentioned. Think how we might picture this. You have here a surface (a), highly coloured, a spherical surface. Now think of this spherical surface as extended over a larger surface (b.c.). The colour will then become paler and if we extend it still further, the colour will become ever paler and paler, if we contract this surface, then supposing it to be a pale yellow here (at the extremity,) it would become a strong, saturated yellow, because the colour is then more concentrated. Now head-clairvoyance confronts the whole cosmos. And, spread out over the whole cosmos is that which man mast first concentrate and unite by means of his life-forces into what he himself is clairvoyantly, as being; so that only by a laborious process of inner development he gradually gives a tinge of colour to the shadowy nature of his experiences. And when for a long, long time he has taken the trouble to experience that general experience which only gives him the sensation of being outside the body; and when he has been aware of this general experience for a long time, and has gained the feeling more and more of a more intense, though not yet a coloured and resounding inner experience, then the regions of the cosmos gradually draw near to this headclairvoyance. This is a matter for slow, selfless development. It must be especially stated, that a STUDY OF SPIRITUAL SCIENCE is indispensable to this development. It must be emphasised again and again, that when it is given out, spiritual science, can indeed be understood. It cannot be emphasised often enough that one need not be a clairvoyant to understand spiritual science. One must of course be clairvoyant to arrive at results, but once they are there, one need not be clairvoyant. UNDERSTANDING of spiritual science must precede personal vision. Here one can say: the opposite path is correct to that which is correct in the physical-sensible world. In the physical-sensible world, we first have correct perceptions, then we pass over to a thoughtful consideration of these, and we then form our scientific judgments. This must be reversed in the ascent to the spiritual world. There, we must first develop ideas we must make every effort to live into spiritual science objectively; otherwise we can never be certain that any observation we make in the spiritual world is interpreted by us in the right sense. Hence knowledge must precede vision, and this is what is so infinitely disagreeable to many; the fact that they have to study spiritual science. Many consider this an

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incomprehensible demand. For it is relatively easy to have perceptions; but to interpret them aright for this it is necessary that one enters rightly, objectively, selflessly into spiritual science. Now just the opposite is the case in what we have called: stomach-clairvoyance. In this, we start from that spiritual-psychic principle which first worked on the bodily, physical nature; for spirit lies at the basis of everything that exists in the world. If we have eaten let us say a piece of cabbage we are mostly vegetarians here and it is then worked over in our organism, one has then not merely to do with the physical-chemical process, carried out by the stomach with its forces and juices, but behind all these the etheric body, astral body, and ego are active. All these processes have spiritual processes behind them. It would be quite false to believe that any material processes exist which have not a spiritual process behind them. Picture this to yourselves: Suppose you lie down after a more or less opulent mid-day meal, and become clairvoyant, but clairvoyant in such a way, that the spiritual-psychic part of the digestive organs rise up especially out of the organs of digestion. Then, while your stomach and the other organs digest correctly, you live with your spiritual-psychic nature in the spiritual-psychic realm, and whereas you usually remain unconscious of the spiritual process carried out in your etheric body, astral body, and ego, this enters your consciousness if you are clairvoyant and then, because you experience yourself in this spiritual-psychic realm, you can see all this working, constructing, and creating of the spiritual-psychic force during digestion; you see it as it projects itself out into the world, and it appears to you reflected in pictures in the external ether. Then you get the most beautiful clairvoyant forms, because you have not now to draw the colours so much out of the cosmos, but because you have the whole process concentrated within your own skin. So that something wonderful takes place around you in the most glorious most magnificent sequences of colour and form, which need be nothing else than the process of digestion or some other bodily process transpiring in the spiritual organs of man. This kind of clairvoyance is distinguished from the other, especially through the fact, that whereas the other clairvoyance starts from shadow forms, and only laboriously acquires a tinge of colour and tone, this starts off with the most magnificent grandeur possible. One can equally well express it as a law: if clairvoyance begins with magnificent forms, especially with coloured forms, then it is a clairvoyance that relates to processes which transpire within the personality. I emphasise this, because it can be of value for the investigation of the spiritual world. Just as anatomy and physiology investigate the digestive and other processes, so clairvoyance is also of great value to investigate in this way the spiritual nature standing behind human processes. But it would be bad, if one gave oneself up to any deceptions, if one cherished illusions, and did not interpret things in a right manner. If one believed that such a clairvoyance, appearing without the necessary preparation, could give more than what takes place in man and is projected into the objective world, if one believed that through such a clairvoyance, one could approach the creative world-powers, the dominant spiritual forces, one would greatly err. Just as little as the riddles of the world can be solved by the investigation of human digestion, just so little can the riddles and secrets of the cosmos be approached by developing this stomach clairvoyance. Thus you see how much belongs necessarily to our gaining a really right orientation to the world we enter through the freeing of our spiritual-psychic powers. No one need have any aversion to stomach-clairvoyance through the observations which have been made. But each one should be quite clear how such clairvoyance is related to what real spiritual clairvoyance can become, and how one should hold oneself far removed from any over valuation of what is gained through a clairvoyance that can only have a personal content. Only when in things which have a personal content, we look away from what is personal, and observe them in the way the anatomist or physiologist considers, the objects he studies with the help of the microscope, or learns through his investigations, only then have these things a special value. In any case no religious feelings should be connected with these things even in the remotest degree; they can only be connected with the results of head-clairvoyance. Man becomes ever more correct in regard to the other clairvoyance, the more he fulfills the demand, that it should be dealt with in every case only in an objectively scientific sense, as are the results of anatomy or physiology. Not everything which is found along the path of clairvoyance, is I venture to use this radical expression worthy of veneration; but all is worthy of being learnt. That is what we must keep in mind. I have already said: that for our cycle, it is especially important to incorporate the results of head-clairvoyance with the general spiritual civilisation of man; this is really important. Today, I will mention one side of the matter with reference to this. We are living at a time, in which humanity must prepare gradually to transcend mere philosophical Idealism, and pass on to a true consciousness of the spiritual worlds, of the general spiritual world in which we live just as we live in the physical world. Now let us start from an experience of head-clairvoyance, which we shall easily understand if we have entered but a little into the things said in the Munich Cycle (footnote, Secrets of the Threshold) held recently and which were dealt with further in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World. I especially mentioned there, that our thinking undergoes a transformation the moment we make ourselves free; especially when with reference to our thoughts we free ourselves from the physical instrument of the head. I expressed it grotesquely at the time by saying, if we became free in this manner, our thoughts have no longer the character which they have in ordinary, everyday life. In ordinary, everyday life we must have the feeling unless we are demented that we are Master of our thought-world, that if we have two thoughts, it is WE OURSELVES who unite or separate these thoughts. When we remember something, we are conscious: we pass over with our inner life from a present experience to a past experience. We always have the feeling; it is we ourselves who stand behind the web and woof of our thoughts. ... This ceases the moment we make the spiritual psychic principle free in our head, when we develop a thinking freed from the body. On that occasion, I put it as follows, I said: It is as if we put our head in an ant's nest, and a peculiar whirling then arises. This is how

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thoughts begin to play one into the other. If in ordinary life, we have two thoughts, and unite them, as for example, the thoughts rose and red, we know that we are master in our own thought-world, able to unite the two ideas: the rose is red. This is not the case when we are outside our bodies. Life enters our thoughts, the thought's own life. Each thought becomes a being. One thought runs towards another, the other runs away from it. So the thought-world acquires a life of its own. Why does it acquire a life of its own? What we experience in the ordinary thoughts of the everyday are only images, shadows of thoughts. You can read this in my book Theosophy. As soon as we develop body free thoughts, each thought becomes like a husk, and an elemental being slips into the husk. The thought is no longer in our power; we put it out, like a feeler, it goes forth into the world, and an elemental being slips into it ... Our thoughts are filled in this way with elemental beings ... and these whirl and struggle in us. So that we can say: If we stretch the spiritual-psychic part of our head into the spiritual world, (it is outside us only, because we are situated within the physical head), if we thus stretch it into the spiritual world, we no longer experience such thoughts as we experience in the physical world, but we experience the LIFE OF BEINGS. We plunge our head just as I have said into an ant's nest We experience the life of beings. This is fundamentally the case right up to the highest hierarchies, and if we wish to experience angel, archangel, or even archai, it must be the same, we must live in our thoughts in the way described and in the beings in them. We send our thoughts out, and a being slips in, and is active in them. If we perceive the beings of Venus, or Saturn, it is as I have said, we let our thoughts slip our, and the Venus, and Saturn beings slip in. We ought not to be the least afraid of having thoughts of the Hierarchies in us, but twist accustom ourselves to live with our heads in the higher Hierarchies. We must say to ourselves: Our thinking ceases, and our head becomes the stage for the activities of the higher hierarchies. Now, in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel thought has been developed up to the purest thought-clarity. In this philosophy is really contained that to which thought could rise at the beginning of the 19th Century. The task of raising thought to this height was then fulfilled. The next task is however that man should go beyond this, and really enter into this whirling, weaving life of thought. We are living at a time when man is called to do this: to perceive the higher Hierarchies. We have to be taken up by the world of the higher Hierarchies, and we must strip off the fear of thus living and weaving in the higher Hierarchies. The life of the 19th Century was quite filled by this fear, this horror of life in the higher Hierarchies. Human beings carried this so far, they did not know it, but fundamentally they carried it so far, that they prayed: O, my dear Ahriman, guard me lest my life in thought is claimed by the activity and life of the higher Hierarchies; otherwise, some devilish Saturn or Sun-being might enter into them: You say: Surely no one thought like this in the 19th Century; but I can prove to you that people did think like this. Ludwig Feuerbach, a philosopher of the 19th Century who especially combated the idea of immortality, opposed all belief in a super-sensible world, because he held this to be the belief of phantastic, mystical dreamers, and considered it harmful for the whole of mankind. Ludwig Feuerbach wrote the following sentences; I beg you to inscribe them particularly well in your souls; The active man, busy with the affairs of human life, has no time to think of death, and hence, no need for immortality; if he thinks of death, he only sees in it the warning to arrange wisely his allotted span of life, not to waste precious time on unworthy objects, but to apply it to the fulfillment of the tasks he has set himself to do. If far from the earth in heaven, on Uranus, or Saturn, or elsewhere, man first found his fulfillment, then there would be no science, or philosophy at all. Instead of what is generally deduced, abstract truths and beings would form the content of our spirit, instead of thoughts, cognitions and ideas, these pure spiritual entities and objects which would then inhabit our head would be our heavenly brothers, Saturn and Uranus-beings would then be the inhabitants of our head. Instead of mathematics, logic metaphysics, we should have in us the most exact likeness of these heavenly inhabitants. These heavenly beings would insert themselves especially between us and the subjects of our knowledge and thought, they would obstruct our vision of every object, and bring about an eternal, complete eclipse of the sun in our spirit. The Sun for Feuerbach is: his thought. Thus he has a complete picture of what would happen. He has however such an unholy horror of it, that he prays to the good Ahriman to reserve him from Saturn and Uranus dwellers becoming inhabitants of his head. They would be nearer and more closely related to us than thoughts, ideas, and concepts, for they are not purely spiritual or abstract entities like these, but sense-like spiritual beings, beings who merely express the nature of the force of imagination. Our whole spirit would then be but a dream, a vision of a more beautiful future. Therefore those whom the gravity of understanding hinders from floating around on the surface of the unlimited ocean of imagination will realise that in the depths of our spirit, the living light of the Angels and of all similar heavenly beings is extinguished, as in an atmosphere, un breathable by them. If these beings then were to enter into our thoughts, our spirit would be a dream thus writes Feuerbach. He only feels secure when in the region of thoughts, and if the life of the Angels, or other heavenly Entities were to enter these thoughts, he would feel insecure. This is the prayer to Ahriman: that he might guard man from a knowledge of the spiritual worlds. This happened in the forties of the nineteenth century through Ludwig Feuerbach, the enemy of any spiritual view of the world. What does this signify? It signifies nothing else than that the time is ripe for us to raise ourselves to the spiritual worlds; we have but to take in earnest what

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this man puts before us, we have then found the way into the spiritual worlds. We only need not fight it by a union with Ahriman. Thus you see: It is not the fault of heaven that spiritual science has not penetrated the culture of our time, for it has penetrated the heads of its opponents. Spiritual science wants to enter the world; The fault therefore does not lie with the heavens. The Gods are giving wisdom to man: Spiritual science has come. As human beings under the leadership of Ahriman has resisted it, it is now up to us not to resist any longer, but to have the courage to accept spiritual science, with full, true, earnestness. One must say this to oneself as regards this development of the 19th Century; One must say: It is as if laid down afore time in the spiritual world, that a spiritual age would come after a materialistic age, and it is for humanity now to open its mind, and its feeling, to receive this spiritual world into itself. That point of view which is so eminent a materialistic view and found in Ludwig Feuerbach, its characteristic, clever, and infinitely philosophically-endowed advocate, is like an attack, a revolt against what is to enter humanity. Spiritual forces come down from above, the forces of understanding, of knowledge have really to rise up from below. The expression which Ludwig Feuerbach discovered for himself is a most characteristic one, that: the solar eclipse of the soul would have to follow, if thoughts ceased to be thoughts, if the beings of Uranus, Venus and Saturn, and so on, played into them ... that is if the higher Hierarchies played into them. A solar-eclipse of the spirit would then take place; these people have an unholy fear of this. This solar eclipse of the spirit is not brought about however by heavenly Beings, who desire especially to bring their light to man. The darkness has been caused by human beings, by their uniting with Ahriman; and because they have spread a cloud of fear around them like an aura, they have sought to bring off their attacks against the penetration of the spiritual world. It is clear from this, that the darkening has proceeded from man, and we must acknowledge that darkness has laid hold of humanity more and more a darkening of a free knowledge, an opposition to the light of the spirit. This is something humanity has itself prepared, and one can see how in the course of the 19th Century, a certain love of all short-sighted, inconsequent thoughts appeared, and a love for everything that did not have to be thought out to an end. A preference and sympathy arose for all those things for which man will not have finally to give account. People loved ever less and less an unprejudiced, impartial, knowledge and thinking, and it is therefore not surprising when this love of the nebulous, of the unclear, of the unfinished in thought gradually assumed an ever more morally assailable character in public life. In so far as this character was countenanced, sympathy for the life of thought became dull; and then passed over into a general attitude. Through this an opposing force in chief was installed more especially against a spiritual science which strove for clarity on all sides. Spiritual science has true sympathy and love above all for consequent, finished, thoughts, not for half-thoughts; it never holds with what is unclear and dark, but must ever reach out to that which spreads light widely, not to that which sends an apparent light into narrow places only. In this connection, we have still to fight our way through many things. These are points I wished to bring forward in our studies today, in order to show how in the course of the century, thoughts through Ahriman gave occasion for the denial of the spiritual worlds, but how these worlds have themselves worked within the thoughts of him who denied them because the time had come The time has come: this saying from Goethe's Fairy Tale is here in its right place. It must be substantiated in the near future.

Man and Nature

Intellect in Man and Nature Bereft of the Gods
Schmidt Number: S-4169

By Rudolf Steiner Translatod by Rick Mansell GA 198

On-line since: 8th May, 2013

This lecture was given by Rudolf Steiner in July of 1920 at Dornach, Switzerland. It is lecture number 17 of 17 from the lecture series entitled, Healing of the Social Organism, published in German as, Heilfaktoren Fuer den Sozialen Organismus. This lecture is also known as, Man's Inner Being and the Earth's Future. It is presented here with the kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwalting, Dornach, Switzerland. From GA 198.
This e.Text edition is provided through the wonderful work of: Various e.Text Transcribers

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Man and Nature

Intellect in Man and Nature Bereft of the Gods
Dornach, July 18th, 1920 In the lecture yesterday which dealt with Spengler's Decline of the West, I tried to bring home to you the significance of anthroposophical Spiritual Science by emphasising the difference between merely abstract concepts and that which also arises in the soul in the form of ideas and concepts but is, nevertheless, reality. Let us realise once for all that with his materialistic frame of mind, and his tendency to reject spiritual conceptions and occupy himself only with ideas concerning the natural world, man is making himself more and more akin to the material, is descending so deeply into the material world that he is no longer speaking falsely when he declares that it is the material substance of his body which thinks, that his brain actually does the thinking. Man is becoming a kind of automaton in the universe, and as the result of his denial of the soul and Spirit he is losing the soul and Spirit. I said before that this thought is by no means popular; people will not accept it because they cherish the belief that the soul-and-spirit will be saved to man for all eternity without any action being necessary an his part. By no means is it so. A man may give himself up to material life to such an extent that he severs himself from the soul-and-spirit altogether, sinks into the realm of the Ahrimanic Powers and passes with them into a cosmic stream which does not belong to our world. But thereby he loses his own Ego, for the Ego does not belong to the world of Ahriman and can only find its true path of development when a human being pursues the normal course of progressive evolution; that is to say, when he unites with the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha and when he realises that in the pr sent age he must find a link with all that spiritual research can contribute to the civilised life of mankind. Since the middle of the fifteenth century man has been living through the phase of evolution in which, as he looks out into his environment, he sees nothing but the material world. And as he looks into his own being he intellectualizes the inner experiences of his life of soul; these become abstract and shadowy. This has been the tendency since the middle of the fifteenth century. The thoughts and concepts with which we build up our picture of the world to-day, drawn as they are from the dicta of orthodox science, have no connection with existence as it actually is. Neither can they lead to the heart of reality. It is merely a convention to imagine that man's life of soul is fundamentally involved in the forming of abstract thought. These abstract thoughts are quite remote from reality; they are nothing but a series of pictures. We may say, therefore, that externally man perceives the material world and inwardly a world of pictures having no essential connection with existence. This has been the lot of mankind since the middle of the fifteenth century and we shall presently see what effect it has upon a conception of the universe to see, externally, nothing but the material world and, inwardly, to have experiences that have become a mere series of pictures. We may ask: Why is it that since the middle of the fifteenth century man's life of soul has gradually come to the point of having no more reality than a picture? The reason is that only in this way is it possible for man to attain his real freedom. In order to understand this let us consider the world as it lies before us to-day and our own place in the world. To begin with we will think of the world, leaving aside the human being altogether. Locking at clouds, mountains, rivers, at the minerals, plants and animals, we ask: What is there, in reality, in the whole wide world, when we leave the human being out of the picture? In other words, we think of all that surrounds us in the mineral and plant kingdoms, and to a certain extent also, in the animal kingdom, but apart altogether from man. In reality, of course, this is quite impossible, but we will assume hypothetically a Nature divested of the human being. In this Nature that is divested of the human being, there are no Gods. That is what we must bring home to ourselves. In this Nature that is divested of the human being there are no Gods, any more than an oyster is there within an empty oyster-shell or a snail in an empty snail-shell. This whole world which we assume hypothetically, a world without the human being, is something which the Gods have separated off from themselves in the course of evolution, just as the oyster sheds its shell. But the Gods the spiritual Beings are no longer within it. The world that surrounds us, is a world of the Past. When we look at Nature we are looking at something which represents the spiritual Past, we are looking at a residue of the Spiritual. And that is why religious consciousness in the real sense can never arise from contemplation of the external world alone. Let us not imagine for a moment that any element of the life of the divine-spiritual Beings who work creatively in mankind, is contained in this external world. Elementary beings, spiritual beings of a lower order, are there, of course; but the creative spiritual Beings who should live in our religious consciousness belong to this external world only inasmuch as represents their shell, being a residue of spiritual evolution in the Past. Certain outstanding personalities have felt the truth of these things. In the spiritual life of the nineteenth century the man who felt most deeply of all that the Nature surrounding man is a residue of divine-spiritual evolution was Philip Mainlnder whose philosophy of self-destruction was born from the gravity of this knowledge and who finally put an end to his own life. It is often the destiny of human beings to steep themselves in one-sided truths of this kind and the inevitable consequence is that this destiny itself becomes one-sided and difficult to bear. Philip Mainlnder, the unfortunate German Philosopher, is an outstanding example of this. Having realised what has been put forward hypothetically in connection with external Nature, you may ask: Where then, are the Gods; where are the creative spiritual Beings? If I were to make a drawing, It should have to draw the Gods within the human being. The truly creative Gods have their habitat in the realm that is bounded by the human skin, within the organs if I may use this expression. The being of man is now the bearer of the Divine-Spiritual. The Divine-Spiritual, the truly creative principles is within the human being. Try to picture to ourselves external Nature as it is to-day, and then a future lying thousands of years ahead in this future there will be no clouds, no minerals, no plants, even no animals. There will be nothing left of all that now lives in

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external Nature outside the bounds of the human skin. What will continue its evolution is the soul and Spirit permeating the inner organisation of man. This will constitute the future. The Nature by which man is now surrounded will pass away, and the HumanDivine principle now within his being will become his outer environment. Insight into the truth that the Divine-Spiritual the only truly creative principle in our time lives inside the bounds of the human skin, must be taken in deepest seriousness, for it lays upon man a responsibility in regard to the whole universe. It enables him to understand the words of Christ: Heaven and Earth the world of external Nature will pass away but my words will not pass away. And when in the individual human being the saying of St. Paul, Not I but Christ in me, is fulfilled, then the words of Christ will live in the individual human being. Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away or My words in the individual human being, namely all that lies inside the human skin and is received into Christ, this will not pass away. All this is an indication of the fact that since the middle of the fifteenth century, through his abstract, intellectual concepts, man has been making his inner being empty and void. And to what end has he been making himself empty? It is in order to receive the Christ Impulse, the Divine Spiritual, into his inner being. I said that as we look into the external world, we see only the material. It is the divine Past. (In this residue of a divine Past there are, of course, the Elemental Spirits who have remained at lower stages of evolution.) As we look into our inner being, we see, to begin with, nothing but abstract concepts which can only become concrete and real when we receive the impulse of the Spirit into our being through Spiritual Science and unite the impulse of the Spirit with our inner life. Man has the choice a choice which has become a matter of greater and greater seriousness since the middle of the fifteenth century either to remain at a standstill with his abstract intellectual concepts or to receive into himself the living substance of Spiritual Science. Abstract intellectuality enables him to evolve a brilliant science of Nature, for intellectual concepts are dead and by their means he can unfold an admirable understanding of dead Nature. But all this mummifies him, makes him akin to matter, and leads him ultimately into the clutches of the Ahrimanic world. To further the Progress of earthly existence and the whole evolution of the earth, he must receive the Spiritual into his being, and in our time the Spiritual does not draw near to man by way of atavistic instinct. It must be reached by his own efforts. The assimilation of Spiritual Science is not, therefore, the assimilation of a theory but the development of something absolutely real, an impulse that will fill the otherwise empty recesses of the soul with spiritual substance. In the mass to-day, men prefer to have this emptiness inwardly and the Past outwardly manifest before them. They will only admit the validity of thought when it has been proved by experiment and they resist the quickening impulses of spiritual life. The danger confronting the world to-day is not so much the spread of false theories but the loss of the very Mission of the Earth. Only those who have really thought through and perceived the task of the human rate will realise how much depends upon the assimilation of Spiritual Science. These souls will never lose sight of the importance of knowledge of the being of man, but in modern natural science and in the ancient religious tradition this knowledge simply does not exist. What is the trend of ancient religious tradition? It directs the minds of men to unworldly abstractions and is silent an the subject of the Gods indwelling the being of man, indwelling his very organism. This thought would he condemned by religious tradition as out-and out heresy. If any attempt were made to bring home to the traditional religions in Europe and America to-day the truth of the ancient saying that the Body of man is the Temple of the Gods, they would indignantly refuse to countenance such heresy. And an the other hand we have a materialistic natural science which precisely because it is materialistic has no real understanding of matter. What does science really know about the functioning of the human brain, of the human heart? I have often told you, and I have also said in public, that one of the views held by modern science is that the human heart is a kind of pump which drives the blood through the body. This dictum of academic science is universally accepted but it is simply a piece of nonsense pure nonsense. We shall never understand the essential nature of the heart we imagine that it pumps the blood in every direction and then lets it flow back again. The circulating blood itself is the living force. The driving force in the human organisation is contained in the blood, in the circulating blood, and the heart is the outward expression of this; the movement reveals itself in the heart. To say in accordance with modern science that the heart drives the blood into the Body, is rather like saying: At ten minutes to nine one hand of the clock pointed to nine, and the other a little past ten, and these hands, in conjunction with the mechanism of the clock, drove me to the speaker's desk and left a great many still outside (because in the Anthroposophical Society people have a habit of unpunctuality). In reality, it is not so at all. Obviously the clock is simply an expression of what is happening it is the expression and nothing more. The heart is not the pumping machine by means of which the blood is driven through the body; the heart is inserted into and is the expression of this whole system of movement. Natural Science, as it is to-day, never leads into the inner being of man. All that science does is to make the inner into the outer by the dissection of dead bodies. But dissection of the dead body merely takes the inner and transfers it to the outer world. I mention this in order to bring home to you that in the spiritual life of to-day there is no inclination whatever to penetrate into the inner being and inner nature of man, and it devolves upon Spiritual Science to bring that real knowledge of man's being which scares the great majority of our contemporaries. Why are they scared? It is because religious traditions through the centuries have utterly hood-winked mankind so far as striving for real knowledge is concerned. Just think of the way in which the traditional creeds mystify human beings with apocryphal utterances culminating in a warning that it is not meet for man to know the Supersensible, that he may only have faith in it and feel its existence darkly. This is all done with the object of playing upon man's pride and self-conceit and also upon his inherent laziness. He must be led to believe that it is not necessary for him to think about the Divine, that his conception of the Divine must be a matter of instinct and dim feeling. But ideas that arise from this region of

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man's being are merely emanations from the organs emanations which become illusions, and these illusions are distorted into all kinds of nebulous ideas by theologians and others who know quite well how much they can count an man's inherent love of ease. The instinct for knowledge which alone can promote the earthly evolution of man and also lead him to the path of spiritual development, has been stifled and suppressed for many long centuries. People to-day are frightened at the very thought of developing knowledgE of realities or of experiencing the spiritual world. But to the extent to which they are frightened to that extent do they sever themselves from the Spirit and soul and make themselves akin to the material. It is so indeed; people are scared when the gravity of these things dawns upon them, because everything to-day is regarded from the external point of view. And here, in parenthesis, let me repeat certain remarks made a short time ago. In Stuttgart we have the Waldorf School. The Waldorf School was founded out of the very spirit of anthroposophical Spiritual Science; that is to say, fundamental principles of education and of teaching were laid before those who were specially Chosen to work in the School. Everything is a question of the Spirit in this art of education. Yet we are finding to-day, a sensation, that people visit the school and actually think that in a couple of hours or so they can inform themselves about the essentials of education there given. But it is of course only through Spiritual Science that one can gain insight into the spirit of the Waldorf School; it cannot be done by short brief visits which only disturb the teaching. To assimilate anthroposophical Spiritual Science, however, is much more difficult and much less sensational than visiting the School as an outsider. As I have often said, the education at the Waldorf School takes account of the existence of the spiritual world, and, above all, of the pre-earthly existence of the human being. What is there to be said about this pre-earthly existence? We may take the year of our birth and say that this is the time when we descended to physical life on the Earth. Children born later have been living in the spiritual world while we were already on the Earth. These children have just descended to the physical world, whereas we ourselves have been living through our earthly existence for a considerable length of time. And they bring with them something of what they were experiencing in the spiritual world while we were already living in the physical world. One can realise this quite clearly among children who are taught according to the principles of Waldorf School education. To give this kind of education is to prepare for the application in everyday life of thoughts and ideas which are the natural outcome of Spiritual Science. But it is precisely here that people are kept back by traditional religions, for the last thing these religions want is the development of inner activity in human beings. Inner activity leads to a real knowledge of the being of man and brings home the truth that the dwelling place of the Gods is inside the bounds of the human skin. Suppose we see a planet in the sky. There is nothing of the Divine-Spiritual in anything upon that planet except in Spiritual Beings whose nature in some way resembles the nature of man. From these Beings the Divine pours its radiance upon us. Why, then, should this radiance be any the less because it shines from the bodies of men? You will begin to feel at home with this thought if you dissociate it from earthly life and relate it to conditions as they are upon another planet. Living an the Earth as you do, you will find that there is something oppressive, something rather coercive in the thought that you and your fellow men are bearers of the Divine-Spiritual. But if you turn the gaze of your soul to one of the other planets it will be much easier for you to grasp the fact that the Beings who there constitute the highest kingdom of Nature are the point from which the Divine Spiritual shines down upon you. In a certain respect the thought we have been considering to-day amplifies the thought which occupied our minds in the last lecture, namely that something is unfolding in the inner being of man upon which the future evolution of the Earth essentially depends, but also that it lies within the powers of the human will to hinder the Earth's evolution, to receive the stream of Ahrimanic forces only. And to-day we added the other thought, namely, that Nature around is transient and external, for it already represents nothing more than a residue of Divine Spiritual creation. The process of Divine-Spiritual creation which dominates the present and will dominate the future, lies inside the bounds of the human skin. Strange as it may seem, it is therefore quite true to say that everything our eyes can see and our ears hear will all pass away with the Earth. Only that which is contained in the regions enclosed by the human skin lives over to the Jupiter stage of evolution, bearing existence as it is an the Earth into future conditions of planetary evolution. When it is once realised that a knowledge of the nature of man is a burning necessity, the urge to understand the connection of the human being with the universe will again make itself felt. You know that man really lives between two extremes, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic as we are accustomed to call them. We can also understand the nature of these two extremes from a more elementary point of view. Philosophers have declared again and again that Being in itself eludes the grasp of thought. This is quite true, for whence comes the sense of being, the feeling of existence which there is in man? The human being exists before he enters earthly existence through conception and birth; he exists in supersensible worlds. From supersensible worlds he descends into his earthly, material existence. Here he experiences something quite new, something he did not experience in the supersensible worlds. He is encompassed by it as soon as he has descended to earthly existence. It is the attractive force of the Earth, gravity, to have weight, as we say, but only by way of illustration. As you know, the expression to have weight is drawn from the most palpable phenomenon of all. The fatigue of which we become aware is similar to having weight, and what we feel in our limbs when they move is also akin to this. But because the fact of having weight is merely the representative phenomenon, we can say: The human being places himself within gravity. And in a hidden way man always enters, a little more into this element of gravity when he approaches a thing of Earth and calls it real.

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It is exactly the reverse when the human being is passing through his life between death and rebirth. Just as here on the Earth he is allied with gravity, in the life between death and rebirth he is allied with light, for light too is used in a representative sense. Because we receive most of our higher sense-perceptions through the eye, we speak of the light. But what lives as light in the sense-perception of the eye is the same element that sounds in the sense-perception of the ear and reveals itself in different tones, just as the light reveals itself in different colours. And it is the same with the other senses. fundamentally speaking, the element we speak of in a representative sense as the light, just as we speak of gravity in a representative sense, is the tincture of all the senses. We are received into the extreme pole of gravity when we descend to the Earth. We are received into the extreme pole of light when we are living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. are, in reality, always in the middle condition between light and gravity; and every sense-perception, as we experience it here on Earth, is half light and half gravity. When, as the result of some pathological condition, or in dream, we experience without the element of our own gravity, we are experiencing only the Spiritual, as for instance in a dream or in delirium. Psychologically, delirium is a state in which the human being has experience:, but his own gravity is no factor in them. This state of balance between gravity and light into which we are placed, is something that is intimately connected with the riddle of the world, inasmuch as it is bound up with many of the experiences we have as beings of soul and Spirit in the world. It will surely be obvious to you from what has been said that neither the traditional creeds nor the fantasies of natural science succeed in finding their way from merely abstract concepts into the light nor from sense perception down into gravity. People have become blind and deaf to these things. Man is bound to the Earth by gravity. He experiences gravity as the element which draws him to the Earth. Think of a crystal. A crystal gives itself its form. Within the crystal there is the same force which the human being feels drawing him downwards the force which gives the whole Earth form. And now think of the oceans and seas. Here the Earth can give form, or rather the element of gravity gives the form. This very same force also gives the crystal its form but in this case it works from within. According to science, nobody knows what is behind matter or within matter. This is said to be a worldriddle. But inasmuch as we experience our own gravity, we experience what is behind the surface of matter; for in relation to the whole Earth we are placed within the same forces which are active in small bodies (as, for instance, the crystal) and by which the various parts are held together. We must reach the point of being able to recognise the small in the great, the great in the small and not to lose ourselves in speculation as to what presumably lies behind matter. Knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual which transcends matter must be kindled by those forces in man's inner being which enable him to understand ideas such as that of the Temple represented in ancient tradition by the human being himself. I have said many times that the sayings of ancient atavistic wisdom contain much that is worthy of deep veneration. In the present age it is our task once again to raise these truths from the depths of our being and to make then the guiding principles of life and action.

Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being

A lecture by Rudolf Steiner Bern, December 12, 1918 GA 186
This edition of: Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being, is a revised translation by Christopher Schaefer of a lecture given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in Bern on December 12, 1918. It is published in German in the cycle: Die Sozialen Grundforderungen Unserer Zeit, 1963, by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung in Dornach, Switzerland. It appeared in the ANTHROPOSOPHICAL REVIEW in two sections, in Vol. I, No. 2 and No. 3, 1979.
Copyright 1982 This e.Text edition is provided through the wonderful work of: The Mercury Press

Thanks to an anonymous donation, this lecture has been made available.

Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being

The times themselves speak clearly enough, demanding that we should apply to the conditions and activities of these times those feelings and modes of thinking which we have acquired from our studies of Spiritual Science. Not only do outward circumstances speak clearly, but our conceptions of Spiritual Science also justify us in a certain way, especially in what we have to say today. In many if our basic ways of looking at the world, we have started from one fundamental fact of human evolution, from the fact that this evolution is accomplished by successive stages of which the most important and most related to us began with the great Atlantean Catastrophe, namely this Post-Atlantean Epoch. Four periods of it have passed by, while we are now living in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Period. This period of development, which began in the 15th century of our Christian era, is the one which we can designate as the period of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul. Other soul forces have been especially evolved in other periods of civilization. In our civilization which has followed the Greco-Latin civilization from the first half of the 15th century, humanity must gradually develop the Spiritual Soul. The preceding period, which commenced in the 8th century B.C. and finished in the 15th century A.D., was pre-eminently the period in which humanity developed the Intellectual or Mind Soul.

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Now we need not give a full description of these cultural stages, but we will particularly look at what is a peculiarity of our age this age which has comparatively few centuries behind it. Each age lasts on average about 2000 years. Therefore much remains to be done in this period of the Spiritual Soul. The task of humanity of civilized humanity in this age of the Spiritual Soul will be that of laying hold of the whole human being and making him entirely dependent on himself, of lifting into the full light of consciousness much of that which in earlier periods man felt instinctively and judged instinctively. Many present difficulties and much that is chaotic around us in our era, become quite explicable when one knows that the task of our era is to raise that which is instinctive to the plane of consciousness. What is instinctive in us happens to a certain degree by itself, but to achieve a conscious result one must make an inward effort, above all, to begin to think truly with one's whole being. Man tries to avoid this, he does not willingly take a conscious part in the shaping of world conditions. Here is a point over which many are indeed deceived today. Men today think the following: Well, today we live in the period of the development of thought. People are proud of the fact that there is more thinking nowadays than in the past. But this is an illusion one of the many illusions in which humanity lives today. This comprehension on which people pride themselves today is mainly instinctive. Only when the instinctive nature which has appeared in the evolution of humanity and which so proudly speaks of thought only when this instinctive nature becomes instead an active element, when the intellect does not depend merely on the brain but springs from the whole man, when it is separated from rationalism and is lifted to the plane of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition only then will that gradually emerge which seeks to emerge in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Period, the period of the Spiritual Soul. That which meets man today and which is clearly indicated even in the worldly thought of the present epoch is something which one continuously needs to mention the appearance of the so-called Social Question. But he who has earnestly studied our anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science will easily perceive that the essential impulse in the shaping of the social order (whether belonging to the State or not) must come from that which human beings can develop out of themselves, as it is this which regulates the relationship between people. Everything which the human being develops out of himself naturally corresponds to certain impulses which are ultimately found in our soul and spirit life. If one looks at the matter this way, one is able to ask: Must attention not then be directed above all to the social impulses or to the social instincts, movements or forces emerging in human nature? We can, if you like, call these social impulses, social drives; but we must keep in mind that they should not only be thought of as mere unconscious instincts since when we speak of social instincts today, we must take into account that we live in the age of the Consciousness Soul and that these drives seek to press up into consciousness. Now, if these things are to count for us, then we must find social impulses which seek to become reality. But in so doing we must recognize the terrible one-sidedness of our age, which should not of course be deplored, but which should be looked at calmly because it has to be overcome. Man has such a great inclination in our day to look at things one-sidedly. But a pendulum cannot swing from the central point out to one side without also swinging back to the other. Just as little as a pendulum can swing to one side only, can social impulses of men be expressed by only one side. This is because the social impulses are quite naturally opposed by anti-social impulses in the human being. Precisely because one finds social impulses or drives in human nature, one also finds the opposite. This fact must above all be considered. The social leaders and agitators, for example, live in the illusion that they need only spread certain ideas or need only appeal to a class of man who is willing and disposed (provided ideas are there) to help forward the social impulse. It is an illusion to act in this way, for in so doing one forgets that if social forces are working, then anti-social forces are also present. What we must be able to do today is to look these things straight in the face without illusion. It is only from the viewpoint of Spiritual Science that they can be looked at straightly without illusion. One is tempted to say that people are sleeping through the most important thing of all in life when they do not begin to look at life from the viewpoint of Spiritual Science. We must ask ourselves: What is the relation between people with regard to social and anti-social forces? We need to see that the relationship between people is fundamentally a complicated matter. When one person meets another, I would say we must look into the situation radically. Meetings of course point to differences which vary according to specific circumstances; but we must fix our eyes on the common characteristics, we must clearly see the common elements in the meeting, in the confrontation between one person and another. We must ask ourselves: What really happens then, not merely in that which presents itself to the senses, but in the total situation, when one person stands opposite another, when one person meets another? Nothing less than that a certain force works from one person to the other. The meeting of one with another leads to the working of a certain force between them. We cannot confront another person in life with indifference, not even in mere thoughts and feelings, even though we may be separated from them by distance. If we have any kind of relation to other people, or any communication with them, then a force flows between us creating a bond. It is this fact which lies at the basis of social life and which, when broadened, is really the foundation for the social structure of humanity. One sees this phenomenon most clearly when one thinks of the direct interchange between two people. The impression which one person makes on the other has the effect of lulling the other to sleep. Thus we frequently find in social life that one person gets lulled to sleepiness by the other with whom he has interchange. As a physicist might say: a latent tendency is always there for one man to lull another to sleep in social relationships. Why is this so? Well, we must see that this rests on a very important arrangement of man's total being. It rests on the fact that what we call social impulses, fundamentally speaking are only present in people of our present day consciousness during sleep. You are, in so far as you have not yet attained clairvoyance, really only penetrated by social forces when you are asleep, and only that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions works into ordinary waking consciousness as a social impulse. When you

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know this, you do not need to be surprised when your social being seeks to lull you to sleep in your relationship with others. In the relationship between people the social impulse ought to develop. Yet it can only develop during sleep. Therefore in the relationship between people a tendency is shown for one person to dull the consciousness of the other so that a social relation may be established between them. This striking fact is evident to one who studies the realities of life. Above all things, our interchange with one another leads to dulling the consciousness of one another, in the interests of a social impulse between people. Of course you cannot go about continually asleep in life. Yet the tendency to establish social impulses consists in, and expresses itself by, an inclination to sleep. That of which I speak goes on subconsciously of course, but it nevertheless actually penetrates our life continuously. Thus there exists a permanent disposition to fall asleep precisely for the building up of the social structure of humanity. On the other hand, something else is also working. A perpetual struggle and opposition to falling asleep in social relationships is also present. If you meet a person you are continuously standing in a conflict situation in the following way: Because you meet him, the tendency to sleep always develops in you so that you may experience your relationship to him in sleep. But, at the same time, there is aroused in you the counter-force to keep yourself awake. This always happens in the meeting between people a tendency to fall asleep, a tendency to keep awake. In this situation a tendency to keep awake has an anti-social character, the assertion of one's individuality, of one's personality, in opposition to the social structure of society. Simply because we are human beings, our soul-life swings to and fro between the social and the antisocial. And that which lives in us as these two forces, which may be observed between people communicating, can from an occult perspective be seen to govern our life. When we meet social arrangements and structures in society, even if these arrangements seem far-fetched from the seemingly wise consciousness of the present, they are still a manifestation of this pendulum between social and anti-social forces. The national economist may reflect upon what credit, capital and interest are. Yet even these things which make for regularity in social transactions are only outward swings of the pendulum between social and anti-social forces. The person who seeks to find healing remedies for these times must intelligently and scientifically connect with these facts. For how is it that social demands arise in our time? Well, we live in the age of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul in which man must become independent. But on what does this depend? It depends on people's ability during our Fifth Post-Atlantean Period to become self-assertive, to not allow themselves to be put to sleep. It is the anti-social forces which require development in this time, for consciousness to be present. It would not be possible for mankind in the present to accomplish its task if just these anti-social forces did not become ever more powerful; they are indeed the pillars on which personal independence rests. At present, humanity has no idea how much more powerful anti-social impulses must become, right on until the 30th century. For men to progress properly, anti-social forces must develop In earlier periods the development of the anti-social forces was not the spiritual bread of humanity's evolution. There was therefore no need to establish a counter-force. Indeed none was set. In our day, when a person on his own account, for his individual self, must evolve antisocial forces, which are evolving because man is now subjected to this evolution against which nothing will prevail, there must also come about that with which man resists them: a social structure which will balance this anti-social evolutionary tendency. The anti-social forces must work inwardly so that human beings may reach the height of their development. Outwardly, in social life, structures must work so that people do not totally lose their outer connections in life. Hence the social demands of the present. They can in a certain sense be seen as the demand for a justified outer balance to the inward, essentially anti-social evolutionary tendency of humanity in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. From this you can see that nothing is accomplished by seeing things in a one-sided way. As men live nowadays, certain words (I will not say ideas or feelings), certain words have certain values. The word anti-social arouses a degree of antipathy. It is considered as something evil. Very well; we perhaps need not trouble ourselves whether it is considered good or bad, since it is quite necessary. Be it good or bad, it is connected with the necessary tendencies of evolution in our time. It is simply sheer nonsense to say that the anti-social impulses must be resisted, for they cannot be resisted. One must grasp the essential inner development of mankind in our time, understand the evolutionary tendency. It is not a matter of finding prescriptions for resisting the anti-social forces; but of so shaping, of so arranging the social order, the structure, the organization of that which lies outside of the individual, that a counter-balance is present to that which works as anti-social force within human beings. Therefore it is vital for our time that the individual achieves independence, but that social forms provide a balance to this independence. Otherwise neither the individual nor society can develop properly. In earlier periods there were tribes and classes. Our age strives against this. Our age is no longer able to divide people into classes but must consider them in their totality and create social structures which take this totality into account. I said yesterday in my public lecture that slavery could exist in the Greco-Latin Period; one was the master, the other the slave. Then men were divided. Today we have as a remnant just that which disturbs the working-man so much, namely that his power to work is sold; in this way something belonging to him is organized from outside. This must go; it is only possible to organize socially what does not integrally belong to the human being, such as his position or the function to which he is appointed, in short, something which is not an inner part of the individual. All this which we acknowledge with regard to the necessary development of social democracy is really so, and must be so understood. Just as no man can claim to do arithmetic if he has never learned his multiplication tables, so too he cannot claim to discuss social reforms and the like when he has never learned those things which we have just explained: namely, that socialism and antisocialism exist quite concretely in the way described. People in some of the most important positions in society, when they begin talking about present social demands, often appear to those who know, as individuals who wish to begin building a bridge over a rushing stream without having the mast elementary knowledge of mechanics. They may well be able to put up a bridge, but it will collapse at the first opportunity. It seems with social leaders or with those who look after social institutions, that their plans will be

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shown to be impossible; for the things of reality demand that we work with them, and not against them. It is therefore tremendously important that those things which form the backbone of our anthroposophical thought and consciousness should one day be taken seriously. One of the impulses which ensoul us in the sphere of our anthroposophical movement is that we, in a sense, carry into the whole of man's life that which most people apply only to youth. We sit on the school-bench of life long after we have become grey. This is one of the differences between us and others, who believe that at the age of 25, or sometimes 26, when they have finished lazying about with their education, that they are ready for the rest of life at most there may still be some amusing additions to one's education. But when we approach the very nerve of Spiritual Science, we feel that the human being really must continue to learn throughout his whole life if he wishes to tackle the tasks of life. It is vital that we should be permeated with this feeling. If we do not get rid of the belief that people can master everything with the faculties they have developed up to their 20th or 25th year, that then one only has to meet in Parliament or some other forum to decide all affairs as long as we do not get rid of this view, we shall never be able to establish healthy conditions in the social structure of mankind. The study of the reciprocal relation between the social and the anti-social is extremely significant for our time. Just this anti-social tendency is of the utmost importance to understand because it must make itself felt and must be developed in us. This anti-social spirit can only be held in balance by the social. But the social must be nursed, must be consciously cared for. And in our day this becomes truly more and more difficult because the anti-social forces are really in accord with our natural development. The social element is essential; it must be cherished. We shall see that in this Fifth Post-Atlantean Period there is a tendency to take no notice of the social in merely acting naturally. Rather it must be acquired consciously in working with one's soul forces, while formerly it was felt instinctively in man. What is necessary and must be actively acquired is the interest of man in man. This is indeed the backbone of all social life. It almost sounds paradoxical to say today that no clear conception of the so-called difficult ideas of economics can be gained if the interest of one for another does not increase, if people do not begin to compare the illusions which have sway in social life with present realities. One who really thinks about it recognizes the fact that simply by being a member of society one is in a complicated relation to others. Imagine that you have a $5 note in your pocket, and you make use of this $5 note by going shopping one morning, and you spend the full $5. What does it mean that you go out with a $5 note in your pocket? The $5 note is really an illusion it is worth nothing in reality (even if it is metal money. At this point I do not want to discuss the theories of the Metalists and the Nominalists with regard to money; but even if it is metal money, it is still an illusion and of no real worth). Money is namely only a go-between. And only because in our day a certain social order exists, an order belonging purely to the State, therefore this $5 note which you have spent in the morning for different items is nothing else than an equivalent for so many days of labour of so many men. A number of men must have completed so many days of work, so much human labour must have flowed into the social order must have crystallized itself into merchandise in order for the apparent worth of the bank note to have any real value, but only at the command of the social order. The bank note only gives you the power to call into your service so much labour, or to put it another way, to command its worth in work. You can picture it in your mind: There I have a bank note, which assigns to me, according to my social position, the power over so many men. If you now see these workmen selling their labour hour by hour, as the equivalent value of that which you have in your purse as the $5 note, then you begin to get a picture of the real facts. Our relationships have become so complicated that we no longer pay attention to these things, especially if they do not concern us closely. I have an example which easily clarifies this. In the more difficult considerations of economics, in the areas of capital and interest and credit, things are quite complicated; so that even university professors and political economists, whose position should mean possession of adequate insight, really have no knowledge. Thus you can see that it is necessary to look at things correctly in these areas. Of course we cannot immediately take in hand the reform of the national economy, which has been forced into such a helpless condition by what is nowadays taught as political economy. But we can at least ask with respect to national education and other such matters: What must be done so that social life and forms are consciously established in opposition to anti-social forces? What is really required? I said that it would be difficult in our time for people to develop sufficient interest in each other. You do not have sufficient interest if you think that you can buy yourself something with a $5 note and do not remember the fact that this brings about a social relationship with certain other human beings and their labour-power. You only have an adequate interest when in your picture you are able to substitute for each apparent transaction (such as the exchange of goods for a $5 note) the real transaction which is linked with it. Now, I would say that the mere egoistic, soul-stirring talk of loving our fellow-men and acting upon this love at the first opportunity, that this does not constitute social life. This sort of love is, for the most part, terribly egoistic. Many a man is supported by what he has first gained through robbing his fellow-men in a truly patriarchal fashion, in order to create for himself an object for his self-love, so that he can then feel nice and warm with the thought, You are doing this, you are doing that One does not easily discover that a large part of the so-called love of doing good is a masked self-love. Therefore, the main consideration is not merely to think of what lies nearest to hand, thereby enhancing our self-love, but to feel it our duty to look carefully at the many-sided social structures in which we are placed. We must at first lay the foundations for such understanding. Yet few today are disposed to do so.

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I would like to discuss one question from the viewpoint of general education, namely: How can we consciously establish social impulses to balance those anti-social forces which are developing naturally within us? How can we cultivate the social element, this interest of man in man, so that it springs up in us going ever further and deeper, and leaving us no rest? How can we enkindle this interest which has disappeared so pitiably in our age, the age of the Spiritual Soul? In our age true chasms have already been created between people. Men have no idea about the manner in which they pass one another by without in the least comprehending each other. The desire to understand the other in all his or her uniqueness is very weak today. On the one hand, we have the cry for social union; and on the other, the ever-increasing spread of purely anti-social principles. The blindness of people toward each other can be seen in the many clubs and societies which people form. They do not provide any opportunity for people to get to know one another. It is possible for men to meet one another for years and not to know each other better at the end than they did at the beginning. The precise need of the future is that the social shall be brought to meet the antisocial in a systematic way. For this there are various inner soul methods. One is that we frequently attempt to look back over our present incarnation to survey what has happened to us in this life through our relations with others. If we are honest in this, most of us will say: Nowadays we generally regard the entrance of many people into our life in such a way that we see ourselves, our own personalities, as the center of the review. What have we gained from this or that person who has come into our life? This is our natural way of feeling. It is exactly this which we must try to combat. We should try in our souls to think of others, such as teachers, friends, those who have helped us and also those who have injured us (to whom we often owe more than to those who, from a certain point of view, have been of use to us). We should try to allow these pictures to pass before our souls as vividly as possible in order to see what each has done. We shall see, if we proceed in this way, that by degrees we learn to forget ourselves, that in reality we find that almost everything which forms part of us could not be there at all unless this or that person had affected our lives, helping us on or teaching us something. When we look back on the years in the more distant past to people with whom we are no longer in contact and about whom it is easier to be objective, then we shall see how the soul-substance of our life has been created by the people and circumstances of the past. Our gaze then extends over a multitude of people whom we have known in the course of time. If we try to develop a sense of the debt we owe to this or that person if we try to see ourselves in the mirror of those who have influenced us in the course of time, and who have been associated with us then we shall be able to experience the opening-up of a new sense in our souls, a sense which enables us to gain a picture of the people whom we meet even in the present, with whom we stand face to face today. This is because we have practiced developing an objective picture of our indebtedness to people in the past. It is tremendously important that the impulse should awaken in us, not merely to feel sympathy or antipathy towards the people we meet, not merely to hate or love something connected with the person, but to awaken a true picture of the other in us, free from love or hate. Perhaps you will not feel that what I am saying now is extremely important but it is. For this ability to picture the other in oneself without love or hate, to allow the other individual to appear again within our soul, this is a faculty which is decreasing week by week in the evolution of humanity. It is something which men are, by degrees, completely losing. They pass one another by without arousing any interest in each other. Yet this ability to develop an imaginative faculty for the other is something that must enter into pedagogy and the education of children. For we can really develop this imaginative faculty in us if, instead of striving after the immediate sensations of life as is often done today, we are not afraid to look back quietly in our soul and see our relationships to other human beings. Then we shall be in a position to relate ourselves imaginatively to those whom we meet in the present. In this way we awaken the social instinct in us against the anti-social which quite unconsciously and of necessity continues to develop. This is one side of the picture. The other is something that can be linked up with this review of our relations to others. It is when we try to become more and more objective about ourselves. Here we must also go back to our earlier years. Then we can directly, so to speak, go to the facts themselves. Suppose you are 30 or 40 years of age. You think, How was it with me when I was ten years old? I will imagine myself entirely into the situation of that time. I will picture myself as another boy or girl of ten years old. I will try to forget that I was that; I will really take pains to objectify myself. This objectifying of oneself, this freeing of oneself in the present from one's own past, this shelling-out of the Ego from its experiences, must be specially striven for in our present time. For the present has the tendency towards linking up the Ego more and more with its experiences. Nowadays man wants to be instinctively that which his experiences make him. For this reason it is so very difficult to acquire the activity which Spiritual Science gives. The spirit must make a fresh effort each time. According to true occult science, nothing can be done by comfortably remaining in one's position. One forgets things and must always be cultivating them afresh. This is just as it should be because fresh efforts need to continually be made. He who has already made some progress in the realm of Spiritual Science attempts the most elementary things every day; others are ashamed to pay attention to the basics. For Spiritual Science, nothing should depend on remembering, but on man's immediate experience in the present. It is therefore a question of training ourselves in this faculty through making ourselves objective that we picture this boy or girl as if he or she were a stranger at an earlier time in our lives; of bestirring ourselves more and more, of getting free of events, and of being less haunted at 30 by the impulses of a 10 year old. Detachment from the past does not mean denial of the past. We gain it in another way again, and that is what is so important. On the one hand, we cultivate the social instinct and impulses in us by looking back upon those who have been connected with us in the past and regarding our souls as the products of these persons. In this way we acquire the imagination for meeting people in the present. On the other hand, through objectifying ourselves we gain possibilities of developing imagination directly. This objectifying of our earlier years is fruitful insofar as it does not work in us unconsciously. Think for a moment: If the 10 year old child works on unconsciously in you, then you are the 30 or 40 year old augmented by the 10 year old. It is just the same with the 11, the 12 year old child and so on. Egoism has tremendous power, but its power is lessened when you

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separate the earlier years from yourself and when you make them objective. This is the important point on which we must fix our attention. The following pre-condition for social activity must be made clear to those people who raise social claims in unreasonable and illusory fashion: Understanding about how man can develop himself as a socially creative being must first be present in this period, when anti-social forces are growing ever stronger as part of human evolution. What will then have been achieved? You will discover the whole meaning of what I have now explained if you consider the following: In 1848 there appeared a social document which continues to work into the present day in radical socialism, and in Bolshevism. It was the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx, which contains ideas which rule the thoughts and feelings of many working men. Karl Marx was able to dominate the labour world for the simple reason that he wrote and said what the working man thinks and understands, as a working man. This Communist Manifesto the contents of which I do not need to explain to you, appeared in 1848. It was the first document, the first seed in what has now borne fruit, after the recent destruction of opposing movements. This document contains one slogan, one sentence which you will often find quoted today by most socialist writers: Workers of the world, unite! It is a sentence which has run through many socialist groups. What does it express? It expresses the most unnatural thing that could possibly be thought today. It expresses an impulse for socializing, for uniting a certain mass of people. On what is this uniting, this union, to be built? Upon its opposite, upon the hatred of all those who are not members of the working class. This associating, this banding together of people is to be brought about through splitting up and separating mankind into classes. You must ponder this, you must think about the reality of this principle which is a genuine illusion, if I can use this expression, and which has been adopted in Russia, now in Germany and the Austrian countries, and which will eat its way further and further into the world. It is so unnatural precisely because, on the one hand, it shows the necessity of socializing, but on the other it builds this socialization out of the anti-social instinct of class hatred, and class opposition. However, these things need to be considered from a higher perspective, otherwise we shall not get very far; above all, we shall not be able to participate in the healthy development of mankind in the present. Nowadays Spiritual Science is the only means of seeing things truly in their totality; it is the only means for understanding our time. Just as one is adverse to entering into the spirit and soul foundations of man's physical constitution, so one also avoids, out of fear and lack of courage, studying those things in social life which can only be understood out of the Spirit. People are afraid, cover their eyes and put their heads in the sand like ostriches when they are confronted by real and important things. Of what does human interchange in fact consist? As we have seen, it consists of one person trying to put the other to sleep, while the other tries to resist and stay awake. This is the archetypal phenomenon of social science in Goethe's sense. This archetypal phenomenon points to something which mere material thinking cannot grasp; it points to that which can only be understood when one knows that in human life one is not only asleep during sleep when we slumber along for hours, oblivious to the world but the same applies to daily waking life, where the same forces which lead to sleep and wakefulness also play into the social and anti-social forces of man. All thinking about social forms can bear no fruit if we do not make the effort to take these things into account. With this in mind, we must not be blind to the events taking place in the world, but must carefully watch what is coming to pass. What, for example, does the socialist of today think? He thinks that he can invent socialist slogans and call to men from all countries Workers of the world, unite! and by so doing, establish a sort of international Paradise. This indeed is one of the greatest and most fatal illusions. People are not abstract, but concrete. Fundamentally, the human being is individual. I have tried to make this clear in my Philosophy of Freedom, in contrast to the relativism of Neo-Kantianism and socialism. Men are also different according to their groupings over the world. We will discuss one of these differences so that we may see that it is not possible to simply say: You begin in the West, and carry out a certain social system, then you go to the East and then home again, as if taking a world tour. But the attitude of taking a world journey lives in those who wish to spread socialism over the whole earth. They look upon the earth as a globe on which they, by starting in the West, can eventually arrive in the East. But people on the earth are different and exactly in this difference dwells an impulse which is the motive force of progress. You can see how, in this way, provision is made for the Consciousness Soul through birth and heredity. This actually comes to expression in the English-speaking people of today. They are organized for the Consciousness Soul through their blood, their birthright, and their inherited faculties. Because the English-speaking peoples have been especially prepared for the cultivation of the Consciousness Soul they are, in a way, representatives of the fifth Post-Atlantean period. People are thus differentiated according to where they live and how they are constituted. The Eastern peoples must effect and represent the true development of humanity in another way. Beginning with the Russian people, and passing on to the people of the Asiatic countries one finds an opposition, a revolt against the instinctive elements natural to the evolution of the Consciousness Soul. The people of the East wish to save the soul treasure of intellectuality of the present age for the future. They do not want it to be mixed with experience, but wish to liberate and preserve it for the next period. During this period, a true union can take place between the human being and the evolved Spirit Self. Thus, if the characteristic force of our present period is in the West, and can indeed be best cultivated as a quality among the English-speaking peoples, the people of the east, out of their national inheritance, seek to prevent the coming-to-pass in their souls of that which is most characteristic of the present period so that it may develop in them as a germ for the following period, which begins with the 30th century. From this we can see the fact that certain laws prevail in human life, and in human evolution. In the realm of nature people are not surprised that they cannot burn ice, that a regular law underlies this phenomenon. But with the social structures of

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humanity, people fancy that the same social form, based on the same social principles, can, for example, be made to work in Russia, as in England, Scotland, or America. This is impossible, for the whole world is organized by underlying principles so that one cannot simply create identical forms at will all over the globe. This is a point which we must not forget. In the Central European countries there is a middle condition of affairs. There, it is as if one were in a balanced condition, between the extremes of the East and the West. Looked at in this way, we see the Earth population divided into three parts. You cannot say: Workers of the world, unite! For the workers are of three sorts, are three varieties of people. Let us look at the people of the West again. We find a special disposition, a special mission for all who speak English by nature (single cases may be different) a disposition for the cultivation of the Consciousness Soul. This disposition expresses itself in not detaching from the soul its characteristic quality of intelligence, but connecting this intelligence naturally, instinctively, with events in the world. To naturally, even instinctively, place oneself in the life of the world as a consciousness soul individual is the task of the English-speaking people. The expanse and greatness of the British Empire rests on this quality. Indeed herein lies the original phenomenon behind the expansion of the British Empire that which is hidden in the impulses of its people exactly coincided with the inner impulses of the age. In my lectures on the European folk souls, you will find what is essential in this matter. Much is contained in this series of lectures which were given long before the war, but which provide material for judging this war-catastrophe objectively (see Note 1). Now, the very capacities connected with the evolution of the Consciousness Soul give the English-speaking peoples a special genius for political life. One can study how the political art of dividing society and creating social structure has spread from England to those countries where things have remained backward, where the remnants of the fourth Post-Atlantean period have remained. This influence has spread even to the division of Hungarian society, to this Turanian member of the European peoples. It is only from the English heritage that a foundation for the political thinking of the fifth Post-Atlantean period can come. The English are specially suited to the realm of politics. It is of no use to pronounce a judgment on these things, the necessities of the case alone do so. One may feel sympathy or the opposite that is a private affair. Objective necessity determines the affairs of the world. It is important that these objective necessities shall be clearly placed before us at this time. Goethe, in his Legend of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, has treated the forces of the human soul as three members, or forces; Power, Appearance, and Knowledge or Wisdom or, as the Bronze King, the Silver King and the Golden King. Many remarkable things are spoken of in this legend, regarding the governing relationships which are being prepared for the present and which will live into the future. We can point out that what Goethe symbolizes by the Bronze king, the force of Power, is that which spreads over the world through the English-speaking peoples. This is necessary because the culture of the Consciousness Soul coincides with the special qualities of the British and American peoples. In the Central European countries, which are not in such a state of chaos, there is an unmistakable equilibrium between the Leaning of the intellect toward the Consciousness Soul, and the desire to be free from it; there, sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other. None of the Central European nations is really suited for political life. When they desire to be political, they are disposed to lose contact with reality. Whereas the political thinking of the Anglo-American nations is firmly anchored in the soul, in the Central European countries, it is not, for the second soul force dominates Semblance and Appearance. However, the people of the Central European countries manifest an intellectuality of special brilliance. Compare anything that the English-speaking people have to say about the nature of thinking and you will find the thoughts strongly linked to solid earth-realities. But if you take the brilliant feats of the German mind you will find that they are more an aesthetic shaping of thoughts, even if the aesthetic shaping has a logical form. It is especially noticeable how one thought leads to another so that thoughts of value appear in dialectical form, shaped by an aesthetic will. If one wishes to apply this to solid earth-realities if one wishes by this means to become a politician then one easily becomes untrue; one easily falls into a so-called dreamy idealism which seeks to establish united kingdoms, with decade-long calls for unity but in the end sets up a mighty State by force. Never before has there been such a contrast in political Life as the one between the dream of unity in 1848 and that which was really established in 1871 (see Note 2). There you see the swing of the pendulum, the shift from that which really strives for aesthetic form, which can become untrue, an illusion, a dreamy picture when one wishes to apply it to politics. Here, there is simply no disposition for politics. When the Central European people become politicians they either dream or they lie. I should add that these things must not be discussed with sympathy or antipathy in order to accuse or to acquit. Rather, they must be said, because on the one hand they correspond with a need, and on the other with a tragedy. These are things that we must heed. And if we then look to the East, things are quite different again. We have seen that the German, if he wants to be political, falls into a dreamy idealism or, at its worst, into untruth. The Russian on the other hand becomes ill or actually suffers a death if he desires to be political. This may seem strange, yet a Russian person has a constitution which creates a disposition towards disease, towards death, with intensive political involvement. The Russian Folk Soul has absolutely no affinity with that quality in the English and American Folk Soul which creates a political capacity. But because of this, the East has the task of carrying the intellect separated from its natural connection with the world of sense experience into the future age of the Spirit-Self. One must therefore know how different abilities are spread among the people of the earth. This becomes visible in many areas. You have, for example, heard about the supersensible experience called The Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. There are marked differences in this meeting with the Guardian. Where this meeting, this initiation, is effected entirely independent of nationality, then it is objective and complete. But when this initiation occurs through special groups or societies connected with a particular people or nation, then it is one-sided. The English-speaking peoples are those who, when not guided by higher spiritual leaders but by their own Folk Soul, are especially suited for bringing to the Threshold those spiritual beings who surround and

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accompany us in this world of Ahrimanic spirits, and whom we take with us when we approach the supersensible world, if they have developed a certain liking for us. They then lead us primarily to an experience of the power of sickness and death. You will therefore hear it said by the greater number of Anglo-Americans initiated into the super-sensible Mysteries, that the first more important event in their cognition of the supersensible world is the encounter with those powers expressing sickness and death. They learn to know this as an external, outward experience. If you turn to the Central European people what will you find, when those who are being initiated are not taken out of their nation and raised to universal humanity, but when the Folk Spirit co-operates with them? Then the first important experience which comes to our notice is a conflict between those spiritual beings who belong to higher worlds, to the other side of the Threshold, and certain other beings who are here in the physical world, on this side of the Threshold but who are invisible to ordinary consciousness. The Central Europeans will first become aware of this conflict. The experience of this conflict makes itself felt to the genuine seeker after truth in the Central European countries as a being penetrated with the powers of doubt. One becomes acquainted with all the powers of many-sidedness. In Western countries, there is a stronger inclination to be satisfied with exact truth; whereas in the Central European countries there is a tendency to immediately see the other side of the question. There, in the searching for truth, one trembles in the balance. Everything has two sides. One is regarded as a Philistine in Central Europe if one ventures a one-sided opinion. But this causes tragic suffering when nearing the Threshold. We must pay attention to this struggle which takes place at the Threshold, between spirits which belong only to the spirit world, and those belonging to the world of sense this struggle which conditions all that calls forth doubt in man, this vacillation with regard to the truth. It is this experience of doubt which creates the European need to be trained in the truth in philosophy so as not to fall prey so easily to the generally recognized impulses of truth in society. When you turn to the Eastern countries and the Folk Soul acts a sponsor at the initiation then one primarily experiences the spirits that work upon human egotism. One sees all that gives rise to human selfishness. The Westerner who approaches the Threshold does not see this. Instead, he sees the spirits that permeate the world and humanity with sickness and death in the broadest sense, as injurious, destructive and degrading for humanity. The Neophyte of the East, however, sees all that comes forward to tempt man as selfishness. Therefore, the ideal which proceeds from Western initiation is making men healthy and keeping them healthy, and giving mankind the possibility of healthy development. In the East, on the other hand, there springs up, as instinctive knowledge in connection to a religious orientation toward initiation, a feeling of one's own insignificance when faced with the sublime powers of the spiritual world. The man of the East, when meeting the spiritual world, is shown how selfishness may be cured, and egotism destroyed because of its dangers. This is even expressed in the external character of people from the East. Much of the Eastern character which is inexplicable to people from the West arises precisely from what is expressed at the Threshold of the spiritual world. So we can see the differences in human qualities when we look at the inner development, the inner shaping of the psycho-spiritual development of humanity. It is important to keep this clearly in mind. In certain occult circles of the English-speaking people who were under the guardianship of the Folk Spirits, prophetic sayings could be found during the second half of the 19th century which referred to the things we have been discussing, things which are happening today. Think of what could have happened if the people of Europe, with the exception of those speaking English, had not stopped up their ears and blindfolded their eyes, so that their attention was directed from the truth of these things. I will tell you of a formula which was frequently repeated during the second half of the 19th century. The following was said: The State must be abolished in Russia, so that the Russian people may develop, for in Russia social experiments must be carried out, which could never be done in Western countries. This might seem unsympathetic to non-English ears, but it contains a high degree of wisdom and insight. And he who can connect himself with these things so that he can believe in their efficacy as impulses in whose realization he can take part, this person is truly of the present age (see Note 3). Those who do not see the reality of these forces set themselves against the time. These matters must be clearly understood. It was, of course, the inevitable lot of Central and Eastern Europe to block their ears and blindfold their eyes to occult facts; to give no heed to them, to work on lines of mysticism, abstract teaching, and abstract intellectualism. But we are now in a time when this must cease. Pessimism and despair must not be created by such contemplations as these. Rather force, courage, and the will to help is needed. In this sense we should always remember that we do not work against, but rather with the issues of our time out of the spiritual scientific impulse of the Anthroposophical Movement. Let us see to it that we do not sleep away our opportunities. Spiritual Science can lead us to the conscious cultivation of social faculties. It can, for example, show us the forces at work in the human being when he is free from the body, what he is experiencing between going to sleep and awaking. But more importantly it can give us a direction in conscious waking life for developing social capacities. We of course cultivate the powers most necessary for our age when we are consciously thinking about those things which can only forcefully penetrate into our soul during waking hours. We could not develop, we would be powerless, if we only had to evolve during sleep. It is for our waking life that the following is therefore important. Two powers are working in the present. One is the power which since the Mystery of Golgotha has worked in different metamorphoses through the ensuing periods of earth evolution as the Christ Impulse. We have often said that just in our age a reappearance of the Etheric Christ will take place. This reappearance of the Christ is indeed not far off. That He is coming again is no cause for pessimism, nor should it give rise to a nebulous longing and a desire for soul-warming, self-seeking, theosophical theories. The Christ Impulse has various forms, but in His present form He wishes to help humanity realize that spiritual wisdom now being revealed by the spiritual world. This wisdom wants to be realized and the Christ Impulse will be a help in this realization. It is on this realization that all depends. At this critical moment humanity is faced with a momentous decision. On the one side stands the Christ Being, calling us of our own free will to do what we have been speaking about today, to consciously and

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freely receive the social impulses which can heal and help humanity. Freely, to receive them. Therefore, we do not unite ourselves on those levels where hatred forms a foundation for love as in the cry, Workers of the world, unite! But we unite by striving to realize the Christ Impulse, by doing those things which are the will of Christ for this age. Opposed to this will stands the adversary who is called in the Bible the unrighteous Prince of this World.He makes his presence known in various ways. One of these ways is to take those forces which allow us as free beings to serve that which we have been talking about today, to take this force of free will and to place it at the service of the physical. This adversary, the Prince of this world, has various instruments; for example, hunger and social chaos. By this means, through external compulsion, and physical measures, the force of free will is subverted to the service of apparent necessity. See how humanity today shows that it will not of its own free will turn to a truly social life, and to a recognition of true progress for mankind. It wishes to be compelled. And yet, this compulsion has not even led people to make the basic distinction between the Spirit of the supersensible world, the Christ Spirit and the adversary, the unrighteous Prince of this world. Look at this situation and see if this does not explain why in so many places today men oppose and struggle against the acceptance of any true spiritual teaching, against true spiritual deeds, and against Spiritual Science. They are possessed by the unrighteous Prince of this world. Now think for a moment; think how you of your own free will turn to spiritual life; think humbly of yourselves, but also earnestly and strongly as the missionaries of the Christ-Spirit today, who have to combat the unrighteous Prince of this world, who lays hold of all those who unconsciously allow themselves to use forces out of the future to realize their own aims. If you think of yourselves in this light there is no room for pessimism indeed it leaves you no time for a pessimistic view of the world. It will of course not shut your eyes and ears to that which has happened, sometimes in a terrible manner and which is tragic to behold in its true form. But you will preeminently keep the following before your souls I am, in any case, called to look at everything without illusion; I must be neither pessimistic nor optimistic, so that forces may awaken in my soul which give me the power to aid the free development of the human being, to contribute to human progress in the place and situation where I am. Even if the faults and tragedies of the age are very visible to Spiritual Science this should not be an incitement to pessimism or optimism, but rather a call to an inner awakening so that independent work and the cultivation of right thinking will result. For above all things, adequate insight is necessary. If only a sufficient number of people today were motivated to say, We absolutely must have a better understanding of things; then everything else would follow. It is just in regard to social questions that there is a need to consciously strive for insight and understanding. The development of the will activity is planned for, it is coming. If we in daily life would only wish to educate ourselves about social issues, and develop new social ideas, then (according to an occult law), each of us would be able to take another human being along. Each one of us can therefore work for two if we have the will. We could achieve much if we had an earnest desire to acquire insight at once. The rest would follow. It is not so bad that not many people can do much about the situation of society today, but it is incredibly sad if people cannot at least make up their minds to become acquainted with the social laws of Spiritual Science. The rest would follow if serious study would take place. This is what I have desired to communicate to you today regarding the importance of knowing and recognizing certain things about the social situation of the present, and how such a recognition can lead to a life impulse for the future. I hope we will again have the opportunity of speaking together about the more intimate aspects of Spiritual Science. Note 1: Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of Folk-Souls. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970. Note 2: The reference is to the distinction between the dreams of the German revolution of 1848 and the creation of the German Empire of 1871 by the Prussian State. Note 3: Here and in other references to Russia in this lecture, Rudolf Steiner appears to be referring to the political attitudes and behaviour of Germany and Austria toward Russia during the time of the Russian revolution when the actions of the central powers certainly strengthened the hands of the Bolsheviks against more moderate social democratic forces.

The Spiritual Development of Man

Spiritual Development: Lecture III: Man's Faculty of Cognition in the Etheric World

In the last few days I have been speaking of man's place in the Universe. On the one side we envisaged man's organisation as composed of physical body, etheric body or body of formative forces, astral body and the true I which passes from earthly life to earthly life. At the same time I also tried to show how these members of the human being are each connected in a different way with the Universe. It can be said that the physical body is connected with all that is the physical, earthly world of the senses; man's physical body is part of that world. But when we think of the etheric body or the body of formative forces, we must understand that this belongs to quite a different kind of world, to that world which is itself etheric and of which I told you that man should experience it as coming to him from the far spaces of the cosmos. If, then, we imagine the forces of the earth spreading out in all directions and man living within these forces, which are those of the physical world, we must conceive the etheric world as coming in on all sides from the direction of the outer global shell of the universe to meet the outstreaming physical forces, and thus

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reaching man. It is obvious, therefore, that man's etheric body is subject to entirely different laws from those governing the physical body. And again, when contemplating man's astral body, we perceive it to be connected with worlds that are not to be found at all in that cosmos which is contained in the Physical and the etheric, and in which we find that with our astral body we belong to the world we enter between death and a new birth. And finally with the I itself we belong to a world that flows as from a quickening fount through worlds which, as for instance our own world, are threefold in character. The three members of our world are the physical, the etheric, the astral. The world of the I passes through this world and through other similarly threefold worlds. It is therefore a far more embracing world, one that we must regard as eternal as compared with the temporal. But we must also have regard to the fact that, whenever we employ those human faculties of perception and understanding which inform us about the etheric body or the body of formative forces, the astral body and the I, we do in fact enter into entirely different worlds. We have to change over to the sphere of active, living thinking in order to experience our etheric body. What we then have to bear in mind is that in that world everything is different from what we experience while bound to the physical world of the senses. In the first place the things and happenings we know from the aspect of the physical world appear in quite a different light in these higher worlds. As it is, the things and events encountered in the physical world are after all only final manifestations. They have their source in the higher worlds; so that we then see more into the primary origins of our surroundings in the physical world. But apart from that, when in the physical world we have, to begin with, the world well known to ordinary consciousness, where man is surrounded by the three kingdoms of nature besides his own. But when we rise to those powers of cognition in my books I have used the expression Imaginative Cognition which enable us to experience our own etheric body or the body of formative forces, we enter the etheric world. And we have sufficiently developed and strengthened our faculties when we have kindled the inner light and can experience ourselves, as it were, in the Second Man, in the body of formative forces; we then enter the world which, at any rate to begin with, reveals itself to us in images: the world of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. Having broken through, as it were, into the cosmic spheres where the etheric body, the body of formative forces, becomes perceptible to us, we recognise on entering this world of flowing images that these reveal manifestations of the Beings of the third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. There we are among Beings who are not with us in the physical world of the senses. The presence of these Beings reveals itself to us through the medium of qualities similar in kind to those we perceive also through our senses in the physical world. But here, in the world of the senses, we see for instance the colours spread over the surface of things or in purely physical configurations such as the rainbow. Sounds are experienced as connected with specific objects in the physical world. In the same way, warmth and cold are felt as emanating from certain objects in the physical world of the senses. But when we regard the world in which the third Hierarchy is revealed to us, we do not have colours adhering to things, sounds reverberating from objects, and so on, but colours, sounds, warmth and cold flowing and vibrating one can hardly say through space but flowing and vibrating in time. Colour is not spread over the surface of things but it fluctuates and moves in waves. And by applying the faculties which enabled us to enter these worlds, we know that, just as in the physical world colour-effect suggests a material foundation, so in yonder world the floating cloud of colour, a flowing organism of colour, is the manifestation of the working and weaving of the spirit-and-soul forces of the third Hierarchy. So that the moment we behold the life-tableau of which I have spoken, which gives a clear and spontaneous picture of the whole of our life since birth, there also appears within this stream of our own life's events something of which one can. say: within the de-materialised world of flowing colours and sounds lives the third Hierarchy. The Connection of the various Members of Man's Being with the corresponding Worlds of the Universe When our faculties of cognition are strong enough to rise to the level where we can observe our own astral body, that is to say, that part of us which existed before we descended into earthly life, and which we shall again carry with us when we have passed through the gate of death, then we know: this is a wider world, a world we do not find in the cosmic ether but beyond the gates of birth and death. Here we enter the wider astral world. Things do not tally exactly with descriptions given in my book, Theosophy, where they are presented from a different point of view. But just as we meet the third Hierarchy when we have attained experience of our body of formative forces, so we encounter the second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Kyriotetes and Dynamis, in the world which reveals to us our own astral body. And this second Hierarchy does not become perceptible to us in flowing colours and sounds, but it manifests itself to us by heralding and proclaiming the import of revelations of the Logos resounding and weaving through the Universe. The second Hierarchy speaks to us. If, after having attained the necessary powers of cognition, one wants to give some Indication of how one is related to these worlds, using words which naturally no longer have meaning that is applicable in the sense-world, and yet are to some extent expressive in regard to the higher worlds, one must say: For the etheric world the inner living thinking becomes a kind of organ of touch. With living thinking we touch this world of flowing colours and so on. We must not imagine that we see the red as the eye sees the red of the senses, spread out on the surface of things; instead we sense, we touch red and yellow and so forth; we touch the sounds, so that we can say: in the etheric world, living thinking is the element of touch in relation to what lives in the world of the third Hierarchy.

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On entering that world to which in a sense our astral body belongs, we cannot speak of experiencing this astral world merely through the element of touch, but we must say: we apprehend this world as the revelation of the Beings of the second Hierarchy. Each separate manifestation presents itself to us as a member, a part of the World-Logos. Out of the deep silence resounds the voice of the Spiritual Beings. Thus, after touch: speech, communication. And when, in the way I have indicated, sustained effort rewards us with the experience of the I which goes from earthly life to earthly life and, between them, passes through the other lives between each death and a new birth, then we enter the spirit-world proper, the higher spirit-world. What happens in this world to begin with, is that we enter into a special relationship to our true I. The I we experience inwardly here in this life on earth between birth and death is, as we know, bound to the physical corporeality. We are aware of it as long as we experience ourselves in the physical body and, in a way, we are forced to practise selflessness when we rise into the etheric world and the astral world. There we have at most something like a recollection of this earthly I. But now we find the true I as it passes from earthly life to earthly life. Our first impression is that of an entirely different being. We say to ourselves: Here I live through this earthly existence between birth and death. Looking back I see that strip of etheric world which takes me back as far as my birth on earth. Then my vision opens into world-wide realms existing only in time, where to speak of space would be quite misleading; but in a wide perspective the world appears to me in all its fullness, as it lives and weaves between death and a new birth. Looking through and beyond the ether, the world of the third Hierarchy, and through the astral, where I was between death and a new birth as in a supersensible world whose life is revelation of the Logos manifesting as the Cosmic Word as my vision penetrates all this, I finally behold a being at first far remote, a being representing the essence of my previous life on earth. First, then, I see myself here in this earthly life with my present ghost-like I, and then, looking far back through all that has just been described, I see what constitutes the essence of my previous life on earth. But at the same time I perceive how the content of the latter, as the gradually evolving I, has been passing through the worlds I have been observing in retrospective perspective as far as my present life on earth. To begin with I do, in fact, perceive my true I as some strange, remote being. And in this being, strange as it appears to me at first, I recognise myself. Every word in this passage should be taken with absolute seriousness because every single word is of significance. This whole experience must culminate in the realisation that the true I first taken to be some strange being, is indeed one's own self; that there appeared what seemed to be some other being which lived in the far distant past, but that it is, in fact, you yourself. And then one discovers how this self has flowed from the previous existence on earth into the present earthly life, but that now, in this life, it is covered up, as it were, and could emerge only if all that befalls between going to sleep and waking were to stand revealed before the soul. It is there that all that which on its way through the astral and etheric world has reached us from our previous life on earth, continues to live and weave. It is, you see, a world of earthly contradictions mingled with chords of heavenly harmonies in this inner process of the striving soul: earthly contradictions inasmuch as by means which are designed to meet the needs of ordinary daily life on earth, one cannot really reach one's own true I. As it is, only the first rudiments of love live in our earthly I. And even so, a glow is shed over life on earth through the power of love which radiates into this earthly life. But this love must grow stronger. It must gain sufficient strength to enable man to behold the etheric world and the astral world through the power of love and thus to overcome what lives in him as his lower self, as egoism the opposite of love to gain mastery over that which, as the antithesis of love, enables him to experience himself in earthly life as an independent I. Love must grow so strong that one learns to ignore this earthly I, to forget it, to disregard it. Love is the identification of one's own self with the other being. This impulse must be so strong that one ceases to heed one's own I as it lives in the earthly body. Here then arises the contradiction, that it is precisely through selflessness, through the highest capacity for love, that one advances towards one's own true I beckoning as it radiates through the cycles of time. One has to lose one's earthly I to behold one's true I. And he who fails to accomplish this act of surrender has simply no means of finding the true I. One could say that the true I does not want to be sought whenever revelation of its presence is desired. If sought for, it hides. For only in love will it be found, and love is a surrender of self to the other being. For that reason the true Self must be found as if it were another being. At the moment of coming face to face with one's true I, one also becomes aware of what lives in a wider world, in the spiritual world itself. One meets the beings of the first Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. And just as there one finds again one's I of which one has really only a reflection in earthly life so now one finds the entire world of earthly environment in its true spiritual form. Hence one must also love this earthly world to find the world of its primal origins, together with the true I. So that we can say: What reveals itself in the spiritual world is something remembered, is touch, speech, memory; but remembrance of something which formerly one had known only in reflections, in images.

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Thus, by experiencing one's human self, and with the realisation of one's own humanity, one enters into the life of the Universe in its totality. And to give a clear picture of the various members of man's being, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I, each must also be shown in its relationship to the corresponding worlds of the Universe. What I have now described must be well understood and taken in its full meaning before any approach to the problem of the four parts of man's nature can disclose their true significance. Here is a case in point which shows very clearly that man must not only turn his thoughts in other directions, but think in a different way if he is to rise to a true understanding of the spiritual world. He must bring to life what are really only dead images in purely physical sense-perception: his attitude of mind must change. And here one can indeed come across some extraordinary products of modern spiritual life, which show the difficulties that have to be overcome if Anthroposophy is to enter into the souls of men. Anthroposophy as Academic Philosophy (Chair-Philosophy) Sees It When the book Occult Science: had been published, a well-known modern philosopher took it upon himself to analyse it. He first read the chapter about the four members of man's constitution physical body, etheric body, astral body, I and so on. Now this book has also been read by many quite simple people but people possessed of healthy common sense. For them it had point and meaning because with healthy common-sense one can always follow a subject, just as one can understand a picture without being a painter. But to one who in these days is a much quoted philosopher, such understanding presents considerably more difficulties than It does to a naive, simple human being. As this renowned philosopher reads: physical body, etheric body, astral body, I, he is puzzled and wonders what he can make of it all. What does it all mean? Physical body, yes, of course. Etheric body? well, perhaps it exists. What is dense matter in the physical body may here be of finer substance, but it is still matter. He argues, therefore, that to distinguish between physical and etheric body is to draw an arbitrary dividing line between the two. Astral body? We know something about a soul, says this philosopher, but astral body? In the soul we have our thinking, feeling and willing. These are functions of the physical body. If one understands the physical body one has also grasped the meaning of thinking, feeling and willing. And the I that is only the synthesis of all this. Such was his way of arguing. And now please observe how the renowned philosopher's critical thought was formulated. Having taken account of what he could find in the Occult Science: much as one might look at a chair, he said to himself: a chair can also be divided into its parts legs, seat, back, first, second and third part and there is no reason why man could not be divided in the same way as a chair. Finally he grants that this will serve well enough as a classification of man's constitution, but there is really nothing remarkably new in it, as in his view the principle underlying the division of man's constitution into its four members applies equally to the chair. When we turn to physical chemistry the matter already becomes less difficult. There one could not talk so glibly about simple division. The chemist divides water into hydrogen and oxygen, H2O; the natural scientist will not simply divide water in an abstract sense into two parts, hydrogen and oxygen. He cannot leave it at that because he knows that hydrogen will not only combine with oxygen, as in water, but that it also combines, for instance in nitric acid, with chloride. It follows that hydrogen contained in water is not only to be found there as part of water but is capable, when not forming part of water, of entering into quite different combinations. And likewise oxygen, when not forming part of water, can enter into other combinations and unite with quite different substances, as for instance, calcium, in lime. Hydrogen plus chloride can become nitric acid, oxygen plus calcium becomes lime. Here one could not say: all you have to do is to divide water into its parts in the abstract, like a chair. Man has to be considered on a still higher level. Here we have not merely a division into physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, but man's physical body must be conceived as belonging to the earth. When a human being passes through the gate of death and leaves his physical corpse behind, the physical body turns to earth, but the etheric body rises up into the ether. The astral body leaves both and enters those worlds which are the domain of the second Hierarchy. And the belongs to a different world again, the domain of the first Hierarchy. These four members do not merely represent a division for classification, they belong to quite different spheres of the Universe. At the same time the distinction illustrates the nature of man's being. We have here, on a much higher level, something for which one has to search already when progressing from the comparison of the chair with that of the water. Naturally the level of mentality in our modern civilisation again presents a considerable obstacle, for the much-cited philosopher could have learned already from chemistry that it is not enough to go on talking only about abstract divisions, that one can apply them to a chair but not to water. However, in the case of this so-called philosopher, the philosophy unfortunately did not get past the chair to the water. It did not rise from the observation of life's trivialities to natural science. On the other hand, natural science does not concern itself with philosophy, so that the chemist of to-day does not think about such things at all. It shows that in a philosophy which, from this point of view, might be called a chair-doctrine, thinking in terms of natural science has as yet no part. Again, in chemistry, in natural science, philosophy plays no pert. Therefore it is precisely in the world of

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the scientist that those conditions are wanting, which can pave the way to an understanding of the deeper, inner truths of the Universe in their relation to man. The man who undertook this critical study did in fact submit his article to me first, in manuscript. But what could I do with it? One cannot enter into a discussion with a man whose mind lacks the very first pre-requisites. I did nothing about it, but later found the article printed with all the mistakes and all the nonsense contained in such chair-philosophy. Such are the trials of fate which Anthroposophy has to suffer on the way. One must be clear about such situations as they so often arise between Anthroposophy and its critics. It is precisely in that quarter that for the time being there is not the slightest possibility of an understanding. And this philosopher, much quoted among philosophers, even makes certain concessions in line with ideas which are more or less popular currency in modern civilisation. For instance, he admits that there once existed a continent between Europe and America called Atlantis, inhabited by the ancient Atlanteans, a prehistoric humanity. Then he asks the hypothetical question I am not quoting verbatim how is it possible that today, when we have a proper physiology and a proper psychology, anyone could conceive the idea of dividing man's being in such a way! Of course in Anthroposophy one does not do it in the way it can be done with a chair, but he thinks so. This philosopher in his own way he is perfectly conscientious was honestly puzzled how anyone could make such a division, or could hold such a primitive conception as compared with the knowledge a modern philosopher can command. Well, as regards fundamental truths the modem philosopher is not in a particularly favourable position, but he thinks he is. Two days ago I explained to those who attended the Teachers' Course what modern so-called psycho-analysis really is. I should like to repeat that the peculiar thing about psycho-analysis is that it arises on the one side from dilettante physiology, in which the soul-forces do not reach the sphere of the spirit but remain bound to the body, while on the other hand it is based on dilettante psychology. The two do not meet. As a result, grotesque connections are being formulated when dilettantism endeavours to establish links between research work in psychology and research work in physiology. And the dilettantism is of immense proportions, and equally great in both cases. The psychiatrists' own psychological dilettantism equals in magnitude that of physical dilettantism, but when both are the same in volume and operate jointly, they multiply each other. That, according to simple arithmetic, makes the square of dilettantism. So that, seen in the true light, psycho-analysis is the square of dilettantism, because it is the product of the multiplication of dilettantism by dilettantism. Now the problem for our much quoted philosopher amounted to this: he could not understand how anyone could conceive such a primitive idea as to divide man's being into four members as one divides a chair into three. So he advances the hypothesis that I must be a re-incarnated Atlantean. Really quite ingenious from the chair-philosophy point of view! The Overcoming of Materialism by Knowledge attained through living Thinking One can be a materialist if lack of inner strength makes it impossible for the soul-forces to seek an opening for finding the way which leads into the world of soul-and-spirit, to the archetypal origins. Nothing can be gained by trying to prove anything on crude evidence, because materialism can certainly be proved as long as the evidence of proof is taken from the physical world. That is the crucial point. To find the way from the physical, into the spiritual, inner activity is needed, not abstract reasoning. The way to true Anthroposophy is found through that inner activity in man which stimulates the search for true knowledge. And all skirmishing in attempts to prove anything is useless, because you cannot argue with a man whose proofs are based entirely on the physical world of the senses. To disprove to such a man what to him is indisputable remains an impossibility as long as he lacks that primal strength of the inner life which alone could start him on the way to finding the spiritual world. This must be understood. One must realise that it is given to man to rise of his own free will from the physical to the spirituals that this rising into the spiritual world is not an act of sense-bound reasoning, but an act of inner, conscious human experience. It is only when one really has this vital inner experience that one becomes capable of appreciating Anthroposophy in the right perspective, as seen against the merits of merely physical methods of cognition. Our time is sorely in need of this. A philosophy whose analytic powers of reasoning are only applicable to such things as chairs, can hardly be expected to have a ready understanding for what are real human values. It is, however, quite competent when dealing with chair-values. But what humanity needs today is what leads man to man, to the real man, not merely to his outward appearance. In its outer aspect the appearance reflects all that is inherent in the archetype of the spiritual entity, but it does not reveal that to inner experience. For in the experience of self, man must first find and recognise himself as a being of soul-and-spirit. Thus in the last resort the way to all knowledge is bound up with knowing oneself as an image of the true Self of man. If with the growing strength of love that level of knowledge is attained by which one recognises as one's own self what at first seems to be a strange being, and again, if one rises to the height where the earthly world is found again in the archetypal world, then one is no longer engaged in a process of gaining abstract knowledge, but in a process of living cognition. And it is in this living process of attaining knowledge that the world reveals itself to man through his own being, and that his own being reveals itself in his experience of the outer world. Thus man becomes a being who finds himself again in the entire

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Universe, for knowing himself he learns to know the world and, knowing the world, he learns to know himself. In this interrelationship between world and man there reveals itself what unites man with the Divine-Spiritual, that which makes his being aglow with the religious mood of all real higher knowledge. And finally, when earnest cognition blends with religious experience, then knowledge radiates religious emotion, and the transparency of knowledge is lifted to that sphere where faith becomes knowledge through its own inner power of cognition. The world is found in man and man in the world on the path of knowledge through the world. (In the etheric world: through living thinking: touch. In the astral world: through the deep silence of the soul: speech. In the spiritual world: through re-cognition: memory.) Thus world and man become united in an all-embracing, cosmic, spiritual-divine being, in which man finds himself and the world and so for the first time rises to his true human dignity which can then also enter his religious and moral ethos and make him fully Man.

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