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+  {
+    "id": "GA068a-22",
+    "title": "Esoteric Christianity: The Gospel of St. John and Ancient Mysteries",
+    "date": "27 Nov 1906",
+    "city": "Düsseldorf",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA068a/English/Singles/19061127p01.html",
+    "book_title": "",
+    "content": "The time has now come to make known in wider circles that which has been spoken of throughout the history of the evolution of mankind under the name of the Mysteries or Mysticism, the so-called Esoteric Wisdom.\nFor in the soul of man, behind what comes to the light of day lies a deeper wisdom which has hitherto remained unknown to mankind in general.\nLet us be quite clear what it is men have always understood by the term “Mysteries” or the “esoteric.” All that has been brought about in the world through civilisation goes back ultimately to a few great personalities, a few leading individuals. For example, a construction like the Simplon tunnel can be traced back to the mental work of great individuals, who were not themselves directly concerned with the building of the tunnel but who made it possible, by their Intellectual discoveries, for others to build it.\nThe “practical” man would perhaps be of the opinion that such things are accomplished by an activity that is purely external. It would be the very greatest mistake to accede to such an opinion. Neither the engineers who conceived the plan, nor the workmen who carried it out, are the spiritual originators. If it were not for what is called Higher Mathematics as elaborated by Leibnitz, Newton and others, such works could never be there at all. These thinkers were necessary in order to bring into being what is called “technics.” If we go to the root of the matter, we shall find that such works could never have been achieved, nor any goods have been manufactured, without the soul of the Thinker .\nIf this is so with regard to the outer materialistic culture, it is true in still greater measure of the spiritual currents that flow through human history.\nAll the Religion and all the Art that has ever been brought to mankind, all the Justice that has ever borne rule in states, all the order and Morality that has lived among men leads back to great Initiates, leads back to hidden sources of Wisdom. This is what we find when we set out to look for the deeper origin of things.\nConsider the works of Art which have succeeded each other through the centuries, and you will find that they can all be traced back to deeper sources. Whether we take a poet like Dante, or a mind and spirit like Goethe's, or a painter such as Raphael, or again some great religious event in history — all moral and religious streams, all art and all science, lead back into the hidden places, where was cultivated in secret that which is known as Mysticism or Esotericism.\nAnd as with all other religions so with Christianity too we find its foundations in the esoteric. It is only an evidence of shortsightedness when the objection is raised, that Christianity is for simple hearts and should speak to the feelings and be comprehensible for all. That is a very shortsighted view. All religions, it is true, ultimately clothe their truths in sentences so full of power and impulse that no soul is too simple to receive them. What emerges finally, however, in this simple form, has its origin in the heights, with the so-called Initiates.\nThroughout history there have always been Initiates. In ancient India it was the Rishis who taught a primeval Wisdom. In Persia Zarathustra was the teacher of Wisdom. We look to Greece, to Egypt, to Rome, everywhere we find to begin with, a religion of the people, but standing in the midst of the people are always those who may be called spiritual “Giants,” unknown to mankind by name. These are they who formed themselves into occult brotherhoods. Whosoever wished to be accepted into such a brotherhood had to undergo a strict and severe probation. The probation had no immediate relation to the intellectual life. It was far more a question of a man's wrestling his way through to an inner freedom of character , where feelings and passions had no power with him. Then he had to learn not to misuse his knowledge. Men who had passed through severe trials and tests of this nature became missionaries to the rest of mankind. They were not allowed to have any other feeling or purpose in their heart, save only this — to serve and help mankind. They had to be men who would make real the words — “He who would be first among you, let him be the servant of all” — And in intellectual striving also they must never lag behind but always press on to find the Higher Truths.\nToday it is frequently said to one who believes in the possibility of knowing the Spiritual Worlds: But we human beings have boundaries to our knowledge. But inside the Mystery circles it was said: Thou has capabilities which slumber in thee; if thou develop them, then canst thou strive through to a Higher Knowledge.\nThe development a man was enabled to undergo by the training of his inner talents and capacities was called in the Mystery Centres a Second Birth. It was said that such a one experienced on a higher plane what a man born blind experiences here in the world of the senses when he has undergone an operation and can see. This “operation” on the soul, the re-birth in the Spirit, was performed for the Mystics in the Mysteries.\nThat which was called in the Mysteries the Kingdom of Heaven, into which the Mystic was led, was not in some other place. The Kingdom of the Spiritual World is here where man is. As many worlds are around us as we have ability to realize and grasp. It was no dry and abstract Wisdom that was received in the Mysteries, but a Wisdom which was at the same time Religion and Art.\nIn the Mysteries of Greece the spiritual eye of the Mystic was opened. It was shown to him how once in primeval times man had been half animal and how the soul had striven upwards to that stage of humanity upon which he now beheld himself. Three stages were shown to him. He saw first forms as they lived in a very distant evolution of mankind, then forms half animal and half man, and finally perfect human forms. These three types of the evolution of mankind stood before him in the Greek Mysteries and they found their expression in Greek sculpture. There was (1) the Zeus type, with the straight nose and with the eyes rounded out upwards; (2) the type of the God Mercury with woolly hair and snub nose; and (3) the type of the Satyr , with quite different eyes, different nose and different corners to the mouth. These three types stand before us in Greek art as an image of the stages of the evolution of mankind. At another time it was shown to the Mystic how the God himself descended into nature, how he evolved upwards through the mineral kingdom, plant kingdom and animal kingdom to the human kingdom and was then born anew out of the human heart. That was called the descent of the God, his Resurrection and his Ascension. The whole process was represented in the Greek drama. All that was represented in the drama came originally from the Mysteries.\nJust as the trunk of the tree divides itself into different branches, so did religion, science and art become divided in the Mysteries. The ancient Mysteries which were celebrated in Greece — the Eleusinian — and the Mysteries of the Egyptian Priest-wisdom were called Mysteries of the Spirit. Those who stood high in these Mysteries as teachers and leaders had attained to the spiritual worlds; they associated with Spirits, they had intercourse with Spiritual Beings. Iamblichus shows us how the Gods descended in the Mysteries. Only after moral purification, and only when the intellect had been made clear and lucid, could one obtain admission into these places of wisdom.\nThis is how it was in the ancient heathen times, in the times of the Mysteries of the Spirit. Never without the most wonderful enthusiasm and the most inward devotion did the Mystics speak of that which could be experienced in the Mystery-schools. Aristides speaks thus: “I thought I touched the God and felt him near, I myself being at the time in a condition between waking and sleeping. My spirit was light, so as none can describe or realise who has not himself been initiated.” And in another passage he says: “It was as if the Spiritual World flowed and poured around me.” Plutarch says, “He who had received initiation in these Mysteries greeted the Godhead with the greeting of eternity.” Whoever had had this experience was called “re-born.”\nWe must now say a little about what formed the last act in every such Initiation into the Mysteries of the Spirit.\nThere had first to be the moral purification and the clarifying of the intellect. Then the pupil must learn to see with the eyes of the Spirit. Behind the consciousness which accompanies us through the waking condition, there is another consciousness. This consciousness does not sink into complete darkness when man falls asleep. Man remains conscious at night, he is there present. But the consciousness which accompanies him from morning until evening, that does not remain. There is however a way of overcoming the unconsciousness man has in sleep; there are methods whereby this end can be attained. By a culture of the soul which brings about certain intimate processes in the innermost being of the soul, man can win through to the possibility of finding new revelations in his dream life; he can experience things which he recognises in another way than with the eyes and ears of the senses. It is immaterial whether a man recognizes the truth in sleep or by day when awake; in either case he must learn to carry over into reality the world which he there experiences. When in this way he has come into the position of being able to see the Spiritual in the whole world, then he has attained the first stage of initiation.\nAt the second stage he has an experience which is like living in a flowing ocean of colour. At this stage there is a higher initiation; a consciousness is developed wherein is revealed to him a still higher Spiritual world. Today in ordinary life man is not capable of awakening the consciousness which lies behind the physical world.\nIn the last act of the Mysteries of the Spirit the pupil was put into a kind of sleep. Care had been taken in the preparation that when the day consciousness sank down, consciousness did not cease. For three days and three nights the man lay in another state of consciousness in the Mystery temple, citizen and participator in another world. Then he was awakened by the Priest. He received a new name. He was an Initiate, he had been “born again.” One could say of the Mysteries of the Spirit: “Blessed are they who have experienced them, blessed are they who now behold in the Mysteries of the Spirit.”\nAt the time of Christ Jesus, to the Mysteries of the Spirit were added the Mysteries of the Son , and these have been ever since the time of Christ. The Mysteries of the Father — the Mysteries of the Future — are only cultivated in a very small circle. The Mysteries of the Son are cultivated in the Rosicrucian Mystery which is also Christian, for those who require a Christianity that is armed to meet all Wisdom.\nToday we will concern ourselves with the Mysteries of the Son, and see how they differ from the ancient heathen Mysteries. If we would grasp what a mighty step forward has been taken by the coming of Christianity, we must learn to understand two important utterances. The one is: “Blessed are they who believe, even when they do not see,” and the other: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” If we comprehend these utterances in all their depth, then we understand the very foundation of Christianity.\nWhilst to the world at large Paul spoke in powerful kindling words, he also gave teachings to his intimate pupils which were transmitted first by word of mouth and then in writing, teachings that are connected with the name of Dionysius, who was known as Dionysius “The Areopagite.” We have here to do with something founded by Saint Paul himself, wherein was proclaimed the deepest wisdom. These teachings of Saint Paul were written down for the first time in the sixth century, in the writings of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius. It is not so much the historical fact, but the content of these documents which is of interest for us.\nAn esoteric Christianity does exist. This is not admitted in certain circles, with the result that a peculiar place has been assigned to the Saint John Gospel. The Saint John Gospel is looked upon by theologians as a book which emanated out of poetic genius. They have however no understanding for what the Saint John Gospel means.\nWhereas the three other evangelists relate the exoteric. Saint John relates what he experiences as an initiated seer, who could look into the Spiritual worlds. The writer of the Saint John Gospel wrote from the point of view of an initiate. Whoever looks upon it as a book that one should read and understand in the same way as one reads and understands any other book knows nothing of the Saint John Gospel. He alone has knowledge of it who can experience it. Most translators do not render the Spirit of it at all.\nThe first words of this Gospel, rightly translated, sound as follows:\nIn the primeval beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and with God was the Word.\nThe same was in the primeval beginning with God.\nAll things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.\nIn Him was the Life and the Life was the Light of men.\nAnd the Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.\nThere was a man sent from God whose name was John.\nThe same came for a witness to bear witness of the Light, that all might believe on it.\nHe was not the Light, but a witness of the Light.\nFor the true Light which lighteth every man, was to come into the world.\nIt was in the world, and the world was made by It, but the world knew It not.\nIt came into each individual man (even into the ‘I’ man It came) but the individual man (the ‘I’ man) did not receive It.\nThose who did receive It, through It they could reveal themselves as Children of God.\nThey who trusted in His Name were not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of human will, but of God.\nAnd the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us and we have heard His Teaching, the Teaching of the only Son of the Father, filled with Grace and Truth.\nThese words with their mighty content — one should not take them and speculate over them, but rather allow them to work upon one in the same manner as countless human beings have done through the centuries. Early in the morning when the soul was still virginal, they have let these words resound in their soul, up to the passage: “And the Word become Flesh and lived among us ...” as above.\nWhen a man does this day by day, then something shows itself in the soul which gives him new life, he is reborn, he is spiritually transformed. He sees around him a spiritual world of which he had previously no idea.\nEveryone who takes the first verses of the Saint John Gospel and lets them work upon him for the education and training of his soul, experiences the Saint John Gospel itself in mighty pictures.\nThere before his spiritual sight stands John the Baptist, as he baptises the Christ; there he sees the picture of Nicodemus, as he has his conversation with the Christ. He sees how Christ cleanses the Temple, he has before him all the following scenes of the Saint John Gospel, he experiences the “stations” from the thirteenth chapter onwards.\nIn order for the pupil to receive aright the influence of these words and find the ‘word’ which is proclaimed by the Saint John Gospel, the teacher spoke as follows: “Thou must fill thy soul for weeks at a time with this one feeling. Think of the plant. It is rooted in the dead stone. If it had consciousness, it would have to bow down to the dead stone and say to it: ‘Without thee I could not live; out of thee I drew nourishment and strength: I owe to thee my being, I thank thee.’ The animal would have to speak in similar words to the plant: ‘Without thee I could not live, I incline myself towards thee in thankfulness, because out of thee I draw that which I require for my existence.’ And it is the same with all the kingdom. Man, who has attained to a higher stage of evolution, must also bow down, as the plant to the stone, to those who work for him, and thank them.” He who would become a Christian Initiate must develop this feeling during a period of many weeks — the feeling that he owes gratitude to him who stands beneath him. Then he experiences in the spirit the thirteenth chapter of the Saint John Gospel where this feeling is given sublime and eternal expression by Christ in the Washing of the Feet. Christ means to say: “Without you I could not be, I incline myself to you as the plant to the stone.” As an outer symbol the Initiate experienced at this stage a feeling as if water were flowing around his feet. It continued for a long time.\nWhen he had gone through this, the Christian Mystic could experience the next stage of initiation. For this he must cultivate the power to endure all the storms and stresses of life. Then he experienced a second picture. He saw himself scourged, and could feel in his own body something like pain at certain points. This went on for many weeks. He experienced the scourging.\nNow he could rise to the third stage. The teacher said to him: “Thou must cultivate a feeling which can endure that all thou holdest highest should be treated with scorn and derision.” The scorn and derision must be for him nothing, in comparison with his own inner strength and certainty. Then the pupil experienced two symptoms of Christian initiation. He experienced the crowning with thorns; spiritually he saw himself with the crown of thorns and experienced a kind of pain in the head which is the sign of this stage of initiation. Afterwards, as a fourth experience he had to develop the feeling that his body was no more for him than any other object in the world. He carried the body with him only as an instrument. In many Mystery-schools one learned to accustom oneself to speak in the following way: “My body goes through the door,” and so on. In this way the mystic experienced in himself the Crucifixion. He saw himself crucified. The outer symbol was that during the meditation stigmata appeared at the places of the wounds of Christ — in the hands, in the feet and in the right side. This is the blood-trial of the Mystic, the fourth stage of initiation.\nAfter this the pupil rose to the fifth station which is called the mystic death, a sublime experience of a spiritual nature, of which no more than an indication can be given. There are moments for a pupil when the whole of the physical world surrounds him as with a black veil. In these moments he learns to know the origins of evil. This was called the descent into hell. Then came a strange and wonderful feeling as if the whole curtain were torn asunder. The mystic death — followed by the mystic awakening!\nThe sixth stage is the so-called Laying in the Grave. All that the earth bears must become as precious to man as his own body. The physical body of man could not exist separated from the earth. If it were removed even a few miles from the earth it would wither, as the hand would wither when separated from the body. What my body is for my finger, that the earth is for men. The independence man attributes to himself is an illusion. And just as man is dependent physically on the earth, so is he dependent spiritually on the Spiritual World. When man comes to feel his unity with the whole planet — then is he “laid in the earth,” then does he undergo the “burial.”\nHereon follows the seventh stage, the “Resurrection” and the “Ascension.” Man experiences here the Eternal. This stage does not admit of description. The Egyptian Priests (who were also their Wise Men) did not make use of the symbols of writing to describe such things. The Mysteries must find a way to tell what cannot be expressed in words. Through the power and might, through the magical power of the Saint John Gospel itself, these things can be experienced.\nSuch an initiation is the initiation of the Son. It has only been possible since Christ came to earth. The outward Christ who walked in Palestine is related to the inward Christ whom the mystic experiences, as the sun is related to the eye. If there were no eye, then could the sun not be perceived. But the sun produced the eye. Where there is no light, the organ for the light is also lost. The eye was gradually created by the Sun. The eye was created for the light by the light, says Goethe. Whosoever allows the Saint John Gospel to work upon him, develops the inner eye. But, as without the sun the eye would never have come into being, so would spiritual seership never have been there if Christ, the Spiritual Sun, had not walked the earth in person. No Christianity without the personal Christ Jesus: that is the essential and all-important fact .\nAll other founders of religion could say of themselves: “I am the way and the truth.” All were teachers. Christianity has brought no new teaching. But that is not important. The important thing is that Christians feel themselves bound together with the personal Christ Jesus, as in a family. That is what matters — that He was there , and has lived and has said: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life .”\nOriental teachers of religion have exoteric teaching and esoteric, in the same way as Christianity has. Christianity differs from them in that exoteric Christianity is more simple and popular, it speaks to the heart, to the feelings; while esoteric Christianity is essentially deeper than all oriental esoteric. The truth is, the Christian esotericism is the most profound which has ever been brought to mankind.\nChristian esotericism was brought to the earth by that very Being Himself with whom one must be united. It is a question of belief in the divinity of Christ. In the ancient Mysteries one had to behold personally during the three days of initiation. What formerly was only present in the Mysteries — that is, in the Mysteries of the Spirit — has in Christianity become an historical fact. The events in Palestine are historical fact and at the same time symbol. Christianity is of such a nature that the simplest heart can grasp it; and yet the wisest man will never outgrow it. For the deepest teachings of Wisdom lie therein.\nIf we understand the Saint John Gospel as a Book of Life , so that we wish to live with it, and let it come to life within us, then we shall come to know esoteric Christianity. Such esoteric Christianity has always existed, it has always been active wherever Christianity has been able to manifest in a worthy and noble way, wherever Christianity has brought the blessings of culture and civilisation to mankind.\nInto all those who had experienced union and fellowship with Christ Jesus there streamed such strength as enabled them to know that life will always gain the victory over death, and that death is never a reality.\nGoethe said that the great World Powers invented death in order to have “much life” in the world. Christianity is a proof that there can arise in the soul a consciousness of the fact that Life is continually and always the Victor in the world."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA068a-39",
+    "title": "The Origin of Evil",
+    "date": "20 Feb 1908",
+    "city": "Kassel",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA068a/English/Singles/19080220p01.html",
+    "book_title": "",
+    "content": "Translator Unknown\nLadies and Gentlemen,\nThere are world riddles which not only meet us when we turn our attention to the great events of life, but which meet us at every touch and turn in everyday life. We could bring forward many such riddles of life, one such is that which shall occupy us today: the question of the origin of evil. It is one of those riddles which meet us in everyday life but which can only find an answer if we go back to the sources and origin of life. Such a question especially shows us in the way it has been treated by man since ancient times that really it can only fruitfully be approached by what we call spiritual science or the theosophical world view. Without that important insight in the world, without that penetration to the sources of existence which can flow to us through this stream of cultural life, an answer is not possible. Hence you will have to undertake with me a really wide path to the sources of existence in order to penetrate this, in a certain connection, everyday enigma. He who only regards the world with that mood flowing out of materialism which follows the course of actions only with the senses cannot find an answer to this question in the remotest degree.\nEvil arises for us, but of course not in its real sense, in the inferior being in human life. The wise person who is also a believer asks how it is reconcilable with a wise ordering of the world which one also calls providence, that this providence lets man sink to what we call evil — that the Godhead lets man become evil in order then to punish him. Not merely the simple believer understands it thus but we hear the same in a poem which the young Goethe composed when he calls these words to a divine spirituality:\nThou let'st the poor man come to grief, Then leavest him to his pain.\nThis question becomes really impenetrable to one who stands on less religious ground. Without a soul-spiritual basis we come to no ordered concept of evil, let alone any connection with the cosmic spirit. Since man was able to think, the leaders of man, the thinkers, have tried to solve the question: Whence comes evil? What meaning has it?\nWe must look back for once into that past age of Persian myths and the continuous conflict of Ormuzd against the evil powers already designated as Ahriman, a continuous fighter against the good. Ahriman is there shown us as the force which in conflict causes a strengthening of the good spirit. If with a great leap we immerse ourselves in the deep meaning of a German thinker, Jakob Böhme, then we find his writings and the continuous course of his life entirely filled with the question as to the origin of evil. Jakob Böhme says that a multiplicity only arises out of a unity, but the multiplicity must be guided however only by the will of the unity, as for example the two hands, which if they are not directed by one will are separate members. Without this guiding unity we can create no great work. These hands can storm against each other, they can mangle each other. The possibility is just then given when that which we call freedom is given to the two. As long as the two hands are determined by the personality, and as long as one will rule them, they will not turn against each other.\nAnd here a feeling already flows into Jakob Böhme that evil has something to do with love. When the Divine Being flowing through the world so loves the world that it extends Being to everything and holds nothing back, in order to give to the multiplicity as great a freedom as possible then the many can strive against each other.\nWe could speak at length about this if we let the thinkers pass before us, we could bring forward many examples from the great epochs but we would always get only a kind of philosophical answer. Today however we do not want philosophical answers, and so without deviation we would occupy ourselves with the spiritual world in order to get a firm point for the answering of our question. In order not to expand our mode of observation too far I should like at once to go to the heart of the matter, and for this we must bring quite briefly the nature of man before the soul. We are clear that evil must have something to do with human nature.\nIf we consider man from the standpoint of what the eyes see and the hands grasp then we only have but one part of human nature in the sense of spiritual science. We only see the physical part of man which he has in common with all apparently lifeless beings. Everything to be found in the human body is also existing there, only of course these mineral forces exist in man in quite a special manner. They are so complicatedly interwoven) so manifoldly built up that the physical body would fall asunder through its own physical laws unless something penetrated it like water penetrates a sponge, something which combats in each man in each moment all disturbances in the physical body. We call this fighter the etheric or life body. In each one of you the physical body would be exposed in every moment to decay unless that fighter, that victor which we call the etheric or life body were in you. Man has this in common with the whole of living nature, this fighter is there in everything that lives. In the moment when at death the physical body is separated from the etheric body then it follows physical laws, it decays and passes over into lifeless nature. The etheric body is something that is regarded by science today as something impossible. Yet we cannot enter further into that but must bring forth the matter only sketchily. Besides the etheric body man has a third member of his being. For one whose spiritual eyes are opened this third member is always visible. You can present this third member logically to yourselves.\nWe ask ourselves — Are the physical and etheric bodies everything? A simple consideration is enough to show that there is really something existing which stands far nearer to man than his bones, muscles, blood and nerves. Something lies quite close as a reality that is the sum of what we call feelings, instincts, passions. That belongs to us in reality and is existing in the same space where blood, muscles, nerves, exist. We have this part of human nature in common only with the animals, not with the plants.\nNow there is a fourth member through which man is the crown of creation. The fourth member of his being is that which enables him to comprise everything which is in him, in the name ‘I’. This name ‘I’ is a name which already hides the secret nature of his being in the distinction which it shows compared with all other names which we have in language. Each person can call a chair “chair”, a table “table” etc., yet the name ‘I’ no one can hear from outside, it must come from one’s own soul. Each object can have its name resounding to us from outside, the ‘I’ can only be heard coming from oneself. All world views which were built on what we call spiritual science have always felt this. In the old Hebraic religion you find for this intimate name of the soul the unutterable Name of God. Why is it so called? If the soul is to hear her true name then something speaks in the soul which can be united with the soul without penetrating it through any organ from outside. The ‘I’ must resound from out of the soul itself. A spark of divine being is in the soul in which it utters its own name ‘I’.\nThat which a distorted philosophy has also wanted to find is the true significance of the word “Jahve”, the unutterable name of the divine soul-part in man. This was also meant when, in ancient Egypt, the veiled image of Sais was referred to. We can read the inscriptions: “I am Who was, Who is, and Who will be. My veil no mortal has lifted.” An investigator, a German romanticist said something correct out of an extraordinary instinct although he did not go deep enough: “No mortal has lifted the veil, we must become immortal.”\nIt was the view of the great Egyptian priestly magi that the ‘I’ was veiled but that the coverings must fall away. No other can solve the nature of the ‘I’ than the ‘I’ itself when it becomes conscious of its true nature by descending into its own depths where it grasps itself in its own immortality; then it knows what is concealed behind the veil. Of course only the very few today are inclined to gaze into the nature of the ‘I’, the utterance of Fichte still holds good: Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an ‘I’. Since Fichte we have seen the coarse materialism flow into the culture of the 19th century. People today are very satisfied when they can partially know something physical and demonstrate it materialistically. They regard themselves as being more like a piece of lava in the moon than an ‘I’. It would be nonsensical to speak of the higher members of man's nature if in the sense of spiritual investigation one were to speak of the fourth member as a mere phenomenon of the physical body. Naturally spiritual investigation must have something in this sphere which must appear very stupid to a person who so often thinks today that everything must rest on the basis of scientific facts. That which occurs in the etheric body, the astral body and the ‘I’ is not the effect of the physical body but the reverse. What transpires in the physical and etheric bodies is the work of the astral body. Only when one gradually raises oneself to this view is one able to answer this question.\nJust consider for example processes which meet us every day. Something arouses in us the feeling of shame. There is something in me of which I desire my environment should see nothing — I blush. Another process is the feeling of fear, noticeable through pallor. With shame a stream of blood rises to the head. With fear the blood recedes back from the head into the inner part of the body. What has happened? A soul process works on the body. Each of these events appears as the result of a soul process. They are indications of how soul working plays into the material. These effects in what is material are not so easily perceptible today. They have more or less withdrawn because of the mighty transformations which the physical body has undergone (as compared with earlier forms of existence). But the further we go back in human evolution all the more do spiritual influences get the upper hand.\nThere are indeed people today who go so far as to deny the working of the soul on the material body. One might not think that people exist with such materialistic views but there is in America a theological school which calls itself pragmatism. They have brought their views to an expression which reveals the grotesqueness of the materialism advocated therein. We need merely bring this utterance for once to our mind: “Man does not weep because he is sad, but he is sad because he weeps.” It is obvious here how the materialistic world view comes into contradiction with the healthy human understanding.\nIt is a fact that must appear natural to us that such consequences are drawn, and they appear today in numerous spheres; only they do not come to the surface in such grotesque fashion. If we now keep firm that physical processes are effects of the spiritual-psychic then it will no longer appear wrong to us if, going back into very ancient times of human evolution we find these effects are all the more significant the further we go back, so that we have to reckon with far-reaching spiritual influences in ancient times of human evolution which today are concealed.\nYou know perhaps that the theosophical view says that human existence runs its course in repeated earth lives. We will only bring that forward briefly. Man goes through many earth lives in his evolutionary path to ever higher perfection. We say in spiritual investigation that everything that lives is subject to transformation. Everything in the world is subject to such transformation, not only man but also mighty worlds are subject to continual change. Just as when we regard the single human being and say “That which transpires in the present life between birth and death is the result of former incarnations,” so we can look to a whole heavenly body and we only understand such a body in the sense of spiritual science when we know that it has acquired in former lives that which it has become today. We also say of the earth and planets that they have passed through other incarnations. As the spiritually highly developed man can look back to former earth lives so earlier planetary conditions can be perceived from the standpoint of spiritual science. We point back to the previous planetary condition of the earth, and this pre-earth is called in spiritual science Cosmos of Wisdom.\nA glance at what is around you can make clear to you why we look back to this pre-earth as the cosmos of wisdom. Just regard man’s physical body. Look at one piece. Take a piece of the thigh bone which is composed of countless scaffoldings and members. It is an artistically constructed structure built with wonderful wisdom. It is so constructed through engineering art full of wisdom that the thigh bone, in spite of its relatively small strength, is able to carry the upper body. No engineer is able to construct such a bridge-like structure with such wisdom, and whoever looks at this wonderful human structure knows what great wisdom is contained in it. We know however also that other members of man are not yet so wise. We need merely think how the passions and impulses of the astral body work. What we eat and drink often contain heart poisons, and yet the heart is built so full of wisdom that it can bear these attacks for decades. Everywhere we find this Wisdom spread out. In the structure of the body we find this wisdom everywhere, in each blossom, in each animal, and we see how the world is penetrated by this wisdom.\nLet us look at the beaver and his dam, building it with marvellous art — if one measures the angles then one will find they are quite exactly measured. So we could observe bit by bit everything that surrounds us. Could we now extract this wisdom from out the world unless it were there within it? The materialistic mood denies that the wisdom which man draws out is in the phenomena. But a natural thinking would tell you that something which man extracts from nature must be contained in it. As little as one can drink water from a glass if none is in it, just as little can one extract wisdom from the world if none is in it. But this wisdom is there and spiritual science knows that this wisdom was in all things at the beginning of earth evolution. Thus in a plant seed for example was a beech; as a proof of this we see a beech tree grows from it and not an oak. The earth carried the wisdom which meets us today already when the things around us were still in germ. Just as truly as the seed comes not from the earth but from the plant, so truly the seed from which our earth was born arose from what the earth was previously. That was the cosmos of wisdom. That which you see today in each leaf, in each organ in man's form, in everything spread out around you, slowly and gradually arose, formed itself member by member and only appeared after wisdom had struggled with wisdom. We had an embodiment on the previous stage of our earth where the wisdom of things was worked out in which, so to say, the things in their wisdom were worked over. What has our earth, to which this Wisdom has come over, for a task? It has its special mission. Just as its predecessor developed the wisdom which surrounds us today bit by bit, similarly our earth today develops bit by hit another cosmic force, and this force is love. Therefore in spiritual investigation we call the earth the Cosmos of Love. The evolution of the earth so runs its course that love appears as a force becoming more and more dominant, and when the earth will have reached its goal then everything will be penetrated by the force of love. Hence we call the earth the cosmos of love. Just as on the previous cosmos the beginning was made with un-wisdom and only gradually was the form of wisdom worked out, so this earth runs its course so that gradually love is worked out. Then when the earth has reached its goal love will be spread out everywhere, everything will be permeated with love, and the earth will have beings on it who will find love just as we find wisdom in everything that surrounds us. Those who will be on the new embodiment of the earth will stand wonderingly before love, just as we stand in wonderment before wisdom. Our earth has the holy mission of letting flow the impulse of love into things. The impulse is here to fulfil this mission, to make it deed. Thus we have to think of the structure of our earth as the cultivation of love going through the entire earth evolution of man. If we see this then we have a handle for understanding today's question, only we must be clear that man is not the only being around us. You know the spiritual investigator does not speak of the spiritual worlds as of something far off in the clouds, but he speaks of them in a natural and self understood way. A person born blind who has his eyes opened suddenly sees everything flooded with light and radiance. He sees a new world around him which was existing before just as light and colours existed before his eyes were opened. In this world which only an unlogical thinking can deny, other beings are existing with other forms of spirituality than man has. We can form an idea of these spiritual beings by bringing to mind that man is in a continual evolution. He must ascend ever higher and higher. In each incarnat-ion he experiences something, he becomes an ever more perfect being.\nWhat perspectives thus open out? We see the great ideals of Man, the Man of the future elevated like a God. We see that as man today stands higher than animal and plant thus will the future man stand to his present existence. Spiritual science knows already today that beings stand above man at his present stage in evolution who are as perfect as we will be in a far future. They are beings highly exalted above man and who long ago passed through the stage we are at today, who have a purely spiritual life and no longer have need to descend to a physical body. Thus we see as man begins his earthly existence, as he leads over what was existing of him from the cosmos of wisdom, then not only he enters the cosmos of love but also higher spiritual guiding beings.\nWho are these? The same as those who let their wisdom flow into the cosmos of wisdom. The same as those who built that cosmos of wisdom out of their creative wisdom. What we have finished before us today has been created by these beings. They are the possessors of productive wisdom. They have put in their wisdom. Because previously in the cosmos of wisdom they developed creatively in reference to wisdom, they have acquired the power of letting love trickle as it were on the earth to all earth men, and bit by bit this love flows to the earth. We need merely cast a brief glance at this earth, then we see how love gradually developed. It appears to us in ancient times in the narrowest limits. Who loved each other in ancient times? At first only small groups of those blood-related. Then we see love spread beyond the narrowest blood relationship. The circle love draws together becomes ever wide. At first we see marriage only between those closely related. Then love spreads to a whole tribe, and then in the Old Testament the whole people is loved, and he who does not belong to the people is foreign. The way is far but we have taken the great step where love is led over from the principle of blood relationship into the spiritual, to the great brother-bond which should span the earth to the Christ-Principle. This is referred to in the utterance: Who does not forsake father and mother, brother and sister and follow Me … etc.\nThis utterance is not to be taken literally. It refers to the fact that love should leave the narrow circle of blood relationship and become spiritual. It should embrace each soul; that is the great mission of Christianity, to make love more and more spiritual until it reaches the form of an all embracing love with which the whole earth should be permeated, so that the beings of the next world will find this love in all things as we have found wisdom. So we see that during earth existence the mission is fulfilled in that what man has brought over from the pre-earth is permeated with love. The assimilation of love is the task man has to develop in the earthly course of the human race. Thus we can see that a whole force which leads men together, progresses ever further into ever widening circles.\nThat is possible only to love. Let us go back once more from the cosmos of love to the cosmos of wisdom. What was existing of man at the transition? That which I described as the four members of his being making man the crown of creation was not yet existing at the beginning of our earth evolution, only the beginnings of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. But just as a seed decays and yet rises again letting a plant arise, so man disappears at the transition from the cosmos of wisdom to the cosmos of love, to arise again on our present earth and gradually the ‘I’ develops. This I must be there as the counterpart to the force of love. Love has other conditions of existence than wisdom. Wisdom can run where all the single members are dependent on each other. Wisdom can rule where a being in love holds sway. But if love is to pass from one being to another that can only happen where it is a free gift which must be there as a Father force.\nOnly such beings have the force for love who have the divine force for the ever greater acquirement of freedom.\nThe I is the counter-pole of love. The I impressed itself in the same measure as love impressed itself. That could only happen gradually in evolution. In the beginning blood speaks, the blood which is related to the loved being. Here love appears to us at the most primitive stage. Love develops more and more to a soul-spiritual force, and therewith the ‘I’ makes itself free. But in order to understand the true evolution of man within the cosmos of love we must keep one thing in mind. We must see that in the cosmos things go on as in a school. Here some always remain behind. similarly this happens in the cosmos. Those beings of whom we have spoken who stand exaltedly above man, those created in productive wisdom could pass over to love. But some remained behind who did not reach the final goal of the cosmos of wisdom, who did not finish their task. They still had to work at wisdom and could not yet stream out love which was not yet given to them.\nThey are beings who stand between the exalted beings and man. Spiritual science calls them the Luciferic beings under the dominion of Lucifer. One may laugh but just as, for example, magnetic forces are around us, so are the luciferic. They extend into the cosmos of love from out of the cosmos of wisdom. They were the beings who endowed man with their small wisdom. They created the subjective, intellectual wisdom of man in the ‘I’ which first became impregnated as it were therewith. An independence was given to this I which only suited it on the cosmos of wisdom if this love-filled wisdom had reached a definite stage. Thus the ‘I’ got a force which it should now transform in independence. Only in the measure in which the Christ principle illuminated it did the ‘I’ become capable of placing itself in harmony with all the forces of its environment on the earth. Before this approach to the Christ ideal is attained such beings again and again take firm hold in man, who are the opposing powers of the ‘I’. Their force is a separating force which will separate the ‘I’ too soon. The Luciferic beings lead a conflict against everything which brings men together.\nThis force has also its good task. It hinders man falling into, as it were, a primeval mash of love. Just as man had to be prepared for love, so earlier they had to be prepared for wisdom. Thus this luciferic principle is to be seen as the principle of illumination of independence. So we have two forces which lead humanity in two different directions and therewith we have the principle of the independent I which consolidates itself out of this conflict. Without this independence love would not be possible; without this independence the origin of evil would not be possible; love makes evil necessary. Hence comes the principle of love which arises from the spirits of love, and the principle of wisdom which arises from the spirits of wisdom. Both lead us from soul to soul, spirit to spirit, I to I. Evil rests on this spiritual fact. The possibility of evil was given with the possibility of love. Only because the God of the earth is the God of Love, and beings became independent I-men was the origin of evil possible. Love made evil possible.\nMan first attains free love and true greatness through the Luciferic powers, and only thereby he takes the forces of evil into himself. The forces of love must penetrate the whole earth, must have overcome evil, have converted it as it were by the end of the earth's course. We see that what man owes to evil is a good. He owes to evil freedom. The origin of evil lies in the Luciferic principle as lies also the origin of freedom, with which is given the possibility of the development of love.\nIf we think of the earth without everything evil then only a tiny force of love is necessary to overcome the forces of evil. The forces of love grow because they have the task of transforming the existing evil in love. Thus we really see something of what Böhme felt, that evil strengthens the mission of love. Thus we see together with the origin of evil the meaning of evil, and if we consider evil spiritually scientifically then we see evil justified in a certain way. Then wherever it meets us we regard it with other feelings.\nIf this penetrates our feelings then it makes quite a different impression on us, not for one who just grasps it speculatively but for one who grasps it theosophically. If we have quiet hours and elevate our spirit to the great riddles then we must experience something so mighty that in evil we yet feel the good. Thus we permeate ourselves with feelings which then go with us in life at every step. We face the whole world thinking, feeling and acting, and that is most essential. Oh, we will become mild if we see what formerly enraged us. These feelings which result as the foundation from those quiet hours constitute the theosophical life. We shall consider this tomorrow even more applied to daily life. Today we have only been able to indicate the function of evil in fleeting outline.\nWe have attained the view that we are short-sighted if we bring forward as an objection to the evil, the wisdom, the love, the spirit of the world. We have seen that this spirit of love powerfully flows through the world, and is such a good spirit that once it brought evil into the world in order to bring about the most effective, beneficial good."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA068a-43",
+    "title": "The Bible and Wisdom",
+    "date": "5 Dec 1908",
+    "city": "Hanover",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA068a/English/Singles/19081205p01.html",
+    "book_title": "",
+    "content": "From shorthand report unrevised by the lecturer. English translation first printed by Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company, 1941. Second printing Steiner Book Centre, 1986. The original German text of this lecture can he found in the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works under the title: “ Der Kreislauf des Menschen innerhalb des Sinnes —, Seelen — und Geisteswelt ”, No. 68 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961. This English edition is presented by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung , Dornach, Switzerland.\nIt cannot he doubted that the influence of the Bible on Western Culture has been greater than that of any other document. It may truly be said that as a result of the influence of the Bible, the human soul has for thousands of years maintained a hold on the most inward being of man, — a hold which has extended to the life of feeling and also to the life of will. The influence in these two spheres of man's being has been stronger than in his thinking and conceptional life, although it may be said that all spiritual life, be it in the region of religion or of exact science, bears traces of the influence of the Bible. And it is evident to those who look more deeply into things, that the very arguments of men who to-day feel bound to attack the Bible — taking up in some cases the radical standpoint of downright denial — themselves show traces of its influence. There has never been any general recognition, and to-day there is practically none, of the extent of the influence of this document; but it exists nevertheless in actual fact to those who have an unbiased outlook. The attitude adopted towards the Bible by modern thought, feeling and perception, has for some time past changed very considerably from what it used formerly to be. The value of the Bible, the attitude adopted towards it by men who to-day take it seriously has altered essentially in the course of the 19th Century. We must not of course undervalue in any sense the standpoint of many modern thinking men who feel themselves bound to take a firm stand on the ground of Science. There are others who hold fast to the Bible, who derive all their deepest convictions from this most significant record, and who prefer to pay no attention when the value of the Bible is under discussion. The attitude of such people is: ‘Others may think as they like; we find in the teachings of the Bible all that our souls need and we are quite satisfied.’ Such a point of view, however justifiable it may be in individual cases, is, in a certain sense entirely egoistical and by no means without danger for spiritual evolution.\nThat which in a given epoch has become an universal blessing to men — or, let us say, an universal belief and conviction, has always originated with the few; and it may well be that an ever increasing stream of conviction may flow out to become universal in no very distant future from the few who to-day feel themselves compelled to attack the Bible because of their desire to build up their world-conception conformably with their Science. For this reason to ignore such spiritual and mental currents and to refuse to listen because one is oneself satisfied is not without an element of danger. Anyone who really takes the evolution of mankind seriously ought rather to regard it as a duty to take notice of the objections brought by sincere seekers for Truth, and to see what relation these objections have to the Bible.\nI have said that the attitude adopted by men, and especially by leaders of intellectual and spiritual life has changed. To-day we shall do no more than point to this change. Were we to look back into the past we should find civilisations where men, especially when they stood at the summit of their spiritual life, doubted not at all that the very highest wisdom flowed from the Bible; and that those with whom it originated were not just average men who were responsible for human errors in it, but were under lofty inspiration and infused it with wisdom. This was a feeling of reverent recognition among those who stood on the heights of spiritual life. In modern times this has changed.\nIn the 18th Century there was a French investigator who came to the conclusion that certain contradictions exist in the Old Testament. He noticed that the two Creation stories at the very beginning of the Bible contradict one another, that one story describes the work of the six or seven days including the creation of man, and that then there is a further account with a different beginning, which ascribes quite a different origin to man. This investigator was specially disconcerted by the fact that at the beginning of the Bible two names of the God-head occur, the name of the ‘Elohim’ in the narrative of the six days' creation, and then later the name of Jehova. There is an echo of this in the German Bible. In the German Bible the name of the God-head is translated ‘Lord,’ ‘God,’ and then Jehova is translated by ‘God the Lord’ or in some such way; at all events the difference is apparent. Upon noticing this the investigator suspected that something had given rise to the untenable statement that the Bible was written by a single individual, whether Moses or someone else, and that different accounts must have been welded together. And after much deliberation he came to the conclusion that all the existing accounts corresponding to the different traditions were simply welded together; one account being amalgamated with another and all the contradictions allowed to stand.\nAfter, and as a result of this, there appeared the kind of investigation which might well be called a mutilation of the Bible. To-day there are Bibles in which the various points of detail are traced back to different traditions. In the so-called Rainbow Bible it is stated for instance, how some portion or other that has come to be inserted into the collective statement has its origin in quite a different legendary tradition — hence it is said that the Bible must have been welded together from shreds of tradition. It became more and more general for investigators to proceed along this line in regard to the Old Testament, and then the same thing happened in the case of the New Testament. How could the fact be hidden that when the four Gospels are submitted to literal comparison they do not agree with each other? It is easy to discover contradictions in the Matthew, Luke and John Gospels. And so the investigators said: How can the single Evangelists have written their respective Gospels under lofty inspiration, when the accounts do not agree? The Gospel of St. John — that most profound writing of Christendom — was divested of all worth as an historical document in the minds of some investigators of the 19th Century. Men came more and more to be convinced of the fact that it was nothing but a kind of hymn, written down by someone on the basis of his faith and not an historical tradition at all. They said that what he had written down could in no way lay claim to being a true description of what had actually taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. And so the New Testament was torn into shreds. The Old and New Testaments were treated just like any other historical document; it was said that bias and error had crept into them, and that before all things it was necessary to show by purely historical investigation, how the fragments had been gradually pieced together. This is the standpoint which more and more came to be adopted by historical, theological investigation.\nOn the other side let us turn to those who felt compelled to stand firmly on the ground of the facts of Natural Science, — who said, quite sincerely and honestly as a result of their knowledge: ‘What we are taught by Geology, Biology and the different branches of Natural Science, flatly contradicts what the Bible relates. The Bible story of the development of the earth and living beings through the six days of creation, is of the nature of a legend or a myth of primitive peoples, whereby they tried, in their childlike fashion to make the origin of the earth intelligible to themselves.’ And such men alienated themselves from the New Testament in the same degree as from the Old Testament. Men who feel compelled to hold fast to the facts of Natural Science will have nothing to do with all the wonderful acts performed by the Christ, with the way in which this unique Personality arises at the critical point of our history, and they radically oppose the very principle on which the Bible is based. Thus we see on the one hand the Bible torn to pieces by historical-theological investigation, and on the other hand put aside, discredited by scientific research.\nThat may serve briefly to characterise the outlook of to-day; but if nobody troubled about this, and simply persisted in the attitude: ‘I believe what is in the Bible’ — that would be Egoism. Such men would only be thinking of themselves and it would not occur to them that future generations might hold as an universal conviction that which to-day is only the conviction of a few.\nWe may now ask: is there perhaps yet a further standpoint other than the two we have indicated? Indeed there is, and it is just this that we want to consider to-day. It is the standpoint of Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy. We can in the first instance understand this best by means of comparison. The Anthroposophical standpoint with regard to the Bible offers to our modern age something similar to that which was accomplished three or four centuries ago by the mighty achievements of scientific research; Anthroposophy seeks to form a connecting link with what was achieved by such men as Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo.\nTo-day we build upon the foundations of what was achieved by such personalities as these. When we look back to the relation which in former days existed between men and nature, we find that in the old Schools or Academics, certain books carried just as much weight as the Bible does with many people to-day. Aristotle, the ancient Greek scholar, whose achievements were by no means confined to the sphere of Natural Science, was looked upon by the widest circles both in the early and later Middle Ages as a far-reaching Authority. Wherever men were taught about nature the books of Aristotle were taken as the basis. His writings were fundamental and authoritative not only in spheres where men pursued the study of Nature in a more limited, philosophical sense, but also in spheres of definitely scientific thought. It was not customary in those days to look out at Nature with one's own eyes, and it was not a question of instruments, apparatus and other things of that kind. In the time of Galileo a highly symptomatic incident occurred, and it has been handed down as a kind of anecdote. It was pointed out by a colleague to a man who was a convinced follower of Aristotle, that many of the master's utterances were not correct; for instance that the nerves proceeded from the heart, this being contrary to the real facts. A corpse was placed in front of the man and it was demonstrated to him that this utterance of Aristotle did not agree with the facts. He said: ‘Yes, when I look at that myself it seems a contradiction, but even if Nature does show it to me I still believe Aristotle.’ And there were many such men, — men who had more faith in the teachings and the authority of Aristotle than in their own eyes. To-day men's point of view about Nature and also about Aristotle has changed. In our time it would be considered ridiculous to derive from ancient books the knowledge of nature which men ought to possess. To-day the scientist confronts nature with his instruments and tries to explore her secrets in order that they may become a common good for all men. But circumstances were such that in the time of Galileo, those who were imbued with the teachings of Aristotle to the same degree as this above mentioned follower, did not understand the Greek Master in the very least, Aristotle meant something different, something very much more spiritual, than what we understand to-day by the nerves. And because of this we cannot do real justice to Aristotle — whose vision was in accordance with the age in which he lived — until we look into nature with free and impartial eyes.\nThat was the great change that took place three or four centuries ago — and we are experiencing such another now in reference to the Spiritual Science and those spiritual facts and processes which are the spiritual foundations of existence.\nFor centuries the Bible was taken by a very large number of men to be the only book able to give information about all that transcended the tangible, physical world. The Bible was the Authority so far as the spiritual world was concerned, just as Aristotle in the Middle Ages was the authority for the physical world.\nHow has it come about that to-day we are in a position to do greater justice to Aristotle? It is because we face the physical world from a position of greater independence. And what Anthroposophy has to give to man of modern times, is the possibility of acquiring direct cognition of the invisible world, just as centuries ago the new age began to acquire direct knowledge of the visible world. Spiritual Science states that it is possible for man to look into and perceive the spiritual world; that he need not be dependent upon tradition, but can see for himself. This is what true Spiritual Science has to achieve for modern humanity — it has to convince man that slumbering powers and faculties exist within him; that there are certain great moments in life when these spiritual faculties awaken just as when a blind man is operated upon and is able to see colour and light. To use Goethe's phrase: the spiritual ears and eyes awaken, and then the soul of man can perceive in its environment what is otherwise concealed. The awakening of the faculties slumbering in the soul is possible; it is possible for man to acquire an instrument whereby he call look into spiritual causes, just as with his physical instruments he looks into the physical world. We have all kinds of instruments for the perception of the physical world — and for perception of the spiritual world there is also an instrument — namely, man himself, transformed. From the standpoint of spiritual science the most important thing of all is that the word ‘Evolution’ should be taken in all seriousness, — ‘Evolution,’ which is a kind of magic word on many lips. It is not difficult to-day to perceive how the imperfect continually develops and evolves, and this evolution is carefully followed up in external Natural Science. To this conception Anthroposophy would not set up the slightest opposition where it remains in the region of scientific facts. But Anthroposophy takes the word ‘Evolution’ in its full meaning, — and so seriously that it points to those faculties which lie in the soul of man by means of which he can become aware of the Spiritual world. Spiritual beings are the foundation and basis of the physical world, and man only needs organs to be able to perceive them. I must here again lay stress upon the fact that today only a few men are in a position to transform their souls in this way. It requires a highly developed soul whose spiritual eyes are open before investigation of the spiritual world can be undertaken and information as to the events and beings there obtained. But if facts about the higher worlds are made manifest, then all that is necessary for the understanding of what is told by the spiritual investigator is healthy discernment, free from all bias pertaining to the intellect or to human logic. There is no justification for criticising the use of spiritual investigation, because we cannot see for ourselves. How many men are able to form a clear conception of Ernst Haeckel's researches and follow them up? It is exactly the same in regard to research in the region of senselife, where what is illuminated by the understanding passes over into the consciousness, as it is in regard to what the spiritual investigator has to say about the information he has gained in the super-sensible world. That which is known as the super-sensible world through direct perception and human powers of cognition must pass over into the universal consciousness of mankind as a result of the Anthroposophical conception of the world.\nOn the one hand then, we have the ancient Bible bringing before us in its own way the secrets of the super-sensible worlds and their connection with the sensible worlds, and on the other we have, in Spiritual Science, the direct experiences of the investigator in regard to the super-sensible world. This is surely a point of view similar to that which one finds at the dawn of modern Natural Science.\nThe question now arises: ‘What has Spiritual Science to say that is able to help us to understand the biblical truths?’ We must here enter into details. We must above all point out that when as a result of the methods laid down by Spiritual Science, man awakens his soul faculties, he sees into the spiritual world and develops what in comparison to objective cognition is an Imaginative Knowledge. What is this Imaginative Knowledge? It has nothing in common with those vague fantasies readily associated with the word ‘Imagination’ nor has it anything whatever to do with somnambulism and things of that nature, but fundamental to it is a strict discipline by means of which a man has to awaken these faculties. Let us proceed from external knowledge in order to make more intelligible what is really meant by ‘Imaginative Knowledge.’ What is characteristic of external objective cognition? There is for example, the perception of a ‘table’; when the table is no longer before us there remains an idea, a concept of it, as a kind of echo. First there is the object, and then the image. Certain systems of philosophy affirm that everything is only image, conception. This is incorrect. Let us take, for example, the conception of red hot steel or iron. The conception will not burn, but when we are faced by the reality the experience is different. The characteristic of objective cognition is that first the object is there and then the image is formed within us. Exactly the opposite process must take place in a man who wishes to penetrate into the higher world. He must first be able to transform his conceptual world in such a way that the conception may precede the perception. This faculty is developed by Meditation and Concentration, that is to say by sinking the soul into the content of certain conceptions which do not correspond to any external reality. Just consider for a moment how much of what lives in the soul is dependent upon the fact of your having been born in a particular town on a particular day. Suppose that you had not been born on that day, and try to imagine what other experiences would then live within your soul, and stream through it from morning to evening. In other words, make it clear to yourself how much of the content of the soul is dependent on your environment, and then let all that has stimulated you from outside, pass away. Then try to think how much would still remain in the soul. All conceptions of the external world which flow into the soul must, day by day, be expelled from it and in their place there must live for a time the content of a conception that has not in any way been stimulated from without and that does not portray any external fact or event.\nSpiritual Science — if our search is sincere — gives many such conceptions and I will mention one as an example. I want to show you how the soul may gradually be led up into the higher worlds through certain definite conceptions. Such conceptions may be considered to be like letters of the alphabet. But in Spiritual Science there are not only twenty-two to twenty-seven letters, but many hundreds, by means of which the soul learns to read in the spiritual world. Here is a simple example: suppose we take the well known Rose Cross and in its simplest form, the black cross adorned with seven red roses. Very definite effects are produced if for a quarter of an hour each day the soul gives itself wholly up to the conception of this Rose Cross, excluding everything that acts as an external stimulus. In order to be able to understand what comes to pass in the soul as a result of this, let us consider intellectually the meaning of the Rose Cross. This is not the most important element, but we shall do it to show that it is possible to explain the meaning. I shall give it in the form of an instruction given by teacher to pupil.\nThe teacher says to the pupil: — ‘Look at the plant standing with its root in the ground and growing upwards to the blossom. Compare the greater perfection of man standing before you, organised as he is, with the lesser perfection of the plant. Man has self-consciousness, has within him what we call an Ego, an ‘ I ’. But because he has this higher principle within him he has had to accept in addition all that constitutes his lower nature, the passion of sense. The plant has no self-consciousness; it has no Ego, hence it is not yet burdened with desires, passions or instincts. Its green beauty is there, chaste and pure. Look at the circulation of the chlorophyl fluid in the plant and then in man at the pulsation of the blood. That which, in man constitutes his life of passions and instincts, comes to expression, in the plant, as the blossom. In exchange for this man has won his self-consciousness. Now consider not only present day man, but look in a spiritual sense at a man of the far distant future. He will develop, he will over come, cleanse and purify his desires and passions and will obtain a higher self-consciousness. Thus, spiritually, you can see a man who has once more attained to the purity of the plant-nature. But it is because he has reached a higher stage that his self-consciousness exists in this state of purity. His blood is as pure and chaste as the plant fluids. Take the red roses to be a prototype of what the blood will be at some future time, and in this way you have before you the prototype of higher man. In the Rose Cross you have a most beautiful paraphrase of Goethe's saying: — “The man who is without this dying and becoming is a sad stranger on this dark earth”! Dying and becoming, — what does this mean? It means that in man there exists the possibility of growing out of and beyond himself. That which dies and is overcome is represented by the black cross which is the expression of his desires of senses. The blossoms in their purity are symbolical of the blood. The red roses and the black cross together represent the inner call to grow beyond oneself.’\nAs I said, this intellectual explanation is not the most important element and it is only given in order that we may be able better to understand these things. In a Meditation of this kind the point is that we shall sink ourselves into the symbol, that it shall stand as a picture before us. And if it is said that a Rose Cross corresponds to nothing real, our answer must be that the whole significance lies not in the experience of something pertaining to the external world through the Rose Cross, but that the effect of this Rose Cross upon the soul and its slumbering faculties is very real. No image pertaining to the external world could have the same effect as this image in all its varied aspects and in its non-reality. If the soul allows this image to work upon it, it makes greater and greater progress, and is finally able to live in a world of conceptions that is at first really illusory; but when it has lived sufficiently long in this conceptual world with patience and energy, it has a significantly true experience. Spiritual realities, spiritual beings which otherwise are invisible emerge from the spiritual environment. And then the soul is able quite clearly to distinguish what is merely conception, illusion, from true and genuine reality.\nOf course one must not be a visionary, for that is very dangerous; it is absolutely necessary to maintain reason and a sure foundation for one's experience. If a man dreams in a kind of phantasy, then it is not well with him, when the spiritual world breaks in upon his consciousness. But if he maintains a sense of absolute certainty in his perception of reality, then he knows how the spiritual events will be made manifest, and he ascends into the spiritual world.\nYou will perhaps have surmised from what I have said, that cognition of the spiritual world is quite different from that of the sense world. The spiritual world cannot be brought into the range of direct perception by means of conceptions having but one meaning, and anyone who thinks it possible to describe what he finds in the spiritual world in the same way as he would describe what he finds in the sense world — simply has no knowledge of the nature of the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be represented in pictures, and in imagery, which must be regarded merely as such. When the spiritual investigator looks into the spiritual world he sees the spiritual causes behind the physical phenomena, and he sees not only what underlies the present but what underlay the past. One thing above all else is manifest to him; namely, that man as he stands before us to-day as a physical being, was not always a physical being. External Natural Science can only lead us back by way of physical phenomena to what man as a physical being once was, and the spiritual investigator has no objection to that. But what surrounds us physically, has a spiritual origin. Man existed as a spiritual being before he became physical.\nWhen the earth was not yet physical, man existed in the bosom of divine beings. As ice condenses from water, so did physical man condense from spiritual man. Spiritual Science shows that the physical is in perpetual contact with the spiritual. But what underlies the physical can only be expressed in pictures, if one wants to approximate to physical ideas.\nWhat happens when a man has re-attained the spiritual stage of evolution, — what comes before him? In a certain sense the spiritual investigator re-discovers the Bible imagery, as given in the six or seven days of Creation. The pictures as given there actually appear before him. These pictures are not, of course, a description of physical occurrences, but the investigator who looks into the spiritual world, sees in clairvoyant consciousness, in how wonderful a way the writer of Genesis has portrayed in these pictures the formation of man from out of the Spirit. And it is marvelous how, point by point, agreement is established between what is so perceived by the spiritual investigator and the Bible imagery. The spiritual investigator can follow in just as unbiased a way as the Natural Scientist approaches the physical world. He does not derive his wisdom directly from the Bible, but he finds emphatic agreement with Bible imagery.\nI will only mention one such point of agreement. When we go back to ancient times, it is seen that behind the evolution of man stand certain spiritual beings who are different from the beings who are there from a definite and later point of time onwards. Many of you will know that man as he is to-day is a fourfold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body (the vehicle of joy, passions and so forth), and the Ego, the bearer of human self-consciousness. The three lower members, physical body, etheric body and astral body, were in existence long before the Ego, which was incorporated into man last of all. Spiritual beings who are designated in the Bible as the Elohim worked on these three earlier principles. And when the Ego began to be incorporated into this three-fold nature, another being from the spiritual world co-operated in the work of the Elohim. If we penetrate more deeply into the Bible we shall find that this Spiritual Being is given the name of Jehova, and rightly so. And in accordance with the inner principles of evolution itself we see that at a certain point in the narrative a new name is introduced in place of the old name of the God-head. We see too, the circumstances surrounding the origin of man which is described in a two-fold way in the Bible. For in point of fact man as a threefold being was dissolved into the universe: as a three-fold being he came into existence afresh, and then from out of the transformed three-fold man, the Ego developed. So that the cleft that would seem to lie between the first and second chapter of Genesis, and that has been the subject of so many false interpretations, is explained by spiritual investigation. It is only a question of rightly understanding the Bible and that is not very easy to-day. Spiritual Science shows that in the beginning higher Spiritual Beings were present; the descendants of these Beings are men, man has emerged from the bosom of Divine Spiritual Beings. We may speak of man as the descendant of the Gods in the same sense as we speak of the child being the descendant of his parents. From the standpoint of Spiritual Science we must look upon the human being standing before us as an Earth-man, the descendant of divine-spiritual beings.\nDoes the Bible tell us anything about this? Indeed it does, but we first must learn how to read it. The fourth sentence of the Second Chapter of Genesis runs: ‘These are the generations of the heavens’ ... and so on. This sentence is misleading, for it does not give what is really to be found at this place in the Bible. The text ought really to stand as follows: ‘What follow here and will now be described are the descendants of the Heavens and the Earth as they were brought forth by the divine power.’ And by the words ‘the Heavens and the Earth,’ divine spiritual beings are meant, divine spiritual beings whose descendant is man. The Bible describes exactly what the spiritual investigator rediscovers independently. Many of those who fight against the Bible to-day are directing their attacks against something of which they have no real knowledge. They are tilting against straws. The Anthroposophical view is exactly expressed in this fourth sentence. We might show verse by verse through the Old and New Testaments how man, when he ascends into the spiritual world through his own faculties, rediscovers the results of his investigation in the Bible. It would lead us too far now if we tried to describe the New Testament in a similar way. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact the Lazarus miracle among others is given in its real form. The manner of treating such subjects to-day makes it impossible for us to get at their real meaning, for modern commentators of the Bible are naturally only able to find what accords with their own personal knowledge. Their knowledge does not transcend sense-cognition, hence the many contradictory interpretations and expositions of the individual Biblical ‘Authorities.’ The only qualified expositor of the Bible is a man who, independently of the Bible, is able to reach the same truths as are there contained. Let us take for sake of example an old book — Euclid's Geometry. Anyone who understands something of Geometry to-day will understand this book. But one would of course only place reliance on someone who had really studied Geometry to-day. When such a man comes to Euclid he will recognise his teachings to be true. In the same sense a man who approaches the Bible with philological knowledge only can never be a real ‘Authority.’ Only a man who is able to create the wisdom from out of his own being can be a real Authority on the Bible.\nIt may be said then, that the Bible is intelligible to a man who can penetrate into the spiritual world, who can receive its influences into himself. The Bible induces in such a man an absolute certainty that it is written by Initiates and inspired souls; a man who can to-day penetrate into the spiritual world, understands the great Scribes of the Bible. He knows them to have been true Initiates, ‘awakened souls’ who have written down their experiences from the levels of the spiritual worlds; if he knows this, he also knows what is hidden within their words.\nI would like here to mention an experience of my own in reference to another matter. When I was engaged on special work in the Goethe Archives in Weimar, I tried to prove something quite externally. You all know Goethe's beautiful prose Hymn to Nature ‘Oh Nature we are encircled and embraced by thee,’ and so on. This hymn depicts in beautiful words that everything given to us by Nature is given in Love, that Love is the crown of Nature. This composition was lost sight of for a time by Goethe himself, and when he was an old man and what remained of his literary work was given over to the Duchess Amelia, it was found. Goethe was questioned about it, and said ‘Yes, I recognise the idea that came to me then.’ The composition was accepted as having been written by Goethe until certain hair-splitters refused to admit that he was the author and attributed it to someone else. My purpose was to investigate the truth about this composition. It had come to my knowledge that at an early period of his life Goethe had with him a young man called Tobler, who had an exceedingly good memory. During their walks together Goethe had elaborated his idea, Tobler had thoroughly assimilated it, and because of his marvelous memory had been able afterwards to write it down very nearly word for word. I tried to show that a great deal of what is to be found in Goethe's conceptions later on is intelligible in the light of this composition. The point is that someone other than Goethe had penned it on paper, but the idea itself in its phrasing and articulation was Goethe's — and that is what I tried to make clear. Later on, when my work was published, a celebrated Goethean scholar came to me and said: ‘We owe you a debt of gratitude for throwing light upon the subject, for now we know that this composition is by Tobler.’ You may well imagine how amused I was! This is how things present themselves to the minds of people who are at pains to prove that in the course of time some particular portion of the Bible was written by one man or another. Some people consider the most important thing to be who finally did the writing, and not which Spirit was the origin and source. But with us the essential thing is to understand how the Bible was able to come into being from the Spirits of those who looked into the Spiritual World and experienced it.\nAnd now let us examine whether there is in the Bible itself, anything that explains this way of looking at things.\nThe Old Testament lends itself to a great deal of controversy, for the events there have grown dim. But it will be clear to anyone who does not want to wrangle, that the Old Testament faithfully describes the significant process of the penetration of the Ego into the entire nature and being of man. Anyone who from the point of view of Spiritual Science, reads of the call to Moses at the Burning Bush will understand that in reality Moses was then raised into the Spiritual world. When God appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush, Moses asked: ‘Who shall I say to the people hath sent me?’ God said: ‘Tell them that One Who can say “I am” hath sent thee.’ And if we follow up the whole process of the incorporation of the Ego, step by step, then the Bible illuminates what is found in Spiritual Science independently.\nBut something else is evident as well, namely, that from a Christian point of view the Bible should not be considered from the same point of view as other historical documents. If we consider the figure of Paul we can learn a great deal that can lead us to this realisation. When we study the earliest form in which Christianity was promulgated, from which all its later forms are derived, we shall find that none of the Gospel narratives are given by Paul at all, but that he speaks of something quite different. What gave the impulse to Paul? How did this unique Apostle acquire his understanding of the Christ? Simply and solely as a consequence of the event of Damascus, that is, not as a result of physical but of super-sensible truths. Now what is at the basis of the teaching of Paul? It is the knowledge that the Christ — although he was crucified — lives; the event of Damascus reveals Christ as a Living Being who can appear to men who ascend to him; — it reveals, moreover that there is in very truth a spiritual world. And Paul makes a parallel between Christ's appearance to him and His appearance to others. He says: ‘First He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve, then to five hundred Brethren at once, to James and then all the Apostles, and last of all to me also as to one born out of due time.’ This reference by Paul to ‘one born out of due time’ is strange. But this very expression is evidence to experienced Initiates that Paul speaks with perfect knowledge of Spiritual Science. He says that he is ‘born out of due time.’ and from this we realise that his illumination is to be traced back to a certain fact. I will just hint at the meaning. He means to explain in these words that because he has been born out of due time he is less entangled in material existence. He traces back his illumination to his knowledge: the Christ lives and is here. He shows that he bases his Christianity upon this super-sensible truth and that it is conviction acquired as the result of direct perception.\nThe earliest form of Christianity as it spread abroad is based upon super-sensible facts. We could show that what is contained in the John Gospel is based upon super-sensible impressions which the writer of that Gospel gives as his own experience, and realising that originally it was possible for Christianity to win belief on the basis of super-sensible experiences of men who were able to look into the spiritual worlds, we can no longer imagine that it is right to apply to the Bible the same standard as we apply to other external documents.\nAnyone who examines the Gospels with the same methods as he employs in the case of other documents, is confronted by something whose inner contents he can never fathom. But a man who penetrates into the experiences of the writers of the Gospels will be led into the spiritual world and to those personalities who have built up their knowledge and their wisdom from out of the spiritual world and have given them to us.\nWe should realise that those from whom the Gospels proceeded were Initiates, awakened souls, taking into consideration as well that there may be different stages of awakening. Just imagine that different people are describing a landscape from a mountain; one stands at the bottom, another in the middle and another at the summit. Each of these men will describe the landscape differently, according to his point of view. This is how the spiritual investigator looks at the four Gospels. The writers of the four Gospels were Initiates of different degrees. It is understandable that there may be external contradictions, just as there would be in the description of a landscape from a mountain. The deepest of all is the Gospel of John. The writer of the John Gospel was the most deeply initiated into the mysteries of what took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era because he wrote from the summit of the mountain.\nSpiritual Science is able to elucidate the Gospels fully, and to prove that the various contradictions in Genesis at the beginning of the Old Testament disappear. Direct perception, then, of the spiritual worlds brings us again to an understanding of the Bible which is a most wonderful document. A man who engages in spiritual investigation will find that there are four standpoints to be distinguished among men who approach the study of the Bible. The first is the standpoint of the naive believer, who has faith in the Bible as it stands and pays no attention to any other consideration; the second is that of ‘clever’ people who stand neither on the ground of historical research, nor of Bible analysis, nor of Natural Science. They say: ‘We cannot recognise the Bible to be an uniform document.’ And when such men realise that Natural Science contradicts the Bible they become ‘Free Thinkers,’ so-called ‘Free Spirits.’ They are in most cases honest, sincere seekers after truth. But then we come to something that transcends the standpoint of the ‘clever’ people. Many Free Thinkers have held the point of view that the Bible is only suitable for a childlike stage of human evolution, and cannot hold its own against Science. But after a time it strikes them that much of what is given in the Bible has a figurative sense; that it is a garment woven around experiences. This is the third standpoint — that of the Symbolist. Here a pure arbitrariness reigns, and the view that the Bible is to be understood symbolically.\nThe fourth standpoint is that of Spiritual Science. Here there is no longer ambiguity, but in a certain sense literal interpretation of what is said in the Bible. We are brought back again to the Bible in order to understand it in a real sense. An important task of Spiritual Science is to restore the Bible to its real position. It will be a happy day when we hear in modern words what really is to be found in the Bible, different, indeed, from all that is said to-day.\nWe may pass from sentence to sentence and we shall see that the Bible everywhere contains a message to Initiates from Initiates; awakened souls speak to awakened souls. Spiritual investigation does not in any way alienate us from the Bible. A man who approaches the Bible by spiritual investigation experiences the fact that details become clear to him about which he formally had doubts because he could not understand them. It becomes evident that it was his fault when he was not able to understand. Now, however, he understands what once escaped him, and he gradually works through to a point of view where he says: ‘Now I understand certain things and see their deep content: others, again appear to be incredible. But just as formerly I did not understand what is now clear to me, so later I shall discover that it has a deep import.’ And then such a man will with gratitude accept what hashes up in him, leaving to the future what he cannot yet explain.\nThe Bible in all its depth will be revealed only in the future, when spiritual investigation, independently of any kind of tradition, penetrates into the spiritual facts, and is able to show mankind what this document really contains. Then it will no longer seem unintelligible, for we shall feel united with what streamed into spiritual culture through those who wrote it down. In our age it is possible for us, through Initiation, again to investigate the spiritual world. Looking back to the past we feel ourselves united with those who have gone before us, for we can show how step by step they communicated what they had received in the spiritual world. We can promise that the Bible will prove itself to be the most profound document of humanity, the deepest source of our civilization. Spiritual Science will be able to restore this knowledge. And, however much bigoted people may say: ‘The Bible does not need such a complicated explanation — it is the very simplicity that is right’ — it will be realised some day that the Bible, even when it is not fully understood works upon every heart by virtue of its intrinsic mysteries. It will be realised too that not only is its simplicity within our grasp, but that no wisdom is really adequate for a full understanding of it. The Bible is a most profound document not only for simple folk, but also for the wisest of the wise. Wisdom, therefore, investigated spiritually and independently, will lead back to the Bible. And Spiritual Science, apart from everything else that it has to bring to humanity, will be the means of accomplishing a re-conquest of the Bible."
+  }
+]

GA068b.json

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+[
+  {
+    "id": "GA068b-25",
+    "title": "Carnegie and Tolstoy",
+    "date": "6 Nov 1908",
+    "city": "Münchenstein",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA068b/English/Singles/19081106p01.html",
+    "book_title": "",
+    "content": "Translator Unknown\nFor many years it has been my duty to give lectures upon Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy.\nThose present at the lectures cannot but acknowledge that the foundation of Spiritual Science as presented is not a dreamy, idle pursuit for the few who have withdrawn from the common paths of life; it illumines the deepest problems and mysteries of existence.\nSpiritual Science will lead the mind towards spiritual origins. It is destined to give out to man-kind knowledge of the spiritual worlds. At the same time its mission is to make life intelligible, to be a guiding star in work and action, giving us a broader and deeper understanding of what happens in our environment, through a comprehension of the underlying spiritual causes.\nThe confusion that exists in the average mind and the consequent spirit of dissension, are due to the endless contradictions found in the opinions of famous authorities regarding the problems of human life. Many people have, however, already felt how Anthroposophy widens the vision, and therefore leads to a wise adjustment of opinions.\nTwo famous modern contemporaries, whose influences are far-reaching, will be brought before us to-day; individualities well suited to present to us the vital contrasts existing in our time. It would be difficult to find two personalities in greater contrast in their thought and feeling and in their standard of right and wrong. On the one hand is the famous, the influential Tolstoy — so strong a personality that no appellation seems adequate to describe his significance for his day and generation. It is difficult to describe him as moralist, prophet, or reformer. But it is evident that in speaking of him something deeply rooted in the innermost depths of human nature is touched; that in his personality something lives which rises from the depths of the human soul — something that cannot be felt in those whose work is merely superficial. The other personality, in so marked a contrast to Tolstoy, is the American millionaire, Carnegie. Why should Carnegie be mentioned in connection with Tolstoy? Just as Tolstoy, out of the depths of his soul, strives to solve the problems of life satisfactorily, even so Carnegie, in his own way, endeavours with a practical and intelligent outlook upon life, to reach guiding principles.\nPerhaps it might be said that just as Idealism and Realism are diametrically opposed, so are Tolstoy and Carnegie in relation to each other. As Fichte says, “Your opinion of life depends upon the kind of man you are,” and a man’s point of view is always connected b, finer or coarser threads with his peculiar character and temperament. Between these two personalities we find the greatest possible contrast. There is the wealthy Russian aristocrat, born in the lap of luxury, who through his social position was not only bound to know the external aspect of that life, but obliged to live with and to taste it. He is satiated with the modern way of thinking, which offers only the superficial. He looks up and beyond at the great outspread wings of moral ideals which the majority of mankind, even though admiring and willingly admitting as beautiful, still believe unattainable.\nOn the other hand we have Carnegie, who was born in simple surroundings, knowing necessity and sacrifice, not equipped with the advantages enjoyed by Tolstoy, but with a will to work with the endless, one may say, ideally-coloured ambition of becoming a man in the broadest sense of the word. Through this attitude towards life Carnegie evolves a kind of realistic idealism, a moral standpoint which reckons from what is seen with physical eyes of the turmoil of experiences in practical life.\nTolstoy, in his radical way, throws down the gauntlet to the modern order of things. His criticism becomes hard as it endeavours to combat modern thought, feeling, and selfish impulses. Carnegie sees life as it has developed historically. The word his soul uses to express his connection with life is “Satisfaction” — satisfaction with the existing order of things. He sees how the differences between rich and poor have arisen and how the differentiation of service has come into being. And everywhere this is his penetrating judgment: It is immaterial whether we find good or evil. Both exist, must exist. They are there and must be reckoned with. Let us work it out. From a realistic conception of things as they are, let us work out an idealism that aims at the great goal of pointing out the right way, within existing conditions, towards such an order of things as will further human progress and development.\nThis lecture does not “take sides” with either of these lives; but the conditions of their development must be understood in order to explain the contrasts: and if Spiritual Science has any task in regard to these men it must be that of understanding and explaining how these differences are evolved from the underlying principles of existence. It cannot be my task to offer biographical information. Only that will be said which will so illumine the souls of both men that we can enter into a deeper understanding of their personalities.\nTolstoy was from the first a man who did not have to fight for the material necessities of life, but was born in the midst of over-abundant wealth, and could easily have vanished like the many thousands who live within the realm of luxury. For this, however, he possessed too strong an individuality. From childhood only that which touched upon the deepest questions of the soul, and of life, seemed to influence him, though as a boy he did not regard critically the happenings around him but accepted them all as a matter of course. How different his attitude was later in life, when he became a censor of his surroundings.\nA long account could be given of how Tolstoy became acquainted with the dark and miserable side of modern social life, especially during his period of army service; how, having learned the misery of war, and the superficiality of the social and literary life of St. Petersburg, he became disgusted with the ethics of the ruling classes. All this is well known. But what interests us more are the great questions which shone out before Tolstoy. Forcing itself more and more into his being, was the question, “What is the centre of life amidst all these conflicting conditions surrounding us? Where is the middle ground to be found?” Religion became for him the great and vital question. He could not at first tear himself from the conventional forms, and though religious considerations grew in importance as he asked himself, over and over again, “What is religion? What does it signify to humanity?” he could not recognize the connecting link between the soul and an unknown spiritual source. It seemed to him that all he had learned of true religion from the men of his own class, had been torn away from its source and had hardened and withered away.\nAt this time he became interested in the lower classes. As a soldier in the Caucasus he learned to know their inner life and found in them something of the primeval, that had not been torn away from the first cause. His eyes opened to the fact that in the naive existence of these lower, inferior people of the soil, truth and reality must abide more than in the artificialities of the class to which he belonged.\nProblem after problem confronted him, none of which he could solve. “Yes; now I have seen those who have departed from the truth, and have become hardened in the periphery. And I have sought a way to religious depths through the souls of primitive people: But the answer to my question founders on the fact that the so-called educated can never be understood nor be in harmony with this primitive state of the soul.” No answer could be found to the burning question. So on and on until the contrasts and contradictions in life become plain. By reading his War and Peace, and Anna Karenina it can be seen how everywhere, even though the artistic form is paramount, the longing to understand life in its contrasts, and most of all the contradictions of the human character, permeate these works.\nIn later life, after he had become the great moral writer, he said: “The endeavour to portray a character ideally and soulfully created, yet in harmony with reality, has cost me untold misery, and I know that many of my contemporaries have had the same experience.”\nIt troubled him that such contradictions exist between that which one recognizes as the ideal and that which actually appears; for order and peace should reign in the world. This disturbed him as long as he was artistically active.\nTolstoy was not simply the objective onlooker all this time. He had been in the midst of life. He had experienced all these things, and could feel the intimate pricks of conscience, the inner reproaches that come to all who suddenly realize themselves to have been born into a certain class, and consequently under an obligation to conform to existing customs. It seemed inconsistent to criticize them. Such personalities are often driven to the verge of suicide by the turmoil in their minds.\nInfinitely more can be learnt by introspection than by criticism of externalities. As from within outwards the horizon of Tolstoy broadened, until from the keen observation of his nearest surroundings he reached the broad plain where he overlooked the whole evolution of mankind, he saw to how wide and universal an extent the great and pure religious impulses of humanity had degenerated.\nThen in all its depth, and in all its strength, the great impulse which was given to the world through Jesus Christ appeared to Tolstoy. But at its side also appeared the great Roman world of the Caesars which made Christianity subservient to power, representing only the outward form which had failed to save humanity and had become a mystery to men. And so his criticisms and his opinions became harsh and warped — and they are surely harsh enough.\nIt was most difficult for him to understand the contradictions in humanity. On the one side tremendous wealth; on the other dire poverty which resulted in the deplorable stunting of the soul’s life, so that humanity, through restriction of spiritual opportunities, could not find its way to spiritual wisdom specially to that which can be found in the original Christian teaching to which it must eventually penetrate.\nThus this comprehensive problem confronted him, this contrast between the luxury of the ruling classes and the spiritual and mental oppression of the masses. Experience of this problem ripened into a conviction, and he developed into a critic more penetrating perhaps than any before him — a critic who does not tire of describing things as they are, and of doing so in such a way as to impress us with their horror. It is natural to judge his attitude towards life from the trend of his contemplations. He said he would have liked to write a fairy tale with the following contents:\n“One woman, having had a very bad encounter with another woman, disliked her intensely and wished to do her the most atrocious wrong. Accordingly she consulted a sorcerer, and acting upon his advice stole a child from her enemy. The sorcerer assured her that if she could take the child, who was born in great poverty, and place it in a home of wealth she could thus fully accomplish her revenge. This she was successful in doing. The child was adopted. It was taken care of according to the manner of the rich — spoiled and pampered. The woman had not expected this development, and was very angry. She went back to the seer to complain that he had given her wrong advice, and had betrayed her. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘you have done the worst one could do to an enemy. When this child develops further and his conscience is awakened to an inner contrast with the outer world, he will know that all he longs for must be in another world: but he will not be able to find it. He will say, “The manner in which I have been brought up has robbed me of the ambition and determination to seek and follow the way which leads to the underlying causes of existence.”’\nThis results in intense suffering for the developing man. Tolstoy understands the soul torture of such an experience, and appreciates the temptation to suicide created by this inward unrest and uncertainty. This illustration reveals his attitude toward the social order of things.\nNow to consider Carnegie, who was the child of a master-weaver. So long as the big factories did not exist the father was able to find work. In the midst of this prosperity Carnegie spent his infancy. Then through the growth of the large factory his father found himself out of work, and was obliged to emigrate from Scotland to America. Only through the most strenuous efforts was he able to provide the absolute necessities of life. The boy was obliged to work in a factory, and as he relates his experiences we recognize in the description the same groundwork, the same depths, that are to be found in the soul experiences of Tolstoy. Carnegie describes what an event it was, his first-earned dollar. He has since become one of the richest men of the day, one who is actually obliged to seek ways and means of using his millions; and he is wont to say, with characteristic frankness: “None of my income has ever given me such a keen satisfaction as those first dollars.”\nHe worked in the same way for some time to support his family; but something lived within him like a hidden power, shaping his life so that he became a “self-made” man. This brought him supreme satisfaction. Even as a boy of twelve he felt himself fast becoming a man, for he who can earn his own living is a man. This was the thought of his soul. Then he went on to another factory, where he was employed in the office, and later became telegraph boy and earned more. He tells us: “A telegraph boy was obliged to memorise all addresses. I was afraid of losing my position, so I learned every name on the streets.” So once more his position was self-made. Then he stole into the office before hours, with other messenger boys, to practice telegraphy.\nThere his highest ideal was to become an operator, and he soon achieved it. Then his happiness was increased by finding a friend who lent him a book every Saturday. How eagerly he looked for each new book! Soon followed events of vital importance to him. A high official advised him to take shares in a certain company and thus advance his prospects. By sacrifice and thrift he accumulated the necessary five hundred dollars. Previous to this time had had used all his energy to support those dependent upon him, and he found it possible to make this investment largely through the economies of his mother.\nThis purchase of ten shares of stock was an event of the greatest importance, for upon the receipt of the first dividends it seemed to come to him, as the solution of a problem, that money makes money. The meaning of capital became clear to him, and this understanding meant the same to him as the working out of any difficult problem to a deep thinker. Before this time money had seemed only the compensation for hard work. Here it is most interesting to observe the result of such an experience upon such a character. From that time he was alert to every opportunity for making money. With the invention of the sleeping-coach Carnegie immediately became interested in it. Thus step by step he seemed to learn to understand and profit by the signs of the times.\nThe old custom of building bridges of wood was abandoned in favour of iron and steel construction. Of the opportunity offered by this change Carnegie took advantage, becoming richer and richer, until he was known as the “Steel King.” Then moral obligation faced him, and with it the questions, “What is my duty? How shall I distribute this wealth so that it may best fulfil its mission?”\nThat which Tolstoy experienced does not exist for Carnegie — there is no criticism of life, but instead an acceptance of life’s conditions as they are. What appeared to Tolstoy as utterly in-consistent, Carnegie regarded as natural. Looking back far into ancient times, we find princes living in the most primitive conditions, differing very little from their subjects in their mode of life. No luxury, no poverty, in our acceptance of those terms. Therefore we feel they did not know the things wealth brings, and there was no difference between rich and poor. From this primitive life everything has developed. Stronger and stronger become the contrasts. “It is well,” Carnegie says, “that beside the hut stands the palace, for there is much they should hold in common.”\nWe must understand his limitations. What struck him forcibly was the personal, brotherly feeling between master and servant under earlier conditions. Our relations have now become impersonal. The employer stands face to face with the employee without recognizing him, without knowing any of his needs. In this way hatred develops. But as it is so, it must be accepted. Carnegie’s view is an absolute endorsement of our outward daily life.\nPenetrating more deeply we see that Carnegie is a keen, sharp, practical thinker of his kind, and that he stands in the centre of industrial life knowing all the different channels into which capital flows: therefore he has developed a wise and a sound judgment. It cannot be denied that this man has endeavoured to solve the problem of right living, and there is something in him which persuades us that he experiences a satisfaction with life impossible to Tolstoy.\nHis practical morality brings up this question: “How must this life be shaped so that that which has arisen of necessity shall have meaning and sense? Old conditions have brought about the custom of inherited wealth. Is this still possible under our present conditions, when capital of necessity produces capital?” he asks himself sharply. He studies life with keen interest and says, “No; it cannot go on in this way.” After considering all sides carefully, he comes to the peculiar and characteristic conclusion that when the rich man regards himself as the distributor of accumulated wealth, for the benefit of humanity, then and then only has his life any significance. He says to himself: “I must not only earn money, not only support my family and relatives, but in so far as I have used my mental powers and forces to bring it together, pouring into my work all my capabilities, this must be turned to the benefit of mankind.” This then is his code, that man, while adapting his powers to the conditions of this age, should earn as much money as possible, but not leave any; he should use it all for the improvement of humanity.\nTherefore, “to die rich, dishonours,” is characteristic of Carnegie’s view of life. He says it is honourable at one’s death to leave nothing. Naturally this is not meant pedantically, because the daughter must inherit enough to live upon; but, radically expressed, “to become rich is fate, but to die rich is dishonour.” An honourable man to Carnegie is the one who “makes an end,” completes a life, leaving no uncertainty concerning that which his ability has brought together.\nWe must recognise the difference between these two characters — Tolstoy and Carnegie. The latter himself feels it and has commented on it in this manner: “Count Tolstoy wishes to carry us back again to Christ; but it is in a way that does not fit in with our present manner of living. Instead of leading us back to Christ, he should demonstrate what Christ would advise man to do under present conditions.’ In the sentence before quoted, “To die rich, dishonours,” Carnegie finds the true stamp of Christian thought. And it is evident that he believes Christ would say that he, not Tolstoy, is right.\nWe see in all this that Carnegie is a noble man, with a progressive, not an indolent, nature, unlike the many who, with little thought, accept things as they find them. He has sought, in many ways, to solve the problem of the distribution of wealth.\nIs it not wonderful that life presents such marked contrasts as those afforded by these two strong personalities who, with the same objective point, pursue such very different courses? To understand this is truly most difficult for some minds. It is not at all marvellous that, on hearing Tolstoy preaching his lofty ideals, some will feel, “Oh, my soul responds to that!” and will sense the uplifting influence. It must be remembered, however, that life has a practical side, and he who is not an abstract dreamer, but in a truly realistic and earnest spirit tries to follow Carnegie’s train of thought, must admit that he is right too.\nThis shows, too, how impossible it is for the man who gives himself up to the practical side of life to acknowledge the greatest ideal, or to believe in its fulfilment.\nTolstoy succeeds in making what he believes is an absolute defence of the original Christian religion. He criticizes all that has appeared from time to time in the guise of Christianity; he has hoped to find the great impulse, or foundation, of real Christianity. In the simplest way he puts before us this impulse as it appears to him. And when a man understands this impulse, it is clear that he has within himself a spark of the Infinite, the eternal world-illuminating spirit of God. Another conviction is that in this spark is the germ of man’s immortality, and that with this understanding he cannot fail to seek for the higher and deeper nature throughout the whole of humanity. From this comprehension he knows that within himself is the real man, who cannot fail to overcome all that is base and unworthy within his nature. He devotes himself to the cultivation of the spiritual or higher self which lives eternally, the Christ.\nHow would a man, I will not say Carnegie, but one who considers things from his point of view, regard the philosophy of Tolstoy’s Christianity? He would say: “Oh, it is grand, magnificent, to live in Christ. The Christ within is one’s Self; but under our present conditions such a thing is impossible. How could civic affairs be conducted in accordance with these strict Christian requirements?”\nAlthough the question is not put before the other side in a corresponding way, Tolstoy gives as definite an answer as possible, saying, “What will happen to the outward order of things pertaining to state and historical events is beyond my knowledge; but I am positive that humanity must live in accordance with the true Christian doctrine.” So, for him, the words, “The kingdom of God is within you,” expand into a deep, significant certainty that man may reach the heights, that he may know the Holy of Holies. This certainty, that the soul can know the truth about this or that, is to him a fact. We see in no other character of our time such a strong faith in the inner man, and such a firm belief that through this faith the outward results must eventually be good. For this reason scarcely any one else has professed such a view of the world with such personal, individual sympathy and such conviction as Tolstoy.\nCarnegie reasons: “What relations must men sustain one to another?” And: ‘It is not good to give to beggars promiscuously, because it is apt to foster laziness. It is necessary to know the exact needs of those whom one helps. Really, one should help only those who are willing to work.” This is the basis of his philanthropy. He says he knows very well that the man who gives simply to rid himself of the beggar causes more havoc than the miser who gives nothing. We shall not judge in this matter; we are only characterizing.\nOn the other hand, let us consider Tolstoy. He meets a friend. This man has a great affection for his fellow men, and Tolstoy sees in him a wonderful new birth. Some one robs this friend; sacks of things are stolen, but one sack is left behind. What does the friend do? He does not prosecute the robbers, but carries them the remaining sack, saying, “You certainly would not have taken them had you not needed them.” This Tolstoy understands perfectly, and he be-comes his friend’s admirer. So much for the different ways of looking upon the parasites of society. These men are human brothers. The differences of opinion are the results of the different attitudes of soul. It must be admitted that Tolstoy is not only a hard critic, but having grasped the source of human certainty he has reached a remarkable point in the development of his soul. Herein begins what is foremost in his greatness, shining out for all who can appreciate it.\nOne result of his strong convictions, that calls forth admiration, is his attitude towards the value of science to the present generation. Because of his ability to look into the souls of men he could see through the vain endeavours and methods of our worldly sciences. Certainly it is easy to understand the teachings of physical and material sciences, and to follow and to realize all that they demonstrate. But what so-called science cannot do is to answer the questions: “How are these different physical and chemical processes united to life?” and “What is life?” So we face the deep scientific problem, the problem of life, and attempt to understand and to solve it.\nIt is significant to note Tolstoy’s remarks on the attitude of our western science in regard to the riddle of life. “People, who in the name of modern science endeavour to solve this riddle, seem to me like men trying to recognize the different species and habits of trees in this manner. Standing in the midst of the trees they do not even look at them, but taking a glass they gaze at a distant hill, upon which they agree should grow the kind of tree they are endeavouring to understand. So appear to me those who, instead of seeking in their own souls the solution of this problem of life, make instruments, create methods, and try to analyze that which exists in nature around them; more than ever they fail to see what life is.”\nThrough this comparison Tolstoy reveals what he understands and feels upon these questions. A careful study of his point of view shows that what he has written on the problem of life is of more value than whole libraries of western Europe which treat it from the modern scientific standpoint.\nIt is good to realize the value of such soul-experiences as Tolstoy’s, and his experience of the certitude of the Spirit is of great importance. We can admire Tolstoy’s way of solving in five lines that which our modern scientific methods fail to solve with long, complicated processes of thought, in whole books. Tolstoy shows great concentration in this power of expressing these great solutions in a few magical strokes, and making great problems intelligible in a few words rather than in the prolix, so-called scientific, philosophical treatises of many modern writers.\nTolstoy stands unique in the depth of his soul-character, and only when this is realised can we comprehend the spiritual reasons for the coming of such a man as he on one side, and on the other such a man as Carnegie — for the latter in his way is as important for his generation. To understand more fully the spiritual sources which lead on the one hand to Tolstoy and on the other to Carnegie, we should regard them from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.\nThe spiritual discoverer sees in the progress of humanity something quite different from that seen by the ordinary man. As the Spiritual Scientist sees in the man standing before him a being of four parts — sees in the physical body the instrument of higher spiritual forces, and behind this the etheric body, the astral body, and the I, or ego — so he sees behind what appears as social order in human life as folk or race or family, the spiritual reality. To-day the “spirit of the people” or the “spirit of the times” has no real meaning. What does he think who speaks of an English, German, French or American “spirit of the people”? Truly, as a rule, only the sum-ming up of so many human beings. To the average mind they are the reality, but the spirit of the people is an abstraction.\nThere is little realisation that that which appears outwardly as so many human beings is the expression of a spiritual reality, exactly as the human body is the expression of an etheric body, an astral body, and the ego. Humanity has lost what it once possessed — the faculty of being able to see such realities. An old friend of mine, a good apostle of Aristotle, tried to make clear to his class how the spirit can be made manifest in the sense-perceptible. By a simple example Knauer — for it was he — made it clear how spirit exists in matter by saying: “Look at a wolf. He eats, we will say, during his whole life nothing but lambs, and then consists of lamb’s material. However, he does not become a lamb. It is not the nature of the food that is significant, but the fact that in the wolf is living something spiritual which builds and holds together its material form. This is the Real — something which must be recognized or else all study of the outer world is vain.\nExamine as man may the outward, material world, if he does not probe to the spiritual he does not come to the source of all life. So it is with the terms “spirit of the people” or “spirit of the times.” For the spiritual discoverer, in the development of Christianity there lives the spiritual reality, not simply an abstract condition. For the spiritual discoverer the sum of humanity is not only that which can be observed in the physical world; behind this lives something spiritual. And for him there is a spirituality, not a bare, unsubstantial abstraction, in the development of Christianity. Beside the Christ is the spirit of Christianity, which is real. This spiritual reality works in a wonderful and subtle way, well illustrated by the following. A peasant once lived who divided his crop. One part he used, and the other he saved as seed, which bore a new crop. This is an illustration which leads us to a law ruling human development; and which proceeds in this way. At certain times are born great impulses which must be sown broadcast. A spiritual impulse, as that of Christianity, given at a certain time, then finds its way to the outer world, taking on this or that form; but perhaps as the outer part of a tree dries up and forms the bark, so the form becomes dry and dies away. These outer forms are bound to die out. And be the impulse ever so strong and fruitful, as surely as it penetrates into the outer world it must disappear like the seed that was used.\nNow just as the peasant held something back, so must some part of the spiritual impulse remain, as if flowing along underground channels. Suddenly with primal force this reappears, bringing a fresh impetus to the development of mankind. It is then that a personality appears in whom the impulse, which has been ripening for centuries, is manifested. Such individualities always appear in direct contrast to their surroundings. They must be in great contrast because the surrounding world has become hardened. They are usually inclined to disregard their environment entirely. Seen from a spiritual standpoint, Tolstoy is such a personality; one in whom the Christian impulse is manifest.\nThese things happen in a forceful way, to break through the shell, and exert a far-reaching influence. Their origin appears wholly radical, and their effects illuminate the world. Such is the law which gives us such seemingly one-sided personalities as Tolstoy. On the other hand, we must expect the contrasting personalities who are not connected with the central stream but wholly absorbed within the peripheral working of the world. Such a person is Carnegie.\nCarnegie can look out and over the circle, can think out the best way for humanity; but he does not see that which as spirit pulsates through human life. Tolstoy does, because he seeks so earnestly the inner certainty, the Kingdom of God, in the individual soul. He can do so because in him is personified that true stream which is below the surface bearing itself onwards and unconnected with such material things as may be inherited.\nWe have physical manifestations but the onlooker does not realize the spiritual within them. We have the spiritual that springs with great strength out of the innermost being of a person, but the onlooker does not understand how this can make itself felt in the world. More and more will humanity find these contrasts and, if another spiritual stream did not appear to reflect again the deep, underlying, spiritual sources making them manifest in the material world, we could not follow Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science leads us into the very depths of spiritual life. It not only traces spiritual life in those powerful impulses which do not unite with deed and fact, it also seeks for it in the concrete, and therefore understands how the spiritual flows into the material. It thus bridges the apparent chasm between the spiritual and material, finding in this way the point of view which brings contrasts into harmony.\nToday we wish to learn to understand, from a spiritual point of view, two contrasting personal-ities. Spiritual Science is not only called upon to preach outward tolerance, but also to find that inner light which can penetrate with admiration into the soul of one demonstrating the great Im-pulse that emanates from the spiritual consciousness. This to-day seems improbable if not im-possible and on the whole radical, because it crowds into so small a space that which in the future will be spread far and wide, and which will then present a very different aspect. This Anthroposophy can realize. It can look also with objective eyes upon the present, and the personality of Carnegie, and appreciate him. Life is not a one-sided affair. Life is many sided, and can be appreciated in all its richness only when the great contrasts are fully understood. Bad indeed it would be if the various colours and tones could not be seen as parts of an artistic whole.\nHuman evolution demands the crystalization of one or the other of these opposites, and so it must be; but with this hope, that mankind may not be lost in the midst of life. There must be a central religion, or Welt-Anschauung, which must solve the many complex problems which now appear so full of contradictions. When Anthroposophy works with this aim in view it will evolve full harmony. Outward harmony can only be the reflection of the inner or soul harmony. And when Anthroposophy shall have accomplished this aim, her true place in modern culture, she will have found that which she is seeking to establish. Anthroposophy desires no theoretical proofs, no speculation; her aim is to prove and demonstrate the truth of her statements in life itself. When she will see the light which she has shed upon life reflected back to her in inner harmony in spite of all contradictions, then she will realize the establishment of her fundamental principles.\n{This follows immediately after the lecture.}\nTOLSTOY AND THE FUTURE\nIn Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the Apocalypse of John, given at Nuremberg in June 1908, he spoke in Lecture 7 of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, which follows our own, and took Tolstoy as an example of a man in whom the culture of the future age can already be seen."
+  }
+]

GA068c.json

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+[
+  {
+    "id": "GA068c-10",
+    "title": "Lecture One",
+    "date": "4 Apr 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/SerpLily/19040404p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The Story of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily",
+    "content": "If Theosophy were to assert that it has in the last few decades brought any new thing into the world, it could easily and very effectively be contradicted. For it is easy to believe that any particular truth or achievement in a special branch of human knowledge, in man's conception of the world or in his world of thought, might enrich the advancing ages, but not that which concerns his innermost and deepest being — the source and origin of all human wisdom — could appear at any particular time. This in itself could not be believed; hence it is only natural that the belief that Theosophy could bring in or want to bring in anything completely new, must call forth a certain distrust against the movement itself.\nBut ever since Theosophy set out to obtain an influence upon modern civilisation, it has always described itself as possessing the old primeval wisdom, which man has ever sought and endeavoured to acquire in many different forms in the various ages. It is the task of the Theosophical Movement to look for these forms in the various religions and world-conceptions through which the peoples, throughout the ages, have striven to press through to the source of truth. Theosophy has brought to light the fact that in the various ages, even in the most primeval times, that wisdom by which man sought to attain his goal, has always in its really most profound essence been one and the same. That is a truth, Theosophy teaches us to be modest concerning the acquirements of our own times.\nThe well-known statement, which, in its lack of humility, boasts of the progress made in the 19th century, is felt to be particularly limited when we observe life in a deeper sense, extending through hundreds of thousands of years. But I do not wish to lead you back to those primeval ages.\nI should like to ask you, by means of the example of a great personality of modern times, how he tried to carry out the wisdom-teaching inscribed in the Greek Temples; “Know thyself!” He, who made this saying his own, was really in complete harmony with the teaching and views of Theosophy. This personality is none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He certainly belongs not only to the German nation, but to many other civilized men of the present age and belongs indeed more or less to us all. Goethe is a spirit who affects us in a very special way. No matter to what part of his life we turn in study, we find, not only the great Poet very pre-eminently there, but, if we go more deeply into the subject, we soon discover in him the Wise One, to whose wisdom we turn back again after long years, always to discover something new.\nWe find that Goethe was one of those spirits who had within him an inexhaustible fund of greatness. And if we have learned to add to our own small stock of wisdom, by turning back to Goethe again and again, we are constantly astonished anew and stand in admiration before that which before was hidden from us, because there was in ourselves no responsive echo of the realm which expressed itself through him. No matter how polished a man may be, no matter how much wisdom he may have discovered in Goethe, if after some years he turns to him again, he will convince himself anew that there is still an infinite fund of what is beautiful and good in the works of Goethe. This experience may come in particular to those who believe profoundly in the evolution of the human soul. It has often been said that in his “Faust,” Goethe produced a sort of Gospel. If this be so, then, besides his Gospel, Goethe also produced a sort of secret Revelation, a sort of Apocalypse. This Apocalypse is concealed within his works, it forms the conclusion to his “Unterhaltung deutscher Ausgewanderten,” and is read only by few. I am always being asked where in Goethe's works this “Märchen” is to be found! Yet it is in all the editions and forms, as I have just said, the conclusion to the above. In this fairy tale, Goethe created a work of art of eternal beauty. The direct, symbolical impression of the work of art will not be interfered with, if I now try to give an interpretation of this fairy tale; Goethe put into this tale his most intimate thoughts and conceptions.\nIn the latter years of his life he said to Eckermann: “My dear friend, I will tell you something that may be of use to you, when you are going over my works. They will never become popular; there will be single individuals who will understand what I want to say, but there can be no question of popularity for my writings.” This referred principally to be the second part of “Faust,” and what he meant was that a man who enjoyed “Faust” might have a direct artistic impression, but that one who could get at the secrets concealed in “Faust” would see what was hidden behind the imagery. But I am not speaking of the second part of “Faust,” but of the “Fairy Tale of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily,” in which Goethe spoke in an even more intimate way than in the former. I shall try to disclose in the course of this lecture the Mysteries concealed in these remarkable pictures, and to explain why Goethe made use of these symbolical images to express his most intimate thoughts. Anyone who is capable of understanding the Fairy Tale knows that Goethe was a Theosophist and a mystic. Goethe was acquainted with that wisdom and conception of the world which we try to give forth in a popular way in Theosophy; and the Fairy Tale itself is a proof of this; only, at the time when Goethe was writing, the endeavour had not yet been made to clothe the highest truths in words and to give them forth in open lectures by the power of reason; these most intimate human psychic truths were not then spoken of openly. Those who gave a hint of them put them into symbolical form, and expressed them by symbols. This was an old custom, dating from the middle ages, when it was thought that it would be impossible to put the highest insight into the abstract form, but that a sort of experience or initiation was necessary. This made it impossible for people to speak of these truths, who believed that a particular sort of mood, a sort of special soul-atmosphere was needed in order to understand such truths; they could not be grasped merely by the intellect. A certain mood was necessary, a certain disposition of the soul, which I will call a psychic atmosphere. The language of reason seemed to them to be too arid, too dry and cold to express the highest truths. Besides which they still retained a sort of conviction that those who were to learn these truths should first make themselves worthy of them. This conviction brought it to pass, that in the olden times, down to the 3rd century A.D. — the truth about the human soul and the human spirit was not given out publicly as it is now, but those who wished to attain to such knowledge had first to be prepared to receive that which was to be given to them in the Sanctuaries of the Mysteries. Therein all that had been preserved of the secrets of nature and of the laws of cycles, was given out as something which, to put it concisely, could not be learned and recognised as dry truths, but which the students had to recognise as living truths and learn to live them. It was not then a question of thinking wisdom, but of living it; not merely a question of permeating wisdom with the glow of the intellect, but of making it the mainspring of life, so that a man is transformed thereby. A certain shyness must possess a man before the Holy of Holies; he had to understand that truth is divine, that it is permeated by the Divine Cosmic Blood, which draws into the personality, so that the divine world lives anew within. The recognition of all this was included in the word “development.” This had to be made quite clear to the Mystic, and this it was which he was to attain through the stages of purification, on the way to the Mysteries, he was to acquire the holy shyness before the Truth, and to be drawn away from the longing for the things of the senses, from the sorrows and joys of life, from all that surrounds us in ever-day life. The Light of the Spirit, which is necessary to us when we withdraw from the profane life, we shall receive when we give up the other. When we are worthy to receive the Light of the Spirit, we shall have become different people; we shall then love with real, earnest sympathy and devotion, that which we are wont to look upon as a shadowy existence, a life in the abstract. We then live the Spiritual life which to the ordinary man is mere thought. But the Mystic learns to sacrifice the Self that clings to the everyday life, he learns not only to penetrate the truth with his thought but has to live it through and through, to conceive it within him as Divine Truth, as Theosophy. Goethe has expressed this conviction in his “West-Ostlichen Divan:” —\nSo lang dud as nicht hast, Dies ‘stirb im Werde’, Bist du nur ein trüber Gast Auf der dunkeln Erde —\nThis it is that the Mystics of all ages have striven for, — to let the lower nature die out, and to allow that which dwells in the Spirit to spring forth; the extinction of sense reality, that man may ascend to the Kingdom of “Divine Purposes.” “To die in order to become.” If we do not possess this power we do not know of the forces that vibrate into our world, and we are but a “trüber Gast” (gloomy guest) on our Earth. Goethe gave expression to this in his “West-Ostlichen Divan,” and this he tries to represent in all the different parts of the “Fairy Tale” of the “Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily!” The transition of man from one stage of existence to a higher one. That was the riddle he wanted to solve, the riddle as to how a man who lives in the everyday world, — and who can only see with his eyes, and hear with his ears, — can lay hold of this “ dying and becoming !”\nThis was the question for the Mystics of all ages; and this great question was always called “Spiritual Alchemy.” The transmutation of man from the every-day soul to the Spirit-soul, one to whom the things of the Spirit are just as real as the things of this Earth, such as tables and chairs and so on, are to the ordinary man. When the alchemical transmutation had taken place in a man, he was then considered worthy to have the highest truths communicated to him, he was then led into the Holy of Holies. He was then initiated, and supplied with the teachings which instructed him as to the purposes of nature, those purposes which run through the plan of the world. It is an initiation of this kind which is described by Goethe, the initiation into the Mysteries, of one who has been made worthy to receive them.\nThere are two proofs of this — in the first place Goethe himself took a great deal of trouble to become acquainted with the secret which may be called the Secret of Alchemy. Between the studies he made at Leipzig and Strassburg he had already discovered that Alchemy had a Spiritual side, and knew that ordinary Alchemy was nothing but a reflection of the Spiritual, and all that is known of Alchemy consisted only in the symbolical expressions of realities. That is to say, he referred to that Alchemy which is concerned with the forces of the inner life.\nAlchemists have also left indications of how this could be worked. As they were only able to describe the transmutation of the human forces by means of symbols, they therefore spoke of one substance being transmuted into another. All they related concerning the transmutation of matter, referred to what the human soul-life developed within itself at a higher stage, when it became transmuted spiritually. All that the great Spirits have disclosed about the Spiritual Realms to those men who are still bound to the life of every day, was taken by them as referring to the transmutation of substances and metals in the retorts, and they took great trouble to try and discover by what mysterious methods the transmutation of substances could be brought about.\nGoethe, in one part of his “Faust,” shows us what he himself understood as to such things. In the first part of “Faust,” in the walk in front of the garden, he points clearly to the false, wrong and petty material conceptions that are held as to Alchemy. He makes fun of those who strive with such feverish efforts to discover these secrets, and who pour forth the lower substances, according to numberless receipts, in company of the Adepts.\n“There a Red Lion, with the Lily wedded, “A wooer bold, within the tepid bath, “From bridal-bower to bridal-bower was speeded “Racked by the naked fire's flaming wrath.”\nThe union with the Lily, which is made fun of by Goethe is what he wished to illustrate in his Fairy Tale, of the Green Serpent and the beautiful Lily.\nThe highest transmutation which man can accomplish is illustrated by Goethe in the symbol of the Lily. It is of like significance with what we call the Highest freedom. When a man follows the primal and eternal laws, in accordance with which we have to complete the primal and eternal circuit of our existence, and if he also recognises the primal and eternal evolution of his freedom, he will then find himself at a certain stage of his development which is accomplished by a disposition of the soul, which may be described by the symbol of the Lily. The highest forces of the soul, the highest state of consciousness, in which a man may be free because he will then not misuse his freedom, and will never create a disturbance in the circle of freedom, — this state of soul, which was communicated to the Mystics in the Mysteries, in which they were collectively transmuted, — this was from all time described as the “Lily.”\nThat which Spinoza expresses at the end of his “Ethics,” (dry and mathematical as he was in his other writings) — when he says that man ascended into the higher spheres of existence and penetrated them by means of the laws of nature, — this state of mind may also be described as the Lily, Spinoza describes it as the realm of Divine Love in the human soul, the realm in which man does nothing under compulsion, but in which everything belonging to the domain of human development takes place in freedom, devotion and utter Love, where everything arbitrary is transmuted by that Spiritual Alchemy in which every activity flows into the stream of freedom.\nGoethe has described that Love as the highest state of Freedom, as the being free from all desires and wishes of our every-day life. He says, “Self-seeking and Self-will are not permanent, they are driven out by the Ego. Here we must be good.” The Divine Love, which is referred to by Spinoza, and which he wishes to attain through Spiritual Alchemy, — that it is with which man should unite himself, that it is with which man should unite his will. Human will active at every stage, is that which in all ages was known as the “Lion,” the creature in which the Will is most strongly developed, and that is why the Mystics have always called the will of man: the “Lion.” In the Persian Mysteries there were seven Initiations; there were the following: first the Raven, then the Occultist, then the Fighter; at the fourth grade the student was already able to look back at his life from the other side, and had really become Man , hence the Persians called one who had overcome the Lion stage a Persian . That was the fifth stage, and a man who had got so far that his actions flowed quickly along, just as the Sun runs its course in the Heavens above, was called a Sun-runner. But he who accomplished all his actions out of absolute and ceaseless love, was looked upon by the Persians as belonging to the grade of the “Father.” At the fourth grade, a man stood at the parting of the ways; he had then, besides his physical body, his etheric double, and that body which is subject to the laws of passions and desires, wishes and instincts; he was now organized for a higher life. These three bodies form, according to Theosophy, the lower part of man. From these the lower man is born. When a man was initiated into this grade and could see this connection the Persians called him a “Lion.” He then stands at the parting of the ways, and that which compelled him to act according to the laws of nature is transmuted into a free gift of Love. When he reaches the eighth stage of Initiation, when he has evolved himself into a free man, one who can allow himself to do, out of free love, what he was formerly driven to do by his own nature, this connection between the Lion and the free loving being, is described in Alchemy as “the mystery of human development.” This is the mystery Goethe represented in his Fairy Tale. First of all he shows us how this man of will stands there, drawn down to the physical world from higher spheres, from spheres of which he himself knows nothing. Goethe is conscious of the fact that man, in so far as his spiritual nature is concerned, comes originally from higher spheres; that he was led into this which Goethe represents as the world of matter, the world of sense-existence, this is the Land on the bank of the River.\nBut in the Tale of the green Serpent and the beautiful Lily, there are two Lands, one on this side of the River, and the other beyond. The unknown Ferryman conducts the man across from the far side into the Land of the sense-world; — and between the Land of spiritual existence and the sense-world there flows the River, the water which divides them. By water, Goethe describes that which the Mystics of all ages have symbolized as water. Even in Genesis the same meaning is applied to this word as we find in Goethe. In the New Testament too we find this expression in the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. “He who is not born again of water and the Spirit, cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Goethe understood perfectly what was signified by the expression “born again of water.” And we can see in what sense he understood it by his “song of the Spirit.”\n\nSeele des Menschen\nSoul of humanity\nNie gleichat du dem Wasser!\nHow like to the water!\nSchicksal des Menschen\nFate of humanity\nWie gleichst du dem Wind!\nHow like to the wind!\n\nThe world of humanity, the world of longing and wishes, the world of passions and desires, is a land inserted between our Spirit and our senses. Our senses know neither good nor evil, they cannot err. Anyone who goes into this question, knows that when we study the laws of nature, we cannot speak of good or evil. When we study nature in the animal world, we find that there are objectionable animals and useful ones, but we cannot speak of good and evil ones. Only when man plunges into the water — into the soul-world — does he become capable of good and evil. This world which is inserted between the Spiritual and the world of senses, is the River over which the Spirit passes from the unknown spheres. The innermost of man came across the River of passions and desires — and when he goes through further development he becomes like the Will-o'-the-wisp.\nThus man is subject to the laws within him, after he has crossed the River, and before he has received the Divine Spark which will take him across to the other world. He is therefore put ashore by the Ferryman who brings men across the River from the far bank to the near one. Nobody can be guided over by the Ferryman but all can be brought over by him. We feel ourselves being brought over without any action of our own, by the forces lying beneath our consciousness, which go ahead of our actions. By means of these forces we feel ourselves placed in the world of sense, — on the hither side; the Ferryman who brought us across from the Land of the Spirit, has put us into this world and cannot take us back to that country again to which we must however return, the Land of the beautiful Lily. The Will-o'-the-wisps wanted to pay the Ferryman his fare with gold, but he demanded fruits of the Earth, which they did not possess; they had nothing but gold, and he would not be paid with that. Gold coins, said he, were injurious to the River, it cannot bear such gold; which signifies that man can purchase wisdom with the fruits of the Earth. This is a profound wisdom; gold signifies the force of wisdom dwelling in man, and this is his guide through life. This force of Wisdom makes itself felt when a man is placed among the things of sense, as the forces of knowledge and reason. But this wisdom is not the wisdom which furthers his development. When it forms part of a man's nature, it makes him self-seeking and egotistical. If this force of reason and this knowledge were to join forces with what flows in the River, their passions would throw up huge waves; for whenever man does not place his wisdom at the service of selflessness, but simply throws it into the River, when he cultivates (frohmen) his passions, the River throws up great waves. Hence it is impossible to satisfy the River with gold; with that wisdom. So the Ferryman throws back the wisdom which has not yet passed through the stage of selflessness. He throws it back into the chasm, where reigns the profoundest darkness, and there it is buried. We shall hear why this is so.\nThe Ferryman demanded three cabbages, three artichokes, and three onions. — Thus he demands the fruits of the Earth. Now by what means can man attain his development? By ennobling the lower desire-forces of his nature, so that he purifies the sense-nature within him and casts this purified nature into the River, and thereby .................. this it is which Schiller refers to in his letters on the aesthetic education of man. He alone understands freedom who has set his own nature free; — when the outer sense-nature is so ennobled that it seeks for the good and the beautiful because it is no longer misled by passion, when we no longer throw our wisdom into the River, but reward our passions with the fruits of the Earth so that our sense-nature itself is taken up by them, just as the fruits of the Earth would be accepted by the River, we have then attained the first grade of initiation as expressed in the words, “Ye must know that I cannot be paid except with the fruits of the Earth.” Then the Will-o'-the-wisps proceed further on this side of the River, that means that man tries to follow his own way of life further.\nOn this side of the River he meets with the green Serpent, the symbol of human endeavours, of human knowledge. This Serpent had previously had a wonderful experience — the Ferryman had ferried over the piece of gold and concealed it in a cleft of the Earth, and here the Serpent had found it. The wisdom that brings men forward is still a hidden treasure, concealed in the mysteries, hence if a man wishes to find wisdom he must seek it far from all human self-seeking. When a man had made himself worthy to receive it, it will be found in its proper place; — the Serpent, the symbol of human striving after knowledge, permeates itself with the gold; this “self” is entirely permeated with wisdom, and becomes luminous. Then the Serpent desired from the Will-o'-the-wisps that which is a cause of pride to the self-seeking man, when he throws about him and pricks himself with, — this human knowledge which when used in the service of egoism is objectionable and worthless, will be attained when man crawls humbly on the ground as does the Serpent, and strives to recognize the reality piece by piece. If a man stands there, proud and stuck-up, he will never attain it, he can only receive it when like the Serpent, he goes horizontally on the ground and lives in humility, — then the gold of wisdom is in its place. Then the man may venture to permeate himself with wisdom — that too is why the Will-o'-the-wisps call the Serpent their relation, and say “We really are related on the side of light.” Indeed they are related, the wisdom that serves the self is related to the wisdom which serves humility; the Serpent is related to the Will-o'-the-wisps.\nNow the tale relates further that the Serpent had been under the Earth in the clefts of the rock, and there had met something resembling human forms — the Serpent had reached a temple; this is none other than a symbol of the Mystery Temples of all ages, — this concealed Temple which was in the clefts below the Earth is the symbol of the Sanctuaries of Initiation. In this Temple the Serpent found the three great priests of Initiation; these priests were gifted with the highest forces of human nature, which theosophy calls Atma, Buddhi, Manas. They are called by Goethe the King of Beauty, the King of Wisdom, and the King of Strength or Will; — with these three basic forces of the soul, into which the human soul must be initiated, the Mystic had to be united in the Temple of the Mysteries — and Goethe represents the Serpent, all luminous within, because it had taken in the gold of wisdom, humility.\nThe old man with the lamp is another figure — what does he represent? He has a lamp which has the peculiarity of only shining when another light is there. Because the Serpent is luminous and illuminates the inner Hall of the Mystery Temple with its own radiating light, — Goethe expresses these thoughts in another passage in the words “If the eye were not sensitive to the Sun it could not perceive the light.” Here he expresses in poetic words what he expressed in the fairy tale in pictures; what we in Anthroposophy call “occult knowledge” is expressed by the old man with the lamp, — the light of occult knowledge cannot shine to anyone who had not prepared himself to receive it.\nIt appears to no one who has not worked his way up to that higher stage of development at which his higher self, his selfless nature shines forth from within, bringing light to meet light, — the highest wisdom is called occult, because it only appears when a man brings his own light to meet it. When those two lights, the intuitive light from above, and the light that comes from the personal, shine into one another, they then give that which man experiences in his transmutation as Spiritual Alchemy — then the space around him become light, he then learns to recognise the highest Spiritual forces, the gifts of the three Kings; Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength, — the gift of the golden King is Wisdom, that of the silver King is Beauty or Piety, the gift of the bronze King is Strength or force of Will. Man can only understand his innermost forces, he can only understand himself when he meets with the light of the lamp which can only shine when there is already a light. Then the three Kings appear in their radiance, and at the same time the significance of the fourth King becomes apparent — the King who is composed of the metals of the three others; — he is the symbol of the lower nature, in which the noble forces of Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength work together as disorderly and inharmonious chaos. These three forces that live in a highly developed soul are also to be found in lower natures, though there they are chaotic and inharmonious. This fourth King is the Kingdom of the present world; — the Chaotic mixture of Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength, — the soul-forces which can only attain the highest when they work together harmoniously, — affect one another in a chaotic way in the present age. The old man said of the fourth King “Er wird sich setzen” (here he will sit down) — The Chaotic mixture will have disappeared when that which Goethe so ardently longed for shall have come to pass, that is, that the Temple shall no longer be hidden, but shall be raised to the full light of day, when it shall have ascended from the depths, and all men will be able to serve in the Temple of Initiation, which will be a bridge across which all men may pass to and fro. That will be a time when all men will have made themselves worthy of being influenced by the highest wisdom, piety, and strength and will. The Temple will then have fulfilled its task. It will have raised itself above the river of passions, and the forces of passion will have become so pure and noble that the highest Spiritual can uplift itself in the Temple, in the clear light of day, above the stream of passions and desires. To this end it is necessary that mankind should be filled with the “Stirb und werde” (dying and becoming) which Goethe so distinctly outlined in his “West-Ostlichen Divan.” Goethe was frequently asked for the solution of the riddle and he replied “The solution of the riddle lies in the fairy tale itself, and not in one word alone.” There is a passage during the conversation in the Temple which we take to be the solution of the riddle. The solution is not a thing which can be expressed in words, but in an inner resolve; that was indicated by Goethe in the fairy tale. The Serpent said “I will sacrifice myself, I will purify myself through selflessness.” It is precisely this which must be taken as the profoundest solution of the riddle, it is an act , and not a doctrine. Till now one could only pass across the River in two ways. The one was when at noon the green Serpent laid itself across the River and formed a bridge, so that at the mid-day hour it was possible to go across the River. This means that at the present age there are moments in a man's life when the Sun is at noon for him, when he is ripe to yield himself to the highest Spiritual light; but he is always drawn away again and again from these noon-tide moments of life, into the lower world full of passions. In such noon-tide moments the elect of the Spirit can pass across from the shore of the sense-life to the shore of the Spirit.\nBut there is yet another way to pass over the River, and that is in the evening, when the shadow of the great giant is thrown across the River, — that too can form a bridge, but only in the hour of twilight. What is this shadow of the great giant? Goethe went into this question more deeply with his intimate and trusted friends; with them he spoke about the forces symbolized by him in the “ Fairy Tale .” On one occasion when Schiller was planning a journey to Frankfort, Goethe wrote to him: “I am very glad you did not come here, to the West, for the shadow of the giant might have got hold of you unawares.” The meaning of the giant is moreover clearly expressed in the “Fairy Tale” itself, the giant who is weak, can do nothing of himself; but his shadow can form a bridge across to the far side. This giant is the crude mechanical forces of nature. Its shadow is sometimes able, when the light is no longer strong, to conduct the men of crude passions across the River. These are the people who, when their clear day consciousness is extinguished, pass over into the Land of the Spirit in trance, somnambulism, psychic vision, or some of the many similar conditions of the soul. Thus the clear day consciousness was also extinguished in the wild delirious acts by which at that time men tried to push their way into this realm of Freedom.\nThey wanted to penetrate into the realm of the beautiful Lily — But the shadow of the giant can alone reach across. Man is only able to overcome his passions in the twilight of his consciousness, when he is in an almost unconscious state, and not when living in clear consciousness. These are the two ways of reaching the opposite bank: First , in the holy moments of the noon-day hour, by the Serpent; and secondly , in the twilight of the consciousness — by the shadow of the giant.\nBut this one thing must be striven after: — the Serpent must sacrifice itself completely. Not only should it lead men over the River of passions at the noon-day hour, but at all hours of the day it should be ready to form the bridge from one side to the other; so that not only a few may be able to wander across, but that all men should be able to cross backwards and forwards at any time. The Serpent made this resolution, and so did Goethe; Goethe points to an age of selflessness, when man will not put his forces at the service of his lower self but at the service of unselfishness.\nThere are a few other thoughts connected with these basic thoughts about the Fairy Tale. I cannot go into them all today, and will only touch upon a few. We find the wife of the old man with the lamp, she is connected with the representatives of human occult knowledge. She keeps the house of the old man. To her come the Will-o'-the-wisps, they have licked off all the gold from the walls, and had at once given away all the gold which enriched them, so that the living “Mops,” who ate up the gold, had to suffer death. The old man is the force of reason, which brings forth that which is useful. It is only when occult force unites with this which forwards material civilization, when the highest is united with the lowest in the world, that the world itself can follow its proper course of development. Man should not be led away from everyday life, but should purify the everyday civilization. In the world man is surrounded in his dwellings by that which hangs as gold upon the walls. All that is around him is the gold. On the one hand he is a man of knowledge and on the other a useful man. Thus he has around him the two-fold experience of the human race; all the collective experience of humanity has been collected together in human science. Those who strive after this, seek what is written in the scriptures. They lick off the historical wisdom, as it were.\nThis it is which surrounds man in his strivings; this it is with which man must entirely permeate himself. But it can not be of use to that which is alive. The living Mops swallowed the gold and died of it. That wisdom which only rules as the dead wisdom of books, and which has not been made alive by the Spirit, kills everything living. But, when it is once again united with the origin of Wisdom, with the beautiful Lily, then it wakes to life again. That is why the old man gives the dead Mops to his wife, that she may carry it to the beautiful Lily. The Lamp has one great peculiarity, everything dead was made alive through it; and what was alive was purified by it. This transmutation is brought about in man by occult knowledge. Besides this, the old woman is begged by the Will-o'-the-Wisps to pay their debts to the Ferryman. These three fruits represent the human sense for usefulness in material civilization, which is to pay tribute to the passions. For from whence should the actual driving forces of nature come, if not from the technique, from the cultivation of material nature? It is an interesting fact that the shadow of the giant as it comes up from the River, takes one of the fruits of the Earth away with it, so that the old woman only has two left. Now she required three for the Ferryman and so had to renounce the River. Something then happens, something full of significance. She has to plunge her hands into the River, whereby she turns so black that she scarcely remains visible. She is still there, but she is almost imperceptible. That shows us the connection between external civilization and the world of the passions. Material civilization must be placed at the service of the Astral, of the soul. As long as the nature of man is not sufficiently ennobled to offer itself as tribute to the River of the passions, so long does technique remain in debt to the River of man (the soul of man). As long as human endeavours are devoted to human passions, man works invisibly at something of which he cannot perceive the final aim. It is invisible, yet it is there; it can be felt, but is not externally perceptible. Everything man does on the road to the great goal, until he pays his debts to the River or the Soul, — all that he has to throw into the River of passions becomes invisible, like the hand of the wife of the old man with the Lamp. As long as the sense-nature is not fully purified, as long as it is not consumed, as it were, by the fire of the passion it cannot shine, and remains invisible; that is what excites the old lady so much that she can no longer reflect any light of her own. This might be gone into more fully, in greater detail; every single word is fraught with meaning. But it would lead us too far to go into all that to-day.\nSo let us hurry on to the great procession in which we encounter a youth, who tried to capture the beautiful Lily too early, and in so doing crippled all his life forces. Goethe says (in another place): “A man who strives for freedom without having first liberated his own inner self, falls more deeply than before into the bonds of necessity. If he does not set himself free, he will be killed.” A man who has prepared himself, who has been purified in the Mysteries, and the Temple of the Mysteries, so that he may unite himself in a proper way with the Lily, he alone will escape death. One who has died to the lower to be born again in a higher sense, can grasp the Lily. The present time is represented by the crippled youth, who wanted to attain the highest by violence. He complains to all whom he meets that he cannot secure the Lily. He must now make himself ripe enough to do so, and to this aim those forces must be combined which are symbolized by those who took part in the procession. It consisted of the old man with the Lamp, the Will-o'-the-Wisps and the beautiful Lily herself. The procession thus included all the different beautiful forces, and it was led down into the clefts of the Earth to the Temple of Initiation. That too, is a profound feature of the enigmatical Fairy Tale, in that it allows the Will-o'-the-Wisps to open the door of the Temple. The self-seeking wisdom is not without object, it is a necessary stage of transition. Human egoism can be overcome if it is nourished by wisdom and permeated with the gold of true knowledge. This wisdom can then be used to open the Temple. Those who unconsciously serve wisdom in an external sense, will be led to the real sanctuaries of wisdom. Those learned men who only bury themselves in books are nevertheless our guides. Goethe does not undervalue science. He knew that science herself uncloses the Temple of Wisdom; he knew that everything must be proved and accepted by science, and that without her we cannot penetrate the Temple of the highest Wisdom. Goethe himself sought this wisdom everywhere. He only considered himself worthy of recognizing the highest revelation in Spiritual life, in Art, after he had gone through the study of Science . He sought wisdom everywhere, in physics, biology, etc., — And so, he admits the Will-o'-the-Wisps into the Temple, they who resting on themselves alone occupy a false position towards the others, towards the others who enter through experience and observations, like the Serpent. They cause the Temple to be opened and the procession passes in. Now follows what Goethe intended to apply to the whole of mankind; the whole Temple moves up and ascends through the cleft in the Earth. The Temple can now be set up over the River of the Soul, over the River of passions and desires, because the Serpent sacrificed itself. The Self of man has become selfless, the Serpent is transformed into precious stone, which forms the piles of the bridge. And now men can more freely go to and fro from the world of sense to the world of the Spiritual.\nThe union between sense and spirit is brought about by man, when he becomes selfless, by a sacrifice of himself, such as was made by the Serpent, which offered itself as a bridge over the River of passions. Thus the Temple ascended from the clefts of the Earth and is now accessible to all who cross the bridge, to those who drive over as well as to those who go on foot. In the Temple itself we meet once more with the three Kings; and the youth who had been made pure by having recognized the three soul-forces, is now presented to them. The golden King goes up to him and says “Feed my Sheep,” — in this Goethe gave expression to a thought which was very deeply engraved in his soul, that of uniting beauty with piety. It is the commandment given in the Bible. He applied these words to the youth in the same sense as when in Rome he stood before the statue of a God, and said “Here is necessity (notwendigkeit) it could not be different from what it is, this is a God. I feel that the Greeks worked according to the same Divine Laws that I am seeking.” It is a personal note of Goethe's when he causes the silver King to appear as Beauty and Piety: And then the King of Strength comes to the youth and says “The sword in the left hand, and the right hand free,” — the sword was not to serve for attack but for defence. Harmony was to be brought about, not conflict. After this event the youth was initiated into the three soul-forces; the fourth King has nothing more to say, he subsides into himself. The Temple has risen from its concealment into the clear light of day. Within the Temple there was raised a small silver Temple, which is none other than the transformed hut of the Ferryman. It is a remarkable feature that Goethe transformed the hut of the Ferryman, — he who carries us over into the land of the Spirit, — into pure molten silver so that it becomes a small altar, a small Temple, a Holy of Holies. This hut which represents the holiest in man, the deepest core of his being which he has preserved as a recollection of the land from which he came and to which the Ferryman cannot take him back, represents something which existed before our evolution. It is the memory that we are descended from the Spirit, — the memory of this stands as a Holy of Holies within the Temple. — The giant, — the crude force of nature, which lives in nature without the Spirit, and could not work through itself alone, but only as a shadow, — has been given a remarkable mission. Now this giant stands upright, and now only does he show the time. This is a profound thought — when man has laid aside everything belonging to his lower nature and has become entirely spiritualised, then the lower forces of nature will no longer spring up around him in their original elemental power, — in the form of storms, as they now do — the mechanical crude force of nature will then only perform mechanical service; man will always require these mechanical nature-forces, but they will no longer have power over him, he will use them in his service. His work will be the hour-hand of Spiritual culture, it will be the hour-hand pointing to the regular mechanical necessity, and will go regularly as the course of a clock. The giant himself will then no longer be necessary. We must not interpret the Fairy Tale pedantically, by interpreting every word, but we must feel our way into what Goethe wanted to say, and which he painted in such beautiful pictures. Goethe in his Fairy Tale brought out what Schiller expressed in his Aesthetic Letters; — the union of Necessity with Freedom. What Schiller tried to express in these letters Goethe could not grasp in abstract thought, but gave in the form of a Fairy Tale. “When I want to express these thoughts in all their living force I require pictures and pictures and pictures, such as the ancient priests of Initiation made use of in the Mysteries.” He did not teach his pupils by means of abstract thoughts, but by bringing the whole drama of Dionysos before them, by showing them the great course of the evolution of man, of the resurrection of Dionysos; and he also showed that which went on invisibly in the drama of “Dionysos and Osiris.”\nThus Goethe wished to express what lived in him in the form of drama and pictures, so we will not interpret the Fairy Tale in the ordinary way, but as theosophy would teach us to do, as representing the uniting of the lower nature of man with the higher; the union of the physical with the etheric body; the life-force and the passions and desires, with the higher nature of man: — the three purely Spiritual soul forces Atma, Buddhi, Manas, which we represented as the three Kings. This is the course of the evolution of man up to the time when every man will be himself an Initiate. This is what Goethe tried to express in a truly theosophical fashion. Just as those priests of Initiation expressed their wisdom in the form of pictures, so Goethe expressed in pictures in his Apocalypse that which represents the evolution of humanity, — that which will some day become the highest act of man — the transformation of the lower nature into the higher and the transmutation of the lower metals, the lower soul-forces into the gold of wisdom. The transmutation of that which dwells alone in the pure noble metal of wisdom is represented by the King who is embodied in the gold. Goethe wished to express this human alchemy, this Spiritual transmutation, in a somewhat different manner from what he had concealed occultly in the second part of “Faust.” Goethe was in the true sense of the word a Theosophist. He understood what it means that all the transitory things we see with our senses, are nothing but symbols, but he also understood that what man is trying to do is impossible to describe, but can be accomplished by an act, and that the “Unzulängliche” is that which lives among us on this side of the River, and we must experience it if the purpose of human evolution is to be fulfilled. Goethe also expressed this to this end in the “Chorus Mysticus” and included it in the second part of “Faust.” The highest soul-force in man is symbolically represented as the beautiful Lily, and the male principle — the force of Will unites with her. He expresses this in the beautiful and expressive words with which the second part of “Faust” concludes. These final verses are a mystical creed. We can only understand them completely when we see our own intimate life come to life again in the story of the green Serpent and the beautiful Lily.\nEven before the close of the 18th century, when Goethe passed on to his work on the second part of “Faust,” his nature had already been transmuted and he had attained the vision of a higher world.\nIt is of profound significance if we are able to understand the words written by Goethe in his testament, the second part of “Faust,” when he had completed his course on the Earth. After his death, this second part was found in his writing table, closed and sealed. He put this book as a gospel into the world, as a testament. And this testament closes with his mystical creed:\n\nAlles Vergängliche ist nur sin Gleichnis Das Unzulängliche hier wird's Ereignis. Das Unbeschreibliche, hier ist's getan, Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan.\n\nOne translation is as follows:\n\nAll things transitory But as symbols sent, Earth's insufficiency Here grows to event. The indescribable, here it is done. The Woman Soul leads us upward, and on."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA068c-12",
+    "title": "Lecture Two",
+    "date": "27 Nov 1904",
+    "city": "Cologne",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/SerpLily/19041127p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The Story of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily",
+    "content": "We have over and over again laid stress on the fact that Anthroposophy is no new thing brought to humanity only in our own times. It is particularly interesting that certain individuals not far behind us in time may be reckoned among those who may be described as Anthroposophists. Besides Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis and Lessing — Goethe steps forth as one of the most prominent. Many will object to this statement, because not much Anthroposophy can be traced in his well-known works. At the time of Goethe it was not possible to give out esoteric truths to all the world. Only in small circles, such for instance as that of the Rosicrucians, could the higher truths be promulgated. Nobody was admitted into this society without proper preparation: but those who belonged to it gave various hints as to its existence, and this Goethe did in many different parts of his works. Only a man filled with the wisdom of Anthroposophy can read Goethe aright. It is impossible for instance rightly to understand “Faust” without this help. The “Fairy Tale” is Goethe's Apocalypse, his Revelations and in its symbolical presentation the profoundest secrets are concealed. We can only understand when we have the key to it, that in this Fairy Tale Goethe revealed his Anthroposophical conception of the world. Schiller asked Goethe to work with him on a magazine called “die Horen” to which Schiller had contributed an article “On the aesthetic education of the human race”. In this the question was put: — “How can a man living in the every-day world preach the highest ideals, and establish communion between the super-sensible and that which belongs to the world of sense?” In a wonderfully impressive way he found words to point out that which to him seemed the bridge leading from the world of sense to the super-sensible world.\nGoethe, however, declared that it would be impossible to him to speak of the highest questions of existence in philosophical terms, but that he would do so in a great picture. He then contributed the Fairy Tale, in which he tried to answer his question in his own way, and sent it to the Magazine, “Die Horen”.\nElsewhere too Goethe expressed himself in an absolutely Anthroposophical sense. In his earlier youth he had already concealed his conceptions in Faust. Between his student years in Leipzig and his stay in Strassburg, Goethe received an Initiation at the hands of a man who was himself deeply initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians. From that time on, Goethe spoke a mystical Anthroposophical language.\nIn the first part of Faust there is a remarkable sentence which comes under the introductory notices. It is: “The Sage speaks”. At this time Goethe already had the Anthroposophical idea that there are beings among us to-day who are further on in evolution than man, and form a ladder between him and the super-earthly spheres, although they too are incarnated in bodies.\nThey have attained to a knowledge reaching far beyond what can be understood by the senses. The passage is as follows:\n“The Spirit world is not locked; Thy mind is closed. Thy heart is dead! Up, Disciple, bathe, and cleanse. Thy earthly breast in Morning-Redness.”\nWhen you become acquainted with Jacob Boehme you find one of the sources (Dawn of the moving Redness, the astral world) from which Goethe created his world of Theosophy. There is much in Goethe which we can only understand when we take it in this sense. In the poem “The Divine”, Goethe speaks of the law which we call Karma, and also speaks of exalted beings:\n“Nach ewigen ehern'n Grossen Gesetzen Müssen wir alle Unser's Daseins Kreise Vollenden. Heil den unbekannten Höheren Wesen Die wir ahnen.”\nIn accordance with mighty iron laws We must all accomplish the cycles of our being — Hail to the unknown higher Beings Whom we divine!\nVolume 2, Page 67 – 68.\nAnyone who wants a verbal proof of Goethe's Anthroposophical line of thought, need only read the poem which, under the title “God and the World” is called “Howard's memory”.\nWhen Goethe spoke intimately to those who were in the same Lodge, he spoke of the ideal Divine Beings, which are ahead of man and shone forth to him as a prototype. What he wrote in the poem “Symbolum” for instance was intended for a small circle:\n“Doch rufen von drüben Die Stimmen der Geister Die Stimmen der Meister.”\nThe voices of spirits, The voice of the Masters, Call from above.\nHe here speaks openly of the Masters, for he is speaking intimately to his brethren of the Lodge. But he leads us furthest of all in his Fairy Tale of the “Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily”. Therein we find represented the three kingdoms in which man lives, the physical, the soul-world or Astral world, and the Spirit-world. The symbol of the astral or soul-world is the water . By water Goethe always symbolised the soul, as in his poem “Fate and the Soul”. Book 11, Page 46.\n“Seele des Menschen Wie Gleichs't du dem Wasser! Schicksal des Menschen Wie gleichs't du dem Wind!”\n“Soul of a man, How like to the water! Fate of a man, How like to the wind!”\nHe was also acquainted with the Spiritual realms in which man lives between two incarnations, between death and re-birth; that is Devachan, the Kingdom of the Gods. Man is ceaselessly striving to reach this kingdom. The Alchemists took the chemical processes as the striving after this Spiritual kingdom. They called it “the Lily”, “the realm of the Lily”. And man they called “the Lion” who fights for the kingdom, and the Lily is the bride of the Lion. Goethe indicated this in his Faust, when he says:\n“Then a red Lion with the Lily wedded, A wooer bold.”\nTherein Goethe speaks of the marriage of man with the spirit. (“in tepid bath”, the bath of the soul. The soul, the water, the red Lion, man) In the Fairy Tale Goethe also represents the three kingdoms. The kingdom of the senses — as the one shore; the kingdom of the soul — as the river, and Devachan (the Spiritual Realm) as that shore on which is to be found the garden of the beautiful Lily, which to the Alchemists is the symbol of Devachan. The whole relation of man to the three kingdoms is symbolised in this beautiful story. We came across from the kingdom of the Spirit and are striving, to get back there.\nGoethe had the Will of the Wisps brought across by the Ferryman from the kingdom of the spirit to that of sense. The Ferryman can bring anyone across, but he may not take them back. We come across by no will of our own, but we cannot get back again in that way. We must ourselves find the way back into the Spiritual realm.\nThe Will of the Wisps take gold as nourishment, they eat it, and it permeates their bodies. But at the same time they throw it from them on all sides. They wish to throw it to the Ferryman as payment, he says however, that a River cannot bear gold, it would make it surge up wildly. Gold always signifies wisdom. The Will of the Wisps are those who seek after wisdom, yet do not mingle it with their nature, but give it away again undigested. The River is the Soul-life; the totality of human instincts, desires and passions. When wisdom is introduced into that, the soul is thrown out into a state of disturbance. Goethe always pointed out that a man must first undergo Catharsis (purification) before he can take in wisdom. For if wisdom is brought into the uncleansed passions, they become fanatical; and a man then remains the slave of his lower ego. The ascent from Kama to Mana is dangerous, unless at the same time the lower ego is sacrificed. With reference to this Goethe says in his “Westöstlichen Divan”, Book 4, Page 17\n“Und so lang du das nicht hast Dieses Stirb and Werde Bist du nur ein trülber Gast Auf der dunklen Erde.”\n“As long as thou hast not got This dying or becoming Thou art but a gloomy guest Upon the dark Earth.”\nA man must be prepared to sacrifice himself. The Will of the Wisps are still in Ahamkara, the slaves of the lower Ego. This wisdom cannot endure. The soul-life must be purified slowly and must ascend slowly.\nThe Will of the Wisps scatter their gold about in the meadow. There they meet with the Serpent who devours it and unites itself with it. The Serpent has the strength not to fill its Ego with pride, not to allow it to become self-seeking, not to raise itself up in pride to an upright position, but to pursue its way in a horizontal position and to move into the clefts of the Earth and there attain perfection gradually.\nA Temple is represented, which is to be found in the clefts of the earth.\nThe Serpent had already passed in and out of this, and had sensed that mysterious beings are to be found therein. And now comes the Old Man with the Lamp. The Serpent, through the gold it had swallowed, has become luminous, and the Temple is illuminated by its radiance. The lamp of the Old Man has the property of only shining where light is, and it then shines with a very peculiar light. Thus, on the one hand there is the Serpent, luminous through the gold, and on the other the Old Man with the Lamp, which is also a light. Through this two-fold illumination every thing in the Temple becomes visible. In the four corners are four kings; a golden, a silver, a bronze king and one composed of a mixture of them all. Till now they could not be seen by the Serpent, he could only find them by the sense of touch; but they now become visible through their own light. They are the three higher principles of man, and the four lower principles. The bronze king is Atma — the divine Ego; the silver king is Buddhi — the love whereby all men can understand one another, and the golden king is Manas, the Wisdom that radiates out into the world and can take in the radiating Wisdom. When man has acquired Wisdom in a selfless way, he can then see things in their true nature, without the veil of Maya. The three higher principles of man now become visible to the Serpent. The golden king is Manas, for gold always signifies Manas. The four lower principles of man are symbolically represented by the fourth king, who is composed of mixtures. Atma, Buddhi and Manas are drawn into the spheres of Phenomena, but in a state of disharmony. Only when this is purified can something develop which could not live where there was a lack of harmony.\nThe Temple is the Sanctuary of Initiation, the Mystery school which can only be entered by those who themselves bring light, when they also are selfless like the Serpent. The Temple was one day to be revealed, and to raise itself above the river. That is the kingdom of the future, towards which we are striving, the secret places of learning must be brought up into the light of day. Everything which is man must struggle upwards, must become harmonious, must strive after the higher principles. That which was formerly taught in the Mysteries must become an open secret. The wanderers are to cross the river, must pass from the world of sense to the super-sensible world and vice versa. All mankind shall be united in harmony. The Old Man with the Lamp represents man who can today attain knowledge without climbing to the apex of wisdom, namely to the forces of piety of mind and of faith. Faith requires light from without, if it is really to lead to the higher Mysteries. The Serpent and the Old Man with the Lamp have the forces of the Spirit, which already shines in those who are to lead in the future. Even to-day anyone who feels these forces is aware of this, through certain secrets. The Old Man says he knows three secrets. But the strangest thing is said of the fourth secret. The Serpent whimpers something into his ear, whereupon the Old Man calls out, “The time has come when a great number of people shall understand which is the right road. The Serpent has proclaimed that it is ready to sacrifice itself. It has reached the point of recognising that man must die, in order to become.” (‘Denn so lang du das nicht hast, dieses stirb and werde’) (As long as thou hast not, this ‘dying and becoming’!)\nTo become”, in order in the fullest sense of the word “to be”; that man can only accomplish through love, devotion and sacrifice. The Serpent is ready for this. This will be made manifest, when man is ready for this sacrifice, then the Temple will be raised above the river.\nThe Will of the Wisps were not able to pay their debt; they had to promise the Ferryman to settle it later. The river received three of the fruits of the Earth; three cabbages, three onions and three artichokes. The Will of the Wisps go to the Wife of the Old Man and there they behave in a very curious manner; they licked the gold off the walls. They wanted to stuff themselves with wisdom in order to be able to give it forth again. Mops eats the gold and dies; for everything living must die of it; he cannot take in the truth and transmute it as does the Serpent, and therefore it is death-giving. The Old Woman had to promise the Will of the Wisps to settle their debts with the Ferryman. When the Old Man with the Lamp comes home he sees what has occurred. He tells the Old Woman she must keep her promise, but must also carry the dead Mops to the beautiful Lily, for she can bring all dead things to life. The Old Woman goes with her basket to the Ferryman: — on the way she has two remarkable experiences. She meets the great Giant, whose peculiarity is that in the evening he throws his shadow across the River so that the wanderer can pass over on it. Besides this the way is also passable when at the noonday hour the Serpent ramps across the river. The Giant can make a bridge across, but when the Sun is at its highest point, the Serpent can do so too; when through the radiant Sun of knowledge man raises his Ego to the Divine. In the sacred moments of life, at the moments of the complete blotting out of self, man unites himself with the Godhead.\nThe Giant is the rude physical development along which man must necessarily pass. In so doing he also reaches the yonder realm, but only in the twilight, when his consciousness is blotted out. That however is a dangerous path, which is followed by those who develop psychic forces and go into states of trance. This crossing of the bridge is accomplished in the twilight of trance. Schiller also wrote on one occasion about the Shadow of the Giant: “These are the dark powers which lead man across the Threshold.”\nWhen the Old Woman passes him by, the giant takes from her one cabbage, one onion, and one artichoke, so that she only retained a part of that with which she was to pay the debt of the Will of the Wisps. The three-fold number is thus no longer complete. That which we require and which we must weave into our soul-life is taken from us by the twilight forces. There is danger in yielding oneself to such forces. The lower forces must be purified by the soul-forces, the body itself can only ascend when the soul completely absorbs it. Everything which encloses an inner kernel as in a shell, is a symbol for the sheaths of man. Indian allegory describes these sheaths as the petals of the lotus flower. The physical nature of man must be purified in its shell. We must pay our debts, and yield our lower principle to the soul-life. We have expressed the paying of this debt by saying that payment must be made to the river. That is the whole course of Karma. As the payment of the Old Woman was insufficient, she had to plunge her hand into the river; after that she could only feel her hand, but could no longer see it. That which in man's external, physical appearance, that which is visible in him, is the body. That must be purified by the Soul-life. This means that if man cannot pay with the plant-nature, he remains in debt. Then the actual bodily nature of man becomes invisible; because the Old Woman was not able to pay her debt she becomes invisible. The Ego can only be seen in the light of day, when purified by the soul-life; — “Oh, my hand, the loveliest part of me” The very part of man which distinguishes him from the animals. That which as spirit shines through him — becomes invisible if it is not purified by his Karma.\nThe beautiful youth who strove after the kingdom of the Lily (Spirituality) was crippled by her.\nGoethe by this meant the ancient Wisdom, for which man must be prepared and purified and have undergone Katharsis, so that he should no longer reach Wisdom through sin but might take into himself the higher Spirituality. The youth had not been prepared by Katharsis. Every living thing which is not yet mature, is killed by the Lily. All the dead that have passed through “Stirb und Werde”, “Dying and Becoming”, are brought to life again by the Lily. Now Goethe says that one who has attained freedom within himself, is ripe for freedom. Jacob Boehme too says that man must develop himself out of his lower principle. He who does not do this before he dies, is destroyed at death. Man must first mature and be purified, before he can enter the kingdom of the Spirit (The Lily). In the old Mysteries a man had to go through various stages of purification before he could become a Mystic. The Youth too had first to pass through these stages, and he is guided through them by the Lily. The Serpent signifies development. We see the Lily gathering those together who are seeking the new way, all those who are striving after the Spiritual. But the Temple must first be lifted up above the river. They all move towards the River, the Will of the Wisps are in front and they open the door. The self-seeking Wisdom is the bridge to the selfless Wisdom. Wisdom leads a man through self to selflessness. The Serpent sacrificed itself. And now we understand the meaning of love, it is a Sacrifice of the lower self for the good of humanity, of complete brotherhood. The whole company moves towards the Temple, which rises above the river. The youth is brought to life again. He is furnished with Atma, Buddhi, Manas; Atma, in the form of the Bronze King, appears before him and gives him a sword. This represents the higher will, and is not connected with the lower will. Atma is so to work in man that the sword shall be on his left and the right hand free, till then man works separately; — the War of all against all. But when man is purified, peace comes instead of war. Only when man is purified will peace take the place of War; the sword will then be worn on the left side, for defence only, leaving the right hand free for well-doing.\nThe second King signifies that which at one time was known as the second principle. Buddhi (Piety, the mood in which a man turns in faith to the highest). Silver in the symbol of piety. The second King says “Feed my sheep”, for here we are concerned with the force of the spirit. The radiance here is that of Beauty. Goethe connected with art a feeling of religious reverence. He saw in it the manifestation of the Divine of the kingdom; the beautiful radiance, the realm of piety. The Bronze King signifies strength without the lower principles, the Silver King signifies peace, and the Golden King Wisdom. He says “ Recognise the highest ” The youth is the four principled man, who is developing his higher principles. The four lower ones are crippled by the spirit until they have undergone the purifying development; after that the three higher principles work together harmoniously in Man. He then becomes strong and able, and may mate with the Lily. That is the union between the soul and the spirit of man. The soul is always represented as something feminine in man. The Mystery of the eternal and immortal is here represented. “The eternal feminine draws us along”. Goethe makes use of the same image in his story, in the union of the Youth with the beautiful Lily. Now the sacrificed human self and all living, pass over the bridge that arches across the river. Wanderers go to and fro and all the kingdoms are now united in beautiful harmony. The Old Woman grows young, and the Old Man with the Lamp is rejuvenated; old age has passed away and everything has become new.\nThe Ferryman's little hut has been gilded over, and is now preserved as a sort of Altar in the Temple. What man formerly took over unconsciously, he now takes over in full consciousness. The king of many parts has collapsed. The Will of the Wisps lick the gold out of him, for that is still connected with the lower. The Giant now indicates the time. What formerly were the sense-principles (which can only lead into the shadows) which lead man across in the hour of twilight and belong to the things of sense, to nature-conditions, now points to the even and regular course of time. As long as man has not developed the three higher principles, the past and the future are in conflict. The giant then works inharmoniously. Now, through these ideal conditions, time is in harmony. Thought permanently strengthens that which was wavering, and makes it steady.\nFaust , Prologue in Heaven.\nThat which in the Pythagorean schools was called the “Rhythm of the Universe”, “The Music of the Spheres”, of the planets, rhythmically revolving around the Sun, is brought about by the accomplishment of Divine Thought. To the mystic a planet was a Being of a higher order. Thus Goethe too says:\nThat man indeed has the capacity of developing to the highest Divine, Goethe says in the words; “Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, Die Sonne könnt es nicht erblicken; wohnt nicht in uns des Gottes eigene Kraft, Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?”\nIf the eye were not fashioned for the sunlight It could not gaze upon the Sun! If there were not in us the very force of God How could we be charmed by the Divine?"
+  }
+]

GA069c.json

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+[
+  {
+    "id": "GA069c-3",
+    "title": "Christ in the 20th Century",
+    "date": "6 May 1912",
+    "city": "Cologne",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA069c/English/Singles/19120506p01.html",
+    "book_title": "",
+    "content": "Nowadays, anyone who lectures on the Christ runs into quite a variety of viewpoints. These fall roughly into two main groups, and a speaker must take them into account, especially if he plans to talk on the subject in the sense intended for this evening's lecture. That is, in the same sense in which other questions and other problems have been dealt with here before. I am referring, of course, to the spiritual scientific or anthroposophical viewpoint.\nThe first group of views is one that bases itself firmly on the premise that Christ is a real force in life. This might be called the religious viewpoint, which all the Christian confessions share in common. We will find on closer study however that no matter how liberal and tolerant it may seem in some respects, it has little use for any but its own view of the Christ. The various proponents of the religious standpoint are simply unwilling to grant that any progress in thinking about Christ is possible.\nThe other viewpoint is also one held by thoroughly dedicated modern searchers after truth. In accordance with a certain scientific trend, it maintains that a study of the Christ event, of what is reported to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era, if pursued with the same reliable historical methods that are applied to the study of other events, does not bear out the assumptions made about the Christ.\nWe realize that this way of looking at things has long been gaining favor. We also know that in the course of recent centuries increasing emphasis has been laid on comparing the Gospels, and that the discrepancies people have discovered in them have forced them to conclude that the Gospels could not be taken as historical documents. After a long period of trying to distill a somewhat reliable picture of Christ Jesus from the Gospel accounts, there have come to be many people today, both in Germany and elsewhere, who cannot reconcile speaking of a historical Jesus or of a historical Christ Event with their scientific consciences.\nSo we find present day positions ranging all the way from a separating out of those facts in the Gospels that can be historically proven, to out-and-out rejection of the historical Christ Jesus. This has given rise to the opinion that, though Christ may still live today for religious-minded people who feel that their faith lifts them to Him, for an ever more rigorously developing science the Christ idea, the concept of Christ, must vanish entirely. Many people are presently convinced that the Christ force will not continue to play any role at all in future, though these same people do not by any means believe that the day will ever come when religion will be lost to humanity.\nCertain facts of the time, however, make it seem unlikely that the belief I have referred to will be proven true, for we can note a strange phenomenon. In our day, it is by no means only the religious-minded and people of feeling, for whom the Gospels have shown themselves a source of uplift and of schooling, who speak of something in the nature of a Christ idea. Earnest, educated, truth-loving men are putting their whole souls into pointing to something that can only be identified as Christ. It is characteristic that the modern American freethinker, Ferguson, voicing what many of his contemporaries feel, can say that Christ is again “the pioneer of a new age” who will unite Europe and America and look with profoundest understanding into the soul of every human being — that He is the one and only right man for the present. Ferguson, a person otherwise famed for his free-thinking views, speaks of Christ exactly as though He went about from one man to the next wielding direct influence upon us. Freethinking spirits are thus beginning to feel the Christ Being directly related to modern humanity. Even though little attention is paid to it as yet, we will find that this tendency, this searching for a force that can only be called the Christ, will make sure headway. John Fiske, a man who did his utmost to further Darwinism in America, stated that all religions assert two basic truths. The first is that all things are related. This is a truth proclaimed by every religion, one that no thoughtful person can deny. The second truth is that what we call good and evil derives from forces external to the human spirit.\nI quote these men expressly because they are both personalities whose whole thinking and feeling are firmly rooted in the present, but they do not rest satisfied with an external view of things. Instead, they have worked their way through to deeper forces of existence. The forces at work in the world are not just physical and chemical: they are also spiritual in nature.\nFor one who takes his stand on a spiritual-scientific view of the world, the concept of Christ just characterized appears to be merely a first dawn glimmering, a preparation for something quite different still to come. I hope I will not be misunderstood in speaking as I have of this preparatory, Twentieth Century form of the Christ concept. Spiritual science has to steer clear of any taint of sectarianism and other such attitudes because they simply do not belong to this age. The spiritual scientist takes the same attitude in speaking of what is to come in human evolution as does the natural scientist who predicts an eclipse of the moon or a transit of Venus: he is not assuming a prophetic role. There are forces in life that can be spiritually investigated in exactly the same sense that natural forces operative in the physical world can be investigated.\nIt will be helpful to gain a perspective on the past history of the Christ idea, which has indeed undergone tremendous changes through the centuries. If we follow it back to its origin, we come upon a strange fact of the early days. We find popular Christianity spreading through the regions ruled by Rome in a way that enables us to say that, while the old Roman culture developed among the upper levels of the population and then grew decadent, we see those on whom life left its mark, those whose lot it was to suffer, slowly and gradually finding their way into popular Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth is increasingly idealized, to the point that he is looked on as divine. The various confessions that made up this popular Christianity tended more to feeling than to thoughts and concepts. But alongside this popular form we find those most enlightened spirits of the time who concerned themselves with Christianity devoting their loftiest ideas, their most significant concepts, to answering the question, “Who, actually, is this Christ?”\nLet us single out, from the abundance of answers given by these illumined spirits, one or two for consideration here.\nIn Gnosticism, a form of thought to which anthroposophy by no means advises returning but simply studies as a phenomenon of past history, we find many different shadings of certain lofty concepts, all centering in an attempt to grasp the Christ idea. In the main, it can be characterized by saying that this Gnosticism, this longing to grasp the Christ idea with the help of the Ioftiest concepts, is a most marvelous form of spiritual development. Of course, those who adopt the modern view that every last facet of humanness gradually evolved from nature's lower orders, from animals, and rose by stages from the most primitive to ever higher animal forms, are bound to consider the Gnostic doctrine a fantastic dream. But Gnostics, too, traced evolution back even further than does the modern natural scientist. They said that we find a period in ancient times in which all animals, even the highest, were present on the earth, and man could have seen them if he too had been there at that time. The Gnostics, however, had in mind a period of evolution in which the human kingdom had not yet appeared, but they did not conclude from this that men developed out of animals, but rather that they descended later from the spiritual world. They maintained that animals. plants and minerals had also descended from the spirit. had materialized out of spiritual realms, so that we have to ascribe a spiritual origin to animals, plants and minerals as well. But there was a period when man had not yet taken on physical form, a time when he was still waiting in the spiritual world for the moment when the earth provided certain other conditions such as would make human life possible here.\nThis does not mean that man was not in existence at that time. Man did exist: not, however, as a visible entity, but as a spiritual one. He lived in the spiritual environment of the earth, but had not yet descended onto it, for the conditions of that ancient time were not such as would have made human development possible. Thus, the Gnostics assumed that there was a most important moment, later than that of the descent of the other kingdoms when titan descended to the earth. It was the Gnostic conviction that if man had incarnated with the other lesser kingdoms, one all-important facet of his being, that is the capacity we know as free, independent human thinking would not have developed. In short, man would lack his true human ego that works front a central focus outward into the world and develops between birth and death. The animal's development is kept within certain limits, but man is capable of progressing in an entirely different way as a result of education and experience. In order to achieve this, said the Gnostic, man entered into a more intimate connection with the element of matter than he would have done if he had remained an unfree being, dependent, as the other creatures around him were on his endowment at birth. Man plunged more deeply into matter in order to become less dependent on what he brought into existence with him. Gnosticism held that this deeper involvement in matter took place at a certain moment in very early times, that is, the moment the Bible pictures as the Fall, meaning thereby the fall into matter just described. But by no means every impulse inherent in human nature was believed to have joined in that descent; instead, something of a superhuman element remained in the spiritual world. While mankind was experiencing all this, something that was part of man but did not accompany him in his descent because he plunged so deeply into physical embodiment stayed on in spiritual worlds. Thus, there was still present in the world above a part of man that had dwelt there when all humanity still lived as one in realms of spirit.\nOn the basis of these assumptions the Gnostics then proceeded to study the Christ Event. A certain moment, described in the Bible as the baptism by John, was of special interest to them. They felt that the human being whose development brought him to that baptism was indeed a most extraordinary man, but nevertheless just a human being. After he had been baptized, something occurred that is hard for modern minds to grasp. Perhaps we can think of it in the sense that many a person has had something happen to him at a certain moment about which he could only say that his whole life was changed in consequence. Many people date their lives from such a moment, feeling it to have been one in which they were spiritually reborn. This is something that can happen to any and every human being. If one pictures this experience raised to a unique and ultimate peak, one understands how the Gnostics felt about the baptism by John in the River Jordan. That element of humanness that had been part of man front the earliest beginnings of his race but which had been waiting in the spiritual world, now left that realm and made its way down to earth, to take up its abode in the unique human being, Jesus of Nazareth. For the next three years Jesus of Nazareth was not just a changed human being. He was one in whom that reserved element of humanness, held over from the very beginning of man's earth life, had come to dwell for the eventual fructification of humanity. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth became the bearer of the superhuman being, Christ for the three years of His earthly life. So the Gnostics held that what had hitherto dwelt in the spiritual world had come into a human body, like a seed planted in the earth. Like a planted seed, which must decompose in order to germinate, this spiritual impulse entering the earth had to pass away in order to spring, seed-like, into hundred-arid thousand-fold fruitfulness. This spiritual element had to pass through death exactly as a seed dies. Far from failing to bear, it poured itself into earth's spiritual-evolutionary stream, where it will be found living on in many kinds of fruiting.\nSo we find in the Gnostic doctrine a pre-history of mankind leading up to the moment of Christ's coming and a post-history following upon the Event of Golgotha. It is history centered in the living action of the Christ impulse as Christ enters into human souls. To the Gnostic, the Christ impulse was history indeed history's whole content and the source of its ongoingness. If this view sounds alien to the contemporary mind, it must be stated that precisely modern natural science, whose ideas are colored by materialism only now at the outset, will press forward ever more vigorously to an understanding and eventual grasping of the reality that underlay the Gnostic concept.\nIn order to show how close the present is to taking up again what Gnosticism offered, let me just point out the following — something that is of course only an elementary first step. Science has thought for a long time that it stands on a solid footing. Basing itself on a truly impressive Darwinism, it felt impelled to assert that everything human developed out of animal origins, and that the driving force behind that development was the “struggle for survival.” It said that all the various creatures were launched into life together, but fell to fighting, with the not too surprising result that, as time went on, the more perfect species got the better of the less perfect. Man was the final product of this perfecting process. “The survival of the fittest” became the slogan of the Darwinists. Now, however, researchers are finding themselves forced to adopt quite a different concept in their honest searching of facts. They are now saying that as we study man afresh and compare him with the most developed animals, we can by no means assume that he evolved in straight-line descent from these species. Instead, we have to trace him back to a primeval form no longer to be found upon the earth. These researchers now believe that such a primeval form once existed and that while man and animal both evolved front it, they did so in two different directions. Outstanding investigators have brought forth a further fact. They put the question: How could man develop as differently as he has when all the while animals, too, were evolving? Strange to say, they have not hit upon a “fight for survival.” They assume that man and his form were in a specially protected place where he could continue under the same conditions which originally brought forth that form, whereas all other creatures were caught up in a downward trend. Thus, man today is being traced back to an invisible primeval form that developed as it did because it was protected in a realm where man did not have to take part in a struggle to survive. These researchers subscribe to only one remaining fiction. They believe the protecting realm to have been a physically perceptible locality.\nGnosticism, too. assumes just such a primeval form. But instead of picturing it as having existed on the physical plane, it assigns it to the spiritual world, which was, in fact, able to afford it protection.\nIf one can conceive the idea that man was a late-corner to the earth, one can also conceive the following thought. Tracing the course of history, we find that a hitherto undivided human race split up into various nations and races and that many different confessions came into being, each shaped in accordance with the feeling of a particular group. In earlier times humanity was so constituted that a person could develop only what was implanted in him by virtue of belonging to a certain tribe. The spiritual force, however, the spiritual being that made man human in the first place, enables him to find the human being in his fellow man instead of what heredity has made of him. Man had to have this capacity restored to him. It was an impulse that could be taken up again only when humanity grew ripe for it.\nSo we encounter lofty and remarkable concepts of evolution in the first Christian centuries. It must be said that what we are witnessing in present-day natural science as the beginning of something that must eventually outgrow the Chrysalis stage, was already anticipated by the Gnostics in the grandiose conceptions reached by them as they thought about these matters. This could happen only because there is such a thing as evolution in man's history.\nIf we look back to a period that lies still closer to the time of man's descent to earth, we come upon a wholly different kind of soul life. Comparing it with the soul life of the present we must say that the latter is oriented toward a sense-based and brain-conditioned way of experiencing, whereas earlier times brought us a marvelous heritage of knowledge in the form of pictures. The fact that this heritage exists proves what spiritual scientific research also discovers to be true that human souls did not always perceive their surroundings as they do today, but were once clairvoyant. At that time man did not feel himself so involved with his own ego. Instead, he felt that he was part and parcel of everything around him. A dreamlike state of consciousness brought him into profound contact with the world about. Primeval man's way of knowing things was through a dreamlike clairvoyance that revealed their mysteries to him. His was an experience akin to dreaming as we know it today. Thus, it was possible for a humanity recently descended from spiritual heights to experience the secrets of the spiritual world in what may be called a clairvoyant dream-state.\nEvolutionary progress meant, however, an ever-deepening descent of man into physical existence, accompanied by an ever further loss of that ancient clairvoyant capacity, though this need not be thought of as a tragedy. For if man had not lost his old clairvoyance he could never have advanced to the stage of free self-awareness that alone provided the basis for conscious personal experience.\nThe loss of the old clairvoyant insight that once gave access to secrets of the spiritual world came about gradually. Even when mankind had become thoroughly at home in the physical world, clairvoyant knowledge was still kept alive in sanctuaries that preserved the heritage of the ancient Mysteries, the treasure of wisdom that had come down to them through the ages. After the Christ Event had taken place and entered the stream of earth-evolution, the Gnostics still hoarded that age-old treasure of wisdom won by humanity's clairvoyant insight, and they formed their idea of Christ in accordance with it. Their concept may, therefore, be described as a reminiscence of knowledge gleaned in olden times, not as the product of free, conscious selfhood. They simply applied what men of ancient days had known to explain the Christ phenomenon. The period during which Gnosticism flourished coincided with the dimming of clairvoyant insight. This made it impossible for those who followed after. in the Middle Ages, to go on working with the heritage of Gnostic wisdom as a means of understanding Christ.\nInstead, something else took the place of Gnosticism. We find people who lived in the centuries after its demise just as eager to grasp the Christ phenomenon, but wanting henceforth to rely on their own human powers of understanding, on a scientific approach. And we see the most enlightened spirits of the Middle Ages turning from Gnosticism to the teachings of Aristotle for the basis of their understanding of the Christ.\nThey found themselves forced to say that Aristotle's world conception brought them to a standstill at a certain point, that true spiritual understanding of the Christ was out of reach of human knowledge.\nIn one respect, however, the view of the world held in the Middle Ages rests on one of Aristotle's main ideas. Aristotle would never have thought of going as far as modern materialism has gone. When we look into his idea of the way soul and body work together, we do not find him subscribing to any such belief as that a man's inner life is conditioned by the heredity that comes to him from parents, grandparents, etc. His view was rather that every person born into the world is given a drop out of the ocean of divinity to unite with his body, that a soul-spiritual core always detaches itself front the universal spirit and enters human beings at their birth. But Aristotle, who was distinguished by a quality seldom met with in our day, that is, the habit of drawing the real consequences of his musing and investigating, does not stop at this point. He goes on thinking, and comes to believe that when a soul passes through the gates of death it does so as a now well- established entity, and as such ascends into the spiritual world. Though prior to birth it did not exist as a separate being, after death it lives on in the world of the spirit as an individual.\nWhat kind of after-death experience does this soul now undergo, as Aristotle sees it? None whatever, since it lacks a body to make that possible. Now its sole content is the memory of its life on earth. It lives on in eternity looking back on its earth-life with the good and evil it has done, wholly given up to memory pictures.\nHere, in Aristotle, may be found the origin of the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell. lt began in his concept and made its way into Catholic dogma during the Middle Ages. But let me say at once that it was not possible for Aristotle as a man of his time to do other than picture the soul as an unchanging entity doomed to gaze forever at its earthly deeds.\nModern spiritual science, anthroposophy, recognizes, of course, that the soul can do more after death than just look back as though in memory-pictures on its previous earth-life. It knows that the soul does not have to stay forever in that state. Instead, it sees man taking with him into the spiritual world as the finest fruit of his earth experience the possibility of transforming or building further on the good and bad deeds he committed here: nor does he stay forever in the spiritual world. Rather is he born again into a new incarnation and has opportunities to work out some karmic compensation for what he did or failed to do in previous lives. The soul passes through the gates of death taking with it the impulse to seek further incarnations for the sake of working out a balance. Aristotle could not accept such an idea because he had always thought that every birth meant a detaching of spiritual substance to form the soul. But spiritual science bears witness to the fact that our present lives derive from past incarnations.\nSo Aristotle may be said to have stood in the way of his own insight. He whom wise men of the Middle Ages called “the precursor of Christ in understanding nature,” did not get as far as the reincarnation concept. We see how he stopped short of the mark in regard to the question of immortality and how for him life's fruit was just eternal contemplation. The inevitable outcome of this was that people could not see into the spiritual world or gain any understanding of the nature of the Christ. For the thinking of the Middle Ages, Christ disappeared into the realm of belief which is closed to knowledge. The age-old tradition of Gnosticism was finally lost. Aristotle could not serve spiritual understanding of the Christ. Thus, a line came to be drawn between what can be known and what must remain a matter of belief. One consequence of Aristotelian thought that lived on was the idea of eternal suffering in hell.\nIt remained for people of more recent times to take the third step in a gradual weakening of faith. They have come to rely more and more on what can be grasped with the physical senses. The effect of this on the Christ concept has been to make Christ an ever less important figure and to render the prevailing idea of Christ more and more materialistic. Where Gnostics once assumed a spiritual principle, and where the Middle Ages in their turn experienced Christ in a mood of purest faith and devotion, the present sees at the beginning of the Christian era not a human being ensouled with a cosmic element but, increasingly, “the simple man of Nazareth,” a man more or less like any other human being. Nobody remembers anything of what the Gnostics had divined. People want to think of Christ in the same materialistic way they think about other historical events. The fact that they regard Him as a mere human being makes it necessary to apply the same methods to the study of His appearance that are generally applied in ordinary historical research.\nIt might have been recognized that the historical approach to the whole question is the easy way out because what could possibly be easier than to take the Gospels and show how they contradict each other! This reduces things to simplest terms. But then wouldn't the researchers have had to assume that their predecessors were the greatest dunces ever for having failed even to notice such obvious contradictions?\nAt any rate, the Gospels were certainly not taken as a schooling, a schooling that enables the soul to lift itself to spiritual perception of the Christ. So it is not surprising that history was pressed into service as a yardstick and that a movement has grown up, associated here in Germany with the theologian, Drews, that denies Christ completely. This happened at the very moment when spiritual science entered the contemporary scene.\nSpiritual science bears witness to the fact just referred to, that human beings and what they carry within them are not products of a single life, but of many past lives. Man once lived wholly in the spiritual world. Then he left it to descend to earth, but he was to have more than one life in a physical body. When he had digested the fruits of an incarnation during an interval spent in the spiritual world, he descended again into physical embodiment. The law that pertains here has often been the object of our study. It teaches us how deeply involved man is in the whole ongoing process we call history. Life only begins to make real sense when we assume that we have all been living on the earth in order to take what was given us in the beginning, make it our own, and then go on developing with the march of the centuries toward ever greater perfection. A closer study of these matters brings something quite remarkable to light, to be described here as man's mission on the earth.\nI must stress again today, as I have so often done before, that the consciousness that man has thus far developed has by no means reached its final form. Man can really take his development in hand: the right spiritual training can lift him to spiritual perception. That is quite within the realm of possibility if he schools his soul in meditation. Just as one can put oneself, by staring intently at a shining object, into a state where one is aware of nothing else (though this is not a recommended practice!), so do we achieve a single-minded, but in this case quite free condition, when we deliberately concentrate all our attention on some soul-spiritual content to the exclusion of all else. Then forces begin to ray out in our souls through which we attain what may be called a body-free condition. Such a person is then really able to say from experience, “I am no longer perceiving with my eyes or thinking with my brain. I am experiencing as a spiritual being, independent of a body, I perceive what lives and has its being in the spiritual world.”\nThis elevation to the level of spiritual perception can be achieved with proper schooling. The rigorous discipline that leads to it has been described in several of my books.\nIt is easier to enter the spiritual world if one has trained one's feeling life to avoid all sorts of over-excited and emotional states and reactions. A person who confronts the world with calmness and equanimity keeps unsquandered reserves of feeling alive within him. The spiritual light, which meditation kindles in us, radiates into such reserves. A person full of selfish demands will never make a disciplined spiritual investigator. But those who achieve real empathy with their fellow-men, who know what selfless love is, who are not absorbed exclusively in their own feelings, have a soul-surplus that can be charged with forces garnered from spiritual schooling. The light of clairvoyance is engendered in feeling that keeps itself free of egotism.\nWhen a person has progressed to the point of being able to live in the spiritual world he can gradually learn to clothe his experiences in ordinary concepts. Handed on in that form, any healthy mentality can grasp them. It is no more necessary for everyone to be a spiritual investigator than for each of us individually to make laboratory tests to see whether what science says is true or not. Those charged with communicating the results of spiritual-scientific research do not shy away from commonsense thinkers. Really healthy minds readily see the truth of statements made by the spiritual investigator. The only people who dispute his findings are those who approach them filled with prejudice. This holds true in the case of spiritual science, which is the fruit of clairvoyant research. It enables human beings to gain access to a world of spiritual experience.\nThe insight that spiritual scientists can presently achieve by means of a heightened consciousness will — to some degree at least, and in certain fields f be attainable by all men in future. It will fall to the lot of Twentieth Century humanity to realize that the soul develops, that it passes through life after life in the course of earth's evolution, and in so doing absorbs from the various cultural epochs what each such epoch has to offer.\nIf one looks nowadays with a more than ordinarily perceptive eye at the human race all over the earth, one becomes aware that it possesses two human qualities that were simply not present in antiquity. This is a fact susceptible of proof. The two new qualities are commission and conscience, and they will go on developing more and more fully as man submits his soul-life to spiritual schooling. Compassion and conscience were new acquisitions at a certain point in evolution.\nMuch that is called compassion is not worthy of the term. True compassion is the capacity to forget oneself and enter another's being so completely that one feels his suffering as he feels it. One's own ego is quite forgotten in such fellow-feeling; one lives entirely in the other's experience. Suppose for a moment that nature were so to arrange matters that at the moment when a person freed himself from narrow self-concern he had the same experience morally that comes to him every day when he falls asleep. When he can no longer maintain control of his body and his brain ceases to serve his soul as its instrument and he goes to sleep, consciousness disappears. A person can, of course, also fall unconscious from compassion. But that would be egotistical in the extreme, for then he could not surrender himself wholly to another's feelings. In that sense, falling unconscious would amount to a moral failing, whereas compassion is one of the two means whereby a person breaks free of himself without losing consciousness. Conscience is the other. It speaks to our innermost being; the listener follows the bidding of a voice that penetrates to where his ego lives. He subjects the self to something larger than itself. Compassion and conscience are thus forces that man is presently engaged in developing. Consciousness will build further on the foundation of the forms that compassion and conscience have thus far taken, going on to develop the spiritual vision that was previously attainable only in abnormal states of consciousness. To say this is not to make a prophecy but to state a fact determined by strictly scientific means.\nAs he realizes what effect compassion and conscience have upon the human soul. Twentieth Century man will have a certain direct experience in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness. He will understand something that might be put in the following way. We see that at birth man inherits something from his ancestors. Spiritual being though he is, he must incarnate physically in a given family and clothe himself in hereditary qualities. Long before we had such a thing as science, people were familiar with heredity, but they gave it an entirely different name. Their term for it was “original sin.” Anyone who understands what the Old Testament meant by original sin knows that the term conveyed a much fuller meaning than science has as yet ascribed to it because it applies to moral as well as physical qualities. Those in whom compassion and conscience have borne fruit will say, however, that although birth saddles us with predispositions that cannot be thrown off, we are also endowed with something that is not bound up with matter and that enables us to rise above ourselves and enter the spiritual world. There is one realm — the realm of one's own soul — where there will be direct spiritual vision. Human beings will affirm that although they are tied on the one hand to physical matter, on the other the soul harbors a radiant helper capable of lifting us beyond ourselves, it is a feeling that suggests the following comparison. Suppose there were someone who found it hard to believe that air everywhere surrounds us and fills every empty space. All he has to do to convince himself is to create a vacuum and observe how the air rushes into it. Just such an empty space is created in the soul by compassion and conscience, both of which detach us from our ego. Into that vacuum streams the spiritual entity whom we know as the Christ. This gives us personal experience of the fact that we can receive Christ into ourselves. Christ Who is present in the spiritual atmosphere just as air is present in the physical atmosphere and flows into every Space it finds empty.\nOn this high level, normal consciousness can indeed become spiritual vision, and no one who has this experience will consider it subjective. He will instead recognize that there must be such a possibility. He will realize that there was a time when it was still unknown and a moment when it became possible for the first time. He will be aware that what he is experiencing made its way down to earth from spiritual realms and united with it as the Christ impulse. This Christ impulse will inevitably come to be looked upon by Twentieth Century man as a force that entered earth evolution at a particular moment in time as a real historical event. That will usher in a period when it will no longer make sense to say that Christ is merely an idea. Instead, people will say that the Christ experience can be conceived as taking place only in this or that individual soul, just as philosophers maintain that there could be no such thing as color without eyes to perceive it. But colors do not owe their existence to perceiving eyes; the truth is rather that eyes are created by the light-world. The fact ought therefore to be stated thus: “No eyes without light.” It is equally true that without the historical Christ human beings could not experience Christ or the Christ-power within them. So they will know Christ to be a spiritual being and realize that this Being once actually lived on earth as a fact of history and sacrificed Himself to become one with the earth. They will be able to make their way into the spiritual world and discover Christ there.\nGoethe often found just the right way of putting some fact or other, and perhaps we might borrow one of his sayings to express what we have been discussing here; it can serve us as a pointer. Goethe said that the eye was built by light to perceive the light: the eye was conjured forth by light from organs that were originally indeterminate. He goes on to make a further statement that calls attention to the impulse we harbor to discover God within us:\n“Were not our eyes profoundly of the sun How could they behold the light? Were not our strength from God's own being won. How could we feel so in Things divine delight.”\nJust as the eye is conjured forth by light, so man's power to see God is conjured forth by God Himself as He lives and moves within and all about us. Those whose own Christ-likeness enables them to experience the Christ in beauty of feeling and insight will know that this is possible only because Christ once descended to earth and lived here, an historic figure. Just as the sun's light conjures forth eyes in human bodies so does the historic Christ conjure forth Christ-life in the souls of men.\n“Unless the soul of man were Christ-like, how indeed could it experience the Christ? lf Christ had not lived as an historic figure how could man's soul ever come to know that most glorious feeling: feeling for the Christ?” Such will be the tenor of Twentieth Century comment. At the very moment when orthodox science reaches the point of denying Christ any historical reality, spiritual science will say without relying on documents that because man can experience Christ he knows that Christ did indeed live historically as a life-giving force, as the sun in that spiritual realm whence human evolution draws its nutriment."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA069c-9",
+    "title": "From Jesus to Christ (single)",
+    "date": "4 Oct 1911",
+    "city": "Karlsruhe",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA069c/English/Singles/19111004p01.html",
+    "book_title": "",
+    "content": "As our subject is arousing the very widest interest everywhere, it seems justifiable to approach it from an anthroposophical standpoint. The manner in which it is being discussed and brought to public notice is, of course, very far removed from this point of view. If it is true that Anthroposophy is little understood and liked to-day, it may be said at once that the treating of this theme in an anthroposophical manner presents peculiar difficulties. 1 Theosophy was the original term, but in later lectures Dr. Sterner changed the word to Anthroposophy. It is unusual in our age for the feelings to be so attuned as to appreciate anthroposophical truths bearing on the more obvious matters of spiritual life, and it is directly repugnant to our present-day consciousness when a topic has to be discussed which calls for the application of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science to the most difficult and holiest subjects.\nIt may be safely affirmed at the outset that the Being around Whom our thoughts are about to centre has been for many centuries the turning point of all thought and feeling, and moreover that He has called forth widely differing judgments, emotions and opinions. Countless as are those who for centuries have held firmly as a rock to all that is connected with the Name of Christ and of Jesus, beyond number also are pictures of Him which have moved souls and occupied thoughtful men ever since the Event in Palestine. Always the picture has been modified according to the general views of the times, to what was felt and considered true at any given period. Thus, when the way had been prepared by the intellectual currents of thought of the eighteenth century, it came about in the course of the following century that what could be intellectually grasped as “Christ” withdrew into the background as compared with what was called later the “Historical Jesus.” It is around the “Historical Jesus” that the widely extended controversy has arisen, and which has here in Carlsruhe its most important protagonists and its most vigorous combatants. For this reason it is as well to give a short indication of the actual position of the controversy before entering on the subject of “Christ Jesus.”\nWe might say that the Historical Jesus of nineteenth century thought originated under the influence of the intellectual current that takes a merely external view of spiritual life and judges it by means of external documents: that there is evidence of His having lived at the beginning of our era in Palestine, that He was crucified and, according to the faithful, rose again. It is quite in line with the character and nature of the present era, now approaching its termination, that in the case of theological research, faith limited itself to what it was thought could be confirmed by historical documents in the same way as any ordinary event is confirmed by independent writings. It may be said that all the historical written traditions elsewhere than in the New Testament could, in the opinion of one of the most important judges, be “easily contained in a quarto page.” All the other references to the historical Jesus in any documents whatever, such for example as in Josephus or Tacitus, may be put out of court, for they can never be used from the standpoint of that historical science which holds good to-day. Beyond these there are only the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. How did the historical research of the nineteenth century examine the Gospels? Regarded purely externally how do they appear? If taken like other records, such as those of military engagements and so forth, they seem to be very contradictory documents of the physical plane, the fourfold presentation of which cannot be brought into harmony. In face of what we call historical criticism these records fall to pieces. For it must be allowed that everything which the earnest and diligent research of the nineteenth century collected out of the Gospels themselves, in order to gain a true picture of Jesus of Nazareth, has crumbled away through the presentation of the kind of research brought forward by Professor Drews. As to all that can be said against the Gospels as facts of history, it is evident that nothing can come to light about the Person of Jesus of Nazareth if we apply the methods whereby accurate science and strict criticism ratify other historical facts. We can only be considered very dilettante scientists if we do not make this concession to the science of the day.\nIs it not the case that those who in the nineteenth century presented the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and wanted to arrive at an historical portrait of Him, had an entirely false conception of the Gospels? Were the Gospels really intended to be historical records in the sense understood in that century?\nWhatever was to be said on this subject I endeavoured to state many years ago in my work, Christianity as Mystical Fact , and our present question, as to what was the real object of the Gospels, was intended to receive its answer not merely through the contents of that book but through the tide itself. For the title was not ‘The Mysticism of Christianity,’ nor ‘The Mystical Contents of Christianity:’ its object was rather to show that Christianity in its origin and its whole being is not an external fact but a Fact of the Spiritual world, and one that can only be comprehended by an insight into a realm lying behind the world of sense and behind what can be corroborated by historical records. It was shown that the forces and causes which brought about the Event of Palestine were not to be found in that region wherein external historical events take place, and thus that possibly not only may Christianity have a mystical content but that Mysticism — the actual gazing into the spiritual — is necessary to disentangle the threads that were woven behind the Event in Palestine and made it possible.\nIn order to realize what Christianity is, and what it can and must be in the soul of man to-day if he is to understand it aright, let us see how deeply grounded in the spiritual facts of human development were the words of St. Augustine: “That which we now call the Christian Religion already existed among the ancients and was never absent from the beginning of the human race up to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh, from which time forward the true religion which was already there received the name of the Christian Religion.” Thus does a standard authority point to the fact that it was not something new which came into humanity with the events of Palestine, but that in a certain sense a transformation had taken place in that which from time immemorial the souls of men had sought and striven for as knowledge. Something was given to humanity which had always been in existence, though hitherto along other lines than the Christian. If we wish to test the other way in which the preceding ages could come to the truths and wisdom of Christianity, we are referred by the historical development of humanity to the Mysteries of Antiquity or the Ancient Mysteries. What is meant by these expressions is little understood to-day, but it will become clearer the more men grasp the conception of the cosmos as presented by Spiritual Science.\nNot merely upon the external religions of the people of antiquity must attention be focused, but upon what was practised in pre-Christian times in those mystic abodes designated by the name of the Mysteries. In the book Occult Science is to be found an explanation from the aspect of Spiritual Science, and there are also numbers of secular writers who have declared publicly what was the secret of mankind in antiquity. We read that only a few were admitted to the schools which were designated “The Mysteries,” and that these schools were the homes of the cults. Also there was a small circle of men admitted to the Mysteries by the priestly sages, and for them this meant a kind of retirement from the outer world: they realized that if they were to reach what was to be attained they must lead a different life than they had so far lived openly, and above all that they must accustom themselves to another way of thinking. These Mysteries existed all over the world, among the Greeks and Romans and other peoples, as may be confirmed by referring to extensive literature which still exists. The pupils admitted to the Mysteries were taught something comparable with what is now called science or knowledge, but they did not receive it in the same way, for by what they experienced they became quite other beings. To them came the conviction that in every man there lives, deeply hidden and slumbering so that the ordinary consciousness knows it not, a higher man. As the ordinary man looks through his eyes upon the world and with his thought-power thinks over what he experiences, so can this other man — at first unknown to external consciousness, but capable of being awakened in the depths of his nature recognize another world unattainable by external sight and thought. This was called “The birth of the inner man.” The expression is still used, though in these days it is dry and abstract in character and regarded lightly, but when the disciple of the Mysteries applied it to himself it stood for a tremendous event to be compared in some measure with being born in the physical sense. As man in the physical world is born out of a dark substratum (be it one of nature according to the materialistic idea, or a spiritual sub-stratum in the view of Spiritual Science) so, physically speaking, there was really born through the processes of the Mysteries a higher man who previously had been as little present as was the human being before birth or conception. The disciple was a new-born being. The present view of knowledge, as given everywhere in answer to a deeply philosophic question, is exactly the opposite of that which formed the central point of the whole idea and outlook of the Mysteries. It is now asked in the sense of Kant and Schopenhauer, “Where lie the limits of knowledge? What is it in the power of man to know?” We need only take up a newspaper to meet the answer that here or there lie the limits and that beyond them it is impossible to go. Certainly it was admitted in the Mysteries that there were problems which man could not solve, but it would never have been held in the sense of Kant or in Schopenhauer's Theory of Cognition that “Man cannot know” this or that! What would have been appealed to was man's capability of development, to the powers lying dormant within him which must be evoked so that he might rise to higher capacities of knowledge. The question in those times resolved itself into what was to be done in order to get beyond that which in normal life is the boundary of knowledge; how to develop deeper powers in human nature.\nSomething more is needed if we are to feel the whole magic charm of the Mysteries that, like a breath, pervades the works of the exoteric writers, Plato, Aristides, Plutarch and Cicero. Here we must be clear that the kind of mental comprehension present in the forming of the disciples of the Mysteries was quite different from that of the men of to-day when they confront scientific truths. What we now call science is open to anybody and everybody in any condition of receptivity whatever. It is just here that we recognize the characteristic of Truth, that it is independent of mood and feeling. For the pupil of the Mysteries the most necessary thing was that, before he was brought to the great Truths, he should go through something whereby his soul was transformed in his feelings and impressions. What to-day appears as a simple scientific truth would not have been put to him so that he could grasp it externally with his understanding, but his natural temperament would have been prepared beforehand so that he could draw near with reverential awe to what could approach him. Consequently his preparation was not one of learning; it was a gradual and radical transformation and education of his soul. The question was how the soul approached the great Truths and Wisdom and how it reacted to them, and hence arose the conviction that through the Mysteries man was bound up and united with the very foundations of the Cosmos and with what flowed from the springs of all cosmic beginnings. Thus was the disciple prepared for the experiencing of something which is described by Aristides. He who, according to what is to be found in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment has lived through what these disciples experienced can himself bear witness. He knows that the words of Aristides correspond with the truth when he writes, “I seemed to be approaching God, I seemed to feel His Presence, and I was in a state between waking and sleeping; my spirit was quite light — so light that no one who was uninitiated could describe or understand it.” There was a way, therefore, to the divine foundations of the Universe which was neither Science nor one-sided Religion, but consisted in a thorough preparation of the soul for the realization of the ideas about the Evolution of the Universe so that it might draw near to God and those spiritual foundations. As we take in the external air with our breath and make it a part of our body, so did the disciple of the Mysteries receive into his soul that which pulsates spiritually through the Universe until he was united with it and so became a new man permeated by the Divinity.\nNow, however, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science shows that what was then possible was only an historical phenomenon in human evolution, and when the question arises as to whether the Ancient Mysteries of pre-Christian times are still possible in the same way it can only be said that historical research verily proves that what has just been described did really exist but that it exists no longer in the same form. The pre-Christian method of Initiation is not now possible. A man must indeed be short-sighted if he believes that the human soul is the same in all epochs, or that the spiritual path of the olden times holds good for the present. The path to the divine and primal sources of the world has now become another, and intellectual historical research shows that it did so in its very essence at the time ascribed by tradition to the Events of Palestine. These Events made a deep incision in the evolution of man. Something entered into human nature in the post-Christian period which entirely differed from what was there before. Such a method of thinking as is possible nowadays — the method of drawing nearer to the Universe through scientific thought — did not exist in pre-Christian ages. The Mysteries did not conduct man in the manner described to the very highest treasures of Wisdom in order that he might do something in secret, or acquire something special for himself as a member of a small circle, but because our modern way of combining thoughts through logic was not possible at that time. A glance at the history of humanity will show that in the course of two centuries, during the time of the Greek philosophers, the present mode of thinking was gradually prepared, and that only now has it reached the point of embracing external nature so wonderfully. Thus the entire form our consciousness takes and the way we create our conceptions of the Universe differ entirely from pre-Christian times. For the moment we are only concerned with this fact as showing that human nature has changed. A careful review of human evolution makes it clear that the entire consciousness has altered in the course of evolution (the results arising from research are to be found in my Occult Science . The men of old did not regard things and think about them as we do with our senses and understanding; they had a kind of clairvoyance, but this was of a dim and dreamlike nature (not such as is described in my The Way of Initiation ). Herein lies the import of evolution, that an old clairvoyance which in primitive times was spread over all humanity gave way to that form of thought which we possess to-day. The ordinary inhabitants of every country had this kind of clairvoyant power, and a path leading from that to higher stages was provided in the Mysteries. Thereby development was given to the normal soul-faculties of man.\nObservation of the world by what we call reasoning and logic having displaced the old clairvoyance, the latter is no longer a natural faculty, but it lasted right through the historical period and reached its culmination in the Greco-Roman era during which the Appearance of Christ occurred. At that point of time collective humanity everywhere had come so far in its evolution that the old clairvoyance had passed away and the old Mysteries were no longer possible. What then took the place of the old Mysteries and what did man acquire through the Mysteries?\nThese were of two kinds: the one proceeded from that centre of civilization which was afterwards occupied by the ancient Persians, and the other was to be met with in its purest form in Egypt and Greece. They were entirely different throughout those times. It was the endeavour of all the Mysteries to produce in man an extension of his soul-powers, but this was achieved in a different way in Greece and Egypt, than in Persia. In the two former, which agreed essentially, the object was to effect in the disciples a transformation of their soul-powers. This transformation took place under a certain supposition which must be understood before anything else. It was that in the depths of the soul there slumbers another, a divine man; that from the same sources whence the rock forms into crystal and the plants break forth in the Spring the hidden man originated. Plants, however, had already utilized all that was contained within them, whereas man, in so far as he had understood himself and worked with his own powers, had remained an imperfect being, and that which was within him had only come to the fore after much endeavour. Appeal, therefore, in the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries was made to a spiritual, a divine inner man, and when this was referred to, allusion was made also to the powers within the Earth. For according to the views held the Earth was not regarded as the lifeless cosmic body of modern astronomy, but as a spiritual planetary being. In Egypt reference was made to the wonderful spirit-forces and nature-forces, called by the names of Isis and Osiris, when it was desired to contemplate the origin and source of what could be experienced as manifestation in the inner man. In Greece this primal source was referred to under the name of Dionysos. As a consequence of this, profane writers asserted that the nature and being of things were the objects sought for, and in the Greek Mysteries they called what was found of the forces of human nature the “sub-earthly” portion of man, not the “super-earthly.” The Nature of the great “Daemons” was spoken of, and under this tide was represented all that worked on the Earth of the nature of spiritual forces. The nature of these daemons (in a good sense) was sought for through that which man was to bring forth from himself. Then the disciple had to go through all the feelings and perceptions that were possible for him in the course of evolution. He had to experience what was meant by “going down into the depths of his soul;” to learn that a fundamental feeling so dominated all soul-being that in ordinary life no conception of it could be formed, and that that feeling was a deep egoism — the almost unconquerable selfishness lying within the inner recesses of a human being. By means of struggling against and conquering all selfishness and egoism the disciple had to go through something for which we have to-day only an abstract expression, i.e., the feeling of all inclusive love and sympathy for men and beings. Sympathy, in so far as the human soul was capable of it, was to take the place of selfishness. It was clearly understood that if the disciple evoked this sympathy, which belonged in the first place to the hidden forces of the world of feeling, it could draw out from the depths of his soul the divine powers slumbering therein. It was held moreover that as he looked out upon the world with his ordinary understanding he must soon become aware of his powerlessness as a man with reference to the Cosmos, and that the further he projected his conceptions and ideas the stronger this feeling grew until in the end he was led to doubt what indeed could be called knowledge, i.e., Gnosis. Arrived at that point he must then overcome this feeling of emptiness in his soul whenever he desired to encompass the Cosmos with his ideas. This consciousness of a void was accompanied by fear and anxiety, and consequently the Greek disciple of Mysticism first filled himself with a dread of the unknown and then by coupling this with sympathy drew forth the divine powers lying within him. So did he learn to transform fear into awe and reverence, and to realize how the highest kind of awe and reverential devotion for all the phenomena of the Universe was able to penetrate every substance and conception that lay beyond the scope of ordinary knowledge.\nThus the Greek Mysteries, as also those of Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian Mysteries, worked outwards from the inmost nature of man and sought to lead him into the spiritual worlds. It was a living apprehension of the “God in Man.” A real acquaintance was formed between man and God, and immortality ranked not as mere abstract theory and philosophy but as something known, something as firmly grounded as the knowledge of external colours, and this was experienced as an intimate connection with external things. With no less certainty was this experienced also in the Persian or Mithraic Mysteries. Whereas man was led in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries through the unfettering of his soul-powers, he was confronted at once with the Universe itself in the Mithraic Mysteries; not only did the Universe work upon him through the great and mighty Nature which is overlooked by those who regard the world in its external aspect, but by gaining a deep intimacy with Nature, he could gaze upon phenomena that lay outside the limits of the human understanding. By the methods then used the most terrible and magnificent powers were brought before the pupil from Universal Space. Whereas the Greek disciple was affected by a deep feeling of reverence, to the Mithraic disciple alone was given the knowledge of the terrible and awe-inspiring powers in Nature so that he felt himself infinitesimally small in comparison. So powerful was this impression, consequent upon his alienation from the primal source of being, that he felt that in its vastness the Universe could at any moment overwhelm and annihilate him. The first impulse came from his being led through a comprehensive astronomy and science away from external things to the greatness of the phenomena of the Universe, and what he further developed in the Mysteries was then more a consequence of the Truth in all its ramifications when Nature in her details (science in the old sense of the word) worked upon his soul. The Greek disciple became fearless through the setting free of his powers. The Mithraic disciple was brought so far that he drank in the greatness of Cosmic Thought, and thereby his soul also became strong and courageous. A knowledge of the dignity and value of a human being was gained, and with it a feeling for truth and fidelity; the disciple learned to recognize that man must always hold himself under control during his earthly existence.\nSuch were the benefits obtained especially through the Mithraic Mysteries, and whereas the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries are to be found spread over Greece and Egypt, the Mithraic are diffused from Persia as far as the Caspian Sea, along the Danube into Germany, and even to the South of France, to Spain and to England. Europe was indeed permeated by the Mithraic Mysteries, and everywhere it was seen clearly that something streamed into man from the Universe if only he could learn to understand it, and this that could be received was Mithra, the God that streams through the world in all worlds. It was through this power of action that courage was aroused: the warriors, the Roman legionaries, were filled with the Mithraic service or cult of Mithra. Both leaders and men were initiated into the Mysteries. Thus was God sought on the one hand by the freeing of the individual soul-powers, and it was quite evident that through this process something streamed out from the depths of the soul. On the other hand, however, it was equally evident that when man sought God by devoting himself to the great cosmic phenomena, something streamed into his soul as the essence, the finest life-sap contained in the world. There were found the primordial forces of the Universe. God came as it were into human souls through this development which was attained in the Mystery schools. A veritable process is to be seen here: each soul became a door for the entrance of the Godhead into human evolution on earth. Few were able to undergo such a development, and a special preparation for it was necessary. The teaching consisted in showing that what was hidden in external nature (Mithra) as also in the inner man of the Greek, poured through the world as a stream of divine consecration.\nThe evolution of man has now changed, and the entire method of Initiation is different. Here we touch upon what must be called the Mystical Fact of the Christ Event. To penetrate deeply into history is to see that the early Christians were more or less dimly conscious that the same force which entered the soul only through devotion to the Mysteries, to the Divine Principle of the Universe (streaming forth from Cosmos as the Mithra or out of the depths of the soul as the Dionysos), was as the deed of a unique Cosmic Divinity in one single Fact in the evolution of the Earth. That which was sought for beyond this, and was not to be found except by those who alienated themselves from outer life in the Mysteries, was at a given time incorporated into the Earth by the Divinity. No human effort was needed, for the Divinity once and for all permeated the Being of the Earth, and henceforth even those who had lost the power to penetrate to the Divine Principle of the Cosmos could meet Him in another way. The God Who could now penetrate into the human soul (neither as Mithra from without nor Dionysos from within) was Himself a fusion of Mithra and Dionysos, and also was related to human nature in its depths. He was embraced and encompassed by the Name of CHRIST. Mithra and Dionysos were united in the Being Who entered humanity in the Event of Palestine, and Christianity was the confluence of both Cults. The Hebrews, who were chosen that they might provide the necessary body through which this Event might take place, had become acquainted with the Mithraic and Dionysian Cults, but they remained far removed from either. The Greek thought of himself as a weak man who must develop deeper powers before he could penetrate into the depths of his soul, while the follower of Mithra felt that by letting the whole surrounding sphere of the air work upon him he might become united with the divine qualities of the Universe. The Hebrew, on the other hand, held that the deeper human nature, with all that was hidden within it, was already there in the first Man, and the ancient Hebrews called this Primal man Adam. According to old Hebraic ideas that which man could seek, and which joined him with the divine, was present originally in Adam, but in course of evolution the descendants of each generation became further and further removed from the Source of Existence. Being “subject to original sin,” as they put it, meant that man had not remained as he was and had been ejected from the sphere of the Divine; regarding himself as standing below Adam he sought the reason in original sin. But though less than that which lived in the depths of human nature, he could unite himself with the deeper powers and thereby be raised again. This point of view, that once man had stood higher and that through the qualities connected with the blood-ties he had lost something, was an historical one. What the adherent of the Mithraic Mysteries saw in humanity as One Whole the Hebrew saw in his own nation and was conscious that its original source had been lost. So that while among the Persians there was a kind of training of the consciousness, there was among the ancient Hebrews a consciousness of a historical development; Adam, by falling into sin, had fallen from the heights where he once stood. Consequently the Hebrews were the best prepared for the thought that that which had happened at the initial point of evolution (and which had brought about a deterioration in humanity) could only be raised again through an historical Event, i.e., by something actually taking place in the spiritual sub-strata of the Earth's being. The ancient Hebrew who rightly understood evolution felt that the Mithra God, equally with the God Who is evoked from the depths of the human soul, could come down without man going through a development in the Mysteries.\nThus in these people, and above all in the case of John the Baptist, there arose a consciousness of the fact that the same which the Mysteries had handed down in the form of Dionysos and Mithra was born at one and the same time in One Man. Those of them who felt this in a deeper sense held that even as through Adam the descent of man into the world was brought about (all men having descended from one forefather and inherited from him all the deeper forces that lead to sin and error) so, through One Being Who descends from the spiritual worlds as the union of Mithra and Dionysos, must the initial point be formed to which men can look when they have to rise again. As in the Mysteries human nature was developed through the setting free of the deeper soul forces or through a view of the Cosmos, the Hebrews now saw in the God Who came down into physical being Him on Whom the soul must look and believe, for Whom it must develop the deepest love, and Who as the Great Example could lead them back to their divine origin.\nHe who had the profoundest knowledge of this fact of Christianity was Paul. The Apostle recognized that as men looked to Adam as their physical progenitor they could, through the Christ Impulse, look to the Christ as the Great Example, and so attain to what was striven for in the Mysteries and must be born again if they were to know their own original nature. The knowledge that was kept within the recesses of the Temples, and could only be attained after ascetic training, was set forth neither in mundane document nor as some external fact but as having been accomplished as a mystical fact, the God Who pervaded the world having actually appeared in one single Form. What the disciples of the Mithraic Mysteries acquired through looking upon the Greatest Model had now been attained through Christ. The courage, self control and energy acquired by those disciples had also to be acquired by those who could no longer be initiated in the old Mithraic sense; through the Model of the historical Christ and the gazing upon Him the impulse towards this fortitude was now to pour itself out upon the soul. In the Mithraic Mysteries, as has been shown, the whole Universe was in a certain sense born in the soul of the disciple, and the courageous soul was fired with all the inner forces of initiative. In the Baptism of John something was poured down from above of which human nature could be the vehicle; when a man was permeated with the thought that his nature was capable of assimilating the profoundest harmony of the Universe, the view of the Baptism aroused within him the understanding that Mithra could be born in human nature. Those, therefore, who grasped the original meaning of Christianity, acknowledged that the end of the Mysteries had come: the God Who formerly had poured Himself into the Mysteries had now flowed directly into the being of the Earth through the Personality Who stood at the beginning of a new era (our present one).\nThe connection with the Greek or Dionysian Mysteries has now to be considered. Through the fact that the human gaze was guided to Jesus of Nazareth in Whom Mithra lived and Who then passed through death, an indication was given that Mithra (the bestower of courage, self control and energy) had Himself died with the death of Jesus. It was further seen that because Mithra had so vanished that which man found in his deepest nature, and had attained earlier through the Dionysian Mysteries, had now become in Jesus of Nazareth the immortal conqueror over death. Herein lies the true Christian meaning of the Resurrection if it is grasped in its spiritually scientific sense. The Baptism by John in [the] Jordan demonstrated that the old Mithra had entered into man, that thereby human nature had won the victory over death, and that by the example so created the soul could unite itself in the deepest love in order to come to that which lived in its own depths. In the Risen Christ was seen the fact that man, by living according to the event that had taken place in history, could rise above the level of ordinary humanity.\nThus in the centre of the history of the world was set an historical event in the place of that which had been sought in the Mysteries times without number. The great revelation that came to St. Paul was that human nature had thereby become different, and this was concealed within what is known as “The Event of Damascus.” Writing of what he experienced before Damascus, the Apostle relates how he learned to understand, not from external documents but through a purely spiritual clairvoyant experience, that the moment when the Incarnation itself should take place in an historical personage had already passed. The existence of Christ as a real man could never be experienced by Paul through an external fact, and what he could learn in Palestine did not convince him that the Union of Mithra and Dionysos had lived in Jesus of Nazareth. But when, before Damascus, his spiritual sight was opened, it became clear that a God Who could be called by the Name of Christ not only worked through the world as a super-sensible Being but had actually come to earth and conquered death. Henceforth he preached that what for the Initiates had previously been a streaming substance was now to be found as continuous historical fact. This lies at the basis of his words, “If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”\nSuch was the path by which Paul came to Jesus by the indirect way of Christ, it being clear to him that something had taken place in Palestine which previously could only be experienced in the Mysteries. And this still applies to-day. Because Christ is the focus of all human development and the highest example for the inmost powers of the soul the bond established with Him must be of the most intimate kind. To become a disciple it is required of a man that he set little value upon his own life, and so it must be regarded as of small importance to lay aside all documentary evidence and historical traditions in order to come to Christ. Indeed there is cause for thankfulness that the fact that there ever was an historical Christ Jesus cannot be established, for no document could prove that He was the most significant of all that has passed into humanity.\nThe connection between Christ and the ancient Mysteries is therefore quite clear. The disciples of the latter had to go through what may be called intimate soul experiences in order to come to God; their inner feelings and sensations were more lively and intense than those of the ordinary man, and so they became aware that they were set fast in a lower nature which hindered them from arriving at the Sources of Being. This lower nature was indeed a seducer leading them away from the upward path, and that which so allured them had also become their own lower nature, and herein lay the “Temptation” that came to every disciple of the Mysteries. At the moment when God awoke within them they became aware also of their lower or sensual natures. It was as though some strange unknown being were urging them not to follow the unsubstantial and airy heights of the spiritual world, but to seize the coarse and material things that lay close at hand. Each disciple had to pass through a time when everything spiritual seemed unreal in comparison with the ordinary way of looking at things, and all that was connected with the senses appeared alluring as against the stress of spiritual effort. At another stage in mystic development these lower forces were overcome, a higher outlook being attained with the growth of invigorated powers of courage and so forth. All this teaching was clothed in certain instructions that may be verified from the writings of exoteric authors, as also in the methods of Initiation given by Spiritual Science and set forth in Occult Science . There were various methods both in the Greek and the Mithraic Mysteries. Finally the disciples experienced the “at-one-ment” with Him Who was the Divine Man, but here the methods were different and varied widely in the many countries where Initiation existed.\nIn my Christianity as Mystical Fact the purpose is to show that in the Gospels nothing is to be met with but a rebirth of old Initiation instructions. What took place externally had already taken place similarly in the course of the Mysteries, and therefore the Divine Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth after the descent of the Mithra Being had to experience the “Temptation.” As the Tempter came on a small scale to the pupil of the Mysteries so did he also confront the God become man. All that was true in the Mysteries is to be found repeated in the Gospel records which were new versions of the old inscriptions and instructions given in the Initiations. The writers of the Gospels saw that once that which hitherto had lain only in the Mysteries had been enacted on the plane of Cosmic History, it was permissible to describe it in the same words as those in which their directions for Initiation were recorded. It is for this very reason that the Gospels were not intended to be biographies of Him Who was the vehicle for the Christ. This is just the mistake of all modern criticisms of the Gospels. At the time they were written the sole object was to lead the human soul to a real love for the Great Soul, the Source of the world's existence. Strangely enough a clear consciousness of this prevailed almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It is pointed out in isolated writings of remarkable interest that through the Gospels the soul can be so transformed as to find the Christ. Old Meister Eckhardt writes, “Some people want to look at God with their eyes as they look at a cow, and want to love God as they love a cow. They love God as an outward possession and an inward comfort, but these people do not love Him aright ... Simple folk imagine they ought to see God as if He stood there and they here; it is not so; God and I are One in recognition.” In another passage he writes, “A Master says, ‘God has become man, and thereby the whole human race is raised in dignity. We may rejoice that Christ our Brother has through His own power passed beyond the choir of angels, and sits at the right hand of the Father.’ This Master has spoken rightly, but verily I do not pay much attention to it. What help would it be to me if I had a brother who was a rich man, and I was at the same time a poor one? How would it help me if I had a brother who was a wise man, and I myself a fool? ... The heavenly Father begat His only Son in Himself and in me. Why in Himself and in me? I am one with Him, and it is not possible for Him to exclude me. In the same work the Holy Ghost received His Being, and is from me as from God. Why? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost does not receive His Being from me neither does he receive it from God. I am in no way excluded.”\nThat is the point: that man through mystic development, without external mysteries but through the simple evolution of the soul, will in later times be able to experience that which was once experienced in the Mysteries. This, however, will only be possible because the Christ Event took place. Even if there were no Gospels, no records and no traditions, he who experiences the Christ in himself along with the being filled with Christ has the certainty, as St. Paul had it, that at the beginning of our era Christ was incarnated in a physical body. An historical biography of Jesus of Nazareth can never be gathered out of the Gospels, but through the right unfolding of his soul powers man can and must raise himself up to the Christ, and through the Christ to Jesus. Thus only can be understood what was the aim of the Gospels and what was lacking in the whole of the nineteenth century researches on the subject of Jesus. The picture of the Christ was allowed to recede into the background in order to present a tangible Jesus quite externally from the historical records. The Gospels were misunderstood, and consequently the methods of investigation crumbled to pieces.\nHerewith the way is at the same time made clear to Spiritual Science. Its object is to show what are the deeper powers that have lain in man since the coming of Christ, and which he can develop. Not in the depths of externally appointed Mysteries, but in the stillness of his room, man can attain by devoting himself to what happened in Palestine that which was attained by the disciples of the Mysteries. By experiencing the Christ within himself he gains in courage and energy and in a consciousness of his dignity as man, and comes to the knowledge of how he has to take his place in humanity in the right sense. And at the same time he experiences, as could the adherent of the Greek Mysteries, the Universal Love which lives in Christ and embraces all external creatures. He learns never to be afraid or to despair in face of the world, and in full freedom and at the same time humility is sensible of devotion to the secrets of the Universe.\nAll this comes to the man who permeates himself with the Mystical Fact of Christianity, the successor of the old Mysteries. Simply through a cognitional development of these fundamental thoughts the Historical Jesus becomes a fact for those who have a deep knowledge of Christ. In Western philosophy it was said that without eyes none could see colour nor hear without ears; the Universe would be without light and sound. True as this is with regard to seeing and hearing, it is equally true that without light no eye could have come into existence nor could man have had any perceptions connected with it. As Goethe says, “If the eye were not born of like nature to the sun it could never look upon the sun,” and “The eye is a creation of the light.”\nThe Mystical Christ, spoken of by those whose spiritual sight is opened and who behold Him as Paul did, was not always in man. In pre-Christian times He was unattainable in any development through the Mysteries in the way in which He was to be found after the Mystery of Golgotha. That there might be an inner Christ and that the higher man could be born an historical Christ was needed, the Incarnation of the Christ in the Jesus. As the eye can originate only through the effect of light, so in order that there could be a Mystical Christ the historical Christ must have been there. Had there been no documents containing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth this could still be said and felt, for Jesus is not to be recognized through external writings. This fact was long known in the evolution of the West and will again be known. Spiritual Science will so formulate that it can draw together from out its various spheres what will lead to a real understanding of the Christ, and thereby to an understanding of Jesus. It has come about that Jesus has been actually alienated from the world and the methods of the Jesus investigations have melted away, but the deepening of ourselves in the Christ Being (in the Christ as a Being) will lead to a recognition of the greatness of Jesus of Nazareth.\nThis path, by which the Christ is first recognized through inward soul experience, leads through what really has developed out of the soul to the understanding of the Mystical Fact of Christianity, and of the gradual development of humanity, as being such that the Christ Event must take place within it as the most significant point in the evolution of man. The way leads through the Christ to Jesus. The Christ Idea bears fruitful seed that will bring humanity not merely to the apprehension of a general pantheistic Cosmic Spirit, but the individual man to the understanding of his own history; as he feels his Earth to be bound up with all cosmic existence so will he recognize that his past is bound up with a super-sensible and super-historical Event. This Event is that the Christ Being stands as a super-sensible Mystical Fact at the middle point of human evolution, and that so will He be recognized by the humanity of the future apart from all external historical research and documents. Christ will remain the strong cornerstone of mankind's evolution. Man will bring the forces out of himself to renew his own history, and therewith also the history of the evolution of the world."
+  }
+]

GA069d.json

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+[
+  {
+    "id": "GA069d-14",
+    "title": "How Can We Gain Knowledge of the Supersensible Worlds?",
+    "date": "9 Mar 1913",
+    "city": "Munich",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA069d/English/Singles/19130309p01.html",
+    "book_title": "",
+    "content": "The only known physical publication of this lecture is in an Anthroposophic News Sheet.\nThe subject of today's lecture sets out from a question which is often asked by people who have perhaps heard superficially of spiritual science and spiritual investigation, for led by the conceptions and habits of thought ruling in the present time, they cannot think how it is possible to draw knowledge from the super-sensible worlds.\nWe have frequently emphasized that a person standing upon the foundation of spiritual research can best of all understand the objections raised from an external standpoint. Indeed one can say that if the conceptions advanced by a spiritual investigator were to meet the approval of wider circles, this would be far more surprising than if they were to give rise to the greatest possible opposition … for they must give rise to antagonism! This fact is explained by the whole of today's civilization and by the whole development of the external economic life during past centuries. Moreover, we have frequently emphasized that spiritual science always fully recognizes the results achieved for the whole of civilization by natural science, and the natural-scientific mentality depends on the fact that the Spirit of the Time has — if we may use this expression — turned away for a while from the spiritual world. (In the course of human evolution “a while” is long and may last for centuries!) This is evident through the fact that it is the physical world which induces people to think, so that they adopt a mentality which is not accustomed to the contemplation of the spiritual world. But this is not the only reason which induces people to oppose spiritual science; this antagonism is due to other, deeper causes. The subject of today's lecture — “How can we gain Knowledge of the Supersensible Worlds?” — therefore seems very appropriate.\nThe very first requirement is that the human being should recognize through self-knowledge that he is a super-sensible being and be able to understand his own super-sensible nature. But there are many things in the psychic life of modern man connected with the cultural achievements of the present time, and of humanity as a whole, which are a serious handicap to real self-knowledge.\nIn regard to his soul, the human being is never alone with it, yet he should be able to face his soul in complete solitude if he really wishes to understand its innermost being. Consciously, he is never quite alone with his soul. Yet there is a kind of solitude which arises when the human being passes over to that condition in which he does not use his external limbs but leaves them to the earth's force of gravity, and when he commands his memory and his intellect bound up with the senses to stand still. This is the case every day, when he falls asleep. The objection raised against the spiritual-scientific statement or truth that when the human being is asleep his bodily organization does not reveal anything that might explain the processes surging up and down within his soul until he wakes up again — that the bodily processes do not in any way explain what takes place in the soul during sleep — this will be unreservedly recognized by natural science in a comparatively short time. Natural science will admit that the soul's content dives down into the bodily organization at the moment of waking up, in the same way in which the air which we inhale becomes a part of our own body. And the same thing can be said of the moment in which we fall asleep, when the soul's content abandons the body. From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we therefore confront a being which is severed from the bodily structure and which does not offer us any instruments enabling us to observe this fact.\nWe can therefore say that the sleeping soul is in a certain sense isolated; that is to say, it is not connected with the external world through the intellect, the senses, and memory, as is the human being when he is awake. But in normal life, we lose consciousness when we fall asleep, and we must therefore say that in this isolated state of the soul the human being is not able to observe the soul that inhabits his body. It is this circumstance which renders a real self-knowledge impossible to ordinary people.\nBut the following question can be raised: Is it nevertheless possible to attain to real self-knowledge?\nIt will be of help to consider another condition of the soul. The fact which will now be advanced is not meant as an analogy, but as an aid enabling us to envisage the reality of the soul's condition between sleeping and waking. It is not an analogy, but an explanation pointing to the real facts. This is the SOUL CONDITION OF THE SEASONS OF THE YEAR.\nIn the Spring the vegetable world springs up, the uplifting world of Nature filling us with joy. In the Spring we see the plants springing up, in the summer we see them growing and flourishing, in the autumn we see them fade way (with the exception of evergreen plants) and in the winter Nature takes them back into her bosom, so that their growth and development cannot be perceived.\nLet us now suppose that with the coming of Spring the human being were able to obtain another state of consciousness; his consciousness would be dulled, and as summer advances it would grow more unconscious — only when Nature begins to fade and to decay would he wake up again. Human consciousness would therefore be slumbering on that part of the earth where summer holds sway, but in that case the human being would never gain knowledge of the germinating, flowering plants round about him. The plants which cover the earth during the summer would remain an unknown world to a person or a being endowed with human qualities, a world which his senses could not perceive, a super-sensible world.\nNow we have something in human life which really corresponds to this. Those who penetrate more deeply into things will not look upon it as a mere analogy, but as a reality — the reality which thus confronts us in the WHOLE NATURE OF THE HUMAN BEING.\nWhat is the sleeping human being that can be physically perceived by our senses? Though outwardly and substantially he may differ from a plant, he is inwardly of the same value as a plant, for a plant's development attains the stage of life, but not that of consciousness, not even the consciousness of animals. Sleeping man therefore resembles a plant, but under different life conditions.\nIn regard to certain forces which influence the human being, he appears to us, in his plant-like condition of sleep, similar to the earth during summer, when the sun with its forces of heat and of light draws the plants out of the soil. We know that we fall asleep when our strength is worn out by the day's work. We also know that sleep restores our worn-out strength by drawing forces out of the depths of life.\nThe same process takes place in the cosmos. If we discard old habits of thinking, we gradually learn to know that sleep is in the real meaning of the word, and not analogously, the SOUL'S SUMMERTIME.\nFrom the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we pass through the soul's summer.\nBut when we are awake, the day's work, and particularly our efforts of thought and the soul forces expended on thought, demolish the plant-like processes. Does not man's waking condition resemble autumn and winter which obliterate from the surface of the earth the plants which the summer produced? Our waking hours are the soul's winter season. This is not an analogy. It is easy to maintain the external analogy so as to discover certain similarities, but this would be a superficial way of considering things. We must look upon things from within, in an intimate way.\nIf we wish to observe ourselves, we cannot find the same access to our being during the soul's summer season as during its winter season, but we lose ourselves as the summertime advances. For if we could observe what forces are at work in order to produce a germinating, growing life, we would really have to grow unconscious. In fact, we are not able to observe the soul; we seem to lose our consciousness in spring and regain it only in the autumn.\nWe can therefore say that self-knowledge is only possible if the hidden side of man's being can be revealed.\nLet us now consider the characteristics of the soul's wintertime; that is to say, of the waking condition. During our waking condition, the soul is filled with emotions, resolutions, thoughts, ideals, and so forth. If we survey all this, we must say that we experience it only in part. For let us only take human thought outside the whole compass of human soul life: How does the human being experience the soul's wintertime, if he wishes to fulfill his tasks in the external physical world? He is interested in his world of thoughts, in everything which he obtains through thinking, only to the extent of asking: What external realities do thoughts reflect? What value should be attributed to thoughts, as images of reality? This constitutes, to begin with, his chief interest.\nThe whole life of the soul is directed towards this chief interest: to develop THIS side of the soul. Other things have far less importance in the so-called normal life. Can one, however, not attribute to thoughts another value than that which consists in merely reflecting something like a picture in the mirror? Those who only wish to attribute this one-sided value to thought (and most people do), are in the same position of an artist who only sees what his work of art is to represent. Yet in the production of a work of art something quite different takes place than a mere representation: something takes place within the soul. Art could not play such an important part in the development of humanity if it did not constantly bear the soul along the path of progress, if it were not a seed which takes root in the soul, thus enabling it to have new experiences and changing it into something quite different from what it was before it looked upon the work of art.\nThe soul does not advance by a one-sided pedagogical, pedantic contemplation of works of art, but by recognizing the laws of human development which are contained in art. Those who only recognize the validity of thought in regard to things which it mirrors and represents, resemble people who only look upon a work of art from the aspect of what it sets forth. The human soul is accustomed to look upon thought as a mere representation. The value of truth is determined by the value of reality grasped by thought. Thoughts which do not aim at this are generally rejected. Philosophy, for instance, has a right to adopt this attitude; but let us ask whether such concepts really grasp reality, whether they refer to something real.\nThere is another way of looking upon thought: it can be measured in accordance with its value as an inner means of self-education. There are thoughts which do not reproduce an external reality, but they are able to advance the soul inwardly. Thoughts of this kind should be taken into consideration when the soul really sets out upon the path of self-knowledge.\nWe have frequently explained that when we immerse ourselves in thoughts which do not represent an external reality, we may designate them as MEDITATION, CONCENTRATION, or CONTEMPLATION. What does this mean? That we call into being a soul condition which resembles that of sleep. It means that the soul does not use its external members, is not incited by the senses, but by a strong will power, by — one might say — a negative attention which rejects the experiences brought by the normal daytime consciousness. This is a condition which is radically different from that of sleep, because the soul remains fully conscious of itself and is filled by a definite thought, and when the soul is thus immersed in this thought, fully concentrated upon it, it is immersed in concentration or contemplation.\nIt is not easy to produce this condition; careful and systematic exercises are needed for it. But it kindles in the soul the light of an entirely new life. When this condition has reached the stage of maturity, the soul feels that dormant forces awaken within it. For this reason the thought itself is not the essential thing in meditation, but the essential thing is to practice CONCENTRATION, to concentrate fully upon this thought. This is the same as training the muscles by physical exercises; they develop by physical training. In the case of the ordinary forces of the soul, thought training exercises are of no importance, for new forces have to be drawn out of the soul's depths, forces which render the soul stronger and more elastic; for instance, that part of the soul has to be drawn out which only re-echoes faintly in our ordinary waking life. Consequently the CONTENT of thought is not the essential thing; the essential thing is that the soul should be ACTIVE, that through this activity it should call into life forces which exist in ordinary life, but in a dormant state. This training shows us that the soul can also exist independently without having to rely on the physical body; a condition arises which resembles that of sleep, though it is radically different from sleep.\nWhy is sleep an unconscious state during our ordinary life? Because the soul's inner life is so weak and concealed that we cannot perceive it. But when these forces awaken, the soul can become aware of itself even when it is not dependent on the body.\nWe now experience that the soul is really able to face its summer season consciously. The content of our thoughts is now experienced in an entirely different way. In the ordinary course of the day, our thoughts are like grains of corn which the farmer gathers on the field. If they are used as nourishment, they only reach a certain stage of development. But when they are gathered, they do not differ from the grains which are to be used as seed. Thus the ordinary thoughts which we experience during the soul's winter form the soul's spiritual content. They fill the soul, they are like the grains of corn which are used as nourishment. But the thoughts which form the subject of meditation and concentration resemble the grains of corn which are used as seed; dormant forces are drawn out of them, which germinate and grow.\nOrdinarily we only learn to know one side of the influence of thought. But through meditation and concentration our thoughts take root in the life of the soul, and their activity changes, for they begin to germinate and grow. We now experience consciously things which we otherwise experience unconsciously during the soul's summertime; a new world arises, the so-called imaginative world. The fruit of our efforts now rises up before the soul and the soul's summer is raised into consciousness, so that we live through it differently than during our normal life, for the experiences which normally glide down into unconsciousness now begin to germinate and grow just as if plants were to grow out of single grains of corn during the winter.\nWe must learn to know this other aspect of our being which reveals the soul in its fruitfulness, in its greening, sprouting life. Thought will otherwise maintain the character of a mere representation, but it begins to germinate and grow if we do not treat it as a mere image, if we look upon it as a seed which can germinate.\nSelf-knowledge then enables us to call up in our consciousness the soul's summertime.\nEven as we first assumed that springtime dulls the consciousness and that a new world arises during the summer, so the soul is now able to survey a new world, which it did not know before. A world, which otherwise would remain concealed, grows out of the soul's living foundation if we do not remain standing halfway, but use our thoughts as seeds. Meditation, concentration and contemplation simply imply that our thoughts and feelings (for this is also possible through feeling) are able to develop forces which otherwise remain dormant and unknown; that is to say, a new world rises up before us.\nMany things work against us if we incessantly strive to produce this world. It is a requirement of human nature that when we enter the summer time of the soul, we must above all maintain within the soul a certain winter constitution if we wish to be capable human beings in life and in ordinary science. This is a necessity in external life, for otherwise we cannot be capable human beings. We should also have confidence in our thinking, for we cannot find our way in the world unless confidence is our starting point; that is to say, unless we confidently believe that we can be guided by our thinking and can trust in the guidance of our thought. Imagine what consequences would arise if there were worlds in which we could not rely upon our thinking! This would shatter us; it would deprive us of every capacity. Human beings must be able to rely on thought; they must have this belief in thought … no matter where they may land with it.\nEverything has its light and dark side. But where we need light, we do not take into consideration the shadows. We train our thought in the sensory world; the physical world is our teacher. It is not the physical world which teaches us to rely on thought in itself; from the physical world we learn to rely on a kind of thinking which finds its support in the external sensory world. From the very outset, we are thus not accustomed to look upon thought as an instrument which is able to lead us in every sphere of life. And we lose our confidence; we begin to feel uncertain whenever we come across something which does not approach us in the customary way.\nIt is this which induces people to take up a negative attitude towards spiritual science. We can understand this, and, as stated, no objection can be raised against it; on the contrary, our contemporaries are quite helpless. But the true cause of their attitude is the fact that their thought has been trained by observing the physical world. In regard to spiritual science, it is as if they were to enter a world which is not the physical world, but with capacities acquired by living in the physical world which trains external thought. This explains the attitude towards realms which are different from those which can be grasped by ordinary external thought. When people are confronted by the super-sensible worlds, they feel that their confidence in thought is imperiled.\nThere is another thing which characterizes the soul's winter, or the ordinary waking condition. We know that the habits of thinking during the past centuries gave rise to materialism, or — to use a nobler term, which is, however, a mistaken designation — monism. This world conception can, however, only be applied to the external world, to the external aspects of life. Spiritual science shows us that the spirit lives behind everything, and if one penetrates into external things one can discover the spirit everywhere.\nIf the soul has passed through a conscientious training, as explained above, a point is reached where we pass through extraordinary soul experiences, which show us why we come to materialism, monism, and so forth. When we feel a new world springing up within us (as described in my book KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS ), a certain moment arises in which the soul has the same feeling towards this new world as towards the physical world . This means that when we observe things in the super-sensible world, we should develop the capacity to turn our attention towards them in full freedom and then to turn our gaze away from them just as freely.\nImagine what it would be like if we were not able to turn our gaze away at will from the objects of the physical world, if they fascinated us to such an extent that we could not look away even if we wished. This would be the situation of a soul who could not turn away from the things which rise up before it as a result of exercises or through its own faculties.\nIn the super-sensible world, however, we cannot turn our gaze away from the objects in the same way in which we turn away from things in the physical world. This does not suffice. It should be remembered that the spiritual investigator must be able to obliterate and cancel every new soul content which he produces. In the spiritual world this is the same as turning away our gaze from the physical objects in the physical world.\nThis is the radical difference between the spiritual investigator and people who have hallucinations, visions and fixed ideas, which they obstinately consider to be objective realities. A spiritual investigator cannot admit such things. He must be aware of the fact that he is only conjuring up shadow images and that he must blot them out again from his spiritual vision. The capacity to obliterate such images pertains to a definite stage of development. One can see how greedily the soul clings to its fixed ideas and images and to blot them out is one of the most difficult things of all!\nWhy? — Because not only the forces already described develop and grow, but also other forces which normally are quite weak. There is ONE force in particular which grows with the development of the other one; namely, SELFISHNESS, the self-love which exists in ordinary life. It grows like a force of Nature. In ordinary life our moral forces can overcome selfishness, but they cannot overcome forces of Nature, such as thunder or lightning! This increased self-love or selfishness appears within the soul as if it were a force of Nature, an elemental force. The soul development leading to spiritual investigation must consequently bring with it also the capacity to overcome this enhanced selfishness, which lives within the soul like a force of Nature that fetters the soul. The soul's ordinary forces do not suffice for this; they cannot overcome it.\nAt this point we come across a deeply stirring phenomenon, which appears from the very outset. It may take on various forms, but it is justified to designate it as the APPROACH TO THE THRESHOLD OF DEATH. We feel as if that part which we call our Ego or the soul were torn away from us as if by lightning, taken away from us. Everything which formerly appeared to be connected with us now seems to be severed from us. Our own self appears like a Being outside; we face it in the same way in which we confront an object of the external world.\nThough it is easy to describe this in words, it is one of the most stirring experiences which we can have. The ground under our feet seems to vanish. Everything which constituted our thoughts and feelings is surrendered, given up. But if we succeed in remaining steadfast, we shall be borne over a kind of abyss. This experience awakens a feeling which lived in us in a dormant state and which must now rise to the surface: it is the FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN.\nThe spiritual world is always present, but we do not know it, and at this moment we confront it as if it were a void. This gives rise to a feeling of fear. But if we proceed regularly along the spiritual path, we should not think that we are in any way endangered by this experience. It forms part of self-education, for we must acquire the strength to bear the sight of the spiritual world — we develop the strength and steadfastness enabling us to bear its sight. In ordinary life we are protected against it and we speak of a GUARDIAN OF THE THRESHOLD.\nThe fact that ordinarily we are not conscious of such things does not prove that they do not exist within the soul. The soul is a twofold being: within its depths it often presents an entirely different aspect from the one which we know. We may, for instance, hate a person and be conscious of this feeling, yet our hate may simply be the cloak of love and we daze ourselves because this love cannot come to full expression. Not only Faust, but every human being, has two souls.\nA soul investigator may come across the following: In ordinary life the human being finds support and strength by checking the fear that lives in his subconsciousness. But a spiritual investigator cannot fail to see the fear which always lives in the soul's depths. He enters the spiritual world by overcoming this fear. If this fear rises to the surface without entering human consciousness, if it knocks at the door, as it were, and a person ignores it in spite of all, what takes place and what enables that person to overlook this feeling? He pushes down fear, as it were, by denying the existence of the spiritual world.\nMaterialists and monists are therefore afraid of the spiritual world; this fear lives in their soul's depth and their materialism dazes them, so that they do not notice it. This is a strange phenomenon; nevertheless it is true that materialism is based upon an unknown, unnamed fear. Of course, it cannot be pleasant for them to hear from a spiritual investigator that monists and materialists speak as they do because they are tormented by fear. But to a real observation this connection between materialism and fear will be clearly evident.\nWe learn to confront the physical world by training thought through the observation of physical things. This gives us confidence in our thinking power and we ignore our subconscious fear. But this also prevents us from entering the super-sensible world.\nA twofold soul condition must therefore be developed if we wish to enter the super-sensible world: on the one hand we should rise to the state of being existing in the spiritual world and on the other hand we should be able to blot it out; that is to say, when we return to the physical world we must push into the background everything that constitutes our field of vision in the super-sensible world. For if we mix up these two worlds we become dreamers, false mystics, and so forth and can never become spiritual investigators.\nStrength of soul should enable us to keep these worlds apart, but at the same time we should be able to connect physical things with super-sensible things, because the foundation of the physical world lies in the super-sensible world. This characterizes a spiritual investigator.\nIt is necessary, for this same reason, that a spiritual investigator should raise into his consciousness, in the soul's summer and winter time, what is normally concealed by sleep. If he fails to do this, he will at every moment fall a prey to the above-mentioned fear.\nWhen we enter the spiritual world we do not only perceive a vague soul-spiritual element, but definite objects, facts and beings which are just as differentiated as the things pertaining to the physical world. Modern people find it so difficult to accept this. They do not forgive the spiritual investigator for seeing a spiritual reality consisting of differentiated beings.\nA well-known man, such as Charles Elliot of Harvard University, once declared that he could find a spiritual element behind the physical-sensory world, but that the human being is always distinct and separate from his body. If the spiritual investigator now declares that self-training, of the kind described above, leads to the perception of DIFFERENTIATED spiritual beings that form a cosmos, people reject this. But if one were to tell Charles Elliot that whenever he sees the vegetable world or observes single plants this is nothing but Nature, Nature, and Nature, or that when he studies various substances in his laboratory these substances are “Nature, nothing but ‘Nature’,” he would come to no result whatever! People tolerate spiritual science if it limits itself to speaking of the spirit in general, but they do not tolerate it if it begins to speak of definite objects and beings pertaining to the spiritual world. But even as the physical world appears differentiated to our sensory organs, so the spiritual world has differentiated beings, even though they do not possess a physical body.\nWhen we learn to know the spiritual world, it therefore presents a differentiated aspect. As stated, SELF EXPERIENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD is needed in order to recognize it, or even to admit its existence. The stirring experience mentioned above produces the result that everything which constitutes our Ego separates from us and that otherwise dormant forces awaken within us. Our soul-spiritual being that helps to build up our physical body and unites itself with the hereditary stream, with everything that comes to us from father and mother, separates from us, and this separation is a deeply stirring, significant experience. A new being then comes to life within us and we realize that the Being which passes through birth and death is not that part of our being which we ordinarily look upon as our own Self! We now experience that part of our being described by spiritual science, the eternal part which passes through REPEATED LIVES ON EARTH.\nWe now face the prospect of solving the problem of infinity in a concrete way, for without such a solution we confront an infinity extending beyond our vision. Infinity comprises single lives on earth. Insight into the super-sensible worlds and knowledge of these worlds can only be acquired along the path described above. People who think that a really satisfactory knowledge can be gained along some other path follow a wrong direction which does not lead to the stirring soul experiences described above. For they wish to acquire super-sensible truths which are really physical facts, truths pertaining to the physical world, but this does not lead them to real knowledge. One can therefore see how difficult it is for modern people to acquire a true knowledge of the super-sensible even for the best of our contemporaries. Here we can only adopt Schopenhauer's standpoint, who says that to begin with truth takes on a paradoxical form, for this has always been its lot. People now adopt the same attitude towards spiritual science as they once did towards Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus. We must take it for granted that spiritual science necessarily encounters the same obstacles. Giordano Bruno said that the blue vault of heaven was not a boundary, as was generally believed. This made natural science progress immensely. Spiritual science is in the same situation today. There are no boundaries of birth (or conception) and death, even as the blue vault of heaven is not a boundary. Giordano Bruno, though he realized the limitations of human knowledge, showed that one can look into infinity and envisage infinite worlds in the infinite firmament. The spiritual scientist must now speak in a similar way. He sets forth truths pertaining to the super-sensible worlds. But our contemporaries find it difficult to understand such truths. They can see that the teaching of repeated lives on earth can really throw light upon human destiny, and they realize that this conception gives courage and strength, for it shows that death does not blot out the human being, but that he can find himself again in future lives on earth. Many of our contemporaries can see this. Nevertheless they expect proofs supporting this truth, proofs which must be advanced in a different way from the one described above and they reject everything which is set forth from the super-sensible aspect.\nA modern writer who really tried to penetrate into the super-sensible sphere and who showed this in many of his writings, recently also occupied himself with the teaching designated as that of repeated lives on earth. This writer is Maurice Maeterlinck. Further down I will quote a passage from his book “ON DEATH.” Maeterlinck has no idea where the proofs for super-sensible truths should be sought, and so he designates this teaching as a mere belief, as mere faith.\nSpiritual science, however, has nothing to do with beliefs and dogmas. The Copernican world conception can be accepted independently of any belief, because it is science. In the same way spiritual science, like Copernicanism, does not come into conflict with any faith. Yet Maeterlinck looks upon it as a belief and the teaching of repeated lives on earth is to him something which can also be found in certain religions, as Metempsychosis. Yet spiritual science speaks of something quite different! It speaks of the REPEATED LIVES ON EARTH. In his book on death Maeterlinck writes:\n... “There never existed a belief more beautiful, just, pure, moral and consoling, and in a certain sense a more probable belief than theirs. Only the teaching of universal atonement and purification of all bodily and spiritual imperfections can explain every social error and all the injustice in human destinies which so often make us feel indignant. But the strength of a BELIEF does not prove its truth. Although six millions of people adhere to it, although it approaches the darkness of man's origins more than any other and is the only one which is not filled with hatred, although it is the least absurd of all religions, it should have given us what the others failed to bring: irrefragable witnesses. So far it has only given us the first shadow of a first testimony.”\nIn the first place, spiritual science has nothing to do with religion; it is a world conception like Copernicanism. Spiritual science is never in contrast with any religion which is rightly understood. But Maeterlinck's new book, which also deals with modern spiritual science, shows that he does not see that spiritual science comes to its results along paths which are quite different from those of ordinary external science. That is why he adopts the standpoint that spiritual science fails to supply proofs. What kind of proofs does he expect? Proofs consisting in the very things which must be cast aside when one enters the super-sensible worlds! He confronts this in the same way in which one used to confront the problem of the squaring of the circle. Until quite recently, the almost yearly attempts to transform a circle into a square covering the same surface never passed the test. The Academy in Paris showed that such attempts cannot lead to any results and that they must end in the wastepaper basket! If one day a solution can really be found, it will somehow come to the surface, but the Academicians declared that they could not waste their time in checking all the calculations presented to them in connection with the squaring of the circle, and people who still try to tackle this problem are looked upon as amateurs, because it is evidently impossible to solve it with the aid of mathematics. Consequently one must say that at the present time it is foolish to attempt to solve this problem of squaring the circle.\nSpiritual science can easily show that in regard to super-sensible things people try to square the circle in another sphere! Supersensible things have to be treated in accordance with the methods described in “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and their demonstrations must be understood accordingly. Otherwise one chases after problems which resemble that of the squaring of the circle. One can find even today that the teaching of repeated lives on earth is “more beautiful, pure, just, and consoling,” more probable than others, and nevertheless fail to recognize it. But it is possible to grasp it if one can see that one cannot discuss it intellectually.\nSupersensible facts must, of course, be investigated by a spiritual investigator, but when they have been investigated, they are accessible to the ordinary intellect. To such truths one cannot apply demonstrations which are obtained by ordinary means, but only proofs such as those required for the understanding of a painting by someone who is not a painter. The ordinary intellect can examine the facts pertaining to the spiritual world and grasp its characteristics. Under the ground there are mines and ores, which cannot exist upon the surface of the earth, under the direct influence of the sunlight. Similarly the results of spiritual investigation cannot be found with the aid of ordinary thought, or through ordinary science. For the investigation of spiritual facts we need the soul forces described above. But when the results of spiritual investigation are communicated, this is the same as sunlight penetrating into the depths of the earth and revealing the ores in all their beauty and refulgence.\nThe ordinary intellect can therefore grasp the results of spiritual investigation, but super-sensible facts can only be investigated by a soul that undergoes the training described above. When we thus grasp spiritual-scientific truths, we develop within the soul a FORCE which gives us inner strength and support. Fruits ripen within us, which appear as a definite way of thinking and feeling, as a definite volitional attitude towards our own self and the universe.\nWe have amply explained all the obstacles which the soul must overcome in order to enter the spheres where the spiritual world reveals itself in its authentic form. We must pierce the darkness and at the conclusion of this lecture we may accept the feelings which are expressed in the following words. If the soul never flags, it will finally come\n\nThrough difficult soul obstacles, Through the chaos of spiritual darkness, To earnest clarity, To luminous truth."
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