Central Europe Between East and West

GA 174a — 2 May 1918, Munich

Eleventh lecture

Today, on the first day of our branch reflections, we want to make a reflection, as is appropriate to the circumstances of the times, that extends to what can fall from our spiritual-scientific endeavor as light on many things that time, questioning, demanding, and should at least fill him with tasks, tasks that are indeed posed in the most eminent sense by the spirit of the time and on whose grasp by each individual perhaps much of the fate of humanity in the near future could depend. Let us start from something that may be obvious to us. You will have noticed that for some time now there has been a change in the mood of the outside world towards our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a change in mood to the effect that this spiritual science is viewed with growing hostility here and there. Only someone who does not appreciate the history of spiritual movements in the right way can be surprised when such a change of mood, such a change of mood, comes; it will come with even greater intensity. As long as a movement like this one is mainly confined to a certain sectarian activity, as long as it is confined to a few people coming together here or there in different cities, sectionally uniting in front or back houses to pursue this or that sectionally, as long as such emerging movements are viewed with a certain indulgent goodwill which here and there may develop into something else, but that is left at that. There is no need to take such movements seriously; they will disappear by themselves, and the rooms in the front and back buildings where such things are done in a sectarian, more family-like way will be claimed by something else. For many years such an attitude prevailed in the outside world towards our movement, and the hostility that arose was more or less an oasis in comparison with the general mood. But things have changed a little, in that at least one side has increasingly endeavored to cast off the sectarian character of the movement. Although resistance to this sectarianism and to uniting with the general culture of the present arises again and again, even from within the ranks of our own society, an energetic attempt must be made to come together with those who are otherwise striving in the culture of the present, despite all resistance and hostility. It will not be enough just to sit down and read out lectures in a comfortable way and the like – although that can of course be a nice family task – one will be obliged to grapple with what people want here and there, to to tie in with what is wanted here and there, in order to find, precisely through the interrelationship with the perhaps reluctant movements of the outside world, what must be found for the present through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

And a very important task for our friends will be to develop the necessary flexibility of mind that will be needed to truly find this way out of the comfortable, safe, warm, family-like environment. It is necessary, but the necessity is not yet felt everywhere. This leads directly to the question: How will the various impulses of our spiritual movement have to deal in the future with that which is traditional or newly arising, or with the belief that it may be something new? How will that which comes from us have to deal with such movements? How will that develop?

Well, first of all, despite all the apparent approval from this or that side, the resistance will be particularly strong on the part of the official representatives of religious, denominational world views. These religious and confessional representatives of world views, from whose ranks exemplary confessors of our movement will certainly emerge, will nevertheless, in their majority, repeatedly emphasize what they pick up from the inherited good of their views, and will find plenty of support among the masses of people today, who, of course, do not believe in authority themselves, but fall for every kind of authority. In particular, it will be difficult to push through spiritual scientific knowledge against the current mood, which is based on a certain extraordinarily comfortable way in which human souls have become accustomed to finding their relationship to the spiritual world. How many people in the present day actually say: “Ah, there come such spiritual researchers who construct a whole world of hierarchies!” One should ascend through the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on to a supreme spiritual, to a supreme divine. Such people find all this far too 'intellectual' to go along with, and they point to the simple, as they call it, naive relationship in which, through strong inner experience, the soul can come to God or even to Christ and the like. This is what you hear over and over again from those who think they know better: direct experience of the highest divine! Why should a person need so many hierarchical intermediaries to come to spiritual knowledge? They can find union with the highest divine in their childlike, simple experience.

But now we have to ask ourselves: What happens in the souls of those who, really with a certain honesty, even if this honesty is a comfortable one, characterize their striving in this way: They speak of the divine that they experience. There are people who have definitely experienced a certain change in their emotional life, through which everything they call divine, spiritual, appears to them differently than it did before. Some call it evangelism, others call it something else, but that does not matter. It is the belief that these people have found access to the highest divine in a childlike, naive way. Some people imagine that experiencing the Christ within is quite simple. But what do they really experience?

Now, I assume that the experiences that are meant here are genuine and honest, that people really experience something, that they have really experienced a change in their spiritual life. I start from a very honest conviction. I also start from a certain lack of prejudice towards the traditional confessional beliefs. What these people experience is then at most the next spiritual that a person can experience. And what is this next spiritual? This next spiritual is that being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, which is assigned to every person for his guidance, which one can call whatever one likes: Christ, the highest God, if one likes! - It does not depend on what one calls it, but on what it really is, which approaches the soul when one has an honest, real experience: It is the Angelos, the Angel, and this Angel one regards only as the highest God. One is too lazy to progress to something else, and the next thing one experiences one designates as one's God and constructs with it — yes, what actually? — the most egotistical religion one can possibly construct! It is not important that all people communicate by giving the thing a single name, because since people do not want to experience anything other than what has been suggested, everyone experiences only their own angel, everyone worships only their own angel. And no matter how many preachers speak of the unified God, of the seemingly monotheistic God, in truth they only speak of the millions of angels that people worship and to whom they give the same name, thus driving people into confusion that these millions of beings are only one being. That is the reality, and at the same time it points to the illusion that one falls prey to when one wants to unite with the most egotistical God in this way.

There is already an external indication of what I have just mentioned. Try to resort to the learned aids that can also be used on such occasions, and you will be able to learn something strange: Take the most learned things in this field today and try to gain knowledge of the origin of a very common word. You will find a word in particular about which all scholars within the German-speaking area will tell you: the origin of it cannot be fathomed. That is the word God and its adjective divine. Take the German dictionary: the article 'spirit' in the dictionary is also not very satisfactory, but still more satisfactory than the article 'God'. All you can find out is that no one knows where the word God comes from. There are all kinds of hypotheses, but no one knows where it comes from. In the face of such a learned conclusion, will anyone still be able to shrink from the assertion that numerous people who speak of God and the divine do not know what they are talking about? Quite naturally, because they use a word of unknown origin for something, well, for whatever they would like to use it for. Things are more serious than they would like to admit. But one does not want to tackle these things. One does not realize how much one lives in clichés and how happy one feels to be able to live in clichés. That is one thing. But one can also find something else.

If you go for the reality that people experience when they speak of their God today, even transcending the denominational, and experience him in their own inner being, they may call it mystical or theosophical, you can experience over and over again that people say: It all comes down to experiencing God within yourself, to becoming one with God within yourself! What exactly does one become one with in this case? If one investigates the thing with which the human being then becomes one, without realizing it, it is nothing other than one's own soul as it was before it entered into physical existence through conception or birth, as this soul has lived between the last death and this birth. Today, even if he sincerely wants to be religious, man either worships his angel or his own ego as it was before birth or conception. He calls it his God and attributes it to the word of unknown origin; but what he really feels dawning from the unconscious is himself. And the curious thing comes to light for the one who sees through reality, that from all pulpits there is constant talk of predestination, and since one cannot think of this without repeated earth lives, so the truth is spoken of these earth lives, namely of one's own self that goes through them, and at the same time the fact of these repeated earth lives is denied. In truth, nothing is talked about more than what Anthroposophy wants to bring to conscious human knowledge.

Now people find that it is necessary to give the matter a name of unknown origin. They actually talk about something emerging from the subconscious that can be experienced in mystical experiences. They call it being with God. In reality, it is being with oneself, with one's self, as it was before birth. If you call it God and ask people to worship it, you are asking people to worship themselves. Self-idolatry is what is celebrated as religion in many cases today. It is necessary to say this today because it describes the full seriousness of reality. But at the same time it is uncomfortable because it points to the tremendously profound lie that permeates our lives.

This life lie has essentially been led to what I have already mentioned here: that in the year 869 at the Eighth General Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, the spirit was abolished. I mentioned that the philosophical, unprejudiced people who start from the so-called unconditional science, today speak of the fact that man consists of body and soul. In truth, he consists of body, soul and spirit. But in the year 869 it was forbidden to speak of the spirit. And there is nothing that Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages avoided more than speaking of the so-called trichotomy of the spirit. But as soon as one left trichotomy, from which, for example, Dionysius the Areopagite still started, from which copies were still made in the 6th century, all of which still speak of the higher hierarchies, as soon as one took leave of what is so eagerly fought against even in today's world, of the old Gnosis, which of course , which of course must present itself to us in a different form today, but which was an enormously lofty thing for its time. As soon as one took leave of it and took into account the comfort of the intellect, one was also condemned to speak gradually of something that actually leads the soul into a terrible life-lie. No wonder that because spiritual science must tell the truth about these things, it arouses the most violent opposition today. And today, in many cases, people do not really want to listen to what people actually want to express in their hearts. It is truly the case that today, for the most part, people have completely forgotten how to listen with their souls.

Sometimes this comes to the surface in grotesque examples. People no longer care about what is actually being said, but about saying something themselves, regardless of whether it is relevant or not. This is not an isolated phenomenon, it is typical, it happens everywhere at every turn. I could give you a hundred examples of this, and a thousand. This is how it is in the literary field, and this is also how it is on the big world stage.

But what is really driving the present, what is driving the present and has ultimately led to such a catastrophe, is intimately connected with such things, with such a spiritual state of the present. This must be pointed out again and again. Even today there are still people who feel compelled to speak of love for one's neighbor, to speak of the fact that one has to respond to the other with understanding and love. But in reality none of this exists. Instead, the prevailing mood is that which Fritz Mauthner expresses in the case of Boll, with which you are familiar, where he launches a terrible tirade against someone who actually agrees with him completely.

In such matters, what one has to clearly and sharply perceive in the present is expressed characteristically and typically. Only by developing the will to engage with such matters will one find the standpoint necessary to make progress today in some way in the sense of human evolution at a place to which one is placed by one's karma.

Above all, we must recognize the following today: we must really look at what has developed in the human being from the last death to the present birth. We can no longer deceive ourselves, we can no longer have illusions through self-idolization, through self-adoration, by calling that which we actually find within us as our real self, God. One will no longer be able to indulge in such deceptions, but will have to look at what everyone brings with them into their physical existence as a legacy from spiritual worlds through their birth. Where is it actually? Yes, my dear friends, we all bring it with us, we bring an enormous amount of wisdom and spiritual knowledge into our physical existence through our birth. Where is it then? We are all so wise when we are born that we cannot believe how wise we are. But where is this wisdom? On the one hand, it is enchanted in our physical body and its predispositions, with which it has united, and on the other hand in our destiny. It wants to be released from this. And in the present time cycle of humanity it lies that this heritage be released through the free activity of the human being, be brought up as higher I-knowledge of what lies enchanted in ourselves and our destiny. We can, by realizing that the human being of today lives differently than the human being of past cultural epochs, also come to some insight about such things.

Let me remind you of something I have already mentioned here. I said that in the first cultural period of the post-Atlantic epoch, people lived differently than they do today. He experienced spiritually and mentally what was happening physically in him. Just as we as children today experience the change of teeth as a special turning point, and experience sexual maturity as a turning point in our psyche, so until the 1950s, people in the first post-Atlantic cultural period experienced their physical development. Then came the time when this was only experienced until the forties, then until the thirties. Today we only experience these things until the twenties. Until the twenties, the human being today experiences what is going on in him physically; then he is, as it were, emancipated. He can no longer experience by himself what lives in the descending development of life; he must experience it by allowing himself to be spiritually stimulated by the soul. The spiritual science must give the impulse to redeem what lies enchanted in our body or in our destiny. Our present-day education has not even come close to achieving this, let alone penetrating it. It must be recognized that an impulse must be laid in man in his earliest youth so that man may learn to grow older. People today do not understand growing old. At most, they understand that they are getting gray hair or – particularly common today – early baldness or similar signs of aging. But there is not what there can be in people: the expectation, the hopeful expectation for each new year, with the certainty that by getting older, one experiences something every year that cannot be experienced earlier. Every year brings something new, every year brings a new revelation, if one knows how to use it.

Of course, the mood must come over people, through which they say to themselves: Now I am turning twenty years old, the thirty- to forty-year-old has experienced something that I cannot yet experience today. I have to wait, then it will reveal itself to me. Consider seriously in all its aspects what it would mean if education worked in such a way that one could look forward hopefully to the approach of one's life. The opposite mood is cultivated today. People want to be elected to state parliaments and other parliaments at a very early age because they believe that one is ready at the earliest age, that one already has it all. What is more common today than for the youngest badgers to say at every opportunity: “That's my point of view!” — Everyone today already has a point of view at the earliest age. It is completely unknown to people that hope lives expectantly, that life holds secrets that reveal themselves little by little. But it would mean a great deal if this were to be incorporated into our education. Then one would have the will to gradually release that which is enchanted into our body and into our destiny.

However, we will have to see the culture as it has gradually developed in a very special light if we want to educate ourselves about such things. We will have to ask ourselves: How do we actually find the right point of view to gradually release what is enchanted in us? — Yes, we may even have to ask ourselves something else: Why should we redeem what we have within us in the form of enchantment? Is it not much more comfortable to leave it to the flesh and the nerves and the blood down there? It can rest there until we die and enter the other world; it can eke out an existence there. We leave what lies within us in enchantment to the nerves, the muscles, fate. Why should one then release this? One should and must release it for the reason that the spirit is subject to very definite laws on its way. That which is given to us as inheritance from spiritual worlds wants to be released, wants to be freed from its captivity. And that occurs by being taken up into consciousness. What lies in the body and in destiny wants to make its way into our consciousness. It has its true home in our consciousness. It should live in our consciousness, not be enchanted in our nervous or circulatory systems, in our muscles or in our bones. For if it remains in the nerves, muscles, bones or in the vague, merely suffered destiny, then this spiritual element is transformed into something else: into evil forces. It is destined to be brought into life through consciousness. If it remains united with the person outside of consciousness, it will either turn into Luciferic or Ahrimanic forces, and will gradually be handed over to Ahriman or Lucifer.

But for a long time, our Western cultural development has reckoned with Luciferic forces, and now, through a particularly esteemed spiritual current, it is preparing to reckon with Ahrimanic forces and to live with them. Man is indeed to be placed in the midst of life, is to find his place in life: that is how he is educated. Certain impulses, certain perceptions, certain feelings are cultivated. What impulses and feelings were used for in particular? Look around you at what is happening in the world. It is on the decline and will soon mean very little, but for centuries it has meant a great deal: medals, decorations, titles, honors. But what is behind all this? Feelings, sensations that make one strive to develop instincts, desires, Luciferic tendencies in humanity. Think about how much Luciferic in human nature has been striven for, cultivated, in order to put man in the place where one wanted to put him, by taking a detour through this Luciferic. That was the Luciferic period. It is on the wane. There is hardly any need to talk about it today, because what is happening in this area is on the wane. Even if people do not yet realize how much this is the case, they will see it. One speaks of something that is on the wane when one speaks of the actually Luciferic cultural impulses.

But the Ahrimanic ones are looming ominously. An example of this: right now, what is expected to achieve so much for the cultivation of humanity in the future, what is called the gifted test, the testing of human talents, is going through the German and other cultural “forests of scholars” in glorious representation. In the world of scholarship, very particular plants have emerged in recent times: certain psychologists, certain soul experts. They do experimental psychology, they experiment on people in order to explore the soul. Now, in the very latest times, these people have also turned their attention to young people. Because they can no longer cope with the old examination system and the old social order, they are turning on young people and testing their abilities so that, as they say – and this has already been said in prominent places – the right man is put in the right place. Of course, you have to start with the child to test how to find the right one. First of all, one tests the ability to grasp things by conducting all kinds of experiments: how quickly a child guesses this or that, which is some kind of vague stuff into which they are supposed to put meaning. Then one tests the intelligence, one tests the memory. The intelligence, for example, by presenting two words to the child or young person that are as unrelated as possible, say, for example, 'mirror' and 'robber'. And then you instruct a number of young people, whose intelligence you want to test, to combine these words in a meaningful way, to say what they want to put between these words mirror and robber. One person puts in: Even a robber can look at himself when he sees himself in the mirror. — This person is considered the least intelligent. Another thought up: the person who is to be robbed or even killed by the robber has a mirror; from a distance he sees the robber approaching and can save himself. — This is a more intelligent boy or girl.

There are now magazines in which these hair-raising methods of testing intelligence are described; they are developed and analyzed as a special achievement of the present. In this way, memory and intelligence are tested. A statistical approach is taken. The person who has told the most stories, for example, about what can happen between the robber and the mirror, is given two or more marks, as with censorship, and the person who has the most dashes, who has been able to find the most ingenious connections, is the most intelligent. That is the man or woman who is to be promoted in some way at special colleges with all kinds of support, and so on. The characteristic of these things, which are really praised today as a special achievement of humanity – and the most courageous educators devote all their energy to these aptitude tests – is that in this way one does not approach the soul at all, but only tests what ahrimanic rests in his physicality, that in this way one only tests how strongly Ahriman can develop through one or the other young person. What will be introduced into human culture in this way will be the ahrimanic impulses. But today one indulges in such illusions, such deceptions.

But this must be the significant thing in our spiritual development, that its seriousness is recognized. Of course, in small groups you can sit together and, as I said, read lectures in a family-like comfort: That does not hurt, or rather, what comes from outside does not hurt. But as this spiritual science gradually begins to spread, seriousness also begins, and this seriousness can only consist in wholeheartedly engaging with what is to be taken in connection with what is developing around us. It is necessary to understand these things and to understand them as deeply as they can be understood. It is necessary to develop the flexibility of mind that makes it possible to move beyond sectarianism to a worldly grasp of what our spiritual science is supposed to encompass. For various impulses must come from this spiritual science, which are healthy impulses in the face of many things that are emerging in our time in the form of a decadent, a declining one. Above all, those who want to enter this spiritual current need freedom, a spirit of independence.

For us, it is not about believing in authority, but about acquiring free, independent judgment. For nothing that is said in the field of spiritual science can be generalized; everything applies individually, everything applies in the concrete for the particular case. It is indeed a certain comfort that the human mind seeks to generalize things in so many ways, but this cannot be done as soon as one enters spiritual realms. Today it is absolutely necessary, absolutely imperative, to also open oneself to such insights, which do not stop at the merely indefinite, abstract, mystical, but penetrate into reality from the spiritual. One may believe oneself to be a great mystic, untouched by world events, going one's lonely way through the world, experiencing God within. But all this is a thin spiritual life, so thin that it does not approach what is present in the world as reality. Such mystics are not required in the present time. The individual can demand such mysticism because it can lull him into the comfortable belief that he is experiencing something very sublime in his soul. But the present time demands a strong spirituality that penetrates into the immediate reality. It demands not only a discussion of the higher hierarchies, but also such an insight into the nature of the higher hierarchies that one can, starting from this knowledge of the nature of the hierarchies, gain insight into what surrounds us on earth. For now the time is coming when human order can no longer be found except through real insights into the nature of what is developing here on earth, even if it is uncomfortable to recognize it.

Read the cycle I gave in Kristiania long before the war, in preparation for the present time, about the individual souls of nations, about the connection between the structure of the individual nations. There you will see that what is recognized in the higher hierarchies can be taken seriously, that it can be applied to the configuration of the earth. Such knowledge is necessary for the present. For such knowledge must provide the practical basis for what is to be undertaken in the future. What has to be done will have to be recognized, not from the phrase-filled writings and speeches of people who today talk about the European nations on the basis of what they call their observations, but one will really have to penetrate into what lives on earth in the realm of the spiritual.

Of course, today we think that anyone who has experienced something has something to say under all circumstances. Yes, do you think that everyone who lived a dull existence in some village in Provence from 1789 to 1800 had something very clever to say about the French Revolution? He has experienced the event; but that does not mean that he necessarily has anything significant to say about it! Similarly, countless people can travel to America or Italy and, as they say today, judge a country and its people. But what they say is not necessarily very valuable for judging what is needed. This depends on having the opportunity to get into the depths of existence, and for that today it is necessary not to accept or reject materialism on the one hand for my sake, or to accept or reject spiritualism, no, for the researcher of reality, the spiritual researcher in our sense, it must be completely irrelevant whether one takes one's starting point from being a materialist or a spiritualist. We do not necessarily have to despise the materialists under any circumstances, because it does not matter whether one starts from matter or from spirit, if one only goes to the end! He who in true contemplation goes to the end of matter finds the spirit in the material things that happen around us. And he who wants to rely on the spirit and is always saying, “Spirit, spirit, spirit!” must above all see that he finds the way from abstract comprehension of the spirit to concrete comprehension of what happens materially. For that which happens materially is a revelation of the spirit, but one must develop the right faith in the spiritual. The one who does not have the expectant life, that each new year can radiate new secrets into us as we grow older, that person, no matter how much he speaks of God and the spirit, does not really believe in God and the spirit. For he believes that he is mature at twenty-five in all that makes a person capable of judgment. But then the rest of life is useless, worthless for the soul; the Godhead no longer reveals anything else.

One must penetrate with the spirit to the material, comprehend it. The spiritual must be so condensed that it can find the material. If we grasp what is otherwise going on out there in the world in terms of material phenomena only in terms of what is within us, we must say: there is an abyss between the external and what goes on within us. Only spiritual science is called upon to bring the external world closer to us and to bring us closer to the external world in such a way that the two meet. We can do this for the individual and for the evolution of the earth. Such things must be understood. As I stated yesterday, natural science is the least suited to grasp the fact that the head is in retrogression and the extremities are in over-development. It is particularly necessary to grasp these things. How can we grasp them? We grasp them by going beyond ordinary imagining, beyond abstractness, and forming an imaginative vision of our own imagining. You cannot look at your own imagination without at the same time approaching what is happening materially in your head as you imagine. If you have the ordinary imagination of the ordinary consciousness, you do not notice what is going on in your head. You only notice this when you ascend to imaginative thinking; you experience the material process.

And do you know what happens in the head, in the mind, while we develop ordinary consciousness? A process of hunger takes place. The waking life of imagination consists in our head starving. The false ascetics and false mystics have instinctively understood this. Therefore, they have let the whole body starve. But it is not normal for spiritual experiences to occur when the whole body is starving. That is always wrong. The hunger-asceticism that is supposed to lead to mystical raptures is one-sidedness, an unhealthy direction. But normally the equilibrium of our body is so arranged that from morning to evening, from waking up to falling asleep, not the whole body, but the head is in a continuous hunger process. It is always the head that is undernourished. This is something that belongs to the process of degeneration. And through the undernourishment of the head, we are able to make room for the imaginative spiritual life. And he who gets to know the imaginative spiritual life as imagination also gets to know what others only know in somewhat lower regions when they feel the growling of the stomach. He learns to recognize that from morning till evening, until he falls asleep, he has a growling in his stomach. What takes place is what one can call the approach of the spiritual to the material in our own body. One-sided mysticism is a comfortable sinking into the inner self, where one experiences not much more than what one experiences otherwise, only a little more condensed. True spiritual development is such a strengthening, such an invigoration of the spiritual life that, when one applies it to one's own experience, one gets to know oneself more precisely, but now really more precisely. One also gets to know the bodily more precisely because one moves so close to the bodily that one moves up into the spiritual with the bodily, that one bridges the abyss that is otherwise always there between the spiritual and the bodily.

And so one bridges the abyss that exists between the physical and the spiritual, even outside in the life of nations. Take a look at the European nations, at least some of them. You know that the leading beings from the higher hierarchies with regard to nations – you know this from the cycle on the souls of nations – are the beings of the archangelic hierarchy, the archangeloi. But how do they work? Of course, this is only an abstraction, to see any archangel as the conductor of this or that people. We have no more than when we talk about the human soul, which can only be present between birth and death because it develops out of something material, namely in our body. In the same way, the archangel, in guiding a people, is bound to the external material. The bridge between the purely spiritual nature of the archangel and the nature of the people is a material one, even if it is not as clearly defined and sharply contoured as our body. We ask, for example: What about the people who inhabit the Apennine Peninsula, what about the people who used to be Romans and are now Italians of Germanic origin? For basically, the majority of the inhabitants of today are only transformed Germanic peoples, but they get their configuration, their national determination, from something else, from the fact that in their breathing process, into the air of their breathing process, the archangel enters, not in the sense of incarnation, but in the sense of, well, let us say, permeation. And by breathing with the air, the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula are connected with their archangel. And anyone who really wants to study in order to recognize something of what is actually at work there must study the peculiar connection between the inhabitants of this peninsula (and also of the Iberian Peninsula, although to a lesser extent) and breathing, with the air. They must know how the air and the special breathing process are incorporated into the human inner being.

It is different with those who live in present-day France. Here the archangel takes a different approach, working through everything that is fluid in the human being's natural development. The French often drink their national character with their wines, but also with other things that figure in the organism as liquid elements. You see, in this way one does not merely arrive at abstract descriptions of the connection between the spiritual and the physical world. There is a description that only hints at the archangel, and below that teem with peoples, people, and the archangel guides people. Through true spiritual science one can understand the process in all its concreteness.

The inhabitants of Great Britain receive through the solid matter developing in their bodies what the archangel has to give them. They absorb it as the solid components form in their body, with the solid organization. Of course, this is only in one area where it expresses itself radically, but it is nevertheless not just a harsh truth, but a spiritual scientific truth: as the Englishman eats his beefsteak, the archangel works on him. Of course, this cannot be interpreted in a chauvinistic sense, because the individual individuality separates itself from it. Man belongs to this matter only with a part of his being, but insofar as man belongs to the people, it is effective in him. One only learns about the earth by not being afraid to go into these things in the future. Man has an inordinate fear of the truth because, of course, uncomfortable things come out through the truth. But as soon as the truth is taken seriously, it is necessary not to shy away from this discomfort.

Let us cross over to America. Even outwardly, in its external configuration, it shows how dependent people become on what radiates from the soil! In Italy from the air, in France from the water, in England from what is destined to enter the body as solid ingredients or to become solid in it. In America it is still different.

You will see that spiritual-scientific truths, when measured against reality, find confirmation everywhere. It is just that today we do not seek this confirmation. In earlier years, I once pointed out that the development of the consciousness soul, which particularly emphasizes the egoism of man, is outwardly and materially increased by sugar. At the time, I pointed out how infinitely greater the consumption of sugar is in the British Isles than, for example, among the self-denying Russian people, where the consumption of sugar is infinitely lower. But if one describes how the consciousness soul only comes into being and develops from the 15th century onwards, one only has to look at the history of sugar production: it only begins in the 15th century. Where, then, does our sugar production actually come from? It is only in the 15th century that people begin to depend on sugar. Everything that is really evoked from the spiritual worlds in spiritual science is fully confirmed precisely when it develops so strongly in the spiritual that it can be submerged in the material, where it lives and must therefore be recognized. As soon as one crosses over to America, one finds not only externally that the Europeans who come to America gradually develop different arms and hands: the formation of arms and hands approaches that of the ancient Indians, the ancient Indian people who have been exterminated in America. And this also applies to the configuration of the facial features, even if it occurs only very gradually and only in the third or fourth generation. Of course, we should not imagine that a staid British philistine can suddenly become an Indian in the third or fourth generation, but it only shows in the finer facial features; but it does emerge. We must face these things squarely, for only by doing so will it be possible, through knowledge, to develop true love across the earth. Love can only be developed by truly empathizing with other people. But to do that, it is necessary to get to know them. The folk spirit works on the American people through the undergrounds of the earth, through the magnetic and electrical forces slumbering in the earth. It is the underground that radiates up and that in America provides the medium through which the national spirit directs the people.

And if we go to Central Europe, it is good to let the people think for themselves. But some things can be said: there is actually something very unstable, something very intimate, that is connected with the material expression of the folk spirit, with the material effect of the folk spirit. There it is essentially the effect of warmth on warmth. The differences in warmth that occur between external warmth and internal warmth, the warmth of winter, of spring, of summer, in short, everything that is expressed in the warmth conditions, that is the medium through which the folk spirit in Central Europe works. Everything that affects blood circulation and breathing as a result of warmth conditions is the indirect way in which the folk spirit works here. You can also follow this in the soul. We still have the opportunity - if we are not Fritz Mauthner - to feel something of the after-effect, I would say, of being warmed through, in the element of language. If you are not abandoned by all the good spirits of language, you are able, for example, in German, to feel your way into the language, not just to stop at the abstract element, but to feel your way into the spirit of the language, because warmth is physically related to the soul in warmth. Nothing is more physically akin to the soul than soul warmth and soul coldness are to physical warmth and physical coldness. That which lives in the sentient soul is already much more foreign to the air; that which lives in the intellectual or mind soul is much more foreign to the element of water, and even that which lives in the consciousness soul is foreign to beefsteak, that is, to the earth. And what is expressed in the human soul is terribly foreign to the magnetic and electrical forces that radiate from the underground into the human development of the American character. That is why there is so much in the American national character that appears as if the American is obsessed by what he does, in contrast to the Central European, who must be with the soul in everything he does, and who can therefore also develop mystical warmth, while the American can so easily develop a spiritualist attitude, can be obsessed by some spiritual thing, just as one can become obsessed by something that no longer flows directly into people, like air, water, earth, but only works up from the earth's underworld to form the structures of a people.

In the Russian national character, in what is being prepared in the East – we will continue to talk about such things the day after tomorrow – the folk spirit is at work, but it is only called upon to play a special role through its people in the future. the folk spirit works through the light, and indeed through the light in such a way that it does not work through the light that radiates directly from the sun, but through the light that is first absorbed into the vegetation and into the earth itself and radiates back again. The solar power reflected by the earth, especially by the vegetation, the solar power working from the ground, is what the Russian national spirit uses as its medium to bring about the structure and organization of the nation.

If we look at all these details — I will talk more about this the day after tomorrow — then we will see how the present and the near future need not a general, vague, phrase-like mysticism, but a spiritually so strong spirit-knowledge that it can immerse itself, that it can put itself into the material existence with which one has to live. So that material existence, when it can be contemplated in its kinship with the spirit, is not regarded, as one has done by mistake, as something one would like to get out of like one's skin in order to get to the spirit, but must be regarded precisely as a revelation of the spirit. He does not yet have the right relationship to the spirit who is unable to recognize that which is physical is in truth a manifestation of the spirit. Everything around us is the body of the spirit. And only when one grasps the spirit in such a way that one is able to see nature as the body of the spirit, only then is one capable of attaining true spiritual knowledge. But these are the things that must be striven for as concrete spiritual knowledge. But is it not actually the case with these things, as soon as one approaches them with complete sincerity, that they become uncomfortable for people, these people of the present day, who of course do not love such truths, who would prefer to hear only: People must love each other across the earth! Yes, certainly, but first they must recognize each other. And love must become independent of what meets one in knowledge, but it can only become independent if that meets one in knowledge. For what I have described, including what I have described about the souls of nations, you all know it, your nerves, your muscles, your blood knows it: it is enchanted in it, it must be brought out of it; and if it is not brought out in the near future, it will stir in the nerves, in the muscles, in the blood, and it will go over the earth as disharmony, as an impulse to conflict and war. The only way to prevent this from happening is to ensure that the spirit, which would otherwise transform into its ahrimanic or luciferic counter-image, is released from nerves and muscles and blood and guided into consciousness, because it wants to live here on earth only in consciousness. Only when he lives in consciousness is he established in his true existence and leads people to what they must come to in the future. He must not be left down there in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic realm, because he transforms when he cannot find his place. This ability of the spirit to transform must be recognized, for it is from this recognition that the tasks for the future arise. It is not easy to rise to the level required of humanity for the future, but it is necessary to dig deep with knowledge so that the tasks of the future can be solved. To do this, it is necessary for people to overcome certain inconveniences. And because they do not want to overcome them, they will often become enemies of spiritual development. This will have to be taken into account, especially when spiritual science spreads. The stronger such a thing becomes, and the more you are all called upon to make the transition from comfortable sectarianism to a cosmopolitan view, to work on the plan of the world, to carry this spiritual science out of the front and back parlors to those places where it is believed that the affairs of mankind must be negotiated. That is what I wanted to talk about today; I will continue the day after tomorrow.