# Supplements to Member Lectures

## GA 246 — 6 May 1912, Cologne

### 50. Receiving Messages from the Gods

*Inauguration of the branch room*

My dear theosophical friends!

We have come together here at this hour to turn our eyes and our souls to that which the loving, understanding spirit of our Cologne friends and members has given to our theosophical endeavor and our theosophical work of the present. Our Cologne members, as we want to remember at this time, have allowed that which has entered their souls in the years since the Giordano Bruno branch in Cologne has existed, in terms of understanding for our theosophical worldview and for the impulses of love and work among people which can follow from the theosophical worldview, to flow into the outer shell which they have now created for this theosophical work here in Cologne. Everything that has entered their hearts and souls from this theosophical worldview has prompted them to build this shell worthy of the spirit they serve, the soul to which they are devoted, so that within this shell theosophical work can also flourish better and better in this place.

At all times, my dear theosophical friends, it has been felt how the outside should be appropriate to the inside. It is only in our present time, in which so much materialistic sense pervades everything, that even an ancient proverb, which speaks of the correspondence of the outer to the inner, has been misunderstood. It was once intended to express that the soul, the spirit, is the original, the true, the active, that this soul and this spirit build their corresponding body and that only a soul which is guided by a correct spiritual impulse can express itself outwardly in the right way in its body, that it is a sign of a beautiful soul when the body as its outward expression is allowed to betray the inner beauty of the soul through its beautiful form. The ancient proverb “A beautiful soul in a beautiful body” is formed from this feeling; it announces, this body, that this soul, which created it and which dwells in it, is beautiful through its spiritual impulses, through its truth. In our time, however, we are close to believing that all we need to do is look after the body properly, make it beautiful, and then this body will become a beautiful soul of its own accord. Nowadays, materialistic life turns everything on its head!

In the outside world you don't even realize how much things are actually turned upside down by the materialistic sense, because people don't look at what is turned upside down and actually find that it is so right in the world. We will often notice in the assessment of theosophical life and work in the outside world that people talk about material existence being the only true and real thing in the world and that the spirit is nothing but a thought in people's brains. People will perceive this as truth, whereas they will perceive what is seen as true reality in the field of theosophical life as fanaticism, as rapture. The only thing that will inform people that they have turned things upside down will be that a time will come when all that which they have turned from the highest to the lowest will no longer be possible. When the spirit of our advancing cultural current will be missing, people will learn to feel more and more from the desolation of their souls, from the desolation of their existence, what Theosophy can be to these desolate souls, to this desolate existence. They will gradually realize that Theosophy must be there in the world, that they need it for their progress.

In the course of our theosophical endeavors, we have been able to point out how, in the course of human development, we can trace how it has striven to give the spirit envelopes. We have pointed to the Greek temple, whose external form can be seen in such a way that one can say: This Greek temple could only arise within a worldview in which the word could be spoken out of the fullest, most intimate feeling, which testifies to how intimately united [the Greeks felt] with everything that is on the physical plan. The word that fully expressed their love for the physical plan, so that they would rather dwell here as beggars than there as kings.

As much as the gods could pour out life onto the physical plan, so much did the Greeks receive in this fourth post-Atlantean period and they intimately united with this divinity on the physical plan and felt life as a divinity and they built their temples to these gods living among them on the physical plan. Thus we perceived such a Greek temple that we could say that a god dwelt in it and that its outer form expressed the fact that people could be far away from this temple and that one could still see that a god dwelt in it and that the outer form was only its shell. That is the idea of the Greek temple.

Then we see a further stage in the development of humanity in the Gothic cathedral, which cannot be thought of as anything other than including the congregation of people who receive the power of God through the power of the Word. While the Greek temple is complete when there is no one in it but God alone, the cathedral is incomplete when there is no one in it. It must enclose the congregation. This is already in the word: Dom = Tum. This syllable expresses the interaction of human souls: “Volkstum”, “Duma” and so on. Thus the cathedral takes its name from that which belongs to its essence like a second side, from the congregation, from that which listens to the divine word. The Greek temple is a dwelling place of the divine spirit, the Gothic cathedral is a dwelling place of the hearing people. For the development of mankind has progressed from Greek times to the Christian Middle Ages. The saying “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word” was heard more or less clearly. - But this proclamation of the Word was truly opposed by the other saying as the fifth post-Atlantean period approached: “And now incline the ear to the Word, and let the ear be in the holy place and listen to the Word, which holds there, pressing towards the ear, the divine spirit.” The sounding divine word must be confronted by the listening, receiving ear and the heart of man. Thus the spiritual was advanced - and those who were able to create a shell for this advanced spirit out of the spirit had an understanding of this.

In the Gothic period, they gave a cover to listening to the divine word. This time is also over, in which this mood in the spiritual currents was the only correct one in time. Again, we as human souls have progressed a little further in evolution, and a new task has been set for our time. We understand this task of spiritual life, into which we ourselves are to be interwoven, when we are able to hear the two words in the most spiritual, in the most comfortable sense, the two words “forget” and “remember”. These two words can teach us much of what we should learn to absorb into our feelings and sensations, into our thinking and into our impulses of will, which are to be achieved in the unfolding of the human spirit in the sense of theosophical feeling, thinking and willing!

The motifs that confront us here in this newly constructed room for our work, the colors and forms - from what spirit do they come? From the same spirit that is to speak to us even more richly in the shell that is to serve our work, in our building in Munich. A correct understanding of the words “forgetting” and “remembrance” should be achieved through the whole way in which the spirit gives itself a shell. But you have to feel and sense many things in your soul if you want to feel and sense these two words in the right way: “forgetting” and “remembrance”.

We have tried again and again to make it clear in what sense we can speak of the world around us as a maya, a great illusion. But have we ever spoken of the world around us only and solely as a great illusion? Have we not always contrasted this maya with the fact that we have appreciated the world insofar as it is a revelation of divine spiritual life? Never should the expression “the world is maya” tempt us to turn away from this sacred nature, which confronts us in the colors and forms of living beings in infinite beauty and infinite wisdom! That would be the greatest sin against the holy spirit of existence if we could not feel nature as a revelation of divine life and wanted to find our way away from it by thoughtlessly coining the word that it is only maya, the great illusion! Nor should we think of withdrawing in our moral life from experiencing in love all the suffering and pain that lives in the hearts of our fellow human beings. It might have been a grandiose egoism if we wanted to think that this was just an illusion! Only then do we really feel the meaning of this expression when we immediately think back to ourselves and say to ourselves: Maya is our own weakness and [our own] misunderstanding of holy nature.

It is only because we look at it with our weak human views that not all the beauties of existence are revealed to us. But if we can get away from ourselves, if we can get out of our own narrow personality - then we will see that gods want to reveal themselves to us in all things of nature and that we ourselves spread a blanket of mist over things.

And if we ourselves, with our souls, were to be mired in the deep riddles of existence and ask ourselves: Why is there so much suffering and pain in existence that could not seem to correspond to a divinely spiritualized existence? If we seriously struggled to see that which is mixed into the world of divine revelations by ourselves as our guilt, our transgression, our egoism, if we looked at this as the source from which suffering and pain arise in life - if we saw all this in existence, then the world would no longer be maya.

Why then is the world initially maya, illusion, to people? This expression must be felt and sensed, not merely spoken. If one feels the word maya in the sense that has just been indicated, then one is contrite, then one is ashamed of oneself, then one is plunged into an abyss of misery and shame. As a human being, you know that you are a miserable creature, unable to see through your smallness and imperfection to the greatness and glory of creation. You have to feel that!

[And as long as this is not felt in all its gravity, humanity will no longer be able to live on!] All, all must learn to feel this in some incarnation - then they will come to Theosophy and then they will attain the other feeling that gives the answer to the question: Why is the world maya, illusion?

And this answer will be given to man! The question must arise in man so that the gods can give an answer to this question. And so the gods say: O man, transform this maya into reality and actuality, carry this reality into all the future! If you had not been given the appearance, the illusion, then you would not have been given this task by the gods to transform the appearance into reality! You are to transform maya into reality! - Everything that exists in the earthly-physical realm is like a reflection of the work of the gods. But what appears in the mirror is only the reflection of reality.

But when man takes reality, the work of the gods, into himself, then the mirror may shatter - through that what man now carries in himself, what he has taken in his soul, he continues to work that what the gods have created before him. The gods have created the world over millions of years, they have created a mirror image of themselves in this world, and man has this mirror image in his soul. Even if the outer mirror of the deity, the world, shatters and splinters, man must carry the divine within him into the future! If he feels this, then he carries within him the awareness of what he has to do with maya, then he feels how he, the human being, is the detour to the salvation of the most intimate matters of the world into the future. And out of the consciousness of this task, Theosophy will lift up the human souls when, driven by the suffering and pain, by the misery of life in the mere maya, they save themselves to it.

In such a spirit of misery (outside), but at the same time of upliftment (inside), we sit in our lodges, and whatever we absorb of Theosophy in them, what does it become for us? If we merely want to experience something through Theosophy, then we are not facing it in the right sense. It is egoism that people want to come to the Lodge just to learn something new and interesting! Unfortunately, this is an old habit that must be broken if we want to work and act theosophically in the right way. Such people must know that everything they have acquired through their so-called cognition as mere knowledge of spiritual things is nothing! This knowledge has no meaning at all for a spiritual future. Man has such knowledge, which dies when he passes through the gate of death. Nothing, nothing at all remains for the future. People have become accustomed to practicing theosophy in this way at first.

But that is not the right feeling towards Theosophy. Only then will you have this right feeling, my dear Theosophical friends, when you imagine, when you gather in your lodges for your Theosophical work, that there is not only a knowledge to be attained, but a power! Imagine as if a God were present in these theosophical lodges and would give you his gifts, that divine power would flow into you and that you are the vessels to receive this divine stream of life. And that you have to carry this spiritual stream out into humanity, which from now on will pour out within the entire development of humanity! You are to receive a message from the gods every time you come together in your lodges, not mere knowledge that satisfies your curiosity. And you must learn to feel: If I do not receive this message, then I am only helpless and inactive in the face of outer life, then I lack everything that gives me strength and power to find my way within the world of maya and to transform it into a spiritual reality! - If you have this feeling, then you have a right feeling within the Lodge! Then you will also know that Theosophy is the holiest and most intimate of your souls!

And then you will also feel in what way the spirit has progressed since Greek times. There we have the God, secluded for himself in the Greek temple, where he does not need a congregation of people around him. Then we have the congregation in the Gothic cathedral, which needs the word of God. And then in our time we have the theosophical lodge: outside the world, in which man himself can forget everything that has come into the world from the beginning until now - and in the lodge we have the man who knows that he has been assigned a task for the future, who receives a letter of guidance into the future in such a lodge. Man must feel this, this progress in the spiritual development of mankind.

The Saturn, the sun, the moon development and a part of the earth development is behind us. We have been informed of this, we receive this information in our lodges. And this message is wrapped up in the earth maya. We must realize that we must be able to forget everything that remains as a remnant of old times, that it all looks like a testament of the gods who worked in ancient times. Our branch work reveals to us the testament of these gods; man may unseal it, but what should he read from it? - He should read nothing from it that merely satisfies his curiosity, his egoism, but this is what he should read from it: How he is to co-create in the divine building of the world! We must be able to forget the old; remember that we must only be devoted to the new wisdom, to that which creates the future. We must also forget everything that surrounds us outside as materialistic culture; remember that in such a space we have symbols in all the colors and forms that confront us, in which the spirit that lives in such a space expresses itself. That this spirit may come alive in us, glow through us and widen our spiritual view into a spiritual world, that is our basic feeling - that is how we must live in such a space!

The Greek god closed the shell around himself. In the Middle Ages, the shell was felt to contain the Word. But we must feel our envelope in our lodges as if we were in a room and there were something in colors and forms which, as we look at it, begins to grow wider and wider, to expand more and more, to grow towards our gaze. But what grows out of it is not empty, not spiritless. It contains the spirit that we feel when we receive the will of the gods in this space, and which spurs us on to what is our task for the future. Our symbols thus expand into an active world! To the world in which we are co-creators. When we are in our rooms in this way, forgetting the outer world and remembering the spiritual world, then we live theosophically in our rooms!

And if such a room with our distinctly Rosicrucian symbols appears in any place and our members work in it, if they conceive the idea of clothing their work with such a room, then this is a sign that something of that sacred sense of duty is present, even if perhaps subconsciously, in the people of this branch. Then these people no longer feel Theosophy as a mere desire, something they want to have, but as a duty. And therefore, every time such an envelopment appears, a stage of theosophical development is passed, and in this respect such a thing has a great, deep, true meaning within our work.

Our friends here in this place, who have been able to take this sacred duty into their hearts, let it be said in this hour that in the way they can and will, the spiritual powers look down on their work, that they imbue the spiritual life that is to unfold here with their power, that theosophical spiritual life finds the blessing from the spiritual worlds out of such a sacrificial act. We are grateful to our dear friends and members in Cologne because they want to make this sacrifice, which is expressed here. This sacrifice! We do not want to say to them, as is usually done in the material world, “You will receive retribution for this sacrifice”. Or: It will be well regarded by the masters of wisdom who are the rulers of our spiritual movement!

No, we want to get out of the habit of using such words within our theosophical movement. But we, who strive theosophically in the most diverse places, and all of you who have come to be guests in these rooms today, we will feel grateful for what our friends in Cologne have done! And most of you will feel it more or less as a self-evident act that indicates that we have just taken a step forward in our theosophical work.

But there is one thing you may feel from today onwards, the word: I have now understood one degree better what theosophical life actually is! - As people understand this better and better, they will also grow ever more deeply and firmly into our sacred spiritual current.

It is probably not in the spirit of those whose initiative and willingness to sacrifice we owe these spaces to mention them by name. We thank them on behalf of those who are behind this work, which contains greater things than one might think from a superficial overview. Understanding their act of love on the part of these individuals, whom we call the Masters of Wisdom, the friends of Cologne may rest assured that their willingness to make sacrifices will bring them ever deeper spiritual satisfaction.

But I would like to remember one of our friends who knew how to put his great and meaningful skills at the service of our movement in the furnishing of these rooms. Our friend Wildermann is one of those who will certainly be ever more numerous, who will understand that everything that is outwardly shaped into a form must be permeated and flowed through by a spiritual life, and not just any arbitrary, abstruse spiritual life, but by the specific spiritual life of the epoch.

People argue today whether there was a Homer 'or not. Why can scholars, whose souls are desolate, argue about Homer? Because he modestly stepped back as a personality, because he is the artist who understood best of all how to deny himself and express an intellectual current that belonged to his time in an external form. Everything in the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey” existed before Homer in the Greek popular spirit. But the fact that it also lives on in posterity is due to the fact that Homer knew how not to pour himself into his work, but to pour this spirit into a form.

There will come a time when people will not concern themselves with what cardinals preached about Christianity in Rome in the fifteenth century. They used high and beautiful words. But if we look at their deeds, they were certainly not always beautiful!

In the future, perhaps little will be said of what these cardinals preached as their theoretical views. But we will understand something else. There is a painting in the Vatican: the so-called “School of Athens” by Raphael. Even if the painting itself disappears one day, the story of it will live on. And it will live on through the fact that the creator of this painting, Raphael, felt the spirit of the Christian word in a different way to popes and cardinals. Before our souls stands the picture depicting the story from the Acts of the Apostles, where the Athenians are gathered together with all the men of old. Then Paul stands among them and says: "You have long spoken of the unknown God, you have long worshipped the likenesses of the gods in your temples and statues. But I will speak to you of the Spirit who works and lives in all existence, whom no external thing can express, but who lives and works in everything, who is also alive in us! - Many did not understand him, they turned away, only a few understood him.

Raffael had this scene before his eyes, he painted it on the wall and, down to the movement of his hand, he poured the spirit he wanted to pour into the one figure. This figure is not Aristotle - no, this is the one Raphael saw in his mind's eye: Paul, speaking to the people about Christ! Paul is standing there - not Aristotle.

People have misunderstood Raphael so much that they have interpreted all kinds of things into this picture, except that which lived in Raphael's spirit. He knew how to selflessly put into his work that which contained more of the spirit of Christianity than the sermons of the cardinals and popes - that which was the special spirit of his epoch. Something like this will awaken more and more among people in the future.

And if there is an artist among us who shows by his deeds how deeply he has grown together with the great spiritual ideals, then look with right understanding at the work of this artist, which shows his great talent and his beautiful will, when you later look at the picture that is embedded in the wall of this Lodge!

If we imbue ourselves with such feelings and sensations that they are in harmony with the spirit of our epoch, then this spirit will continue to work in our theosophical striving, longing and work, and that which is to be fulfilled through Theosophy will be fulfilled for our work, for all mankind. You will be able to feel how a holy spirit invisibly rules in this room, and if you ask this good spirit who it is, the answer will be: It is the loving, uplifting, empowering thoughts of our Theosophical friends outside that are rippling through this room. And when, at particularly solemn times, you feel these forces that rule in this room in a particularly sacred way - as if the best of a world of spiritual life were being poured into your souls, the deepest that the powers of love and the striving for wisdom can give the human soul - when you feel these forces, say to yourselves quietly and intimately in your soul: "Those who send us these forces are those whom we call the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of sensations - advanced human souls whose work consists in letting their forces flow towards us. I implore their blessing, their assistance, their help at this moment for the work here in this place and in this room, and I know that this prayer to those who guide us is not in vain. By striving honestly and out of truth, the masters will give us their powers, they will rule and be felt in this room, of that we can be certain. We must pledge ourselves to them in this hour in true and sacrificial devotion, and they will be with us in our striving, creating and working in this space. Then we can no longer say: May a good spirit work here. Then the best spirit will rule and work here.