World Mysteries and Theosophy

GA 54 — 19 October 1905, Berlin

Basic Concepts of Theosophy: The Soul and Spirit of Man

Not long ago, in certain circles it was considered eminently unscientific to speak of the human soul as a special entity. And to speak of a spirit in addition to the soul is met with very little understanding today. Now, the topic we have set ourselves today is quite broad in scope. I will only be able to outline a few main points. Within the spiritual scientific worldview, we are led to that older division of the human being, which is a threefold division, as opposed to what is almost solely valid in the consciousness of the present human being, namely the twofold division of body and soul. The threefold division to which the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview must return is that of body, soul, and spirit. First, let us agree on what we actually mean by body, soul, and spirit. The human body is something that does not require much mental image to be understood. But on the other hand, the mental image of the physical, the mental image of the external physical, is so much the only thing that preoccupies our present humanity today that it is quite difficult to understand the difference between soul and spirit, and even the nature of the soul itself. In contrast to some of the other lectures I have given here, we must now pay close attention to the precise meaning of the concepts and ideas we want to develop here, and I must therefore ask you to focus your attention today on the finer distinctions in human mental images.

When a person stands before you, you will readily admit that the space occupied by that person is filled by the human body. For your senses provide you with evidence of this human body. Now, however, the human being can observe himself at least partially through his senses, and we can therefore say that the human being is, for another human being endowed with senses and for himself, a physical, corporeal being. But in the space that the person fills, there is undoubtedly much more than what your senses can see. Perhaps what the other person can see with their eyes and touch with their hands is the least significant thing in human life as a whole. For when people talk about their lives, they very rarely talk about their physical, sensory exterior. They speak of their fate, of joy and sorrow, of pain and everything that lives within and is not immediately perceptible to the senses. One person may stand before you and another beside them. What your senses perceive in these two people is not the most essential thing at first, but it may be that one person has a sad inner soul and the other has a joyful soul filled with pleasure. In both cases, as you can see, the inner essence of the person fills the space in a slightly different way than their physical existence. If you place a blind person in front of another person, the blind person will not initially perceive the physical existence of the other person. Unless they are made aware of the other person through their sense of touch or in some other way, they may be led to believe that there is no one else in the room because their eyes reveal nothing to them. In order to be convinced of an external existence that can be perceived by the senses, one needs senses that are capable of perceiving this external physical existence. Now we must ask ourselves: Would this external physical existence still be there even if it were not perceived? Would I not also be in this place if I were surrounded by blind and deaf people who could not see or hear me? For me, I would be there, I would be there within myself. And just as I am there within myself according to my physical existence, and this must be distinguished from the perception of others, so we must now also rise to the possibility of making this same distinction for what I have listed as a second kind of existence, for pleasure and pain, for the life that fills space without the senses perceiving what fills space. When a person stands in front of a blind person and that blind person suddenly regains their sight, external existence becomes a perceptible existence for the blind person, and the question arises: Could not the existence of pleasure and pain, of sorrow and joy, of anger and passion, which is just as much a part of human beings as their red blood, their nerves, and their bones, but which is not initially perceptible to the physical senses, also be there as something perceptible to other human beings?

Human beings know what they can perceive. Human beings are beings in the process of development, beings that have evolved from imperfect stages in the distant past to their present existence. All the organs that are on and in human beings have developed gradually. Little by little, the ability to see and hear has developed in relation to external existence; little by little, the external physical world has become a perceptible world for humans, a world that they know and can observe. If humans are developing in this way, might we not ask whether they could develop further? Could they not become aware of what is not yet perceptible to them today? Just as the room in which a person stands is initially dark and gloomy for the blind, and then, when they regain their sight, they begin to perceive colors and physical forms, so it could also be that what still lives in the room, what flashes through the soul, could also be made visible and perceptible. Human beings have been guided to their external, sensory visibility by the external forces of the world. They have done nothing to achieve this. They have been placed on the physical plane by the order of nature, armed with sensory organs to perceive the sensory world. But human beings can take their further development into their own hands; they can enable themselves to experience more than the sensory world around them.

This development toward a higher life has been cultivated and cherished in certain human communities since time immemorial. Just as humans initially have sensory eyes and sensory ears, so too has the ability to perceive through spiritual eyes, if I may express it that way, and through spiritual ears, been developed in individual humans through their own activity. Just as it is true that when the eye opens, it perceives a colorful world around it where there was previously darkness and gloom, so it is also true that through appropriate training, the soul's eye is opened so that what lives in the emotions, in pleasure and pain, becomes perceptible. The instruction that leads to such a higher development of the human being is different from ordinary teaching. In detail, our ninth lecture will discuss what can be discussed publicly about this inner development. Those who want to know more about this inner development will be able to learn more about it. Today I can only refer to the ninth lecture. However, the most necessary points will be indicated.

Today's external culture knows very little about the teaching that human beings must receive in order to obtain spiritual eyes and ears. And of what can be learned, only a small amount is known. But it is precisely the spiritual-scientific worldview that is called upon to awaken an understanding of the supersensible, because it is a necessary requirement for culture. Today, all teaching is aimed at absorbing as much content as possible for the intellect, for reason. But this means nothing other than that a world of ideas is awakened in us that relates to the outer sensory world. Our external sensory perception is expanding ever wider. But this is not so necessary; for our present culture, as magnificent as it is in its achievements, it is not what deepens the human being. At all times there has been another kind of teaching, a teaching that does not follow the external breadth of the sensory world, but aims at the depth of the world's being. You can get an idea of this if I describe it to you in just a few words.

Everything you currently read in scientific writings has come about through external sensory observation. Science more or less regards it as something in which nothing belongs that has not come about through external observation. It is assumed that human beings should remain as they are, that they already have the ability to absorb what this science can offer them. Essentially, however, it is completely different when it comes to instruction that is intended to lead to spiritual perception in human beings. In such schools, something else is taught. First of all, people are not given teaching material that conveys as many concepts as possible. Instead, a student would come to a master, so to speak, and, based on their entire character, be deemed mature enough to develop their inner senses. Then he did not have to absorb much new content, but first had to become a completely different person. He was not given a book, not a specific content, but first a so-called eternal thought content, something eternal that originated from those people who were further along in their development than the rest of civilized humanity.

We must first agree on what we mean by such eternal thought content. Try to look within your soul and ask yourself: How much of the mental images and thoughts that live within me, of the feelings and everything else in your soul, belongs to the time and place in which you live? — Try to think about what passes through your soul from morning to evening, and what would be different, completely different, if you were in Moscow instead of Berlin, and then if you were living at the end of the 18th century instead of the beginning of the 20th. Subtract from your soul's content everything that you have taken out of the space and time in which you live. Try to figure out how much of your mental image would also apply to a person in another place and time. It is not much. But there are things that apply not only to today and to Berlin, but also to other places and other times. When we ascend in this sense, we find more and more that, as if guided by a great spiritual leader of humanity, our minds are directed above all to such eternal thoughts. The religious writings of all ages are full of such things, which are independent of space and time. And to mention the most trivial, I can say that mathematics is something that is independent of space and time. That which deals with the temporal and spatial is itself temporal and transitory. But when the soul deals with the imperishable, it becomes eternal and imperishable and takes in that which is immortal. Therefore, the Master first gives the soul an eternal thought content that can be given to anyone, regardless of whether they live in America, Japan, or the southern tip of Africa, a thought content that is related only to the innermost part of the soul.

Then the student had to detach himself from the sensual outer world and live with what lives within him as a force. With tremendous patience, the deepening into the human inner soul had to take place. The human inner being is alive, and just as the marvelous structure of the physical eye arose from the mere mass of cells, so the spiritual eye arises in the soul through the eternal spiritual content when it deepens in this way and lives in meditation. The physical eye was not always there. It came into being through the confluence of external physical forces. In the soul, human beings are capable of awakening the spiritual eye when they allow themselves to be further developed by the spiritual content. Such students, who had to devote a large part of the day to their exercises, waited and waited patiently. There were times in culture when this was possible. So they waited until the inner forces awakened by spiritual deepening gave them the perception of what filled the space as pleasure and pain, as instincts, passions, and drives.

A physical eye sees because an external light source casts rays onto an object. Without light, nothing can be seen. The eye and light belong together. In the sensory external world, the eye and light are two separate things. In the soul, the spiritual eye is awakened, and this is also the source of a new spiritual light. We ourselves must radiate this light, which makes visible the soul that stands before us. When you have received the inner light in this way, through immersion in your inner being and the associated awakening of inner life, then your own astral body begins to shine from within and illuminates everything in truth and reality, just as the sun illuminates objects. But you do not illuminate the outer world, but rather that which is spiritual, that which lives in human beings as emotion; this then becomes visible to you through the rays that you yourself emit. In this way, human beings can make perceptible to themselves that which is, but which is not perceptible externally.

All the great leaders of humanity who have spoken to us about the soul: do not believe that they had only empty phrases and words in mind. If one believes only in the sensory world, one knows nothing of the depths that have moved and shaped human culture. People usually speak from their immediate observations. Consider, for example, the relationship between soul and body; as I have just discussed, you must tell yourself that this relationship between soul and body is such that the physical, which stands before us, is permeated and interwoven with the spiritual. And just as it is true that this body, which you call your own, is nourished from outside by food and is thereby enlivened and supplemented from outside, it is equally true that this body is enlivened, illuminated, and permeated by the soul. When this body sleeps, the soul is not in it at first, then it is separated from it, it is outside it. Then we cannot speak of the soul flowing into the body. A German theosophist, a profound mind, has expressed himself about this relationship between soul and body in a wonderfully charming way, which can only be properly understood if one makes the assumptions we have just made. This theosophist — as we may call him — speaks of sleep, when the soul is not in the body, in a peculiar way. He says: “Sleep is soul digestion; the body digests the soul. Waking is a state of influence of the soul stimulus — the body enjoys the soul.” This is a wonderful comparison. Just as one enjoys food when eating, so — according to this theosophist — the body enjoys the soul that lives within it. And just as the body digests food after enjoying it, so the body digests what the soul has sunk into it while in the state of sleep. This saying by our German poet-theosophist Novalis is very beautiful. In him you can find a source of the most beautiful spiritual-scientific wisdom. It can only be understood from a spiritual-scientific worldview. I could cite countless examples from the German spiritual world that would show you how the great seers of humanity spoke with expertise about the soul and the body and their relationship to each other.

The third thing we must talk about is the spirit. We summarize pleasure and pain, sorrow and joy, passion, instinct, and desire, and whatever else we can name in a similar way, under the name of soul. And if you ask what the soul is, we say: What first comes to life within us is the soul. Those who have received the training I have just described can attain perception of this soul. Spirit is not only present within human beings, but, when you think about it, through a very banal exercise of reason, you can convince yourself that it is present everywhere in the world. All people in the world think, think about what is around them. Through their thoughts, they gain knowledge of the world around them. These thoughts are not only an expression of what lives in the outside world, but also of something that does not live in the outside world. When you look out over the universe, your senses perceive a vast number of stars and processes, an entire world of stars, and then your mind comes into play and forms a concept of this world of stars. When your senses see a drop of water, your thinking forms a concept of this drop of water. In short, you are not satisfied with merely perceiving things, you also want to understand them. This is different from mere sensory perception. If you have a glass with no water in it, you cannot scoop out any water. If there were no thoughts and no concepts in the space outside, then you could not bring any out either. It would be illusory to think about the world if the world were not constructed of thoughts. The stone you think about and comprehend must have been created by a thought, otherwise the thought could not be brought out. If you do not want to get caught up in grotesque contradictions, you must admit that the thoughts in the world outside are just as true as the thoughts in your head. You think, and the thoughts that live within you are none other than those that have constructed the world.

Thus, we find something else in our soul that is not perceptible to the senses, but which is not merely an inner life, but leads us to an understanding of the entire universe. You must admit that our ideas and concepts are not perceptible to the senses, for otherwise man would also have concepts of the world of the stars, which he must first form in his soul. Thus, the concept lives within and it also lives in the outside world. We call that which is contained within the soul. Pain belongs within our own inner being. It has its limits in the limits of our soul. What I feel, what I experience as suffering and joy, is something that interweaves and permeates my inner being, but which initially has little to do with the starry space. What flashes into my mind as a thought has something to do with the whole outside world. This is first spirit out in the world, and then the repetition of spirit in one's own soul.

So we have a threefold division: The sensual in the world, the material existence, perceived by the outer senses; the soul that we experience and which the soul that is taught in the way I have spoken of can also perceive, and the spirit that we presuppose in the whole world, as the fluid that flows through it and as that which first reveals to us the essence of things. Human beings can initially perceive this spirit where it appears as such. What they can perceive there is its external physiognomy, the way in which the spirit expresses itself in external sensory reality. It is not the spirit that we see in the world, but that through which the spirit expresses itself sensually.

Human beings think in the spirit. Thoughts live in the world, but human beings cannot see them. They can only think them. As truly as you yourself think about the world and as truly as a spiritual reflection of the world forms within you, so truly does it form in every other human being. And this other human being is not only instinct and passion, but also lives within this spiritual reflection of the world. This, in turn, can be perceived through the eyes and ears of the spirit for a higher view. It is true that the inner training I have spoken of not only produces the ability to perceive the soul of the human being, but the human being can also develop the ability within themselves to see the thoughts of others, to understand and perceive their worldview, their entire environment. Then, when the human being perceives not only the outer image of this thought, but the thought itself, when he is able to open his spiritual ears to the universe, so that they can perceive not only the starry sky through their senses, but also that through which everything sensual has become, for which everything sensual is the outer physiognomy, then they will truly and really perceive the thoughts, the spirit of the world. The star then appears to them not only as a star, but the star tells them something. The stones, for example, the rock crystal, appear to him not only as clear as water, but also reveal their essence to him, and it is possible that through such deepening, as has been indicated, man encounters every thing in a completely new way, so that the things around him speak resoundingly, tell him their innermost names, and reveal their essence to us. This is what the ancient Pythagoreans, who had such training and who initiated others into such a way of hearing the world, meant when they spoke of the music of the spheres. It was not a mere comparison, it was the direct perception and awareness of what is otherwise hidden behind things. This veil of nature shatters before the spiritual ears, and the harmony hidden behind this veil resounds. This is also what Goethe means with his words in the “Prologue in Heaven.” It is not a mere phrase that stands there. It would be a phrase if Goethe were to speak of a resounding sun. But no, he says: “The sun resounds in the old way in brotherly spheres, singing in competition, and completes its prescribed journey with a thunderous roar.” These are the words of the world spirit resounding from the music of the worlds. Goethe continues this later, where he says: “Resounding, the new day is already born for spiritual ears.” When human beings develop this ability, the spiritual becomes conscious to them. Then the thought lies before their soul as perceptibly as the body does before the ordinary human being.

Body, soul, and spirit are the three members of the human being. Human beings are first and foremost physical, bodily beings. Within them, the soul lives and develops. And in this, in turn, the spirit of the whole world is reflected and lives on as a third element, as far as human beings can comprehend it. From the outside to the inside and from the inside back out again – this is the path that human beings take from the body through the soul to the spirit. What gives us the possibility of having such a soul existence in the first place? We owe this possibility to the fact that we can live in the soul. We live in pleasure and suffering, in pain and joy, even if we do not yet perceive this externally. We also live in our body, but we perceive this from the outside. There is a difference between these two areas of existence. In the spiritual scientific worldview, what we have around us, as we initially have the external physical around us, is called the existence of complete consciousness. Our consciousness initially connects with physical existence. This consciousness lives only on the physical plane, and we call the physical plane what spreads out around us for the senses. What lives in our soul is something else. This is called life, and this life is called existence on the so-called astral plane. The physical plane and the astral plane are the two realms in which human beings live. On the physical plane, human beings are conscious; on the astral plane, they merely live. There, they are not yet consciously aware of things outside themselves. But they live in the soul or astral realm.

The third type of existence is spiritual existence. As present-day human beings, we generally do not yet live in this realm, or at most only partially. But as we live our way into the spirit, this spirit gradually connects with our soul, and we could say that this soul spreads out over the entire environment, becoming larger and larger. When human beings grasp the outside world, comprehend the meaning and spirit of the outside world, they are no longer confined to their inner selves, but boldly step out of themselves and connect with the things around them. Compare animals with human beings in this respect. Animals live, so to speak, entirely in their souls. They do not form concepts of their environment. They do not expand their souls beyond the spiritual realm of the world. This is also the difference between humans and animals. Animals live and weave, so to speak, within their inner selves. Humans, however, step out of their inner selves. We could also describe this in the following words: humans detach themselves from themselves. Humans always have a soul, an inner life. This inner life is there. But human development consists in expanding this inner life beyond their environment, beyond what is around them, beyond the spirit, so that it flows out and spreads over the whole world. When this happens, the human soul connects with the eternal. Then this marriage of the human soul with the eternal, the world spirit, takes place. Then, when this connection of the human being with the eternal world spirit takes place, this whole sum of pleasure and suffering, this whole world of drives and desires and passions within us, the whole astral body of the human being, becomes something else. The pleasures and instincts that are given to human beings, as they have emerged from the hand of nature, which they share with animals, all this soul life disappears and passes away and belongs as such to the transitory. Try to imagine what lives in human beings in terms of such instincts, sufferings, and joys, and how this life unfolds in human beings. They are connected with the transitory.

Now human beings begin to step out of the circle of this transitory. They refine their instincts and desires, their passions, and cease to find pleasure and displeasure only in what is bound to place and time. They rise to what lies behind things and is hidden by the veil of the senses. It is important when human beings begin to be able to take pleasure not only in what their eyes show them, but also in what descends into their souls from the spiritual world through the impressions of their eyes. It is a great moment in human development when human beings no longer follow merely their sensual instincts, but are guided by supersensible motives, by moral ideas and concepts that penetrate not from outside, but from the spirit. Just as the body is permeated by the soul, so the soul is permeated by the spirit. Take human beings at certain earlier stages of development, and you will find them as physical beings permeated by the soul. While human beings stand before you as physical bodies, they live out their existence in their instincts and passions. More and more of the supersensible enters the soul. It becomes permeated with the spiritual. The latter, that is, when the soul is gradually permeated with the spiritual, lifts the soul out of time and space, and as much as there is in the soul that is sublime beyond time and space, so much is imperishable in it, so much remains of it as an imperishable effect of itself. So you see that just as the soul is embedded in a body, the spirit is embedded in the soul. And just as the embedding of the soul in the body points us to a distant past in which they gradually became connected with each other, so the connection of the soul with the spirit points to the future of humanity. This development takes place very gradually. It happens first of all in such a way that more and more the spirit permeates the soul.

Consider how the beginning of spiritual content in the soul first arises. Imagine you have an object in front of you. You see it as a sensory object. You turn around: the sensory object is no longer in front of you. But an image of this sensory object is in front of you. We call this the mental image of the object, in a certain sense the memory of it. This remains in the soul. This is the first element of how the spirit takes hold in the soul. It happens in the form of memory. We could not absorb anything of the spirit of our environment if we were not able to know something about objects even when they are no longer in front of us. The first element of the spirit lives in human beings in memory. And as it is with objects in the environment, so it is with our own soul. Let us just consider the role that memory plays in our soul life. Animals live entirely in the present. Of course, the stages I describe and the degrees I assign are more extreme than they are in reality. Animals also have to go through a certain spiritual development, but one must resort to a certain extremity of expression in order to make the point clear. What the animal feels and experiences today is the main thing for it. What constitutes the spiritualization of the whole being for humans is that they are able to live beyond the present. By bringing our memories from our spiritual life into our present, into our today, we spiritualize ourselves more and more; in this way we grasp the spirit in the first element. I have the spiritual before me when I remember yesterday's experiences. Memory is one of the most important moments for the spiritualization of soul life. Memory connects us to our spiritual and soul existence, which is connected to the external world and stretches from birth to the present. If we could not remember past days, we would have little spiritual content. There are still peoples today who do not have such memories. There are still peoples who forget what experiences they have in the cold and therefore have to seek a protective shell anew every evening. To take up this memory and develop it more and more is what those who strive for higher development seek. Here begins the possibility of looking beyond our transitory existence, which is enclosed between birth and death.

Imagine that you have made it your principle to bring meaning and reason into life through memory, and not just to live in the present, but to learn more and more to see your whole life as a tableau before you, with the awareness that only from this whole temporal being of yours can flow what you want to accomplish. If this is the case, and if it is used again to awaken inner forces, as I indicated earlier when I spoke of reviving the contents of the soul through contemplation, then we can continue to look back, trying to make it more and more concrete, and trace it back to birth. This can be done. But it requires infinite patience; we will talk more about these methods later. Then you will also see that which is not confined between birth and death. Then you will learn to connect what happens within this life between birth and death to other things. Through my own observation in memory, I learn to connect my today with yesterday and to meaningfully combine the effect of today with the cause of yesterday; I learn to follow the inner thread of cause and effect in my soul. Then the same force that leads me back to my present life guides me beyond birth. Because I have learned to look at cause and effect in the soul itself, what was before birth, how the human being lived before birth, becomes an experience. Through the gradual development of this sense, the human being gains knowledge of previous lives, and the law of reincarnation becomes a true fact for him. By sharpening our perception of the temporal in the inner world, we gain the soul capacity to make reincarnation a fact for ourselves. What do we do in this case? In this case, we fill the soul with that which connects us to the spiritual. And then our inner vision expands. While we grasp the spirit of the outer world through our understanding of it and pour and spread our soul over the outer world, we spread our consciousness of the spiritual itself by going beyond birth. In this way, our view expands more and more, and we look up from what is bound to place and time to what follows in the sequence of time. From there, we then take hold of the essence of the human being, which is imperishable and eternal.

Human beings are becoming more and more spiritual. The first stage is when they move beyond the pleasures and pains of existence and develop feelings for the supersensible, something like pleasure and pain. The more they develop this, the more Plato's beautiful statement becomes true for them: The body is perishable because it feeds on the perishable, but the spirit is imperishable because it feeds on eternal nourishment. — Such is the relationship between body, soul, and spirit. The body perishes. What can be seen of the human being is handed over to the earth with death. But what lives in the human being as pleasure and pain, the soul, did not come into being with birth, but is linked to something that extends beyond birth. Thus, the existence of the soul extends beyond the boundaries of birth and death. But what a person takes in by stepping out of their soul and connecting with the spirit connects this soul itself with the eternal sources of existence. This deifies the soul. In this way, the human soul becomes visible outside the body. As long as it is bound to the body and is one with it, it is something transitory. When the soul connects with the spiritual, it becomes more and more eternal and imperishable. This brings us to the point where we understand what human self-knowledge is, what true knowledge of the human inner being is.

At first, the human being experiences his soul within himself by experiencing pleasure and suffering, joy and pain. But then this soul is filled with mental images that disappear again. Something comes to life there that is hidden from the mere senses. What comes to life in the soul is at first merely a thought within the human being. But in the course of life, they connect this thought with their soul. They learn to feel and empathize with the spiritual, and ultimately they love the spiritual, just as they previously loved only the sensual. Desire ultimately extends to everything spiritual. Selfishness becomes a selfless love for the imperishable. In selfishness, human love is grasped in the soul. But when we grasp it deeply within ourselves as spirit, we realize that we find this self in the whole rest of the world, that we are connected with the whole rest of the world, and that just as we are born of the physical, it is equally true that we are born hourly as spirit from the spiritual universe, the spiritual-divine world. If we therefore seek our higher self, which is present in us like a spark, we will see the spiritual in the whole environment. This is the great wisdom that Vedanta philosophy has summarized in the saying: Tat tvam asi — That is you. When human beings are conscious of their spirit and begin their development by stepping out into the world, their self expands to the spirit of the universe, to a spiritual self-existence, and we are then everywhere in our very essence. Then what was merely comprehension becomes soul-related content for us, and that is the real elevation of the soul to spirit, elevation to real spiritual life.

There is a beginning of spiritual life, but it is dry and cold. There are people who only warm up when it comes to matters of the soul, people who rejoice and suffer only when it comes to matters of the soul, to pain and pleasure. They say that the spiritual remains something distant and cold. When they look up at the starry world, they find their thoughts about it abstract; but they are dry and cold in their minds. But when the soul grasps the spirit, then we feel, then we do not merely think with the universe, for then the view through reason and intellect is transformed into a soulful grasp of the entire universe. What was once merely pleasure now becomes pleasure in the spiritual; what was love in the soul now becomes love for the spiritual-divine in the world. Our feelings, which we had locked away inside, spread out over the whole world. Our self flows out, and we become one with the universal spirit. We lose our sense of self and find ourselves again in the universal spirit. This is something higher than mere thinking. In the soul, man has brought it to feeling. In the spiritual, he begins to be able to use his intellect. But he will also come to the point where he will reach the spirit with his feelings. Then he will find himself on the step to the divine. That is the ladder he has to climb with his own strength, to connect the soul with the spirit, so that they become one. That is true self-contemplation. When we meet a friend and feel warmth in our hearts, when we comprehend the divine spirit that permeates the world not only with our minds but also grasp it with our hearts, feel it and sense it, then we penetrate through the head and its wisdom to the heart and its wisdom-love for the whole world. In this way, we elevate ourselves by elevating our soul, and in this way, we not only get to know our narrow-minded inner self, but we expand our self and find ourselves out in the world. It is often emphasized: just look inside yourself, there you will find the God-man. No, in oneself one can only find what one has within oneself. If one wants to find more within oneself, one must first develop this higher self, and one develops it by spreading the higher self over the whole world. Those who advised people to seek self-knowledge did not mean idle contemplation of one's inner self. This self-knowledge is meant as we have now understood it, as an ascent from the soul to the spirit. Then the human being no longer feels any difference between himself and the animal, the plant, and the stone. A general feeling of world brotherhood pervades his heart. And then, and only then, when man has this in mind, does he understand as the ultimate goal of development from the physical-soul to the spiritual-soul the beautiful words of the poet, who was also a seer: “One succeeded; he lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais. — But what did he see? He saw — wonder of wonders — himself!” And the spiritual scientist adds: In this self he finds the divine, and that is precisely theosophy, divine wisdom, lifting the heart, the soul, up to the spirit in such a way that it succeeds in connecting wisdom with the divine and in having not only understanding but also a general feeling for the divine world.