World Mysteries and Theosophy

GA 54 — 16 November 1905, Berlin

The Core of Wisdom in Religions

When someone reads a popular book today, say about astronomy, it is probably primarily to learn about the mysterious facts of the universe. They will find satisfaction in such a book if the things they learn make sense to their intellect, their senses, and their feelings. They will also try, wherever possible, to gain an understanding of how such truths and insights are arrived at, in popular lectures involving experiments, or at accessible observatories, laboratories, and so on, in order to penetrate as far as possible into the things that are communicated to them. In any case, one thing remains the same. The person who reads such things must assume that there are other people who, through very special research methods and very special scientific and technical training, have acquired the abilities that are communicated in our popular books.

Anyone who reads Haeckel's “Natural History of Creation” may say to themselves: Yes, that makes sense to my intellect, my reason, my feelings. — But they will also realize that a great deal, a very great deal, is involved in establishing these facts in the first place. And they may then assume that there is a small group of people who are engaged in establishing such facts. A large part of humanity behaves in a very similar way toward other writings that seek to bring facts from another realm to human beings, namely toward the so-called religious writings. Basically, it is no different from the situation I have just described. When it comes to religious writings, too, people first ask themselves: Does this speak convincingly to my feelings, my emotions, and my reason? Here, too, they always assume — or at least they did in the past — and there are still numerous religious creeds today in which this is the case — that, just as with external, sensory facts that we learn about from Haeckel's “Natural History of Creation” or from popular descriptions of astronomy, there is also a small circle of people who know the methods and have the key to establishing these religious truths. Thus, in relation to religious documents, people also assumed that there are individuals who are capable not only of reading these truths, but also of verifying them; that there are individuals who have the key to them and know the methods by which one can be directly convinced of them. In short, as with any other representation of facts, it must be assumed that religious writings originate from knowledge and direct experience.

In contrast to writings that deal with sensory facts, humans assume that there are individuals who verify these facts using telescopes, microscopes, biological and other investigative methods. With regard to the messages contained in religious documents, we must also assume that there are people who know the methods for penetrating, through experience, the realm touched upon in religious writings. Just as the realm of sensory facts is dealt with in a vivid manner in the “Natural History of Creation” and the realm and facts of astronomy are dealt with in popular lectures, so the realm of the supersensible, the invisible, the spiritual is dealt with in religious writings. And if we, as non-researchers, are to place the same trust and faith in religious writings, we must also assume that there are individuals in the world who have made it their special task to gather experience in the world of the supersensible, the invisible, in the world of what underlies the sensory world as spiritual causes. Human beings cannot behave any differently toward the presentation of a natural history of creation and the presentation of a supersensible history of creation. It is not people's attitude toward these things that differs; what differs are merely the areas that the relevant writings describe. This means that there must be knowledgeable people who can verify the facts communicated in the religious scriptures. However, to a certain extent, this awareness has been lost in relation to religious documents, especially in our time. And just as it would make little sense if someone could not assume that researchers are behind popular scientific accounts, it would also make little sense if we could not assume that researchers are behind the statements in religious writings. To renew and revive the awareness today that there is also research in the supersensible realm is the task of theosophy or Spiritual Science. Spiritual research wants nothing more than to reawaken awareness in the widest possible circles that this is the case, as I have now said.

The word “theosophy” is often translated in German as meaning that theosophy is knowledge or wisdom of God. This is not a correct translation, at least it does not convey what theosophy is about. Knowledge of God is something that initially also comes to the theosophist as an intuition, as something that represents the ultimate goal of all knowledge. And just as we have not yet brought all means and abilities of knowledge to consciousness, so we cannot say that we can already have a comprehensive or conclusive knowledge of the divine origin of the world.

Humanity will continue to develop and progress, including in its cognitive abilities. Even the most advanced among us today cannot conceive of what insights into the mysterious worlds of existence humanity will be able to achieve along this path. We must realize that European civilized people have a completely different concept of the deity than, for example, the so-called savages of Africa or the barbarians who invaded the Roman Empire from the north at the beginning of the Middle Ages. We must assume that an ordinary educated person among us also has a different concept of the divine being than Goethe had. We can also form the mental image that humanity will continue to progress, that in the future, abilities will be developed in humans that will make Goethe's intuitive and imaginative powers seem very undeveloped. We can have an inkling of how much more sublime and magnificent the concept of God will be for those people than our own. We can say that we live, move, and have our being in God, but that knowledge of God can never be complete. So theosophy does not mean that it wants to be a knowledge of God. Theosophy means the knowledge that the deeper, innermost essence of the human being acquires, in contrast to the ordinary, everyday knowledge that the outer, sensual, transitory nature of the human being acquires.

Let us be clear: we see colors and light around us, we hear sounds, smell odors, taste flavors, touch objects, feel warmth and cold, and so on, all through our external sense organs. And we can form the mental image that for those who have no ears, there is no world of sound, but a silent world around them; for those who have no eyes, there is no bright, colorful world, but a dark one. All this is only a summary of what humans can perceive with their senses. But the senses consist of material forces that are returned to the earth. And what we perceive through them is also transitory. We have thus brought the transitory human being before our eyes. The physicist shows us that a time will come when the earth will be scattered into countless atoms, when it will no longer be there. Then all the colors, lights, sounds, and forms of minerals, plants, and animals will no longer exist in their present form; indeed, the human form itself will no longer exist.

We have thus characterized the sphere of transience in human beings. What these transient human beings recognize is everyday science, the kind of science pursued by our official science. This is not to say anything against this official science. But all of this science is nothing more than a preoccupation with the things of transience. But there is another way of looking at the world, namely through those abilities in human beings that are themselves imperishable. The human being carries an imperishable core within itself. And this imperishable core, which we find within ourselves through self-observation, through our own contemplation, will be carried out by human beings into a new existence in the times when the earth will have been scattered. They will carry this imperishable core into other worlds, and what they have recognized, they will carry into another world as the fruit of this earthly life. What is thus recognized through the divine core of being is the content of Spiritual Science. Theosophy is not a recognition of other things, but a recognition of a different kind, a recognition of the other member of the human being. Theosophy or Spiritual Science therefore does not come from people who want to rise with their ordinary minds and senses to a contemplation of the spiritual from the sensual, but from those who have awakened the abilities slumbering in human beings and are thus able to explore the supersensible, the imperishable. Ordinary science considers plants, animals, and humans according to the ordinary characteristics that present themselves to the senses. Spiritual research also considers only what surrounds us in the world. But it observes it through other powers and other abilities and thus learns about the eternal and imperishable properties of things. That is theosophy. And those researchers who have awakened such abilities within themselves are those who are able to ascertain for themselves the supersensible facts that are communicated to us in religious creeds. Just as natural scientists in laboratories and observatories use the power of their senses and instruments to ascertain what can then be read in popular books, so researchers of the supernatural ascertain through their own experience what has been communicated in the religious documents of the various periods of human history. In the same sense that we speak of scientific laboratories and astronomical observatories as places of research, we speak of spiritual research centers. We call this spiritual research center — the name is not important — the Lodge of the Masters of Wisdom. Because all wisdom must ultimately be based on a common origin, on a common foundation, because all those who are spiritually connected to these teachers are imbued and permeated by that wisdom, all research also goes back to the spiritual source, to the great brotherhood of the most advanced sages, who have recognized what is proclaimed in those religious documents from their own insight through the means of spiritual research. Call what underlies all religion “the spiritual laboratory of humanity,” call it “the great white lodge,” it remains the same. We now know what is meant by this. Just as every popular book goes back to what has actually been researched somewhere, so each of the great religions goes back to what has been researched in a spiritual sense in this laboratory of the white brotherhood of humanity. And those who founded the religions were nothing other than great, outstanding individuals who enjoyed the teaching and instruction of that brotherhood in this great spiritual laboratory, were introduced to the spiritual life that underlies all phenomena, and were sent out from there to the various peoples to speak to each people in its own language and in its own way. A unified basis of knowledge, a primordial truth, is taught in that spiritual laboratory, and it is possible that those who climb upward through inner development will learn to recognize the methods of research themselves and will be able to use them as Haeckel and other natural scientists use the sensory methods. It is possible that they will find access to the researchers of the spiritual laboratory and learn from which central place the great sages who went out to the south and west and brought the great messages to humanity came from. It is possible that they will find the way to those from whom they can learn how all this came about.

The ancient religious teachers were sent out from the same place, the great founders of religions who brought the first messages in ancient India, whose echoes the European researchers so admired when they encountered the wisdom that lies in ancient Brahmanism. The same place of wisdom sent forth the various Buddhas, who brought their messages to the individual members of the Asian religions; it sent forth the Egyptian Hermes, who founded that wonderful religion of which one said to Solon: What you know is like the knowledge of children compared to the wisdom of our initiates. Pythagoras, the great teacher of the Greek people, emerged from it, as did the one who shines into the future, whose religious confession is becoming ever broader and more spiritual, Jesus himself. Here we have the connection as it presents itself spiritually, and we see how the various religions refer back to the central place where the highest human wisdom is cultivated. Anyone who considers the various religions will be convinced that their characteristics themselves point to such a central place. The fact that similarities can be found in the various religious beliefs has often been recognized by our materialistic cultural researchers. Zoroastrianism, ancient Hinduism, Buddhism, even the religion that existed in ancient America, all contain elements in which there is a remarkable correspondence. However, it has been believed that this correspondence comes from external reasons. People have not penetrated deeply enough because they have lost the key to it to some extent. But those who truly engage with the core of truth underlying religions will be able to gain the conviction from the religious creeds themselves that the similarities cannot originate from external factors, but that they arise from a common core of wisdom, and that they have only been shaped differently out of consideration for individual peoples and different times.

When we look across to Asia, we first find the remaining vestiges of an ancient religion that, in our modern sense, can no longer really be understood as a religion. We find this religion in the remarkable culture of Chinese civilization. I am not talking about the religion of Confucius, nor about the religion that spread as Buddhism in India and China, but rather about the remnants of the ancient Chinese religion, the Tao religion. This is the religion that refers people to Tao. Tao is translated as the goal or the way. But one cannot get a clear mental image of the essence of this religion by simply sticking to this translation. For thousands of years, Tao has expressed and continues to express for a large part of humanity the highest ideal to which people can aspire, what they believe the world and all of humanity will one day achieve, the highest potential that lies dormant within every human being and will one day blossom from the innermost human nature. Tao means both a deep, hidden soul and a sublime future. Those who know what it is not only pronounce Tao with shy reverence, but also think of it with reverence. The Tao religion is based on the principle of development, and it says: What is around me today is a stage that will be overcome. I must be clear that this development in which I find myself has a goal, that I will develop toward a sublime goal, and that a force lives within me that spurs me on to reach the great goal of Tao. If I feel this great power within me and feel that all beings are moving toward this goal with me, then this power is the guiding force that blows toward me from the wind, echoes from the stone, shines from the lightning, resounds from the thunder, and sends me its light from the sun. In plants, it appears as the power of growth; in animals, as sensation and perception. It is the power that will always and forever bring forth form after form until that sublime goal is reached, through which I know myself to be one with all of nature, which flows out of me and into me with every breath, which is the symbol of the highest developing spirit, which I perceive as life. I perceive this power as Tao. — In this religion, there was initially no mention of a god in the hereafter; there was no mention of anything outside the world, but rather of something through which one can find the strength to advance humanity.

Tao was truly felt at that time, when humans were still connected to the divine source, especially among the population of Atlantis. Our ancestors did not yet have such highly developed minds or such intelligence as humanity has today. Instead, they had a more dreamlike consciousness, a more instinctively ascending imagination, and a less calculative thought life. Form a mental image of the dream life, but intensified so that it is meaningful and not chaotic, and form a mental image of a humanity from whose soul such images arise, which announce the feelings that are in their own soul, which reflect everything that is around us externally. One must imagine the soul world of these primitive humans as very different from our own today. Today, humans strive to form mental images and ideas about their environment as accurately as possible. Primitive man, on the other hand, formed symbolic, allegorical mental images that appeared full of life within himself. When you meet a person today, you try above all to form an idea of whether they are good or evil, intelligent or stupid, and you try to form an idea that corresponds as dryly as possible to the outer person. This was never the case with the primitive man of Atlantis. An image arose in his mind, not a concept of the intellect. When he encountered an evil person, an image arose in his mind that was dull and dark. However, the perception did not become a concept. Nevertheless, he adjusted his behavior according to this image. When they had a bright, beautiful image before them, which stood before their soul like a dream, they knew that they could trust such a being. And they became afraid of an image when it arose in them in black, red, or brown colors. The truths did not yet appear intellectually and rationally, but as inspiration. He felt as if the deity working in these images was within himself. He spoke of the deity that announced itself in the blowing of the wind, in the rustling of the forest, and also in the images of inner soul life when it urged him to look up to a sublime future for humanity. And he called this Tao.

The present human being, who has replaced this primitive humanity, has a different relationship to spiritual powers. They have lost the power of direct vision, which in a certain respect is duller and dimmer than ours, and in return have attained the stage of intellectual and rational mental image, which in a certain respect is higher, but in another respect also lower. This puts modern man on a higher level than primitive man, because he possesses a sharp, penetrating intellect; but he no longer feels the living connection with the divinely active Tao forces of the world. As a result, he has the world as it reveals itself in his soul, and on the other hand, the powers of the intellect. The Atlantean felt the images that lived within him. Modern man hears and sees the outer world. These two things, the outer and the inner, stand opposite each other, and he no longer feels how a bond passes from one to the other. That is the great meaning of the development of humanity. Ever since the land masses rose again after the floods of the oceans had inundated the continents, ever since that time, humanity has longed to rediscover the bond between what it feels and perceives within and what presents itself to it outside in the sensory world. Hence the word religare = religion has its justification. It means nothing other than to reconnect what was once connected and is now separated, to reconnect the world and the self. The various forms of religious beliefs are nothing other than the means, the ways taught by the great sages, to rediscover this connection. They are therefore so diverse in form in order to be understandable to people of every cultural level.

The ancient Indian, who had a lushly growing plant world before him, which made him dreamy in his soul and did not make it necessary to produce external tools and external culture, needed to hear what exists as religion in humanity in a different way than modern man. When people live a quiet life, different mental images arise in their souls than when they work with crude tools and have to be technically active. Thus, we have different external nature in different areas of the earth and equally different inner soul life of human beings, and since the bond is to be sought through the different religions, it is only natural that the masters had to determine the way to find this bond in different ways for different peoples and different times.

The first way in which this bond was established, in which the ancient Tao of Atlantis was sought again, is the religion of ancient India, the land of the Ganges, which in ancient times received the teachings of holy rishis, great initiates, whose sublime teachings still echo in the wonderful Vedic poems and in the Vedanta philosophy of the ancient Brahmins, which reaches up to the highest levels of human understanding. In broad strokes, it was proclaimed to humanity that there is something that serves as a unified foundation for everything. Brahman, Parabrahman, Bhagavad, and whatever other names there may be, it was called. And what we find in the Vedas, which are only an echo of the original ancient teachings, shows us how great and powerful and at the same time how sublime were the concepts through which that subtle spirituality attempted to ascend to the divine source of being. One could paraphrase it as follows: Once upon a time, the spiritual hosts gathered around the primordial being and asked it who it was, and it said: I would not be who I am if I could define myself by anything other than myself. When you define something, you look for a higher concept for it. The individual animal beings, the lion, the eagle, the dog, the wolf, and so on, are defined by moving on to the higher concepts of the cat species, the dog species, the bird species, and so on. The individual winds are defined by moving on to the general concept of wind. Thus, every thing in the world has its name, which indicates what stands above it. But I, said Brahman to the spiritual hosts, I have no name above me. I am the I Am.

This is the original source from which man originated, this is the goal to which man should return. Development also existed here in ancient India. Development was the magic word through which man perceived his goal. According to religious belief, there must have been something that led to the point where man stands today. There must once have been a longing that led down from the divine origin into this world, to the necessary transitional stage where we stand today. As true as it was necessary and right that there should have been such a longing and desire leading into the world, so true is it that there must be a force that leads human beings out again, so that they can return the fruits of this world to the divine source. This force is the overcoming of desire through divine desires, the purification of goals through the divine goal.

Now it was something quite different that was perceived as religion than in the ancient times we have spoken of. Now it was no longer the God who revealed himself within, now it was the God who revealed himself from without, for man's inner being had had to create a gulf between itself and the outside world. Apparently, the word now takes the place of immediate life and mere power, and Veda itself means nothing other than word. It is through the word that advanced, wise people proclaimed what is the source and goal of man, what underlies the whole world. In ancient times, people had a completely different mental image of this word than we do today when we speak of the word.

I would like to try to give you a mental image of what people felt when they spoke of the Veda, of the Logos, and later of the word. Human beings give things names. They say, this is this and that is that. But when their mouths name things, it is not arbitrary, but rather the same names that the divine primordial soul of humanity once spoke from within itself and thereby created things. Humans see things and then speak their names. But the primordial soul first spoke the names, and after the word, things were formed. So in ancient times there was a primordial soul that spoke the words of creation. The words became things, and the human soul subsequently found the words in the things that the deity had placed there. It reawakened the sleeping words from the things. This was how humans related to the deity, where they had a religious feeling, a feeling for the word, which truly lived in ancient Indertum. That is why the word has become associated with the idea that there are people who are able to look deeper into the nature and essence of the world, who can immediately echo and proclaim in their words what the deity once breathed out into the world. Such people were regarded as initiates. The ancient Indian spoke of his rishis not as ordinary human beings, but as those who had already attained the degree of immortality in their physical bodies and did not live in the sensory world, but in their souls in the higher heavenly world and had contact with the gods, with the spiritual beings that underlie the world. By looking up to people who had developed the Tao within themselves in this way, people were aware that every human being would one day reach this level. And with this was connected the teaching of rebirth, of frequent return. It was not from his imagination, but from his perception, that Buddha spoke to his followers and said: I look back on one, two, three, four, ten, a hundred lives. — And he spoke of these hundred lives as one speaks of one life. In these many lives, he acquired everything that enabled him to speak not only from the experience of the sensual world, but also from the experience of the supersensible world, and to bring the message of these supersensible worlds to humanity. This supersensible knowledge is a fundamental component of all religions.

Let us once again put ourselves in the shoes of the peoples who feel the Tao. They try not only to unite with the divine in religion, but they regard themselves as a covering, as a shell of the divine. That was their immediate consciousness. There were people who could not think in this way, who were not as intelligent as we are, but who had an immediate awareness that they themselves enclosed a divine core, just as a fruit encloses its core. They saw and felt this core, and through it they looked back into the past and out into the future. Through this, they felt within themselves the teaching of reincarnation.

Such consciousness was found by the immigrants who came down at that time. The ancient Indian teachers who gave the Indians their first Brahman culture still found a living belief in reincarnation at that time. Therefore, all religions that originated from this place have the doctrine of reincarnation. The Tao was felt in its various forms of human activity. It is only natural that the people of our time, who have separated their soul life from the great external forces, could not see the many lives, but only saw that they represented the limitations of this soul life. From each subsequent stage, which now extends northward, beginning with the ancient Persian religion, the awareness that the human soul is a shell around the eternally reincarnating core faded. Consciousness was limited to the zenith between birth and death, and to how, within birth and death, the “religare,” religion, must be sought. For the first time, the contrast between duality and unity is truly felt.

While the Taoist man of the Atlantean era felt a living connection with the original source, and the Brahmanic man still attempted to awaken the Brahman, which is thought of as the same outside and inside man, the man in Persia first felt a certain duality, a dualism. They perceived what had become of the human being as inner and outer, as the primordial ground and the present human form. They looked up to the primordial ground from which everything around them had emerged, they looked up to the word from which plants, animals, and humans had emerged in their physical form. But they also felt something else: they felt that something was at work within them that was not in harmony with the harmony that must be restored to its original divine state. They felt the latter as a departure from the original divine. He encountered the contrast, the duality of light and darkness or male and female. They represent the primordial ground and that which awaits the human soul in material densification. This is the second stage of human development.

The third stage confronts us in the prehistoric and historical stories of Egypt, which have been preserved for us in the “Book of the Dead.” There, humans perceived a third element in addition to the duality. They saw how a light, the sun, outshines the earth, how it penetrates it with its rays and awakens the seeds and beings slumbering within it, how the primordial ground must be fertilized. This trinity: primordial ground, fertilization, new life, is symbolized by Osiris, the sun, the god of light; by Isis, matter; and by Horus, the life that develops from it. These were the three Egyptian deities. The trinity thus appears here. And this trinity now becomes a fundamental core in all later religious creeds.

The deity then appears to us as a trinity in religious creeds, where it is called: Father, Word, and Holy Spirit — Isis, Osiris, Horus — Atma, Buddhi, Manas. We now find the trinity everywhere in religions. And we have recognized the reason for this. It appears to us in images or words in Asia, in Egypt among the priests, but also in the Greco-Roman world, in Augustine, then in the Middle Ages, where one finds a corresponding primordial tone that emerged perfectly clearly in the past as the primordial ground from which man emerged. Humanity has developed into what it is today and now strives toward the future from the center of its being. The ancient spiritual researchers perceived this as the trinity in human beings. When we have matured toward greater perfection in the future, then that power to which we owe our existence and which today works within us as the hidden source of being will have emerged in a formative way. This was perceived as the divine, the inexpressible in human beings, which is equal to the first constituent of the threefold world. And then what now lives in human beings, what strives toward this highest, was perceived as the Word working in the present, the Son who has arisen from the Father, who rests inexpressibly within him: from the Father has come forth the Son-man. Just as this Father-ground shapes the future, more perfect human being, so too did it create the developing Son-human, the Buddhi, the second human element, which is not yet perfect, but is the reason why we strive for perfection. This is the second entity. But this world foundation has also been at work in the past. Just as the sensual human being was created in the past by the universal foundation, so too does that which has already taken shape and radiated within him today have something that also emerged from the foundation in the past and is now already fully formed. If we look out into the universe as it makes itself perceptible in colors, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations, we see that it has flowed out of the inexpressible primordial source. In this sense, we can call this primordial source, which appears to us, the creatures, spirit, even in the Christian sense. But the world has not been created to an end. The world is a seed, something that has a soul within itself, that has within itself the drive toward the future. That is the Son. That is why this striving was called: the Word, Veda, Edda. The third is what is within us today as a force, what will become perceptible in us in the future: the Father, the source of all being, lying deep within all our souls.

To feel this vividly, to make it the essence of all inner mental images, means to feel the Trinity. Persona means mask or outer form, concealment. Therefore, religion shows this core of truth, which I have just developed, in three different masks, in three persons. God has three different persons, which means he appears in three different masks: Spirit, Word, and Father. With this, we have at the same time touched on the religious creed that led to Christianity. If you understand this in truth, you will also find this truth expressed in it. If you correctly understand the deepest gospel, that of John, you will find in it the same consciousness of religare, of connecting with a higher consciousness that has appeared in human form: the teaching of the incarnate Logos, the incarnate Godhead, the present Godhead itself, living in brotherhood with the two other forms of the Godhead, the Spirit originating in the past and working in the present, and the Father creating in the present worlds into the future. Thus, the Son has gone forth from the Father, is at the same time connected with the Spirit, and thus the Son is the great foreshadowing that will lead to the Father. This is what is also pointed out in the words: “No one comes to the Father except through me,” through the divine essence of the present. Then it is further pointed out that he will send the Spirit again, the essence of what is already in the world today. As true as Christ said, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,” so true is it that he will come again, that all of Christianity has been a preparation for the new form. For the time being, the Spirit is here, knowledge and science; for the time being, religions have been taught as they were taught in the past. The religious documents have been preserved for us, and theologians are now seeking to interpret them and teach according to them. This is how theology now works in place of wisdom. Theosophy means wisdom and truth; theology means the teaching of wisdom and truth. Just as theology arose from Spiritual Science, so theology must return to Spiritual Science.

I have often pointed out how research used to be and how a change then came about. Until now, all places of learning have relied on the books of the ancient sages, on Plato, Aristotle, and so on. There were no researchers, only interpreters. I am referring here to that remarkable period described in theology, which later generations, who had learned to read nature, the fundamental book, could no longer comprehend. Faith in the written word was almost absolute. For example, if a natural scientist claimed that the nerves did not originate in the heart but in the brain, the response was: Aristotle says otherwise, and Aristotle is right, even though the object in question might have demonstrated the claim. In the widest circles today, there is still no awareness that there is a key, that there are research centers and research methods that establish the facts of the spiritual world just as observatories or laboratories establish the facts of the sensory world. For thirty years it has been proclaimed that there is such a thing as a spiritual center of humanity, and theosophists are saying nothing more incredible than when Haeckel says: This is so and so. When Haeckel makes a claim, we assume that he has found the evidence for it in his research. Likewise, we assume that what is said in religious documents has been verified by facts, and that there are individuals among us who can themselves go back to the sources. Theosophy or Spiritual Science draws attention to spiritual researchers and to the return to the central place. It speaks again from experience about supernatural things, just like those who originally created the religious documents spoke from inner experience. Just as natural science experienced a revival four hundred years ago, so theosophy or Spiritual Science today should mean a revival of direct spiritual research.

This brings us to the necessity of returning to that core of truth which I attempted to describe in brief, from the Tao to the appearance of the great redeemer of humanity. What I wanted to achieve today is to give an awareness of how Spiritual Science relates to the central point, the core of truth, of the various religions. Those who have not yet approached Spiritual Science may come back to hear more. But perhaps some will say that it is a new form of Buddhism, a new religion, something Oriental, bringing something foreign into our world. But that is not the case; that would not be Spiritual Science. Only those who are unwilling to listen to what Spiritual Science has to say speak in this way. The aim of Spiritual Science is to seek the core of truth in our external religious confessions, to go back to the sources from which the books that exist today originated and were created. It is necessary to go back to the facts, then the books will be better understood, then new life will flow into humanity. Christianity is thus to be understood as a religion that has to prepare humanity for the future, as the religion of the Son, through which one finds the Father in the same ways. Making this religion understandable is at the same time one of the most important tasks of Spiritual Science. It therefore seeks the kernel of truth in all religions in order to find the kernel of truth in our own. We recognized that religion did not arise from childish mental images, but from the highest wisdom, from spiritual research. But we also learned that one can stand on the heights of science and still be a religious person. When this insight, this research, finds resonance again, then a living feeling will awaken for what one of the theosophists proclaimed to the world more than a hundred years ago Goethe proclaimed to the world as a kind of program, as a beautiful and magnificent core statement for humanity, with which we would like to conclude today, confessing that there can be no true science, no deeper human observation, which depicts religious truths as childish; and that all religions contain as their core our highest goal:

Those who possess science and art,
Also have religion;
Those who do not possess those two,
Let them have religion!