Second Stuttgart Lecture

Then he spoke of the second kind of painful experiences. He spoke of those events before the ruined sacrificial altar, he spoke of how he had penetrated into the old mysteries, in which the divine spiritual beings had descended directly, and how a descent had taken place in this respect as well. Instead of the good old pagan gods, demons were present at the sacrificial feasts. He spoke of the great cosmic events, of the Our Father in reverse, as it were. It was an extraordinary conversation he had with his mother. He spoke of how he had had to recognize how Lucifer and Ahriman fled before the gates of the Essenes and came to the other people who could not follow the strict rules of the order. He spoke of all this. It was like a retelling of his life so far. It was a conversation that was shaped by the fact that the words were not just words of the narrative, that the words did not just contain what usually lies in words, but what he said was the innermost experience expressed in words, pain and suffering expressed in words, transformed into infinite love, pain that had been transformed into love and goodwill. These words flowed over to the mother like realities. It seemed like a piece of the soul itself that passed from Jesus to the mother. In just a few hours, everything that was more than a mere experience came together. It was a cosmic experience in the truest sense of the word. Jesus of Nazareth could only speak words, but a part of his soul lay in these words. And much would have to be related if one wanted to characterize what the Akasha Chronicle gives. So it came about in the course of this conversation that it stood clearly before Jesus' soul at which point the development of mankind had arrived. Now it dawned on him with an ever clearer awareness that the Zarathustra soul was in him. Thus he felt how he, as Zarathustra, had gone through the development of humanity at that time. What I am saying to you now were not the words that Jesus spoke to his mother, but he expressed himself in a way that she could understand. What he felt there made the secret of human development clear to him. The impression of how Jesus feels and experiences this inwardly while speaking to his mother is incomparable. He speaks to his mother about how each human age has its own particular powers and that this is of great importance. There was once a human age, the ancient Indian culture, when people were particularly great because their whole lives were glowing with the childlike, sun-like powers of early childhood. Today, we still have some of these powers in us from our first to seventh year.