Lecture Thirteen

Of course these things have been said today only from a sense of duty towards truth; but they must be said out of such a duty to truth. It is of importance that a certain number of people should realise how necessary it is to give the Mystery of Golgotha its cosmological significance. This significance must be recognised by a number of people, who must on their part, undertake a certain responsibility that the fact should not remain hidden from earthly humanity—the fact that humanity is connected with the non-earthly Spirit, who lived in Palestine in the Man Jesus, at the beginning of our era. It is necessary that the knowledge of the entrance of Christ from the non-earthly world into the Man Jesus of Nazareth, should not be withheld. To such penetration belongs the overcoming of that dishonesty which is so general today in questions of cosmic conceptions and of faith. For what is done today? We are told on the one hand that the Earth moves in an ellipse round the Sun and has evolved in the sense of the Kant-Laplace theory, and we subscribe to this; and on the other hand we are told that at the beginning of our era such and such events took place in Palestine. These two things are accepted, without being connected; people accept them and think it of no consequence. It is not without consequence however, for it is much less evil when a lie is consciously accepted, than when it takes shape unconsciously, and degrades Man and drags him down. For if we consider a lie as it appears in a man's consciousness, every time he falls asleep it leaves his physical and etheric bodies with his consciousness, and lives on in spaceless, timeless being, in the eternal being, while Man is in dreamless sleep. There is prepared all which can result from the lie in the future; that is, everything is made ready to correct it, if it is in the consciousness. But if it is in the unconscious, it remains with the physical and etheric bodies lying in bed. When Man is not occupying these bodies, it then belongs to the Cosmos, and not to the earthly Cosmos alone, but to the whole Cosmos; there it works for the destruction of the Cosmos; above all, for the destruction of the whole of humanity, for this destruction begins in humanity itself.